The concept of the nation, or a nationality, as consisting of a single people living within a defined territory speaking a single language and sharing a common culture is a concept which emerged in the West and then was adopted by many Asian societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
I came across a definition of the nation/nationality which Vietnamese scholar Nguyễn Bá Trác wrote in 1917 in the journal Nam Phong. It is a fascinating definition in that reveals a moment of transition, one in which this new concept was being adopted but older ways of thinking were still included.
Let us first look at what Nguyễn Bá Trác wrote. He asks rhetorically “What is our country’s nationality (dân tộc) like”? And this is how he answered:
“As for the races (chủng) of people, although there are the different categories of Giao Chỉ, Chiêm Thành and Chân Lạp, at present they have all mixed together and become a single and separate An Nam race. There are no divisions between races (chủng tộc). As for the spoken language, people from Cao Bằng and Lạng Sơn in the north to An Giang and Hà Tiên in the south can all sit on the same mat and talk to each other. There are no linguistic barriers. As for customs, there are no divergent customs when it comes to the rituals for funerals, sacrifices, capping ceremonies and weddings (tang, tế, quan, hôn). As for moral teachings (giáo hóa), all are united in respecting their elders and serving their superiors (kính trưởng sự thượng). What is more, in the country there is no discrimination between classes. Those among the common people who are talented at studying can become high government officials. Such is the equality [in the society]. Previously there were a few times when the Yuan troops were driven away and the Northern Barbarian [Hồ] raiders were captured. Such is the energy of the spirit of the people. As for the literature of the country, although it is overly weak and cannot avoid being dismissed by the new generation as [the literature of] old-fashioned scholars and rotten Confucian scholars [Nho sinh]. However, in ancient times it is from this [literature] that loyalty, filial piety and fidelity emerged, and that the proper norms of conduct and human relations were established.”
Like the concept of the nation, race was another new concept at this time, and it is interesting to see Nguyễn Bá Trác referring to an An Nam race which consisted of the “different categories of Giao Chỉ, Chiêm Thành and Chân Lạp,” or what we would today call the Kinh (or Việt), Cham and Khmer. It of course is also interesting to consider that Nguyễn Bá Trác believed that these peoples had all mixed together to create a single race.
Moving on to his description of the nation/nationality, we can see that he is employing the Western definition of a people who speak a single language and share a common culture, however instead of using the general word “culture” (văn hóa), Nguyễn Bá Trác employs specific terms which essentially point to what we would today might call “Confucian culture.”
In other words, what unites the An Nam race is that they all follow Confucian rituals and moral norms. One wonders if Nguyễn Bá Trác had ever actually met a Cham or Khmer. . .
Another interesting point is that we can see an early expression of the “resistance to foreign aggression” theme which would eventually become so central to Vietnamese identity in the second half of the twentieth century. The way Nguyễn Bá Trác expresses this concept is much more subdued than its later form, but it shows that this idea was starting to be expressed by this time.
Yet one more element about this passage which is historically specific is the way in which Nguyễn Bá Trác states that there was something weak about the literary tradition of the past.
Such a criticism of the literary tradition of the past was a popular lament across East Asia at this time, as was the effort on the part of some more conservative scholars to attempt to salvage the morals of that literary tradition.
Finally, the concepts of “equality” and “classes” were also new, having been adopted from the West.
As such, this is a fascinating passage which reveals a moment of transition when new and old ideas co-existed together. We could call this a process of “localization,” but it did not lead to a permanent localized conception of the nation. Instead, eventually Vietnamese scholars would go on to fully adopt Western definitions of the nation, such that today the most commonly heard definition of the nation in Vietnam is Stalin’s that:
“A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life and psychological make up manifested in a common culture.”
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Thanks!
I found that the Vietnamese for long, during the twentieth century was stuck in dealing with those concepts of ethnicity, nation, race… and in employing equivalent terms in Vietnamese. In fact, there is a huge difference between the Vietnamese perspective and western context of modern nation state making. It may be easy for Jean-Baptiste Colbert or Otto von Bismarck to make these terms reality but it took hundred years from Gia Long, Minh Mang to HCM to transfer those into a plural society.
Thank again for your suggestion related to the idea of “viet”. Would you please give me some suggested readings regarding to this subject recently?
I don’t mean to brag, but I think that this blog is one of the only places where this subject is discussed.
Charles Holcombe, a historian whose main focus is China, has written about early “Vietnam” and done so in ways which don’t see anyone whom we can clearly call “Viet” before say the 10th century.
Charles Holcombe, “Early Imperial China’s Deep South: The Viet Regions through Tang Times,” Tang Studies 10-11 (1997-98): 125-56.
John Phan has recently put forth a linguistic argument that the Vietnamese language only started to form around the time of the 8th-10th centuries. As a non-specialist, I find the linguistic evidence difficult to understand, but I get his point.
John D. Phan, “Re-imagining Annam: A New Analysis of Sino-Vietnamese Contact,” China Southern Diaspora Studies 4 (2010) [an online journal, Australian National University].
Liam Kelley has looked at the different ways in which Vietnamese elite envision their land prior to the 20th century.
Liam Kelley, “Vietnam as a ‘Domain of Manifest Civility’ (Van Hien chi Bang),'” Journal of Southeast Asian
Studies, 34.1 (2003): 63–76.
However, the most important period is the early 20th century. That is when the major intellectual changes took place. No one has really examined this. People have emphasized “resistance,” but there were radical intellectual changes which took place at that time. In my humble opinion, if we don’t undertand those changes, we can’t understand Vietnamese history because we will be trapped in thinking that the way Vietnamese think today is the way that Vietnamese have always thought.
Many thanks,
I do share the view that it is difficult to basically rely on linguistic evidences although it is easy to realize linguistic relations. The ways language is transferred or adopted are various in history, even sometime not necessary in the context of direct conquest or domination.
“Resistance” was mainly promoted during the late 19th and 20th centuries by nationalism and became extreme because of political idea. In fact, the coin has two sides, resistance and adaptation can be found in the evolution of any society, especially in times those societies have to deal with outside challenges.
Most of Vietnamese contemporary understandings and interpretations about themselves had been basically shaped between the 1960s and 1990s. I may be wrong, but what come to my mind is that there is a very interesting timeframe in which people who lived or live in VN today fundamentally change their perception and conceptualization of their question of belonging, identity, their space, spatial organization, social and political organization and so on:
– Early 19th c.,
– Late 19th c.,
– Early 20th c., to 1930s
– 1930s-1955/58
What have seen between 1954-1958 was an effort to shape a new “image”, new body of knowledge for a new purpose. For the first time, power have been used to create knowledge and its heritage is “huge” to the rest of the 20th c.,
I would say, the key for new understandings is that VN’s intellectuals need to go beyond nationalist discourse and diversify their view historically rather than to self-enjoy standing firmly and rigidly upon the second-half 20th century perspective.
I think the biggest moments were the early 20th century and the 1960s. The early 20th century is when Western ideas were adopted. In the 1960s, the scholarship which was created to serve the American War had an enormous impact and is what people are still living with. If it wasn’t for the War, for instance, I doubt that we would have Hung vuong today. There were scholars in the South, like Nguyen Phuong, who didn’t believe in them, and people like Dao Duy Anh doubted this too, but during the War the government in the North needed “proof” that Vietnam had been a nation since the beginning of time so that people would be inspired to fight to defend it.
As for the early 19th century, be careful not to confuse the fact that this was the first time that there had been a kingdom which stretched from Cao Bang to the Mekong delta with what peole thought. I think the land was very divided at that time, and I don’t think people in the Red River delta or the Mekong delta changed much of anything in those years. Those two regions were still just loosely under the control of the Nguyen. It was only in the 1830s that Minh Menh made an effort to bring those areas under direct control. So I don’t know that there was much change in the early 20th century. The Nguyen Dynasty would probably like us to believe that there was, but I doubt it.