4
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 46(1), pp 4–31 February 2015.
© The National University of Singapore, 2015 doi:10.1017/S0022463414000599
革命, Cách Mạng, Révolution: The early history of
‘revolution’ in Việt Nam
George Dutton
This article traces the etymology of the term ‘revolution’ as it developed in Việt
Nam between the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.
It argues that the term was slow to catch on, and that activists who used it did so
in often contradictory ways. The term’s historical development complicated efforts
to fix its meaning, and it was not until the later part of the 1920s that it came to
be consolidated, in part through Hô ̀ Chí Minh’s publication of a short book
entitled Đường Kách Mệnh (The road to revolution).
Among the key events of twentieth-century Vietnamese history was the
long revolution against French colonialism. While the nature of this revolution is often debated, less attention has been paid to the ways in which
Vietnamese thought about the concept of revolution in itself. Before one
can have a ‘revolution’ one needs a word to categorise the event as such.
This article considers the history of revolution in modern Việt Nam, looking not at the event which came to bear the label, but rather at the label
itself. The term ‘revolution’ made its way into early twentieth-century
Vietnamese political discourse and came to be deployed in various and
haphazard ways in the 1900s and 1910s. This article examines the etymology of the term ‘cách mạng’ and surveys the ways in which it was understood and used in Việt Nam during the early decades of the twentieth
century. Examining the etymology of the term within the particularities
of the Vietnamese historical context allows us to see how ‘revolution’
became part of this political discourse. It also shows how the term’s historical evolution and application was freighted with associations that
George Dutton is Associate Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of
California Los Angeles. Correspondence in connection with this paper should be addressed
to: dutton@humnet.ucla.edu. I am indebted to Ken MacLean in particular, but also to the
other participants who offered detailed comments when I presented this article at a conference on ‘Revolution in Vietnam’ at UC Berkeley organised by Peter Zinoman. Thanks also to
the two anonymous JSEAS reviewers who pointed me to additional sources and offered
thoughtful suggestions.
革命,
CÁCH MẠNG, RÉVOLUTION
5
complicated its usage and early popularisation amongst Vietnamese anticolonial activists. I argue that its etymology complicated efforts to understand the word ‘revolution’, and that it took several decades before its
use became common among Vietnamese anticolonial activists. Thus,
although these individuals were likely exposed to the term in the form of
the Chinese neologism ge ming (革命) by 1905, it would be nearly two decades before its modern meaning came to be more commonly understood
among political activists, and developed a certain fixity of meaning.
In order to think about the concept of revolution, I begin with a later
twentieth-century attempt to define the term, namely the elegant articulation offered by Huỳnh Kim Khánh in his Vietnamese Communism, 1925–
1945 (1982). Khánh considers the term ‘revolution’ in the context of earlier
Vietnamese disagreements about how to understand the word and its
limitations:
In Western political theory, the word revolution retains the meaning that Copernicus
used in his astronomical studies. It refers to a complete circular movement that leads
to the replacement of one social and political system by another. In this perspective,
revolution is distinct from rebellion. A rebellion is perceived as a negative process,
limited in scope and incoherent in its demands. An act of defiance, it necessarily
establishes limits to the conditions considered intolerable. In the words of Albert
Camus, a rebel is ‘a man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation’. In other words, the rebel can at best be a political reformist who proposes
limits to power and demands for liberalization. Revolution, on the other hand, originating the realm of ideas, represents fundamental changes in the historical process.
It calls for a basic transformation of the structure and process of rule. Thus, a rebellion reacts to facts, whereas a revolution involves principles. In this sense, a revolutionary is not only a rebel who destroys, but also a builder who constructs a new
society.1
Here Khánh captures the transformative flavour of the modern conception
of ‘revolution’, while usefully juxtaposing it with an alternative type of political upheaval, namely ‘rebellion’. This definition encapsulates the dichotomy that historians and polemicists often grapple with, how to distinguish
true revolutions from what they might consider to be mere rebellions
(or revolts). This conundrum has exercised several generations of
Vietnamese activists and intellectuals who have sought to come to terms
with, for example, whether the Tây Sơn period is best labelled the ‘Tây
Sơn Rebellion’ or the ‘Tây Sơn Revolution’.2 Many other historical episodes,
1 Huỳnh Kim Khánh, Vietnamese communism, 1925–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1982), pp. 82–3.
2 Works that have addressed this debate, either implicitly or explicitly include: Văn Tân,
Cách mạng Tây Sơn [The Tây Sơn revolution] (Hà Nội: Nhà Xuất Bản Văn Sử Đi ̣a,
6
GEORGE DUTTON
from both the premodern and modern period have been similarly scrutinised and labelled, often without consensus.3
Another scholar who has engaged with this question of how to define
revolution in the Vietnamese context is Stein Tønnesson. Unlike Huỳnh
Kim Khánh’s earlier work, Tønnesson’s The Vietnamese Revolution of
1945 (1991) looked directly at how Vietnamese actors themselves understood the term. Tønnesson examines an article by Trường Chinh, the
Vietnamese Communist Party’s chief theoretician, written in September
of 1945 a week and a half after what Chinh labelled as the ‘August
Revolution’. In the article, Trường Chinh did not formally define ‘revolution’ as a term, as Tønnesson notes, but did articulate a clear distinction
between revolutions and mere coups d’état.4 Trường Chinh saw a revolution as involving fundamental change, the use of violence, mass participation, and the transfer of power to the people, unlike a coup, in which, as he
noted, ‘One ruling circle overthrows the other ruling circle to establish a
new government. But basically the old regime remains intact.’5 Drawing
on Trường Chinh’s analysis Tønnesson articulates a working definition
of a revolution as ‘a general insurrection involving a reconstitution of the
state and leading to radical social change’.6 Like Huỳnh Kim Khánh’s definition, Tønnesson’s is a helpful starting point, though it anticipates the
evolution of the term that the present article traces.
While Trường Chinh was defining ‘revolution’ after the event, and with
more than a bit of distortion as Tønnesson’s book argues, my approach to
the term begins from the opposite direction, considering its earliest manifestations when it was highly contested, uncertain, and changing. I focus on
the origins and deployment of the term by Vietnamese anticolonial activists
directly involved with events that were seen as constituting a ‘revolution’
(or not) or those affiliated with groups that might be regarded as ‘revolutionary’. Use of the term is obviously politically charged, for labels matter
1957); Văn Tân, Quốc Sử Quán Triêù Nguyễn đối với khởi nhghĩa Tây Sơn’ [The Nguyen
history board and the Tay Son righteous uprising], Nghiên cứu li ̣ch sử 65 (Aug. 1964): 14–21;
Trâǹ Huy Liệu, ‘Đánh gia cuộc cách mạng Tây-Sơn và vai trò li ̣ch sử cuả Nguyễn Huệ’
[Evaluating the Tây Sơn revolution and the historical role of Nguyễn Huệ], Văn sử đi ̣a 14
(Feb. 1956): 30–44; Tạ Chí Đại Trường, Li ̣ch sử nội chiến ở Việt Nam từ 1771 đến 1802
[History of the civil war in Việt Nam from 1771 to 1802] (Sài Gòn: Văn Sử Học, 1973).
3 Such episodes were often those centred on political transitions and concerned questions
of legitimacy. These included the rise of the Ho clan, the Mac seizure of power, the
eighteenth-century challenges to Trinh authority, and various nineteenth-century uprisings
against the Nguyen court.
4 Stein Tønnesson, The Vietnamese Revolution of 1945: Roosevelt, Ho Chi Minh and de
Gaulle in a world at war (Oslo: International Peace Research Institute, 1991), pp. 2–5.
5 Ibid., p. 3.
6 Ibid., p. 5.
革命,
CÁCH MẠNG, RÉVOLUTION
7
enormously, shaping debates as events unfold and beyond. Revolution, in
whatever language, is seen as denoting a particular thing that is distinct
from other sorts of things. But, just as the events being labelled are different
from one another, so too are the ways in which the term is understood. The
instability of the term’s meaning endures, to be sure, but was particularly
acute during its first several decades on the Vietnamese linguistic landscape. This essay is an effort to trace and examine some of this instability.
Words carry with them histories — some longer than others — and
their meanings can never be fully separated from those histories. Each
deployment of a particular term in a new context establishes an additional
layer of meaning that complicates the ways in which the term is and can be
used. The term ‘revolution’ exemplifies this etymological reality, for in
labelling particular historical episodes as ‘revolutions’ one finds that their
unique elements, circumstances, and conditions can either be collapsed
into a deceptively simplistic uniformity, or their component elements can
be selectively extracted to sustain subsequent labelling of events that may
share only a few or even a single element.7 Thus, the ‘revolutions’ that
preceded the ‘Vietnamese Revolution’ constituted part of the historical
and semantic baggage carried by the term in its incarnation in the
Vietnamese context. It was bound up with a historical thread that stretched
back through such diverse upheavals as the Irish Revolution (1922), the
Russian Revolution (1917), the Chinese Revolution (1911), the Prussian
Revolution (1848), the French Revolution (1789), the American
Revolution (1776), and even England’s ‘Glorious Revolution’ (1688).
Each of these revolutions, some linked more by the term ‘revolution’
than any particular structural commonalities, became historical antecedents that could be drawn upon by Vietnamese calling for ‘revolution’ or
simply seeking to understand what it meant. Early Vietnamese explorers
of the term, as we shall see, also identified what they saw as domestic antecedents or parallels to these global instances of revolutions in ways that
only further muddied the politicised linguistic waters.
It was not only the history of these modern ‘revolutions’ that gave the
term a particular flavour in the early twentieth-century Vietnamese context. It was also shaped by the etymology of the term itself, one which
had, after a fashion, existed in Việt Nam even before the modern period,
7 There are of course efforts, such as Goldstone’s, to identify multiple shared attributes that
can be used to identify revolutions. While this is a useful exercise, my essay is less concerned
with systematic and scholarly efforts to identify revolutions than it is with the deployment of
the term in self-conscious fashion by participants in the events, and for particular purposes.
Jack Goldstone, ‘The comparative and historical study of revolutions’, Annual Review of
Sociology 8 (1982): 187–207.
8
GEORGE DUTTON
but which then arrived in new configurations at several historical moments
and in several distinct forms. Multiple meanings, numerous etymologies,
and complicated historical precedents all ensured that the term ‘revolution’
became a strongly contested one. Terms for revolution that entered or were
developed in Việt Nam included all those found in the title of this article:
革命, cách mạng (kách mệnh), révolution. Each of these was used by
Vietnamese activists and intellectuals to talk about something whose core
meaning remained as complicated as the array of terms being used to try
to encapsulate it. The fact that these terms were derived from a complex
of languages including classical Chinese, Vietnamese, and French, each
with particular historical and linguistic overtones, virtually ensured confusion. Indeed, as Hue-Tam Ho Tai has pointed out of this period,
When it came to defining revolution, local Vietnamese were ... left to their own
devices. The notion of changing the Mandate of Heaven, redolent as it was of classical connotations, could be interpreted in any number of ways without recourse to
historical experience, opening the way to misunderstandings.8
While the notion of ‘misunderstandings’ might better be understood as
‘contestations’ over the meaning and applicability of the term, it is quite
clear that as ‘ge minh/cách mạng’ began its career in Việt Nam, it did so
under the weight of a variety of expectations that kept the term a contentious one.
‘Revolution’ in Cochinchina: Révolution
The term for ‘revolution’ arrived in Việt Nam not, as one might expect,
from Japanese or Chinese scholars grappling with the creation of an Asian
neologism for the concept, as happened with so many other alien ideas, but
rather appears to have done so along newly established networks established
by French colonisers. It almost certainly made its first appearance in the
southern reaches of the Vietnamese realm, in French Cochinchina and in
the form of the French word ‘révolution’, possibly as early as the 1860s,
but certainly by 1875. It was here, as Philippe Peycam and others have
shown, that European ideas and the words to express them were being introduced by the earliest French colonisers to the Vietnamese with whom they
interacted.9 In Cochinchina the term ‘revolution’ and other new words
would have been used and understood by the tiny cohort of Vietnamese
scholars who were being schooled in French and who were becoming
8 Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 171.
9 Philippe M.F. Peycam, The birth of Vietnamese political journalism: Saigon, 1916–1930
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), pp. 19–21, 50–52.
革命,
CÁCH MẠNG, RÉVOLUTION
9
aware of the broader scope of European history. They would have become
aware of the French Revolution at the very least, and it would have been
in this context that the term ‘révolution’ arrived. Thus it seems fairly
clear that like other modern concepts and terms, ‘revolution’ appeared in
the southern region several decades before it became known to scholars
in the north.
By the 1870s at the latest, Vietnamese Francophone scholars were also
becoming aware of the term in its modern political sense, and were using it
for their own purposes. This is significant, for it shows that by this early
date it had already escaped its bound form as ‘French Revolution’, likely
the form in which it first appeared in Việt Nam. The earliest published
usage of the term ‘revolution’ by a Vietnamese that I have traced is in
Trương Vĩnh Ký’s 1875 Cours d’histoire annamite à l’usage des écoles de
la Basse-Cochinchine. This textbook, by a noted Vietnamese polymath
who worked closely with the newly arrived French, is a lengthy survey of
Vietnamese history, in which the author uses the word ‘revolution’ exactly
once, and in a rather unlikely spot. The revolutionary moment identified by
Trương Vĩnh Ký was the political reorganisation of the northern Tri ̣nh
court after 1573 during its lengthy struggle with the Mặc family. The
extended passage reads:
Dès lors Trịnh-tòng, maitre absolu du royaume et du roi, se décora des titres les plus
hauts et s’attribua les pouvoirs les plus étendus. Mais pour étouffer l’envie et s’entourer
d’une cour intéressée à le soutenir, il éleva en même temps ses compagnons d’armes et
ses amis. Et comme il craignait l’intervention de Nguyễn-hoàng, son oncle, il le fit
nommer Thái-phó du royaume à Huế, en lui recommandant de conserver du
paddy dans les magasins de l’Etat et de n’y garder que 400 livres d’argent et 500
pièces de soie (annales).
Les Mạc, espérant que cette révolution pourrait les servir, reparurent.
Once Trinh Tong came to have complete control over the kingdom and the king, he
decorated himself with the highest titles and arrogated to himself the most extensive
powers. But in order to snuff out any jealousy and to create a court willing to support him, he simultaneously promoted some of his companions in arms and his
friends. And, because he feared the intervention of Nguyen-Hoang, his uncle, he
named him the Thai Pho of the Kingdom of Hue, and instructed him to protect
the paddy rice in its state warehouses, and to retain only 400 pieces of silver and
500 pieces of silk (per year).
The Mac, hopeful that this revolution would serve (their interests), reappeared.
10
10 Trương Vĩnh Ký, Cours d’histoire annamite à l’usage des écoles de la Basse-Cochinchine,
(Saigon: Imprimerie du Gouvernement, 1875), p. 82; my translation; emphasis added.
10
GEORGE DUTTON
Clearly, this use of ‘revolution’ is a curious one. Trương Vĩnh Ký seems to
be describing a kind of political consolidation on the part of the Tri ̣nh,
rather than a political upheaval or a change of regimes, much less a transformation of the fundamental political system itself. It is perhaps not surprising that this episode, the only one described by Trương Vĩnh Ký as a
‘revolution’, was not included in subsequent surveys of earlier ‘revolutions’
in Vietnamese history.
Furthermore, this usage does not accord with Trương Vĩnh Ký’s own
definition of the term in his slightly later 1884 Petite dictionnaire
Français–Annamite, the first Vietnamese language dictionary to feature
the term.11 In it, he included not only the nouns ‘révolution’ and
‘révolutionnaire’ but also the verb ‘révolutionner’ (to carry out a revolution).12 The dictionary did not suggest direct Vietnamese analogues for the
term, nor did it create some sort of neologism. Instead, Trương Vĩnh Ký
attempted to define these terms using Vietnamese approximations. The
Vietnamese terms he used were ones suggestive chiefly of political upheaval
and chaos, rather than systematic transformations of political systems. His
definition of ‘révolution’ began with the mechanical sense of turning or
̀ which is literally ‘a
revolving, using the Vietnamese phrase sự xây vân,
revolution’ as in the turning of a wheel. This meaning is reinforced with
the parenthetical inclusion of the sinically-derived Vietnamese term vận
(運), also meaning to turn or revolve. Only then did Trương Vĩnh Ký
offer the additional glosses for ‘révolution’ in the political sense, which
he rendered in Vietnamese using loạn (disorder/chaos) and biến
trong Nước (internal disorder). Along the same lines, he glossed
‘révolutionnaire’ (a revolutionary) as loạn and biến loạn, or as ke ̉ làm
loạn — a person who creates this chaos. ‘Révolutionner’ (to carry out a
revolution) is similarly defined as dấy loạn (to rise up in disorder) or
làm cho biến loạn (to bring about calamitous disorder). Not surprisingly,
his definitions of ‘rebellion’ and ‘revolt’ also used the word loạn to indicate
the idea of disorder. Trương Vĩnh Ký’s dictionary is significant for demonstrating that attempts to render the term ‘revolution’ into Vietnamese were
11 Other nineteenth-century Vietnamese dictionaries published in Cochinchina do not
include any terms for revolution. The term does not appear in either the 1877 or the
1898 editions of the Dictionnaire Annamite–Français published in Saigon. Nor is it found
in Huỳnh Ti ̣nh Của’s 1895 Đại Nam Quấc Âm Tự Vi ̣. Furthermore, neither of these dictionaries even carries the older Chinese usage of ‘ge ming’ in reference to a changing of the fates
of heaven, suggesting perhaps that the term was sufficiently obscure as to not be considered
relevant for inclusion of a dictionary focused on more commonly used terms and compounds, or, equally likely, that it was not recognised as a compound.
12 Trương Vĩnh Ký, Petite dictionnaire Français–Annamite (Sài Gòn: Imprimerie de la
Mission, 1884), p. 1032.
革命,
CÁCH MẠNG, RÉVOLUTION
11
already going on in the early 1880s, anticipating the arrival of the
Japanese/Chinese neologism ‘ge minh/cách mạng’ by several decades. It
is also an important example of the ways in which new terms might
carry multiple and inchoate senses as they entered the Vietnamese lexicographical landscape, contributing to confusion on how one might understand them.13
‘Revolution’ in Tonkin: 革命
While ‘revolution’ arrived via the French language and came to be
understood by a small handful of southern scholars, its later arrival in
Tonkin was considerably more complex. Furthermore, the term for revolution that appeared among northern scholar activists, 革命 (ge ming; cách
mạnh), was one with a linguistic lineage that reflected long-standing
Vietnamese connections to the Chinese classical language, as well as the
lexicographical changes that had begun to develop among Japanese and
then Chinese modernisers. Like many of the new terms coming into the
Vietnamese language to describe novel concepts, things, and practices,
this word for revolution must have been coined by Japanese scholars
who had been assiduously transforming and expanding their own language
to accommodate the broad range of new information coming into their
society since the 1860s. The term was then picked up by Chinese modernisers and it would have been via their writings that it entered
Vietnamese political discourse. Many of the neologisms being crafted by
Japanese scholars created new combinations of characters to represent particular concepts like, for instance, the term xã hội (社會) for ‘society’. Such
compounds of characters not previously used in tandem neatly served the
interests of Japanese scholars trying to find ways to express the essence of
new ideas via particular sinitic characters. Used together, the meanings of
the individual characters within the compound suggested the new idea.14
13 One could certainly trace the use of the word ‘révolution’ among Francophone scholars
and students over the course of the first decades of the twentieth century. Such an inquiry
could examine French-language newspapers of the period, as well as the writings of such
prominent figures as Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh and Nguyễn An Ninh, among others. I suspect
that the word would have come into relatively frequent use in their respective political commentaries. For this article, however, I have opted not to follow this track, which would
require an article in itself. One should at least bear in mind, however, that this sense of ‘revolution’ continued to coexist with more indigenised forms. Moreover, given their own exposure to and experience of the French language, even the most prominent Vietnamese
revolutionaries, such as Hồ Chí Minh, would have continued to use the term ‘révolution’
as a part of their political discourse, which would have distinguished them from their
Chinese and Russian revolutionary counterparts.
14 Alexander Woodside, Community and revolution in Vietnam (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1976), pp. 54–5, explores the development of xã hội in the Japanese context, and
12
GEORGE DUTTON
While many Japanese neologisms followed this pattern, others made
use of existing compound terms, which were repurposed to express new
concepts. The term that came to be used for revolution, 革命 (ge ming;
cách mạnh), is an example of this phenomenon. By the time that
Japanese scholars began to use the compound to represent ‘revolution’ in
a modern sense it had already existed in classical Chinese texts for several
millennia, albeit describing an event that lacked some of the elements carried by the modern term. Of the two characters 革 and 命, the former is the
more straightforward. 革 means simply ‘to remove’ or ‘to change’.15 命 on
the other hand, is a far more complex term. It can be differentially rendered
as ‘fate’, ‘destiny’, ‘life’, ‘to command’, ‘a decree’, ‘a command’, or ‘the will
of God’. The idea of 命 lies at the core of classical governance in East Asia,
and it was absolutely essential to possess or control 命 in order for a
Chinese or Vietnamese emperor to maintain his rule. Fear of the loss of
命 was an equally important element of governance, and court officials
were on the constant lookout for signs and portents that 命 (in the sense
of ‘the mandate of heaven’) might have been lost or that the ruler’s hold
on it might have become tenuous.
In classical Chinese and Vietnamese usage, the characters had been
brought together as a kind of compound to describe an alteration of rulers,
typically the transition from one dynasty to a new one.16 As such, it is not
surprising that Japanese scholars would have utilised this pairing of characters to speak of modern notions of revolution in the sense of political
change. In its classical incarnation, however, the term was typically used
to describe a more conservative action, a restoration of a political order
that had gotten out of control, or a transfer of authority to a different
emperor, but still an emperor. It was used to discuss the removal of the
‘mandate’ (of Heaven, which was implied) to rule, from a particular ruler
or ruling house. The most celebrated, and earliest appearance of the term
is in a phrase from the Classic of changes (Yijing, v. Kinh Di ̣ch, 3rd century
BCE): 湯 武 革 命 which might be rendered as ‘Tang and Wu [each]
the implications of its importation to Việt Nam; interestingly Hồ Chí Minh also uses the
term to illustrate the introduction of neologisms into the Vietnamese language, see Hô ̀
Chí Minh toàn tập [Complete works of Ho Chi Minh] (Hà Nội: NXB Chính Tri ̣ Quốc
Gia, 2000), vol. 2, p. 160.
15 It also has the unrelated meaning of animal hide or skin.
16 I say ‘kind of compound’ here for while the characters were used together, they were not
being used as a noun compound — i.e. there was not really a sense of ‘revolution’ as a thing.
Rather, the characters were used together as a phrase — the verb of change being enacted
upon the object (fate or rule). Indeed, this juxtaposition of these characters seems to have
been relatively rare. The individual characters, especially 命, were much more typically
used independently of each other.
革命,
CÁCH MẠNG, RÉVOLUTION
13
removed the mandate [to rule, from reigning dynasties]’.17 Thus it
described the transfer of political authority from one dynasty to another.
A few examples help to illuminate the ways in which the term was deployed
in the early Chinese literature. The first comes from the Baopuzi (Master
embracing simplicity, 抱朴子), an important Daoist text by Ge Hong
(283–343). The Baopuzi includes several uses of the term 革命, of which the
two following are the most pertinent to political upheaval and change:
漢高應天，承運革命。
The First Emperor of Han assented to heaven, and performed a change in its
mandate.18
Then, in an elaboration of the terse reference in the Classic of changes, Ge
Hong comments on the early rulers and their role in causing political change:
湯武逆取順守，誠不仁也。應天革命，以其明也。
Tang and Wu went against the natural order of things, and then went on to order
society properly. It was truly a case of lack of benevolence. In responding to heaven,
they changed its mandate. This was their brilliance.19
In both examples the term ‘ge ming’ is directly linked to that for heaven,
‘tian’. This underscores the idea that the source of these ‘changes of the
mandate’ lies in heaven itself, even if the change itself is enacted by people
following the wishes of heaven. This ties back to the idea that 命 is a ‘fate’
related to heaven and to the authority granted by heaven for a ruler to exercise authority. A slightly different approach to the issue, also from the
Baopuzi, runs as follows:
天乙革命而務光負石以投河姬武翦商而夷齊 不食於西山。
When Tianyi removed the mandate, Wuguang shouldered a stone and threw himself
into the river. When the Ji-surnamed King Wu [of Zhou] cut off the Shang, Boyi,
and Shuqi stayed in the western mountains, refusing to eat.20
17 R.H. Mathews, Mathews’ Chinese–English dictionary, rev. American ed. (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1943), p. 497.
18 Chinese Text Project (http://ctext.org/; last accessed 8 May 2014); trans. in Jay Sailey,
The master who embraces simplicity: A study of the philosopher Ko Hung, A.D. 283–343
(San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1978), p. 129.
19 Chinese phrase taken from the Chinese Text Project; trans. in Sailey, The master who
embraces simplicity, p. 205. The first sentence might also be rendered: ‘Tang and Wu kept
rightly that which they had acquired wrongly.’
20 The text is taken from the Chinese Text Project (http://ctext.org/; last accessed 8 May
2014). The translation was generously provided by my colleague David Schaberg, who
puzzled out that 天乙 was the given name of the founder of the Shang Dynasty.
14
GEORGE DUTTON
The phrase is a reference to the actions (committing suicide) of dynastic
loyalists — Wuguang, Boyi, and Shuqi — in response to the fall of their
respective dynasties. Here there is no explicit reference to heaven in the
removal of the mandate. Rather, it is an action by a particular (future)
ruler: the founder of the Shang and that of the Zhou dynasties. On the
other hand, in the classical formulation the role of heaven would be implicit, given the understanding that such a ‘removal of the mandate’ could
only conceivably transpire if it were permitted by heaven.
Such juxtapositions of 革 and 命 continue through the centuries,
though an electronic search of major classical texts yielded only a modest
number of examples. This suggests, though it is hardly definitive, that
the pairing was not a frequent one. A considerably later example of the
pairing of the terms is noteworthy for suggesting political upheaval, rather
than merely a transition of power. This comes from the Ming (Dynasty)
‘Veritable Records’ (Ming Shi Lu), which contain a statement attributed
to the third emperor of the Ming Dynasty, Ming Tai Zong (r. 1402–1424):
前代革命之際,肆行屠戮,違天虐民, 朕實不忍.
In earlier eras’ periods of ‘revolution’ there were wanton acts and slaughter; there
was violation of heaven’s [will] and cruel mistreatment of the people, and I truly
could not bear this.21
This comment thus sees 革 命 as a kind of political happening that does
not merely displace one dynasty with another, but also as one that produces
chaos and violence. Moreover, it sees 革 命 not as a single event, but rather
as defining a period of time — i.e. using it as an adjective (‘a revolutionary
era’) instead of a noun. This example suggests that there was some fluidity
in the meaning carried by the term, even prior to the modern period. The
instance is also useful for suggesting that earlier Chinese incarnations of the
phrase had, at the very least, latent qualities of part of the meaning that
‘revolution’ in the modern sense would later come to bear. The existence
of such examples would have made it an even more logical fit as
Japanese scholars cast about for a phrase that could be used to represent
the modern term.
Like their Chinese counterparts, Vietnamese classical scholars had also
made use of the term 革 命 in reference to government transitions, specifically those in which one monarch was overthrown by another to whom the
mandate had been transferred, and who would then restore political and
public order. Unsurprisingly, prominent examples of this usage are found
21 Chinese Text Project, http://ctext.org/ (last accessed 8 May 2014). My translation.
革命,
CÁCH MẠNG, RÉVOLUTION
15
in the Tây Sơn period of the last decades of the eighteenth century (1771–
1802), a time of multiple political transitions, which saw the replacement of
two ruling dynasties by new ones. Documents issued by the Tây Sơn
Emperor, but written by his primary Confucian official, Ngô Thì Nhậm,
illustrate this usage. In a decree issued to a group of soldiers, probably in
1789, Nhậm uses the phrase: ‘朕應天順人, 乘時革命，以兵定天下’
(We have responded to heaven and put in order the people, and have
taken the opportunity of the changing of the mandate to use soldiers to settle all under heaven.)22 In another somewhat later document, ‘Decree
extending benevolence’, Ngô Thì Nhậm uses a slightly modified version
of this phrase: ‘朕應天順人, 光膺景命’ (We have responded to heaven
and put in order the people, and have graciously received the conditions
of fate [or ‘of the commands, i.e. of Heaven]).23
Such uses of the phrase, and the more general references to ‘the fates’
or ‘commands’ (命) give some indication of the resonance this particular
term had. It is a complex one that carried multiple meanings and numerous
dimensions. On the one hand, ‘fate’ in a modern sense seems to be that
which lies beyond the capacity of people to change; and yet, it is a doubleedged sword, for when political circumstances are changed (by the people),
this is conveniently seen as an indication of ‘fate’. The people then become
the agents of heaven by enacting change. At the same time, the term that
can be translated as ‘fate’ is the same one used to indicate the ‘commands’
or ‘decrees’ of the emperor. Thus, the term links the emperor with the heavens, in that the emperor creates ‘fate’ through his commands. Seen
another way, the heavens can cause ‘fates’ to occur to the emperor, but
the emperor can cause ‘fate’ to happen to his subjects through his use of
‘commands’. Clearly there were numerous classical antecedents already circulating in Việt Nam via texts like the Classic of changes (and probably also
later texts such as the Ming Shilu, cited above) and as the Tây Sơn-era case
suggests, the Vietnamese were deploying the phrase in their own political
articulations.
革命 Returns to Việt Nam: Liang Qichao and Phan Bội Châu
These cases indicate that at one level the compound 革命 was already
in Việt Nam prior to the twentieth century. What happened at the beginning of that century was its re-importation, now bearing a (somewhat) different meaning. As with many of the neologisms flowing into Việt Nam
around the turn of the century it is extremely difficult to determine
22 Ngô Thì Nhậm, Ngô Thì Nhậm toàn tập [The complete works of Ngo Thi Nham] (Hà
Nội: NXB Khoa Học Xã Hội, 2004), vol. 2, p. 617.
23 Ibid., p. 641.
16
GEORGE DUTTON
precisely when this reintroduction of 革命 took place. Indeed, it is not clear
which Chinese scholar was the first to take up the reimagined phrase from
the Japanese, though it was possibly Liang Qichao who would have come
across it during his decade-and-a-half of exile in Japan beginning in
1898. In this respect, the term shared a historical and geographical trajectory with a large number of other abstract nouns that were similiarly coined
in Japan, imported to China, and were then picked up by Chinese-trained
Vietnamese intellectuals and transplanted in Việt Nam.
A strong candidate for the first text in which Vietnamese scholars
might have come across the term is Liang Qichao’s influential: 新民說
(Xin Min Shuo — Tân Dân Thuyết, New People), which he wrote and published in Japan as a series of articles between 1902 and 1905.24 Xin Min
Shuo was an extended discussion of what Liang Qichao considered crucial
factors that the Chinese people should consider as they sought to renew and
strengthen themselves to stimulate national revival in the face of profound
political and indeed existential challenges. The work cites numerous
European historical precedents for political change, making frequent references to ‘the French Revolution’ (法國大革命).25 The work also speaks of
‘nineteenth-century revolutionary unrest’ in general suggesting that the
term was already being used by Chinese scholars not only in its bound
form, but also in a descriptive way to label particular kinds of political
upheaval.26 Indeed, Xin Min Shuo includes a lengthy chronology of
European historical events featuring several revolutions: not only the
French Revolution, but also the ‘revolutionary upheavals’ (革命起) in
Austria and Italy in 1848. Later it discusses the English, American, and
even Japanese revolutions. Given his connections with Liang Qichao after
his own arrival in Yokohama at some point in early 1905, it is extremely
likely that Phan Bội Châu would have seen this important work, and his
vocabulary as well as his larger works would have been influenced by it.
Moreover, the content of the work, including its strong Social Darwinist
overtones, are consonant with the essays found in the textbooks of the
Đông Kinh Nghĩa Thục, the first modern-style Vietnamese educational
institution, suggesting that by 1907 this work might well have been one
of those being drawn upon by those creating the textbooks.
24 This should not be confused with a periodical by the same name that Liang Qichao was
also publishing during this period. See Theresa Man Ling Lee, ‘Liang Qichao and the meaning of citizenship: Then and now’, History of political thought 28, 2 (2007): 310.
25 The entire text in Chinese can be found at: http://www.chinapage.com/big5/prose/xms.
htm (last accessed 30 Sept. 2011).
26 Ibid.
革命,
CÁCH MẠNG, RÉVOLUTION
17
If Phan Bội Châu was likely the earliest Vietnamese to be exposed to
the neologism ge ming, either through the writings of Liang Qichao or
(much less likely) the moderniser Kang Youwei, it is striking that he
does not yet make use of it in any political tracts he produced while in
Japan under the direct influence of Liang Qichao and his writings. None
of Phan Bội Châu’s works from this 1905–1907 period, including his
most significant titles — Việt Nam Vong Quốc Sử (History of the loss of
the country), Tân Việt Nam (The new Việt Nam), and Hải Ngoại Huyết
Thư (Overseas letter written in blood) — uses the compound 革命. In
fact, the first occurrence of the term in Phan Bội Châu’s writings is in
his 1908 tract, Truyện các liệt sĩ Hà Thành (Tales of the martyrs of Hà
Nội), written to commemorate the Vietnamese who had participated in
an uprising against the French earlier that summer. In it, Phan Bội Châu
refers to the Vietnamese who had been in service to the French, but who
had become ‘people of the revolutionary side’. (người của phía cách
mạng).27 This is the single use of the term ‘revolution’ in this work, indicating that the term had not yet captured his imagination, as it had that
of Liang Qichao.
A survey of Phan Bội Châu’s extensive political writings between 1905
and 1925 reveals very few uses of the word, even in his more elaborated
calls to arms such as the founding documents of the Quang Phục Hội
(The Restoration League), which Phan Bội Châu organised in 1912. In
fact, these documents do not even make a single reference to the Chinese
Republican Revolution, which had occurred just a year earlier. Although
the term ‘revolution’ is nowhere to be found in these documents, Phan
Bội Châu did have it in mind at the time, and used it in letters he sent
in the context of the Quang Phục Hội’s creation. In one, written to his
co-conspirators in Nghệ-Tĩnh, Phan Bội Châu refers to a period in
which ‘the revolutionary troops are not yet able to go forth’, while elsewhere he wrote that ‘in the South and out in the North, the revolutionary
movement is spreading everywhere, and will exist all over the place’.28
While Phan Bội Châu made hesitant use of the term in these early
years of the twentieth century, his more moderate contemporary Phan
Châu Trinh was also beginning to deploy it in his own writing. His first
27 Phan Bội Châu, Phan Bội Châu toàn tập [The complete works of Phan Boi Chau] (Hà
Nội: NXB Thuận Hóa, 2000), vol. 3, p. 149. Like all of Phan Bội Châu’s writings, this one was
produced in classical Chinese, and was then published and distributed back to Việt Nam. In
this case, the original Chinese text has been lost, so this version is derived from a contemporary French translation. One presumes that the term ‘革命’ was in the original, though
there is no way of being absolutely certain.
28 Ibid., vol. 3, p. 394.
18
GEORGE DUTTON
published use of the word ‘revolution’ occurred in a lengthy text in classical
Chinese, ‘A new Vietnam following the Franco-Vietnamese alliance’, written some time before 1911. Part of this text was a survey of the political
landscape of early twentieth-century Việt Nam, and in it Phan Châu
Trinh sought to distance and distinguish himself from the more radical
activities of his compatriot Phan Bội Châu. He wrote about the existence
of two general political orientations in Việt Nam during this time, describing these as the ‘Self-rule Party’ (tự tri ̣ đảng), which represented his own
position and the other as the ‘Revolutionary Party’ (cách mạng đảng),
which reflected the position of Phan Bội Châu. These were not parties in
any formally constituted sense, but more groups of people who might be
classified under these two rubrics. He does write, however, that there
were somewhat more organised groupings representing these two political
orientations, Phan Bội Châu’s ‘Revolutionary Support Party’ (Cách Mạng
Phù Hội Đảng) and the Self-rule Support Party (Tự Tri ̣ Phù Hội
Đảng).29 In this use of ‘revolutionary’ it seems quite clear that Phan
Châu Trinh is using it in the sense of aggressive actions to bring about political change, rather than fundamental change to underlying structures. In
this regard, his use is consonant with the prevailing use of the term that
emerged among Vietnamese activists between about 1910 and 1920.
Moreover, in this sense his description of Phan Bội Châu’s political orientation seems quite appropriate.
After this usage of ‘revolutionary’, Phan Châu Trinh virtually gives up
on the term. An examination of the rest of his oeuvre between 1912 and his
death in 1926 shows almost no use of the term, even when one might
expect it. In the early 1910s, for example, he produced a translation and
adaptation of a Japanese novel, Rare encounters with beautiful personages,
parts of which are set in the United States and which describe the heroes
and episodes from the American Revolution. In the course of the translation he manages to speak at length about the American Revolution without
using the word ‘revolution’.30 Later, in a 1922 open letter to Emperor Khải
Đi ̣nh, Phan Châu Trinh similarly manages to discuss the Chinese
Revolution without using the term ‘revolution’. Rather than describing
what occurred as a revolution, he notes simply that ‘China is the
29 Phan Châu Trinh, ‘A new Vietnam following the Franco–Vietnamese alliance’, trans. in
Phan Châu Trinh and his political writings, ed. Vĩnh Sinh (Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program
Publications, Cornell University, 2009), pp. 72–4.
30 Vĩnh Sinh, Phan Châu Trinh, pp. 28–33; also Mark Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and
America: The making of postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 (Durham: University of North
Carolina Press, 2000), pp. 20–23.
革命,
CÁCH MẠNG, RÉVOLUTION
19
motherland of our country’s civilisation, and in the year 1912 they also
overthrew their king (đuôỉ vua) in order to establish a democratic
country.’31
Another text in which one might expect to find references to ‘revolution’ is the Quốc dân đọc bản, a textbook prepared for the 1907–1908
Tonkin Free School. The school’s founders had been directly influenced
by the work of Liang Qichao, and the text itself engages numerous modern
political topics. Indeed, it is a kind of primer of citizenship in a new world
of nation-states, financial institutions, and newly conceptualised groupings
like ‘society’. Despite this, the textbook contains not a single use of any of
the terms for ‘revolution’. Even an essay entitled ‘Regimes’ (or Political systems — Chính thê)̉ that includes a discussion of political changes in Europe
since the eighteenth-century contains no reference to revolution in general
or to the French Revolution in particular. The essay simply discusses popular efforts to place limits on the power of absolute sovereigns and, rather
̉ to
than using the term ‘revolution’, speaks merely of ‘changes’ (thay đôi)
the political systems. This is particularly noteworthy given the considerable
likelihood (as discussed above) that the Vietnamese already had an awareness of the French Revolution qua ‘revolution’ by this time via the writings
of Liang Qichao. Perhaps the closest the Quốc dân đọc bản comes to any
discussion of ge ming is an essay entitled ‘Belief in the mandate of heaven
is false’. This essay argued against the idea that fate was the primary controlling force in peoples’ lives. In short, it was a call to action that challenged the fatalism implied in the passive acceptance of the ‘mandate of
heaven’. At a deeper level, however, it also eroded belief in the idea that political rule was somehow ‘fated’ by a higher power, clearly representing a
revolutionary approach to power and governance.32
Even later anthologies of erstwhile early ‘revolutionary’ writings had
difficulty tracking down materials that made actual references to the
term for revolution. A noteworthy instance of this is Đặng Thai Mai’s
̀ thế Kỷ XX, 1900–1925) (Vietnamese
Văn thơ cách mạng Việt Nam (Đâu
revolutionary poetry, from the beginning of the twentieth century, 1900–
1925). The title notwithstanding, this anthology contains virtually no
texts that make use of the term ‘revolution’ in any of its variants. There
are only two exceptions, Phan Bội Châu’s 1912 letter (discussed above)
to supporters in Nghệ-Tĩnh on the occasion of his founding of the Việt
̉ tập văn học Việt Nam [General collection of Vietnamese
31 Phan Chu Trinh Texts, in Tông
literature] (Hà Nội: NXB Khoa Học Xã Hội, 2000), vol. 19, p. 184.
32 Quốc dân độc bản [Volume to be read by the nation’s people] (1907), reprinted as Văn
thơ Đông Kinh Nghĩa Thục [Literature of the Tonkin Free School] (Hà Nội: NXB Văn Hóa,
1997), pp. 462–3.
20
GEORGE DUTTON
Nam Quang Phục Hội, and Ngô Đức Kế’s 1917 poem, ‘On the seven days
in Thái Nguyên that recovered the land’, which also contains one occurrence of the term ‘revolution’.33 While the title of this anthology is, of
course, a post hoc label for a period in which political writings expressed
somewhat inchoate aspirations, the absence of the term in the prose and
poetry of this period suggests that it had not yet captured the imagination
of those who were struggling to find labels to apply to their political hopes.
While the term revolution does appear in a small number of texts before
1920, it had not yet achieved anything approaching widespread use.34
Indeed, the limited use of the term is underscored by an examination of
̉ tập văn học Việt Nam, which provides a broad (though not
the Tông
exhaustive) survey of Vietnamese literature from this period. The volumes
covering the years between 1885 and 1925 show, again, only scattered use
of the term, reinforcing the impression gained from my more detailed survey of the works of Phan Bội Châu and Phan Chu Trinh that the term’s
appearance was sporadic and inconsistent.
Not only was the term’s use still quite limited in the first decades of the
twentieth century, but even when it was being used, ‘revolution’ manifested
signs of its orthographically transitional nature. That is, in most texts of the
pre-1920 period it was still being written in the Chinese character version
of 革命, while the quốc ngữ form was still extremely uncommon. While in
China there was no alternative, for Vietnamese the option of quốc ngữ presented the possibility of, at least visually, separating the term from its classical roots, making it somewhat easier to insist on a modern reading of it.
Scholars of this generation would still, of course, know how it might be rendered in characters, but the visual disruption caused by the romanised letters would have helped make the break. But most early Vietnamese
anticolonial scholars, even those oriented toward a ‘revolution’ in the modern sense, were writing the term using characters. For example, every time
Phan Bội Châu wrote the word ‘revolution’ he was writing it as 革命.
Another intellectual who used it in the form of 革命 in this early period
was Ngô Đức Kế (1879–1929), in his poem ‘On the seven days in Thái
Nguyên that recovered the land’ (題太原七日光復記). Penned to
̀ thế kỷ XX (1900–1925) [Vietnamese
33 Đặng Thai Mai, Văn thơ cách mạng Việt Nam, đâu
revolutionary poetry, beginning of the twentieth century] (Hà Nội: NXB Văn Học, 1974).
34 There is a similar and striking absence of the term in Mark Bradley’s discussion of the
degree to which early twentieth-century Vietnamese were enamoured of the American
Revolution and its implications. Bradley provides a detailed discussion of these scholars
and their engagement with and writings on such external models, and yet the term ‘revolution’ itself does not appear. In short, these men were able to talk about the American
Revolution without talking about a ‘revolution’. Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America,
pp. 20–23.
革命,
CÁCH MẠNG, RÉVOLUTION
21
commemorate the uprising at Thái Nguyên, the first stanza of the poem
includes the line:
我南革命英雄史 The history of our southern country’s revolutionary heroes35
Another early poem to use the term was by the scholar Hoàng Tăng Bí,
who had been a participant in the Đông Kinh Nghĩa Thục. Written in
1924 and entitled ‘Vi ̣nh Tùng Thoại’ (A chant for Tùng Thoại), it was a
lament/commemoration of a female soldier who had taken part in the
1916 Duy Tân movement. The last lines of the poem ran:
新民新學呼號日 A new people, and a new learning ring out under the sun
革命公開有大名 The revolution makes it known that it has great names.36
These poems are reminders that although revolution was entering the discourse of anticolonial activists, it continued to do so primarily in its
Chinese character form. Very few scholars were yet using it in its quốc
ngữ equivalent, whose orthography was itself unstable, sometimes being
rendered as cách mạng and at other times as kách mệnh.
Revolution matures: Writing in the 1920s
As we have seen, although the term 革命 had been developed and
deployed by other East Asian intellectuals to talk about revolution, the
term, and its romanised version, cách mạng, had been slow to take hold
among Vietnamese intellectuals. By the early 1920s, however, it began to
appear with greater regularity in the writings of Phan Bội Châu and others.
Commencing this increasing usage of the term, Phan Bội Châu wrote a
pamphlet in early 1921 entitled ‘The doctrine that I have embraced these
nine years’, which begins with a section labelled ‘How does one carry out
the revolution of civilisation?’ In it Phan Bội Châu noted: ‘We have
made revolution the essential [thing] for pulling [up] the roots of bad government.’37 At the same time, however, he disavowed his own earlier radicalism, in a section entitled: ‘Why have I abandoned the method of violent
revolution?’ Thus, in this work, Phan Bội Châu had already made the transition from violent revolution to a revolution of ‘civilisation’. Several years
later, Phan Bội Châu made even more extensive use of ‘revolution’ in a
̀
1924-pamphlet entitled ‘Truyện Phạm Hông
Thái’ (The tale of Pham
Hong Thai), a commemoration of a young Vietnamese radical’s attempt
̉ tập văn học Việt Nam (vol. 19), p. 616; also Đăng Thai Mai, Văn thơ cách mạng,
35 Tông
p. 387.
̉ tập văn học Việt Nam (vol. 19), p. 565.
36 Tông
37 Phan Bội Châu, Phan Bội Châu toàn tập, vol. 5, p. 207.
22
GEORGE DUTTON
to assassinate a French governor-general in Canton. Here he used it in
much more descriptive fashion, both as a noun and as an adjective. He
referred to the notion of ‘revolutionary consciousness’, but also described
worker strikes as ‘laboratories of revolution’.38 He also made additional
references to a ‘revolutionary movement’ (時革命, p. 642), a ‘social revolution’ (社會革命, p. 645), to a ‘desire for the revolution to succeed’ (欲謀革
命之成功, p. 646) to a ‘national revolution’ (國民之革命, p. 647), and
finally, he spoke of a ‘revolutionary party’ (革命黨, p. 650).39
While Phan Bội Châu was thinking about revolution largely within a
Vietnamese context, other Vietnamese were starting to explore revolutions
in a more global sense. A prominent example is found in a brief 1922
̀ entitled Muốn Thì Đươc̣ : Ai-nhı ̉-lan cách-mạng
pamphlet by Hải Triêu,
lươc̣ -sử (If you desire it, you will achieve it: A summary history of the
Irish Revolution). This pamphlet is noteworthy for marking one of the
earliest appearances of the quốc ngữ form of ‘revolution’ that I have
found. The Irish Revolution it describes was a struggle against what had
become a centuries-long British domination of its neighbouring isle. It
began with a declaration of independence in 1919 and after a two-year battle succeeded in ousting the British and restoring Irish autonomy. While
the pamphlet itself was probably a translation of a European-language
work, the preface was certainly original, and is revealing about how its
author understood ‘revolution’ in the Irish case. Significantly, the primary
emphasis of this work is not on revolution as an act of political transformation, but rather on revolution as national liberation. It opens with the
words: ‘Oh, Freedom! Freedom!’ Then, echoing the title of Phan Bội
Châu’s tract ‘Việt Nam vong quốc sử’ (History of the loss of the nation),
Hải Triêù describes the Irish as having ‘vong quốc’ (lost their country) to
the British in the twelfth century.40 As such the Irish ‘revolution’ sought
to oust the British and to reestablish national independence after centuries
of oppression. Despite its fervour (the text is liberally sprinkled with
exclamation marks), the preface is careful not to draw any explicit connections to the Vietnamese case, leaving it to the reader to connect the final
dots. The implicit parallels to Việt Nam are certainly there, particularly
in a paragraph in which the author describes Ireland as underpopulated,
38 David Marr, Vietnamese anticolonialism, 1885–1920 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1973), p. 259.
39 All page references are to Phan Bội Châu, Phan Bội Châu toàn tập, vol. 5.
̀ Muốn thì đươc̣ : Ai-nhı ̉-lan cạch-mạng lươc̣ -sử [If you wish it, you will receive
40 Hải Triêu,
it: A summary history of the Irish revolution] (Gia Đi ̣nh: 1922), p. 1; this reference to the
‘loss of the country’ [亡國] is a reference to the Mozi, in which the phrase notes that a
ruler who loses the support of his scholars will lose his country.
革命,
CÁCH MẠNG, RÉVOLUTION
23
possessing rather limited resources, and with a modest land mass, all juxtaposed against the large populations, substantial resources, and general
might of the English.41
The Irish case is of course quite important as a significant departure
from some of the other revolutionary precedents of which the
Vietnamese had already become aware, notably the French, the Chinese,
and the Russian revolutions. Clearly these were internal affairs in which
existing and entrenched political systems were being uprooted and replaced
with radically new ones. The Irish ‘revolution’, akin to the American case,
was more about national liberation than political transformation, and also
like the American Revolution, was motivated in large measure by the injustices of rule by outsiders. Thus, while there may have been elements of the
Irish revolutionary forces and leadership that sought a transformation of
social and economic relations, the overriding objective was to drive out
the ruling powers precisely because they were alien to the local populations.
Viewed from a historical perspective, the Irish case would appear somewhat
analogous to the first phase of the later Vietnamese revolution in which the
emphasis was upon driving out the French, while the postcolonial phase of
the Vietnamese revolution — dominated by social and economic transformations — would be more comparable to the radical upheavals seen in the
French and Russian revolutions.42
Debating and consolidating ‘revolution’: From Nguyê˜n Thượng Huyền’s Cách
mệnh to Hôˋ Chí Minh’s D̶ ưoˊng
̛ kách mệnh
While scholars were making rather limited use of the term, none had
yet made a self-conscious attempt to explain precisely what a revolution
was, Trương Vĩnh Ký’s 1884 dictionary definition notwithstanding. As
the textual examples considered so far suggest, the word cách mạng (usually
as 革命) continued to be used to describe rather nebulous political upheavals, notable more for their violent form than their particularly defined
objectives. It was also used in poetry in rather indistinct ways that continued to bind it to more classical meanings, whether in its juxtaposition with
英雄 (heroes) or its linkage to 大名 (great reputations). Indeed, as Huỳnh
Kim Khánh observed: ‘In practice ... the term cach menh had been used
loosely to identify any rebellion against political authority in the
41 Ibid., p. 3.
42 This is, of course, a considerable simplification of the Vietnamese Revolution’s course.
The first phase did also include social transformation, most notably the land reform campaign, which began in 1953, and the nature and extent of social and economic transformation after 1954 varied considerably between the DRV and the NFL-held territories south
of the seventeenth parallel.
24
GEORGE DUTTON
Vietnamese anticolonial struggle, every leader or group rising against the
French colonial rule was usually referred to as cach menh.’43 Thus, use of
the word had shifted from the classical conception of 革命 as restorative
(a restoration of the ideal order), to one that emphasised an almost openended political struggle — cách mạng as chaotic — even as it continued to
bear marks of its classical antecedents. It had not yet fully taken form as the
modern sense of revolution as a fundamental and calculated transformation
of the political system itself. This awaited, Huỳnh Kim Khánh argues, the
efforts of Hồ Chí Minh.
Khánh identifies a particular episode as exemplifying this transition,
from the muddled and uncertain use of the term ‘cách mạng’ to a much
clearer modern articulation shorn of most of its classical Chinese baggage.
The episode in question, one Hue-Tam Ho Tai also described in some
detail in Radicalism and the origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (1983),
began with the publication in 1925 of a 22-page quốc ngữ pamphlet by
̀ the son of Nguyễn Thượng
an older scholar, Nguyễn Thượng Huyên,
̀ an early anticolonial nationalist and colleague of Phan Bôi Châu.44
Hiên,
Entitled simply Cách mệnh, this short tract was part of a broad publishing
trend among Vietnamese intellectuals in this period who were writing
explanations and commentaries on new concepts and terms ranging
from religion to revolution.45 In the work’s preface, Nguyễn Thượng
Huyêǹ describes his motivation for writing on this topic:
I have written this book ‘revolution’ to participate in our country’s necessary task,
[one to be undertaken] by all of those whose instruction is superior or equal to
mine. Alas! My voice is weak, and the means at the disposal of our enemies to cancel
out the effects of the winds of the East (the revolutionary intrigues) are insuperable.
My heart beats strongly as I write my book; but it is difficult for the sound of these
beats to be heard by my compatriots. I strongly hope that those who acquire my
book will speak [of it] with others, so that I might be able to contribute to the awakening of our fellow citizens.46
The preface was followed by a general introduction consisting of a comment on the need for revolution, followed by a brief, if somewhat
43 Huỳnh Kim Khánh, Vietnamese communism, pp. 81–2.
44 Nguyễn Thượng Huyêǹ (1868–1925) was a classically trained scholar who had passed
the civil service examination and had later served in the Nguyễn court’s administration.
In 1907, however, he left his position to take part in the Đông Du movement, travelling
to Japan. After a failed effort to recruit followers in Thailand for an attack on the French,
he went to China, where he retired at a Buddhist monastery in Hangzhou.
45 While such writings often took the form of newspaper articles, some were published
instead (or also) as pamphlets.
̀ La révolution, trans. of Cách mệnh (n.p., n.d.).
46 Nguyễn Thượng Huyên,
革命,
CÁCH MẠNG, RÉVOLUTION
25
ill-informed discussion of the Chinese characters that had come to represent the term:
Revolution is, in the eyes of our present compatriots, a perilous enterprise, in which
it is better not to participate ... Such an attitude is regrettable, because revolution
should not be for us an object of fear, it being the prerequisite for our independent
life. We should have the desire to change our misfortune and to create a better destiny for ourselves. Why is it that we misunderstand revolution? Why is it that we fear
it without reason? One should not forget this, and thus lose one’s only possibility for
salvation!
What is revolution? The two characters ‘cách mệnh’ (革命), which represent
‘revolution’, do not appear in our common tongue. They have come from
Chinese and take their origins from the phrase: ‘The revolution of the earth brings
about the four seasons; the Emperors Thanh-Thang and Vo-Vuong have carried out
revolution, and this has responded to the desires of heaven and of men’, a citation
take from the I-Jing, the Classic of changes.
The character ‘cách’ indicates in the proper sense: change, and the character
‘mệnh’, the mandate of heaven. In ancient times, it was believed that the king
ruled the people according to a celestial mandate. The succession of Emperors on
the throne was a succession of ‘changes’ in the mandate of heaven. From the expression cách mệnh [comes] ‘revolution’, which denotes in our times all of the notable
changes in the government of a country. The usage has removed from the expression
the sense of the mandate of heaven, and has only preserved the sense of ‘change’. By
extension, ‘cách mệnh’ signifies change. However, it is necessary that such change
has a purpose, that of changing evil into good, to be worthy of the name revolution.
̀ eyes, the objectives of a revolution echo
Thus, in Nguyễn Thượng Huyên’s
a kind of classical ideal, of supplanting evil with good, rather than being
transformative of a particular political system. He concludes with a list of
objectives that would preclude a political upheaval from being called a
‘revolution’.
One should never call ‘revolutionary’ a movement that raises its banners against a
peaceable king in order to deprive him of his wealth and his dignity, simply to create
trouble, to ignite warfare in a country at peace, to seize the collective possesions of a
weak people, or to deprive nations of their liberty in order to plunge them into
slavery. 47
Having offered a kind of definition of revolution and some attempt at a
brief etymology of the term, Nguyễn Thượng Huyêǹ lists what he considers
the principle historical examples of the phenomenon of revolution. It is a
curious list, one that begins with the first ‘revolutions’, in this case the
ancient Chinese precedents established by Emperors Thang (湯) and Wu
47 Ibid., pp. 1–2.
26
GEORGE DUTTON
(武).48 From this Huyêǹ jumps rapidly into the modern period for which
he provides a haphazard and not quite chronological listing of past
revolutions:
The
The
The
The
The
The
The
The
1789 French Revolution
1911 Chinese Revolution
1917 Russian Revolution
1918 German overthrow of Kaiser Wilhelm II
American Revolution
1919 Indian revolt against the British protectorate
Gandhian ‘revolution’ for independence
1922 Egyptian ‘revolution’ against British authority
But Huyêǹ was not finished, for he concluded his list with a series of events
‘which have unfolded in our country, which might also be called revolutions’. This list includes:
The
The
The
The
‘revolt’ of the Trưng Sisters
‘uprising’ of Ngô Quyêǹ
‘sedition’ of Đình Tiên Hoàng
‘uprising’ of Lê Thái Tổ
̀ view of ‘revolution’ had, at
This list indicates that Nguyễn Thượng Huyên’s
one level, not moved far from the classical definition of ‘cách mệnh’ as a
transition from one regime to another, without necessarily seeing any fundamental alteration in the political system itself. Thus, even ‘revolts’, ‘uprisings’, and acts of ‘sedition’ could be ‘revolutions’. Juxtaposing this list of
Vietnamese ‘revolutions’ with the previous list of modern ‘revolutions’ suggests that he was using the term ‘cách mệnh’ simultaneously in its original
and its modernised meanings. The actions of Vietnamese historical rebels
would appear to stand on equal footing with the Bolsheviks and the
̀ call to revolution
French radicals. In this context, Nguyễn Thượng Huyên’s
was rather ambiguous, for a potential revolutionary reading this tract might
be quite puzzled as to whether he or she should be following the example of
the Trưng Sisters or of Vladimir Lenin. Nguyễn Thượng Huyêǹ himself
provided no real guidance, merely remarking vaguely after concluding
his lists of ‘revolutions’: ‘It must be recognised that revolution is truly a
grand and humane undertaking.’49 I would argue, following Huỳnh Kim
̀ approach is emblematic of the diffiKhánh, that Nguyễn Thượng Huyên’s
culties that Vietnamese activists had in pinning down the term’s meaning.
48 While it is true that the early Chinese texts included the term ‘ge minh’ to refer to the
political transitions affected by these rulers, it is equally clear that this represented dynastic
transitions, rather than transformations of the underlying political systems.
̀ La révolution, p. 3.
49 Nguyễn Thượng Huyên,
革命,
CÁCH MẠNG, RÉVOLUTION
27
As David Marr observed of Vietnamese political activists of the early twentieth century: ‘they still confused revolution with activism, an error that has
plagued more than one militant Vietnamese party even to the present
day.’50 Their confusion saw actions, however poorly planned or implemented, as ‘revolution’. As Marr notes, the idea that ‘revolution’ might be
understood only to mean ‘doing’ was one in circulation then and now.51
After writing Cách Mệnh, Nguyễn Thượng Huyêǹ sent it for comment
to Hồ Chí Minh.52 Having read the pamphlet, Hồ concluded that it presented a useful opportunity to address publicly what he regarded as the
shortcomings of existing popular conceptions of revolution. Hồ replied
̀ but responded also indirectly in
in a lengthy personal letter to Huyên,
the pages of his new journal Thanh Niên (Youth) and by finally writing
his own articulation of the term’s meaning in a brief book, Đường kách
mệnh (The road to revolution). In these responses, Hồ addressed both
what he saw as the ‘muddle-headed’ nature of the prevailing views of revò particular views on the manner in
lution, and Nguyễn Thượng Huyên’s
which the Vietnamese should engage the French.
Hồ began his letter by politely praising Huyêǹ for his bravery in writing on a complex issue in quốc ngữ and then damns him with faint praise
by stating that the documents clearly reflected ‘someone who liked to read’.
̀ reply to Nguyễn Thượng
Such ‘niceties’ aside, however, most of Hô’s
̀
Huyên was extremely critical, and he launched his opening salvo without
holding back:
What do you want? That they [the French] should give us full freedom to do everything we like, to seek every means to challenge them? You want them to do nothing
to prevent us from harming their interests? Instead of blaming others, it is much
more reasonable to blame ourselves. We must ask ourselves: Why are the French
able to oppress us? Why are our people so ignorant? Why have we not been able
to successfully wage revolution? What must be done? [Ho concluded by writing]
‘You have expended twenty pages on a discussion of revolution, but you have not
said: what must be done before revolution; what must be done during revolution;
what must be done after revolution.53
Clearly for Hồ it was insufficient simply to describe revolution. If one was
to take up the topic at all it had to include some attempt to use it as a point
̀ reply is interesting for how it situates him
of departure for action. Hô’s
within the lineage of Vietnamese nationalists who ascribed many of the
50 Marr, Vietnamese anticolonialism, p. 207.
51 Ibid., p. 207.
52 Huỳnh Kim Khánh, Vietnamese communism, p. 82.
53 Quoted in Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the origins of the Vietnamese Revolution,
p. 175.
28
GEORGE DUTTON
fundamental problems to the Vietnamese themselves. This was a particular
mantra of Phan Châu Trinh and, to a lesser extent, of Phan Bội Châu as well.
̀ pamphlet, by contrast, had focused on the crimes of
Nguyễn Thượng Huyên’s
the French, and their suppression of Vietnamese political aspirations.
This exchange was also a stark reminder that the term ‘revolution’ had
become a strongly contested one, in part precisely because of the historical
baggage that it carried. Huyêǹ could not (or chose not to) separate its classical meaning from its modern one, and as such lumped all political transitions, of whatever nature, into the same broad category. Hồ clearly viewed
this as both careless and dangerous. For his part, Hồ fully rejected the classical meaning of the term, and focused only on the modern sense of a radical transformation of socio-political systems. Indeed, he criticised Huyêǹ
for using too many classical allusions, and even questioned his etymology
of the term ‘revolution’.
You say that the words ‘cách mệnh’ were taken from the Yi Jing. This may be true.
But I do not dare to confirm this. However, I do not believe that when they are using
the words cách mênh, the Chinese are borrowing these words from the Yi Jing, rather
they have translated these from Western languages. Various words like ‘reform’ ‘economics’ ‘freedom’ and ‘society’ have also been created in this fashion in China.54
More importantly, however, Hồ sought very clearly to distinguish ‘revolution’ from what he considered as lesser kinds of political actions, such as
rebellions, revolts, and the like:
In the French language there are various words like ‘reform’, ‘evolution’, and ‘revolution’. Evolution is a series of successive and peaceful transformations. Reforms are
more or less numerous changes brought about in the institutions of a country,
changes which may or may not be accompanied by violence. Even after the reforms,
there would always remain something of the original form. Revolution entirely
replaces the old regime with a new one.55
Furthemore, as Khánh notes,
[Hô]̀ repeatedly pointed out that the myriad violent changes of monarchical regimes
in Chinese and Vietnamese history and the numerous violent acts in opposition to
French rule — such as the Tax Protest Movement of 1908, the attempt to poison the
French troops in Hanoi, and the mutiny at Thai Nguyen — were not cach menh.
They were only rebellious acts, and even if they had been successful in their
objectives they would have effected no fundamental change.56
54 Hô ̀ Chí Minh toàn tập, vol. 2, p. 160. My translation.
55 Ibid., pp. 160–61.
56 Huỳnh Kim Khánh, Vietnamese communism, p. 83.
革命,
CÁCH MẠNG, RÉVOLUTION
29
Hồ went so far as to point out that ancient precedents from the Yi Jing
being cited by Nguyễn Thượng Huyêǹ were hardly revolutionary:
According to my current understanding of the meaning of cách mệnh, neither
Thành Thang nor Võ Vương succeeded in carrying out a revolutionary undertaking.
When they first fought against the kings Trụ and Kiệt they were raising up a revolution in their country. But once Trụ and Kiệt had been defeated, they again
enthroned emperors and continued to preserve the monarchical system. To say
that they carried out a revolution is not correct.57
While Hồ responded to Nguyễn Thượng Huyêǹ directly, he also responded
indirectly, most notably in writing his own revolutionary tract — Đường
kách mệnh. This document served as an indirect response in that it implicitly challenged the idea of ‘revolution’ articulated by Nguyễn Thượng
̀ which was about action, but not about direction. By spelling out
Huyên,
a ‘road’ to revolution, Hồ was addressing one of the fundamental weaknesses of existing discussions of revolution: their lack of structure and direction. But he also pointed out, in his brief justification for producing the
work — ‘Why have I had to write this book?’ — that there remained considerable confusion about the term revolution itself. This was not, as Hồ
saw it, because of a lack of material, but rather because of French censorship and restrictions: ‘Many books have been written about the theory and
history of revolution. The French fear these, and thus have prohibited us
from studying them, and prohibited us from seeing them, and consequently
our compatriots are very confused regarding the two characters cách
mệnh.’58 Hồ Chính Minh almost certainly had Nguyễn Thượng Huyêǹ
(among others) in mind when he wrote this.
Given this basic problem of definition, Đường kách mệnh begins in
̀ Cách mệnh, namely
precisely the same manner as Nguyễn Thượng Huyên’s
by asking the direct question: ‘What is revolution?’ (Cách mệnh là gì?)
̀ Hô’s
̀ answer is quite concise: ‘Revolution
Unlike Nguyễn Thượng Huyên,
is the destruction of the old and its replacement with the new, and it is
the destruction of the bad, and its replacement with the good.’ (Cách
mệnh là phá cái cũ đôỉ ra cái mới, phá cái xấu đôỉ cái tốt.)59 As this introduction suggests, the entire volume is written as a series of questions, followed by explanations. In this respect, it follows in the existing tradition of
published explications of particular terms mentioned earlier. It is also a
57 Hô ̀ Chí Minh toàn tập, vol. 2, p. 161.
58 Ibid., p. 261.
59 Ibid., p. 263. Intriguingly, Hồ follows this by a list of revolutionaries that begins not with
Marx, but with Galileo, followed by Stevenson (inventor of the steam train), and Darwin, and
it is only after these three that he brings up Marx.
30
GEORGE DUTTON
reflection of the fact that Đường kách mệnh was largely a compilation of the
instructional materials Hồ had been using as a teacher for those coming to
join Thanh Niên for its crash course on Marxism and revolution. The book
was very much a revolutionary primer in the true sense of such a work.
Deeper analysis of the rest of the content of Đường kách mệnh goes
beyond the scope of this paper.60 What I suggest here, along the lines
already sketched out by Huỳnh Kim Khánh, is that in some respects this
text served to bring to a close the earlier phase of the use and expansion
of the word ‘revolution’ in the Vietnamese anticolonial struggle. Prior to
the dissemination of Đường kách mệnh, the term had primarily been
used in a rather vague way, describing a range of political actions of an
anticolonial nature, whatever their scope, structure, or guiding principles.
This usage was, as I indicated, emblematised in the ways in which
̀ sustained criNguyễn Thượng Huyêǹ used it in his study of the term. Hô’s
̀ work marked a definitive rejection of this
tique of Nguyễn Thượng Huyên’s
earlier and inchoate usage. It did not, of course, bring an end to the struggle
over the term, which remained bitterly contested. What it did do, however,
was to articulate some clear guidelines to define the terms of the debate.
Conclusion
̀ desire to narrow the definition of revolution, and to
Whatever Hô’s
shake the dusts of time from the term cách mạng, the historical meaning
remained sticky well into the 1930s, with the compound cách mệnh continuing to carry at least echoes of its classical meaning. In his critically
̉ Đào Duy Anh began the
important 1931 dictionary, Hán Việt Từ Điên,
entry for ‘Cách Mẹnh’ with a brief discussion of the term’s earlier incarnation: ‘The words cách mệnh according to the old meaning are to change the
commands of the king (the king bears the command of heaven), to change
the court and king.’ It was only after this older meaning had been explained
that the modern sense of the word could be introduced. Interestingly, Đào
Duy Anh’s definition begins by almost precisely echoing Hồ Chí Minh’s
brief gloss of the term: ‘Nowadays, cách mệnh has the meaning of changing
an old and bad system, and setting up a new and better system. Eg.
Revolutionary government, revolutionary economics, scientific revolution,
revolutionary family.’61 In short, the shift had been one from changing
60 A useful discussion of the text is found in William Duiker, ‘What is to be done? Hồ
Chí Minh’s Đường kách mệnh’, in Essays into Vietnamese pasts, ed. Keith W. Taylor and
John K. Whitmore (Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University,
1995), pp. 207–20.
61 Đào Duy Anh, Hán Việt từ điên̉ [Chinese–Vietnamese dictionary], reprint (Hà Nội: Nhà
Xuất Bản Văn Hóa-Thông Tin, 2009 [1931]), p. 55.
革命,
CÁCH MẠNG, RÉVOLUTION
31
the court and king, to changing the underlying system. It is hardly surprising that such a dictionary would assess the word in these terms. It was very
much a bridging project, one that served to link the Vietnamese orthographic and lexicographic past with its new present and future as represented by quốc ngữ. Since the dictionary included the original characters
for Vietnamese terms it could hardly ignore either their origins or the
fact that many users of this dictionary would still have had some knowledge
of the Chinese characters, and possibly their classical usages.
In short, the word cách mạng came to carry an enormous weight of
multiple meanings, which were contested, reflected on, and sometimes
carefully sharpened. It was used both carelessly and carefully, generally
and specifically. It could refer to a particular kind of military–political process to achieve carefully laid out objectives, or it could refer simply to a certain kind of departure from past practices, structures, or patterns. Even
more vaguely, it could be about change or upheaval in a certain sphere,
a change whose outcome was far from certain or understood. While the
word could be used without any value judgement, it could also be used
as a term of approbation or of opprobrium, depending on one’s vantage
point. It could be used to measure matters of degree, in which change at
a certain point might become revolutionary, or a political action might
be revolutionary, or such changes or actions might fall short of achieving
this status.
This leaves us with some measure of the early genealogy of the terms
for revolution as they appeared in Việt Nam between 1870 and 1927. This
genealogy has been somewhat episodic rather than continuous, reflecting
the reality that the terms had multiple and parallel existences. They did
not follow a single trajectory, but travelled along various routes, being
transformed through their contact with different ideologies, different histories, and different circumstances. The term ‘revolution’ was part of a neologistic mix of immense complexity that shaped and was shaped by the
dynamic social and political circumstances in Việt Nam between 1900
and the 1930s. It gave birth to its opposite in the emergence of both
‘counterrevolutionary’ and ‘reactionary’. Again, it was contested and not
fixed. The arrival of the term, freighted with so many possibilities, might
be said to have stirred the pot, yet another in the vast array of neologisms
that sprang forth in the period between 1900 and 1930. It was there for the
taking, but to take it was to embrace an open-ended and contested term.