Phan Bội Chau

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Phan Boi Chau, portrait photography, 1940

Phan Bội Châu (born December 26, 1867 in Nghệ An Province, † October 29, 1940 in Huế , French Indochina ) was a Vietnamese nationalist author and activist. He was one of the leading figures of the Vietnamese nationalism that was forming against French colonial rule at the beginning of the twentieth century. Despite little tangible success, he became a well-known symbolic figure of resistance against French colonial rule in French Indochina.

Origin and career

Phan Boi Chau was born into a family of landowners in Nghệ An Province. At the turn of the century he passed his exams in the capital and a career in the mandarinate appeared to Phan Boi Chau mapped out. However, Phan chose not to pursue this traditional career path and instead devoted himself to the emerging nationalist movement.

Political activism

In 1903, Phan Boi Chau founded a reform-oriented nationalist society for modernization ( Duy Tan Hoi ) with the support of the reform-oriented prince of the Nguyễn dynasty Cuong De . In 1905 Phan Boi Chau moved to Japan . From there he wrote political treatises in which he called on his compatriots to resist the French colonial rulers and to join the nationalist organizations in exile. In 1906, the publication reached Letters from Overseas in Blood. great fame in Vietnam. He thus became one of the leading exponents of the Movement to Learn from Japan as a model for modernization.

In 1908 he had to leave Japan and settled in the Chinese Empire . Here he had contact with Sun Yat-sen , whose guomindang propagated the overthrow of the empire in favor of a republic. After the Xinhai Revolution in 1911, he restructured his society for modernization based on the Guomindang model. The organization now called the Society for the Restoration of Vietnam ( Viet Nam Quang Phuc Hoi ) tried unsuccessfully to organize uprisings in the colony. Phan Boi Chau was briefly arrested in China. Towards the end of the First World War , Phan resigned himself to the prospects of success in armed resistance against the French. Phan Boi Chau changed his political line as a result and outlined the possibility of modernizing his homeland in cooperation with the French colonial rulers.

Prosecution

Phan Boi Chau's home in Hue, where he was under house arrest for 15 years

In 1925, Phan Boi Chau was arrested by French agents in the international settlement in Shanghai and taken to Hanoi . There he was charged and convicted of high treason by the colonial authorities . He spent the rest of his life under house arrest in Huế, where he died in 1940.

souvenir

Phan Boi Chau achieved national fame as a pioneer of anti-colonial nationalism in Vietnam. A museum is dedicated to him at his final resting place in Hue. His memoirs were published in Hanoi in 1957 under the title Eine Selbstkritik ( Tu Phe Phan ).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Bruce L. Lockhart, William J. Duiker: Historical Dictionary of Vietnam, Oxford, 2006, pp. 306f
  2. ↑ Pierre Brocheux, Daniel Hémery: Indochina. An ambiguous colonization, 1858-1954. Berkeley 2009, p. 295
  3. ^ Duiker, W. (1971). Phan Boi Chau: Asian Revolutionary in a Changing World. The Journal of Asian Studies, 31 (1), 77-88. doi: 10.2307 / 2053053
personal data
SURNAME Phan Bội Chau
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Vietnamese intellectual and nationalist
DATE OF BIRTH December 26, 1867
PLACE OF BIRTH Nghệ An Province
DATE OF DEATH October 29, 1940
Place of death Huế