Introduction: Documenting Vietnam over the Long Twentieth Century—Becoming Modern, Going Global

Abstract

This chapter places the chapters in this volume in the context of the evolution of scholarship from Area Studies to Global Studies,and the accompanying transition from a nation-focused and language-based approach to a transnational perspective that leverages Western-language sources. Combining the best of both approaches, the authors in this volume emphasize the importance of language-based research while still remaining attentive to the global dimensions of the Vietnamese past.

1.1 Introduction

Over the past century, Vietnam has undergone a remarkable series of transformations. If we could go back in time to the mid-nineteenth century, we would find an early modern kingdom deeply influenced by Sinitic culture. By the end of the nineteenth century, some members of that elite, now under French colonial rule but still connected to a broader East Asian intellectual network, began to examine an alternative to their cultural world, the world of Western culture. The door to that world opened and new ideas and practices rapidly transformed elements of Vietnamese society through a process that has often been labeled as “modernization” or “Westernization.” While such terms suggest a uniform process, the reality was of course very complex as there were different forms of modernity and the West was not homogenous.

This complexity became extremely evident in the post-colonial era in Vietnam, as the northern half of the country pursued a socialist vision of modernity following such approaches in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China while the southern half sought to create a new society that was in part inspired by the philosophy of Personalism. With the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, the path to a socialist vision of modernity became the official direction for the entire country to pursue, and with the deterioration of relations with China following the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War, the Soviet Union became the main guiding light for that journey. Soviet experts visited Vietnam and Vietnamese students and workers traveled to the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, while hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who did not share this vision of the future fled as refugees and established diasporic communities around the globe. Finally, beginning with the Đổi Mới reforms of 1986, the doors to a wider outside world gradually opened and Vietnamese began to consider how they could integrate into a globalizing world.

In this synopsis of the history of Vietnam over what we can call “the long twentieth century,” we can see two key points. First, we see Vietnam actively participating in the global circulation of ideas and people. Second, we also see a perpetual effort to achieve some form of modernity that is always imminent but seemingly never achieved, as political developments have repeatedly changed the focus of the desired form of modernity for the nation. The chapters in this volume document different stages in these long and interconnected processes of engaging with the outside world and seeking some form of modernity. Further, they do so by bringing together the strengths of two approaches to historical scholarship, what we can call the Area Studies language-based, nation-focused approach with the more recent transnational or global approach to studying the past.

1.2 Area Studies and Global Studies

Modernity is, of course, an enormous topic that has been dealt with extensively by scholars. Once seen as a uniquely European phenomenon characterized by a move toward secularization, rationality and individualism that developed from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and then spread to other parts of the globe in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is more common today to see the term “modernity” used in the plural, with reference to “multiple modernities” (Eisenstadt 2002). This concept of multiple modernities is employed by scholars to argue that there are various forms of modernity that historically emerged across the globe, and that each can only be understood in its specific historical, cultural, and political context.

This task of understanding the specific historical, cultural, and political contexts of places around the globe has long been the purview of the field of Area Studies, with its emphasis on linguistic training and deep knowledge of individual societies. However, in recent decades Asian Studies, a subfield of Area Studies, has undergone an intellectual transformation that has moved Asian Studies scholarship from its language-based and nation-focused origins to a new emphasis on researching transnational topics, research that at times relies heavily, and at times even exclusively, on Western-language sources.

With the end of the Cold War and the rise of globalization, there were Asian Studies scholars who came to believe that their focus on individual, or at times national, societies was insufficient for understanding the connections between societies and nations that globalization was illuminating. Funding agencies agreed, and starting in the 1990s, there were calls for “border-crossing” scholarship and in the early 2000s for research that focused on “inter-Asian connections” (Kelley 2021: 362–365). Further, in recent years such approaches have continued to be championed as the way forward for Asian Studies (Chua et al. 2019: 45).

In response to these calls, numerous works have been published since the 1990s that seek to examine various aspects of the history of Asia in regional or global perspectives, from Asia as a whole (Gunn 2011, 2021; Tagliacozzo 2022), to sub-regions like Southeast Asia (Reid 1988, 1995; Andaya 2006; Lieberman 2003, 2009; Lockard 2009), to individual countries like China (Adshead 2000, 2004; Ropp 2010). Additionally, leading journals like the Journal of Asian Studies have promoted such topics as interconnections among Asian countries (Duara 2010; Sen 2010; Andaya 2010), and “Global Asias” (Yano 2021; Chen 2021; Ryang 2021), a new field that seeks to merge Asian Studies with Asian American Studies. Finally, at the institutional level, the 2010s saw the emergence of various centers focusing on “global Asia” or “global Asian Studies” (Sato and Sonoda 2021: 207–208). There are now, for instance, global Asia research centers at Waseda University¹ and National Taiwan University.² There is a Global Asia Institute at the National University of Singapore³, while the University of Hong Kong features an Asia Global Institute⁴ and NYU Shanghai, meanwhile, is home to a Center for Global Asia.⁵ Beyond the Asian region, there is a Stockholm Center for Global Asia⁶ and a Global Asia Institute at Pace University⁷ in the USA as well as various programs and initiatives around the world that focus on various forms of global Asian Studies (Sato and Sonoda 2021: 207–208).

While the above scholarship and institutions have responded to the call to examine Asia from transnational and global perspectives in diverse ways, we can nonetheless identify certain commonalities. In terms of scholarship, many of the works that promote this approach rely heavily on Western-language and secondary sources. While one could argue that works of theorization and broad synthesis of regional or global topics necessitate such an approach, we also can find an extremely heavy reliance on Western-language sources, and particularly English-language sources, in studies that deal with transnational topics that are more limited in scope. To be fair, we are of course today the benefactors of decades of scholarship in that language and English has now become the dominant and “desired” global language (Phan 2017); nonetheless, we would argue that this emphasis on researching transnational topics combined with the convenience of accessing abundant English-language scholarship has nonetheless moved Asian Studies away from its professed core strength, language-based research. As such, while some may see such scholarship as the way to move Area/Asian Studies forward, one could also argue that it is undermining that field by neglecting its main contribution.

In terms of the “global Asian Studies” institutions that have been established, we can also detect a commonality in that many are devoted to the examination of contemporary affairs. The Global Asia Research Center at National Taiwan University, for instance, focuses on the following areas: Family, Population and Gender; Ethnicity and Migration; Global Economy and Local Inequality; Civil Society and Social Movements; Urban Development and Governance; Global Culture, Religion and Consumption.⁸ The core research programs at the National University of Singapore’s Global Asia Institute are Behavior Change, Health Care, Data Analytics, and Interdisciplinary Research.⁹ The same focus on contemporary affairs can be found at other centers and programs as well, with the result that historical scholarship plays a minor role in how “Global Asia” is being envisioned (see the comments by Tamara Sears in Isaac et al. 2021).

Alongside this trend to promote global and transnational scholarship has been a move to globalize nation studies. This is a phenomenon that we can detect in the emergence of programs and initiatives that focus on such topics as “Global Japan” or “Global China.” While some, like the Global Japan Lab at Princeton University,¹⁰ focus on contemporary affairs, others, such as the Global China Studies major at NYU Shanghai,¹¹ attempt to meld the traditional Area Studies language-based approach with the insights gained from an understanding of transnational and global contexts. Finally, one graduate program that bridges the above two approaches is the PhD in Comparative Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore.¹² Among the program’s requirements is proficiency in two Asian languages, as candidates are expected to bring the language-based approach of Area Studies to their study of a transnational or comparative topic.

1.3 The Field of Vietnamese History

This trend toward producing transnational or global scholarship, and particularly the tendency to produce scholarship that is heavily based on secondary sources in Western languages, particularly English, is one that has generally not been adopted by scholars who work on Vietnam. While scholars inside Vietnam largely focus their research on the nation, employ Vietnamese language sources, and have been less influenced by international scholarly trends, for many of the foreign scholars who work on Vietnam today, linguistic ability has served as an essential element in their scholarship. Whereas there were foreign scholars who worked on Vietnam beginning in the 1950s and 1960s who had limited or no linguistic ability in Vietnamese, starting in the 1990s, a new and sizable generation of foreign scholars emerged whose scholarship is defined by its reliance on Vietnamese language sources.

This transformation took place as Vietnam opened to the world in the 1990s and foreign scholars were able to visit that country and conduct research. As such, just as scholars who focus on other areas were beginning to examine transnational topics, a new generation of Vietnam scholars were, for the first time, able to engage in serious language-based and archival scholarship on Vietnam, which in the case of Vietnam, includes the use of Vietnamese, French, and classical Chinese. In the late 1990s and into the 2000s, numerous monographs on Vietnamese history emerged that were marked by their significant engagement with Vietnamese language sources. To give some examples, there were works that were primarily based on Vietnamese sources (Ninh 2002; McHale 2004; Dutton 2006; Dror 2007), Vietnamese and French sources (Zinoman 2001; Taylor 2004; Ramsay 2008; Goscha 2012), Vietnamese and classical Chinese sources (Li 1998; Kelley 2005), as well as works on the Vietnam war that made use of Vietnamese archival sources (Asselin 2002; Nguyen 2012; Miller 2013).

That said, this does not mean that scholars working on Vietnam are unaware of or ignore the larger transnational or global contexts in which their linguistically informed research is located. Instead, it is that this element of their research has not been highlighted or made the focus. However, on close inspection, one finds that particularly in recent years it has become ubiquitous. Such diverse topics as the Catholic church (Keith 2012), the colonial alcohol monopoly (Sasges 2017), republicanism (Zinoman 2013; Goscha 2016; Tran and Vu 2022), the Communist revolution (Vu 2016), the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ (Goscha 2022), land reform (Holcombe 2020), cosmopolitan nationalism (Nguyen 2020), and masculinity (Tran 2017) are only understandable in larger global contexts and the authors of the above recent works all examine and discuss those contexts.

1.4 The Chapters

The chapters in this volume reflect this approach to the study of Vietnam. All the chapters have transnational or global elements; however, their authors are also deeply attuned to language and highlight the importance of using sources in vernacular languages, and classical Chinese in the case of the first chapter, to understand how Vietnamese engaged with diverse currents of modernity across the long twentieth century. This engagement with language and the documents that record it is what the “documenting” in our chapter title refers to. Not only do the authors in this volume “document” forms of modernity in their chapters, but many deal with actual “documents” that were employed to promote various elements of modernity.

The opening chapter of the volume, Ran Tai’s “Pursuing Văn Minh: A Study of Civilizational Discourse in the Historical Narratives in Colonial Vietnam (1900–1915),” is a perfect example of this. Here the author examines the introduction into Vietnam of the Western concept of “civilization.” This concept was appropriated by certain members of the Vietnamese elite in the early twentieth century as it made its way to Vietnam through the medium of Chinese, traveling across knowledge networks in East Asia, from Japan to China to Vietnam. Ran Tai documents this process by examining some of the actual documents that were written to promote this new concept. Further, he makes the novel contribution of examining works written by pro-French Vietnamese intellectuals, a group that has long been neglected in the scholarship on modern Vietnamese history.

The Western concept of civilization encompassed many different elements that were emphasized in varying ways by the Westernizing members of Vietnamese society in the early twentieth century. One fascinating example is the subject of Chap. 2, “Huỳnh Thị Bảo Hòa (1896–1982): A Woman Who Wrote to Change Vietnamese Society” by Phuong Ngoc Nguyen. Huỳnh Thị Bảo Hòa was an early modernizer who through her writings documented the possibilities for Vietnamese women in the new world of “civilization.” This included research that she conducted on the ancient kingdom of Champa as well as a novel about a French woman who married a Vietnamese soldier in France during World War I and who traveled to Vietnam to find him after the war had ended. Through these writings, Huỳnh Thị Bảo Hòa sought to bring change to Vietnam, particularly to the lives of women.

In addition to Huỳnh Thị Bảo Hòa, there were other people in early twentieth century Vietnam who sought to modernize the lives of women, and this is a topic that is addressed in Chap. 3, “An Educational Regime of Truth for Social Reform in Late Colonial Vietnam: The Journalistic Art of the Possible in Phụ nữ tân văn’s ‘Travel Stories’ and ‘Letters for You’” by Thanh Phùng and Đăng Minh Vũ. In this chapter, the authors examine two regular columns in a newspaper called Women’s News (Phụ nữ tân văn) and identify what they call an educational regime of truth for social reform in late colonial Vietnam. In particular, Phùng and Vũ argue that while there are elements about these columns, such as their supposed female authorship, that are questionable, these writings sought to document a vision of a modern society that served to educate their readers about the possibilities of the future.

For writings to serve this potential, they had to be able to reach people through sale or dissemination, and this is the topic of Chap. 4, “Between Sacred and Secular: Publishing, Books, and Everyday Life in Colonial Cochinchina” by Cao Vy. In this chapter, Cao Vy examines the global circulation and manipulation of documents, first from the archival services of colonial Indochina to the French National Library and finally to newly digitized archives. Through a careful reading of these documents, Cao Vy maps the extensive, vibrant landscape of colonial publishing. Focusing on the practice of book donation, Cao Vy reveals the convergence of commerce and religion in colonial publishing and shows how new technologies could be used to create, rather than dissolve social ties. In this way, this chapter opens a window into the social world of early twentieth-century Cochinchina and its complex mix of the traditional and the modern, the local and the global.

A prime example of the convergence of publishing and religion that led to enhanced social ties is the topic of Chap. 5, “Multiple-Agents Involved in the Localization Our Lady of La Vang: From a Mythic Figure to the Mother of Vietnam,” by Duong Van Bien. In this chapter, the author examines how a version of the Virgin Mary worshiped in central Vietnam, Our Lady of La Vang, was transformed over the course of the twentieth century into a symbol of the Vietnamese nation and Vietnamese indigeneity. This transformation relied heavily on the deployment of modern print publications. At the same time, however, the novel ways in which Our Lady of Vietnam was depicted and explained were also influenced by Vietnamese politics in the post-colonial era. Indeed, politics became paramount in the post-colonial years and that is evident in the following two chapters as well.

In Chap. 6, “Another kind of Vietnamization: Language Policies in Higher Education in the Two Vietnams,” Le Nam Trung Hieu foregrounds the issue of language and its role in processes of colonization, decolonization, and nation-building. After 1945, leaders in both Vietnams prioritized the adoption of Vietnamese as the language of instruction for new and modern national educational systems. Higher education was a particular challenge, requiring the development of entire new vocabularies for topics that had previously been taught in French. Le Nam Trung Hieu’s work highlights the immense labor necessary to make ideas circulate, the crucial roles of individual academics in both the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in the north and the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) in the south, and the way processes of translation and circulation are inherently political. In the end, the different processes the two regimes employed to build new vocabularies and curriculums reflected their divergent visions of a modern Vietnam.

Chapter 7, “Not So Honest Relations: Top Level Polish-Vietnamese Contacts 1965–1970” by Jarema Słowiak then looks more closely at one of those visions of a modern Vietnam, the vision of socialist modernity that was pursued in the North. Here, Słowiak uses a very different kind of document, the records of the Polish Foreign Ministry, to locate the DRV in the larger socialist world. Slowiak reveals intra-bloc relations as complex, multifaceted, and occasionally acrimonious. Polish Communist Party First Secretary Władysław Gomułka actively avoided additional aid commitments, questioned his Vietnamese counterpart Lê Duẩn’s understanding of global politics, and deplored DRV strategies that he felt led to needless loss of life. For his part, Lê Duẩn considered his Polish counterpart a revisionist with little appetite for global revolution. Beneath a veneer of fraternal solidarity, erstwhile allies pursued their own goals and followed their own paths to socialist modernity.

That one can use Polish sources to seek to understand North Vietnam in the 1960s, as Słowiak does, points to an important issue. We listed above the various monographs on Vietnamese history that have been published in the past twenty-five years that rely on such languages as Vietnamese, French, and classical Chinese. These languages have long been recognized as essential for researching about Vietnamese history. However, starting in the second half of the twentieth century, Vietnam became ever more interconnected with the rest of the globe, a process that particularly picked up speed in the 1990s following the Đổi Mới reforms of 1986. As such, for scholars who focus on historical topics in this period, there are other languages that can be employed, and with the establishment of Vietnamese diasporic communities around the world, “Vietnam” can be examined in multifaceted ways.

This is precisely what we find in Chap. 8, “New Voices in A New World—Media Portrayal of the Experiences of German Reunification in 1990 by Vietnamese Contract Workers in East Germany” by Julia Behrens and Nicolai Okunew. In this chapter, Behrens and Okunew take us to the time of the dissolution of the socialist bloc in 1990. They use a unique document—transcripts of a weekly radio program produced in East Germany for Vietnamese contract workers—to broaden our perspective on a turning point in global history. The loosening of censorship allowed the program’s producers to call into question claims of “international solidarity” and reveal the insecurity and racism experienced by Vietnamese during what East Germans call the “year of anarchy.” Media reports also demonstrate the agency and resilience of Vietnamese as they adapted to rapid economic and social change. Finally, Behrens and Okunew trace reciprocal flows of ideas about freedom, democracy, and (post-)socialist modernity between Germany and Vietnam at a time when the latter was experiencing its own process of reform and transition. When contract workers eventually returned to Vietnam, they brought their experiences, networks, and ideas with them.

Contract workers returning from East Germany were not the only people who arrived in Vietnam in the 1990s with ideas about how the country could or should be reformed. There were foreign specialists who did the same, and this is the topic of Chap. 9, “JICA’s Legal Technical Assistance Projects in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos since the 1990s” by Nobumichi Teramura. In particular, Teramura examines the work of Japanese legal experts who were sent by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) to assist with legal reform in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. In doing so, these legal experts found themselves competing with experts sent from other international agencies as well as Vietnamese government officials who had clear ideas about what kinds of legal reforms they felt were acceptable.

While the opening chapter by Ran Tai and the closing chapter by Nobumichi Teramura are very different in content, those differences serve as ideal symbols of the incredible transformations that Vietnam underwent over the course of the long twentieth century, transformations that are documented in various ways in the intervening chapters. At the turn of the twentieth century, Vietnamese intellectuals struggled to educate their colleagues about the Western concept of “civilization” by writing about this concept in classical Chinese while at the turn of the twenty-first century Vietnamese officials used English to engage with experts from Japan, the USA, and other countries about how to implement legal reforms. In both instances, Vietnamese were attempting to establish a form of modernity in Vietnam. However, we perhaps can see a change in scope, from an effort to “become modern” at the turn of the twentieth century by engaging with new concepts from the West to an effort to “go global” at the turn of the twenty-first century by taking the larger world as a model for modernizing reform. Hence, the title of this volume.

1.5 Conclusion

All but one of the chapters in this volume (Chap. 6) were first presented as papers at the 12th Engaging With Vietnam (EWV) conference, held 24–28 August 2021. This conference was organized in conjunction with the 12th International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) conference and was scheduled to be held at Kyoto Seika University in Japan; however, due to the pandemic, the conference was moved online. The theme of the 12th EWV conference was “Engaging with Vietnam and ASEAN: Mobilities and Identities in an Age of Global Transformation.” Of the roughly 200 presentations that were made at that conference, there were a good number that dealt with historical issues, and some of those papers appear here in this volume. Further, what we found that united these papers was the fact that they all addressed topics that involved transnational or global issues, thus mirroring the development we have seen in recent years in the larger field of Vietnamese history. Therefore, in this volume, we have sought to highlight that transnational/global element but at the same time to also recognize the degree to which these chapters, like much of the recent scholarship on Vietnamese history, is still deeply grounded in traditional Area Studies language-based research. We feel that this combination is a great strength, and we wish to highlight and celebrate it here. Finally, we should note that many of the authors in this volume are at the early stages of their careers. As such, not only does the scholarship here indicate where research on Vietnamese history currently stands, but also it points toward an exciting future for the field.