Nguyễn Khắc Viện

Nguyễn Khắc Viện (5 February 1913 in Hương Sơn – 10 May 1997) was a Vietnamese historian, literary critic, sometime dissident, and advocate of a Vietnamese health exercise dưỡng sinh similar to yoga.^[1][2]

Nguyễn Khắc Viện

Viện was a member of the French Communist Party formerly in charge of external propaganda and statements to foreign press.^[3][4] However his circulating of criticism of the government in the 1980s^[5] led to a ban on his writings till the early 1990s.^[6]

Life

Khắc Viện first came to Paris, France, in 1937, a time when the capital was a hotbed for anti-imperialist political exiles. He would stay in the country for twenty years, wherein he pursued an advanced degree in medicine, became a doctor and a writer.^[7]

He became a member of the French Communist Party in 1947, two years after Ho Chi Minh's declaration of Vietnamese independence.^[8] and worked on propaganda, campaigns, and discussions for Vietnamese national liberation with both French intellectuals and Vietnamese soldiers in the French army.

Khắc Viện was a prominent voice for Vietnamese national liberation since 1953 until his expulsion to Vietnam in 1963.^[8] He became the editor of the French journals Études Vietnamiennes (Vietnamese Studies) and the Courrier du Vietnam (Vietnamese Courier).^[7] Under the pseudonym Nguyen Nghe, he wrote a prominent critique of the book Wretched of the Earth by fellow anti-colonialist Franz Fanon, in the essay "Frantz Fanon and the Problems of Independence."^[7]

He married Nguyen Thi Nhat in 1966, and they had one adopted daughter.^[8]