Marxism in Asia

In Southeast Asia, Marxism found its main political expression in Vietnam and, abortively, in Indonesia. Vietnamese Marxism was bound up with nationalism from the outset. In the early post–World War I years, Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969), the preeminent figure in the history of the movement who was initially attracted by the nationalist appeals of the Leninist theory of imperialism, became a founding member of the French Communist Party. Ho united several small Vietnamese Marxian-oriented parties into the Indochina Communist Party in 1930, but the party (and Marxism in general) were suppressed by the French colonial administration, forcing Ho to operate largely from abroad until World War II.

In 1941, the Vichy-controlled French colonial regime in Vietnam began active collaboration with the Japanese army. The conditions were thus created for the ICP to emerge as the organizer of nationalist resistance to foreign domination—in the form of the Viet Minh, established in 1941 as an antifascist united front that took on an increasingly military character. While the Viet Minh was broadly based, it was Communist controlled—and its leader Ho Chi Minh became the symbol of Vietnamese nationalism. Adopting guerilla warfare tactics, Communist-led military forces successively fought the Vichy French colonial regime, the Japanese army in 1945, the post-war French colonial administration, and eventually the United States in a war that lasted more than three decades. The Communist victory in 1975 was essentially the triumph of Vietnamese nationalism. Marxism-Leninism, the official ideology, lent a social revolutionary dimension to the movement. But nationalism was always at the heart of its goals and appeals.

The Communist success in Indochina was not replicated elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Indonesia offers a particularly striking contrast. The Indonesian Communist Party, organized under the influence of Dutch Marxists in the 1920s, was among the earliest and largest Marxist parties in Asia. But the party's identification with ethnically Chinese Indonesians, its pro-Beijing sympathies, and its hostility to Islam undermined its nationalist credentials. Thus, the Communist bid for power in 1965 was crushed by the Indonesian army operating under nationalist and Islamic banners. Neither Indonesian Marxism nor Communism survived the bloodbath that took an estimated half-million lives, mostly ethnic Chinese.

Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the main political manifestations of Marxism took the form of abortive Communist-led guerrilla insurgencies. Hostility to ethnic Chinese, as well as to China, was a major factor in the failure of Communist movements in Malaysia, Thailand, and Burma. Only in the Philippines, where Chinese migrants are socially well-integrated, does a Communist insurgency continue to simmer.