Trần Trọng Kim
Trần Trọng Kim (* 1883 in Hà Tinh , Annam ; † December 2, 1953 in Đà Lạt ) was a Vietnamese scholar, civil servant and politician. For a few months in 1945 he was Prime Minister of the government of the "independent" Empire of Vietnam under Japanese occupation.
Life
Trần Trọng Kim first worked as an interpreter in Tinh Binh ( Tongking ). In 1905 he went to France as an employee of a private company. Three years later he received a scholarship from what was then the École coloniale , later the École nationale de la France d'Outre-Mer , which allowed him to take up teacher training at the Ecole normal of Melun ( Seine-et-Marne department ).
After his return to Vietnam in September 1911, he entered the school service of Annam. He slowly rose to the post of Tongking Public Elementary School Inspector by 1942. However, he was known less as a teacher than for his learned works on the history, Buddhism and Confucianism of Vietnam. He was an active and leading member of several Confucian and Buddhist societies.
In 1939 he was appointed a member of the Tongkinger parliament. After French Indochina was incorporated into the Greater East Asian sphere of affluence , several Japanese experts consulted him on questions of Vietnamese culture . These contacts made him suspicious of the ( Vichy ) French colonial administration under General Jean Decoux .
When the Sûreté carried out its second purge of pro-Japanese Vietnamese in the fall of 1943, Kim was brought to Hanoi by the Japanese military police ( Kempeitai ) on October 28, 1943 . Together with Duan Ba Trac , with whom he had worked on a dictionary, he convinced the Japanese that it would be best to evacuate them to Singapore . At the beginning of November both were brought to Saigon , where they were both accommodated as "guests" of the Dai Nan Kooshi (大 南 公司) company, a front organization of the Kempeitai. On January 1, 1944, the two of them traveled on a Japanese ship to Singapore, where Trac died of lung cancer in December. Kim was then sent to Bangkok. On March 30, 1945 he was ordered back to Saigon, ostensibly to advise the Japanese on history. The Japanese occupiers had previously - on March 9th and 10th - disarmed and interned the French colonial troops.
In fact, he was introduced to General Kawamura Saburō by the 38th Army and Lieutenant General Hayashi Hidetzumi , who revealed that he, along with his friend Huang Xuang Han , had been selected to consult with Bảo Đại in Hu on the formation of an independent Vietnamese government .
Head of government
After arriving on April 5, he consulted the king several times. On the 16th, he agreed to form a government. On the same day, the commander of the 38th Army Tsuchihashi Yuitsu was appointed governor-general of Vietnam of Japan. Kim made a cabinet list of 10 names that he - in the Confucian sense - considered talented and worthy (tài duức) . They all had a modern education, mostly in France; however, none of the nominees had political experience. All but one were under 50 years of age. One of the nominees, Luu Van Lang , declined the appointment, the others had been in Hue by early May to begin their work. Tran Van Chuong (* 1898) became deputy prime minister and foreign minister .
During the four-month term of office, this cabinet initiated a large number of measures, which, however, inevitably remained ineffective due to the circumstances of the time. The most lasting effects were the change of the country's name, now officially Vietnam , and the substitution of the discriminatory French term Annamites with the term Vietmien . The chosen national flag was again a symbol of the Republic of Vietnam in a very similar form from 1954 to 1975. The main focus was on "national unity" (doan ket) of the three parts of the country. To the extent that the government actually exercised control, however, it was limited to the north - which was then suffering from famine - and the center of the country. Timid attempts to reform the bureaucracy also failed because of the hostility of the parallel Viet Minh government . The economic situation deteriorated rapidly as the Japanese withdrew 787 million yen from the state treasury and used paper money to fuel inflation. Some measures that have worked have been the reduction of the poll tax (thuể thân) for the poor, the introduction of exams in Vietnamese (Romanised) language, and a revision of the penalties of political prisoners. A partial amnesty from May onwards not only freed a number of the Viet Minh, but also many criminals, for example members of the Bình Xuyên .
The government did not have any military means of power, it was completely dependent on the Japanese occupation forces, who, however, "handed" certain powers over to it on June 29 - without ever having diplomatically recognized them. On August 8th, as part of the " reunification of Vietnam ", the big cities were placed under the "governance" of Kim. In the chaotic days after Japan's surrender, the Viet Minh effectively took power across the country. As a result, Kim's government, which had been plagued by resignations since the beginning of the month, disbanded when Bảo Đại abdicated on August 25, 1945.
Kim then returned to his studies.
Works and literature
Kim published several books, in Romanized Vietnamese language ( Qu vc ngữ ) , on Buddhism, Confucianism and Vietnamese history, which made his erudition known. His memoir Mot Gon Gio Bui was published posthumously in 1969.
- Shiraishi Masaya; The background to the Formation of the Tran Trong Kim Cabinet in April 1945; in: Indochina in the 1940s and 1950s; New York 1992, ISBN 0-87727-401-0 ; Pp. 87-112
- Tran Trong Kim: Viet Nam Su Luoc (a history of Vietnam; orig. 1919)
- Tran Trong Kim: La Doctrine des Nho: Confucius et ses disciples . Hà nội 1924 (Impr. Thực nghiệp)
- Vu Ngu Chieu; The other Side of the 1945 Vietnamese Revolution. The Empire of Viet-Nam March-August 1945; in: Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 45 (1986), pp. 298-328
See also
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Trần Trọng Kim |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Vietnamese politician, premier in 1945 under the Japanese occupation |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1883 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Hà Tinh , Annam |
| DATE OF DEATH | 2nd December 1953 |
| Place of death | Đà Lạt |