Pang Zi and the Independent Regiment

Pang Zi was born in Beihai, Guangdong in 1919Footnote ³⁶ and joined the CCP in 1938. In late 1945, while a low-ranking cadre in the Chinese communist system, he was dispatched by the CCP's southern Guangdong branch to Vietnam to discuss two issues with the Vietnamese communists; the first was the entry of a CCP military unit into Vietnam. Pang Zi was instructed to inform the Vietnamese communists that the First Regiment of the Southern Guangdong Anti-Japanese People's Liberation Army (广东南路人民抗日解放军), a CCP armed force created in May 1945 and based in southern Guangdong, planned to enter Vietnam to escape GMD attack. The local CCP leaders wanted their Vietnamese comrades to help find a place to station the regiment and to provide supplies for it. The second issue was the mobilisation and organisation of the Chinese living in Vietnam. Pang Zi had heard that the Vietnamese communists had expressed the desire to invite some CCP members to Vietnam to help mobilise the Chinese living there. Pang was instructed to inform the Vietnamese communists that the CCP would be willing to help promote revolution among the Chinese in Vietnam.Footnote ³⁷

One reason why Pang Zi was chosen for this mission was that his classmate and friend Zhao Shiyao had been living in Vietnam and had even secured a position in the newly created Vietnamese communist government led by Hồ Chí Minh. Zhao was the one who had brought Pang Zi into the CCP and who had transmitted the message that the Vietnamese communists wanted their Chinese comrades to help mobilise the Chinese in Vietnam. Pang Zi found Zhao Shiyao immediately after arriving in Hải Phòng from Zhanjiang in late 1945.Footnote ³⁸ Zhao then introduced Pang Zi to Wu Qimei (Ngô Kỳ Mai), who would become a very important contact for Pang. Wu had been a middle school classmate of Zhao Shiyao and was one of the most influential Chinese revolutionaries in northern Vietnam at that time. He was an official in the DRV's Ministry of Public Security and had direct contact with high-ranking Vietnamese communists, including Hồ Chí Minh. In fact, he was the one who had helped Zhao Shiyao secure a position in the Hải Phòng Bureau of Public Security.Footnote ³⁹

With Wu Qimei's assistance, Pang Zi had two meetings with Lê Đức Thọ, a high-ranking ICP leader; Wu also served as interpreter during the two meetings. Pang Zi's superior within the CCP had instructed him to approach Hồ Chí Minh directly after arriving in Vietnam, but Lê Đức Thọ told Pang that Hồ Chí Minh was too busy to meet him in person, and Wu assured Pang in private that Thọ was powerful enough to make decisions regarding relations between the two parties. During the two meetings, Thọ told Pang that the Vietnamese revolutionaries welcomed the CCP forces moving into Vietnam and would provide necessary assistance. Thọ also confirmed that it was true that the Vietnamese communists wanted their Chinese comrades to help with promoting revolution among the Chinese in Vietnam. Thọ hoped that as the first step the CCP could help publish a Chinese-language newspaper in Vietnam. Pang promised that he would help move a private printing shop from Zhanjiang to Vietnam to help publish a Chinese-language newspaper, and Thọ later provided money to cover the expenses for that project.Footnote ⁴⁰

It should be noted that this was neither the first nor the last time that Hồ Chí Minh and his party asked the CCP to dispatch people to Vietnam to help promote revolution there. In the early 1940s, Hồ Chí Minh had asked the CCP to send back to Vietnam some Vietnamese communists who had been working in China. Hồ wanted them to return home to help fight the Japanese invaders in Vietnam. In 1945, upon Hồ Chí Minh's request, Hong Shui (Nguyễn Sơn), Huang Zhengguang 黄正光 (Nguyễn Khánh Toàn), and Liang Jinshan were sent back to Vietnam. All three were born in Vietnam, and Liang was half-Chinese. Liang was poisoned to death in 1946 by the Chinese Nationalists when he was negotiating with them on behalf of the Việt Minh, Hong Shui returned to China in 1950 and became the only foreigner who was awarded the title of general in the PLA in 1955, and Nguyễn Khánh Toàn stayed in Vietnam to serve as a ministerial level official in the DRV government.Footnote ⁴¹ In 1950, it was also because of Hồ Chí Minh's request that Mao Zedong dispatched Chen Geng, Wei Guoqing and other PLA officers to Vietnam to serve as advisers.

Obviously, of the two issues that Pang Zi discussed with Lê Đức Thọ, namely, the entry of a CCP military unit into Vietnam and the mobilisation of the Chinese there, the former was more important to the CCP than the latter, and the latter was more important to the ICP than the former. It seems that Pang Zi was not the only CCP delegate sent to Vietnam to negotiate on the first issue. Liang You, a veteran communist based in western Guangxi, was one of three other delegates who were sent to Vietnam to discuss the same issue with the Vietnamese communists. Liang remembered that initially the Vietnamese communists were not willing to permit the CCP forces to enter Vietnam, but gave their approval after the three held meetings with senior Vietnamese communists Hoàng Văn Hoan and Hoàng Văn Thái, both of whom had close connections with Chinese revolutionaries. Liang You and his colleagues later even moved the headquarters of the CCP's Left River region branch to a forest area in Vietnam.Footnote ⁴²

Pang Zi went back to Zhanjiang in December 1945 to report to his superiors and then returned to Hà Nội in February 1946 to continue to serve as an informal messenger for the CCP's southern Guangdong branch in Vietnam. The First Regiment, which later became known as the Old First Regiment after the creation of the New First Regiment in southern Guangdong, did move to Vietnam from southern Guangdong in early 1946, disguised as Vietnamese troops.Footnote ⁴³ The presence of Chinese Nationalist troops in northern Vietnam was one of the reasons why the CCP troops had to disguise themselves as Vietnamese forces. In June 1946, the CCP's Guangdong branch also considered moving the CCP forces on Hainan Island to northern Vietnam to avoid being exterminated by the GMD, but Feng Baiju, the stubborn legendary leader of the CCP forces in Hainan, refused to move his troops out of his native island.Footnote ⁴⁴

Pang Zi did not join the Old First Regiment, which was stationed in Cao Bằng, Lạng Sơn, and Nghệ An (see Map 1).Footnote ⁴⁵ Instead, he stayed in Hà Nội to help maintain communications between the two parties. In Hà Nội, he met Lê Đức Thọ again and was also introduced to Hoàng Văn Hoan. In June 1946, the CCP's South China Bureau, based in Hong Kong, dispatched Zhou Nan to Hà Nội to serve as its formal delegate to Vietnam, and Pang Zi became Zhou's messenger and assistant. Pang also tried to build contacts with the Chinese living in Vietnam and help with the printing business. Zhou Nan had been a head of the southern Guangdong branch, and he stayed in Vietnam for about a year. After his departure, Zhuang Tian, who had participated in the Long March and served as a top commander of the CCP forces in Hainan, became its leading representative in northern Vietnam. Zhuang arrived in Cao Bằng in September 1947 to command the Old First Regiment and serve as a senior military adviser to the Vietnamese communist forces. In fact, he was the first high-ranking CCP military adviser sent to northern Vietnam during the First Indochina War and was thus a predecessor of General Chen Geng and General Wei Guoqing who would arrive in Vietnam in 1950. Zhou and Zhuang were the highest-ranking Chinese communists who worked in northern Vietnam before 1950.Footnote ⁴⁶

Map 1.

Important Places in the Sino–Vietnamese Cross-border Revolutionary Zone

After the arrival of Zhou Nan in Hà Nội in mid-1946, Lê Đức Thọ suggested that a committee be created to oversee the affairs of the Chinese in Vietnam, and this led to the formation of the Overseas Chinese Working Committee, with Zhou Nan as its head and several CCP representatives from Guangdong, Guangxi, and Yunnan as members. However, the committee failed to accomplish much, and it became dormant after holding one or two meetings.Footnote ⁴⁷

Shortly after the First Indochina War began in December 1946, Pang Zi and another CCP member, Yu Mingyan, felt that there was not much they could do in Hà Nội to help with the war effort.Footnote ⁴⁸ Pang and Yu then wrote to Hồ Chí Minh and volunteered to go to the four northeastern provinces, Quảng Yên, Bắc Giang, Hải Ninh, and Lạng Sơn (see Map 1), to organise anti-French self-defence forces among the Chinese living there. All four provinces had relatively large ethnic Chinese communities. Hồ Chí Minh supported their proposal and promised to offer assistance, but also warned them that they would face many difficulties. They carried Hồ's written reply with them and went first to Quảng Yên province near Hải Phòng. The local Vietnamese communist leaders were very supportive. They gave the pair some money and promised to provide more funds and supplies. The Vietnamese communists also wanted Pang Zi and Yu Mingyan to help improve relations between the Chinese and the Vietnamese communities in the region, since there had been some inter-communal conflicts.Footnote ⁴⁹

It did not take long for Pang and Yu to organise a group of over ten revolutionaries in Hoành Bồ, Quảng Yên, several of whom had participated in the Anti-Japanese War in China. Pang Zi then went to Thái Bình and brought back a group of over ten fighters who had relocated from China to Vietnam. The two groups were then merged and they started to attack the French. Their brave actions even won the praise of General Võ Nguyên Giáp, the commander-in-chief of the Vietnamese communist forces. By late May 1947, Pang Zi's armed group had expanded to over 100 fighters, after which they publicly announced the formation of the Overseas Chinese People's Self-Defence Regiment of the Northeastern District of Northern Vietnam (越北东北区华侨民众自卫团), with Yu Mingyan as its political commissar and Pang Zi as the director of its political department.Footnote ⁵⁰ The commander was Li Hanwei, an ethnic Zhuang from Guangxi who had been an officer in the Old First Regiment, and the deputy commander was Huang Dequan, who was from Guangxi but had spent much time in Hải Ninh and had many connections there.Footnote ⁵¹

Two months later, the self-defence regiment was merged with another overseas Chinese military unit in Bắc Giang, which had been created by a section of the Old First Regiment stationed there. The new unit, which now had two to three hundred fighters from Quảng Yên, Lạng Sơn and Bắc Giang, became known as the Independent Regiment of the Vietnam National Army (越南国家军队独立中团), with Huang Bing as its commander and Pang Zi as political commissar.Footnote ⁵² Among the four leaders of the self-defence regiment, Li Hanwei, Huang Dequan, Yu Mingyan, and Pang Zi, Pang and Huang stayed to serve as leaders of the Independent Regiment, whereas Li Hanwei and Yu Mingyan were sent back to China.Footnote ⁵³ The Vietnam National Army had been created in 1946 by reorganising all the Vietnamese communist armed units that had been created since 1944. According to regulations issued by Hồ Chí Minh, soldiers serving in the Vietnam National Army ‘had to be between eighteen and thirty, be declared fit by an army doctor, and know how to read and write quoc ngu, the Romanised Vietnamese script’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Obviously, not all members of the Independent Regiment met these requirements. Very likely Pang Zi was not able to read and write quoc ngu.

At the time of its creation, the Independent Regiment was much smaller than a normal regiment in the Vietnam National Army, which could have up to 1,500 fighters.Footnote ⁵⁵ The regiment had expanded to about 1,000 fighters by 1948 and over 1,200 fighters by early 1949. These fighters came from different places in northern Vietnam, including close to 100 from Thái Nguyên.Footnote ⁵⁶ They fought alongside the Vietnamese regiments in the Northeastern Campaign against the French forces in late 1948 and were awarded a medal by the Vietnam National Army for their contributions to that campaign.Footnote ⁵⁷ During its stay in Vietnam, the regiment fought over 350 big and small battles, destroyed 30 to 40 enemy garrisons, killed over 600 enemies, and captured over 1,200 weapons. It also created a base area that covered 18 counties in the four provinces of Quảng Yên, Bắc Giang, Hải Ninh, and Khang Hải.Footnote ⁵⁸

The CCP and ICP agreed that the Independent Regiment would be jointly supervised by both parties and that the regiment would participate in both the anti-French war in Vietnam and the civil war in China. It was also decided that the regiment would be solely supplied by the Vietnamese side, which promised to treat it equally as other regiments in the Vietnam National Army. However, according to Pang Zi, this promise was not fully kept.Footnote ⁵⁹

The Independent Regiment was assigned both military and political duties, and its most important political task was to help the Việt Minh win over the Chinese living in northern Vietnam. The Department of Overseas Chinese Movement within the underground ICP and the Office of Overseas Chinese Affairs within the DRV government as well as their local branches were directly in charge of administering the Chinese communities in the Việt Minh-controlled areas. These party and government units managed overseas Chinese affairs through the overseas Chinese administrative committees (华侨理事会), which were mediators between the Chinese community and the Việt Minh.

In areas controlled by the Independent Regiment, its commanders soon began to get involved in conflicts between Vietnamese communist officials and overseas Chinese administrative committees regarding policies toward the Chinese. One cause of conflict was the citizenship issue. Although the DRV government had not issued any policy regarding the citizenship of the Chinese, the local Vietnamese leaders decided to follow the French practice of dividing the ethnic Chinese into Chinese citizens and local citizens. They wanted the Chinese to adopt Vietnamese citizenship, but many Chinese resisted. The commanders of the Independent Regiment supported the Chinese, arguing that the Chinese should not be forced to change their citizenship. The Vietnamese leaders wanted the Chinese farmers who had been cultivating wasteland to pay taxes to the state, but the overseas Chinese administrative committees were reluctant, because they believed that the Vietnamese government had granted a tax exemption within a certain period to those who cultivated wasteland, and again, the regiment commanders supported the overseas Chinese administrative committees. Many Chinese insisted that they should be permitted to travel to areas occupied by the French to work or to do business, and they had the support of the regiment commanders but not the Vietnamese leaders.Footnote ⁶⁰ Moreover, the Vietnamese leaders did not agree that the land cultivated by the Chinese had all been wasteland since ‘The Hải Ninh people's committee asserted that wealthy overseas Chinese had seized two-thirds of all arable land in the province, leaving little for Vietnamese, Nùng, or other ethnic groups.’Footnote ⁶¹

Conflicts between the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutionaries became so intense that some local Vietnamese leaders submitted a letter to the ICP's Central Department of Overseas Chinese Movement attacking their Chinese comrades. In the letter, the Vietnamese accused the Independent Regiment's commanders of being ‘feudal and bourgeois nationalists’ who had no understanding of Marxism and Leninism, who had sabotaged the party's policy of promoting solidarity between the Chinese and Vietnamese, and who therefore were not real internationalists. The regiment's commanders responded in writing, defending themselves. These disagreements and conflicts foreshadowed similar episodes which were to take place from the 1950s to the 1970s. Over sixty years later, Pang Zi admitted that they did make some minor mistakes, such as failing to show due respect to the Vietnamese leaders, but insisted that they were correct on major issues.Footnote ⁶²

These conflicts were particularly intense in Hải Ninh province, and they were even reported to the US State Department by its intelligence agents, who noticed that the Independent Regiment was only nominally controlled by the Việt Minh. According to these reports, members of the Independent Regiment conducted intensive political activities and spread CCP rather than Việt Minh propaganda among the Hakka Chinese in Hải Ninh. The regiment also collected taxes and controlled transit through the province. In late 1948, the Việt Minh had to send its own propagandists, including pro-Việt Minh Hakka revolutionaries, to Hải Ninh, and moved the Independent Regiment away to counter its expanding influence there.Footnote ⁶³ Despite these measures, in May 1949, a local Việt Minh committee estimated that 75 per cent of the 150,000 Nùng and Ngái people in Hải Ninh had been under the Regiment's influence, to the extent that the committee feared that ‘Hai Ninh may become a Chinese province’.Footnote ⁶⁴ There were some grounds for suspicion: part of Hải Ninh had been Chinese territory before it was ceded to French Indochina in 1885,Footnote ⁶⁵ and the Chinese were a majority in the province.Footnote ⁶⁶ According to one estimate, the Nùng people or Hakka farmers made up 60 per cent of the local population, and the overseas Chinese, or urban Chinese, formed 3 per cent, the Vietnamese constituted only 13 per cent, and the rest were made up of minority groups such as the Dao (Yao) and Thai.Footnote ⁶⁷ The Việt Minh leaders made other efforts to curb the Regiment's influence in Hải Ninh. They ordered the Nùng people to join organisations controlled by the Việt Minh, stopped the activities of pro-CCP overseas Chinese organisations, and refused to grant property ownership rights to Chinese residents.Footnote ⁶⁸

The Independent Regiment came to an end in June 1949. As CCP troops were preparing for their final attack on the GMD forces in Guangdong, Guangxi, and Yunnan, the Chinese and Vietnamese communists agreed that most of the Independent Regiment's fighters should return to China. The ongoing conflicts between the Independent Regiment and the Vietnamese revolutionaries might well have been another reason for relocating the regiment to China. Pang Zi and most of his comrades returned to different regions of southern China and never entered Vietnam again.Footnote ⁶⁹ Pang confirmed that the disagreements between the Independent Regiment and the Vietnamese over policies toward the Chinese in Vietnam was a factor which prompted him to leave. A small number of the fighters remained in Vietnam and were reorganised into a battalion, with a Vietnamese communist as its commander and a Chinese communist as its political commissar. They fought alongside the Việt Minh till the end of the First Indochina War.

In addition, in September 1950, upon the request of the Vietnamese communists, about 150 former members of the Independent Regiment who had moved to China the previous year were sent back to work and fight in Hải Ninh. There were three governments operating in Hải Ninh at the time: the French colonial government, the Nùng Autonomous government, which was actually part of the French system, and the anti-French Việt Minh-led government. The French and pro-French Chinese were the dominant political forces in Hải Ninh, and the Vietnamese communists wanted these Chinese revolutionaries to help mobilise the Chinese in Hải Ninh. Some of these 150 Chinese later became high-ranking officials in the province, but in the late 1970s, Vietnam expelled many of them, and they ended up as refugees in China.Footnote ⁷⁰

Although the Old First Regiment and the Independent Regiment were the best-known Chinese military units in northern Vietnam during the early years of the First Indochina War, they were not the only ones. In June 1945, a group of CCP members in Fangcheng, southern Guangdong, created an armed unit called the Qinzhou-Fangcheng Overseas Chinese Anti-Japanese Guerilla Brigade (钦防华侨抗日游击大队) in Naliang, near the border with Vietnam. They immediately moved the unit to the Đường Hoa region in Hải Ninh, Vietnam. The unit had about 150 fighters, who fought the Japanese and puppet troops in Vietnam for nearly two months and then moved back to China. It is interesting to note that although its leaders and soldiers were mostly Chinese from China, they chose to call themselves overseas Chinese because the leaders had planned to take the unit to Đường Hoa from the beginning, and they knew that most of the residents of Đường Hoa were Chinese, some of whom were from Naliang. The unit re-entered Vietnam in late August 1945, only days after retreating to China, and was almost wiped out by a rival Chinese armed force.Footnote ⁷¹ It was a rare scene of two Chinese armed units fighting against each other on Vietnamese soil. In late October 1945, the Fangcheng branch of the CCP recreated its armed wing and named it the Fangcheng Guerilla Brigade (防城游击大队), which had about 150 fighters. Several months later, the brigade was reorganised and moved to Vietnam as a battalion of the Old First Regiment. A local CCP leader proudly recalled that the CCP armed units of Fangcheng made at least three entries into Vietnam during the First Indochina War.Footnote ⁷² Zhou Nan and Zhuang Tian, the two highest-ranking CCP leaders who had worked in Vietnam before 1950, were dispatched to the region between Guangxi and Yunnan to command a liberated area there. The armed wing of the liberated area was the Guangxi-Yunnan Borderland Column (桂滇边纵队), and there would have been members of the Old First Regiment and the Independent Regiment in the column. In May 1948, this column had to retreat to Vietnam to escape from Nationalist troops. In August 1948, while stationed in Hà Giang, the column was joined by another communist armed unit from Yunnan, which was under the command of the famous Yunnanese communist Zhu Jiabi.Footnote ⁷³ The New First Regiment, which was created in southern Guangdong after the departure of the Old First Regiment, also entered Vietnam in November 1948 to take a respite. The regiment later moved to Yunnan.Footnote ⁷⁴ In March 1949, fighters from two CCP regiments based in southern Guangdong disguised themselves as Vietnamese guerillas and attacked the French garrison in Móng Cái, located right next to the Sino–Vietnamese border. They killed more than 50 of the French troops, took over 100 captives, and also captured a large number of high quality weapons.Footnote ⁷⁵

In general, both the CCP and the underground ICP were supportive of the cross-border actions of the armed units under their sole or joint control. In late 1948 or early 1949, Fang Fang, an important leader of the CCP's Southern China branch, reached an agreement with an ICP delegate in Hong Kong, according to which if a CCP unit moved to Vietnam to conduct joint actions with an ICP unit, then the CCP side would nominate the commander and the ICP side the political commissar of the joint force. If an ICP unit moved to China, then the commander of the joint force would be an ICP choice, and the political commissar would be a CCP member.Footnote ⁷⁶ The CCP-ICP cross-border collaboration prompted the French command in the region to form a short-lived alliance with the Chinese Nationalist forces in Guangxi,Footnote ⁷⁷ thus creating a hot local theatre of the emerging international Cold War.

While quite a few armed units followed the path of the Old First Regiment — that is, they were created in China and then fought in both countries — there were also Chinese armed groups that were more similar to the Independent Regiment, which means they were formed in Vietnam and then fought in both Vietnam and China. In Bắc Giang, the Overseas Chinese Volunteers Armed Unit (华侨武装志愿队) was active from early 1946 to October 1947. This unit was jointly organised by the CCP and ICP, and it started out as a small band of 22 people but later grew into an armed force of over 100 fighters. Most of those fighters moved to China in late 1947.Footnote ⁷⁸ The Chinese miners in the Hồng Quảng district also organised a guerilla unit, which had over 20 fighters in late 1948.Footnote ⁷⁹ In 1949, some CCP members created the Hải Ninh Overseas Chinese Anti-violence Self-defence Unit (海宁华侨抗暴自卫队) to fight against the French forces who were taking revenge for the CCP's March attack on the Móng Cái garrisons.Footnote ⁸⁰

In addition to military units, there were also many active Chinese mass organisations in the Việt Minh areas. In Thái Nguyên province, where many Việt Minh leaders and organs were based during the war, there were six overseas Chinese mass organisations, including the:

• • Thái Nguyên Division of the Vietnam Branch of the Southeast Asian Overseas Chinese Association (越南南洋华侨协会太原分会),

• • Chinese Association of Thái Nguyên Province (太原省中华会馆),

• • Study Society of the Overseas Chinese Democratic Youths of Thái Nguyên Province (太原省华侨民主青年进修社),

• • Overseas Chinese Women's Association of Thái Nguyên Province (太原省华侨妇女会),

• • New Democracy League (新民主主义同志会), and

• • Thái Nguyên Branch of the Wartime Relief Association of the Overseas Chinese in Vietnam (越南战时华侨筹赈会太原分会).

All these organisations were created between late 1945 and early 1947, and controlled by Chinese communists. In fact, all six organisations in Thái Nguyên were led by the same couple, Guo Han and Liang Fang, who married in the province in late 1945. Guo was born in Kunming and was taken to Thái Nguyên when he was a teenager. He joined the revolutionary movement in early 1946 and became a CCP member in early 1947. Liang was born in Hà Nội and joined the CCP in 1949.Footnote ⁸¹

Wu Qimei and the Central Bureau of Political Security

In late 1945, as mentioned, Pang Zi was able to get in touch with high-ranking Vietnamese communist leaders largely thanks to his former classmate Zhao Shiyao and Zhao's former classmate Wu Qimei. However, Wu and Zhao did not join Pang Zi when the latter moved to the northeastern district to create the Overseas Chinese Self-Defence Regiment. Pang Zi decided to go to work in remote areas partly because he felt that he was not needed by the party centre. Wu Qimei could not leave the party centre, because he had close relationships with the ICP's leaders and his services were much needed. Zhao Shiyao was not as powerful as Wu Qimei in the Vietnamese communist system, and he decided to stay with Wu Qimei possibly because he had been relying on Wu ever since he moved to Vietnam.

Wu Qimei was born in 1912 in Vietnam. His family originally came from Guangdong and he grew up in Hạ Côi, Hải Ninh, which had a large community of Hakka-speaking Chinese.Footnote ⁸² He was sent to China for education and became a classmate of Zhao Shiyao when attending a middle school in Guangdong. Wu even attended a university in Shanghai.Footnote ⁸³ In 1932 and 1933, he became a leader of a group of Chinese progressive activists in Hải Phòng.Footnote ⁸⁴ It is not clear whether or not this group was part of the CCP, although some of its members later went to Yan'an, the Party's wartime capital. Wu joined the ICP in 1937. He ran a bookstore in Hải Phòng at that time, and also served as a part-time teacher in some Chinese schools in Hải Phòng. In 1940, he was arrested by the French colonial authorities and imprisoned in Sơn La.Footnote ⁸⁵ It is believed that it was during his imprisonment there that he got to meet Hồ Chí Minh. He became Hồ Chí Minh's political secretary after he was released from prison.Footnote ⁸⁶ This account is problematic because Hồ Chí Minh was not imprisoned in the same place at the same time.Footnote ⁸⁷ According to a more reliable source, Wu Qimei was sent to China to work with the senior Vietnamese communist Hoàng Quốc Việt after his imprisonment.Footnote ⁸⁸ It is more likely that it was during his stay in China in the early 1940s that he got to know Hồ Chí Minh, since Hồ was also in China at that time. Another possibility is that he got to know some high-ranking Vietnamese communists during his imprisonment, and some of these people introduced him to Hồ Chí Minh after their release. There was a large group of Vietnamese communists who were detained in the French prison in Sơn La, including Lê Đức Thọ.Footnote ⁸⁹ As Hồ Chí Minh's secretary, Wu would have had opportunities to meet other high-ranking Vietnamese communist leaders, including Lê Đức Thọ, to whom Pang Zi was introduced by Wu in late 1945.

It was about the same time when Wu Qimei arranged the meeting between Lê Đức Thọ and Pang Zi that Thọ gave Wu a special assignment. In late October or early November of 1945, Lê Đức Thọ told Lê Giản, head of the DRV's Ministry of Public Security, that he wanted to send a group of Chinese comrades to work with Lê Giản, emphasising that they were all well-educated people who had good political understanding. Lê Giản was pleased to learn that one of these Chinese comrades was his old friend Wu Qimei. The two had worked together in Hải Phòng as revolutionaries in the late 1930s but lost contact with each other because they were both arrested by the French in 1940 and sent to different prisons. It turned out that Lê Đức Thọ wanted Wu Qimei and his team to work as secret agents who would spy on the Chinese Nationalists who had been stationed in northern Vietnam since shortly after the Japanese surrender. Lê Đức Thọ affirmed that the agents’ identities would be kept secret, and their expenses would be covered by a secret budget. The group would report to Lê Giản only. Lê Giản had the responsibility of checking their reports and sending the important ones to Võ Nguyên Giáp and Lê Đức Thọ. Lê Giản confirmed that some of these reports were quite useful.Footnote ⁹⁰

Wu Qimei was appointed leader of this group, which Lê Giản simply describes as the ‘Mei Group’ or the ‘special work team’, but its official name was changed to ‘the Central Bureau of Political Security of Vietnam’ in early 1947. In late 1946, after the GMD's withdrawal from Vietnam and the outbreak of war, the leaders of the ICP and DRV all relocated to the northernmost part of the country. The Ministry of Public Security moved to the city of Tuyên Quang, and the Mei Group moved there too. The party leaders now decided to send Wu Qimei and his group to central and southern Vietnam to assist the revolutionaries in French-occupied areas. The leaders believed that it was easier for the Chinese revolutionaries to travel to those places because the French treated the Chinese more leniently than they did the Vietnamese.

Partly because of this new assignment, Wu Qimei expanded his group by bringing in his friends and relatives, including his old friend Zhao Shiyao, Zhao's friend Guo Fang, who was also a friend of Pang Zi, Wu Jingye, a senior communist intellectual from China, Hong Zongju, another long-time friend of Wu Qimei, and Wu Nansheng, a former GMD agent who had been persuaded by Wu to leave the GMD and to work for the communists. In mid-1947, Cheng Minde, another old friend of Wu Qimei, also joined the group. Within this group, Wu Qimei and Cheng Minde were members of the ICP, Zhao Shiyao, Guo Fang, and Wu Jingye were members of the CCP, Hong Zongju was a progressive intellectual, and Wu Nansheng claimed to have been a leading member of the Malayan Communist Party before working for the GMD.Footnote ⁹¹

The group's expansion and complex composition would prove to be its downfall. About two months after Cheng Minde's arrival, Lê Đức Thọ told Lê Giản that he had been informed that Cheng had been a GMD agent working in the Sino–Vietnamese border area. Cheng had been working as an editor for Ly Ban, a senior Vietnamese communist who had spent a long time in China, but was forced to resign when Ly Ban discovered his former connection with the GMD.Footnote ⁹² Lê Giản and Wu Qimei took Cheng into the group because both of them had known Cheng for a long time and also because Cheng told them that he had decided to leave Ly Ban due to some disagreements with his fellow editors. Very likely Wu and Giản did not have a chance to check with Ly Ban about Cheng Minde. Lê Đức Thọ was also suspicious of Wu Nansheng, calling him an agent of Chiang Kai-shek, and warned Lê Giản to keep a close eye on Wu Qimei's group. Lê Giản told Lê Đức Thọ that he had already assigned a senior Vietnamese communist to live with Wu Qimei and another Vietnamese agent to observe their activities from the outside, but the two Vietnamese agents had failed to discover anything unusual partly because of the language barrier — neither of them could understand Cantonese. Lê Giản then assured his boss that he did not believe Cheng Minde was a GMD agent, and Lê Đức Thọ was not happy to hear that.Footnote ⁹³

In late 1947, right before the French launched an all-out attack on the Vietnamese communist base area in Tuyên Quang and Thái Nguyên, Lê Giản received three documents from high-ranking party leaders affirming that Wu Qimei and Cheng Minde were both Chiang Kai-shek's agents. Both allegedly had close contacts with leading GMD agents in the Dongxing-Hải Ninh area before the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War in 1937. Some of these documents even carried the signature of Trường Chinh, the ICP's secretary general. Lê Giản now had to take the matter seriously for three reasons: first, the new round of accusations was endorsed by more party leaders; second, Wu Qimei himself became a target of accusations; and third, the ICP affirmed in a resolution issued in 1947 that

Lê Giản then rushed to Tuyên Quang to investigate the case. After spending two days talking with Wu Qimei and his people as well as the Vietnamese cadres who had had close contact with the group, Lê Giản concluded that the accusations against Wu Qimei and his people were unfounded. Instead, he became suspicious of those who had made accusations against them.Footnote ⁹⁵

Pang Zi reports that in 1955, Trường Chinh told some Chinese officials that the accusations against Wu Qimei's group were made by two Chinese communists, Guo Zhaohua and Guo Fang, and at least one of them, Guo Fang, was actually a member of Wu's group. Zhao Shiyao, Pang Zi, and Guo Fang had been close friends back in China, and it was Zhao Shiyao who brought both Pang Zi and Guo Fang into the CCP in 1938. In his old age, Pang Zi still could not understand why Guo Fang would submit all those false reports to the Vietnamese communist leaders to accuse his comrades, including Zhao Shiyao. It was the accusations from Guo Fang and Guo Zhaohua, combined with the French attack on the base area, which convinced some Vietnamese leaders that traitors within their ranks might have provided intelligence to the French and that those traitors were none other than Wu Qimei and his group.Footnote ⁹⁶ Considering the report from Ly Ban about Cheng Minde mentioned above, it appears that there were accusations from different directions against Wu Qimei and his group.

There is evidence showing that Wu Qimei did have connections with the GMD. In 1939, he recommended a young Chinese from northern Vietnam to work for the Bureau of Investigation and Statistics of the Military Council of Chiang Kai-shek's government, which was one of the most powerful secret agencies within the GMD system. However, this does not mean that Wu was a GMD agent. There were many communists hiding within the GMD system at that time, and Wu could have been one of them. The young Chinese he recommended to the Nationalists was actually a communist revolutionary.Footnote ⁹⁷ During the war against Japan, Hồ Chí Minh and some other Vietnamese communists also collaborated with the Chinese nationalists. It is believed that it was to hide his identity as a communist so that he could better cooperate with the Chinese Nationalists, particularly General Zhang Fakui, that Nguyễn Ái Quốc changed his name to Hồ Chí Minh in the early 1940s.Footnote ⁹⁸ Immediately after the Japanese surrender, the Vietnamese communists developed a rather close relationship with some GMD members, purchasing a large quantity of weapons, as well as communications equipment, uniforms, printing presses, and paper from them.Footnote ⁹⁹ The Chinese Nationalist forces that occupied northern Vietnam contributed greatly to the August Revolution led by the Việt Minh, with Hồ Chí Minh and his followers working quite well with Lu Han and other Chinese Nationalist commanders.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ It was because of such cooperation that the Chinese Nationalists ‘gave the DRV five valuable months of de facto protection from serious French attack north of the sixteenth parallel’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Hence it was very unfair for the Vietnamese communists to have accused Wu Qimei of having contact with the GMD. Indeed, the assignment Wu Qimei had received from the party leaders was to gather intelligence about the GMD troops in Vietnam, and it would have been difficult to do this without having connections and communications with the GMD.

It was unfortunate for Wu Qimei and his group that Lê Giản's trust in them failed to save them. After the French launched their land, sea, and air attack on the central base area in late 1947, Lê Giản had to leave Tuyên Quang to take charge of the security of the top leaders, including Hồ Chí Minh.Footnote ¹⁰² He asked his subordinate, head of the Tuyên Quang Provincial Bureau of Public Security, to oversee Wu Qimei's group. When he returned to Tuyên Quang about a month later, he received the shocking news that most members of the group, including Wu himself, had been ‘liquidated’ in October 1947, and all the written material about the group had been destroyed. He was told that the brutal order had been given by Lê Đức Thọ, who believed that Wu Qimei and his people were indeed Chiang Kai-shek's agents and that they could cause severe harm to the party if the French were to lay their hands on them.Footnote ¹⁰³ Wu Qimei and the other victims were killed by Tuyên Quang and Thái Nguyên public security officers.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

At least twenty people were ‘liquidated’, including Wu Qimei and his cousin Wu Qiying, along with Wu Jingye, Cheng Minde, Hong Zongju, and several women. Only a few members of the group managed to survive. One of the accusers, Guo Fang, was not killed, and the other accuser, Guo Zhaohua (if he was a member), also survived. CCP member Zhao Shiyao managed to escape, as did the former GMD agent Wu Nansheng. Most of those who survived the liquidation later returned to China and died in imprisonment imposed by the CCP, and they were imprisoned in China mainly because of the crime they had supposedly committed in Vietnam.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This indicates that Wu Qimei and his teammates were killed mainly for political reasons. At the moment when they were purged, they were suspected of being agents not only for the GMD, but also for the French, because once the Cold War started, the GMD and the French were perceived to be allies. Their ethnic identity was a secondary factor behind their tragic deaths. It was mainly because they were Chinese that they were chosen to work as secret agents to spy on the GMD, and it was also because they were Chinese that they were later suspected of being secret agents for the GMD and the French.

For a long time, the CCP seemed to simply accept the accusations against Wu Qimei's group made by their Vietnamese comrades, and that led to the imprisonment of Zhao Shiyao and some other members of the group who were lucky enough to survive the purge. In the early 1950s, the Guangdong Bureau of Public Security sent a group of officials to Vietnam to investigate the case of Wu Qimei's team, particularly the case of Zhao Shiyao, and the group got to meet and talk with Trường Chinh, Ly Ban, Lê Giản, and others. The Vietnamese leaders confirmed that the accusations against the group were initially made by other Chinese revolutionaries, implying that it was not their fault that Wu Qimei and his subordinates were executed. The investigation did not cause the Chinese side to change their verdict against Zhao Shiyao.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Among the victims of the purge, if Wu Qimei was the most prominent ICP member, then Wu Jingye was the most influential member of the CCP. Born in Guangdong in 1911, Wu Jingye moved to Singapore with his parents as a child, because his grandfather had made a fortune there. In 1930, he joined the CCP while in Malaya and was involved in revolutionary activities in Malaya, Guangdong, Hong Kong, Thailand, Burma, and southern Vietnam. In 1938, he became the editor-in-chief of a Chinese-language newspaper based in southern Vietnam. In 1943, while in Shaoguan, Guangdong, he lost contact with the CCP. He arrived in Hà Nội from Kunming in August 1946 and established contact with the CCP organisation in northern Vietnam. Later that year, he joined Wu Qimei's group.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

In the decades following the ‘liquidation’ of Wu Qimei's group, the two parties revisited the case several times, and most of the victims have been gradually rehabilitated by both parties. It is believed that Lê Đức Thọ did not inform Hồ Chí Minh or get his approval before issuing the order to purge Wu Qimei's group. After Hồ Chí Minh learned about the killings, he tried to console the relatives of the victims and also ordered the local governments to take care of their relatives. Meanwhile, he did not make it explicit that he believed that the victims were innocent and that he did not approve Lê Đức Thọ's decision.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In 1961, the Tuyên Quang Provincial Public Security Bureau issued a certificate to Wu Qimei's children, confirming that their father was ‘missing in action’ in October 1947. In 1981, with the approval of Prime Minister Phạm Văn Đồng, the Vietnamese government finally recognised Wu Qimei as a ‘martyr’, and later also erected a tomb for him in the Tuyên Quang Provincial Cemetery for Revolutionary Martyrs, although it is not clear whether or not Wu Qimei's remains were buried there. It is interesting to note that this belated political rehabilitation came at a time when the Vietnamese and Chinese communists were fighting a bloody war against each other in the same border region that Wu Qimei once conducted his revolutionary activities.

Whereas the Vietnamese side focused its attention on Wu Qimei, the Chinese side showed much more concern about Wu Jingye and Zhao Shiyao. After Wu Jingye's death, his wife returned to China and worked in Yunnan till 1980, when she retired and moved to her birthplace, Hong Kong. She suffered much persecution at the hands of the CCP because of the suspicions placed on Wu Jingye. In 1985, Wu Jingye was finally rehabilitated by the Yunnan Provincial Committee of the CCP, and five years later, a book was published to commemorate him.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Zhao Shiyao was also posthumously rehabilitated in the 1980s.

Rong Zhaolin and the Hải Phòng Overseas Chinese New Democracy Union of Vietnam

Whereas both the Independent Regiment and the Central Bureau of Political Security were based in rural regions controlled at least partially by the Việt Minh, there were also ethnic Chinese revolutionary organisations operating in urban areas ruled by the French. One such organisation was the Hải Phòng Overseas Chinese New Democracy Union of Vietnam (越南海防华侨新民主主义联合会), and one of its key leaders was a Chinese revolutionary named Rong Zhaolin.

Rong Zhaolin was born in Cao Bằng, northern Vietnam, in 1913, to a Chinese family that had been living there for three generations. The family originally came from Nanhai county in Guangdong province, China. Rong attended elementary schools first in Cao Bằng and then in the town of Pingmeng in Zhenbian county, Guangxi, which is adjacent to Cao Bằng.Footnote ¹¹⁰ At the age of 15 he was admitted to the Number Seven Middle School of Guangxi in Longzhou. It was during his time in Longzhou that he got to closely observe the Longzhou Uprising launched by the CCP in 1929. After the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931, Rong and a group of friends left Guangxi for Guangzhou, where they attended several schools, including Sun Yat-sen University. In Guangzhou, he met friends who were CCP members. He became a member of the Chinese Communist Youth League in 1935, and joined the CCP a year later.Footnote ¹¹¹

After the Japanese occupied the coastal areas of Guangdong in 1938, Rong and some of his comrades moved to northern Guangdong to conduct anti-Japanese activities. One year later, the CCP leadership in northern Guangdong dispatched Rong and two other communists to Pingmeng, Guangxi, to hide within the GMD forces stationed there. Unable to maintain regular communications with their superiors in Guangdong, the small number of communists in Pingmeng decided to focus on educating and mobilising the youths in the Sino–Vietnamese border region. Rong and his wife Li Duansheng, also a communist, returned to Cao Bằng to teach in a local school, but they maintained close contact with their comrades in Pingmeng. Soon Cao Bằng was also occupied by the Japanese and the couple had to move to Guangxi and Yunnan, and they did not return to Vietnam until after the Japanese surrender in 1945. By that time, they had lost contact with the CCP, although they still considered themselves CCP members and tried to promote the CCP agenda wherever they were.Footnote ¹¹²

They moved to live in Hà Nội not long after returning to Vietnam, and one of their friends, who was also a CCP member, was in Hà Nội as well. The three formed a cell and they decided to promote revolution among the Chinese living in Vietnam. Soon that friend decided to return to China, and Rong Zhaolin moved to Hải Phòng to serve as the editor of a Chinese-language journal. In early 1948, he was introduced to Yang Shijie, a Chinese ICP member. Yang had been instructed by ICP's Hải Phòng branch to create an underground ethnic Chinese organisation, which would work directly under the Party's municipal committee to enforce its policies regarding the Chinese, with the aim of mobilising and organising their support for the anti-French war. There were active underground CCP agents and organisations in Hà Nội and Hải Phòng at the time, but Rong seemed to have had no contact with them. Instead, he developed close contacts with the ICP through Yang Shijie, and assisted Yang in creating the underground organisation, which was named the Hải Phòng Overseas Chinese New Democracy Union of Vietnam. Yang and the other leaders assigned Rong to draft the organisation's programme and founding declaration.Footnote ¹¹³

According to Rong Zhaolin, the programme stated that the New Democracy Union would ‘take Marxism, Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought as its guiding principles’ and would ‘use these principles to educate its members’. It would ‘spread revolutionary truth among the overseas Chinese, to support and participate in the righteous anti-French war of Vietnam, and expose the aggressive acts of the French colonialists and traitorous behaviour of their running-dogs’. Furthermore, it stated that the union ‘supports the Chinese revolution led by the CCP’. Rong recalled that in drafting this document he consulted the Chinese New Democracy Youth League's programme, but also took into consideration the special conditions in Vietnam.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Yang Shijie was the leader of the New Democracy Union, and Rong was put in charge of its division of culture and education. Among his colleagues in the division were the principal and some teachers from the Overseas Chinese Middle School of Hải Phòng. Members of the union included teachers, students, factory workers, owners and employees of businesses, and office workers. There were different divisions that served different groups of people. The union published a news bulletin to disseminate among its members reports from the Xinhua News Agency and the Việt Minh News Agency. It also published some other magazines, and the aim of the propaganda was to call on the Chinese in Vietnam to offer their support to both the Việt Minh and the CCP.

Rong Zhaolin became the head of the Hải Phòng Overseas Chinese New Democracy Union of Vietnam in late 1951 when most of the other leaders had to leave Hải Phòng to escape from French soldiers. In late 1952, Rong and several other leaders were arrested by the French. The head of the women's division, Gao Ying, an eighteen-year-old Chinese woman born in Hà Cối of Hải Ninh, was killed by the French and was later recognised as a revolutionary martyr by the Vietnamese government.Footnote ¹¹⁵ She was possibly the most famous member of the Hải Phòng Overseas Chinese New Democracy Union of Vietnam. Rong and the others were eventually taken to the notorious French prison on Phú Quốc Island in southern Vietnam, where they got to meet many ethnic Vietnamese revolutionaries who were their fellow inmates. They were not released until after the signing of the Geneva Accord in 1954, when DRV traded some French prisoners of war for these imprisoned revolutionaries. Rong then returned to northern Vietnam to run the training centre for the youths of the New Democracy Union based in Hải Dương.Footnote ¹¹⁶

The Việt Minh took over Hải Phòng from the French in May 1955, and the New Democracy Union was dissolved by the authorities not long after that. Rong Zhaolin continued to live and work in Vietnam as an official. In 1970, he was arrested and imprisoned for unknown reasons. He was released in 1977 and in May 1978, his entire family relocated from Vietnam to China. Back in China, he was initially resettled on a state farm in Guangxi and later moved to Nanning, the provincial capital, where he died in 2002.Footnote ¹¹⁷ He was offered a position in the local government mainly because he managed to prove that he had been a CCP member since 1938. A number of other former members of the New Democracy Union had also moved to China by the late 1970s.

Chen Huaquan, one of Rong Zhaolin's followers, who was a member of the Hải Phòng Overseas Chinese New Democracy Union of Vietnam and was imprisoned on Phú Quốc along with Rong, believed that the Hải Phòng Overseas Chinese New Democracy Union of Vietnam was a branch of the Overseas Chinese New Democracy Union of Vietnam (越南华侨新民主主义联合会), which also had branches in the other two major cities in northern Vietnam, namely, Hà Nội and Nam Dinh.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Another former member of the Hải Phòng Overseas Chinese New Democracy Union of Vietnam confirmed that the headquarters of the Overseas Chinese New Democracy Union of Vietnam was located in the liberated area and that the martyred Gao Ying had attended a training programme there in 1951.Footnote ¹¹⁹