How to speak to the masses, part II: Hồ Chí Minh as a moral and linguistic exemplar and the dynamics of register formation in 20th century Vietnam

Abstract

AbstractHồ Chí Minh's extended essay Fixing the Way We Work, written in 1947 after he and other high‐ranking members of the recently formed DRV (Democratic Republic of Vietnam; Việt Nam Dân chủ Cộng hòa), had been forced to retreat from Hanoi to the uplands of Thái Nguyên province, elaborates on organizational and practical problems within the party and obstacles to mass mobilization. The final chapter describes a way of speaking HCM refers to as ba hoa and which he sees as a “speech sickness” afflicting many low and middle ranking cadres who are in direct contact with the masses. In the first part of this essay, I argued that the largely proscriptive and negatively formulated instructions articulated in this context cohere by virtue of a common focus on problems of action. Specifically, ba hoa names a stereotyped speech register in which the connection between speaking and doing comes undone. In what follows, the second part of the essay, I describe the other, positively formulated half of the larger project of register formation: the elevation of HCM's own mode of expression (phong cách diễn đạt) to the status of an exemplary model that all Vietnamese people are expected to emulate. This involved extensive metasemiotic elaboration and (re)framing which was accomplished, in large part, through the writings of contemporaries and later interpreters. A consideration of this literature along with an analysis of the continued spectral presence of HCM in contemporary Vietnam allows for a specification of the semiotics of exemplarity.