Ho Chi Minh

Ho Chi Minh was born on 19 May 1890 in his mother's village in Nghe An, a poor province in central Vietnam with a tradition of resistance to the French. His father Nguyen Sinh Sac passed one of the highest Confucian examinations in 1901 and became a district magistrate, but was dismissed and wandered through the south for the rest of his life as a teacher and healer. His mother died in Hue in 1901.

As a schoolboy in Hue he witnessed the peasant protests of 1908 against taxes and forced labour. He chose neither the career of a mandarin nor the road to Japan pointed out by older nationalists, but wanted to get to know the West. After leaving in 1911 he sailed as a ship's hand and worked in Marseille, New York, Boston and London, among other places. In Paris he earned his living as a retoucher of photographs and wrote for left-wing papers.

In Lenin's theses on the colonial question he found in 1920 what he was looking for: a movement that made the liberation of the colonies its cause. For him communism always remained bound up with national independence. As an agent of the Comintern he worked under dozens of aliases in Moscow, Canton, Siam and Hong Kong, trained young Vietnamese and sat in British and Chinese prisons.

In 1945 he used the power vacuum after the Japanese surrender to seize power with the Viet Minh. In 1946 he negotiated in France for months for a compromise and chose war only when that failed. His style was that of the simple, approachable 'uncle' in sandals and a khaki suit; behind that image stood an experienced party leader who favoured collective leadership and steered between Moscow and Beijing to obtain support from both.

Since the 1880s Vietnam had been brought wholly under French rule and divided into the colony of Cochinchina and the protectorates of Annam and Tonkin. The administration rested on monopolies on salt, alcohol and opium, on plantations and mines and on a small French-educated elite. Risings were harshly put down, such as the Yen Bai mutiny of 1930.

The two world wars undermined the colonial empires. The Japanese occupation of Indochina (1940–1945) broke French prestige; a famine in the north cost an estimated one to two million lives in 1944–1945. After 1945 decolonisation became entangled with the Cold War: the United States saw the Viet Minh as part of world communism and in the end paid most of the French costs of the war.

The victory at Dien Bien Phu is regarded as the first time an Asian independence movement defeated a European colonial army in a major pitched battle, and it inspired movements from Algeria to Cuba. The Geneva Accords divided Vietnam provisionally along the seventeenth parallel; the promised elections of 1956 were not held, and the struggle for the south grew into the Vietnam War, in which an estimated one to three million Vietnamese died.

In the north the party built a state on the Soviet and Chinese model. During the land reform 'landlords' were brought before people's tribunals; estimates of the number of executions range from a few thousand to more than ten thousand. In 1956 Ho publicly acknowledged 'errors' and the party secretary responsible was replaced. Writers and scholars who asked for more freedom in those years were silenced.

According to the official account Ho Chi Minh never married, and he lived in a simple house on stilts beside the former palace of the governor-general. From the early 1960s his health failed and Le Duan took over the direction of the war in the south. He died on 2 September 1969, the national day; for that reason 3 September was long given as the date of his death. He did not live to see reunification in 1975.

In Vietnam his memory is part of the state ideology and criticism of him is not permitted. Foreign historians debate whether he was first and foremost a nationalist or a communist; biographers such as William Duiker and Sophie Quinn-Judge describe him as both at once. How great his personal responsibility was for the repression of the 1950s, when his actual power was already declining, remains disputed.