The Journal of Asian Studies

Vol. 61, No. 1, February 2002

pp. 7-31

Vietnamese Marxism, Dissent,

and the Politics of Postcolonial
Memory: Tran Duc Thao,
1946 - 1993

SHAWN McHALE

The themes of nationalism and revolution occupy an important place in the study of post-1945 Asia. Nowhere is this more evident than in Vietnam: after all, the Resistance War against the French (1946-54), followed by the war against the Americans and their allies (1965-75), has shaped modern Vietnamese history. For the 1950s in particular, scholars of Vietnam have developed a view in which nationalistic communists in the north consolidate their grip on power, undergoing crises but emerging stronger. This view has obvious merit. Nonetheless, it can leave the observer with the sense that a monolithic Vietnamese communism, tempered by years of struggle, inevitably triumphs. Three features are left out of such accounts. First, they downplay the diversity of Vietnamese world-views in the 1940s and 1950s. Second, they often lack a sense of the contingent and the accidental. And third, readers today are often left unaware of how deeply the relationship between past and present is contested. The past itself was, and is, in dispute: the contestation in the 1950s, where polemics eventually triumphed over open debate, left behind a fragmentary and partial historical record. The present has been no less problematic: contemporary concerns have reshaped memories and structured our sense of the past.

This essay takes up the challenge of writing about the 1950s in Vietnam by focusing on a person who unsuccessfully challenged the Vietnamese Workers Party: the philosopher Tran Duc Thao.[1] Thao was one of the most brilliant Vietnamese of the post-1945 generation. Initially attracted to Husserlian phenomenology while a student in France, he eventually turned to Marxism. In the pantheon of postcolonial intellectuals, Thao’s brief phenomenological reflections on colonialism and national­ism merit comparison with the works of Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. His writings on Marxism represent the most searching engagement with that doctrine of any Vietnamese writer in the twentieth century. After he returned to Vietnam in 1951, Thao dared to criticize the Party in 1956 (during what is known as the Nhan Van - Giai Pham affair), an act that led the Party to silence him within Vietnam for most of the next thirty years. He traveled to France for medical treatment, where he died in 1993.

The Nhan Van - Giai Pham affair takes its name from two periodicals, Nhan Van (Humanity) and Giai Pham (Beautiful works), which published short essays, literature, and cartoons critical of the Party leadership in 1956. These criticisms ranged from condemnation of the way a literary prize was awarded to attacks on the lack of democratic freedoms in the country and within the Party. Tran Duc Thao contributed two articles criticizing the Party to Nhan Van. The parallels to the Hundred Flowers movement in China are obvious; more broadly, this movement can be seen as part of a crisis in the communist world occasioned by the death of Stalin and Khruschev’s subsequent condemnation of his cult of personality in February 1956. While some Vietnamese writers drew inspiration from the outbreak of criticism in China and the USSR, they also reacted to popular unease that had been developing since 1954 within Vietnam. The Workers Party, fearful of democracy without firm leadership, cracked down. Dissent, nonetheless, lingered on until 1958, when the Party reasserted its control through a campaign against “revisionism.” The Nhan Van - Giai Pham affair, although technically referring to the controversy surrounding the two periodicals, has nonetheless come to symbolize the mid-1950s dissent against the regime as a whole.

Scholars have failed to agree on the relationship of the Nhan Van - Giai Pham affair to larger issues of Vietnamese intellectual and political history. Writers depict the affair as a literary event centering on the demand that the Workers Party allow writers freedom to think and publish without heavy-handed censorship. To some analysts, the affair was an intellectual turning point, a time when the Party-state cracked down on dissent and thus defined a repressive Vietnamese intellectual life until the 1980s and beyond. Others, such as Bui Tin, have (ruefully?) stated that the Nhan Van - Giai Pham affair had little impact outside the milieu of intellectuals. Georges Boudarel and Kim Ninh have sidestepped the fixation on the events of 1956 alone by inscribing their significance in a longer development of movements of dissent. Boudarel notes, for example, that dissent originated not simply with marginalized intellectuals but within the armed forces and Party (1991, 87-88). And one other scholar, Patricia Pelley, has completely ignored the Nhan Van - Giai Pham affair in sketching out the vigorous dissent that appeared in the writing of history in the 1950s. She thus implicitly criticizes the idea that 1956 was the sole locus of contestation.[2]  Scholars in general have overlooked the broad political critiques of the Party penned by several participants, including Tran Duc Thao.

Reflecting on the controversy over this period, three observations come to mind. First, too much focus on the events of 1956 obscures the place of the affair in an intellectual dialogue stretching back more than two decades. The call for democratic freedoms, after all, was a staple of communist critiques of the colonial regime in the 1930s, and the Viet Minh promised to embrace freedom of thought in 1945. Second, this affair, and Tran Duc Thao’s role in it, can be seen as a clash of high modernisms. Key writers including Phan Khoi, Nguyen Huu Dang, and Nguyen Manh Tuong ignored, marginalized, or attacked “feudal” and “backward” legacies from the past such as Buddhism and Confucianism. At the same time, they articulated a forward-looking vision in which scientific thinking and technology was invoked to shape and transform society. The Workers Party represents one variant of this vision in which an authoritarian state employed its full coercive powers to such ends.[3] This clash of high modernisms, which was essentially an ideological contest, occurred when northern Vietnam still had a somewhat contentious public realm. The resolution of this clash shaped the trajectory of Vietnamese intellectual and political life in the decades that followed. if this essay were only concerned with the struggle over high modernism and its resolution, however, its finding might be of limited interest. But the essay also addresses the troubled question of how to represent the past. As the Nhan Van - Giai Pham affair of 1956 recedes farther into the past, it increasingly moves (to borrow a formulation of Shahid Amin) from event to metaphor and memory (Amin 1995). Its content has become transformed. Post-1956 accounts from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam characterize the affair as “antirevolutionary” conspiracy but avoid delving deeply into the events. Overseas Vietnamese writers usually place an anticommunist spin on the events, as when the exiled literary critic Nguyen Hung Quoc states that Nhan Van - Giai Pham writings aimed “to expose the other, base (xau), dictatorial side of socialism”(Nguyen Hung Quoc 1996, 151-52). Such comments are puzzling, since some of the key participants in this affair, such as Dao Duy Anh, Truong Tuu, Nguyen Huu Dang, and Tran Duc Thao, criticized the Party but supported socialism. They differed only in nuance from prominent outsiders to the affair, some of whom also attacked authoritarianism and dogmatism (chu nghia giao dieu).[4]

In the broad sweep of post-1945 history, the Nhan Van - Giai Pham affair lives on at the margins of Vietnamese historical consciousness. The affair is overshadowed by events like the division of the country, the rise of the dictator Ngo Dinh Diem in the south, and the slow descent into war. In terms of the narrower topic of dissent and of intellectual history however, it is close to the center of this consciousness in a most peculiar way. In many senses, the Nhan Van - Giai Pham affair lives on in Vietnamese historical consciousness only as a metaphor and a memory separated from the publicity of the event. To some, it is an antisocialist conspiracy, to others, it is a paradigmatic example of communist repression of freedom Embedded in predetermined narratives the Nhan Van - Giai Pham affair plays its assigned roles

Rescuing the affair from such predetermined narratives, and seeing it through  intellectual trajectory of Tran Duc Thao, this essay confronts such memory fragments and metaphors. It is not easy to determine the precise facts about this past. one, the plethora of self-criticism texts that come out of this affair present one version of history: the regime forces most participants to confess to their “misdeeds.” How can we use such texts, as well as later historical representations of these events based on them? Second, memories of the affair have made their way into print in recent years. What is the status of such memories, and are they more reliable than self-criticisms? Finally, Tran Duc Thao himself made some cryptic comments about the affair in 1984. What are we to make of these statements, and in particular his partial disavowal of stances taken in 1956? To set the stage for the resolution of such questions, this essay now sketches out the early details of Tran Duc Thao’s life, linking them, when relevant, to developments in Vietnam.

Tran Duc Thao and Vietnam: Trajectories
of an Individual and a Nation

Tran Duc Thao was born in Hanoi in 1917.[5] He attended French-language schools from the age of five, passed his baccalaureate degree (tu tai) at age 17, and only then appeared to have mastered the romanized script used for Vietnamese. After a year at the Faculty of Law at the University of Hanoi, he left for France in 1936. He studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure (rue d’Ulm) and received his Agrégation in Philosophy in 1943, writing a thesis on the phenomenologist Husserl.

Thao became involved in anticolonial politics from 1944 onwards. From October to December 1945, French authorities jailed Thao for being a threat “to the security of the French state.” In the same period, Paris began to take note of this promising intellectual, a young man from Vietnam who was Merleau-Ponty’s student. Thao’s efforts to explore phenomenology and Marxism began to gain attention. He joined the group around Sartre and Merleau-Ponty’s Les temps modernes (Modern times), an extremely influential journal in postwar France. In 1948, Thao penned a celebrated article for this journal on the Franco-Russian philosopher Alexandre Kojève in which he argued for the superiority of Marx over Hegel. Along with other Vietnamese in France, such as the poet Pham Huy Thong, Thao campaigned in support of the Vietnamese revolution. For example, he contributed articles on colonialism and Indochina to Les temps modernes. Howard Davies has called Tran Duc Thao “the dominant figure” in that journal’s opposition to colonialism, even claiming that Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon were his “most significant emulators” (Davies 1987, 19-20).

Tran Duc Thao’s support for anticolonial causes was a direct reaction to the momentous transformations underway in Indochina at the time. The August General Uprising of 1945, in which the Viet Minh temporarily seized power from the Japanese and the French at the end of World War II, marked a turning point in Franco­Vietnamese relations. This uprising was also a watershed for many intellectuals: after 1945, a significant minority of them (including Tran Duc Thao) began to rethink their passionate engagement with Western ideas. Activists such as Hoai Thanh, Nguyen Dinh Thi, Nguyen Huu Dang, Truong Tuu, and Dao Duy Anh called for a “new culture” that was not hostage to the French. Early results, however, impressed few. Truong Tuu soon complained of the paucity of good literary works (Truong Tuu, 1946). By 1949, Pham Huy Thong, trying to salvage something positive in postwar cultural achievements, was reduced to celebrating such attributes as the sincerity of the new literature (Pham Huy Thong 1949, 24).

Despite these early missteps, it is probably not an exaggeration to speak of intellectuals “reinventing” themselves in this period as they struggled to articulate a new role for themselves in a resolutely nationalist Vietnam. At first this change took place under relatively loose Party direction, but from 1948 or 1949 onwards, the Party tightened its grip over intellectual life. Maoist thought and practices began, for the first time, to have a heavy impact on Vietnam. At the Second Party Congress, February 11-17, 1951, the new Labor Party declared that “Vietnam’s experience, especially, testifies to the validity of applying Mao Zedong’s ideology” (Furura 1992, 159). Prominent communists such as General Nguyen Chi Thanh and Hoang Van Hoan pushed the Maoist line fervently.

In this period, the People’s Republic of China gave substantial help to the Viet Minh. This aid ranged from rifles, to an artillery and engineering division, to a Chinese Military Advisory group composed of senior officers that helped the Viet Minh plan all major battles against the French.[6] Chinese films and publications proliferated, large numbers of Vietnamese students traveled to China, and Vietnamese even dressed in Mao jackets. At this point, the French even collected uncorroborated reports that well-known revolutionaries such as Tran Van Giau and Duong Bach Mai came under suspicion for “Trotskyist” leanings, had been interned, and may even have been expelled from the Party.[7]

The continuation of the Resistance War, and the growing influence of China, helped to transform intellectual life. Two examples will illustrate the changes from the 1930s onwards. In 1939, Xuan Dieu, a lover of Baudelaire, challenged those who were arguing that “Annamese literature must have an Annamese character” by asking: “do we need to close all seaports, absolutely forbid all communications, shut off the entire country?! Preserving does not mean wandering around and around a stagnant pool of water” (Xuan 1939, 9). By the 1950s however, Xuan Dieu had refashioned himself as a nationalist poet of the revolution and had left his apolitical romanticism behind. The literary critic Hoai Thanh underwent a broadly similar transformation. In 1942, he and Hoai Chan could write, in a book still famous in Vietnam, that “the West today has penetrated into the deepest part of our soul” (Hoai and Hoai 1985, 11). By the mid-1950s, Hoai Thanh had rejected his younger self, one that exalted the individual, looked to the West and celebrated the romantic, and reinvented himself as one rooted in the people. Both Xuan Dieu and Hoai Thanh expunged excessive French and romantic influences and dedicated themselves to serving the “revolution,” the people, and the Party.

Tran Duc Thao had not been able to participate directly in these transformations, as he had followed the dramatic events in Vietnam from abroad. In 1951, however, he reached an intellectual and personal crossroads. On the one hand, he confirmed his reputation in France as an important and exciting new philosopher when he published his most famous work, Phénoménologie et matérialisme dialectique (Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism). The book, which became quite well known in European philosophy, was eventually translated into English, Italian, and Japanese. But by late 1951, uneasy at supporting Vietnam from afar, Thao returned home to contribute to the construction of a revolutionary nationalist Vietnam,

On his arrival in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Thao encountered a country that was remarkably changed from the 1930s and 1940s. Cultural and social traditions once important, such as Confucianism and Buddhism, appeared to have abruptly faded from view. The postcolonial state loomed much larger in the life of the nation than the colonial one had just fifteen years earlier. Communist concepts permeated printed discourse. One should be wary of concluding that alternative forces and world-views had simply disappeared; it is clear, nonetheless, that the Viet Minh was making inroads into the cultural and political realms.

Tran Duc Thao arrived in the north just as intellectuals began to participate in Maoist-flavored rectification (chinh huan) campaigns. Nhu Phong portrayed the participation of intellectuals in self-criticism as follows:

The poets The Lu, Xuan Dieu, Huy Can, Luu Trong Lu, Che Lan Vien, and Tu Mo, all people whose names had been well known to the Vietnamese people for ten or even twenty years, were more enthusiastic than any one else, once their thought control course had been completed, in denouncing all the works they had produced before the date of their entry into the Party. All these poets noisily proclaimed that the poems which everyone had acclaimed in the old days were, in truth, no more than the products of a decadent culture.

(Nhu Phong [Le Van Tien] 1962, 78)

Nhu Phong asserts that the state published “tens of thousands” of copies of these writers’ self-criticisms and distributed them to cadres and others for study (1962, 78). Through the experience of self-criticism, intellectuals managed to recast themselves in a new light. Seeing themselves as part of the revolution, they often left their old colonial selves behind.

Tran Duc Thao embraced enthusiastically this same process of rectification and self-criticism. He joined the “rectification” class led by the writer To Hoai in the winter of 1951-52, a time when the Vietnamese were just adopting Maoist self-criticism practices on a wide scale. To Hoai’s class consisted of intellectuals and artists including Phan Khoi, Tu Mo, Van Cao, Nguyen Cong Hoan, and Tran Duc Thao (To Hoai 1992, 111-12). Tran Duc Thao, newly arrived from France, abandoned his Western clothing and eagerly adopted a peasant’s plain brown shirt and pants. He took his assignment quite seriously:

At night he slept without a mosquito net, even though we were in the jungle at the head of the Lo River, and at nightfall, mosquitoes came out in droves. “I returned late [to Vietnam), I have to train for hardship for times with you.” Tran Duc Thao spoke seriously. Not long after, Tran Duc Thao collapsed with malaria.

(To Hoai 1992, 113)

The story underlines Tran Duc Thao’s initial naivete combined with a sincere desire to rid himself of Western bourgeois habits and immerse himself in Vietnam.

On completing his rectification course, Tran Duc Thao returned to academic pursuits. He was an intellectual of high stature. He immediately began to publish articles on Vietnam for the new history journal Van su dia (Literature, history, and geography) and supposedly wrote at least one book.[8] Thao, a founding faculty member of the national university (opened in 1956), became dean of its Faculty of History.

Thao’s intellectual pursuits show, more broadly, how the Workers Party tried to mobilize the intelligentsia to serve the state and, at the same time, develop an authentically postcolonial culture in which Marxist analysis played a key role. This work accelerated after 1954 in the north as the DRV set up research organizations (such as the Institute of History) to write Vietnam-centered histories and ethnographies that were not captive to French colonial scholarship. The Ministry of Culture and the Workers Party encouraged new cultural discourses and practices that would help construct a postcolonial reality: ideologically oriented literacy campaigns, the use of self-criticism, and strong advocacy for socialist realism in literature all testify to the Party’s desire to reshape the cultural and political field.

In the 1954-56 period, then, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was being pulled in two directions. On the one hand, the Party’s influence deepened through land reform campaigns and the aforementioned proliferation of Maoist-flavored practices of rectification and ideological study. The Party argued that Marxist-Leninist dogma alone was insufficient. As one 1955 text told readers,

Combining the study of the theory of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin with the study of the experiences of the masses: that is the leadership line of comrade Mao Zedong. That is “the unity of the general truths of Marxism-Leninism with the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution’ of which comrade Mao Zedong has spoken.

(Tran Ba Dat 1955, 71)

Such statements support the conclusion that Maoist influence and Party authority peaked in this period.

But was the Central Committee of the Party really in control? Despite a keen interest in Maoism, and despite the victory over the French in 1954, Vietnamese began to express unease with and opposition to the Party. An important segment of the radical intelligentsia stressed the rights and responsibilities of individuals and the privileged autonomy of intellectuals. During the Resistance war (1946-54), many of these Vietnamese accepted the Viet Minh line. As the old patriotic scholar Phan Khoi noted (with some exaggeration), during the years of resistance, “it seemed as if no one was troubled at all” by the cultural policies of the party, and the ‘masses” and the leadership were as one. This, he stated, changed after 1954: mistakes in land reform bred dissension at all levels of society (1957, 9).

On May 7, 1956, for the first time, Party leaders admitted that they had committed errors in carrying out land reform. According to the person in charge of the process, these errors had led to the purge of three quarters of rural communist cells and to the execution of 15,000-45,000 suspects.[9] But if the Party leadership began to accept some responsibility, Georges Boudarel has characterized its explana­tions as a “triumph of euphemism, untruths, and finally, of nonsense” (Boudarel 1991, 255). By July 1956, General Nguyen Chi Thanh was noting the worrisome disquiet (thac mac) in army units. General Thanh stated that it was right for units to allow more democracy for soldiers to express their concerns (thac mac). He pointed out, nonetheless, that not all units knew how to cope with such criticism. Democracy without firm leadership, he argued, was unacceptable (Nguyen Chi Thanh 1970, 266-67). In that same month of July, Tran Duc Thao found a person to translate a recent Chinese article for the university review: the article was none other than Lu Dingyi’s call to “let a hundred flowers bloom” in China (Boudarel 1991, 239-40).

But did Tran Duc Thao lead the critique of the Vietnamese Workers Party? Boudarel has stressed that Nguyen Manh Tuong, Dao Duy Anh, Dang Van Ngu, Phan Khoi, and Tran Duc Thao, often seen as promoters of the intellectual dissent against the Party, “were neither the initiators nor the organizers” of such critiques. They followed in the footsteps of members of the Party and the Military who had criticized the Party before the Twentieth Party Congress in the USSR (February 1956) and before the Hundred Flowers movement broke out in China in 1956 (Boudarel 1991, 255). This point is extremely important, for the Vietnamese Workers Party later argued, the facts notwithstanding, that “dissident” intellectuals enjoyed no broad support. In this way, the Party made it easier for itself to target intellectuals as objects of Party repression.

Problems for Tran Duc Thao first arose at the University of Hanoi (where he taught) after he contributed two articles to the periodical Nhan Van (Humanity) that attacked Party abuses and called for more democracy. It is difficult, however, to figure out what exactly happened next: an official history of the national university skims over the 1956-58 period and does not mention Tran Duc Thao by name. After mentioning “disorders” in Poland and Hungary that year, the book states that “a group of antirevolutionary elements that for a long time had concealed themselves within State organizations took advantage of the opportunity to come into the open.” But the Party and the leadership organized everyone to “smash the conspiracy,” and by 1958, had achieved complete victory (Dinh Xuan Lam 1991, 19-20). Tran Duc Thao and his fellow sympathizers are expunged from the historical record. His name comes before the public again in 1958 when his self-criticism, followed by scathing attacks on this confession and a second self-criticism, is published in Nhan Dan. I will return to these documents in due course.

Tran Duc Thao: From Phenomenology to Marxism

The narrative above, while accurate, is extremely incomplete. It is a historical account that skims over Tran Duc Thao’s central concern: philosophy. By ignoring philosophy, scholars run the risk of assuming that Tran Duc Thao’s critique can be adequately understood either in terms of international communism or in terms of Vietnamese domestic developments. But just as international communism did not frame the entirety of Vietnamese communist thought, neither did conditions within the country completely shape contestarion against the Party and the state. In Tran Duc Thao’s case, it is necessary to retreat in time, delve into his philosophical journey, and then see how this journey intersects with his Vietnamese experiences.

While Tran Duc Thao’s later critiques of the Vietnamese Workers Party came out of a Western European Marxism, his first love had been phenomenology. In the early 1940s, Tran Duc Thao had been attracted by Husserl, who had thought he avoided the pitfalls of idealism by arguing that all knowledge is found in the world of sensible experience. Rejecting the notion that truth could be found in the realm of pure logic, Husserl argued that it was instead to the world of lived experience, the “life-world,” that philosophy must turn. The “life-world,” so familiar to us, is the “foundation of all objective knowledge” (Landgrebe 1981, 179).

The phenomenological method shaped Thao’s earliest writings. In a 1946 article, for example, he noted that to a Frenchman, the notion of Vietnamese independence is an abstract possibility, but a possibility contradicted by the fact of French colonial domination. To the “Annamite,” on the other hand, the opposite is true:

Viet-Nam as it would have been without colonialism is not for him a “mere hypothesis,” but a project actually lived, the project even of his existence, that which defines his existence as Annamite. This world of possibilities forms the backdrop (fond) on which appear perceived realities and which endow them with meaning. Erupting into this world, colonialism’s contribution reveals its negativity immediately.

(Tran Duc Thao 1946, 881)

Colonialism’s negativity, in other words, stops the “Annamite” from realizing his or her true potential.

Tran Duc Thao then expanded his analysis by invoking the phenomenological notion of “horizon” to develop a powerful argument. He argued that the “Annamite” was not hostage to a colonial view of the world. Indeed, given the same facts, Vietnamese and French often arrived at opposite conclusions. Thus, the philosopher argued that differences cannot exist at the level of the quality of arguments over colonialism: instead, “the meaning of existence is prior to the arguments one uses in justification” and depends on the horizon within which one apprehends the real. To the Frenchman, Vietnam is within the French empire. It is part of his “internal horizon,’ the frame within which appears everything within the French community” (Tran Duc Thao 1946, 897, 883). To the “Annamite,” on the contrary, his horizon is defined by Vietnam itself, and France is outside of it. This difference in vantage points determines the kinds of arguments each side uses to justify itself.

From the above, it is clear that the early Tran Duc Thao had downplayed internal cleavages (such as class) within national communities in the interests of constructing a phenomenology of nationalism and colonialism. This changed, however, as Thao shifted from phenomenology to Marxism. Compared to Soviet or Chinese Marxism-Leninism, Thao’s new Western Marxism was much more conversant with Hegel and phenomenology and paid greater attention to questions of individual rights, responsibilities, and freedoms. By 1948, Thao had rejected parts of the phenomeno­logical analysis, now seeing dialectical materialism, and its analysis of labor and class struggle, as the best way to understand historical transformations (Tran Duc Thao 1948). By 1951, in Phenomenologie et matérialisme dialectique, Thao argued that “Marxism appears to us as the only conceivable solution to the problems raised by phenomenology itself.” He later elaborated on this point by stating that he had hoped to find the solution to his intellectual impasse in the Vietnamese revolution itself (Tran Duc Thao 1986, xxi; 1992, i).

Tran Duc Thao’s newly appropriated philosophy, like his rejected phenom­enology, evinced a profound faith in rationality and science. Marxism added an explicit theory of the linear and progressive unfolding of history. In such a fashion, it was clearly high modernist. By this point, Tran Duc Thao had come to believe that Husserl’s phenomenology, although claiming to center on the “life-world,” or world of sensible experience, did not go far enough beyond idealism: “Husserl’s class position did not allow him to go back to the social relations of production that defined the real content of sensible life” (Tran Duc Thao 1951, xxviii). Marxism, Tran Duc Thao argued, shows that meaning is constituted historically through labor and thus in terms of class.

At first glance, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism seems to shed little light on Thao’s later criticism of the Vietnamese Workers Party. The book is concerned above all with exposing the contradictions of Husserlian phenomenology, on the one hand, and resolving these contradictions through Marxism. But the Marxism presented in these pages is highly theoretical and seems far removed from practical politics. That being said, a few points about this book bear on Tran Duc Thao’s 1956 writings. First of all, as François Lyotard has noted, Thao holds that the superstructure (ideology and culture) is somewhat autonomous from the base, or production of material life, and it is precisely this (limited) autonomy of base and superstructure that gives rise to the contradictions which drive the historical dialectic (Lyotard 1991, 128). This idea of autonomy of the superstructure may well have influenced Thao’s own sense of autonomy from the Party and his clear interest in questions of consciousness.

Second, Thao appreciates the power of negation to promote welcome change. In his phenomenological analyses, he had characterized colonialism as negativity: colonial development pushed Vietnam along a path that negated what it would have been if it had been allowed to develop on its own. But in his Marxist phase, he portrays negativity as an essential and constructive part of the historical dialectic: revolution entails negating one’s alienation but also reconstituting a new society in which selected and desired elements of the past are absorbed into the new by the proletariat (Tran Duc Thao 1986, 216-18). One final point about this work: true to Marx, Tran Duc Thao saw labor, and thus class, as the arena of struggle. He paid no attention to the role of parties. Indeed, throughout his later writing, one can sense that to Thao, the Party is secondary to the people: the people are the vanguard of history, and the Party gets in trouble when it forgets that elementary fact.

Tran Duc Thao’s thought often operates at a high level of abstraction. But in returning to Vietnam and participating in the building of socialism, Tran Duc Thao forced himself to link personal transformation to social change. And once the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had won at Dien Bien Phu, forcing France to withdraw from Vietnam, Tran Duc Thao turned to practical as well as philosophical questions. In 1956, invoking the example of the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, Tran Duc Thao penned two articles that indicted the Workers Party for its errors (e.g. in land reform) and called for the development of “democratic freedoms.” His critiques, while sharp, were also imbued with a utopian flavor: Tran Duc Thao believed that the future was a time in which individuals and the collectivity would be able to realize, through emancipation, the full possibilities of a classless society.

In his October 1956 article, Thao called on the Vietnamese Workers Party to struggle against bureaucracy, factionalism, and the cult of personality. In Thao’s view, after the defeat of the French imperialists and the completion of land reform in the north, these “sicknesses,” manifestations of the regime, had reappeared. It was the responsibility of the Party and the people to fight against them if they were to “build socialism.” And it was their duty, he believed, to develop “democratic freedoms” (Tran Duc Thao 1956, 10).

Tran Duc Thao carefully distinguished his view of “democratic freedoms” from what he termed the bourgeois notion of such freedoms:

The freedom that they (the people) want to develop decisively is not the bourgeois freedom of the old society, the freedom of a minority that exploits the majority. The freedom that they want to develop is the freedom of the entire people to criticize the leadership, because the leadership is precisely the leadership of their own. ... That freedom is the right of the citizenry that is recognized and protected in our system.

(Tran Duc Thao 1956, 1)

Tran Duc Thao noted that although the populace is guaranteed “democratic freedom,” in practice, members of the Party apparatus subvert these freedoms.  How best, then, to make sure that such freedoms develop? Thao pointed out that freedom “is not something that can be bestowed” by the Party. It is not something for intellectuals; it is something that the entire populace must realize for itself.

The problem, Tran Duc Thao argued, is that the Party had not correctly distinguished between the content of freedom and the form of freedom. “In content,” he stated, “our system is in its essence and in actuality free.” The Vietnamese had overthrown French imperialism and only traces of past exploitative practices remained. But in the form of freedom numerous problems still remained, and these problems hindered the full participation of Vietnamese in realizing their freedom. In a later discussion, Thao clarified as examples of the “form of freedom” the rights of free speech, right of assembly, and freedom of the press (Tran Duc Thao 1956, 1, 5).

Rejecting the notion that Vietnamese had to work only for the collectivity, Tran Duc Thao argued that “the form of freedom is individual freedom.” Under the old regime, this was nothing but an “idealist daydream,”

but in our society, it has been regenerated and transformed into a real value. The individual serves the collectivity, but the collectivity also must construct the individual, and the form of freedom in the people’s legal realm is the condition to allow each individual truly to contribute to the construction of the collectivity.

(Tran Duc Thao 1956, 5)

In other words, the true development of the individual is part of a dialectical process that at the same time takes Vietnam further along the road to the development of the communist collectivity. Eventually, Thao believed, society would dissolve classes and the state would wither away (tu tieu) (Tran Duc Thao 1956, 16).

If Tran Duc Thao had left his critique at that, perhaps he would have been spared the wrath of the Party. But in a subsequent article that year, he sharpened his attack. At every level of the Party, he stated, one could find the maladies of bureaucratism, factionalism, and cult of personality. These maladies were widespread in society “but only in the leadership does it have the capacity to cause great harm to the people.” The case of land reform illustrated this well. Lower-ranking cadres in the localities recognized these errors, Thao noted, and they had to endure the harm caused to themselves or to those around them (Tran Duc Thao 1959a, 20):

Backwards and conservative elements prevented the masses from expressing their opinions, obstructed the rectification of errors, causing great harm; organizations were heavily damaged, the reconstruction of organizations in the districts and provinces developing according to a doctrine in which peasants were turned into ruffians (luu manh hoa).

(Tran Duc Thao 1959a, 21-2)

In essence, these backwards and conservative elements made enormous errors and then turned errors into the Party line. Furthermore, they became consumed by imagined conspiracies: “A powerful apparatus, built to wipe out the enemy, reaches the point of not being able to see the enemy and turns on its friends, taking them to be the enemy and indiscriminately destroying them” (Tran Duc Thao 1959a, 22).

Tran Duc Thao’s criticism of Party abuses focused on the events from 1954 to 1956. The Workers Party came to acknowledge its mistakes in land reform: in fact, Ho Chi Minh apologized for them (Duiker 2000, 483). But the fear of “hidden conspiracies” subverting the revolution, mentioned above, has never disappeared in Vietnam: in an ironic twist, the Party eventually labeled Tran Duc Thao as a hidden enemy who had tried to undermine the revolution from within.

In important ways, Tran Duc Thao’s essays reached far beyond Vietnam to reassert familiar arguments of Marx that Communist parties had neglected. Thao stressed the importance of the individual to Marxism, stating that the development of the individual and of the collectivity were intertwined; the Party, suspicious of bourgeois individualism, rejected this argument. Furthermore, despite his surface acceptance of Party leadership, Tran Duc Thao ultimately saw the Party as of secondary importance. In his view, the Communist Party had arrogated to itself rights which belonged to the people and in so doing had deceived itself and the people about the situation in Vietnam. Speaking from within a Marxist discourse, Thao argued that the Party needed to reform. The Party, also speaking from within what it considered to be Marxist ideology, reacted by choking off any public debate over the Party and its errors. Thao, forced into self-criticism, becomes a victim of the 1956—58 crackdown on dissidents, and is mostly forgotten in the larger sweep of Vietnamese history.

The Party Counterattack, Forced Self-Criticism,

and Competing Claims to Truth

From late 1956 to early 1958, Party leaders forged no consensus over how to react to the 1956 critiques of the Nhan Van - Giai Pham “group.” In 1957, critics of the Party remained free, but Party ideologues took the offensive. The latter became acutely worried that the public would confuse the Marxism of critics such as Truong Tuu and Tran Duc Thao with that of the Party: Truong Tuu’s thought in particular was perceived as “deviant” and “dangerous,” a “false Marxism-Leninism” that could “lead astray” the people (Van and Nguyen 1957, 99). Thus Party writers labored to emphasize differences with the “dissidents.” But they also countered criticism by arguing that intellectuals already enjoyed great freedom. Stating that the negative characteristics in society were a legacy of the old system that could be criticized, one work exclaimed that Vietnamese writers had the freedom to praise everything good and noble, had the freedom to serve the people and the Ancestral Land (to quoc), and that such rights were “very sacred (and) very precious” (Van Tan and Nguyen Hong Phong 1957, 43-44).

Such arguments did not convince critics: having militated for freedom of the press against French colonialists, they wanted such freedoms realized in the postcolonialera. In 1958, however, the Party launched a campaign against “revisionism” to promote its view of correct Party doctrine and to slander the Nhan Van - Giai Pham group. This campaign was broadcast widely in print and closely followed the 1957 Chinese campaign against “revisionism.” The trial of the Nhan Van- Giai Pham group became a public morality tale to an extent not seen since in Vietnam.[10] While few Vietnamese had ever read the Nhan Van - Giai Pham texts, newspapers circulated the participants’ self-criticisms, as well as criticisms by others, to tens of thousands of Vietnamese.

The Party attack on the Nhan Van - Giai Pham group addressed broad doctrinal issues, and in particular attempted to link the group to Trotskyism (Nhan Dan April 13-23, 1958, Thuy Trieu 1959, 7-8). Despite a brief collaboration between southern Vietnamese Trotskyists and Stalinists in the 1930s, the Workers Party saw Trotskyists as some of its greatest enemies. The Party also used slander to discredit its enemies. Some articles focusing on key individuals, such as Nguyen Huu Dang, Truong Tuu, and Phan Khoi, unearthed, exaggerated, or invented their unsavory intellectual beliefs and personal habits. The authors of some of these essays claimed an acquaintance with the accused, thus lending “authenticity” to their words. Editorials and letters from readers completed the attack. The Party then demanded that the accused undergo public self-criticism: if the self-criticisms were deemed good enough, the Party let the person off the hook. If not, a second round of attacks followed.

A reader encountering these criticisms for the first time must have come away with the sense of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the Party’s critics. Allegations piled on top of allegation: “The wicked actions of the Nhan Van - Giai Pham group are clearly in accord with the plot of the Americans and [South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh] Diem to destroy the north.” A variety of articles claimed that the accused were Trotskyists coming into the open. One stated that Nguyen Huu Dang was from a landlord family; was egotistical and selfish; wanted to be an emperor or ,general; in early 1940s sold materials on the black market; had gambled at night on floating gambling dens before 1945. Another article accused Phan Khoi of denouncing the anti-imperialist forces to the secret police before 1945; furthermore, this account claimed, the Viet Minh security police (Cong An) had caught Phan Khoi red-handed, sometime after 1946, smoking opium in the Vietnamese Nationalist Party (Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang) offices! Thuy An was accused of being close to the families of the French general de Lattre de Tassigny and the colonial-era Chief of the Sureté Marty; of being a lover (nhan tinh) of a member of the Vietnamese Nationalist Party; and, in general, of being part of a group within the Nhan Van - Giai Pham group that used thugs and prostitutes to debauch others (see Nhan Dan April 13- 23, 1958). Faced with this cascade of criticisms, attacking their moral stature as well as their political beliefs, it was hard for the criticized to strike back. Not all accused succumbed to the pressure. The old scholar Phan Khoi held firm, but died before the state could bring him to trial. Truong Tuu, one of the most conspicuous critics of tbe Party, refused to take back his opinions and was jailed. Many, however, recanted. Under obvious pressure, Tran Duc Thao decided to undergo self-criticism.

Thao’s self-criticism, published between May 22 and May 24, 1958 in the Party newspaper Nhan Dan (The People), is disconcerting. Some parts of it ring true, others do not. Early on, Thao commented in his self-criticism that “I am a child of French imperialism. . . . But although a child, I also hated French imperialism” (Tran Duc Thao 1959b, 55). Such attempts to defend himself are overwhelmed, however, by hypercritical “admissions.” When I read that “Tran Duc Thao” supposedly says that “in truth, I spread reactionary and slanderous allegations from enemy newspapers and radio” (Tran Duc Thao 1959b, 49), my first inclination is to assume that Tran Duc Thao agreed under duress to sign a statement in which the Party put words into his mouth. Although my assumption is almost certainly accurate, I have no way of knowing for sure.

What is undoubtedly true is that Tran Duc Thao’s “self-criticism” failed in the eyes of the Party because it did not go far enough. The text combined apologies for “errors” (e.g. falling into anarchism) with principled and factual rebuttals of his critics. It is no surprise that the parts of the self-criticism that come across as most truthful to this reader are the ones that retain a spirit of defiance. This defiance clearly bothered his critics: Nguyen Hoan, in a counter-attack published in Thoi moi on June 6 and 7, 1958, stated that “Tran Duc Thao is still disingenuous and covering things up (and) has not had to reveal his true nature (mat that)” (Nguyen Hoan 1959, 62).

After Tran Duc Thao condemned the Party’s flaws, the Party forced him out of his university position and out of the public eye. While it dismissed him on ideological grounds, another reason may have stung more: as the poet Pham Huy Thong, acting as a witness for the prosecution in 1958 charged, Tran Duc Thao had “lost touch (with) his roots in the people” (Pham Huy Thong 1959, 26). We see a shift here away from a purely ideological criticism of Thao to one with an essentialist flavor: if one is rooted in the people, one does not deviate from the ideological line. Pham Huy Thong, once guilty of the same “rootlessness” as Tran Duc Thao (he too had spent years abroad in France, was once enamored of French literature and learning and had held reformist views) was drawn in to condemn Thao for holding such views.

It would be simple to assume that self-criticisms are fraudulent documents and probe no further. But can we leave the matter at that? Such documents are claims to truth on the part of the individual undergoing self-criticism and, of course, the Party. To explore the nature of the process, I want to step back and address two problems:the nature of the language of self-criticism, and the claims to truth possible with this language. The two problems are tightly interrelated.

Self-criticisms are meant to serve clear didactic, ritual, and political ends. So how can one make a text clear to an intended audience? On the one hand, texts often subvert the intentions of their authors precisely because they are inherently open to multiple interpretations. Nonetheless, we can easily argue that some texts (e.g. poetry) are more open to multiple readings than others (e.g. lists). The reasons lie not simply in the text, but in the reader and the process of reception.

The phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty has made a useful distinction between “fertile” and “institutional” language that suggests how the range of possible interpretations of a text can be narrowed. Fertile language, such as the language of poetry, used in unfamiliar ways, is open to multiple interpretations. Stereotypic language, in contrast, is utterly familiar. Michael Yen quotes Merleau-Ponty:

We live in a world in which speech is an institution. For all these many commonplace utterances, we possess within ourselves ready-made meanings. They arouse in us only second-order thoughts; these in turn are translated into other words which demand from us no real effort of expression and will demand from our hearers no effort of comprehension. . .  The linguistic and the intersubjective world no longer surprises us, . . . and it is within a world already spoken and speaking that we speak.

(Yeo 1992, 44).

This last phrase is pregnant with meaning. Merleau-Ponty’s formulation suggests that meaning does not inhere in the text itself, but in the meanings that readers bring to texts. When language is institutionalized, the dominant range of meanings a word, a sentence, or a full text has narrows substantially.

The process of self-criticism, I argue, gives rise to an extreme version of stereotypic language. It is stereotypic because over the decades communists have striven to link together a series of Marxist concepts into an ideology that, it is expected, readers will interpret in a restricted way. Indeed, by the mid-1950s, the Workers Party had transformed what was once a fertile language (the new language of communism) into an institution and had attempted to narrow the range of meanings that could be attached to any one concept. Furthermore, not only did Party cadres argue that the text had a restricted range of meanings, they also taught recruits a method of reading such texts.

The nature of language is intimately connected to questions of claims to truth. One difficulty of reading self-criticisms is that we tend not to believe statements made under duress. Slavoj Zizek has discussed this problem in a different context in terms of the “impossible-real.” When on trial, a dissident communist is told to “be a good communist” and tell the truth. But in telling the full truth, the dissident simply implicates himself or herself more deeply and paves the way for sentencing or execution. In other words, it is impossible to realize the goal without sacrificing oneself needlessly. This is the “impossible-real” (Zizek 1989, 165).

Self-criticism falls into this type of dilemma. The mark of a successful self-criticism is one in which the author makes a “forced choice.” If you choose to confess your sins, you will retain your freedom of choice. If you do not, you cannot have the freedom to choose. Zizek argues that this is not a peculiarity of choice under totalitarianism, but occurs in every subject’s relationship to the community to which he or she belongs: “the situation of the forced choice consists in the fact that the subject must freely choose the community to which he already belongs, independent of his choice – he must choose what is already given to him” (Zizek 1989, 163-65; italics in original).

Zizek’s argument is suggestive but flawed. When we circle back to the case of Tran Duc Thao, we see that the Party did indeed pressure Thao to choose the community of Vietnam as the Party defined it. Yet the philosopher faced a dilemma. He was making a choice at a time of great change, when the nature of the community to which he belonged was unclear. His “community” was under negotiation. Not only were there competing visions of what “Vietnam” was, but in his philosophical formation, Thao had never been defined by the Vietnamese nation-state. His dilemma, perhaps, is that of the postcolonial intellectual, for whom such choices can be particularly acute.

Returning to the particular language of Tran Duc Thao’s self-criticism, I see him trying to mark out a space not totally defined by the regime. Thao initially struggled to use language in a somewhat “fertile” manner and avoid being contained by the institutional language of self-criticism. The result: his critics rebuked him and he had to revert to stereotypic language. The text that ensued does not seem to be Tran Duc Thao talking: it seems to represent a struggle between Thao and a Party committee.

Thao’s self-criticism, and those of others such as that of the idiosyncratic Marxist historian Dao Duy Anh, haunt us. As public statements, they were exploited by the Party to frame the meaning of the Nhan Van - Giai Pham affair within the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. From this point onwards, the affair takes on a life of its own increasingly divorced from the original events and texts of 1956. We shall return to this “afterlife” in the conclusion, for, like a traumatic event, the affair, while increasingly hidden from public view, continues to shape Vietnamese cultural and intellectual life in myriad ways.

It is hard to know what exactly Tran Duc Thao thought in 1958 of his “self-criticism.” In 1984, he wrote that the two articles for which he was attacked “confused socialist democracy with bourgeois democracy, Marxist humanism with bourgeois humanism” (Tran Duc Thao 1991, 255). But this seeming admission of theoretical failure must be paired with a comment he made in 1989 about the hypothetical case in which a person is unjustly accused and no longer is considered to belong to the class of the masses: “Regardless of what he says, his words will be seen as the words of the enemy, or almost as the words of the enemy. Although he speaks the truth, no one will mention it. People will not imperil themselves by being seen as having any connection with the enemy” (Tran Duc Thao 1989, 122). In such a situation, Thao states, we have to remember: everyone is a human. It is only by recognizing this fact that we can protect ourselves from excesses of class analysis and protect the rights of the people as a whole (1989, 122). It is hard not to read these words without thinking that Tran Duc Thao was speaking in the light of his own experiences. But can we say for sure? It may be impossible to know what he thought in 1989 or 1984, let alone 1958. This difficulty is not simply one of textual interpretation, but of psychology as well. Anecdotally, Vietnamese have commented that Thao developed a deep fear of persecution that was obvious up to his last years of life (Tran Tri Vu, 5). This seems to be confirmed by a cryptic comment he made hinting at his political traumatization:he later noted how, “paralyzed,” he was unable to “speak” for years.

Post-1958 Legacies

What was the fate of Tran Duc Thao in postcolonial Vietnam? The regime forced him to leave public life, He was not sent to prison, unlike TranThieu Bao (Minh Duc), who was sentenced to ten years in prison in 1960, or Nguyen Huu Dang and Thuy An (Luu Thi Yen), sentenced to fifteen. Instead, he toiled in anonymity: the publishing house Su That (Truth) hired Thao to translate western philosophical classics into Vietnamese (Nguyen Hung Quoc 1996, 165; To 1992, 79).

Thao’s peculiar fate was linked to developments at home and abroad. Thao probably had protectors in the Vietnamese Workers Party who mitigated his punishment: after all, he avoided prison. But such protectors could accomplish little. For one, the Vietnamese Workers Party depended on the PRC and the USSR for material and ideological support. While the latter two countries increasingly clashed by 1958, both shared an aversion to a pluralistic Marxism. In such an international context, it is no surprise that Thao was silenced.

Foreign intellectuals were thwarted when they tried to contact Tran Duc Thao. From 1965 onward, the government allowed Thao to send his articles abroad. But when the French writer Olivier Todd asked Premier Pham Van Dong in 1966 if he could see Thao, Dong evaded the question. Perhaps the most creative reply was when Dong said: “I’m so sorry, my dear friend, Tran Duc Thao could not come because the bridge he had to cross was bombed” (Todd 1981, 220). Now Americans had to shoulder the blame for Thao’s continued silence. A different Vietnamese (living in France, I assume) once said to Todd: “for him (Tran Duc Thao), it’s like dying an excruciatingly slow death” (c’est la mort au compte-gouttes) (222). Thao himself, who avoided speaking about the material privations of these years, did once remark that his living conditions had been “more wretched than a dog’s” (Tran Tri Vu, 1). Until the 1980s, he was forced to live alone and in poverty. His father was dead, and his wife, apparently under pressure, divorced him (Pham Trong Chanh 1993, 30).

Tran Duc Thao’s situation improved in the late 1980s. He was allowed to travel to France. In 1989, a time of openness, the regime allowed Thao to publish a book in Vietnamese attacking Althusserian anti-humanism. Foreigners who met Thao in these years had mixed reactions. While they were impressed by his superb command of phenomenology, they were pained to hear him speak about current events: on that score, it was as if “his thought had stopped in 1958, that he was completely lost when it came to reality and the current world situation” (Pham Trong Chanh 1993, 31). Jean-François Revel had perhaps the most extreme reaction: this intellectual, who had known Thao in the 1940s, referred to him as a “propagandizing zombie” when he came to Paris in the 1980s (Revel 1993).

Thao began to change his intellectual views markedly from 1991, when the Vietnamese government let him travel to France for medical treatment. He prolonged his stay, helped in part with monetary support from an informal “friendship” society of Vietnamese living in France. Despite his past experiences, and despite his lingering fears of persecution, he remained, as Tran Dao noted, “still optimistic, still hopeful” (Tran Dan 1993, 13). As Thao himself wrote in 1992: “the conscience, in its appeal to itself, puts forth the demand for good in action, truth in knowledge, and beauty in the realization of lived experience (processus vicus)” (quoted in Tran Dan 1993). These are remarkable words to come from the pen of a man who had been abused by the Vietnamese Party-state for many years.

At the end of his life, according to one report, Tran Duc Thao was turning against Marxism (Tran Tri Vu, 9). No texts from his hand, however, document such a radical shift. Before finishing his philosophical projects, Thao died on April 24, 1993 in Broussais Hospital in Paris.

Conclusion

How can we make sense of Tran Duc Thao and the broader significance of his life? Thao himself suggests some guidance. Near the beginning of his 1946 essay on colonialism in Indochina, he made the simple point that our understanding of existence depends not simply on the words and arguments that we deploy, but also on the horizon within which we perceive the real. But at the end of this same essay, Thao made an intriguing claim: that it was possible for individuals to “live above particular horizons, and position themselves in terms of a human point of view” (Tran Duc Thao 1946, 900). This essay makes the same dual claim. On the one hand, this essay underlines the point that the varied accounts of Tran Duc Thao’s intellectual and political journeys arise out of vastly different horizons of understanding. On the other hand, these interpretive horizons are not absolute barriers to comprehension. For all the antagonism between Tran Duc Thao and his critics, he shared with most of them a high modernist view of state and society that transcended their political differences.

Simply looking at texts and oral interviews produced since 1993, however, one is initially struck by the fragmented, even jumbled, views on Tran Duc Thao. Local boy, brilliant scholar, flawed hero, enemy of the revolution, misguided soul: texts and oral interviews produced after 1993 can lend support to each of these interpretations. Inhabitants of Song Thap hamlet (commune of Chau Khe, Tien Son district, Bac Ninh province), Thao’s native village, recall vaguely that he “encountered difficulties” in the 1950s but nonetheless seem proud that this scholar achieved renown.[11]” An unusually frank account by the historian Luong Ninh, avoiding the usual clichéd condemnation of the Nhan Van - Giai Pham “gang,” unreservedly praises Thao’s teaching in the mid-1950s: it “left a strong impression on me that has never dimmed” (Luong Ninh 1996, 75-76). But these are individual memories: what about texts that more clearly carry the imprimatur of the Party or the state? Official texts are unable to arrive at a comprehensive evaluation of Tran Duc Thao that situates his “dissent” of the 1950s in a longer trajectory of philosophical and political interrogations. Official works continue to condemn, in formulaic language, the “anti-revolutionary conspiracies” in which Thao and others supposedly participated in the 1950s.[12]’² But what is most startling, given the extent of the man’s past troubles with the Party, and the Party’s continuing denunciation of the Nhan Van - Giai Pham affair, is that the state announced in 2001 that it was awarding Tran Duc Thao the Ho Chi Minh prize posthumously. This is one of the highest awards that Vietnam can bequeath on its citizens. In death, with parts of his past censored from the award announcement, Thao has been resurrected as an exemplary intellectual.

There is a supreme irony in this award: after all, the contradictory representations of Tran Duc Thao’s past can obscure, as I have argued, the fact that Thao shared some fundamental views with the regime. If Thao ended up antagonizing the communist regime, it is no less true that he shared with that regime a high modernist ideology, one that evinced great faith in the possibility of human beings to master nature and human nature, in part through the application of science and technology to rationalize society (see Scott 1998,4). Tran Duc Thao and the Communist Party certainly clashed, yet it was a “fraternal” conflict between Thao’s beliefs and the Party’s authoritarian version of such high modernism. Tran Duc Thao framed the debate over what it meant to be Vietnamese in clearly modernist terms, and decisively rejected the notion that alternative Vietnamese ways of perceiving reality were valid. He shared the same incomprehension as the Communist Party for Buddhism, Confucianism, and “superstitions.” Like the Communist Party, Thao was an agent of a new faith that assumed that the populace could be “enlightened” and could even “enlighten’ themselves. This is hardly the view that one gets from either anticommunists or communists writing about the Nhan Van - Giai Pham affair.

In this debate between high modernists, the relationship between state and individual occupied center stage. The Workers Party saw itself as the creator of a postcolonial future peopled by citizens who shed themselves of their colonial habits and mores. The state, in this view, was the midwife of emancipation. But what kind of freedom” The Party focused its energy on the relationship of one collectivity to another collectivity. It argued that repression in the present was necessary to consolidate power, defeat the enemy and then realize freedom in the future. And as this process developed, one of the central concerns of Marx’s writings, how to realize full emancipation of the individual, was relegated to the margins. Marx’s concern with the dialectical relationship between class and individual, which is at the heart of Thao’s thinking, was simply absent from Workers Party ideology of the 1950s. And if not all “dissidents” shared Thao’s Marxism, all of them shared his belief in open debate and distrust of authoritarianism.

If Tran Duc Thao shared some affinities with the regime, the differences between Thao and the Party are significant. Thao asserted, for example, that the struggle for individual freedom and freedom from domination was crucial. For Thao, individual rights and collective action were inextricably intertwined. Class issues were far more important to him than issues of Party control. Ironically, unlike the Workers Party, Tran Duc Thao had an abstract faith in the correctness of the masses and showed great concern over the dangers of authoritarianism. More the democrat, at least in theory, he abhorred the heavy-handed approach of the top-level cadres of the Party.

In making such arguments, Tran Duc Thao undoubtedly did not see himself as a dissident against Marxism or as any less Vietnamese. Quite the contrary: through a Marxist optic he was attempting to define the community to which he belonged. There was enough controversy among Vietnamese in the north from 1954 onwards for us to argue, instead, that all of them were struggling to define community. Unable to win over many Vietnamese to its view, the Workers Party, shedding its democratic lineage, finally resorted to authoritarian methods to win the argument. As a result, Tran Duc Thao and other critics dropped out of public view.

If we left the analysis at that, the study of Tran Duc Thao and its link to larger issues of Party rule would seem to be, as I have stated, suite straightforward. It is not. If authoritarian high modernist projects strive to make society more rational and more legible, they end up by subverting their own intentions: the urge to impose a vision of what should be ultimately defeats the rationalizing project. Visions triumph over reality. The past is revised to serve the present. In the case of Tran Duc Thao, as time has passed, the story of what he stood for, and the entire question of the nature of Vietnam in the mid-1950s, has become murkier than ever as the Party-state has rewritten the history of contestation as one of conspiracies and “dissent.’ Tran Duc Thao’s fate, then, has become heavily implicated in questions of how to represent and remember the past.

In recent years, we have seen an outpouring of interest in Vietnam and abroad on questions of representation, memory, commemoration, identity, and history. Indeed, one senses that “memory,” like “identity,” can be all things to all people: this term invades historical writing about modern history, yet can seem, by its ubiquity, to be a useless term in analysis. This problem aside, the study of memory has certainly led scholars to a deep appreciation of its complexity, richness, and fragility.[13] Enamored of the power of memory, historians use participant recollections to enliven a historical account and fill in gaps in the record. Such recollections provide an emotional link to the past that is often lacking in the textual record. But at the same time, historians are increasingly sensitive to the vagaries of remembrance. We know that later events can transform a participant’s memories of the past. And those memories may be expressed in a conceptual language or framework that postdates the events in question. Given these complications, we are more aware than ever before that histories that mix printed, written, and artifactual fragments from the past with later memories of the same event can be problematic documents.

When we turn to Tran Duc Thao, this problem is key. One cannot simply follow the typical historian’s approach by drawing on (uncertain) remembrances of the past to buttress a documentary record. The task is far more complex, and it is not always clear which kinds of sources are more reliable. Individual memories, Marxist (or pseudo-Marxist) ideological frames that channel memory fragments into certain directions, and empirical data all shape representations of the past. The problem of approaching Thao’s life is symbolized by his documents of “self-criticism,” hybrid texts that claim to represent the melding of individual experience with larger truths, yet whose “self’ appears to be constructed by a Party committee. In the years since their publication, individuals with a vested interest in perpetuating the view that the Nhan Van - Giai Pham affair was a “hidden conspiracy” out to subvert the revolution have continued to articulate this view. The symbolic violence committed against Tran Duc Thao in 1958 by Party agents has been reiterated so often that it has become a banality. In short, Vietnamese have reinvented the past and themselves so often that even when we possess a deep archive of material with which to work, contextualizing that information can be notoriously difficult.

The Vietnamese construction of a supposedly postcolonial nation is haunted by the erasure of individuals, groups, events, and voices. But perhaps “erasure” is not quite the right term here. On the one hand, I have come to see the Party-state as a “memory machine” churning out an impressive array of texts, such as communist memoirs, novels, and histories, that re-present the past in approved ways. Communist memoirs and novels uphold socialist virtues and disparage noncommunists. Histories place the Workers Party center stage and are notable for what they leave out. The “memory machine,” perhaps aware that it cannot eradicate memories from people’s minds, tries to steer people to apply a socialist template to that past. It celebrates new acts of commemoration. What Carol Gluck has commented about Japan after 1945 is, with slight change in temporal focus, apropos here: “the prewar past, to be obliterated, had first to be retold” (Gluck 1993, 64).

The year 1958 opened with a campaign against “revisionism” (chu nghia xet lai). This Marxist-Leninist concept is odd, for communists are always “revising” the past to fit the Party line of the moment. Indeed, Vietnamese then, as now, were encouraged to “re-vision” the past to not “see” certain individuals or groups, not publicly remember certain events, and to place public discussion of the past into safe interpretive frameworks. But there is a limited effectiveness to such campaigns. Unwelcome parts of the past linger on. As Duong Thu Huong’s Paradise of the Blind (1993) and Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War (1996) illustrate, many Vietnamese live existences shot through with distressing memories (of land reform, of the war, and so forth) and invaded by traumas. No amount of exhortation can change that fact. The past disrupts the present; unresolved traumas do not fade away. The question remains: can “re-visioning” the past contain these fragments of the past and control them?

I am reminded here of the argument of Event, Metaphor, Memory, a book about the Chauri Chaura “riot” and killings that came to play, incongruously, a role in Indian nationalism. At the beginning of this work, Shahid Amin writes that “it is necessary to historicize an event which all Indians, when commemorating the nation, are obliged to remember – only in order to forget – as an ‘error” (Amin 1995, 1). Indians are obliged to “remember” this event as a negative moment, a mistake, on the road to nationalist awakening. But they do not actually “remember” the event that happened: they come to “remember” a narration of that event heavily contaminated by nationalism. And so, by the end of his book, after sifting through oral histories of the event as well as court records, Shahid Amin admits defeat in untangling what actually happened. But in defeat he emerges victorious: his book is a remarkable exercise in showing how metaphorical understandings shape memory to the point that people remember things that can be shown never to have happened.

I bring up Amin’s book because Tran Duc Thao’s intellectual odyssey, and the odysseys of numerous Vietnamese, play a similar role in the construction of the postcolonial revolutionary nationalist narration of the past. Vietnamese today do not remember an unadulterated past. Memory fragments most certainly appear in the consciousness of individual Vietnamese, triggered by some chance association, but the complex refashioning of past events is inevitably elaborated in idioms and frameworks that post-date the actual memories.

Vietnamese are obliged to represent the events of 1956 as “mistakes,” “aberrations” on the path to “constructing socialism.” 1956 shows up periodically in Vietnamese accounts of the past: oblique references are made to “counter-revolutionary mistakes” and to "plots” hatched from within Party organizations. The similarities to the experiences of the USSR, China, or Cambodia are obvious. In focusing on "conspiracies," the Party-state tries hard to deny any commonality between peasants complaining about the injustices of “land reform” in the 1950s and intellectuals complaining about the mistakes of land reform and of assaults on freedom. Vietnamese are indeed obliged to “remember” the past, but the metaphors deployed by the Party and its critics, shorn of connection to events, have come to shape representations and distort memories. For the average Vietnamese, such metaphors are all that remain of the dissent in the 1950s that led up to the Nhan Van - Giai Pham affair.

List of References

AMIN, SHAHID. 1995. Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chaurj Chaura, 1922—1992. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

BAN NGHIEN CUU VAN SU DIA. 1956. “Nhung van de lich su de ra” (Historical questions to be addressed). Van su dia 22 (October): 1-2.

BAO NINH. 1996. The Sorrow of War. Translated by Phan Thanh Hao. New York: Riverhead.

BOUDAREL, GEORGES. 1991. Cent fleurs icloses dans la nuit du Viet Nam (One hundred flowers blooming in the Vietnamese night). Paris: Jacques Bertoin.

BROWNING, CHRISTOPHER. 1992. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins

BUI TIN. 1995. Following Ho Chi Minh: The Memoirs of a North Vietnamese Colonel. Translated and adapted by Judy Stowe and Do Van. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

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FOOTNOTES

Shawn McHale (mchale@gwu.edu) is Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History and the Elliot School of International Affairs, George Washington University, Washington D.C.

For comments and questions on this paper, and encouragement, I would like to thank Keith Taylor, Bill Turley, Ed McCord, and audiences at George Washington and Cornell universities. I have tried to respond to the thoughtful atid searching critiques provided by two anonymous reviewers, but fear that I have not answered all their objections. Three colleagues in Europe, Tran Tri Vu, Christopher Goscha, and one who wishes to remain anonymous, helped me to obtain key materials. I am grateful to my family and George Washington University for financial support.