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While any struggle for power in Hanoi was being kept wholly under wraps, there was no disguising anxieties in Peking and Moscow. Chinese Communist Premier Chou Enlai, accompanied by a brace of high-ranking aides, arrived in Hanoi less than 48 hours after the announcement of Ho's death and almost immediately went into lengthy conferences with the North Vietnamese Politburo. Next day he flew back to Peking, probably to avoid a confrontation with incoming Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin. The semicomic scramble to avoid a meeting brought into the spotlight once more the Sino-Soviet rivalry for favor in North Viet Nam.
In this struggle, Ho's role was all-important. He succeeded not only in avoiding a rupture in relations with either nation but also in keeping aid flowing in. "He was the man who kept Moscow and Peking in balance," said Jean
Lacouture, a French biographer of Ho, "with an inevitable tendency for the Soviets. His death is a loss to Moscow." Privately, Soviet sources conceded as much. They noted that Ho's great prestige had enabled him to tread a neutral course between Peking and Moscow, and that his successors may find it more difficult to do so.
Altering the Equations
There is little question that a basic power equation was unbalanced by Ho's death. That was altogether fitting, for during his lifetime he had altered many an equation.
Ho was born in 1890 in Nghe An province, in what is today North Viet Nam. According to a local maxim, "a man born in Nghe An province will oppose anything," and both his parents were cast in that rebellious mold. His father lost his post as a magistrate for associating with the anti-French movement; his mother, who died when Ho was ten, was charged with stealing weapons from French barracks for the rebels. At the time, nationalism was beginning to be a potent force in Southeast Asia, spurred by the generally oppressive colonial rule of the French, British and Dutch. Ironically, nationalism was less a local product than a European import. As Gunnar Myrdal pointed out in Asian Drama: "It was with the intellectual weapons forged in Europe, where liberalism had become the middle-class ideology, that the liberation movements rose in South Asia and fought their way to a vision, and later the realization, of full independence."