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Thailand and the Southeast Asian Networks of the Vietnamese Revolution, 1885-1954. By Christopher E. Goscha. Richmond: Curzon, 1999, 418pp.
During Vietnam's occupation of Cambodia in the 1980s, ASEAN rallied behind the front-line state of Thailand, which feared Vietnamese tanks would roll down (and eventually become gridlocked in) the narrow streets of Bangkok. For Christopher Goscha, the irony is that the Vietnamese revolution was made manifest on the same streets of Thailand. Goscha presents a fascinating history of the Southeast Asian roots of the Vietnamese revolution, and strikes into fertile ground. While most works on the early days of the Vietnamese revolution focus on Ho Chi Minh's years in France and Moscow, where he was trained by the Comintern before being sent to China, Goscha argues that there already was an active revolutionary network across Indochina into Siam, that dated back into the 1880s when Indochinese patriots fled from French colonial oppression into Thailand. By the late 1940s, according to one Viet Minh document, "Thailand has become the sole corridor (cua ngo duy nhat) to the international community for the Vietnamese and Indochinese resistance movements" (p.288).
Most research to date has focused on the Viet Minh's ties to China. This is understandable for several reasons. Ho himself spent many years as the Comintern's representative in China and he founded the Thanh Nien movement in southern China, where his chief lieutenants would eventually emerge, many of whom went on to attend the Whampoa military academy. And we tend to look towards China for the roots of the Vietnamese revolution simply for ideological reasons and the fact that China, after 1949, became Hanoi's chief supplier of aid and materiel. The problem with the Vietnamese revolutionaries concentrating their efforts and resources in China was that they became vulnerable to the radical shifts of Chinese politics. Following Chiang Kai Shek's violent attack on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which drove the CCP underground and out of the cities in 1927, there were minimal contacts between the Thanh Nien and the CCP. From 1927, through the CCP's regrouping in Jiangxi, through the Long March, ending in 1935, there was little the CCP could offer the Thanh Nien: it was fighting for its own survival. Moscow, likewise, was little help at that...