Vietnamese History

In memoriam of an extraordinary Vietnamese national hero and a friend of mine.
My piece covers Đặng Văn Việt, a young Vietminh colonel and his military commander and mentor, General Võ Nguyên Giáp, who helped shape Vietnam's recent history. I also was honored to meet General Giáp. 
Đặng Văn Việt led the regiment that inflicted the first great defeat on France's colonial army in 1950. It was a huge shock to France and the prelude to its final defeat as colonial power at Dien Bien Phu just four years later.

The Mongols created the world‟s most powerful empire in the thirteenth century, conquering China and establishing the Yuan dynasty. Their military power was in doubt, however, after failed naval invasions in Japan and Vietnam. According to historical records, the Vietnamese tactics used against the Mongolian Armada were designed to prevent them from reaching the mouth of Bach Dang River by using hidden stakes that were driven into the riverbed in secrecy. Using the large difference in tides, the Vietnamese successfully lured the enemy fleet into the trap, destroying or capturing perhaps as many as 400 vessels. Since the 1950s, approximately 700 years after this watershed event, Vietnamese archaeologists have discovered a number of large wooden stakes in the midst of reclaimed paddy fields along the Bach Dang River. Excavations and research were conducted which led to the identification of several stake-yard sites believed to be dated to the battle that took place in 1281 C.E., howev...

The question of the specific role played by Japan in the process that led to the independence for the three nations of former French Indochina – Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia – has been seldom studied by historians. The central position of the Pacific War for American and Japanese specialists, the crucial importance of the Indochina War for French researcher, and the language barriers are the main reasons for this lack of interest.
Nevertheless, if Japan did not create the independence movements in Vietnam, nor even the conditions that led the Vietnamese to seek independence, its role was essential. Its occupation of the Western colonies in Southeast Asia not only destroyed the domination system of the Western countries, it also annihilated their prestige and gave confidence to the local populations in their ability to conquer their independence and access to modernity.
If the case of Vietnam is particular, since French colonial apparatus was left untouched until 1945, the victory against French forces in September 1940, the presence of Japanese military on Vietnamese soil and the Japanese cultural propaganda towards Vietnamese population played an important role in eroding French might. If Japanese occupation does not explain everything, it was the real starting point of the process that led Vietnam to independence.
Japan began to put pressure on French Indochina from 1938, when the front of the Sino-Japanese War moved southward. Because Chiang Kai-shek refused to give up, Japan decided to blockade China. After Canton felt the 21 archOctober 1938, the main route that linked China to the outside world was the “French Indochina route”, a railway route that was linking the Indochinese harbor of Haiphong to the Chinese city Yunnan, Kunming. Under Japanese pressure, French government accepted officially to forbid the transit of goods from Indochina to China, but accepted in fact its continuation since it wanted to help China to resist Japanese move in the direction of Indochinese border.
France opposed Japanese pressure until German victories in Europe, from May 1940, disrupted the situation in Southeast Asia. France, isolated because of its separate armistice with Germany, could not defend Indochina anymore since British alliance was necessary against any external threat. Suffering a rebuff from the United Sates, the Governor General, Georges Catroux, had to close the Chinese border and to accept a Japanese control mission in Indochina, under general Nishihara Issaku. Catroux was replaced by the admiral Jean Decoux who, despite strong words, had accept Japanese demands. Despite several treaties and agreements, Japanese forces attacked French army in Indochina the 23 September and defeated them easily. This coup, often seen, till nowadays, as a local initiative, was in fact directed from Tokyo.
Japanese army got the right to station troops in the North of Indochina, to use air fields and to remove troops from Southern China through Indochinese territory. From this time, France will have to yield to every Japanese demand : the integration of Indochinese economy to Japanese empire sphere, the lost of two territories to Thailand, the occupation of the rest of its territory and, finally, a Japanese dominion over Indochina after the Pacific War broke out. Japan had decided, from July 1940, to enforce the new policy of Southward expansion, accepting the risk of going to war with the English speaking powers. The occupation of Indochina was a part of this policy and it played an essential role in the deterioration of the relations with the United States.
Japan needed French Indochina territory to attack British colonies. This is why Vietnam played a crucial role during the first campaign of the Pacific War, especially against British Malaya – which was attacked before Pearl Harbor. After the first phase of the war, Indochina lost its strategic position, but still provided rice and raw material. Despite its anti western propaganda, Japan decided to let France continuing its domination on Indochina. This situation was not an anomaly, but a rational choice based on the fact that the best and cheapest way to administrate Indochina was to leave the task to French authorities.
During most of the Pacific War, Indochina was under a dual domination, French and Japanese. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Shigemitsu Mamoru, preached for the elimination of French presence. Despite the suppression of the Vichy regime and its replacement by an enemy of Japan – the Free France –, this is only the 9 March 1945, seven months later, that Japanese army attacked. The threat of an American landing and the will of Japanese army to secure a continental road from Southeast Asia to Korea led to the decision to put an end to French administration.
By making the three nations of Indochina proclaiming their independence and by annihilating French armed forces, Japan created a watershed. Japan, being seen as a defeated country, was not successful in administrating the country, lacking time and support. The Vietminh was able to fill the void left by French administration and to get the support of a large part of the population by acting against Japan. The latter played a last important act, after its surrender the 15 August 1945, by letting the Vietminh taking the power.
What would have happened if Japan had not destroyed French domination? Since independence movements were not in position to overthrow the French colonizers, and Japan had good reasons to consider keeping the status quo, this question is not a petty one. To think of it as an alternate history can be useful in letting us understand that everything was not decided from the start, that France could have left Vietnam differently, that non communist forces could have played a more important role and, last but not least, that the Japanese attack the 9 March 1945 was the decisive defeat that France could never overcome.

This paper discusses the failed policy of reconciliation carried out by the leadership in Hanoi after the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam (commonly known as „South Vietnam“) on April 30, 1975.
It argues that in spite of all promises to the contrary after the end of the war the victorious North systematically dicriminated Southern Vietnamese who had worked for the former Saigonese government or the United States in Vietnam. Furthermore, I will analyse in which way the leadership in Hanoi tried to write the Republic of Vietnam out of history by destroying „sites of memory“ (lieux de mémoire).
In the following I discuss how this policy together with the building of socialism in the southern part of the country led to serious social conflicts and finally to a massive exodus of approximately one million Vietnamese.
In the second part of the paper, I will show that since the beginning of the reform policy in Vietnam (đổi mới) in the 1980s the failed integration of many defeated South Vietnamese after the end of the war has increasingly been adressed in “memory debates” among Vietnamese abroad and at home. The fate of the former South Vietnamese war cemetery in Biên Hòa will serve as an example.

Only excerpts available here. Full text is at https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/jcws_a_00819 (or through library access)
Abstract:
From the late 1950s until 1975, the war between North and South Vietnam had both domestic and international consequences. Unlike the Cold War divide between the United States and the Soviet Union, the war between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, the Communist North) and the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, the non-Communist South) was an armed conflict between two polities that both identified themselves as Vietnamese. In this twenty-year-long struggle, the fates of the DRV and the RVN were tied to their success in producing new generations who would subscribe to their respective agendas. This was done through many venues, of which education was one of the most important.
          This article analyzes the educational systems at the primary and secondary school levels in the DRV and RVN after the division of the country, with a special focus on the years between 1965 and 1975. It considers their respective “divorces” from the colonial educational system and explores their goals, their problems, and the means they used to overcome these problems. Moreover, the DRV attempted to create an educational mini-empire with the DRV centered agenda—establishing a Vietnamese-based system in China, bringing into the DRV Laotian children, and exporting their ideology in the educational system established in the NLF-controlled territories of the RVN. The DRV created a rigidly politicized school system focused on the war and the construction of socialism. The RVN, creating an educational antipode of the North, endeavored to separate schools from the war, largely taking politics out of the curriculum and leaving pupils to figure out for themselves the aims of the conflict and their place in it, stranding many of them in ambiguity. If the DRV system was depriving pupils of the means to challenge the government, the RVN was supplying children with such means. Relying on archival materials and published documents, this article compares the educational systems at the primary and secondary school levels in the DRV and RVN after the division of the country, with a special focus on the period 1965–1975.

The following article explains that the only way to avoid a disaster was to develop the economy and finance of the country. It is made with excerpts from my book “Viet Nam- Political History of the two wars- Independence War (1858–1954) and Ideological War (1945–1975)” prefaced in the English version by Professor Janet Hoskins (USC, LA) and in the French version by Historian Pierre Brocheux.

North and South Vietnamese youth had very different experiences of growing up during the Vietnamese War. This book gives a unique perspective on the conflict through the prism of adult–youth relations. By studying these relations, including educational systems, social organizations, and texts created by and for children during the war, Olga Dror analyzes how the two societies dealt with their wartime experience and strove to shape their futures. She examines the socialization and politicization of Vietnamese children and teenagers, contrasting the North's highly centralized agenda of indoctrination with the South, which had no such policy, and explores the results of these varied approaches. By considering the influence of Western culture on the youth of the South and of socialist culture on the youth of the North, we learn how the youth cultures of both Vietnams diverged from their prewar paths and from each other.
https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/south-east-asian-history/making-two-vietnams-war-and-youth-identities-19651975?format=HB

Through six intensive and semi-structured interviews, this research paper examines the role social support networks may or may not have played in facilitating the resettlement experiences of Chinese-Vietnamese refugees living in Canada after the Vietnam War. It was observed that those who were privately-sponsored emphasized the instrumental role their benefactors played in assisting their successful resettlement, whereas those who were government-sponsored were forced to adopt a more independent mindset of forming their own social support systems. Regardless of sponsorship type, the notion of hard work was a commonality found amongst the participants. They arrived at the receiving country expecting and willing to accept conditions of underemployment and downward mobility. The effects of pre-migration enabling factors such as marital status and educational attainment are also acknowledged. Within a social support framework, theories of social capital and resiliency are used to analyze the lives of the participants after the traumatic experience of forced migration.

Keywords: Chinese-Vietnamese refugees, resettlement, Canada, social support network, resiliency theory

Western historians have focused on a series of supposed “lost moments” when America could have changed the character of Ho Chi Minh and the post-colonial Vietnamese state. Foremost among these is the “Wilsonian Moment” during the Versailles peace conference in late 1919 and early 1920. Some western historians argue that Ho preferred the American president’s concept of self-determination above all other political philosophies. Only later, after suffering Wilson’s indifference, did French socialists radicalize Ho and he begin his migration to the communist world.

This narrative, however, is contradicted by newly digitized archival and library resources on Ho Chi Minh’s actions in 1919-1920. In fact, Ho never referenced the American president. Instead, he was advocating for Lenin’s concept of political development at this time. This new picture of Ho Chi Minh’s activities not only demonstrates that Woodrow Wilson did not factor into his political vision and challenges notions that the metropole and Europeans were a unidirectional force of radicalization. Indeed, Ho Chi Minh was himself an agent of radicalization, pushing French socialists to join Vladimir Lenin’s Third International as the Versailles conference closed.

This paper seeks to understand how Hang's mother Que develops herself into a smaller character by refusing to take part in motherhood. While passing the torch onto other characters, Que is left confused in the dust. The paper will explore the brilliant Duong Thu Huong's real life and how it influences a character that is she shares similarities with.

The unimagined community proposes a reexamination of the Vietnam War from a perspective that has been largely excluded from historical accounts of the conflict, that of the South Vietnamese. Challenging the conventional view of the conflict as a struggle on the part of the Vietnamese people against US imperialism and its puppets, the study presents a wide-ranging investigation of South Vietnamese culture, from political philosophy and psychological warfare to popular culture and film.

The onset of the Zhou dynasty at the end of the second millennium BCE coincides roughly with the establishment of the Chǔ (tshraʔ / khra C) fi efdom and the emergence of the ethnolinguistic stock known as Kra-Dai (Tai-Kadai). The ancestors of the Kra family proper, situated in the southwestern portion of Chǔ, began to disperse ostensibly as a result of upheavals surrounding the end of Shang, the beginning of Western Zhou, and the gradual rise of Chǔ into a full-fl edged kingdom by the 8th century BCE. Beginning with this underlying premise and the stance of comparative and historical linguistics, the present paper provides, in a chronological frame, a hopefully more probable picture of the ethnolinguistic realities of China south of the Yangtze and relevant parts of Southeast Asia, including the geography past and present, of language stocks and families, their classifi cation, time-depth, and the possible relationships between them. The focus is primarily on the Kra-Dai stock of language families up until the end of the Han Dynasty in the 2nd century CE, and secondarily up to the 11th century. Attention is given to what can be deduced or abduced with respect to ethnic identities in pre-Yue Lingnan and Annam, and to other questions such as whether or not Kam-Sui should be included under the rubric of Yue and the position of Mường in early Vietnam. Dedication This paper is dedicated to the memory of Grant Evans whose fi nal publications, both in JSS 102 and posthumously in the present volume, have refocused attention on the broader history of the Tais in Southeast Asia and paved the way for a re-examination of old ideas in the light of new evidence. The resurgence can be said to have begun with Chris Baker's paper in Volume 90 of JSS which used linguistic evidence to trace historical movements of Tais from an assumed Urheimat along the Guangxi-Vietnamese border west into Laos, Yunnan, Thailand, Burma and Assam. Following on from the 1 I owe a great debt of gratitude to David Holm, who gave generously of his time and knowledge in the preparation of this paper. Without his advice and deep insights into southern Chinese and Zhuang history and prehistory the story told here would have been much the poorer. I would also like to thank Gérard Diffl oth, Nathan Badenoch, and Weera Ostapirat, with whom I was fortunate enough to discuss various aspects of linguistic proto-history and their bearing on topics addressed here and to learn from their extensive and profound scholarship.

The Suminokura family is one of the main Japanese trading families who benefitted from the shuinsen system, sailing to Southeast Asia with the red seal of the shogun and contributing to the opening of early modern Japan to international commerce. They almost exclusively traded with one country, Đàng Ngoài (Tonkin) and more specifically with the Nghệ An province.They left a very rich corpus of documents,  which  depicts their activities there and the regulation of foreign trade by local  authorities. From  these  sources,  a network model can be built, which highlights the close proximity between the Suminokura and local authorities, the omnipresence of bureaucracy and the importance of family relations. Therefore,  the  Suminokura  corpus  represents  a  unique  source  of  information  about  how Japanese  trade  took place in early modern Southeast Asia,  how well integrated  the  Japanese were and opens further questions about the role played by institutions, guarantees and trustin the organisation of early modern Japanese trading networks.

This is UNEDITED and ORIGINAL text from Tạ Chí Đại Trường that he wrote when he reviewed the manuscript version of an article I wrote. In that draft version, I made a careless mistake about the date when the Lĩnh Nam chích quái was publishes. I fixed that mistake in the text, so when an English translation was made of these comments, that section was omitted. I'm leaving it here, however, so that readers can see more of Tạ Chí Đại Trường's knowledge about Vietnamese history.

I previously asked (through a mutual acquaintance) for permission from Tạ Chí Đại Trường to make these comments available. I was told that he approved, but I never got around to doing so. Sadly, I recently learned of his passing, and therefore in his honor, and out of sincere gratitude for his comments, I am making them available here now.

The book, published by the Cambridge University Press in 2015, traces the spread of a global anti-imperialist consciousness from the vantage point of Paris between the two World Wars. It seeks to answer the questions of why and how Paris became a hatchery for many of the political and intellectual elites that rose to prominence in Africa, Asia, and Latin America after World War II. So far, the formative nature of Parisian stints of figures such as Zhou Enlai, Ho Chi Minh, Ferhat Abbas, Léopold Sédar Senghor, or Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre has been approached mostly from the angle of individual biographies. By contrast, this study explores the local social context in which these and other activists moved. The book therefore treats interwar Paris as a crossroads of global migrations, which through contact and exchange bred new forms of anti-imperialism subsequently catapulted onto a global stage. The book will speak to students and scholars of twentieth-century imperial, international, and global history as well as to social scientists interested in migration, race, and ethnicity in France.

Since the mid-2000s Vietnam has become an important manufacturing hub in garment and, increasingly, in electronics. However, the expansion of an FDI-dominated, export-oriented manufacturing did not contribute to a genuine national industrialisation process and the weight of manufacturing on GDP has actually declined. Low industrial wages (associated with poor working conditions) have emerged as a structural (rather than transitory) competitive factor for the country’s participation in global production networks.

The Indochina War was the one that France led from 1945 to 1954 in Laos, Cambodia and Việt Nam, the three countries that formed "Indochina" when it still dominated them.  The three countries had fallen into the hands of France as it advanced in the conquest of their territories in 1858 - with the attack of Đà Nẳng (Việt Nam) which it called Tourane-to the creation of the Indochinese Union by the decrees of 17 and 20 October 1887. It was then composed of Việt Nam-divided into three kỳ (regions or countries, kỳ meaning flag), Cochinchina in the south, Annam in the centre and Tonkin in the north - and Cambodia and was administered by a Governor-General of Indochina (GGI). Cochinchina was a colony ruled by a governor while the other three parties were protectorates each managed by a "superior resident". The Laotian protectorate established in 1893 and the 1300 km2 Kouang Tcheou Wan (or Guangzhouwan) 广州湾 territory in South China with a 99-year lease signed in 1898 were later added to this Indochinese Union.

This article focuses on how political agendas and existing societal circumstances in three Southeast Asian regions impacted the early history of immigrant Hokkiens, one of the most prominent Chinese ethnic groups. The article argues that different Hokkien actions and their outcomes were shaped or highly influenced by the prevailing agenda and political struggles of local rulers and/or colonial powers, resulting in selective adaptive behaviour as ‘challengers’ or ‘cooperators’. There were prominent immigrant Hokkien challengers to the status quo in Manila and elsewhere in the Philippine Islands, but both cooperators with the prevailing status quo and challengers to it were common in Hoi An, Vietnam. By contrast, cooperators were conspicuous in Batavia and in the colonial Dutch East Indies.

Một hội thảo khoa học quốc tế gần đây tại Thành Phố Hồ Chí Minh sử dụng khái niệm " Giao lưu văn hóa tư tưởng Phương Đông " , tên này được dịch ra tiếng Anh là " Oriental Cultural Exchanges ". Đã có dịp xem qua kỷ yếu hội thảo với chương trình được tổ chức công phu và tập hợp của nhiều báo cáo giá trị, đóng góp của hội thảo này là không thể phủ nhận. Việc dịch tên gọi hội thảo sử dụng khái niệm " Oriental " như trên trong khung cảnh học thuật Việt Nam cũng là điều hoàn toàn " bình thường " vì đối với các học giả Việt Nam, " Đông Phương học " là một khái niệm trung tính, thậm chí còn " positive " (tích cực) vì nó giúp định hình không gian của ngành một cách rõ ràng, thậm chí còn mang màu sắc hàn lâm cổ điển. Vì thế, đối với người Việt, " Đông Phương học " không có sự khác biệt với " Đông Nam Á học " , " châu Âu học " , " Nhật Bản học " … Tuy nhiên, việc sử dụng khái niệm " Orient " , " Oriental " và " Orientalism " trong khung cảnh học thuật tiếng Anh lại là một câu chuyện khác. Bài viết này sẽ đề cập đến nguồn gốc của sự phê phán khái niệm này và gợi ý về sự cẩn trọng đối với các học giả Việt Nam khi sử dụng chúng trong công bố học thuật quốc tế. Hãy bắt đầu bằng một câu hỏi: vùng Trung Đông trong trí tưởng tượng của quý vị có gì?

Regarding the operational specifics of death penalty policy, Professors Johnson and Zimring have argued that it is extreme left or right wing authoritarian states’ aversion to a limitation of their own powers that determines high rates of executions in countries such as Vietnam, Singapore, China and North Korea as opposed to other, less-punitive Asian nations which share similar cultural and religious characteristics.  For a regime like Vietnam’s, the swift carrying out of a death sentence, especially when performed in public, serves to highlight the state’s power over life and death and enhance political control over the domestic constituency.  At first glance then, little scope for the exercise of the clemency power as a form of lenient reprieve from the death sentence by the executive government appears possible under a repressive regime of this nature.

However, unlike China and Singapore, a notable feature of Vietnam’s death penalty practice since the Doi Moi reforms of 1986 has been the executive’s willingness to reprieve a large minority of prisoners sentenced to death through Presidential clemency, even though executions themselves have continued unabated.  What official and unofficial justifications have been given for grants of Presidential clemency in Vietnam, and relatedly, what structural and cultural factors explain the use of clemency in a noticeable proportion of death penalty cases?  These are the under-researched questions I provide plausible explanations for in this article, incorporating an empirical study of Vietnam’s death penalty clemency grants since the mid-1980s, interpreted through the lens of the relevant academic literature on clemency and pardon grants.