Patterns of Political Party Behavior in South Vietnam

Abstract

Following the initialing of the Treaty of Hue in 1884 ceding Tonkin and Annam to France as “protectorates”, the Vietnamese Emperor Ham Nghi led a nationalist imperial party against consummation of the colonialists gains. This Nguyen imperial party, a regional guerrilla and terrorist faction based only in the north central section of the nation and operating from highland fiefs, relied upon violence, the personality of its leader, the mystic of his cause and the mystic of nationalism. This combative “party,” while hardly a party in the strictest sense of the term and perhaps not even a movement in the strictest sense of that term, was defeated with the capture of its leader in 1888. Yet this party has continued to serve in miniature as the model for subsequent political party activities in Vietnam. Nearly all of the numerous Vietnamese parties have more or less emulated the patterns of behavior of the first anti-colonial party and few in South Vietnam have gone much beyond modifying the tactics of that vanguard group.