Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
- one-third of the year and particularly during the harvest, that the people have enough to eat.'
- "The peasant's painful efforts, wrote an exceedingly tame Vietnamese nationalist during the 1920's, are not rewarded with sufficient well-being, so he 'dreams of more happiness, of more justice.' There can be no doubt that he did. But what the moderate nationalists failed to see was that by 1930, a great many peasants were ready to proceed from dream to action. They would now have listened to any party whose leaders were ready to make the troubles of the poor their chief political concern. This, unfortunately, was grasped only by the communists. When they proclaimed that the struggle for independence could have meaning for the poor only if independence aimed at improving their social condition, the communists had won the first round in their fight for leadership of the nationalist camp."2
Communists were, however, not the only Vietnamese political movement actively seeking to change the French colonial relationship. Three categories of political forces can be identified:
Principle Vietnamese Political Movements, 1920 – 1940
(with Dates of Activation)3
- Parties Advocating Reform of the French System
- Constitutionalist Party (1923)
- Vietnam People's Progressive Party (1923)
- Democratic Party (1937)
- Socialist Party (1936)
- Theocratic Movements
- Cao Daism (1920)
- Hoa Hao-ism (1939)
- Parties Advocating Revolution and National Independence
- Vietnam Nationalist Party (1927)
- Vietnam Revolutionary Party (1927) - disbanded 1930
- New Vietnam Revolutionary Party (1928) - disbanded 1930
- Indochinese Communist Party (1930)
- Trotskyist Movement (1931)
- Vietnam Restoration League (1931)
The reformist parties were strongest in Cochinchina. There the French administered directly rather than through Vietnamese as in Annam or Tonkin, and, apparently feeling more secure in their control, tolerated in the South open Vietnamese political activism prohibited in central and north Vietnam. Nonetheless, no reformist movements acquired a popular base, and all were moribund at the start of World War II.
