Why Vietnam loves and hates China
By Andrew Forbes
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_ ... 6Ae01.html
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 top
Sometimes 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.)