- Location
- Op een dag, Nederland.
- Pronouns
- she/her & ne/nem
(Huỳnh Tấn Phát)
Name: Nguyễn Tiến Chí
Age: 19 May 1908 (46 years old)
Gender: Male
Ethnicity: Viet
Religion: Mahayana Buddhism
Party/Faction: Vietnamese Nationalist Party (VNQDD)
List of Occupations and Offices Held: Politician (19??-present)
Acquaintance of the Chief of State (1950-present)
Personality: Nguyễn Tiến Chí is someone who is the peak of hypocrisy. He will talk loftily of the universality of Doctor Sun Yat-sen’s ideas on one hand and yet on the other hand cut deals that go against those ideas. Behind that brash hypocrisy lies a man who knows he lives in history, that the unrelenting wind of change will push other men hither and thither, but he will be like a sailboat. He will sail with the wind but not like the helpless ones. He will have his steering wheel and sail his own fate. Is he a bit intimidated by those times? Oh sure. But that makes it all the more fun!
Other Important Information: Likely has lots of connections cultivated over the last decade.
Biography: There are men who wish to use those times to improve the lives of the masses even at the cost of their own. There are men who hold to lofty ideas no matter what. And then there are men like Nguyễn Tiến Chí.
While not completely bereft of ideas, he is far more pragmatic than most. Some, okay a lot, would consider his actions hypocritical. But can an idea feed a man? Can an idea pay an army? No. The world runs on very non-ideological grounds, and the best men are ones that have their morality shaped by ideas but their decisions by the facts on the ground. Or at least that is what he would say.
Nguyễn Tiến Chí is the result of a precarious upbringing. Born to one of the scant middle-class, he realised from a young age that the reason why his family achieved that was through nothing but hard work and some questionable involvement in the black market. Every time he looked around his Vietnam, he saw nothing but poverty. A lot of poverty. It sickened him that his country was like this, and the French masters were doing nothing to fix it.
By the time he was 20, he was keen to get involved in some anti-colonial politics. France had ample time to bother fixing Vietnam, and all of his life they never did. He knew a doomed endeavour when he saw one, and hence when he heard of the VNQDD, he promptly joined them. This period of his life is known as the one where he was most idealistic, getting caught up in the nationalistic fervour. He has an arrest record in France for it. And a missing tooth.
Did he take part in the failed revolution of 1930? With the French gone, he can safely say he was, and only escaped execution via disguising himself as a female peasant for more time than he would admit. It is in this time that he developed some of his (admittedly by now very tense) communist ties (a few people still recall meeting Nguyễn Tiến Chi, note the different tone), and it is the time he became acutely aware of the sexist nature of Vietnamese society. Also, if you believe some people, he still screams like a woman.
After a while, he escaped to Yunnan where the rest of the VNQDD was, shorn himself of the deception, and became part of the resistance, although by now increasingly sceptical of Hồ Chí Minh’s political intents and becoming one of the more mild anti-communists in the VNQDD. Vietnam needed to be freed from Franco-Japanese colonialism, yes, but this didn’t mean Hồ could be trusted completely. He was vindicated in the end as Hồ turned on them.
After the war, and as the chaos of post-1945 Vietnam ensued, the now penniless Nguyễn Tiến Chí realised an opportunity in his home city of Saigon. Moving quickly, he claimed that his (actually somewhat lower-middle-class) family was true owners of many valuable goods that was still in Vietnam somehow and managed to pull a lot of party connections to get those. He then promptly sold many of them abroad at higher than market prices, and returned to his family’s tried and true method – namely a business that prioritises trade and has dubious black market connections.
It is in this that he first made the acquaintance of Bảo Đại, who he privately despised for his Japanese collaboration but knew had a lot of outsized influence in South Vietnam. With his business being known as one of the few reasonably successful major ones, he could manage to portray himself not as an ex-communist revolutionary, but as a respectable businessman who promised to help in the creation of a better Vietnam.
He is by absolutely no means in Bảo Đại’s favourites for Prime Minister. And why would he wish to jeopardise all he has by taking on what he sees as a thankless task? Let some poor sucker do it. Nguyễn Tiến Chí knows the real power isn’t in a political office. It has always been money in the end.
Cold hard money.
Skills:
Charisma -3
Organising - 3
Generalship - 1
Skulduggery - 3
Religious Matters: "I am a Buddhist. But I don't think we should discriminate against any religion, really. Vietnam is bigger than any of them."
Foreign Policy: "The French? No. But the Americans? Absolutely. We should work with them."
Economic Policy: "We should seek to create a good mixture of state intervention and the free market. No communism. Social democracy."
Bao Dai:
- Privately: "He is nothing but a Japanese collaborationist. Should have been shot with the rest of them."
- Publicly: "I support the idea of a restrained executive. Perhaps a true republic with a good balance between a president and legislature. But if the conclusion to this discourse is a ceremonial monarchy, I will support it, as I will support any non-communist system for Vietnam."
The Chinese: "We should not target any ethnicity in particular. But I absolutely do support a tax on landowners."
Foreign Policy: "The French? No. But the Americans? Absolutely. We should work with them."
Economic Policy: "We should seek to create a good mixture of state intervention and the free market. No communism. Social democracy."
Bao Dai:
- Privately: "He is nothing but a Japanese collaborationist. Should have been shot with the rest of them."
- Publicly: "I support the idea of a restrained executive. Perhaps a true republic with a good balance between a president and legislature. But if the conclusion to this discourse is a ceremonial monarchy, I will support it, as I will support any non-communist system for Vietnam."
The Chinese: "We should not target any ethnicity in particular. But I absolutely do support a tax on landowners."
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