For more than 50 years, most of which he spent away from Southeast Asia, Ho worked single-mindedly to realize the end of French colonialism and the erection of a Vietnamese national state....
... When he turned to the West, Ho Chi Minh rejected the traditional conservative Vietnamese nationalist course of militarism and a mandarin society, and instead chose the course of republicanism, democracy and popular sovereignty. Meeting other Vietnamese nationalists in Paris, Ho found he could not accept their course of peaceful cooperation with the French, and sought another solution. ...
... Excited by the prospect of a peace based on President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points — especially the point concerning national self-determination of peoples — Ho drafted a modest eight-point program for Vietnam and, renting a formal suit, sought an audience with leaders of the great powers. His proposals would not have meant independence for Vietnam, but instead called for greater equity, more basic freedoms, and Vietnamese representation in the colonial government.
Unable to gain a hearing at Versailles, Ho then pursued the colonial question in the French Socialist Party, of which he was a member. At the Party Congress at Tours on Christmas Day, 1920, Ho Chi Minh sided with the Communist wing of the party since the Communists advocated immediate independence for all colonial areas.
