Leading Western-trained Viet-namese communist who helped Vietnamese national-ists take over in Saigon in August 1945. Born in Tan An province in southern Vietnam, Tran Van Giau pursued his secondary studies in Toulouse, France, where he became involved in radical politics. He joined the French Communist Party in May 1929 and in 1931 he traveled to the Soviet Union, where he studied at the University of Toilers in the Far East. After pursuing advanced ideological training there, he joined the Comintern which dispatched him to Cochinchina in 1935 to build up the Territorial Committee for Cochinchina on behalf of the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP). Shortly after his return, the colonial police arrested him for illegal political activities. Tran Van Giau regained his liberty after four months. In 1935, the French sentenced him to five years of prison for his involvement in the “Deschamps affair”. Upon his release in 1940, he was interned in a “Special Workers Unit” (Formation spéciale de travailleurs) in southern Vietnam, from which he escaped shortly thereafter.
Following the Allied liberation of France and General Charles de Gaulle’s rapprochement with the Soviet Union, Tran Van Giau entered into contact with French Gaullists in Indochina concerning the need to collaborate against the common enemy, the Japanese. In December 1944, he contacted secretly the Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière leader in Indochina Louis Caput along similar lines, just as Truong Chinh was doing in the north. From this time, Tran Van Giau produced brochures and published clandestine papers explaining why the Indochinese should collaborate with the New France led by De Gaulle against the Japanese in exchange for French colonial reform and eventual decolonization. During this time, he was not in direct contact with the ICP leadership located in northern Vietnam, nor was he a member of the Viet Minh, which was also located far to the north. Tran Van Giau worked closely with Pham Ngoc Thach in mobilizing the youth in the Saigon area and would use Thach and his Vanguard Youth League (Thanh Nien Tien Phong) to promote the communist position in the south following the Japanese defeat in August 1945. Relations, however, between communists such as Tran Van Giau and non-communist political, national, and religious groups, such as the Cao Dai, Hoa Hao, and Binh Xuyen, were difficult from the start.
In August and September 1945, Tran Van Giau served as chairman of the Provisional Administrative Committee for Nam Bo and supported the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) declared in Hanoi by Ho Chi Minh on 2 September 1945. Recalled to Hanoi in November 1945, Tran Van Giau headed a special Bureau for Nam Bo (Phong Nam Bo). While he advised the government on southern affairs, he ceded his communist leadership position in the south to Le Duan, who headed up the revamped Territorial Committee for Nam Bo (Xu Uy Nam Bo) from October, and Nguyen Binh, who ran military affairs for all of the south from December. In 1946, the government sent Tran Van Giau to Thailand to procure arms for the southern resistance and to win over Thai support (Tran Van Giau had known Prime Minister Pridi Banomyong since their days in France). Tran Van Giau represented the DRV at the Asian Relations Conference held in New Delhi in 1947. For unclear reasons, he was recalled to Vietnam in 1948 and arrived in Inter-Zone IV (Lien Khu IV) sometime in 1949. He briefly served as the director of Communications and Propaganda in this zone before dedicating himself to educational and intellectual matters. Until the end of the Indochina War in 1954, he worked in central Vietnam as the vice director of the Provisional University of Inter-Zone IV. It remains unclear why he was removed from important political and diplomatic positions in the government, Party, and in Southeast Asia. See also HOANG VAN HOAN; LE HY; TRAN NGOC DANH.