Vietnamese Communism In Comparative Perspective

William S Turley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000011128
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book focuses on how the Vietnam Communist party adapted to its environment in order to achieve and exercise power and to what degree these adaptations made the Vietnamese revolution distinctive.

1
Communism and History in Vietnam

John K. Whitmore

History is a source of strength for us.

Pham Huy Thong
Hanoi, January 26, 1973¹

A title such as this involves two topics first, the place of Communism in Vietnamese history and, second, the manner in which Vietnamese Communists have looked at the past of their country.² I will offer some impressions on both these topics and will finish with comparative remarks concerning Communist historiography. The resulting essay is meant as a suggestion for further work.

Communism in Vietnamese History

How we view the place of Communism in the Vietnamese past depends on the assumptions, stated or implicit, taken of the reality of Vietnam. The popular conception in this country is that traditional Vietnamese culture was a reflection, generally a pale reflection, of China's. This was the Confucian view, subsequently adopted by French and American writers. If this were so, the French conguest and the emasculation of the imperial institution destroyed the reality of Vietnam. All that was left to the Vietnamese was to draw in some fashion on the contemporary ideologies of the twentieth century. Into the cultural vacuum left by the historical discontinuity came a flood of foreign ideas. The Western powers were justified in their attempts to guide the nation. Communism was merely another of the foreign systems trying to take its place on the Vietnamese scene. Vietnam whirled in the international vortex. There remained no continuity from the past of any value, and little of its culture existed by which the Vietnamese could resolve their contemporary dilemma: what would Vietnam be in the modern world?

If, instead, we look to internal detail rather than external relations for our guidelines in reconstructing Vietnamese history, we may offer different configurations of past and present in Vietnam. Recent work, my own and others, suggests to me a schema such as in Table 2.1.

The archaeological work achieved in northern Vietnam over the past twenty years and Keith W. Taylor's recent doctoral disseration, The Birth of Vietnam,³ show the existence of the thriving local society of the Lac in the Red River (Song Khoi) valley two thousand years ago. Over the last centuries B.C., major developments took place that led to a wet rice economy, refined bronze implements, local chieftains ("the Lac lords"), and a certain regional power west and northwest of the present Hanoi (first, the Hong Bang dynasty, then the invading Au). This initial period of internal cultural achievement ended with the expansion of the great Han empire in China from the second century B.C. to the first century A.D. Segments of the indigenous society came to be encompassed in the Chinese imperial world. Others carried on the beliefs of their past, including the myths of political leadership and resistance. The result of the centuries of Chinese domination was not to transform the Vietnamese into Chinese but, as Taylor has so well described, to transform Vietnamese consciousness. The culmination of this consciousness came in the eleventh century when the indigenous myths, the borrowed elements from China, and the rising Buddhist church came together to form the basis for an indigenous state, that of the Ly, 1010 to 1224.⁴

This new form of state was, to my mind, quite similar to those of its contemporaries in Southeast Asia: Angkor in Cambodia, Pagan in Burma, and eastern Java. The Ly state was aristocratic, Mahayana Buddhist, and indirect in its control of the countryside. The blood oath of loyalty and, I believe, a cult of cosmic kingship were important elements in the political structure. With the Tran dynasty, 1225 to 1400, this pattern continued. Yet the need for a tightened control of resources led to the establishment of more Sinic elements, particularly Confucianism, in Vietnam. A crisis in political control in the late fourteenth century brought 100 years of change and the emergence, in the 1460s, of the full "Chinese model" under the Le dynasty, 1428 to 1787. This "model" was heavily

TABLE 2.1
Outline of Vietnamese History

Indigenous Cultural and Political Development
42/43 A.D.	Chinese crush uprising of the Trung sisters
Domination by China, Revolts by Local Chieftains
938	Vietnamese victory over southern Chinese forces
1010	Vietnamese capital established at Thang-long (Hanoi)
Southeast Asian Buddhist State in Vietnam
1077/1287	Vietnamese victories over Chinese/Mongols
1370-1390	Cham victories, crisis in Vietnamese state
1400-1407	Ho Quy Ly rules, reforms Vietnam
1407-1427	Ming Chinese occupation of Vietnam, victorious Vietnamese resistance
1460s	Vietnam officially adopts Chinese-style Confucianism, bureaucracy
The Chinese Model in Vietnam, Internal Political Upheavals
1527-1592	The Mac dynasty, strongly Confucian
1600-1774	Trinh/Nguyen split
1770s-1780s	The Tay-son rebellion
1789	First Tet offensive, defeat of Chinese invasion
1802-1885 (1945)	Nguyen dynasty with capital shifted to Hue
1860s-1880s	French conquest of Vietnam
Vietnamese Search for Their Place in the Modern World
1900-1925	Phan Boi Chau, Phan Chu Trinh
1920s-1940s	VNQDD (Nguyen Thai Hoc), ICP (Nguyen Ai Quoc/Ho Chi Minh)
1945	The August Revolution, Vietnam declared independent
1940s-1970s	Dien Bien Phu, Tet offensive 1968, 12 days of December 1972, Spring offensive (Ho Chi Minh campaign) 1975
1976-1976	Establishment of the SRV

influenced by the contemporary Ming dynasty and included the bureaucratic form of direct administration, Neo-Confucianism as the ideology of the state, and universalistic selection for office via examination.

The "Chinese model" (with certain changes) lasted as the ideal of Vietnamese government for four centuries. It reached its greatest reality in Vietnam during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, only to collapse before the French thrust. The colonial regime retained the kings, though in the process the monarchy lost its appeal for most of the Vietnamese people. What is important to realize is that certain themes in Vietnamese culture, some of them linked to the ancient myths, survived both the imposition of the Chinese ideal and the French conquest.

Nevertheless, the immediate question arising from the modern political crisis was: what form will the new Vietnam take? The answers offered were numerous and came from ail points of the political spectrum. A. B. Woodside provides a nice sample of the responses from the past hundred years in his book, Community and Revolution in Modern Vietnam, as also does William J. Duiker's The Rise of Nationalism in Vietnam, 1900-1941.⁵ From the 1940s to the 1970s, the number of alternatives narrowed until May 1, 1975, marked the adoption of the Communist model. Communism had been successfully merged with the indigenous themes of Vietnamese culture to form the basis for a new political regime in Vietnam.

Such a view provides reality to the old phrase continuity and change. A strong theme of continuity must be recognized in Vietnamese civilization, as simultaneously new choices changed the form taken by that civilization. It is not so much a question of the old and the new, "the formalistic dichotomy of tradition and modernity," as it is of a continuing series of transformations of indigenous culture and society.⁶ Communism is playing the major role in this, the latest of these transformations.

Communist Historiography in Vietnam

In each of the major periods in their history, the Vietnamese have produced a different view of their past. The earlier forms of myth and chronology were almost timeless in their application to the political present and may have been strongly Southeast Asian in their form. The Chinese model brought its own style of history, a highly moral one, which blended with and tended to dominate the older views of the past.⁷ The result was, as mentioned above, the Confucian view, which emphasized the Chinese-style elements and was copied by subsequent French and American writers.

With the success of the Communist model in Vietnam, the Marxist view of history became predominant. Yet we must see in the new history the merger of theoretical and indigenous elements already noted. A key question to ask about this view of the past is the extent to which it sees the Communist present as continuous with the Vietnamese past. Does the transformation of society, in Marxist terms from communal to slave, feudal, capitalist, socialist, and ultimately Communist, allow for the continuity of Vietnamese civilization?

In pursuing this question, I am going to make the postulation that stressing the Marxist historical framework means less of a sense of continuity and vice versa, lesser emphasis on Marxist historiography marks a greater interest in continuity. An example would be the Vietnamese designation in early 1973 of the Chinese protectorate during the Tang dynasty as "feudal" (i.e., a universal classification) and not explicitly as Chinese (a particularistic classification).⁸ This implied a break between feudal and socialist periods in general and the fundamental comradeship of socialists, Vietnamese, Chinese, or whomever. The events of the past year have, of course, changed this. The Chinese have proven to the Vietnamese that, socialist or not, old habits die hard.

The chief concerns in Vietnamese Communist historiography over the past four decades have paralleled the goals of the same years--independence, unity, and socialism for Vietnam. In particular, from the 1940s into the 1970s, the watchword has been integrity--integrity of their temporal history and of their geographical space. As A. B. Woodside noted in contrast to China, "Loyalty to the monarch remained unconditional only as long as the monarch did not cede national territory . . ."⁹ The Communists picked up the age-old theme with the formation of the Viet Minh at the Eighth Plenum of the Indo-Chinese Communist Party (ICP) Central Committee in May 1941. This act marked the shift from a broad focus on a contemporary, universal class struggle across the states of Indochina to the specific emphasis on Vietnam and its heritage. In so doing, the ICP joined (and acted to channel) the surge of Vietnamese historical interest in the 1930s and the effort to overcome the fractured society of the colonial period, to restore to the Vietnamese their sense of themselves.¹⁰ Ho Chi Minh advanced this move the following year when he used indigenous literary forms (specifically the 6-8 luc-bat verse) to encourage the sense of mystique about the Vietnamese national tradition. "The History of Our Country from 2879 B.C. to 1942," a 236-line poem, came from his pen to rally indigenous pride. At the heart of the poem was the call for the "sons and daughters of Lac Hong" to repel the foreign invaders (French and Japanese). In general, we may say with Woodside, "Virtually for the first time, Ho linked the Communist cause to glorious Vietnamese historical memories like the Tay-son victory over the Chinese at Dong Da in 1789." Besides stressing the temporal unity, Ho also worked on the consciousness of the land and its cultural unity. His poem, "The Geography of Our Country," used the simple style of five-word lines to project the image of the totality of Vietnam. Easily memorized, such verses reinforced the sense of oneness lingering from past tradition.¹¹

This theme of national unity has remained fundamental to the Vietnamese revolution. Present and past merge, and contemporary heroic acts have become merely the latest over the course of several millenia. Nguyen Khac Vien in 1968 made reference to "the stream of history" encompassing Vietnam from the Bronze Age to the present, and the official History of Vietnam, Vol. I (1971), embodies this theme.¹² Luu Quy Ky, secretary-general of the Association of Vietnamese Journalists in Hanoi, saw, three weeks after the Christmas 1972 bombing of Hanoi, those "twelve days of December" in an image from the eleventh century (Thang-long, now Hanoi, the "ascending dragon" of anti-aircraft fire), and he included the battle against the B-52s in the long line of great actions of resistance to invaders. These actions were the litany of the thirty-year war to bring a Communist state to a reunified Vietnam, providing it with "an optimistic toughness" (to use Woodside's phrase) as Ho urged his people "to be worthy of" their heroic ancestors.¹³ To quote his message to the Capital Regiment on January 27, 1947,

You are the representatives of the many thousand-year-old spirit of self-respect and self reliance of our people, the indomitable spirit that has passed down through the two Trung sisters, Ly Thuong Kiet, Tran Hung Dao, Le Loi, Quang Trung, Phan Din...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. COMMUNISM AND HISTORY IN VIETNAM
• 2. VIETNAMESE REVOLUTIONARY DOCTRINE IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
• 3. VIETNAMESE COMMUNISM AND THE PEASANTS: ANALOGY AND ORIGINALITY IN VIETNAMESE EXPERIENCE
• 4. "CLASS-ISM" IN NORTH VIETNAM, 1953-1956
• 5. VIETNAMESE COMMUNISM AND RELIGIOUS SECTARIANISM
• 6. INFLUENCES AND IDIOSYNCRACIES IN THE LINE AND PRACTICE OF THE VIETNAM COMMUNIST PARTY
• 7. POLITICAL PARTICIPATION AND THE VIETNAMESE COMMUNIST PARTY
• 8. INSTITUTIONALIZING THE REVOLUTION: VIETNAM'S SEARCH FOR A MODEL OF DEVELOPMENT
• 9. VIETNAM AND THE SOCIALIST CAMP: CENTER OR PERIPHERY?
• Index