Melody Tze Yin Shum

South China was a semi-familiar cultural and intellectual environment that provided Vietnamese revolutionaries with the resources needed to sustain a revolution overseas. My project examines three issues: the role of South China in the Vietnamese Revolution and the structure of that revolution, the nature of imperialism and extraterritoriality, and the nature of Asian communism. I reconstruct these networks by tracing the footsteps of different revolutionaries. Existing bonds between the Vietnamese and the Chinese were strengthened by shared anti-imperialist sentiments. The existence of foreign concessions, and later warlord-controlled areas in China, allowed Vietnamese revolutionaries of all political colors to construct networks that bypassed the surveillance of their French colonizers.