The Mentor and the Mentee Competing Visions in Vietnamese Political Thought

This chapter examines the work of the Vietnamese nationalist, Phan Chu Trinh, and of Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Vietnamese communist revolution, who offer differing responses to the shared experience of suffering under French colonialism. Their ideas provide valuable insights into how colonized peoples have creatively responded to colonialism, namely by synthesizing Eastern and Western traditions to strengthen themselves. The “Vietnam War” took the lives of 58,000 Americans and over two million Vietnamese. Americans who supported the war wanted to help Vietnamese anti-communists fight Vietnamese communists, believing that if communists took control of Vietnam, communism would spread in Asia and threaten the ideal of individual freedom all over the world. Phan Chu Trinh argued that the Vietnamese should adopt liberal democracy from the West to strengthen Confucian morality in Vietnam, and Ho Chi Minh argued that the Vietnamese should use Confucian techniques of self-cultivation to become better Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries.