Vietnamese Railway Workers during the Revolutionary High Tide

Abstract

Vietnamese railway workers at the Trường Thi workshops in colonial Vinh, north-central Vietnam did not join the uprisings against French authority that rocked Nghệ An, Hà Tĩnh and Quảng Ngãi provinces in 1930 and 1931. Although the railway workers by then shared a common vocational identity and were unified in seeking improvement of workplace concerns, ethnic, sectarian, regional and status differences among them weakened a common political identity. The heterogeneity of railway workers' attitudes towards political alignment at the time encourages a broader re-examination of the attitudes of participants and observers in the Nghệ Tĩnh Soviets overall.