I know that this post sounds extremely conspiratorial, so I'm worried that I might be breaking some rule, but I hope that you read on a bit to understand why I feel so compelled to ask this question in this particular subreddit.
I learned about this belief today from my mother and her boyfriend (both Vietnamese) while I was asking them about their respective histories of how the Vietnam war brought them to the U.S..
Naturally in the course of their explanation, they gave me a run down of who Ho Chi Minh was, what he was doing in France at the end of WWI, his arrest in Hong Kong, and then they mentioned something that I had never heard of before, and that is: there were TWO Ho Chi Minhs.
The REAL Ho Chi Minh who died in Hong Kong in the 1930s, and the replacement Ho Chi Minh that showed up back in Vietnam towards the tail end of WWII to join the Vietminh in fighting off the Japanese. This imposter was purportedly a Chinese agent whose purpose was to promote communist influence.
I'm unable to find any sources about this whatsoever, but my mother and her bf (who never talk about this stuff with each other) brought up this fact as if it were common knowledge. I even asked them if this sentiment is common amongst the Vietnamese and they both confirmed, saying that only French, Vietnamese, and Chinese historians are savvy to fact.
I was wondering if anyone had any information about this hypothesis and how it became popularized, and had any thoughts on its verisimilitude.
The conspiracy comes from a Taiwanese book called 胡志明生平考 (Examine the life of Ho Chi Minh) by Hu Junxiong 胡俊熊 in 2008. Originally the man who LARPed as Ho Chi Minh was supposed to be Hu Jizhang 胡集璋, but then become Hu Guang because the anti-communist Vietnamese oversea discovered that Ho Chi Minh used to work in the Chinese army under the name Hu Guang.
To be honest, this entire conspiracy can be debunked by simply looking at Ho Chi Minh's ears. His ears are asymmetrical and there's a scar on his left ear. In every photo of Ho Chi Minh from young to adulthood, this scar is always present. This is also what French intelligence used to identify him.
If you understand Vietnamese, you should read this. It's written by Nguyễn Duy Chính, a non-communist historian. He pointed out many weak arguments in Hu Junxiong's book.