Hồ Chí Minh

Hồ Chí Minh
Portrait of comrade Ho Chi Minh
Born	Nguyễn Sinh Cung (1890-05-19)May 19, 1890 Kim Liên, Nghệ An Province, French Indochina
Died	September 2, 1969(1969-09-02) (aged 79) Hanoi, North Vietnam
Cause of death	Heart failure
Nationality	Vietnamese
Political orientation	Marxism-Leninism Ho Chi Minh Thought

Ho Chi Minh (May 19, 1890 — September 2, 1969) was a Vietnamese revolutionary. He is known in Vietnam by the nickname Uncle Ho.

Ho Chi Minh joined the Communist Party of France in 1920, studied in the Soviet Union in 1923, joined the Communist International in 1924, and carried out revolutionary activities in China from 1924 to 1927. In 1930, he founded the Communist Party of Indochina, and in 1941 he initiated the establishment of the Vietnam Independence League, which led the struggle against the French colonialists and Japanese imperialism.

Ho Chi Minh was elected President and Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in March 1946, Chairman of the Central Committee of the Vietnam Labor Party (now the Communist Party of Vietnam) from February 1951 to 1969, and led the war against France from 1945 to 1954, and the war against the United States in the 1960s. He died in Hanoi on September 2, 1969, at the age of 79.

Aside from being a politician, Ho was also a writer, a poet and a journalist. He wrote several books, articles and poems in French, Chinese and Vietnamese.

Life

Early life

Kim Liên - family

In 1890, Ho Chi Minh was born as Nguyễn Sinh Cung and raised in Kim Liên village, in the province of Nghệ An as a child of a rural teacher named Nguyễn Sinh Sắc (his father) and of a weaver named Hoàng Thị Loan (his mother). At that time, Vietnam was suffering from French colonialism steming in 1858. Despite many struggles of resistance, the French colonialists consolidated its occupation by 1884. However, many uprisings of rebels seeking to re-establish the feudal system still persisted including those of Phan Đình Phùng (1885 - 96) and of Hoàng Hoa Thám (1884 - 1913).

He was the third child in the family. The eldest sister was borned in 1884, named Nguyễn Thị Thanh and his older brother, borned in 1888 was named Nguyễn Sinh Khiêm.

He and his family lived in the village of Hoàng Trù where his grandparents would teach Confucianism and writing to the children of the village. There, Ho Chi Minh was exposed to the Vietnamese stories, songs and fairytales.

Huế and the death of his mother

In 1895, his father took the family to Huế by foot through the rural countryside. They would lived in an army barrack near the Governor's building as his father was preparing for an entrance examination to become a Mandarin. 3 years later, in 1898, his father would move the family to Dương Nỗ village, 7km from Huế, to teach children and Ho Chi Minh himself to write in Chinese characters. The family would live in the abandoned home of Nguyễn Sĩ Khuyến.

In 1901, as Ho Chi Minh had moved into Huế again with his mother while his father and brother had gone to Thanh Hóa to attend the entrance exam, his mother gave birth to the fourth child - Xin. Unfortunately, Xin would died due to malnutrition and his mother would soon died as well. Devastated, he would moved to Kim Liên with his grandmother for a little while. Not long after, he was informed that his father had passed the entrance exam as a Phó bảng "Junior Doctor". As per Confucian tradition, his father gave him a new name: Nguyễn Tất Thành.

Young student

By now, Ho Chi Minh was attending formal classes with the scholar Vương Thúc Quý, a son of a rebel who fought the French, and then had gotten good with Chinese characters. The scholar was also regionally famous and had intellectuals visiting him, chief among them was the infamous Phan Bội Châu whom Ho Chi Minh would take inspiration from to fight for an independent Vietnam.

In September 1905, Ho Chi Minh was admitted into the French-Native primary school in Vinh city (12.5km from his birth place). Here, he was introduced to the ideals of the French Revolution. Not long after in June of 1906, he went to Huế again with his father. Ho Chi Minh began to attend a cours préparatoire at the French-Viet primary school in Thừa Thiên province.

By the time he was attending the higher cours élémentaire, protest and unrest were rampent in Huế due to high taxes on the Peasants. Ho Chi Minh, now an 18-year-old, joined the protestors. The demonstration however, was brutally repressed and hundreds of weaponless peasants were massacred by the colonialist troops. Ho Chi Minh was subsequently expelled from the primary school and was closely monitered by the French colonialist afterwards. He then attended the higher cours moyen at the prestigious Quốc Học - Huế highschool by the alias of Nguyễn Sinh Côn. He has by now, became very conscious of the oppression dealt by the colonialists on the native Vietnamese and is also inspired by the rebelious acts against the French by king Thành Thái and Duy Tân.

Teacher

In the summer of 1909, Ho Chi Minh moved to Quy Nhơn province (400km from Huế) to study the cours supérieur at the French-Viet primary school in Quy Nhơn province by his new teacher - Phạm Ngọc Thọ. He would moved again to Saigon in 1910 but ran out of cash. This prompted him to teach physical education at the privately owned Dục Thanh School in Phan Thiết (175km from Saigon).

Activism in France

In 1911, Ho Chi Minh left Vietnam to seek for ways to achieve national liberation of his country. He traveled to France, visited various French colonies in Africa, went to the United States and many Latin American countries. He also went to England, Germany and Russia, then finally returned to France.

Ho Chi Minh learned Esperanto between 1914 and 1917 in his visit to Britain.

In 1919, Ho Chi Minh joined the Socialist Party of France and studied social theory, the French and North-American revolutions, the Commune of Paris, and the October Revolution in Russia. In June 1919, he presented a 8-point platform in the Paris Peace Conference, demanding freedom from colonial interference in Vietnam.

In 1920, it was the first time Ho Chi Minh had access to Lenin's article Theses on the national and colonial questions, published in the periodical L'Humanité, the newspaper organ of French Socialist Party. In December of that same year, Ho Chi Mihn participated of the 18th Congress of the FSP, in which the French Communist Party was founded.

Vietnamese independence movement

In 1924, Ho Chi Minh traveled to China, in the city of Guangzhou. Along with other revolutionaries from parts of Asia, including China, Korea, India, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia, he founded the Association of Oppressed Peoples of Asia. In the same year, he traveled to Moscow to speak in support of national liberation at the 5th Congress of the Comintern.

In 1925, Ho Chi Minh helped develop the Association of Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth, what became the embryo of the Communist Party of Vietnam.

In 1931, the Hong Kong police arrested Ho Chi Minh at the request of France.

In 1935, the first National Congress of CPV was established.

In September 1945, Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam's independence from France by simply saying, "We are free".

See also

• Library works by Ho Chi Minh

References