Ho Chi Minh, Revolutionary Youth Leader

In the early 20th century, Vietnam was being controlled as a colony of France, but through a blend of nationalism and communism, it would finally find independence from France in 1954. Communist youth groups, specifically Ho Chi Minh’s Revolutionary Youth League, influenced the national viewpoint before and during the French-Indochina War, the war that would ultimately free them of French control. In the spring of 1925, Ho Chi Minh created the Revolutionary Youth League, a precursor to the Vietnamese Communist party. Based on previous Communist Youth corps, the Revolutionary Youth League was an instigator to many communist movements around Vietnam. Arriving just after Phan Boi Chau’s failed nationalist movement, the league educated and trained many Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries, and soon the idea of revolution gained great support. While the Revolutionary Youth league ultimately crashed a few years after Ho’s departure in 1927, many members became the core of the Vietnamese Communist Party, including Ho. Asian countries like Vietnam were long held back by oppressive Western powers, and under the communist ideal of equality of mankind the working class could rise up. The Revolutionary Youth League can be championed as the root of Vietnamese independence because it educated many of the young intellectuals who would eventually come to lead the country out of colonialism.

The colonialism of which the Vietnamese suffered for over a century was partially caused by their own intolerance. French interest in Vietnam began in the 16th century, as the rest of Europe began an obsession with Asian goods, and Christian missionaries were looking to convert natives. In Vietnam, priests and traders found their work to be impossible, as V...

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Whitman, Alden. "Ho Chi Minh Was Noted for Success in Blending Nationalsim and Communism." The New York Times, September 4, 1969, 17.

Secondary sources:

Duiker, William J. "The Revolutionary Youth League: Cradle of Communism in Vietnam." The China Quarterly, no. 51 (July/August 1972): 475-99. JSTOR: (652485).

Mabie, Margot C.J. Vietnam There and Here. New York, New York, U.S.A.: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985.

Nguyen, Chi Hong. "From the French Colonization Period in 1858 to the Foundation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945." Vietnamese International Student Mobility: Past and Current Trends 2, no. 2 (2013): 128-48. JSTOR (204631).

Peycam, Philippe. "From the Social to the Political: 1920s Colonial Saigon as a “Space of Possibilities” in Vietnamese Consciousness." East Asia Cultures Critique 21, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 496-546.