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Despite its difficult history in the wake of wars with the United States and China, Vietnam has not only survived, but it is developing well. The relationship between the Communist Party and civil society remains to be ironed out smoothly, but the d?i m?i policy of reforms made important strides in this realm.
This book surveys the entire history of Vietnam with a focus on its relationship with China to the North. It not only looks at the many border conflicts but also at ongoing trade between the two lands. While it does note social and cultural influences from China, it does not see Vietnam as a lesser cousin of sorts. It assesses just what makes Vietnam distinctive past and present. It stresses as well that Vietnam is a multi-ethnic society with numerous peoples, customs, and languages.
Tsuboi takes pains to examine how Vietnam is dealing with the extraordinary scars of war to which it has been victim, but it goes beyond victimization to emphasize its present economic development (stresses and strains).
Most characteristic of this book for a Western audience is its discussion and assessment of Japan's role in contemporary Vietnam and Japanese-Vietnamese relations. It is written in a style accessible to all audiences.
Tsuboi Yoshiharu (b. 1948) entered Tokyo University in 1968 at the height of the student movement in Japan and soon became involved in the Vietnam antiwar movement. Upon graduation in 1972, he decided to make the study of Vietnam his career. The esteemed scholar of Vietnam, Yamamoto Tatsuro told him that it was too dangerous to study in Vietnam at the time and that he should go study in France where there was a wealth of documents available. He pursued a PhD (1982) at the École des Hautes Études en Science Sociale under Georges Condominas. After living and working for a number of years, he was professor at Hokkaido University. He is now professor emeritus at Waseda University. His published work includes: L'Empire vietnamien face à la France et à la China , 1847-1885 (1986); Vetonamu = Viet Nam: yakudo Ajia (Vietnam, dynamic Asia) (1997); Vetonamu gendai seiji (Contemporary politics in Vietnam) (2002); Vetonamu shinjidai: "yutakasa" e no mosaku (Vietnam's new era: Searching for "prosperity") (2008).
It is by no means the case that Vietnam forged its own distinctive ethnic character through interactions solely with China. In fact, Vietnam itself is a multi-ethnic country within which some fifty-four nationalities co-exist. Among them, the overwhelming majority is occupied by the Kinh people (represented in Chinese by the graph ? meaning 'capital'; they fashion themselves 'residents of the capital' and take a superior view of themselves vis-à-vis other peoples), reaching as much as 90% of the population; in a narrow sense, they stand in for the entire Vietnamese people.
Fifty-three other ethnicities occupy the remaining 10%. For a detailed look at the representative ethnicities, by language groupings, see Chart 1.
Chart 1:Language Groups in Vietnam (population figures, 1984).
(Source: Furuta Motoo ????, Betonamujin kyosanshugisha no minzoku seisaku shi, kakumei no naka no esunishiti ????????????????: ??????????? (History of the Vietnamese Communists' ethnicity policy, ethnicity in revolution) (Tokyo: Otsuki shoten, 1991), pp. 34-35.)
In past studies, when speaking about the Vietnamese ethnic group, scholars were referring to "Vietnamese" in a narrow sense, meaning the Kinh. The other ethnic minority peoples were outside the field of vision. In other words, an equality was established among the Kinh ethnicity, the Vietnamese people, and the country of Vietnam.
There were historical reasons for this-namely, in the long history of resistance against China, to establish their own identity they first had to create the myth that the Kinh equaled the Vietnamese people. As rulers, as we saw in Chapter 1, the Kinh called themselves the "Southern Sinic Empire" and looked down on both the domestic ethnic minorities and neighboring peoples as barbarians.
After beconing a socialist state, during the harsh fighting of the Vietnam War, in fact the other ethnic groups, centered around the Kinh who constituted the overwhelming majority among all ethnic groups, came together to fight for "national independence," but to boost the sense of identity of an "ethnicity" and enhance patriotic passions, they deliberately avoided exposing internal differences, and there was no need to do so at the time.
As soon as the war was over, though, the issue of ethnic Chinese residents was revealed in the form of the boat people, and after that the war with neighboring Cambodia erupted. And, the problem of the "many ethnic groups" both neighboring and domestic (out of sight and out of mind until then) burst out into the open in one fell swoop.
In recent research addressing this situation, there has been a strong trend to try to deal with the people of Vietnam as "all of the peoples residing within the nation of Vietnam" in this wider framework, and thus the history of the Vietnamese people as "the history of the interactions among the fellow peoples who dwell not only within the nation of Vietnam but within the vicinity."
In this chapter, while making maximal use of the results of recent research, I will be looking at the Cham, the Khmer (Cambodian), and the Lao (Laotian) peoples who have had an immense impact on the formation of the "history of the Vietnamese people" in a broad sense. As can be seen in Chart 1, these three peoples even today reside as minority nationalities within the country of Vietnam. From the second to the fifteenth centuries, however, the Cham people had established their own "kingdom of Champa" centered on the region of Dà N?ng in the central region of contemporary Vietnam. At its height it overwhelmed the Vietnamese people in a narrow sense. From the fifteenth century, it went into decline, though even today in the central and southern parts of the country, it has left a significant mark, particularly in the cultural realm.
From the ninth to the thirteenth century, the Khmer people established the Angkor dynasty covering vast territory straddling contemporary southern Vietnam, Cambodia, northeastern Thailand, and Laos. The immensity of the power and prestige of the Angkor dynasty in its day is symbolized not only by the ancient capitals represented by Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, but also by the majestic appearance of the Khmer remains at Vat Phou in Laos and Muong Thanh in northeastern Thailand. The Khmer people are the main ethnic group in the present state of Cambodia.
In the fourteenth century, the Lao people established the Lan Xang (Lancang) dynasty covering extensive territory, and they remain today the main ethnic group in the makeup of the People's Republic of Laos.
Thus, there coexists on the Indochinese Peninsula including Vietnam numerous and varied ethnic groups dubbed "the treasure house of peoples." As a region for research topics in the fields of ethnology and anthropology, it is an object of keen desire, and research concerning many different ethnicities have been published. Due to constraints of space, I cannot discuss these ethnic minorities here, but let me just add two points.
First, the great majority of minority ethnicities are known as "mountain peoples" because they reside in mountainous terrain. The Kinh, standing for the "Vietnamese" in a narrow sense, are flatland people who reside in the lowlands; they have established a kind of "compartmentalized" relationship with the mountain peoples. As long as they suffer no natural disasters like famines or floods, the mountain folk do not descend into the flatlands. And, by the same token, the lowland people do not go into the jungles where numerous endemic tropical diseases, like malaria, run rampant.
Lowland merchants would periodically bring large earthenware pots filled with salt and rainwater which mountain people much needed. And, aromatic wood such as aloes and aloeswood, timber such as Indian sandalwood, ivory, and rhinoceros horns (nowadays, the Asian rhinoceros has become extinct in Vietnam, although they did exist through the nineteenth century) were gathered by mountain people and traded for precious items with the people in the flatlands. By the same token, when mountain peoples needed daily necessities, such as clothing and medicines, they brought to market rattan-made items such as chairs, textiles, honey, and opium to sell. In this way, there were interactions between mountain and lowland peoples via trade in the past. Nowadays, the various kinds of commercial products and harvested items have changed, and there are numerous sites where trade in kind has changed to business transactions using currency as an intermediary. Despite this, peaceful interactions have basically continued.
Second is the issue of the border. On the Indochinese peninsula, consciousness of national borders as a line dividing national sovereignties only came about from the middle years of the nineteenth century when the Western powers invaded the region and established colonial rule there. Prior to that,...
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