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“Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom.”1
he appeared to lead by persuasion and consensus rather than by imposing his will through force of personality. Nor did he write frequently about his ideas or inner motivations. In contrast to other prominent revolutionary figures, Ho Chi Minh expressed little interest in ideology or intellectual debate and focused his thoughts and activities on the practical issue of freeing his country and other colonial societies from Western imperialism.
A paramount fact in the history of the country is its long and frequently bitter struggle against the expansionist tendencies of its northern neighbor, China.
Hard work, the subordination of the desires of the individual to the needs of the group, and a stable social and political hierarchy were of utmost importance. The existence of a trained bureaucracy to maintain the irrigation system and the road network was considered essential, but there was relatively little need for commerce and manufacturing.
As was traditional in Vietnamese society, to mark the occasion his father assigned to him the new name Nguyen Tat Thanh, or “he who will succeed,” on the village register.
In teaching his students, he rejected the traditional pedantic method of forcing his students to memorize texts, but took great care to instruct them in the humanitarian inner core of Confucian classical writings while simultaneously instilling in their minds a fierce patriotic spirit for the survival of an independent Vietnam.
The road into Laos—the “road of death,” as it became known to the Vietnamese—became a major source of popular antagonism to the new colonial regime.
He frequently quoted from the fifteenth-century Confucian scholar Nguyen Trai, who had once pointed out that it was necessary to understand the enemy in order to defeat him.
For many Asian intellectuals, the group ethic of Western socialist theory corresponded better to their own inherited ideals than did the individualist and profit-motivated ethic of Western capitalism.
In the Confucian mind, Western industrialism was too easily translated into greed and an unseemly desire for self-aggrandizement. By contrast, socialism stressed community effort, simplicity of lifestyle, equalization of wealth and opportunity, all of which had strong overtones in the Confucian tradition.
It was, however, Lenin’s famous “Theses on the National and Colonial Questions,” presented to the Second Comintern Congress in the summer of 1920, that set Nguyen Ai Quoc on a course that transformed him from a simple patriot with socialist leanings into a Marxist revolutionary.
