Source: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/ID26Ae02.html
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2Why Vietnam loves and hates
ChinaBy Andrew Forbes
For more than 2,000 years, Vietnam's
development as a nation has been marked by one
fixed and immutable factor - the proximity of
China. The relationship between the two countries
is in many ways a family affair, with all the
closeness of shared values and bitterness of close
rivalries.
No country in Southeast Asia is
culturally closer to China than Vietnam, and no
other country in the region has spent so long fending
off Chinese domination, often at a terrible cost
in lives, economic development and political
compromise.
China has been Vietnam's
blessing and Vietnam's curse. It remains an
intrusive cultural godfather, the giant to the
north that is "always there". Almost a thousand
years of Chinese occupation, between the Han
conquest of Nam Viet in the 2nd century BC and the
reassertion of Vietnamese independence as Dai Viet
in AD 967, marked the Vietnamese so deeply that
they became, in effect, an outpost of Chinese
civilization in Southeast Asia.
While the
other countries of Indochina are Theravada
Buddhist, sharing cultural links with South Asia,
Vietnam derived its predominant religion - a mix
of Mahayana Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism
popularly known as
tam giao or "Three
Religions"- from China. Until the introduction of
romanized
quoc ngu script in the 17th
century, Vietnamese scholars wrote in Chinese
characters or in
chu nho, a Vietnamese
derivative of Chinese characters.
Over the
centuries, Vietnam developed as a smaller version
of the Middle Kingdom, a centralized, hierarchical
state ruled by an all-powerful emperor living in a
Forbidden City based on its namesake in Beijing
and administered by a highly educated Confucian
bureaucracy.
Both countries are deeply
conscious of the cultural ties that bind them
together, and each is still deeply suspicious of
the other. During the long centuries of Chinese
occupation, the Vietnamese enthusiastically
embraced many aspects of Chinese civilization,
while at the same time fighting with an
extraordinary vigor to maintain their cultural
identity and regain their national independence.
During the Tang Dynasty (6th-9th centuries
AD), Vietnamese guerrillas fighting the Chinese
sang a martial song that emphasized their separate
identity in the clearest of terms:
Fight to keep our hair long,
Fight
to keep our teeth black,
Fight to show that
the heroic southern country can never be
defeated. For their part, the Chinese
recognized the Vietnamese as a kindred people, to
be offered the benefits of higher Chinese
civilization and, ultimately, the rare privilege
of being absorbed into the Chinese polity.
On the other hand, as near family, they
were to be punished especially severely if they
rejected Chinese standards or rebelled against
Chinese control. This was made very clear in a
remarkable message sent by the Song Emperor
Taizong to King Le Hoan in AD 979, just over a
decade after Vietnam first reasserted its
independence.
Like a stern headmaster,
Taizong appealed to Le Hoan to see reason and
return to the Chinese fold: "Although your seas
have pearls, we will throw them into the rivers,
and though your mountains produce gold, we will
throw it into the dust. We do not covet your
valuables. You fly and leap like savages, we have
horse-drawn carriages. You drink through your
noses, we have rice and wine. Let us change your
customs. You cut your hair, we wear hats; when you
talk, you sound like birds. We have examinations
and books. Let us teach you the knowledge of the
proper laws ... Do you not want to escape from the
savagery of the outer islands and gaze upon the
house of civilization? Do you want to discard your
garments of leaves and grass and wear flowered
robes embroidered with mountains and dragons? Have
you understood?"
In fact Le Hoan
understood Taizong very well and, like his modern
successors, knew exactly what he wanted from China
- access to its culture and civilization without
coming under its political control or jeopardizing
Vietnamese freedom in any way. This attitude
infuriated Taizong, as it would generations of
Chinese to come.
In 1407, the Ming Empire
managed to reassert Chinese control over its
stubbornly independent southern neighbor, and
Emperor Yongle - no doubt, to his mind, in the
best interests of the Vietnamese - imposed a
policy of enforced Sinicization. Predictably
enough, Vietnam rejected this "kindness" and
fought back, expelling the Chinese yet again in
1428.
Yongle was apoplectic when he
learned of their rebellion. Vietnam was not just
another tributary state, he insisted, but a former
province that had once enjoyed the benefits of
Chinese civilization
and
yet had wantonly rejected this privilege. In view
of this close association - Yongle used the term
mi mi or "intimately related" - Vietnam's
rebellion was particularly heinous and deserved
the fiercest of punishments.
China on
topSometimes a strongly sexual imagery
creeps into this "intimate relationship", with
Vietnam, the weaker partner, a victim of
Chinese violation. In AD 248,
the Vietnamese heroine Lady Triu, who led a
popular uprising against the Chinese occupation,
proclaimed: "I want to ride the great winds,
strike the sharks on the high seas, drive out the
invaders, reconquer the nation, burst the bonds of
slavery and never bow to become anyone's
concubine."
Her defiant choice of words
was more than just symbolic. Vietnam has long been
a source of women for the Chinese sex trade. In
Tang times, the Chinese poet Yuan Chen wrote
appreciatively of "slave girls of Viet, sleek, of
buttery flesh", while today the booming market for
Vietnamese women in Taiwan infuriates and
humiliates many Vietnamese men.
It's
instructive, then, that in his 1987 novel
Fired
Gold Vietnamese author Nguyen Huy Thiep
writes, "The most significant characteristics of
this country are its smallness and weakness. She
is like a virgin girl raped by Chinese
civilization. The girl concurrently enjoys,
despises and is humiliated by the rape."
This Chinese belief that Vietnam is not
just another nation, but rather a member of the
family - almost Chinese, aware of the blessings of
Chinese civilization, but somehow stubbornly
refusing, century after century, to become Chinese
- has persisted down to the present day.
During the Second Indochina War, Chinese
propaganda stressed that Vietnam and China were
"as close as the lips and the teeth". After the US
defeat, however, Vietnam once again showed its
independence, allying itself with the Soviet
Union, in 1978-79, invading neighboring Cambodia
and overthrowing China's main ally in Southeast
Asia, the Khmer Rouge.
Once again Chinese
fury knew no bounds, and Beijing determined to
teach the "ungrateful" Vietnamese a lesson. Deng
Xiaoping, the Chinese leader, openly denounced the
Vietnamese as "the hooligans of the East".
According to one Thai diplomat: "The moment the
topic of Vietnam came up, you could see something
change in Deng Xiaoping.
"His hatred was
just visceral. He spat forcefully into his
spittoon and called the Vietnamese 'dogs'." Acting
on Deng's orders, the Chinese army invaded Vietnam
in 1979, capturing five northern provincial
capitals before systematically demolishing them
and withdrawing to China after administering a
symbolic "lesson".
But who taught a lesson
to whom? Beijing sought to force Hanoi to withdraw
its frontline forces from Cambodia, but the
Vietnamese didn't engage these forces in the
struggle, choosing instead to confront the Chinese
with irregulars and provincial militia. Casualties
were about equal, and China lost considerable
face, as well as international respect, as a
result of its invasion.
Over the
millennia, actions like this have taught the
Vietnamese a recurring lesson about China. It's
there, it's big, and it won't go away, so appease
it without yielding whenever possible, and fight
it with every resource available whenever
necessary.
Just as Chinese rulers have
seen the Vietnamese as ingrates and hooligans, so
the Vietnamese have seen the Chinese as arrogant
and aggressive, a power to be emulated at all
times, mollified in times of peace, and fiercely
resisted in times of war.
In 1946, 1,700
years after Lady Triu's declaration, another great
Vietnamese patriot, Ho Chi Minh, warned his Viet
Minh colleagues in forceful terms against using
Chinese Nationalist troops in the north as a
buffer against the return of the French: "You
fools! Don't you realize what it means if the
Chinese remain? Don't you remember your history?
"The last time the Chinese came, they
stayed a thousand years. The French are
foreigners. They are weak. Colonialism is dying.
The white man is finished in Asia. But if the
Chinese stay now, they will never go. As for me,
I
prefer to sniff French shit for five years than to
eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life."
Yet Ho was an ardent admirer of Chinese
civilization, fluent in Mandarin, a skilled
calligrapher who wrote Chinese poetry, a close
friend and colleague of Chinese leaders Mao Zedong
and Zhou Enlai. Ho wasn't as much anti-Chinese as
he was pro-Vietnamese. It was his deep
understanding of and respect for China that
enabled him to recognize, clearly and
definitively, the menace that "a close family
relationship" with the giant to the north posed,
and continues to pose, for Vietnam's independence
and freedom.
It's ironic, then, that as
the current Vietnamese leadership strive to
develop their economy along increasingly
capitalist lines while at the same time retaining
their monopoly on state power, the country they
most admire and seek to emulate is, as always, the
one they most fear.
Andrew
Forbes is editor of CPA Media as well as a
correspondent in its Thailand bureau. He has
recently completed National Geographic
Traveler: Shanghai
, and the above is an
excerpt from his forthcoming book A Phoenix
Reborn: Travels in New Vietnam.
(Copyright
2007 Andrew Forbes.)
Julio Dorneles 