The realities of French colonialism inspired a wide range of responses from the Vietnamese people, sometimes manifested in words and at other times in actions. The books under review here reflect both kinds of responses from men representing successive generations of Vietnamese political activists. One helped lay the foundations for national self-strengthening while the other was an active participant in the revolutionary movement to drive out the French. These men, the reformist scholar Phan Châu Trinh (1872–1926) and the Trotskyist revolutionary Ngo Van (1912–2005), had similar objectives — a newly configured Vietnam — but rather different visions of how to achieve this goal. This difference is to some extent explained by their respective experiences of colonialism, with Ngo Van a mere 14 years old when Phan Châu Trinh died in 1926. However, it also reflects differing views of the fundamental problems faced by the Vietnamese people. These books also represent the gap between the abstractions of political rhetoric and the concrete realities of lived revolution. While Phan Châu Trinh speaks of morality, ethics and democracy, Ngo Van describes strikes, arrests, tortures and executions. Together the two works illustrate the complexities of the Vietnamese struggle, a struggle that took place both in the rarified realm of the cerebral and in the muddy realities of the quotidian.

Phan Châu Trinh, as Vinh Sinh points out in his extended and extremely useful introduction, has long existed in the shadow of his contemporary Phan Bội Châu. Phan Bội Châu's relentless revolutionary activism had greater appeal to subsequent generations of Vietnamese looking back on the early anticolonial struggles. Furthermore, Phan Bội Châu placed much of the blame for Vietnam's ills on the French, while Phan Châu Trinh saw many of the problems stemming from the failures of the Vietnamese people themselves. It was this distinction that drove Phan Châu Trinh to argue for a fundamental Vietnamese self-renewal as the answer to their problems, while Phan Bội Châu's simpler message was that Vietnam's problems could be solved by the violent ouster of the French. It was, at a basic level, the distinction between reform and revolution, and it is thus that these two men's ideas have long been distinguished.

Here Vinh Sinh seeks to make Phan Châu Trinh's nuanced political views more widely known to an Anglophone audience. This follows Sinh's earlier work on Phan Bội Châu, including a translation of his autobiography, Overturned chariot (in collaboration with Nicholas Wickenden; University of Hawai'i Press, 1999) and an edited volume, Phan Bội Châu and the Đông Du movement (Yale Southeast Asia Program, 1988). The present volume opens with a 55-page introduction in which Sinh introduces Phan Châu Trinh's political career and contextualises the translations that take up the remainder of the volume. He particularly emphasises the influences that Japan and Japanese scholars had on Phan Châu Trinh's thought. Sinh describes Phan Châu Trinh's 14-year exile in France, and then his return toward the end of his life. This detailed essay is an important contribution in itself, but the real value here lies in the first English translations of four important writings and public lectures given by Phan Châu Trinh. Up to this point, Phan Châu Trinh's political views were represented in translation only by renderings of a 1907 letter he wrote to Governor General Paul Beau, urging Franco–Vietnamese co-operation, albeit with greater French sensitivity to Vietnamese aspirations and competencies. The four texts translated here all postdate that letter, and cover the period from 1910 to late 1925. The first two translations are of written texts: ‘A new Vietnam following the Franco–Vietnamese alliance’ composed between 1910 and 1911, after Phan Bội Châu had been released from Poulo Condore, and the ‘Letter to Emperor Khải Định’, which he drafted in Paris in 1922 in conjunction with the Emperor's official visit to the Marseilles Exposition. The latter two translations are of public lectures given by Phan Châu Trinh in Saigon in November 1925: ‘Morality and ethics in the Orient and the Occident’ and ‘Monarchy and democracy’. Together these four texts offer a useful survey of Phan Châu Trinh's evolving political views, and important commentary on developments in Vietnam in the first decades of the twentieth century.

‘A New Vietnam’ represents Phan Châu Trinh's attempt to do several things. He begins by chastising the Vietnamese for their slavish imitation and reliance on China, arguing that such an outmoded outlook was preventing the Vietnamese from responding effectively to the challenges of the modern era. He also argues that the Vietnamese should seek self-rule, but should do so by drawing on the numerous advantages that cooperating with the French offered. In this respect, this document might be seen as a counterpoint to his letter to Paul Beau, this one addressed to the Vietnamese themselves, rather than the French. What is striking about the continuity in his attitude towards the French is that in the interval between this work and the Beau letter, Phan Châu Trinh had spent nearly two years in the French penal colony on Poulo Condore for his alleged role in a 1908 peasant tax revolt. The work is also noteworthy for Phan Châu Trinh's using it to distinguish (and distance) himself from the violent agitation of Phan Bội Châu, a man whom he respected, but whose aggressive approach he found counterproductive. Thus, Phan Châu Trinh distinguishes between his own ‘self-rule party’, and Phan Bội Châu's ‘revolutionary party’, reflecting what Vinh Sinh argues was a lifelong belief that ‘to depend on foreign help is foolish and to resort to violence is self-destructive’ (p. 1).

Phan Châu Trinh's speech on ‘morality and ethics’ is a lengthy chastisement of the Vietnamese people for having lost their sense of ethics over the centuries, largely because of slavish devotion to outmoded monarchism. He argues that notions of collective self-help and mutual responsibility have been lost, and that at best people pay only lip service to Confucian ideals. He holds up Europeans (and the French in particular) as models for a new kind of ethics, one based on a collective social awareness and mutual support, and one that focuses more on the larger national community than on the self-interests of the family unit. While acknowledging problems in the West, he argues that its basic ethical principles are sound and should be taken up by the Vietnamese. In short, like his other writings, here too Phan Châu Trinh sees the French essentially as a positive model for the Vietnamese, a people not without the capacity for ethical action, but a people who have lost their ethical way because of historical circumstances. Indeed, he sees the problem partly as a deviation from the true teachings of classical figures such as Confucius and Mencius, the latter of whom he suggested made an argument for democracy (p. 118).

The critique of Emperor Khải Định (often referred to as Thư thất điều — ‘Letter of the seven clauses’) is a frontal assault on the Vietnamese monarch and his failings towards his people. The letter was written to coincide with the Emperor's visit to the Marseilles Exposition in 1922, and was publically circulated in several languages. In it, Phan Châu Trinh criticises the Emperor for his autocratic actions, for his extravagant waste of the people's resources, his insistence on sustaining the kowtow ceremony, and even the ways in which he garbed himself. In short, Phan Châu Trinh viewed him as out of touch with his people and obsessed with the trappings of rule, merely using the French colonial presence for self-aggrandisement, rather than tapping into it to benefit his subjects. The letter compares Khải Định unfavourably to the European monarchs who had come to operate under constitutional restrictions, and had become more concerned about the welfare of their people and state. Phan Châu Trinh concludes by insisting that the Emperor abdicate his position and turn over power to the Vietnamese people, thus permitting them to work in active collaboration with the French to improve their social welfare and to strengthen the nation.

How then does one link Ngo Van to Phan Châu Trinh? One might say that their link is a kind of passing of the revolutionary torch, for the two men represent a generational transition. Ngo Van first arrived in Saigon roughly six months after Phan Châu Trinh's death and high profile funeral in the spring of 1926. He entered a city on edge, both because of the lingering sentiment surrounding Phan Châu Trinh's death and the high-profile actions of a younger firebrand, Nguyễn An Ninh. It might also be argued that Ngo Van and his generation represented an evolution of the anticolonial movement, now inspired by the Russian Revolution and the growing influence of Marxist doctrine. Ngo Van's experience of French colonialism was shaped by the turmoil of these events and growing French suspicion of revolutionary activities over the late 1920s and early 1930s. Indeed, Ngo Van's memoir begins with his arrest and subsequent detention and torture in the Saigon Central Prison in the summer of 1936, and two later chapters also describe his time in prison. In this regard it has much in common with the larger genre of Vietnamese prison memoirs so carefully studied by Peter Zinoman in Colonial Bastille (2001). In the Crossfire, subtitled ‘Adventures of a Revolutionary’ is not a life history, but rather a collection of anecdotes focused on the period between 1936 and 1946 during which Ngo Van was most politically active. He does offer a brief survey of his life prior to coming to Saigon in 1926.

The book is valuable for the way in which it immerses the reader in the revolutionary struggles of the late 1920s and 1930s. Ngo Van, although well educated and well read, was a part of the urban working class, and his revolutionary enthusiasm was that of the politically active proletariat. In this regard he was far removed from Phan Châu Trinh's scholarly background. His memoir is also valuable for showing the schisms within the complex communist movement, in particular those between Ngo Van's Trotskyists and the Stalinist camp, schisms that were at their height in the Saigon of the 1930s. Indeed, the ‘crossfire’ of the volume's title is a reference to the contests for revolutionary predominance between these two camps. These culminated, as Ngo Van describes it, in the Fall of 1945.

With the surrender of the Japanese and the French efforts to restore their colonial control, the two Vietnamese revolutionary groups were openly jostling for power on the streets of Saigon. Ngo Van's Trotskyists were caught in what emerged to be the crossfire between the Stalinists led by the southern leader of the Việt Minh, Trần Văn Giàu on the one side and the arriving French troops on the other. In the end, both groups of Vietnamese revolutionaries were forced out of Saigon, but it was the Stalinists who succeeded in claiming the mantle of revolutionary leadership, while the Trotskyists found themselves marginalised or killed. This portion of his narrative is quite important for complicating the usual storyline of this period by illustrating the powerful tensions between Ngo Van's Trostkyists and the Stalinists represented by the Việt Minh and under the leadership of Trần Văn Giàu.

Ngo Van concludes the first part of his memoir with a description of his last two years in Saigon, watching the French carry out mopping-up operations and the Việt Minh steadily eliminating their Vietnamese rivals. For a memoir the author includes a substantial amount of historical background to which he was not an eyewitness, describing the actions of such figures as Phan Châu Trinh, Nguyễn An Ninh, and Hồ Chí Minh. The 30-page chapter that concludes the memoir proper is entitled ‘And my friends?’ It consists of a series of capsule accounts of friends and acquaintances, and his knowledge of their fates. In many of these brief biographies it is unclear exactly what the person's relationship to Ngo Van was, and the reader is left to wonder whether the word ‘friends’ in the chapter title is used somewhat loosely. Noted figures such as Phan Van Hum and Nguyễn An Ninh are both included in the ‘friends’ sections, yet the author admits that he met each only once.

In the crossfire concludes with a second section, entitled ‘In the land of the Héloïse’, in which Ngo Van describes portions of his life after 1948, when he left Vietnam for France. It details his experiences as a factory labourer in France, the racism that he encountered, and some of the humdrum details of daily life as a member of the ‘working class’. In short, it reveals Ngo Van as a man who did not leave his revolutionary ideals behind when he left Vietnam. Rather, he continued to identify with and celebrate the working class and its plight, simply moving the struggle to a new land.

Phan Châu Trinh and his political writings and In the crossfire are both valuable for their first-hand perspectives of the development and evolution of the Vietnamese anticolonial movements. Representing two different generations of activists and political thinkers, they reveal the ways in which these movements changed and adapted to circumstances and new political philosophies. While each represents a single individual's perception of the anticolonial effort, both are important for illustrating larger patterns of response to the reality of French domination. Neither publication is without faults — Phan Châu Trinh lacks an index, and In the crossfire is at times frustratingly episodic — but these are minor compared with the real value of these books. They each add substantially to our understanding of Vietnamese history over the first half of the twentieth century, offering nuance and detail of great value and at times of considerable emotion.