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NGUYEN THI MINH KHAI

Early life
Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai was born Nguyễn Thị Vịnh on 1 November 1910 in Vinh, Nghệ An Province, Vietnam.

Her father, Nguyen Huy Binh, had learnt French but, after failing the civil service examinations, chose to work as a railway official in Vinh. He frequently permitted her to retain the banned documents in an upstairs room at the train station. When Minh Khai grew more engaged in her revolutionary activities, her mother, a petty shopkeeper, supported her financially on her frequent visits to different provinces.

As a young student, she was heavily affected by the young radical schoolteachers such as Tran Phu and Ha Huy Tap.

In early 1930s, under mounting pressure from her parents of marrying into a prestigious family, she resolved to emancipate herself from her family and start her professional revolutionary career.

Revolutionary career
In 1927, she co-founded the New Revolutionary Party of Vietnam which was a predecessor of the Communist Party of Vietnam.

She was considered as one of the prominent female members of the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP).

In April 1930, she was delegated to Hong Kong and became a secretary for Hồ Chí Minh (at the time known as Nguyễn Ái Quốc) in the office of the Orient Bureau of the Comintern.

In April 1931, Minh Khai was detained by the British administration in Hong Kong. The British colonial government initially planned to turn her over to the French authorities. However, her Cantonese fluency enabled her to avoid being handed over to the French but instead, she was imprisoned in several Kuomintang jails in China from 1931 to 1934.

After being released from a Shanghai prison in 1934, she contacted the ICP and was arranged to arrive in Vladivostok and, ultimately, Moscow for further training.

In 1934, she and Lê Hồng Phong were sent as delegates in the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in Moscow. Later she married Lê.

In 1936, she returned to Vietnam and became the top leader of the communists in Saigon. She was seized by the French colonial government in 1940 and was executed by firing squad the next year. Her husband Lê had been jailed in June 1939, and later died in the tiger cages at Poulo Condore prison in September 1942.

Legacy
Today, Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai is honoured as a revolutionary martyr by the Vietnamese Communist Party, and some roads, schools, and administrative units in Vietnam are named after her. Some of these include the Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai urban ward in Bắc Kạn, and Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai High School.

RAW MATERIALS
A. "The Vietnamese Communist Nguyen Thi MInh Khai (1910–1941), remembered as one of the most illustrious of early Communist women in Vietnam and the highest-ranking woman in the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) in the 1930s. She is the only woman selected to address the Seventh Congress of the Commintern in Moscow. She uses this platform to highlight issues of gender oppresion within both the colonized societies and the West."

B.1. "In fact, Minh Khai managed to gain the attention of Nguyen Ai QUoc (1890-1969, the future Ho Chi Minh), then the most senior Vietnamese nationalist leader and high-ranking Comintern representative for Southeast Asia, whom she apparently married in late 1930 or early 1931."

B.2. "French policing action soon separated her from Nguyen Ai QUoc, but before long MInh Khai continued with her clandestine activities in CHina.Politely but firmly she rejected the advances of another party member and arguably profited from her association with Nguyen Ai QUoc, whose aura is likely to have helped her get selected by the ICP's newly formed Overseas Bureau for participation in the Seventh Comintern COngress in Moscow in 1935. Whie this elevated her to the upper ranks of the ICP and further allowed to study at the Comintern Congress to one focusing on women's issues, even though she primarily addressed wider issues, such as responding to French militarism in the Far East with the mobilisation of a broad popular front.

C. MInh Khai was arrested by the British in HOng Kong on suspicion of subversive activities, but convinced them that she was Chinese and was thus extradited to Canton, where she spent some months in prison. Later in 1934, Minh Khai was deemed sufficiently senior in the new ICP, to be sent as a delegate to the Seventh Comintern COngress. At some point HO and Minh Khai were supposed to get married, but (...) this marriage had still not taken place. In March 1941, Minh Khai was executed by a French firing squad in Saigon, after documents were discovered in her house, which appeared to incriminate her. (...) His reaction to his comrade Minh Khai's execution in 1941 goes unrecorded. He may have regarded such a sacrifice for the Party as part of the inevitable historical process. It was embarrassing for the Vietnamese authorities in later years that seh claimed to be Ho's wife, although she subsequently married another of his colleagues.

D. Minh Khai married to Le Hong Phong in Moscow before returning to Indochina. In a letter sent Bui Hai Thieu in Najing, dated 31 March 1933, seized by the Indochinese Surete, she responded to friends of a man with whom she had had a liaison in the past: "The marriage is nonsensem a bore, trouble... Now it's all over... My only husband is the Communist Revolution." This shows that she;s among the many men and women throughout history who sacrificed themselves for a religious or political cause deemed worthy of their self-abnegation.

Rear Admiral Platon, Secretary of State for the Colonies in the Vichy government, had asked Governor-General Decoux to commute her sentence because she was woman.Her father, who worked at the train station in Vinh, wrote a moving letter to Maréchal Pétain asking him to give his daughter a reprieve.

Minh Khai had several aliases, including Duy and Lan. Duy or Co Duy (Cô Duy) is used when she was working in Hong Kong as an assistant to Ho Chi Minh from 1930 to 1931.(Note: In the letters seized by the Indochinese Surete in Ynnan in 1937, there was one jacket cover 2890 mentioning: "Nguyen Ai Quoc's wife could be Nguyen THi MInh Khai, called Co Duy") Lan or Tran Lan.