The Birth of Vietnamese Political Journalism: Saigon, 1916-1930

THE BIRTH OF VIETNAMESE POLITICAL JOURNALISM

The Birth of Vietnamese Political Journalism

SAIGON 1916–1930

Philippe M. F. Peycam

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS     NEW YORK

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

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NEW YORK   CHICHESTER, WEST SUSSEX

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Copyright © 2012 Columbia University Press

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-52804-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Peycam, Philippe M. F.

The birth of Vietnamese political journalism : Saigon, 1916–1930 / Philippe M.F. Peycam.

   p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-15850-3 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-52804-7 (electronic)

  1. Journalism—Political aspects—Vietnam—Ho Chi Minh City—History—20th century. 2. Government and the press—Vietnam—Ho Chi Minh City—History—20th century. 3. Press and politics—Vietnam—Ho Chi Minh City—History—20th century. 4. Nationalism—Vietnam—Ho Chi Minh City—History—20th century. 5. Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam)—Politics and government—20th century. I. Title.

PN5449.V53H645 2012

075.97′7—dc23                                                        2011027412

A Columbia University Press E-book.

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References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

MAPS

INTRODUCTION

Part 1.  The Origins of Saigon’s Public Sphere

1.  Social Order in the Colonial City

2.  French Republicanism and the Emergence of Saigon’s Public Sphere

Part 2.  The Newspaper Village as a Political Force

3.  In Search of a Political Role (1916–1923)

4.  Scandals and Mobilization (1923–1926)

5.  The Limits to Oppositional Journalism (1926–1930)

CONCLUSION

ABBREVIATIONS

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK TRANSPIRED FROM MY 1999 DISSERTATION AT the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London. The research and writing of the dissertation spanned seven years; four of those years were spent in Vietnam where I had access to numerous untouched archival and press materials. During this period, I, as a young researcher eager to learn about the Vietnamese language and history, had the opportunity to get to know the people and society of this fascinating country.

After completing my PhD, the manuscript remained untouched for another seven years. It found a second life while I was living in Cambodia, where I was involved in developing an academic-humanitarian institution, the Center for Khmer Studies (CKS). The revision process was not easy, even though I was living in Vietnam’s closest southern neighbor. The sense of isolation from my former field of study was all the more exacerbated by the sudden passing of my PhD supervisor, Prof. Ralph B. Smith, in December 2000. The unique combination of generous encouragement and challenging demands that I was accustomed to during my years under Prof. Smith’s mentorship was sorely missed.

Once CKS was sufficiently established, I began the process of reconfiguring the dissertation into a book. A major part of this work was carried out in the tropical heat of Cambodia on the terrace of my wooden house in Siem Reap. It reached completion in Singapore while I was a fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. The result, I hope, is a more concise and clear account about Vietnam’s first political journalists and their use of print newspapers to challenge authority.

Trying to thank all those who helped me in the course of this two-phased journey is a challenge.

First, there are the people and institutions that helped me during my research and dissertation in Vietnam, France, and the United Kingdom. I would like to thank Mrs. Hòa of the National Archive number 2 in Hồ Chí Minh City, Miss Hương of the General Scientific Library in Hồ Chí Minh City, and the very helpful staff of the periodical department of the National Library in Hanoi. Thanks are due also to Doctor Võ Vãn Sên, Nguyễn Vãn Lịch, and Mrs. Dung, from Hồ Chí Minh City University’s Center for Vietnamese and Southeast Asian Studies, along with Professors Bùi Khắnh Thế, Tổn Nữ Quỳnh Trân, Nguyễn Đinh Đầu, the late Trần Vãn Giàu, and Phan Giá Bên. I owe this period of intense reflection to those benefactors and in particular to the late writer and historian of the South Sơn Nam (our discussions at Brodard café and at his favorite beer garden in Gô Váp), to the jovial and affectionate Mr. Nguyễn An Tình (son of Nguyễn An Ninh, and an example of intellectual independence on his own), to the chain coffee drinker and two-war veteran Mr. Vũ Gia Phúc (then president of the Hồ Chí Minh City’s branch of the Association des Anciens du Lycée Albert Sarraut). My stay in Vietnam was made all the more stimulating due to an exceptional group of young scholars and professionals in Hồ Chí Minh City, at a time when the southern metropolis was not in fashion among Western scholars: Chũ Quang Tôn, Lê Thị Thành Thủy, Nguyễn Tạo Ngô, my professor of Vietnamese Thầy Minh, Rie Nakamura, Stéphane Dovert, François Tainturier, and Natasha Pairaudeau.

In Paris, I could count on the invaluable insights of passionate scholars, including Daniel Hémery Pierre Brocheux, Trinh Vãn Thào, Gilles De Gantès, Emmanuelle Saada, and Nguyễn Văn Kỳ. Prof. Nguyễn Thế Anh guided me in the course of writing my Diplôme d’Études Approfondies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. His extreme attention to detail was a match to Prof. Smith’s own rigor in accuracy. I regret not to be able to offer a copy of the book to the wonderful and so knowledgeable Madame Quach Thanh Tâm Langlet, the young-at-heart poet, writer, painter, and revolutionary Ngô Vân Xuyết and the true Vietnam-lover, Georges Boudarel. In Aix-en-Provence, at the Archives d’Outre-Mer, I benefited from the effective guidance of Lucette Vachier.

In London, I was equally inspired by an exceptional group of scholars and friends from a variety of countries who, like me, engaged in the study of Vietnam around Prof. Smith’s inspiring and congenial presence: the late Judy Stowe, Lê Mạnh Hung, Young Soon Nho, Sud Chornchirdsin, Sophie Quinn-Judge, Webby Kalikiti, Tobias Rettig, Ang Cheng Guan, and others. In the last year, I shared my carrel with Caroline Brassard, also a Vietnam specialist. Professors Ian Brown and Gervaise Clarence-Smith also offered good advice. Other SOAS friends, whom I came to know better during my Cambodia years, include Michel Rethy Antelme, Keiko Miura, William Southworth, and the Thailand specialist Rachel Harrison. Throughout this period, I am the most indebted to my supervisor Prof. Smith, who helped me to shape my ideas into a completed dissertation thesis. But I could not have finished without the support and patient re-reading by Julia Bindman.

During the revision phase of the manuscript, I received encouragement and support from other eminent scholars including: Peter Zinoman, Shawn McHale, David Chandler, David Marr, Claire Trẩn Thị Liện, David Lempert, Sarah Womack, Lois de Ménil, Sophie Quinn-Judge, Paul Kratoshka, Pascal Bourdeaux, Tuân Hoảng, Lê Quang Đỉnh, Judith Henchy, Mariam Lam, David Biggs, Trương Bữu Lâm, Herman Lebovics, Milton Osborne, and certainly other people whom I have missed. Each, in different ways and capacities, contributed to the improvement of the manuscript, sometimes through intense discussion or through their generous time spent in reading and revising parts or the entirety of the text—I would like to express my gratitude to each and every one of them.

Of all those who helped to improve the manuscript, I can’t thank Prof. Hue-Tam Ho Tai enough for her guidance through this long, uncharted journey. She read and re-read each chapter one after the other. She was not only vigilant in checking content details, but she also made invaluable suggestions for the reshaping of the book. On so many occasions she gave me her precious time to meet in cafés in Hồ Chí Minh City, between panel meetings at the Association of Asian Studies conferences, or at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to discuss the book.

My thanks also go to Chương-Đài Võ, who went through the manuscript to polish my baroque English and made very helpful suggestions to render the text more effective in a literary sense. My gratitude also goes to Peter Dimock, former executive editor of Columbia University Press, who helped turn the manuscript into a finished, publishable piece. Two hours before the text was sent to the Press, Olivier Cunin drew two great maps, contributing to the visual aspects of the book.

At the Press, I thank Anne Routon, Editor for Asian History, whose calm, authoritative guidance in the delivering of my first book have been invaluable. I also thank Leslie Kriesel, Assistant Managing Editor, for her hands-on supervision of the production process, and the anonymous editor who spotted inconsistencies in the final text.

As for institutional support, I would like to mention the School of Oriental and African Studies, its department of history, its superb library, and its legendary pub. I have very fond memories of this truly exceptional institution, which, in my view, is so much more than the overseas development business school which successive UK governments have tried—so far unsuccessfully—to turn it into. At Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, I was able to continue my prolonged and often difficult research in Vietnam thanks to Prof. Nguyễn Thế Anh, who was kind enough to let me skip lectures to concentrate on my work. For three crucial years, in Vietnam and in England, I was lucky to receive financial support through the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Lavoisier scholarship programme. Much later, when I resumed work to turn the dissertation into a book, I benefited from flexible work schedules at CKS. The Center’s fantastic library at Vat Damnak helped me overcome the sense of isolation from the field of Vietnam studies. Finally, I am grateful to the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore and its director, Ambassador Kesavapany, who provided me with a visiting research fellowship. I enjoyed the wonderful working environment of the Institute’s library and its dedicated staff.

In addition, I have been most fortunate to be able to rely on the constant moral support of Masako Iijima. She has been at times host, advisor, confidante, and compass-bearer through the bumpy years of manuscript revision.

And I would also like to thank my parents, Marie Pérard and Pierre Peycam. I have not always kept them informed of my work and I am afraid I may not have the patience to translate the book into French so that my father can read it.

It is hard to believe that almost two decades have already lapsed since I first thought of undertaking this project.

I would like to dedicate this volume to Prof. Ralph B. Smith. I would have liked to give him a signed copy over a glass of wine in one of his favorite Bloomsbury restaurants.

Indochina 1937

Saigon 1930

Introduction

THE YEAR WAS 1926. ON APRIL 4 AN EVENT OF GREAT significance took place in the southern metropolis of Saigon that would set off a small revolution in the minds of many Vietnamese. From neighborhoods in and around Saigon, as well as from the northern and central parts of the country, 50,000–70,000 men and women defied French colonial order. Following the precedent set the previous year of a national funeral given to Dr. Sun Yat Sen, founder of the Chinese Republic, they marched in silent protest through the city to pay tribute to the nationalist figure Phan Châu Trinh, who had died twelve days earlier. Trinh was considered then (as he is today by leaders of Vietnam’s one-party state) to be a democratic reformer. He symbolized a path of nonviolent reform—a stark contrast to the dominant course that Vietnamese history was to take during the rest of the twentieth century.

The event was not an isolated one. The excitement surrounding Phan Châu Trinh’s return from a long exile in France had been compounded by the public’s indignation over the trial of Phan Bội Châu, the country’s other emblematic nationalist figure, in Hanoi during the summer of 1925. In November 1925 the arrival in Saigon of the first socialist governor general of Indochina, Alexandre Varenne, further added to the uncertain political climate that involved the local governor, Maurice Cognacq, and an infuriated Vietnamese and French opposition over his corrupt practices.

The Saigon of the 1920s was the center of open anticolonial contestation in Vietnam, and the atmosphere was electrifying. On March 24, 1926, a crowd of ten thousand had gathered at the Saigon port pier to welcome the return of the Constitutionalist Party leader Bùi Quang Chiêu. Hundreds came to listen to his speech following news of the arrest the previous day of three young journalist-activists, Nguyễn An Ninh, Dejean de la Bâtie, and Lâm Hiệp Châu. The demonstrators responded to each event with calm determination, wresting creative political leadership away from the colonial state and gaining a symbolic victory against French rule and its self-assumed legitimacy. These events constituted a decisive episode in the evolution of peaceful public Vietnamese resistance to foreign rule, a resistance that had begun a few years earlier and had been waged almost entirely through newspapers by a number of political journalists whose articles were crucial in rallying the Vietnamese public onto the streets of Saigon.¹

The rise of an urban Vietnamese public culture of opposition to colonial rule enabled and enacted through journalism is the focus of this book. A study of the development of a press of contestation and the sociopolitical context of its emergence is of pivotal importance for our understanding not only of modern Vietnamese history but also of the transformation of political culture in societies subjected to Western colonial domination. This study of 1920s’ colonial Saigon could well be repeated with slight variations in a number of urban environments, including British India’s Calcutta, Dutch Indonesia’s Batavia (today’s Jakarta), and the Shanghai of the international settlements. As in Saigon, the European imperial idea or project, with its stated promises of orderly rational progress and the superiority of its values, saw its internal contradictions and weaknesses exposed by an emerging native culture of public inquiry that forced it to occupy a defensive position and ultimately to collapse.² This study traces the origins of a new mode of political action in Vietnam, a process that echoes Partha Chatterjee’s description of the creative steps taken by the colonized to recapture political agency through a combination of appropriation and resistance. Ideological content was less important than the construction of new cultural norms of political action. A new political culture or tradition was defined, and at the heart of that culture were journalism and the rise of public print media.³

My interest in the subject was inspired by the relevance I saw of Jürgen Habermas’s account of the development of a public sphere in eighteenth-century Europe to what my research revealed was taking place in colonial southern Vietnam after World War I.⁴ Habermas used the term public sphere to refer to a political framework that lay outside the traditional circuits of authority, within which an educated elite made up of private individuals established itself as a political force to monitor, challenge, transform, and possibly overthrow the ruling power. In Europe, this force took effect in the form of printed pamphlets, essays, and salon politics. In seeking to limit the power of absolute monarchs, members of the rising urban bourgeoisie and fringes of the aristocracy willingly engaged in a rational, argument-based dialogue, thereafter establishing a framework of political accountability, which—in Britain, France, and the United States—ultimately led to the surrender by the central authority of its monopoly over political legitimacy.⁵

A similar phenomenon, I argue, took root in early twentieth-century Vietnam within the confines of the colonial regime. Established by means of a violent conquest that began in 1859 in the southern part of the country that the French called Cochinchine and expanding northward in the 1880s into the newly created protectorates of Annam in the center, and Tonkin in the north, colonial rule over a dismembered Vietnam meant the subjugation of eighteen million people and the effective effacement of an ancient monarchical state. With the addition of Cambodia and Laos, the three Vietnamese regions (or kỳ) formed the new ensemble of French Indochina, with the northern Vietnamese city of Hanoi as its capital. Though military supremacy created the domination, as in other colonial enterprises, French hegemony was soon justified by an ideological arsenal that claimed the superiority of Western civilization and, in particular, the French republican political model and its right to rule over so-called less advanced people in the name of human progress. This argument, however, gave rise to counterarguments.

In the early twentieth century, Western pretensions of unchallengeable supremacy suffered a number of palpable blows: the Japanese victory over Russia in 1905, the butchery of World War I among European nations, the 1917 Soviet revolution in Russia, and, in the Asian French colony, the persistence of opposition to colonial rule at both popular and elite levels. This latter phenomenon arose against the background of major sociocultural transformations, most acutely experienced in the main urban centers of Saigon and Hanoi. Opposition crystallized into a historical moment in the midst of World War I, when the fate of France itself hung in the balance in Europe and when a less assured colonial state was trying to hold on to its position by conceding to the Vietnamese population limited, shared responsibility.⁶ The purpose was to obtain native support for the war effort and, beyond it, for the supposedly mutually beneficial project offered by French republican colonialism. Negotiating some form of consenting relationship with a segment of the Vietnamese population became the strategy pursued by Governor General of Indochina Albert Sarraut (1911–1913, 1917–1919), one of the most politically astute French leaders of the time.

In late eighteenth-century ancien-régime France, the politically and economically weakened monarchy endeavored to justify its role and actions to its population through the use of mass propaganda—thus opening a space for public rational inquiry. A century and a half later, the colonial authorities in Vietnam opened a narrow but real space of public debate, less through representative bodies (as in the case of other European possessions such as British India, the United States’ Philippines, or Dutch Indonesia) than through newspapers. This attempt by the French government met with the rise of a newly assertive, urban Vietnamese middle class, particularly in the southern port city of Saigon.

The largest urban Vietnamese center and the city most affected by Western influence after more than sixty years of occupation, the capital of Cochinchina was a vibrant multicultural metropolis endowed with a powerful native bourgeoisie. Cochinchina was technically a colonie directly ruled by French republican metropolitan laws, as opposed to the protectorats of Annam and Tonkin, where, in principle, the Vietnamese administration was still in charge. Though most exposed to Western conventions, Saigon had retained substantial economic autonomy from the French. In addition to the conditions that Habermas maintained are necessary for developing a public sphere, Saigon also displayed the socioeconomic conditions that Benedict Anderson has classically depicted as necessary for the rise of nationalist sentiments among the bourgeoisie under colonialism. The critical importance Anderson placed on the colonial city as the central vector of transformation at both the individual and the collective level is born out by the Vietnamese case.⁷

To examine the dynamics of Saigon’s public sphere, I focus on the work of urban Vietnamese journalists and their pursuit of autonomy. This study illuminates two interrelated historical phenomena presented in separate parts. One is the uneasy—yet politically creative—encounter of colonial and indigenous sociopolitical cultures in the context of the colonial city. The other is the development of newspapers and activist journalism during the decade that immediately preceded the rise of rural-based, communist mass movements in the 1930s—a rise that eventually led to the political marginalization of newspapers as the principal tool for transforming the status quo.⁸ This study emphasizes and reflects the fundamental hybridity of Vietnamese political journalism as it was shaped by the sociocultural and political context of French republican colonialism.

Saigon’s public sphere was formed not merely out of the imposition of colonial practices and ideas but also in the context of an established society with its own political cultural foundations and the transformations that resulted from having to live under colonial rule. These factors were exacerbated in an urban center like Saigon, where wealth, education, information, and instruments of power were concentrated. In precolonial Vietnam, social relationships and political expression were determined by what Western scholarship rather imperfectly depicts as Confucian notions of interpersonal loyalty and social harmony based on hierarchical dependency (on the family, the village, or the emperor) rather than on equality between individuals. In the southern part of Vietnam, however, the region most recently colonized by Vietnamese settlers who sought to break away from the rigidity of the northern society, loyalty to the emperor and the village were less strong. Although one’s kin remained the nucleus in which every individual existed socially, there was more room for cultural and political change.⁹ As we will see in the context of 1920s’ Saigon, the process of redefining the individual’s relationship to others and to the community provided conditions for new forms of social and political consciousness, at least among those elements of Vietnamese society directly affected by the changes.¹⁰

What particularly distinguishes early twentieth-century Vietnam from the eighteenth-century Europe of Habermas’s study was a situation in which the power of the colonial state was equally dependent on seemingly disconnected environments—political developments in the metropole, those among the population of French settlers, the colons, and those among the native subjects. Vietnamese public politics was indeed conditioned by the stances of the French colonial administration and those of the colons as much as it was by the already dynamic local history. The evolution of Vietnamese political culture must therefore be considered in relation to what was occurring in other French colonies and, above all, in France itself, with the consolidation of the republican regime after a century of political instability. The rise of a modern Vietnamese political culture of contestation, as it defined itself in the colonial context, was, at least in its beginning, closely linked to contemporary French political trends—through Vietnamese who had been educated in the metropole, their contact with the colons’ political practices, and multiple relations with the colonial state and its self-legitimating discourses.¹¹

A contradiction that became increasingly frustrating among Western-educated Vietnamese was the gap that existed between an official French rhetoric anchored in republican liberal discourse—and its proclaimed embrace of universal progress and human equality—and the daily reality of the political, economic, and social denial of these rights to the indigenous population. The social Darwinist-influenced theories of inequality between civilizations that justified this double standard convinced many Vietnamese to seek the promises of progress, modernity, and survival of the fittest.¹² The terms of this debate were laid by the colonizers through the establishment of institutions and practices ranging from schools and modern instruments of political education to the romanization of the Vietnamese language and the democratization of cheaply printed information.¹³ Both this French genesis of Vietnamese modern political awareness and its indigenization are the subjects of the second chapter.

Arising from the aspirations of urban, Western-educated Vietnamese, this pursuit adopted original forms of activism, using newspapers as a distinct political force that flourished within the constraints of the colonial legal framework. Cochinchina was directly ruled by metropolitan laws that allowed for freedom of the press and of printed materials, at least in the French language. Beginning in the second decade of the twentieth century, Vietnamese saw that public action carried out within the limits of colonial law, principally through newspapers, presented a possible avenue of political expression to address the French colonial regime. Some chose to use quốc ngữ—the phonetic rendering of the Vietnamese language into a romanized alphabet—to establish their public role as promoters of cultural and social modernization and self-improvement through education. Though restricted by tight censorship, they believed in the importance of public action and anticipated their compatriots’ reception to it. Others chose to write in French, the uncensored language of politics, in newspapers often launched with initial approval from the authorities. Their public expression imitated the political rhetoric of the French press, and they positioned themselves in relation to the colonial government policy.

Not many years later, a significant number of younger journalists assumed a more radical role as they openly challenged the colonial regime and the contradictions of the Republican rhetoric. Navigating between two worlds of cultural references and using new forms of social interactions available in the colonial port city, their public political action became increasingly dramatic at both the individual and the collective level.¹⁴ Direct confrontation with the colonial regime reached its highest point in 1926. The events of that year sparked a radical evolution—if not a small revolution—that changed these journalists’ roles and, for some, ended their commitment to peaceful reform through the power of the pen. The promise of subverting the status quo through public politics began to fade in their eyes. What emerged in its place was the realization that other means and strategies were necessary—including the power of the gun—and the conviction that history was on their side. Others held on to their faith in print, at least for the purpose of engaging in the intellectual debates that their political actions had inevitably begun.

The 1920s, therefore, saw both the birth and the demise of Vietnam’s first attempt at mounting a public political challenge through use of the bourgeois medium of print and its associated politics of deliberative and polemical persuasion: its creators conceived a rational public sphere of educated political debate both as a means of challenging colonial domination and as an end in itself. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that Saigon’s public political debate cannot be considered as fully representative of the political will or popular sentiments of Vietnam. Journalists themselves were only a microcosm of the Vietnamese urban community and its emerging interests and social networks. I map the rise of new forms of public debate and organization by profiling individuals who exerted their action around and through newspapers and by tracking changes in their public discourse and actions.

In describing Saigon’s public sphere socially and culturally, this book discusses a range of individuals rather than a few remarkable figures. Their stories are presented to situate their role as activist journalists in its particular historical context and to highlight how individuals of different backgrounds came to view their responsibility toward the wider community. This approach combines individual biographies with comparative techniques borrowed from sociology. It renders a sense of the plurality of individual destinies while establishing patterns of social and political development. I use the same biographical approach to tell the story of a number of key journalists and the newspapers they worked for and to show the links between their worldviews and the development of newspapers as instruments of political expression. I hope that this approach, rather than the arrangement of artificially descriptive themes, will convey the internal fabric of Vietnamese modern political culture and its transformations in the context of Saigon under colonial rule.

For this investigation I have made use of newspapers and the archives of the Sûreté, the French colonial political police. Saigon in the 1920s expressed its political and social culture as text in the newspapers of the period. As a source, they require a peculiar kind of reading, providing both understanding of political developments and insight into the concerns and habits of everyday life. By monitoring and recording the day-to-day fortunes of a community or the parallel vicissitudes of particular individuals, newspapers are irreplaceable witnesses of change. Combined with information collected from other sources, offer unique insight into the ways individuals acted, interacted with each other, and used the public sphere.

Information from the Sûreté is used to corroborate what is found in the newspapers. The fact that newspapers—like a number of individual journalists—received constant attention from the colonial police, recorded in the form of archival files, makes a study of these records all the more important since they contain information not available in the newspapers themselves. The files were chiefly of two types: annual reports and firsthand testimonies by informants. The annual reports, which were regularly produced from 1922 on, covered political events that took place in Saigon and Cochinchina. Beginning in 1927, monthly reports were added, a sign of the colonial authorities’ growing anxiety. These reports were sent to a handful of political and judicial administrators of the colony, contributing to shaping the way in which the highest circles of the colonial government perceived the native society. Most of these reports are found at the Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer (CAOM) in Aix-en-Provence. I also use firsthand intelligence reports (Notes d’information) found in the Trung Tâm Lưu Trữ Quốc Gia 2, or Vietnamese National Archives Center no. 2 (NA2), in Ho Chi Minh City.¹⁵ The bulk of these Cochinchina Sûreté documents are still kept in Saigon. Although not always easy to access, they provide a vivid account of the journalists’ daily activities and lives, often due to the informants’ intimacy with their targets of surveillance. Spies and informers were not always professionals; they were sometimes activists who accepted money and gave information to Sûreté officers on an ad hoc basis. Much of the biographical information contained in this book originates from these hitherto untouched sources.

The goal of this book is not only to reconstruct a historical milieu that was as cultural and social as it was political. It also aims to chart chronologically the historical moment in which steps taken by a number of public individuals created a new space of political expression amid the contingencies and contradictions of colonial rule.¹⁶ These actions marked a rupture with the feeling of unease and powerlessness that characterized the first decades of European occupation. They were multifaceted, made up of borrowings, compromises, and adaptations, and were not always expressed in directly political terms. However, the opposition between colonized and colonizing and, with it, a Vietnamese collective, alternative consciousness became gradually more apparent, engulfing the Saigon political scene in radical political contestation. For many people in southern Vietnam who lived through these years, the tribulations of Saigon journalists left a memory of untarnished innocence and of endless possibilities—the true ferment out of which future revolutions would come. For contemporary readers looking to the future, this study argues in favor of a political narration that is anchored in the local, contextualized experience. This study confirms Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler’s important point that political possibilities do not just lie in grand oppositions, but in the interstices of power structures, in the intersection of particular agendas, in the political spaces opened by new and renewed discourses and by subtle shifts in ideological ground.¹⁷ It shows how tenuous, multiform, and contingent are the pathways along which historical events often develop. To know the past in the complexity of its unfolding, my study emphasizes, one must resist the temptations of teleology.

Part 1

The Origins of Saigon’s Public Sphere

CHAPTER 1

Social Order in the Colonial City

AS FRANCE AND ITS EMPIRE BECAME ENGULFED IN THE First World War, the colonial port city of Saigon found itself developing into, to paraphrase Henri Lefebvre, a space of possibilities. ¹ Within its boundaries, a complex process of imposed acculturation and social interactions led to new expressions of Vietnamese consciousness on both an individual and a collective level. Gottfried Korff has referred to this creative aspect of the colonial city as internal or internalized urbanization, which is concerned with mentalités formed in the communicative relational system of the metropolis [that have the role of] acting, thinking and feeling in the process of urbanization. ²

For many Vietnamese internal urbanization meant new forms of social interaction and a dynamic with the hinterland that reconfigured social and cultural awareness, which brought important consequences for the shaping of a new imagined and experienced community.³ The kind of interactions experienced in the colonial city emphasized individual mobility, flexibility in dealing with changing modes of work and life, and accustoming oneself to a new praxis of time, new hierarchical categories, and a new set of values deemed under the colonial order to be modern, rational, and therefore legitimate. Internal colonial urbanization affected and involved different groups of the urbanized population at different times and in a variety of ways. It grew through a simultaneous dialogue between the city and the people, from the specific challenges of the urban environment to its inhabitants’ sociopolitical positions, and their responses and actions in turn influenced and even shaped the colonial and postcolonial urban environment. The history of the colonial metropolis shows how the experience of urbanization, with its heterogeneity and inherent contradictions, opened new spaces of freedom and pluralism.⁴

Historical Developments

Saigon⁵ was a typical Southeast Asian city.⁶ Before the arrival of the French in 1859, it belonged to the southern region of the Vietnamese empire, originally annexed from Cambodia in 1698. The port city was incorporated into a regional commercial seafaring network led by Chinese merchants who were in direct contact with other major maritime commercial centers like Malacca, Singapore, and Batavia (Jakarta), as well as Guangzhou and Hong Kong. With its Chinese component in Cholon (in Vietnamese Chợ Lớn, literally large market), the urban center was the region’s main commercial hub.⁷

A defining feature that survived into the colonial period was its position as a political, commercial, and cultural center. Prince Nguyễn Ánh, the future emperor Gia Long, founder of the Nguyễn dynasty in Huế, chose Saigon to be the cornerstone of his political strategy of reconquest of the country against the Tây Sơn insurgency.⁸ Despite—or thanks to—these events Saigon became closely integrated within the Vietnamese polity to develop into an official center in its own right, where, for instance, civil service examination sessions at the provincial level were held.⁹ The twin centers of Saigon and Cholon, six kilometers apart, already formed a major urban spatial system partially filled between them by a collection of more than forty hamlets. In the last decades before French occupation, this ensemble represented a population estimated at more than one hundred thousand inhabitants.¹⁰ In contrast to Hanoi, its northern rival, Saigon’s main characteristic was its extreme heterogeneity and fluidity. The port city was indeed the meeting point of economic and social refugees from rural Cochinchina and from the northern and central parts of Vietnam, and a large Chinese community had been settled there since the seventeenth century. Distributed into small centers within the Saigon-Cholon perimeter, the precolonial Saigonese population was not entirely cut off from its rural environment. Rice paddies, communal land, and hydraulic plans were still a distinct feature of the place, while land and water connections were bordered by small market centers, the xóm làng chợ.¹¹ Of this population was born a distinct urban society with a culture different from that of the rural environment. Next to the country people of the delta area, the dân nông thôn, existed the city dwellers, the dân thành thị, more popularly called kẻ chợ (literally, market individual), who might be not only mandarin, military, businesspeople, artisans, coolies, workers, servants but also rice or vegetable croppers and wholesalers at the same time. This heterogeneous population was largely influenced by the important presence of the Chinese Minh Hương. In the precolonial period, the Minh Hươngs were those of Sino-Vietnamese extraction or those Chinese assimilated into the community of Vietnamese subjects under the Nguyễn kings. Chinese migrants freshly installed were called người Hoa Kiều. They were compelled to appear on registers kept according to their region of origin (this form of control was continued during the French period). Besides the Chinese, a number of foreign traders and travelers, Arabs, Malays, Indians, and Europeans, regularly visited the port city. In this heterogeneous urban environment in which individualism, pragmatism, and openness to strangers flourished, the character of the Saigonese kẻ chợ slowly forged itself. That character was revealed in the vocabulary, popular beliefs, and attitudes pervading everyday life best described by the southern writer Sơn Nam.¹²

After the fall of the city in 1859, Saigon became the cornerstone of the new French expansionism in the Far East. With the subsequent conquest of northern Vietnam in 1884 and the historical city of Hanoi becoming the new capital of the French Indochinese Federation a decade later, Saigon remained the capital of the old territory—legally a French colony—of Cochinchina, as well as Indochina’s main economic hub. With a population of 232,100 in 1918 and 324,000 in 1931, the urban complex of Saigon-Cholon was Indochina’s most populous center.

The City as Colonial Apparatus

In the political economy of early twentieth-century Western imperialism, three defining features shaped the