15 Things about Vietnam #14 - The Chinese

The Vietnamese are deeply suspicious of the Chinese. Though no single country has influenced Vietnamese culture more than China, to suggest that the Vietnamese and the Chinese are basically similar or the same is one of the biggest faux pas you can make while in Vietnam.

To say that the Vietnamese and the Chinese have history - in the sense of having a well-known propensity to spar, scrap and generally hurt each other's feelings - would be an understatement. 

So here is the rough history. This will take about 10 hours, so if you find history a dull subject, feel free to have a break for today and come back later in the week for the last installment in this series.
  

The history lesson. So. The reason the Vietnamese and the Chinese are culturally quite close is that the Vietnamese cultural heartland in the area around Hanoi was a Chinese colony from roughly 120BC to 940AD. And because, once the Vietnamese finally kicked the Chinese out, they did something a little strange: they become more Chinese than they already were before.

The 1000 or so years that the Vietnamese spent under the Chinese thumb are what set up a solid foundation for a further 1000 years of hatred and resentment. As a Chinese colony, Vietnam paid lavish tribute to the Chinese Emperor: cartloads of silk, ivory, mother of pearl and sandalwood disappeared over Vietnam's northern border, and the wider population was forced to do strenuous amounts of unpaid labour for the general enrichment of the Middle Kingdom. Vietnamese rebellions against this state of affairs started as early as the first century AD and they are celebrated down to this day as heroic steps on the road to True Vietnamese Nationhood.

But beneath the surface - indeed on the surface a lot of the time - a huge amount of borrowing was going on; even though the Chinese ruled Vietnam ruthlessly for their own benefit, the locals didn't straightforwardly repudiate Chinese ways, they adapted to them and in many cases made them their own. Not the least of the cultural imports was Confucianism and the thing to remember about it, if you want to get your head around its influence in Asian history, is that it has gone through a series of slow transformations, starting out, in Confucius's day, as a kind of minority report on the ethics and politics of feudal China, slowly becoming a consistent body of philosophical ideas, then a blueprint to run a sophisticated feudal society, in the end becoming something close to a religion, with a lightly emphasized cult of Confucius and a heavily emphasized cult of classical Confucian texts.

Essentially it was in these last two forms that Confucianism arrived in Vietnam, along with Han Dynasty troops, who occupied the greater part of the Vietnamese cultural heartland in the Second Century BC. 

Han Emperors sent various officials, schooled in Confucian ways, to govern their fractious new dominion. Over the years, a range of Confucian institutions worked their way into the Vietnamese system. Full-blown Chinese ancestor worship became a normal part of Vietnamese life. The beautiful, elaborate regulation of works and days by customary ritual, which Confucius himself had perfected back in the Fifth Century BC, took on Vietnamese form. Plus there was the language: 70% of Vietnamese words come from Chinese and it was during Vietnam's days as a Chinese colony that the main work of linguistic assimilation took place.

A second rather large import was Buddhism, which again seems to have reached Vietnam from China, rather than its Indian heartland. After the Third Century AD, pagodas became normal features of Vietnamese villages and in them the Vietnamese gave Buddhism a warm-hearted Vietnamese twist. Monks read their scriptures in Chinese and took their general lead from the main movements in Chinese Buddhism, like Zen. The wider population accepted the Chinese forms and got on worshiping what they liked. To become truly popular in Vietnam, Buddhism adapted itself to the cults of various gods, spirits and natural powers that the Vietnamese had already been worshiping for untold ages.

 

For better and for worse, Chinese influence didn't let up though, even once the Vietnamese regained their independence in 938AD. Every couple of 100 years, new Chinese invasions were launched and promptly beaten back - at the cost of vast numbers of human lives. In the Eleventh Century, the Sung Dynasty tried its luck, in the Thirteenth Century the charge was led by the well-known right-wing dynasty of the Mongols, led by Donald Trump. However, the kernel of the grudge that the Vietnamese bear the Chinese down to today probably lies in the occupation of Vietnamese territory by Ming Dynasty troops between 1407 and 1427 - an episode that saw the wanton destruction of most of Vietnam's previous high culture, stored neatly in the Royal Citadel in Hanoi and torched by marauding Ming troops.

All the invasions did something to define Vietnam's cultural identity in anti-Chinese terms. The Vietnamese victors of battles against the Chinese formed the basic pantheon of national gods and culture heroes. At an even more basic level, the whole place turned itself into a wildly tough fighting force capable of subordinating pretty much all individual desire to the needs of collective self-defense. Historical irony no.1: The collective consciousness which the Vietnamese think of as a distinctively national trait has two historical bases, both of which are deeply related to China: a positive base in Confucian ideas about the individual's duty to family and society, and a negative base in Chinese bastardry towards its southern neighbour. Countries are made to stick together as countries in funny ways. In Vietnam it was a deep undercurrent of Chinese ideas and an overwhelming amount of Chinese nastiness that did the trick.

Probably the most counter-intuitive response to the threat of Chinese invasion was the decision on the part of Vietnam's own Lê Dynasty (1428 - 1788) to set up a thoroughly Chinese system of government and education, after the Ming ran amok in the early 1400's. Effectively, a new Chinese strand was grafted onto Vietnamese history, in the generation or two after the rout in Hanoi; from 1463 the selection process for all government jobs in Vietnam was rigorously based on knowledge of the Chinese classics, tested in national exam competitions every three years. The watchword of the great Confucian emperor, Lê Thánh Tông, was that government should be the preserve of men of noble character, not men of noble birth - well-educated men steeped in Confucian notions of ritual and responsibility and capable, if called on, to improvise a drily beautiful poem or two. (As a virtuous Confucian, women, either of noble or not so noble character, were of little interest to him.) 

The immediate effect was to raise the prestige of Chinese high culture to new heights. From the time of the Lê reforms, anyone (anyone male at least) who wanted to share in the responsibilities or profits of government also had to be a master of the Chinese language, together with the general arts of life associated with it.

In fact you could say that many of the elements that the Vietnamese think of as constituting "Vietnameseness" only came together at the time of the Lê Dynasty's turn towards China. The "traditional" Vietnamese respect for learning only became traditional under the impact of Chinese ideals of scholarship. The political cohesion of the country was solidified as a centralized bureaucracy modeled on Chinese lines came into existence. In the end, even the struggles of ordinary Vietnamese against the injustices of the system got a boost from - the system itself. While Chinese-style scholars who successfully landed government jobs tended to use their hard-earned privileges to grind the noses of poor rice farmers, other Confucians lived much closer to the people. There were Confucians who retired to their home villages once their work in government was done. There were Confucians who taught in their home villages all their lives after failing to get a government job in the first place. Both types of outsiders encouraged the broader masses in their struggles with royal authority in the decades and centuries that followed, as the initial Confucian idealism of Lê Thánh Tông slowly dissipated.

In the long term, a nice little amalgam of Chinese and native Vietnamese culture came into existence. The formal rules that regulated daily life, which Confucianism had issued by the 1000, were adapted or abandoned in line with average-everyday Vietnamese common sense. The prudery of official Confucianism was set aside in lusty village festivals (and is still there to see in the artwork on display in old-fashioned Vietnamese villages).

The patriarchal emphasis of official Confucianism was infused with some authentic, Vietnamese-style mummy worship. The cult of ancestors, which in the Chinese tradition is basically a duty on the part of male descendants to pay homage to male forefathers, in the Vietnamese tradition was renovated, with male and female ancestors honoured equally at the family's ancestral altar.

After another Chinese invasion in the Eighteenth Century, Vietnam's feudal monarchy was in fact overthrown and the country's new rulers briefly looked set to modernize the place along authentic non-Chinese lines. This time, Chinese-style conservatives won the day and Vietnam's last royal dynasty, the Nguyễn, established itself on the throne. (The reason so many Vietnamese share the family name "Nguyễn" dates from this era of Vietnamese history. The Nguyễn clan had long provided the Southern parts of Vietnam with a caste of feudal overlords. Essentially, once the overlords of the South became the new ruling clan throughout the land, they ordered masses of their new subjects to take the clan name, giving rise to a top-down naming system whose effects persist to this day.)

With the rise of the Nguyễn, the stuffy side of Vietnam's Chinese heritage asserted itself; having ascended to royal power, Vietnam's new masters styled themselves more Chinese than the Chinese themselves - which itself was a complex bad joke, given that China at the time was ruled by a non-Chinese dynasty, intent on wrapping itself in the now heavy cloak of Chinese tradition. Major historical irony number 2.

Strict adherence to traditional Chinese forms got Vietnam exactly nowhere. The Nguyễn's traditionalism, just like that of their models in Peking, left them ill-equipped, both mentally and materially, to confront the challenges posed by a new set of invaders from the outside: Westerners armed with weapons, drugs and a hard-nosed attitude to getting their own way. Here was a force that was more powerful and far more foreign - both to the Chinese and the Vietnamese - than any army that had swept across their respective northern borders down the centuries. While Western intervention in China fueled Civil Wars that were still being fought in the middle of the Twentieth Century, in the case of Vietnam the result was out and out occupation. By the end of the Nineteenth Century, French colonists had systematically performed two feats. First, they had divided Vietnam into three, ruling the South as an out-and-out colony and Central and Northern Vietnam as "allied dependencies". Secondly, they had reduced the great Chinese spectacle of the Nguyễn monarchy to a colourful sideshow, which is what it remains (with a bit of help from the tourist industry) pretty much down to today:

As far as more recent attitudes to China go, parts of Vietnam's communist establishment seem at times quite close to recognizing that the age-old Vietnamese grudge against the Chinese is hardly a simple matter. School primers still tend to present the Chinese as the eternal aggressor and communist orthodoxy tends to reinforce this with simple moral tales about the injustice of the total social-political system imported from the Middle Kingdom: Chinese influence on Vietnam tends to get lumped together in a black and white volume entitled "the evils of feudalism". Over the past 25 years, more open-minded historians have taken the liberty to fill out the story - in particular to show how local Confucians were a diverse bunch who at times played the part of country intellectuals, shaping, or even leading, the struggles of ordinary Vietnamese against the venal agents of feudal authority. 

In fact one of the more interesting ways Vietnam's Chinese heritage has begun to be read during the past 25 years of tentative liberalization is through a combination of Marx and Confucius.

To explain how this works would take another 10 hours, so I'll spare you the details. But the rough idea is to downplay orthodox Confucian ideas about fixed social roles and the duty of absolute obedience owed to rulers and instead take the Confucian idea of humaneness, teasing out of it an acknowledgement of the basis of political rule in the hearts and aspirations of the people.

Obviously it'd be a pretty steep task to discover in Vietnam's Chinese heritage a full-blown notion of legitimate government of the people by the people. But Vietnam's Communist masters, in their own cramped way, know they have to add some of the lessons of Confucius and Mencius to the more familiar strictures of Marx and Lenin. The task of ruling Vietnam, and of keeping themselves firmly positioned on the once plush seat of state, depends crucially on responding - not just to contradictory expectations emanating from Beijing and Washington, but to the average Vietnamese sense of what it means to live in a dynamic, but rapidly fragmenting, social world.

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Not that China and Vietnam are particularly at peace now that the positive side of Vietnam's Chinese heritage has been given some degree of official recognition. Chinese raids into Vietnamese territory started all over again in the last quarter of the Twentieth Century, virtually from the time China began its current rise to global power. Nowadays, fear of further Chinese aggression is kept on permanent low heat by Vietnamese media sources ever-fond of a patriotic story. And of course it is heavily fueled by the Chinese, who are intent on projecting power in cultural, economic and military terms now that they produce half the goods, and own half the debt, of the entire world.

You might have thought the well-known war the Vietnamese fought against America between 1963 and 1975, with substantial Chinese assistance, might have helped to keep a lid on old-fashioned tensions between the two neighbours. Surely the project of building socialism together, and defending it against the aggression of American "imperialists", was enough to make the age-old enemies work together?  Unfortunately, minor differences of opinion are sometimes as good as actual wars to get people or nations at each other's throats again. And it was just such a muddle of strategic and ideological differences that again turned the Vietnamese against the Chinese in the 70's, after a mere 20 years of communist brotherhood.

Towards the end of the Vietnam War, Chairman Mao started seriously negotiating with the Americans, in a bid to win an unlikely ally in another weird, nasty ideological struggle (between Communist China and the Soviet Union). Mao in fact favoured a two-state solution to the conflict in Vietnam and if he'd had his way the North Vietnamese effort to boot out the Americans and unify the country would've been rendered entirely meaningless - Vietnam, like Korea, might have remained divided in two down to this day. Understandably, the North Vietnamese leadership in Hanoi were upset. 

However, relations between Beijing and Hanoi really went sour after the end of The War, once the North Vietnamese had stitched up their victory over the American-backed government of the South. In the years prior to 1975, Mao had been the main patron of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, who, when they came to power, proceeded to turn the entire country into an enormous death camp and then launch raids across Cambodia's border with Southern Vietnam, killing miserable Vietnamese rice farmers by the thousand.

In the meantime, the Vietnamese were doing their fair share of shooting and smiting. In the South of Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese of ethnic Chinese origin were on the receiving end of a not very bright idea: to liberate the accumulated capital of the Chinese business community in South Vietnam - straight into the coffers of the new Communist government. Large numbers of the Chinese population of Saigon (soon to be renamed Ho Chi Minh City) were sent back to China and many of the rest fled the country. Ethnic Chinese Vietnamese made up a large percentage of the boat people who were soon fleeing South Vietnam in droves. Those who remained were often forcibly resettled in the Southern countryside. Many ethnic Chinese had been small traders in and around Saigon's Chinatown (Chợ Lớn) for generations. With little or no skills growing subsistence crops in wild jungle places, many came close to starvation in the years immediately following the war.

The new Communist government's decision to expropriate the riches of Chinese Vietnamese after 1975 might have been a social disaster. What the new government did to stop the raids across the Cambodian border was an unprecedented good; it marched the Vietnamese army straight into Phnom Penh and kicked out the Khmer Rouge, who by 1978 had managed to slaughter 2 million Cambodians in the name of their special Chinese version of communism. However, the episode was a disaster for Chinese-Vietnamese relations. By 1979, China's Deng Xiaoping had decided that the Vietnamese needed to be "taught a lesson" for kicking out China's mob in Phnom Penh. So a six-week war was launched, Chinese troops occupied several towns on the Vietnamese side of the Chinese-Vietnamese border, only to be beaten back by battle-hardened troops, fresh from fighting the Americans, the Cambodians and just about everyone else.

The Chinese claimed the mess as a strategic victory. The Vietnamese noted with some pride that this time the invaders from the north hadn't made it more than 50km into Vietnamese territory. Neither side pointed very frankly to the hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Vietnamese killed in Deng's extravagant pedagogical set-piece.

That brings us almost to the present day, when numerous minor and medium-sized grievances still simmer away.

The dispute that gets the most coverage is over a series of tiny islands in the South China Sea that are claimed by both countries. For China the dispute seems to be partly about mineral riches, partly about geopolitical strategy: a third of the world's shipping passes between Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines on its way to ports in Northern Asia and having military control of sea-routes is definitely on the map of China's path to global power. For the Vietnamese, the dispute is mainly about national pride. Naturally enough, they consider it highly provocative when the Chinese build military bases on what are in essence fortified sand banks.

 
And they find it downright offensive that China claims sovereignty over the sea pretty much right up to the Vietnamese coastline, as the notorious Chinese 9-dash map of the region makes plain:  

Even mentioning the "South China Sea" in Vietnam could land you in a bit of trouble. Many Vietnamese won't know what you're talking about and some of the ones who do will be riled by the word "China" in the English designator for the relevant body of water. Calling it the "South China Sea" in some sense gives credibility to Chinese claims. In Vietnam it's called the"Biển Đông" (East Sea) - presumably because it is to the east of the impish, dragon-shaped nation whose belly sticks out into the deep aquamarine in a way richly suggestive of property rights.  

If Vietnamese suspicions about Chinese geopolitical strategy are well-founded, then the suspicion that the Chinese are intentionally setting out to poison Vietnamese kiddies seems slightly overblown. There can be no doubt that a certain quantity of deadly Chinese chemicals ends up in Vietnamese food, and in some of the other products flowing across the Vietnamese-Chinese border in great profusion. But Vietnamese patriots have blown this up into a systematic plan to kill, or at least seriously enervate, the Vietnamese body-politic; the reality, I suspect, is that the dangerous chemicals moving southwards over the border into Vietnam are in equally wide circulation in China.

True, Chinese factories might be producing coffee-substitutes laced with lead and other toxins and trucking them across the border into Vietnam. But greed alone is what prompts Vietnamese coffee vendors to buy the stuff and sell it on the street. One plastic tank apparently makes 400 cups of a saleable, coffee-related product. And creates dozens of new cases of cancer. Yum.

A little less nutty, but still in the realm of uncontrolled suspicion, is the idea that crafty Chinese farming conglomerates are deliberately driving honest Vietnamese primary producers out of business. Again, there's a kernel of truth to this. Yes, large, credit-rich Chinese farms do produce large, cheap, chemically enhanced fruit and vegetables which flood the Vietnamese market, making it harder and harder for small-scale Vietnamese growers to get by. And, yes, there do seem to be Chinese business operatives at work in various upcountry places in Vietnam, buying up supplies of subsistence products and selling them back to locals at an extravagant mark-up in what is essentially an elaborate con. However, the grim reality of what is going on most of the time is probably not that of systematic Chinese evil-doing, but the simple fact of hard-nosed economic competition across borders. And here's the thing. Economic competition across borders is something that China and Vietnam have both signed up to in a very big way in recent decades.

If dodgy chemicals and toxic economic competition are controversial enough, then there's the whole issue of the Mekong, which is the life-blood of the economy, indeed the life-blood of society itself, in the south of Vietnam. Unfortunately for the Vietnamese, the Mekong has its source - do you know where? In Laos and Cambodia (firm Chinese allies) and in China's ("China's"?) Tibetan highlands. And what have Chinese investment banks been encouraging the Laotians and Cambodians to do with merry abandon in the upper reaches of the Mekong in recent times? Exactly what the Chinese have been doing to most of China's rivers: damming them as fast as they can to supply the region's growing power needs, and in the process reducing water flows to Vietnam's "rice-basket" in the Southern lowlands.

Though tensions have been managed diplomatically so far, the long-term potential for conflict over the issue is palpable. The Vietnamese already have a sense that the Chinese have their hands around the nation's proverbial jugular. The fact that the Chinese and their allies have control over half the country's water supply is only bound to inflame it. In the long-term, reduced water-flow has the potential to turn the Lower Mekong, home to 20 million people and the source of 90% of Vietnam's rice, into little more than a searing, salt-logged plain.

No doubt about it, the uncontrolled suspicion and awkward messages directed at the Chinese from the Vietnamese lowlands look set to keep on coming:

 
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If the similarities and common interests between Vietnam and China are masked by historical aggression and modern-day suspicion, what can we say does genuinely distinguish the Vietnamese and the Chinese?

The first thing the Vietnamese themselves would point to if you asked them this question would be the last thing to strike a Western visitor to Vietnam: the Vietnamese and the Chinese, according to the Vietnamese at least, look quite different.

Of course, you'd expect the Vietnamese to claim that Vietnamese women are more distinctive (more beautiful) than Chinese women. What they'd also tell you is that Chinese eyes are smaller and narrower, Chinese faces flatter and rounder and Chinese general features somehow not as fine - all of which does make it roughly possible for Vietnamese to tell Vietnamese and Chinese faces apart at least some of the time. (Chinese lips are supposedly not as full as Vietnamese lips and, as the local proverb goes, "thin lips tell lies".)

Is it true that the Vietnamese think a bit differently to the Chinese? It would be silly to take Vietnamese self-stylization at face value, though it's true that clichés about national character do have real world effects - normal people adjust the way they think and behave to fit in with fixed ideas about the way members of their own clan normally think and behave, and how they're different from their neighbours. It's a kind of trick of psychological perspective. And one that certainly seems to be in play a fair bit on the south side of the Chinese-Vietnamese border.

The Vietnamese, across the board, think of themselves as pluckier and tougher than the Chinese - something they put down, in large part, to having been invaded by their northern neighbours so many times down the centuries.

The further south you go in Vietnam, the more you'll hear it claimed that the Vietnamese are better at enjoying themselves than the Chinese. Vietnamese, it is true, are willing to credit the Chinese with having a more ancient or refined culture than their own. The downside is that the Chinese are supposed to be more boring and staid; where a "typical" Vietnamese will speak his heart or throw a spontaneous party, a "typical" Chinese will (in the Vietnamese mind) stand on ceremony.

In my experience, Vietnamese, across the board, are in fact more accommodating towards foreigners, a little more eager to please; they're interested in what the rest of the world thinks of Vietnam, where the Chinese are indifferent, or maybe just too busy to care. Turn up in Vietnam speaking half-decent Vietnamese and people will really make a fuss of you; even if you can just pronounce half a dozen simple phrases, you'll make quite a few locals deliriously happy. In China, try the same party trick and you will be greeted, at best, with a certain wry smile.

In business and politics, the Chinese are supposed to be coldly calculating, in both the short and the very, very long term. The Vietnamese (again on their own account) could never be like that; like Australians, they're attached to the sorts of ideas of informal mateship that do the rounds of little nations which think of themselves as made up mainly of good, little people. A typical Vietnamese, on this picture, could never play his cards close to his chest or pretend that nothing is happening for years on end, the way Chinese businessmen and government officials do: striking up friendships and making the general warmth of Vietnamese existence flow out in all directions are much too important for that.

Or such roughly are the fixed ideas the Vietnamese have about the Chinese. The key point being that there is no corresponding set of fixed ideas about the Vietnamese entertained by anyone in China. The Chinese of course have their stereotypes and clichés, their historical and cultural sore points, and their blind spots, about other nations and the wider world. But one of the benefits of being the most populous nation on earth with a 5000 year history is that you are spared little-nation anxieties about the really big nations in your neighbourhood of the world. This brings us to inter-cultural irony number 3. The Chinese just don't pay the Vietnamese as much attention as the Vietnamese pay them.

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Your lesson for today: when in Vietnam, whatever you do, don't tell Vietnamese people that, as far as you can see, they're basically Chinese with a twist.

Remember that nowadays being a normal, patriotic Vietnamese person, who's proud of his country's culture and its successes fighting painful defensive wars, means being a little bit anti-Chinese.

If it's the younger generation of Vietnamese you're mixing with, note that being young and hip in today's Vietnam means idolizing Korean boybands, imitating Korean hairdos, reading Japanese manga and infusing your life with a bit of pop cultural edginess from a range of Asian and Western sources.

Vietnamese teenagers might spend days (or years) playing Chinese martial arts games on their computers and quite a few Vietnamese oldies are addicted to the historical soap operas that are churned out by studios in Shanghai and Hong Kong by the bucketful. However neither the games nor the soaps have any noticeable effect on wider culture or mentality. While masses of Vietnamese learn Korean or head to Japan for work, and eventually make it back to Vietnam with a range of Korean or Japanese ideas in their heads, the number who orient themselves towards China is vanishingly small: a minority in the military-political establishment, plus the realists in the economics and business fraternity, who know well enough where most Vietnamese supply chains start out from.  

Ask a bunch of Vietnamese teenagers what their nation's primary cultural symbols are and they'll probably tell you something about the lotus. Ask them what the lotus stands for and they won't mention the Buddhist idea of tranquil beauty, they'll tell you about Vietnam Airlines.

Try digging a little deeper - and the brighter ones will tell you that red is the traditional Vietnamese colour of marriage, bamboo the traditional Vietnamese symbol of unity and the dragon the traditional symbol of Vietnamese power and prosperity.

 

Now ask them where these key cultural signifiers come from and their eyes will widen and one or two of the boys will let out a confused roar: China! At which point some of them will start booing and some of the others start muttering in an undertone.

Optimistic inhabitants of a globalized culture world that they are, young Vietnamese might say they'd be happy to see all the old Chinese stuff that belongs to Vietnam's past disappear into the dustbin of history.  

But the ones doing the muttering perhaps see it differently. They know, or rather they feel in their bones, that by pulling up the roots of Vietnam's Chinese culture, they'd in a sense be abolishing Vietnam itself.

Irony no. 4, the biggest of them all, one that applies equally to history and culture and individual psychology: there's nothing more awkward than the effort to escape something that has always been a part of yourself, and often one of the deepest parts, the way China is part of Vietnam.