Scholarship on Revolutionary Youth in Colonial and War Periods
From: Paul Sager <paul.sager@nyu.edu>
Date: Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 6:22 AM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Dear list,
I'm wondering if anyone knows of any work that has been done
specifically on the phenomenon of young people's participation in the
Vietnamese revolution. I am not talking about youth organizations
under Vichy and afterward - work on that by Raffin, Jennings,
Larcher-Goscha, and Cantier has been concerned essentially with
government policy and practice. Rather, I'm wondering if anyone has
taken up Vietnamese youth itself as a topic. In my readings, scholars
seem to take as a given that the movement was driven by the actions of
the young, even while ICP leadership was of course older. David Marr,
for example, in Vietnam 1945, writes of "the readiness of young people
to take the initiative (and of older people to follow)" (p. 472) as a
primary characteristic of the movement in that year. But has anyone
gone deeper into this? Has anyone written about, for example, the
specific sociology and culture of youth in that era, perhaps with an
analysis of the demographic and cultural factors that made youth as an
age group revolutionary, and the focus of so much government
propaganda and organization on all sides?
Thanks
Paul Sager
Graduate student
New York U.
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From: Hue-Tam Ho Tai <hhtai@fas.harvard.edu>
Date: Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 6:52 AM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Paul, I do not believe there is a systematic study, but there are some
clues.
Given that most of the Revolutionary Youth League membership came after
the student strikes of 1926-1927, we can infer that the majority of its
members (as opposed to leaders) were students.
If one looks at the age of the first generation of ICP leaders, a lot of
them were born around 1910, which would make them 16 in 1926.
D. Hemery has written an article on Une Emigration patriotique (sorry I
do not have the full citation at hand) which deals with the emigration
of young Vietnamese to France. My father was one of those who went to
France in 1926. My father was expelled from school in 1926 at the age
of 16, together with his classmate Ung van Khiem. Ung van Khiem
followed a different trajectory from my father. Truong Chinh was
expelled from school the following year and joined the RYL at the age of
17.
I've been working on the memoirs of my aunt who was a member of the
Revolutionary Youth League and was involved in the Barbier Street
incident (Dec. 1928). Of the people involved, only Ton Duc Thang and
the victim, Le van Phat, were in their 30s. The rest were 25 and
younger, most around 20-23. My aunt was 18 when she went to Guangzhou to
be trained.
Hue-Tam Ho Tai
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From: Paul Sager <paul.sager@nyu.edu>
Date: Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 7:05 AM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Thank you, Hue-Tam Ho Tai. Again, it is more than clear that the vast
majority of activists and participants were under 30, perhaps one
definition of "youth." But does anyone else know of any scholarship
that takes up this issue specifically?
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From: Sidel, Mark <mark-sidel@uiowa.edu>
Date: 2008/7/30
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Others can speak to scholarship on this issue - certainly not me - but in primary sources I'd point out Nguyen Bac's wonderful Giua thanh pho bi chiem (In the occupied city) (Nha xuat ban Ha Noi, 1994), a memoir of his time as a Viet Minh agent in Hanoi in the late 40s/early 50s. It gives a vivid sense of both young people's participation and on the roles of intellectuals and cadres during this period, some of them familiar to VSG readers.
Bac's book has been translated into English (by me, not yet published, but certainly someday), and into French by Philippe Papin (published as Nguyen Bac, Au coeur de la ville captive: souvenirs d'un agent du Viêt-Minh infiltré à Hanoi. Translated by Philippe Papin. Paris: Arlea, 2004, 133 pp. - good job, Philippe!) WorldCat shows the French volume available at NYU, UW, Iowa, Yale, Cornell, LC, Emory, Alberta, Montreal, Laval. The original Vietnamese is in LC and the Australian National Library, but my guess is that some individual VSGers own it too - virtually no-one who was prowling bookstores in Hanoi in 1994 and 1995, when the book appeared as part of the 50th anniversary publications on Hanoi, could have resisted buying it if they saw it.
Le Thi's "Changing My Life: How I Came to the Vietnamese Revolution," Signs, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Summer, 1998), pp. 1017-1029, gives a sense of one young woman's journey in the years leading up to 1945 and may also be useful for students.
Best wishes to all....
Mark Sidel
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From: Hue-Tam Ho Tai <hhtai@fas.harvard.edu>
Date: 2008/7/30
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Paul:
In what way? By statistical analysis? By a study of press articles? David and I have both written about the generational change that followed the educational reforms of 1919 and the coming on the scene of Nguyen An Ninh. But I don't know of any systematic analysis of the age of participants in various movements.
Hue-Tam Ho Tai
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From: g.de-gantes@laposte.net <g.de-gantes@laposte.net>
Date: 2008/7/30
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
The book Vietnam, du confucianisme au communisme (Paris, L'Harmattan, 1990 ; a new edition is available, summer 2008) by Pr Trinh Van Thao is built on the idea of "generation" (class of age). The "generation of 1907" for exemple, is described as the group of teenagers who were whitness of the Duy Tan movement, but too young to have been active players. The collapse of the movement lead them to think new ways of action : most of young people born around 1890/1895 are supposed to have shared the same kind of feelings which make their "generation" different from those who were their elder. In his book, Pr Trinh Van Thao study three "generations" : 1962, 1907 and 1925.
It is not exactly about the issue of "youth" and the book is written in French, but it is based on Vietnamese sources.
Gilles de Gantès.
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From: David Marr <dgm405@coombs.anu.edu.au>
Date: 2008/7/30
To: "g.de-gantes@laposte.net" <g.de-gantes@laposte.net>, Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
There is something fascinating about the power of young people in Vietnam from 1945 to whenever. It's not unique to Vietnam, as Ben Anderson and others have demonstrated for the `pemuda' in Indonesia in the same era. The traditional respect for age is turned on its head. It happens again in South Vietnam in 1963-66, although with less impact ultimately. One place to research this phenomenon is the 1945-46 press in Hanoi, Haiphong, Hue, Quang Ngai and other towns. And again in 1963-66 newspapers in Saigon, Hue and Dalat.
David Marr
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From: Paul Sager <paul.sager@nyu.edu>
Date: 2008/7/31
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Thank you all for your suggestions and comments. No, it's certainly
not unique to Vietnam -
really it's almost universal. But I'm struck by how much attention has
been paid to "youth" by
governments and political factions in various eras in comparison to
how little scholarship
addresses youth as a subject. (I'm not actually researching this myself by the way -
I just wondered if anyone had.)
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From: Hue-Tam Ho Tai <hhtai@fas.harvard.edu>
Date: 2008/7/31
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
A couple of observations about the youth in politics:
The spread of universal education during the Third Republic, and especially after 1904, meant that more attention was focused on young people. In Vietnam, the educational reforms of 1919 had the same effect, even though schooling was far from universal. But the Reform Movement of 1905 had already begun to focus on young people as the vectors of cultural change.
Baden Powell's Scouts movement also focused on youth, as well as health and sports. If we read newspapers of the 1920s in Vietnam, there was a lot of coverage of sports; sports was part of the curriculum in Franco-Annamite schools, as photos of the period illustrate.
Hue-Tam Ho Tai
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From: Charles Keith <charles.keith@yale.edu>
Date: 2008/7/31
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
On the Catholic end of things, the 1930s saw an explosion in associations for Catholic youth in Vietnam. Most were chapters of associations first created in Europe as a part of Catholic Action, a movement to mobilize the Catholic laity that was the Church's answer to the growing threat of mass politics in Europe. Tens of thousands of Vietnamese Catholic youth were a part of these associations, some of which focused on labor and the problems of rural life to a degree that made some Catholic observers (and some colonial officials) uncomfortable. Although it is not easy to prove this directly, it seems to me quite likely that these youth were among the most vocal supporters of the August Revolution in 1945/early 1946 before relationships between the Viet Minh and Catholics started to disintegrate.
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From: Paul Sager <paul.sager@nyu.edu>
Date: 2008/8/1
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Charles, have you found a reliable reference for your figure of "tens
of thousands" of Vietnamese
Catholic youth in the Catholic youth associations? Because Anne Raffin
has a figure from a November
1941 state report showing only 700 total non-French members of the
Jeunesse ouvrière catholique (JOC)
and only 250 total non-French members of the Jeunesse étudiante
catholique (JEC). This is in Raffin,
Youth Moblization in Vichy Indochina, p. 74. Were there other associations she doesn't mention and
if so, what were they?
Thanks.
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From: Charles Keith <charles.keith@yale.edu>
Date: Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 7:25 AM
To: vsg@u.washington.edu
Dear Paul and list,
Most of the associations for Vietnamese Catholic youth in the 1930s are barely
documented in colonial archives, which explains the discrepancy. To give one
example, probably the most widespread association for Vietnamese Catholic youth
in the 1930s and 1940s was Eucharistic Crusade (Nghĩa Binh Thánh Thể). It
targeted younger youth (ages 12-16) and it was more explicitly "religious" than
"social," so colonial administrators didn't really bother with it. NBTT was
first founded in Vietnam in in Hà Nội in 1929. The group quickly spread to
Huế (1931), Sài Gòn (1932), Phát Diệm (1932), Thanh Hóa (1933) and
other cities. By the early 1940s, sixteen cities had chapters numbering well
over one hundred. Membership statistics for groups like these are always
sketchy, but the Hà Nội chapters together reported three thousand five
hundred members as early as 1934, with fifteen hundred in neighboring Phát
Diệm, and groups in Bùi Chu were (logically) reported to have by far the
greatest membership in Vietnam, although statistics for Bùi Chu, like all
Spanish Dominican-led dioceses, are frustratingly difficult to come by. For
the above numbers, see “Ngỏ Mấy Lời Cùng Nghĩa Binh Bắc Kỳ,”
Nghĩa Binh Thánh Thể Tạp Chí, May-June, 1934.
From this information, I find it reasonable to estimate that the total
membership of Eucharistic Crusade in Vietnam was well over ten thousand by the
end of the 1930s, perhaps larger. NBTT was the biggest but far from the only
such association; Valiant Hearts, Valiant Souls (Hùng Tâm Dũng Chí) was
prominent in the south, and Catholic Boy Scouts had an important presence as
well. This isn't even getting into the sorts of groups you mentioned, which
also included groups like Rural Catholic Youth (Thanh Niên Thôn Quê Công Giáo) and Agricultural Catholic Youth (Thanh Niên Nông Nghiệp Công
Giáo). Although some individual chapters of these groups are documented in
colonial archives, as you point out, I've come across other chapters (usually
in smaller places outside of Hanoi or Saigon) that are not (or perhaps the
documentation was lost, like much of the colonial documentation at the
provincial level, especially in the north). All things considered, then, I
think it's reasonable to say that out of a Catholic population of roughly 1.2
million in the late 30s/early 40s, several tens of thousands participated in
what really was a widespread movement. Indeed, the very fact that most
Catholic observers referred to it as a movement (phong trào) itself suggests that participation reached these extents.
Best,
Charles
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From: Hue-Tam Ho Tai <hhtai@fas.harvard.edu>
Date: Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 7:48 AM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Professor Nguyen Dinh Dau in Ho Chi Minh City was part of the Jeunesse ouvriere catholique in Hanoi and could probably give more information.
Hue-Tam Ho Tai
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