Vietnam Imperial March and Nationalism
From “The Two Viet-Nams: A Political and
Military Analysis”, Chapter 2: A Glimpse of the Past
By Bernard B. Fall (Praeger Publishers, New York, 1971),
In 111 B.C., the victorious Han crushed the young
Vietnamese state, and save for a few brief but glorious rebellions, it remained
a chinese colony for more than 1,000 years.
Viet-Nam became a Chinese protectorate ruled by a
governor and subdivided into military districts. By the beginning of the first
century A.D., the country had absorbed along with many Chinese settlers –
a great many of them the refugees from the Han dysnaty – much of what was
worthwhile in the culture of the occupying power: the difficult art of rice
planting in artificially irrigated areas, Chinese writing skills. Chinese
philosophy, and even Chinese social customs and beliefs. But – and in
this the Vietnamese are unique – they succeeded in maintaining their
national identity in spite of the fact that everything else about them had become
“Chinese.” Opposition to the Chinese rule built up as the Chinese
presence became more ubiquitous and brutal. Finally, what could be called a
routine ”occupation incident,” the execution of a minor feudal
lord, brought about a configuration. In 39 A.D., Trung Trac, the wife of the
slain lord, and her sister Trung Nhi raised an army that, in a series of swift
sieges, overwhelmed the Chinese garrisons, which had grown careless over the
years. In 40 A.D., the Vietnamese, much to their surprise, found themselves free
from foreign domination for the first time in 150 years and the Trung sisters
were proclaimed queens of the country.
Naturally in so large an empire, Chinese reaction was
slow, but when it came, it was effective. Old general Ma Yuan began his
counterattack in 43 A.D., and the Vietnamese troops of the two queens made a
fatal error: They chose to make a stand in the open field against the
experienced Chinese regulars, with their backs against the limestone cliffs at
the edge of the river Day – not far from the place where General Vo
Nguyen Giap was to pit his green regulars against French Marshal de
Lattre’s elite troops 1,908 years later.
The result was the same in both cases: The more
experienced regulars destroyed the raw Vietnamese levies. The two queens,
rather than surrender to the enemy, chose suicide by drowning in the nearby
river. “Sinization” now began in earnest, with Chinese
administration taking the place of traditional leaders. Two more rebellions
took place. One in 248 A.D., also led by woman, Trieu Au, collapsed almost
immediately, and like the Trung sisters, Trieu Au committed suicide. The second
led by Ly Bon lasted from 544 to 547 and was also crushed. With the rise of the
strong Tang dynasty in China after 618, resistance became hopeless: Viet-Nam
became the Chinese Protectorate General of the "Pacified South"
("An-Nam" in Chinese). It was under the name "Annam," a
symbol of humiliation and defeat, that the region was to become best known to
the outside world.
With the decline of the Tangs, Viet-Nam’s
chances for freedom rose again. A rash of rebellions in 938 led to the defeat
of the Chinese the following year. By 940, the Vietnamese were in full control
of their country from the foothills of Yunnan to the 17th parallel Although
they retained formal suzerainty ties with China throughout most of their
history until French domination became complete in 1883, their northern
neighbor, despite sporadic threats, never quite succeeded in controlling the
country again, save for the brief period from 1407 to 1427. Having secured
their rear areas, the Vietnamese now could address themselves to their major
historical mission - securing Lebensraum for their teeming agricultural
population in the relatively empty deltas to the south of their boundary. But to
the south lay the Indianized kingdom of Champa.
VIETNAMESE
COLONIALISM
What happened next was as thorough a job of genocide as
any modern totalitarian state could have devised. Founded in 192 AD., the
Champa kingdom, whose beautiful capital, Indrapura, was located near
present-day Faifo on the Central Viet-Nam coast, prospered for several
centuries through its flourishing seaborne trade and its powerful battle
fleets, one of which sailed up the Mekong and across the Great Lake (Tonic Sap)
of Cambodia to capture and sack Angkor in 1177. Like their near contemporaries
in Europe the Norsemen, the Chams were mostly seaborne raiders with all the
advantages and drawbacks, of the concomitant social and political organization.
They were the scourge of the area as long as they were strong and capable of
carrying the war to their neighbors in their swift ships, but having neglected
agriculture and the penetration of their own hinterland, they were incapable of
resisting the slow but steady gnawing-away process with which the peasant-based
Vietnamese state faced them. Thus, after several successful Cham raids into the
Red River Delta, the Vietnamese finally beat them off, and the Chams were
pushed onto the defensive.
Slowly, Vietnamese rice farmers peacefully occupied the
unfilled northern plains of the Champa kingdom, very often with the consent of
the Chams, who felt that this process would serve their own enrichment. But as
the settlements of the Vietnamese grew so grew the willingness and ability of
the neighboring Vietnamese state to protect its own citizens. Slice by slice,
delta by delta, the process was repeated. There were a few temporary setbacks
in the process but by the end of the eleventh century, all the coastal
provinces north of Hue had been conquered. The next important slice, including
Hue later Viet-Nam's imperial capital, became Vietnamese in the course of the
mid-fifteenth century, thanks to a marriage between he sister of the Vietnamese
king and the king of Champa. But in 147l, after renewed bitter warfare, in the
course of which the Vietnamese conquered the Chams' second capital,
Vijaya-Indrapura having been lost earlier-the once-flourishing Champa kingdom
was near collapse. It lost more than 300 miles of shore line and in fact became
little more than a beachhead stretching precariously over the small deltas of
Khanh-Hoa, Phan-Rang, and Phan-Thiet
One and a half centuries later, the Champa kingdom had
simply disappeared. Today, all that is left of it is a series of watchtower
ruins at the landward edge of the Central Vietnamese coastal plains and a small
group of perhaps 30,000 handsome Indian-featured people eking out livings as
fishermen and artisans around the Vietnamese cities of Phan-Rang and Phan-Ri.
In the course of this successful venture into
colonialism (for it was nothing else), the Vietnamese state decided to
institutionalize the process, and in 1481, the don-dien were created. Like the
Roman coloniae 1500 years earlier or the Israeli nakhal settlements 500 years
later (or the Austro-German Wehrbauern in the 1700's) the don-dien were
agricultural settlements given to farmers who were for the most part army
veterans and who, in return for free land, defended the new frontier. The
members of the don-dien were a tough hardy lot, not only willing to defend what
they already had, but usually not loath to push the border farther west-this
time at the expense of the decaying Khmer (Cambodian) state. It was obvious
such a situation was fertile in border incidents, which were further exploited
to round out the Vietnamese domain. In 1658, all of South Viet-Nam north of
Saigon (then that the fishing village of Prey Kor) was in Vietnamese hands;
Saigon itself fell in 1672.
The
next step in colonial conquest was also typical. A Chinese merchant, Mac-Cuu,
had established himself in southwestern Cambodia and, like the well-known European trading companies of the time, had
taken physical possession of several provinces stretching from Kampot to Camau.
When the Cambodians and their Siamese allies threatened Mac-Cuu's "state
within a state," he appealed for help to the neighboring Vietnamese, who
were only too happy to oblige. By 1757, Viet-Nam had occupied the rest of the
Mekong Delta and the swamp-infested Camau Peninsula. Vietnamese settlers began
to pour into the empty provinces, which became a vast "Far West" for
the Vietnamese state. To this day, the areas on the western side of the Mekong
are known to the Vietnamese as "Mien-Tay" ("the New West").
By the end of the eighteenth century, Viet-Nam had expanded to the full extent
of its present shore line.
Vietnamese intervention in Cambodian affairs had begun
in 1623 when Chey Chettha II, a king of Cambodia who had married a Vietnamese
princess, attempted to shake Siam's overlordship with the help of the Nguyen.
In exchange for that help, the Hue govern-ment requested Cambodia's
authorization to send settlers to Prey Kor, and a Vietnamese general was sent
with a security detachment to protect the new settlers. In 1658, a Vietnamese
expeditionary force again had to intervene in the endless internecine struggles
of the various pretenders to the Cambodian throne, and in 1660, Cambodia began
to pay a regular tribute to the Vietnamese court.'
But the Vietnamese yoke on
Cambodia was to take a shape far more direct than the highly theoretical
suzerainty China still exercised over Viet-Nam. The declining Khmer state was
split into three Vietnamese "residences" under the control of a
Vietnamese Chief Resident at the Cambodian court at Oudong. The Vietnamese
began an acculturation process that, as in the neighboring provinces and in the
case of the Chams, amounted to veritable genocide: destruction of the Buddhist
temples and shrines, compulsory wearing of Vietnamese clothing and hairdress,
Vietnamization of city and provincial names, and, finally, abolition of the
royal title of the Cambodian sovereigns. By the early nineteenth century, the
queen, Ang Mey (1834-41), held a virtual prisoner in her palace, was officially
referred to as merely "chief of the territory of My-Lam."3
From 1841, Cambodia was purely
and simply incorporated into Viet-Nam, but after a Cambodian rebellion
encouraged by Siam and a brief war in which Siam and Viet-Nam fought each other
to a standoff, both countries agreed in 1845 to a condominium that ended only
when France's protectorate was established, in June, 1863. A similar
condominium policy in northern Laos also had brought the important Tran-Ninh
Plateau—now better known as the Plaine des Jarres—under
intermittent Vietnamese control beginning in the sixteenth century.
It is interesting to compare the Vietnamese colonization
process with the corresponding process of state-building going on in Europe at
that time; for too many well-intentioned writers (particularly those in the United
States who feel that Europe must continually make amends for her colonial
performance) tend to gloss over the non-European colonial processes that were
going on simultaneously. In Europe, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
witnessed what could be called a national "regroupment" process:
Spain left the Low Countries; non-German states lost their influence in
Germany; and the Turks, after a high tide that had brought them to the gates of
Vienna in 1529 and 1683, returned to the lower reaches of the Balkans. In
Europe outside Russia, only Austria-Hungary was to survive as a major
multinational state until 1918, and no new state rose to power by ethnic
assimilation of alien areas. Viet-Nam was obviously doing exactly the opposite:
It carved out its territory through military conquest over states whose level
of indigenous culture was at least equal, if not superior, to its own. In other
words, it did not invoke the moralistic rationale of "Manifest
Destiny," "la Mission Civilisatrice," or "the White Man's Burden"; its
action, like the German Drang nach Osten, was simply a manifestation of the vitality of
its people. It was simply and purely a process of colonial conquest for
material gains, no more, no less. The fact that it took place on contiguous territory
does not make it anv more respectable than, say, the Russian conquest of
Hungary.
But what makes the Vietnamese
colonial process unique in Asia is that it took place in competition with that
of several European powers—and the Vietnamese beat them to the punch on
several occasions! By 1750, nearly all the later European colonial powers had
appeared on the scene: the Dutch and Spaniards in the Spice Islands, the French
and British in India, and the Portuguese through-out Southeast Asia, even as
far inland as Laos. All of them, at one time or another or simultaneously, had
trading stations in Viet-Nam. Whether through superciliousness or plain
ignorance, none of the "traditional" colonial powers consciously
reacted to the Vietnamese colonial process. But it was not without reason that
the French consolidated their position in South Viet-Nam first when they set
out to conquer the country one century later; after all, it had been Vietnamese
for so short a time that its conquest proved easiest, for its inhabitants were
the least secure in their social structure and institutions. This assertion
appears to be borne out by the fact that the South appeared more
“pro-French” (or simply “French”) than central and
North Viet-Nam and that the French colonial penetration became more difficult
as it advanced farther North.
Thus much of what today is the Republic of Viet-Nam
south of the 17th parallel has been "Vietnamese" for a
shorter span of time than the Eastern seaboard of the United States has been
American" This is a reality that cannot be simply talked away, for it
affects the very fabric of the nation in times of stress and crisis, as in the
1960’s.
Having consolidated their hold on the lowlands, the
Vietnamese committed virtually the same error as their Cham predecessors. They
failed to give their country sufficient depth, Literally, teeming in their
narrow delta, few Vietnamese had any particular desire to face the inhospitable
forests and primitive tribes of the highlands, and save for a few government-sponsored
settlements in the mountain areas of both zones, 95 per cent of all those who
are Vietnamese ethnically rather than by political fiat, live at an altitude of
less than 900 feet (300 meters).
In the highlands, the fierce
Thai, Muong, or Tho tribes tolerated Vietnamese overlordship with about as much
good grace as the latter to tolerated their own submission to the Chinese.
Tribute in ivory, precious woods, and spices was exacted by Vietnamese
mandarins who otherwise left the tribes to their traditional leaders and
Vietnamese annals are full of mountaineer uprisings. In fact, the tribal Thai
were left almost entirely to themselves from the middle of the eighteenth
century until the arrival of the French in 1893. The primitive southern
tribesmen presented a problem of their own. The Vietnamese kings sagely
recognized that they constituted a buffer zone against the still dangerous
Khmer empire, and simply left them to their own devices, after the tribal
chieftains had made their formal
submission and paid a symbolical tribute. That direct relationship
between Vietnamese-crown and the mountain tribes continued until 1955.
Nevetheless, the failure to integrate the mountain
minorities into the Vietnamese national community has remained a serious
problem to this day and is unlikely to be resolved satisfactorily in the near
future.
The Vietnamese themselves, for all their cultural and
social homogeneity suffered politically from their own overrapid growth and and
their separation from the Tonkinese homeland. With the means of communication
then in existence, the government in the Red River plain was simply incapable
of exercising effective control over 1,400 miles of deltas. Divisions occurred,
with local feudal lords taking matters into their own hands. In the north, the
exhausted Le dynasty had been overthrown by the Governor of Hanoi, Mac Dang
Dung, who had, in Buttinger's words, "built himself a staircase of lordly
and royal corpses right up to the throne," which he reached in 1527. In
the south, another feudal lord, Nguyen Kirn, had set up a Vietnamese
government-in-exile in Laos, built around a descend-ant of the Le. When Nguyen
Kirn died in 1545, murdered bv sup-porters of the Mac clan, the struggle
degenerated into a long civil war that, save for some brief spells of unity,
lasted almost two centuries—with both sides claiming to represent the
interests of the hapless legitimate Vietnamese kings while, in fact, merely
watching over their own privileges. In the apt words of one French historian,
the Vietnamese kings "were reduced to reigning over all Viet-Nam while
being incapable of ruling over even the smallest district."4
In this indecisive struggle, the
south remained largely on the defensive. In the 1630's, the Nguyen rulers built
two huge walls across the Vietnamese plain of Quang-Tri near its narrow waist
at Dong-Hoi— barely a few miles to the north of the present dividing line
at the 17th parallel—and for 150 years the country remained divided on
that line, just as it now has been since 1954. A de facto truce existed between the north
and the south from 1673 to 1774, although the feudal Trinh lords (who, in the
north, had succeeded the Mac as protectors" of the Le kings) still
demanded the surrender of the southern "rebels," and the Nguyen in
the south refused to agree to reunification as long as the Le kings were
helpless puppets of the Trinh. It is apparent that the Vietnamese people have
had abundant experience in the kind of bitter internal division that was to
rend it again 180 years later, after a brief period of independence and unity.
There has been much debate over why the Trinh, with four-fifths of Viet-Nam's
population in their area, never succeeded in breaking the hold of the Nguyen
over the south, especially since the Nguyen not only had to hold the line
against their northern foes, but also had to fight several bitter wars on their
own southern frontiers with Cambodia, where Vietnamese settlers were advancing
into the Mekong Delta. Economic and social reasons have been invoked by some
historians who accept the Marxist interpretation of history as the only valid
one, but that interpretation does not quite hold here for the economic and
social organization of the Nguyen area was a carbon copy of that of the north.
Militarily, also, both sides operated along similar lines, and both sides
received "foreign aid" (a situation not unknown today). The Dutch
backed the northern regime, while the Portuguese backed the Nguyen by providing
modern artillery and military advisers. Since neither side was willing to
consider a flanking maneuver through the inhospitable jungles to the west of
the Wall of Dong-Hoi, a military stand-off resulted, which left the way open to
a politico-ideological struggle. It was in the ideological sphere that the
Nguyen side had the overwhelming advantage, for in the eyes or their own
population, the Trinh lords had lost the mandate of heaven " In an
explanation of that important aspect of the attitude of the Vietnamese toward
his government, a Vietnamese nationalist wrote in 1948:
“If the sovereign
oppressed the people, he no longer deserved to be treated as the sovereign. His
person was no longer sacred, and to kill him was no longer a crime. Revolt
against such tyranny not only was reasonable but was a meritorious act and conferred
upon its author the right to take over the powers of the sovereign.”5
In the name of this right to revolution, the Nguyen were
eventually victorious over the decadent Le and Trinh; Ho Chi MM. defeated the
French- Ngo Dinh Diem overthrew the discredited Nguyen ruler, Bao-Dai; and the
National Liberation Front of South Viet-Nam has sought to gather a popular
following first against the stagnant Ngo Dinh Diem regime and then against its
successors.
But an unforeseen event was to change for a brief moment
the course of Vietnamese history. This was the rebellion of the three brothers
from Tay-Son, a small village not far from Ankhe on the northeastern edge of
the PMS. The uprising began in 1772; by 1777, the Nguyen had been defeated and
the last surviving prince of the family Nguyen Anh, had been driven into the
inhospitable swamps of the Mekong Delta. The Trinh, who had thought the moment
ripe to settle their accounts with the southern regime became the neext victims
of the victorious Tay-Son. By 1786, most of North Viet-Nam had fallen into the
hands of the Tay-Son, who officially abolished the moribund Le dynasty in 1787,
although the youngest of the Tay Son brothers, Hue,
took care to marry the daughter of the last Le king.
Between1789 and 1792, Vietnam was once more united
under a single ruler, but the reunification brought in its wake a bitter civil
war waged BV the Nguven, the Tay-Son, and the Trinh, which left Viet-Nam more
devastated than had 150 years of division. Present-day Marxist sources like to
describe the Tay-Son as "progressive" rulers who lost their
"mandate of Heaven" because they failed to solve the "social
contradictions" then prevailing in Viet-Nam. The actuality seems to be
less poetic: They were simply the first Vietnamese rulers to try to attempt to
establish a military dictatorship in a country where the military were regarded
with somewhat less than high admiration.
Thus, when Nguyen Anh began his
campaigns of reconquest with the help of a French force of Katanga-type
adventurers, the populace, mindful of the relatively efficient administration
built up through competitive examinations under the Nguyen, began to flock
again to the tatter's banners. The fact that, thanks to his experienced French
cadre and its better artillery, he outclassed the Tay-Son militarily, also had
a great deal to do with the renewed enthusiasm for the Nguyen. But the final
victory of Nguyen Anh over the Tay-Son was also the beginning of a new era:
that of European political and military intervention in Vietnamese affairs.
