Coming out of a perfect storm of the COVID-19 pandemic, devastating floods and political indecision of the previous year, Timor-Leste celebrated the twentieth anniversary of its independence in 2022 with some rays of hope. The presidential elections in May saw the return of José Ramos-Horta, Nobel Peace Prize colaureate, also a prior presidential office bearer between 2007 and 2012, as the new president. With his victory, the resistance generation leaders remain at the helm of Timor-Leste but they are confronted with a myriad of governance problems, including the shrinking sovereign wealth fund, lacklustre economic growth, food insecurity and youth unemployment. As a seasoned diplomat with international standing, Ramos-Horta has actively pursued a multi-pronged foreign policy to keep Timor-Leste on an even keel among key partners—namely, Australia, Indonesia, China and ASEAN.

The Shifting Political Landscape

The seeds of political crisis had been sown back in February 2020 with the withdrawal of the National Council for Timorese Reconstruction (CNRT) party, headed by resistance hero and former president José “Xanana” Gusmão from the three-party coalition comprising the CNRT, the People's Liberation Party (PLP) and the Kmanek Haburas Unidade Nasional Timor Oan (KHUNTO, which stands for “Enrich the National Unity of the Sons of Timor”). The youth-oriented KHUNTO, however, unexpectedly broke ranks with Gusmão and the CNRT afterwards and threw its support behind the fledgling alliance between the PLP and the Revolutionary Front for an Independent Timor-Leste (FRETILIN). This new coalition gave Prime Minister Taur Matan Ruak, leader of the PLP and also former president of Timor-Leste, an extended mandate to govern until 2023 so that he would oversee the looming COVID-19 health crisis. He nominated five FRETILIN members and one member of the coalition partner Democratic Party (PD) to fill long-vacant positions in the government's Council of Ministers. By June 2020, the new coalition government—or the Eighth Constitutional Government, as the current administration is formally known—was in place with Gusmão sidelined and with the Ruak government continuing in office as of this writing. It was against this background that Gusmão plotted a comeback not directly but working through a trusted protégé to unseat the FRETILIN-held presidency.

Local and international media coverage of Ho Chi Minh's arrest and trial was significant. From a modern media studies perspective, we see in this chapter two processes at work: one exposure and the other censorship (especially when it came to Chinese media). But in the absence of court transcripts, either discarded or lost during the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong, local English-language newspaper accounts serve as surrogate accounts of the sometimes terse and esoteric legal arguments presented across nine sessions of Hong Kong's Supreme Court. While such media reports have long been available, they have not hitherto been presented in print in such analytical narrative detail.

This chapter examines the marginal notes added to the key British dossiers relating to the Sung Man Cho v. Superintendent of Prisons case, revealing a picture of perplexity and even confusion as to the way ahead in ongoing correspondence between the British Foreign Office, the Colonial Office, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, the Home Office and other concerned departments. In the background, especially as interpreted by Crown Council F. C. Jenkin QC, stood a complex British legal discourse on banishment/deportation and extradition.

This chapter retraces the appeal made by Ho Chi Minh's legal team to the Privy Council in London in an attempt to cancel a Hong Kong Governor-in-Council order to return him to a French jurisdiction. Drawing upon British and French documentation, the chapter explains the out-of-court settlement in his favor but also intramural government maneuverings and even incompetence in the handling of his case: Ho Chi Minh's thwarted attempt to reach England, an aborted trip to Singapore and, with local Hong Kong legal assistance, his anticlimactic final departure from Hong Kong to Shanghai. A range of documentation is brought to bear upon, for example, faux reports of Ho Chi Minh's death, his journey to Moscow and communist recriminations over his Hong Kong interlude.

This chapter offers a portrait of the younger Ho Chi Minh, including his family background in Vietnam prior to him setting out on a series of sea journeys that would lead to France. Settling in Paris at the end of World War I, he soon gained local and even international attention by petitioning for Vietnamese autonomy at the Versailles Peace Conference. Through the prism of French police reports, in this chapter we see Ho Chi Minh, now calling himself Nguyen Ai Quoc, immersed in study and networking with a view to exposing the worst excesses of colonialism. He was beginning to distance himself from the Eurocentric preoccupation of French communists, and was persuaded by Lenin's own framing of the colonial and national question. In his early adulthood he published his own newsletter and organized other colonials before making a dramatic exit in the direction of Moscow. There he undertook studious preparation under Communist International auspices ready to launch his revolutionary career, from the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou (Canton) as it turned out.

Even before arriving in Hong Kong from Moscow, Ho Chi Minh had prior experience in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, having set up there in November 1924 (one year after Tan Malaka). The period coincides with the First United Front between Kuomintang government under Sun Yat-sen and the communists and with Soviet advisors moving in. Drawing in part upon materials supplied by French agents and Comintern records, this chapter explains how Ho Chi Minh bonded with a core group of confidants and comrades in Guangzhou, including youth trainees, many of whom would return to center stage in communist party organization in Hong Kong as well as in future actions. However, he was obliged to move this group away from anarchist and other ideologies in the interest of setting down a secretive Leninist-style cell system. Besides teaching and writing, Ho Chi Minh devoted much time to propagandizing among Vietnamese youth. The chapter also identifies the role of one Vietnamese double agent in brokering his local marriage, shortlived as it was, owing to the collapse of the united front and major repression of the Left.

This chapter uses little-exploited French archival documentation to show the lengths to which French consuls in Hong Kong, the ambassador in London, as well as the governor-general in Hanoi went in their attempts to persuade British officialdom in Hong Kong as well as the British Foreign Office of the danger posed to colonial order by Ho Chi Minh should he not be rendered back to French territory. Not hitherto exposed in the literature with reference to Hong Kong, the episode opens a new insight into the way that the colonial powers of the day sought to get their way. While police cooperation between the two colonial powers was strong, the French would be disappointed that their solicitations failed to win satisfaction at any level of government, whether in London or Hong Kong. The unsuccessful French efforts were unrelenting during and even following the Privy Council appeal, as with proposed prisoner swaps and other quid pro quo deals touching colonial outposts from India to Africa.

Today, as a declared heritage site in Hong Kong, the former Victoria Prison at No. 16 Old Bailey Street, including the Central Police Station Compound and the Central Magistracy, attracts a steady flow of visitors. We may assume that at least some of them have prior knowledge of the former presence here of its most famous inmate, namely Ho Chi Minh. We may also assume that others with no prior knowledge learned of this fact through information provided by a guide or through a careful reading of signboards. As revealed by photographs and exhibits, renovation and expansion of the prison compound, which continued through the twentieth century, transformed the site radically from its earlier appearance, even if prison practices were little altered across the decades. Becoming a remand prison after World War II, the prison began to admit illegal immigrants and Vietnamese “boat people” in the early 1980s. It was decommissioned in 2006.

This chapter explains the circumstances surrounding Ho Chi Minh's arrival in Hong Kong from Thailand in December 1929.He went on to launch the Vietnamese Communist Party at a meeting held in Hong Kong in February 1930 dubbed the Unification Conference. The following October he further superintended the creation of the Indochinese Communist Party (thus bringing in Cambodia and Laos in addition to Vietnam), albeit with Moscow-returnee Tran Phu stepping into the leadership. If this was all that Ho Chi Minh accomplished in Hong Kong then it would still be significant. Operating out of his base in Kowloon City, Ho Chi Minh then took charge of communist party organization in Malaya and Thailand. As described with reference to French archival documents, his misplaced efforts in sending coded messages to contacts in Singapore backfired, leading to sweeping arrests of the communist underground from Vietnam to Shanghai as well as his own apprehension along with a female comrade in Hong Kong on June 6, 1931.

The Sumatra-born revolutionary, Tan Malaka, shared prison time in Hong Kong with Ho Chi Minh. In this chapter we see the then twenty-six-year-old Tan Malaka setting up in revolutionary Guangzhou under Communist International auspices. There, he networked with leading Sun Yat-sen government officials, co-hosted an important Asian trade union conference, and assumed a new role as editor and publisher. Known to Ho Chi Minh from Moscow days, the two would also meet in Guangzhou. Somewhat adrift in the Philippines prior to deportation to China, it could well have been Ho Chi Minh who summoned him to Hong Kong with a view to clarifying the status of the communist movement in Singapore/Malaya in the wake of a failed rebellion on Java. Tan Malaka was treated differently from his Vietnamese counterpart. He was arrested in the British colony, denied legal assistance, did not make a court appearance or gain media attention, although he did evade extradition to his homeland. Tan Malaka bequeathed a rich description of his experience in Victoria Prison and this chapter adds fresh detail on this episode, otherwise little acknowledged in Hong Kong writing.

This chapter deals with the aftermath of Ho Chi Minh's arrest and incarceration in Victoria Prison (along with that of a female comrade Ly Sam/Co Thuan). It draws upon a trove of documentation, both personal and political, that was seized from Ho Chi Minh's Kowloon City premises. These documents were lost to British record keepers but survive in French and Russian archives and are here offered for the first time in print. The chapter examines Ho Chi Minh's household budget notebooks to reveal the names of tenants and their activities. It also introduces the crucial support rendered by local lawyer Francis Loseby in mounting the Sung Man Cho/ Ly Sam defense in Hong Kong's Supreme Court. Besides offering detail on Ho Chi Minh's prison experience, this chapter also introduces rare documentation in the form of letters written from prison to the French double agent, including his own medical and mental condition, among other key intelligence details reaching French ears.

As much debated among Vietnamese nationalists, even the notion of a nation of Vietnam was in tension with a greater Indochina, or what is described here as a “geobody.” Yet this chapter also wonders how memory of the Hong Kong interlude plays out in Vietnam (and Indonesia) today. Ho Chi Minh reconnected with lawyer Frank Loseby after the war, and Loseby (and even Jenkin KC) are honored today in Hanoi as saviors. In addition, British rule of law and independence of the judiciary – as showcased in this book – are seemingly cast in a new and positive light. But if Ho Chi Minh's Hong Kong interlude has been celebrated in books and even movies in Vietnam, memory of Tan Malaka remains far more contested in Indonesia today, notwithstanding his “rehabilitation” in more democratic times as a “father of the Republic.”