BOOK REVIEW: Vietnam Nationalist Party (1924-1954)
Vietnam Nationalist Party (1924-1954)
(Nguyen Van Khanh, Springer, January 2016, ISBN:
978-981-10-0073-7)
(Page 233-234)
(Page 233-234)
Dinh Xuan Lam, Tran Van Kham
In the 1920s, an event occurred that
transformed the Vietnamese political landscape. This was the almost
simultaneous establishment of three political organizations: the Vietnam Revolutionary Youth League (Việt Nam Cách
mạng Thanh niên đảng-VRYL) in 1925, the New
Vietnam Revolutionary Party (Tân Việt Cách mạng Đảng-NVRP) in 1927, and the Vietnam
Nationalist Party (1927).
The assessment and evaluation of the two
former organizations followed the dominant path of Vietnamese revolutionary
development, which aimed toward socialism. As for VNP, from the onset, it was
not clear on which position and role it would play in the revolutionary
movement from 1925 to 1930. At that time it was more difficult to assess what
it might influence and how it may impact on the subsequent development of the
Vietnamese revolution.
Materials pertaining to the development of
the VNP prior to 1945, found in the occupied territory during the resistance
war against France and America produced both within and outside the country
were of limited value. These are mostly primarily focused on serving egoistic
political interests. Within the territory occupied by the revolutionary
government after 1954, when the North was liberated, there has been no
monograph which gives an in–depth account of this issue and scholarly work on
the subject has chiefly been some papers published on conference proceedings or
paragraphs in common historical books.
That led Prof. Dr Nguyễn Văn Khánh chose VNP
in the history of the Vietnamese revolution,
a complex issue, as a topic for his research and teaching material in the
Faculty of History, University of Social
Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University, Hanoi. Thus, this is a daring and audacious
decision.
The author’s mission has to
research VNP in a
systematic and comprehensive way, from its origins to the establishment and
development, to its political ideas and organizational structure, and finally
its internal divisions and decline as a political force after the Yen Bai
uprising, so as to define the role and position of this organization in the
revolutionary movement from 1927 to 1930 and hereafter. He has done so by
making a comprehensive survey of materials, both official and unofficial, both
domestic and foreign, which include not only conventional documents but also
texts from localities and hometowns of vital personalities of this
organization. The challenge before him was to utilize such complex collection
of documents and then compare, contrast and evaluate them based on
Marxist-Leninism, Hồ Chí Minh ideology, documents of the Party and with the
advice of Party leaders who gave comments on VNP such as Lê Duẩn, Trường Chinh, etc. The author has done so with
great success.
This work, includes 8 chapters and appendixes with 197 pages, has just
been published by Springer and being listed in the Scopus database. It shows
value of this work for Vietnamese study scholars. Findings are presented
systematically and comprehensively, relying on official and unofficial, as well
as domestic and foreign sources, including texts from localities and
hometowns of vital figures in the organization. The author compares, contrasts
and evaluates this complex collection of documents based on the theoretical
perspectives of conflict theory, social system theory, social structuralism and
functionism, dialectic materialism and Marxist theory. It is essential reading
for Vietnamese and international researchers interested in Vietnam’s political
context in the early twentieth century and for undergraduate and postgraduate
programs in Vietnam’s history and politics
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