Talk:Zeng Xueming

Ambiguous sentence
"Representatives of the Chinese government told her to stop trying to contact Hồ and promised to provide for her needs if she did."

If she did what? It's not clear. If she stopped trying to contact Ho? r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 21:30, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Naming concerns
Two things... first of all, Hồ Chí Minh is referred to throughout the article by his family name, Hồ, whereas Tăng Tuyết Minh is referred to as Minh. This seems inconsistent, and unless you have a good reason for having done so I suggest you use Tăng, her family name.

Secondly (this is not a style issue but just a content question), when and how did she get her Vietnamese name? I assume she wasn't given a Vietnamese name at birth, given that both her parents were Chinese... r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 01:17, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
 * As a Chinese person, her article should use her Chinese name and not the Vietnamese transliteration of her name. DHN (talk) 03:51, 9 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Duiker and Brocheux both call her "Tang Tuyet Minh," so that seems to be the established convention in English. I confirmed with Google that "Tang Tuyet Minh" gets way more hits than the Chinese-oriented alternatives. How logical is that given that she never even visited Vietnam? Vietnamese are generally referred to by given name. "Ho" is a special case because this is a pseudonym. (You wouldn't call Meat Loaf, Mr. Loaf.) For a typical three-syllable Vietnamese name, the short form is the last syllable, so that is what I did here. Duiker uses "Tuyet Minh" as the short form, so that is a possibility too. In formal written Vietnamese, it's the full name every time; They never shorten it.
 * In response to your question on where she got a Vietnamese name from: Each Chinese character has a traditional Vietnamese reading. So there is an automatic translation. Even Hong Kong film stars with no relationship to Vietnam get Vietnamese names. Kauffner (talk) 06:12, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
 * That sounds good, then. I'll leave a hatnote on the page to clarify this for readers. r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 12:58, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Ho's Beautiful Woman
Their togetherness lasted a bare few months. The knowledge that she had married a great man would likely have provided her with some comfort, but the comfort was surely no substitute for lost love. That asides, one or two comments are in order.

1.) The Vietnamese government does not do itself or anyone else a favor by denying or concealing that Ho had a woman in his life (The photo on the main page shows a beautiful young woman's face). That she was non-Vietnamese shouldn't have been seen as a problem at all (Happening all the time, from ancient times to the present days: Normal for statesmen to marry foreigners). Celibacy is not at all a measure for someone's dedication to something, the Vietnamese government doesn't seem to understand that.

2.) About the names: All Vietnamese dynasties are referred to by their family names. Uncle Ho and the poetess Ho-Xuan-Huong have always been referred to by their family names. Addressing people by their given names must be a recent development. Westerners, don't play along with the improper addressing game. Do refer to Ho's woman by her surname, be it in its Vietnamese or Chinese version of the spelling. The Vietnamese must re-learn to address people properly, by their family names. (Besides, Nguyen/Ruan is not a "pure" Vietnamese name; All contemporary Vietnamese carry Chinese surnames. Koreans and to a lesser extent Japanese, too, carry Chinese surnames.)

Uwe 123.243.142.170 (talk) 02:21, 25 June 2009 (UTC)


 * "Uwe": Sorry this seems to be a "I know better than the Vietnamese themselves" view point. How people are addressed in Vietnam is up to the Vietnamese people to decide. Addressing someone by his/her given name has a practical reason: try finding a Mr. Nguyễn in Hanoi, people will laugh at you. By the way Nguyễn is a proper Vietnamese name, whatever the etymological source of that surname is. Nước mắm ngon quá! (talk) 17:40, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Problematic sources
This article uses several problematic sources: Reference #1 seems to be a self-published website, as is source #3 which is an online forum of overseas Vietnamese, and #5, which is a Vietnamese translation of the original article reposted on what appears to be an opposition site. Removing these sources will not affect the contents of this article substantially, and I think would give it more credibility. DHN (talk) 03:59, 9 June 2009 (UTC)


 * There wouldn't be much left of the article if we took out all of that. The first and third references are to published Chinese magazine articles. The problem is that the links are to copies kept on self-published Web sites? This is like rejecting a photocopy. One of the sites even has a scan of the original article. Brocheux refers to the same articles in his published biography, but of course without linking. Would it be better to take out the links? I don't see how that would be an improvement. Kauffner (talk) 05:16, 9 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Self-published websites might claim that they're posting copies of the original articles, but how do we know that for a fact? The Vietnamese-language article uses Brocheux (who referred to Huang and also himself looked at the intercepted letter at the Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer) and Duiker.  Basically all the sources trace back to Huang, with Brocheux backing it up with his research at the CAOM). DHN (talk) 06:40, 9 June 2009 (UTC)


 * It wasn't Brocheux who went to CAOM. It was Daniel Hémery, another French author. In any case, it seems this a lost cause and I'll just take article down. Kauffner (talk) 07:13, 9 June 2009 (UTC)


 * WEll there are proper sources. Rverted  YellowMonkey  ( cricket calendar poll! ) 07:37, 9 June 2009 (UTC)


 * This is a fairly new article. No it should NOT be taken down. But are all these sources proper? Hardly. Like someone above said. Trần Gia Phụng is a well-known overseas Vietnamese who has long been opposing the current government, with a point of view that is in no way neutral, not unlike many others. The title of his article alone is a fairly obvious insult to Hồ. You can't call him wrong, but you can't call him a neutral and proper source either. And what Huang Zheng says is an unverified claim at test, unlike Duiker who has at least received more media coverage and peer-review(while still controversial). The thing that matters here is the letters that Daniel Hémery found. In short, Duiker and Daniel Hémery are ok for now, but Trần Gia Phụng is NOT okay, and Huang Zheng's work shouldn't be seen as a proper source, unless someone could give a good reason. So I'll probably put a note and hopefully someone will improve the article . This is obviously an article where some people wouldn't care about telling the truth. If you think my edit is intrusive, you can change it as you wish, but I ask that at least remind everyone that some of the sources still need some cleanup.Divinemangor (talk) 10:00, 30 August 2009 (UTC)


 * NPOV doesn't mean that every source must be neutral, but that the different opinions on the subject should be balanced. I haven't found any pro-government sources that discuss this issue, but it would certainly improve the article if such material was included. Huang's 2001 article was published in a scholarly journal in China and is cited as an authority by Brocheaux. Kauffner (talk) 15:41, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

"Tăng" or "Tằng"?
Bongdentoiac changed "Tăng Tuyết Minh" to "Tằng Tuyết Minh" in both vi.wiki and en.wiki but didn't use any reliable source for this name. Every Chinese-Vietnamese dictionaries have a section named "Chinese names", which writes "Tăng", not "Tằng". "Tằng" is Vietnamese transliteration of 曾 in Han-Viet dictionary, but it is normal to have different pronunciation when that character used in people's name. Tân (talk) 00:46, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Hán Việt Từ Điển gives both spellings, so take your pick. If vi Wiki is going with "Tăng", we might as well follow them. Dieuhuyen (talk) 12:22, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Tằng is for "céng", while Tăng is for "zēng", so the matter is clear for this one. (Anonymous coward: 2A01:E34:EC2B:49E0:290:4CFF:FE0D:F43E (talk) 17:52, 28 June 2015 (UTC))

Move discussion in progress
There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Ngô Bảo Châu which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RM bot 02:00, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Pinyin
I understand the case for giving this name in pinyin. But the name used in the text needs to correspond to the title or readers will be confused. The current title is romanized according to Han-Viet, the Vietnamese equivalent to pinyin or Wade-Giles. So it is a systematic spelling, not a "Vietnamese pronunciation of her name." Dieuhuyen (talk) 12:28, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

Requested move

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the proposal was moved. --BDD (talk) 19:02, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

Tang Tuyet Minh → Zeng Xueming – The article concerns the Chinese Catholic girl (1905-1991) married by Hồ Chí Minh during his exile in Guangzhou in the 1920s. Since the sources are drawn from recent work by several Chinese academics the name in most (Chinese) sources is naturally Zeng Xueming. This has been picked up in some Vietnamese-language sources where the Chinese name is transliterated by character value as Tăng Tuyết Minh, and this then picked up by 2 English sources: Tucker Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War and Brochard as Tăng Tuyết Minh. But this is a bio of a Chinese person who never left China and never spoke a word of Vietnamese, and the main sources are in Chinese. So far only one English source has picked up the pinyin name (Pham, misspelling Zeng as the more common surname Zheng), but with no real English sources to speak of we should follow what exists - Chinese sources, and Chinese name for Chinese person. As our WP:UE "German for German politicians" guideline etc. In ictu oculi (talk) 02:43, 13 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Comment She's from Guangzhou, shouldn't her Cantonese name be used instead of Mandarin or Vietnamese? And considering the time period, I would think that she would appear in contemporary accounts using Wade-Giles, not pinyin. (And the article should indicate all of these versions of her name, and any modern simplified Chinese) -- 65.94.171.126 (talk) 05:46, 13 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Not normally, because WP:PINYIN says to default to pinyin unless a very clear case for Cantonese is established. Contemporary records barely exist, moderns sources only. In ictu oculi (talk) 10:26, 13 May 2014 (UTC)
 * A Cantonese name is kind of vulgar, and she would not get a passport or be interviewed by a newspaper under a dialect title. She was an educated girl. Shrigley (talk) 21:46, 18 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Support per In ictu oculi. Chinese romanization is preferable for a Chinese person who never lived in Vietnam. -Zanhe (talk) 20:26, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Support because it's utterly surreal to posthumously make up a Vietnamese name for a Chinese person and have them be known as such when most of the research on her now comes from Chinese sources, and research on her is forbidden in Vietnam à la Nikolai Yezhov. Shrigley (talk) 21:46, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Comment: Are there English-language sources that referred to her as Zeng Xueming? All English-language sources I've seen refer to her using the Vietnamese transliteration. DHN (talk) 22:16, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
 * No, not yet, only Pham, who as above misspelled the pinyin. Tucker and Brochard only cite the Vietnamese academics which is third hand. In ictu oculi (talk) 10:09, 21 May 2014 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

cantonese though
trying to put the Cantonese Jyutping romanisation of her name next to the Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin. It's actually in the source already (search for "cj=Zang1 Syut3ming4"), but I can't get it show up with a link to Jyutping as currently happens for Hanyu Pinyin. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 107.188.17.6 (talk) 04:29, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

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