Phan Chu Trinh

Phan Chu Trinh
Vietnamese name
Quốc ngữ	Phan Chu Trinh
Chữ nôm	潘周楨

Phan Chu Trinh (His name has no tones, this is a correct spelling) also known as Phan Châu Trinh (1872 - 1926) was a famous early 20th century Vietnamese nationalist. He also used the alias Tây Hồ. He sought to end France's brutal occupation of Vietnam. He opposed both violence and turning to other countries for support, and instead believed in attaining Vietnamese liberation by educating the population and by appealing to French democratic principles. Though he failed in this project, Vietnam was later liberated via an armed uprising led by Hồ Chí Minh.

Hồ Chí Minh started his political activism working with Phan Chu Trinh and other activists in France.

Biography

Phan Chu Trinh was born in Tay Loc, Quảng Nam province, Central Vietnam in 1872. He was the son of a rich land owner and scholar. His father was a fighter in the Scholar's Revolt, but in 1885 he was killed by the other leaders in the revolt who suspected him of being a traitor. This left Phan Chu Trinh an orphan at the age of 13.

Phan Chu Trinh's older brother educated him in the classics. In 1901 he got the highest Mandarin degree.

In 1905 he resigned from his post in the mandarin bureaucracy. He had become strongly opposed to the monarchy, traditional Vietnamese court and mandarin system. He called for the abolishment of the monarchy and its replacement with a democratic republic. He considered a return of the Nguyễn Dynasty monarchy to be worse than French occupation.

Having earlier met Phan Bội Châu in 1903, in March/April 1906 he went to Hong Kong and then to Kwangtung to meet with him again. He made his way there disguised as a very dishevelled common laborer. He then went to Japan with Phan Bội Châu as part of the Ðông-Du movement. They stayed in Yokohama, where they had set up a two-story Japanese house to teach students, which they called Binh Ngo Hien. In June they went to Tokyo to inspect the Japanese education and political system.

Phan Chu Trinh disagreed with Phan Bội Châu's early ideas of asking for military assistance from Japan, as he didn't trust Japan's militarism. He also had other disagreements with Phan Bội Châu's philosophy. Therefore they had a friendly argument for a few weeks before he returned to Vietnam.

Back in Vietnam he continued to receive letters from Phan Bội Châu arguing about his opposition to the monarchy and his belief that the French could be used. Phan Chu Trinh continued to campaign with slogans like "Up with Democracy, Out with Monarchy", and "Making Use of the French in the Quest for Progress". This made Phan Bội Châu quite upset and worried that the movement was fragmenting and fundraising efforts would fail.

In 1906 he wrote to the French Governor General Paul Beau. He asked the French to live up to their civilising mission. He blamed them for the exploitation of the countryside by Vietnamese collaborators. He also called for France to develop modern legal, educational, and economic institutions in Vietnam and industrialise the country, and to remove the remnants of the mandarin system.

In 1907 he opened a patriotic modern school for young Vietnamese men and women. The school was called Dong Kinh Nghia Thuc, or Free School of the Eastern Capital (Hanoi). He was a lecturer at the school, and Phan Bội Châu's writings were also used. The school carefully avoided doing anything illegal. Its ideas attacked the brutality of the French occupation of Vietnam, but also wanted to learn modernisation from the French. The school required scholars to renounce their elitist traditions and learn from the masses. It also offered the peasants a modern education. One of its achievements was a series of free public lectures with animated discussion and debate around various theories of modernisation and western ideas. Phan aimed to replace the confucian philosophies that had traditionally governed Vietnam.

After peasant tax revolts erupted in 1908, Phan Chu Trinh was arrested, and his school was closed. He was sentenced to death, but it was commuted to life imprisonment after his progressive admirers in France intervened. He was sent to Côn Đảo Island (Poulo Condor). After three years, in 1911, he was pardonned and sentenced to house arrest. He said he would rather return to prison than have partial freedom. So instead he was deported to France, where the French continued to monitor him.

He went to Paris in 1915 to get the support of progressive French politicians and Vietnamese exiles. There he worked with Hồ Chí Minh, Phan Van Truong, Nguyen The Truyen, and Nguyen An Ninh in a group called "The Group of Vietnamese Patriots". The group was based at 6 Villa des Gobelins. There they wrote patriotic articles signed with Hồ Chí Minh's alias, Nguyễn Ái Quốc, "on behalf of the Group of Vietnamese Patriots".

He worked as a photograph retoucher to support himself while he was in France.

He returned to Saigon in 1925, where he died on March 24, 1926. His funeral was attended by 60,000 people and caused big protests across the country demanding the end of French colonial occupation. But Vietnam would not be liberated from foreign occupation until almost 30 years later.

Debates With Other Nationalists

Later Hồ Chí Minh once called Phan Chu Trinh "a conservative, narrow-minded man of letters", in a letter to Phan Bội Châu.

Phan Bội Châu describes his meeting with Phan Chu Trinh in Japan like this:

"It seems that at that time, deep in his heart, he already had a different aspiration. He and I kept company in Kwangtung for more than ten days. Every day when we talked about the affairs of our country, he singled out for bitter reproach the wicked conduct of the monarchs, the enemies of the people. He ground his teeth when talking about the ruler of the day, who was bringing calamity to the country and disaster to the people; as much as to say that if the system of monarchical autocracy were not abolished, simply restoring the country's independence would bring no happiness."

In Tokyo Phan Chu Trinh later told Phan Bội Châu:

"The level of their people is so high, and the level of our people is so low! How could we not become slaves? That some students now can enter Japanese schools has been your great achievement. Please stay on in Tokyo to take a quiet rest and devote yourself to writing, and not to making appeals for combat against the French. You should only call for 'popular rights and popular enlightenment.' Once popular rights have been achieved, then we can think about other things."

Phan Bội Châu comments:

"Thereafter over more than ten days, he and I debated time and again, and our opinions were diametrically opposed. That is to say, he wished to overthrow the monarchy in order to create a basis for the promotion of popular rights; I, on the contrary, maintained that first the foreign enemy should be driven out, and after our nation's independence was restored we could talk about other things. My plan was to make use of the monarchy, which he opposed absolutely. His plan was to raise up the people to abolish the monarchy, with which I absolutely disagreed. In other words, he and I were pursuing one and the same goal, but our means were considerably different. He wished to start by relying on the French to abolish the monarchy, but I wished to start by driving out the French to restore Vietnam - That was the difference. However, even though his political view was the opposite of mine, he liked me personally a great deal and we roomed together for several weeks. Then all of a sudden he decided to return to our country."