Keywords

2.1 Introduction: The Duy Tân Movement and the Emergence of Nation-Centered Historical Writing

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the last traditional Vietnamese regime, the Nguyễn Dynasty (1802–1945) suffered from a series of crises from French military aggression. Having ceded to the French, three provinces in the Mekong Delta in 1862 and three more in 1867, the Nguyễn, in 1883, further agreed to let the remaining central and northern territories become protectorates, namely, Annam and Tonkin. The encounter with the French colonial power which claimed for itself the role of a civilizing savior brought a great shock to the Vietnamese elite and their ideology.

Having a history of sharing Sinitic culture, writing Sinitic characters (Hanzi/Hán tự 漢字)Footnote 1, and composing Literary Sinitic/Classical Chinese texts, the Vietnamese elite had for centuries accepted a specific kind of civilizational discourse, to understand the order of the world in which they lived. That civilizational discourse was based on the concept of wenming/văn minh 文明.

The word wenming originated in a famous East Asian divination book, the Classic of Changes (Yijing 易經). The earliest parts of this book can be traced back to the period between the fourth and second centuries BCE, during which time the word wen 文 meant “patterns” and ming 明 denoted “illuminated and manifested brilliantly.” The compound word, wenming, referred to the patterns emerging from people’s divination about and observation of heaven, earth, and human behavior. These patterns, according to Yufen Chang, grew into China’s earliest writing script, which gradually endowed wen with such meanings as “words,” “characters,” “writings,” “texts,” “learning,” “literature,” “belles-lettres,” etc., and covered it with an aura of sacredness and magic (Chang 2020: 5–6). Around the middle of the first millennium BCE, the concept of wen was used by the people who claimed themselves as civilized to differentiate themselves from people whom they perceived as barbarian and illiterate. Through the effort of “a small group of masters of statecraft and moral philosophy,” a collective “civilizational consciousness” emerged in early China (Bergeton 2019: 3). As many scholars have pointed out, early Chinese empires developed this “civilizational consciousness” as an important discourse to help manage and control the empire (Brindley 2021: 5; Chang 2020: 6).

Having a millennium-long history under Chinese administrative rule, the Vietnamese elite came to share this premodern civilizational discourse centered around Confucian music-rites, traditions, and praxis, and viewed themselves as the legitimate representative of wenming, or văn minh in Vietnamese, and their country a “domain of manifest civility” (wenxian zhi bang/văn hiến chi bang 文獻之邦). Regarding it as universalistic, they utilized the civilizational discourse to construct a powerful imperial ideology and hierarchical ethnography which elevated them to a higher civilizational order in the establishment of a dominant regional hegemony in the early-nineteenth century—a period in which they conquered numerous peoples and states to the south and west of Vietnam, Champa being the most famous example (Kelley 2005: 30; Tran 2020: 170; Chang 2017: 57; Goscha 2016: 23).

With the Qing dynasty’s struggle to fend off Western encroachment in the middle of the nineteenth century and particularly its defeat in 1895 by the Westernized Meiji Japan, however, Vietnamese intellectuals realized that the order of the “Sinographic cosmopolis”Footnote 2 could no longer be universalistic—it could not provide a set of principles to explain the contemporary clashes with the West and the latter’s overwhelming military victories (Tran 2020: 170; Gadkar-Wilcox 2014: 374; Nguyen 1998: 231). Facing this declining world system, they had to seek a new paradigm that could help to understand the position of their country in a new world political order based on the new concept of sovereign nation states (Carrai 2021: 134).

In the early 1900s, Vietnamese intellectuals launched a reform movement called “Duy Tân” 維新, literally meaning “reform,” which was inspired by Japan’s successful Meiji Reformation in 1868 and China’s failed Hundred-Day Reforms in 1898. Most of the members who led this reform were born in the 1860s and early 1870s into scholar-gentry families from north and north-central Vietnam, which meant that they were highly educated in a tradition of Classical Chinese literature and Confucian thought which emphasized the concept of văn minh (Bradley 2004: 67). Despite their different stances toward French colonization, participants in this reform shared the same objective of transforming their country into an “enlightened and civilized” nation. They eagerly devoured “new books” (tân thư 新書) composed by influential Chinese reform scholars including Kang Youwei 康有為 (1858–1927) and Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929), acquiring Western knowledge through the mediation of the Sinographic translational network between Japan and China (Chang 2020: 8).

New terms that these books introduced, such as state, race, society, sovereignty, nationality, evolution, competition, were deeply engraved in the minds of these reformists. They were convinced that without a thorough understanding of these concepts, the Vietnamese would not be able to become a “civilized” (wenming/văn minh) society and sovereign nation-state capable of defending its independence in international competition (Chang 2020: 2). In both Classical Chinese and the Romanized Vietnamese script (quốc ngữ), they wrote in various literary forms such as journal articles and political pamphlets to passionately expound and disseminate these new ideas to their fellow Vietnamese. Among these writings, the general history of the Vietnamese nation emerged as an important genre. Not only anti-French revolutionaries but also mandarins working for the Nguyễn Dynasty under the French protectorate actively engaged in the enterprise of composing national histories. In their writings, new terms pertaining to the ideas of civilization were frequently used to periodize the history of Vietnam and construct a historical continuity of the Vietnamese nation.

Most of the existing scholarship on modern Vietnamese historiography has a particular interest in anti-French historical writings and has provided many insightful discussions (Marr 1971; Duiker 1976; Woodside 1976; Tai 1996).Footnote 3 However, little scholarly attention has been paid to the historical works composed by the Nguyễn literati-officials collaborating with the French colonial authorities. According to Sarah Womack, “collaboration” is the mutual accommodation and manipulation of colonizer and colonized in pursuit of separate agendas. In this sense, “collaborators” can be regarded as indigenous agents who actively engage with colonial policy and administration (Womack 2003: 4).

As will be shown in the following sections of this article, the writings of these collaborating literati-officials not only indicated the complexity of the Vietnamese perception of French colonization but also the efforts of Vietnamese to establish a national historiography in which they demonstrated the historical agency of the Vietnamese people. Therefore, the imbalance in the extant English-language scholarship is problematic for three reasons. First, it neglects the dynamics of intellectual interactions between the anti-French activists and their counterparts who collaborated with the French colonial authorities, which, in turn, has narrowed the scope of research on anti-French historiography. Second, it tends to simplify and even caricaturize the picture of the collaborative historiography of Vietnam. Finally, the omission of a meticulous analysis of the conception of văn minh in these collaborative historical writings has obscured a better understanding of the broader and more complex conceptual interactions in the Sinographic knowledge network at the turn of the twentieth century.

Through close readings of the historical texts written by two reformist mandarins loyal to the Nguyễn Dynasty during the Duy Tân movement, Hoàng Cao Khải’s 1909 Mirror of Việt History (Việt sử kính 越史鏡) and his 1914 Essentials of Việt History (Việt sử yếu 越史要), and Ngô Giáp Đậu’s 1911 Việt History for Secondary Schools (Trung học Việt sử toát yếu 中學越史撮要), this chapter will explore how ideas pertaining to civilization were introduced into Vietnam through the mediation of a Sinographic translational network and reconfigured into a localized concept of “văn minh” in the construction of the national history of Vietnam, in this case by the Vietnamese figures who collaborated with the French.

By placing these historical writings in a broader regional and global context, this chapter makes two scholarly contributions. First, it challenges the conventional but influential “Western Impact/Vietnamese Response” paradigm that depicts modern Vietnamese history as a series of responses to exterior pressure, which risks voiding all Vietnamese agency from history or subsuming all Vietnamese history into a Western historical narrative (Wilcox 2010: 5). Focusing on pro-French reformist historical writings and their interaction with other contemporary historical scholarship produced in East Asia (Japan and China, in particular), this chapter provides a complex picture of historical knowledge production in colonial Vietnam during the reform movement in the early-twentieth century. Second, through investigating the regional context, especially the Sinographic translational network, that shaped Vietnamese national historical writings, this chapter demonstrates the regional connectivity that mediated the process whereby Vietnamese reconstructed Western knowledge. By focusing on the regional nature of knowledge production, this chapter transcends the dichotomy between Western hegemony and local agency that stresses the “autonomous” or “Vietnam-centric” point of view in much postcolonial scholarship on the role of knowledge in modern nation-building.Footnote 4

2.2 Translating Civilization: Văn minh as a Neologism in Colonial Vietnam

Although the Sinocentric political system in East Asia began to collapse in the late-nineteenth century with the defeat of the Qing empire in the First Sino-Japanese War, the link between its former center and members based on the shared legacy of the Chinese script and classical learning was reconfigured as a translational network in the early-twentieth century. In this emerging network, as Yufen Chang has noted, the relationship between the constituting societies was equal, at least theoretically, with Japan as the new nodal point that provided source texts on how to attain enlightenment and civilization for its East Asian neighbors (Chang 2020: 8). In these texts, the concept of civilization based on Western experience was translated into the Sinitic world. Ostensibly, the compound word wenming/văn minh (bunmei in Japanese) in these texts appeared to be the matching word to translate the Western concept of “civilization;” however, as the following part of this section will demonstrate, there was a complex rupture in the meaning of the word as a neologism from its premodern predecessor.

The first emergence of the Western concept of civilization in the Sinographic world can be traced back to the missionary periodical, the Eastern Western Monthly Magazine (Dong-Xi yang kao meiyue tongji zhuan 東西洋考每月統記傳) published by a Prussian Protestant Missionary Karl Gützlaff (1803–1851) in the 1830s in Guangzhou, an important port city in the south of China. The compound word wenming appeared at least five times throughout the articles of that magazine, according to Fang Weigui’s count (Fang 1999: 76). Every time this word appeared, it was always linked to the compound word jiaoze 教澤, literally meaning “benefits of teaching,” which, according to Fang, referred to the benefits of the teachings of Christianity to the development of human society.

To the church, civilization was not the purpose but merely one of the achievements that the religion brought (Fang 1999: 76). Readers in East Asia were of course familiar with the word wenming; however, the notion underlying this very word did not refer here to what they believed to be embodied in the Sinitic classics but a novel concept which referred specifically to “Western, Christian civilization.” Fang Weigui noted that “civilization” in the major European languages including French, English, German, and Italian was initially used to describe the “process” rather than the “achievements” of development. It was not until the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries that “civilization” gradually came to denote the progressive “state” and “level” of development, which made it a prevalent notion to describe and examine the development of not only individuals but also communities, ethnic groups, and nations (Fang 1999: 74–75). In the second half of the nineteenth and in the early-twentieth century, those ideas related to this specific (and secularized) notion of civilization including progress, race, society, sovereignty, people, evolution, and competition, gradually replaced the premodern notion of civilization and gained wide acceptance among intellectuals in East Asia (Fang 2019: 64).

An obvious example of this intellectual transition can be found in the comparison of bilingual dictionaries compiled between the 1820s and the 1930s in East Asia. In these dictionaries, as many scholars have noticed, there was a significant change in the matching words to translate civilization (Fang 1999; Huang 2017). In Sino-English dictionaries compiled in China in the late-nineteenth century, words affiliated with “civilization” were usually translated into the concept of jiaohua 教化, or “educational transformation,”Footnote 5 a concept which emerged in the Warring States period (476 BCE–221 BCE).

The same phenomenon can be found in Vietnam as well. The earliest appearance of the French word “civilisation” in a dictionary can be traced back to the Small French-Vietnamese Dictionary (Petit Dictionnaire français-annamite) compiled by the renowned and erudite Vietnamese Confucian-Catholic scholar Pétrus Trương Vĩnh Ký 張永記 (1837–1898) in 1887 in Saigon. Like his Chinese counterparts, in that dictionary Ký did not interpret civilization as văn minh but giáo hoá (jiaohua in Chinese). He defined it as “Giáo hoá; to make (someone) well-trained; the way to giáo hoá” (Giáo hoá; Sự làm cho thuần thực; phép giáo hoá) ( Trương 1884: 386; Chang 2020: 15). Considering that Vietnamese intellectuals had a long history of sharing the Sinitic culture and classics with their Chinese counterparts, on the level of the lexicon, the concept of this Sino-Vietnamese giáo hoá could be regarded as the same as that of the Chinese jiaohua, a Sinocentric concept that means to educate and enlighten people with classical learning (Chang 2020: 15, note 8). It was not until the early-twentieth century that wenming/văn minh appeared, gradually replacing jiaohua/giáo hoá as the equivalent word to translate “civilization.” Underlying this change was a profound intellectual transition in the Sinographic world of East Asia.

In 1875, influential Japanese Enlightenment scholar, Fukuzawa Yukichi 福澤諭吉 (1835–1901) published An Outline of the Theory of Civilization (Bunmeiron no gairyaku 文明學概略) as a response to “old Confucian scholars” and the traditional ideology of “harmony” and “order” in the early Meiji era (Fukuzawa 1969: 60). In his book, Fukuzawa, for the first time in East Asia, linked civilization (bunmei or bummei in Japanese) to the idea of “progress” in his discussion about the actualization of human freedom around the globe (Hwang 2020: 76). Borrowing the unilinear evolutionary historical view from the works of François Guizot and Henry Thomas Buckle, Fukuzawa not only divided the history of human society into three evolutionary stages: barbarian, semi-civilized, and civilized, but he also regarded European countries and North America as the most civilized in his time and attributed their national independence to the level of civilization they had achieved (Hwang 2020: 28; Sheng 2012: 398). Regarding civilization as the universal standard for the recognition of sovereignty, he urged that Japan, as a semi-civilized nation, should not follow the Sinitic model but rather the paragon of Western civilization to advance its progress in civilization and attain national independence.

Fukuzawa’s elaboration of the theory of civilization was echoed in the writings of the prominent Chinese reformist scholar and public intellectual Liang Qichao. During the period in exile in Japan, Liang wrote on this topic in “On Ten Aspects of the Chinese Nation’s Invigoration” (Guomin shi da yuanqi lun 國民十大元氣論; 1899) and “On Liberty” (Lun ziyou 論自由; 1902). According to Ishikawa Yoshihiro, Liang provided “a Chinese version of Fukuzawa’s An Outline of the Theory of Civilization” in these two important articles (Fang 2019: 62–63). Through his editorship of several pioneering newspapers, Liang Qichao established his influence and intellectual authority in the Sinographic world of East Asia (Tang 1996: 49). With the help of modern print technology and the existing readership linked by the Sinographic translational network, Liang Qichao and other reformists’ elaboration on civilization and progressive historical views were widely read and appropriated by the elite in East and Southeast Asia.

In 1908, W. W. Yen’s (Yan Huiqing 顏惠慶; 1877–1950) English and Chinese Standard Dictionary (Ying-Hua da cidian 英華大辭典) was published. As missionary Francis Lister Hawks Pott (1864–1947) indicated in the preface he wrote for this dictionary, the editors’ initial plan was to translate Webster’s International Dictionary. As Table 2.1 shows, Yen’s dictionary consists of translations of the definitions of “civilization” from Webster’s dictionary, namely, “the act of civilizing” and “the state of being civilized.” Yen, in his dictionary, further translated these two definitions for “civilization” as “educational transformation, inspirational transformation” (jiaohua, ganhua 教化, 感化) and “civilization, enlightenment, the state of being educationally transformed” (weming, kaihua, you jiaohua 文明, 開化, 有教化), respectively (Yen 1908: 379). Similar to earlier Sino-English dictionaries, the word wenming, together with jiaohua, was employed to translate “civilization.” Apart from the definition of “civilization,” a more profound change appeared in Yen’s definition of “civility.” On the one hand, he followed part of Webster’s definition for “civility” (“The [state] quality of being civilized”) and translated this definition as “civilization, enlightenment, dignity” (wenming, kaihua, duya 文明, 開化, 都雅), with the term “dignity” here, duya 都雅, being a term that first appeared in the third-century Records of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo zhi 三國志), which indicated gentleness and dignity (Huang 2017: 69, note 8). On the other hand, Yen linked a progressive view of history to his interpretation of the entry “civility”—“as, from barbarism to civility”—and translated it as “transform from barbarism to civility” (zi yeman jinzhi wenming 自野蠻進至文明) (Yen 1908: 379). Based on the above analysis, the translation of “civilization” and “civility” in Yen’s 1908 dictionary suggests both the interaction between the Chinese and Western missionaries and the influence of the Sinographic knowledge production in East Asia at the turn of the twentieth century.

Table 2.1 Entries for “civilization” and “civility” in the dictionaries of Yen (1908: 379) and Webster (1898: 260)
Full size table

In Vietnam, it was not until the 1930s that the word văn minh became the equivalent word to translate “civilization.” In 1932, Đào Duy Anh (1904‒1988), a historian and linguist who was close to the leaders of the Duy Tân Reform Movement, defined văn minh in his Sino-Vietnamese Dictionary (Hán Việt từ điển 漢越字典 Dictionaire Sino-Annamite) as “the radiance of morality manifested in the areas of politics, laws, learning, institutions, etc., is called civilization. The opposite of savagery” (Cái tia của đạo đức, phát hiện ra ở nơi chính trị, pháp luật, học thuật, điển chương v. v., gọi là văn minh. Phản đối với dã man) (Đào 1932: 537). Later, in 1939, another definition appeared in the Vietnamese Dictionary (Việt Nam tự điển 越南字典, 1931) edited by the Association for Intellectual and Moral Formation (known by its French acronym AFIMA) in Hanoi, an institute organized by a group of high-ranking mandarins in 1919 under the sponsorship of Louis Marty, the head of the Indochinese Sûreté Générale (Tai 1992: 121). In this dictionary, the entry văn minh was defined as “Being refined and luminous. It refers to a society or an epoch that has achieved a high level of enlightenment [khai hóa 開化]: civilized society” (Văn-vẻ sáng-sủa. Nói về xã-hội hay thời-đại đã khai-hóa tới một trình-độ cao: Xã-hội văn-minh) (Hội Khai Trí Tiến Đức [1931] 1939: 627).

It should be pointed out that in both W. W. Yen’s and Đào Duy Anh’s respective interpretations of the entry, “civilization,” the notion of jiaohua/giáo hoá did not entirely disappear. As mentioned above, jiaohua remained as the first word choice for Yen to translate “civilization.” In Đào Duy Anh’s definition of văn minh, there is an obvious combination of the modern notion of Western civilization and the premodern concept of jiaohua/giáo hoá. On the one hand, the way that Anh contrasted văn minh with dã man (savagery) was obviously influenced by Fukuzawa’s An Outline of the Theory of Civilization, in which he solidified the Japanese translation of the concepts pertaining to “savagery” as yaban (Chn., yeman 野蠻) (Sheng 2012: 394–401). On the other hand, by “radiance,” Anh, to some extent, presumed that there was a center, be it as an individual or a political entity, exercising influence on the people or other political entities because of its superiority in morality and culture. This notion resembles what Brindley demonstrated in her analysis of the formulation and evolution of the jiaohua discourse in the early Chinese imperial history. According to Brindley, this discourse was associated not only with the ideal of a good education, but of an education that involves inculcating people in the moral values and ways of Chinese/Sinitic culture and civilization. More importantly, this concept was implicated in a particular approach to state control and policies of cultural, even ethnic conversion in the centuries following its emergence (Brindley 2021: 2). To some extent, jiaohua could be seen as a premodern civilizational discourse in the formation of a centralized Chinese empire.

Similarly in Vietnam, especially during the reign of the second emperor of the Nguyễn Dynasty, Minh Mạng 明命 (1791–1841, r. 1820–1841), the discourse of giáo hoá was integrated as part of his administrative policy in the imperial course of southward expansion and assimilation of non-Viet peoples to a Sino-Vietnamese Han culture, the Vietnamese language, and Chinese characters. Underlying this civilizing mission, according to Goscha, was “an inclusive ‘Dai Viet’ (Great Viet) identity defined from the capital, from the top down, as part of the East Asian Han civilization” (Goscha 2016: 46–47; Weber 2011: 757).

Comparing this giáo hoá discourse to Đào Duy Anh’s interpretation of văn minh, it is clear that both terms were implicated in a hierarchical, top-down structure of power in which the center, claiming to represent civilization, could exercise its influence on the periphery. Therefore, what differentiated văn minh from giáo hoá was not the cognitive structure of the power relationship between the center and periphery but rather the very nature of civilization which empowered the center to “manifest” and “radiate” its influence. It is in this sense that văn minh became a neologism at the turn of the twentieth century.

As Lydia Liu noted in her research on translingual practice in early-twentieth-century China, modern Chinese words and concepts, as well as those from the classical Chinese language that have been mediated through modern Chinese, often present hidden snares (Liu 1995: 17). These “hidden snares” that Liu observed can also be found in the case of văn minh as a neologism in colonial Vietnam. Morphologically, this word văn minh shares the same form with its premodern predecessor. As the above analysis shows, however, in becoming the matching word to translate “civilization,” it simultaneously included both the progressive view of history which was based on the modern Western historical experience and interpreted via the Sinographic translational network and the premodern Sinitic concept and its cognitive framework of giáo hoá. As will be demonstrated in the next section, together with văn minh, the discourse of giáo hoá played a significant role in the formation of a collaborative Vietnamese historiography during the Duy Tân period.

2.3 The Discourse of Văn minh in Pro-French Sino-Vietnamese Historical Writing

In parallel with the translation from civilization into văn minh was a transformation in the ways of narrating Vietnamese history in the Duy Tân Movement at the turn of the twentieth century. During this period, the Vietnamese intelligentsia, under the influence of the “new books” imported from China through the Sinographic translational network, widely accepted the idea that becoming civilized was the prerequisite for restoring national sovereignty and independence. And historical experience, they believed, could bring out clearly the meaning of civilization. As the following part of this chapter will demonstrate, the emergence of a new historiography in 1900s Vietnam is inextricable from Liang Qichao’s nationalist historical thinking.

2.4 Liang Qichao’s New Historiography

Any set of new narratives needs to engage with the established ones. In his 1901 essay, “Introduction to Chinese History” (Zhongguo shi xulun 中國史敘論), Liang Qichao pointed out the difference of scope between traditional and modern historiographies. According to him, traditional historians confined themselves to simply recording historical events, while modern historians could articulate the causal relationships between events and demonstrate the development and historical experience of a nation (Liang 1999: 448). One year later, Liang systematically elaborated the above opinions in his seminal article “New Historiography” (Xin shixue 新史學) published in the twentieth issue of the journal Renovation of the People (Xinmin congbao 新民叢報). In this manifesto of modern historiography, Liang lamented that traditional Chinese history writing suffered from the following four problems: (1) it mistakenly identified the royal family with the entire country and thus paid excessive attention to the events that took place around the court; (2) it focused on a few individuals while failing to investigate the activities of the people as a group; (3) it prioritized ancient times; and (4) it could not articulate the nature and spirit of history implied by those scattered historical events (Liang 1999: 737). To deal with these problems, Liang proposed to restore the nation to the center of historical writing and investigate its development throughout history.

Liang Qichao approached the issue of historical development with the notion of “jinhua” 進化, literally, “progression and change.” For him, jinhua was an irreversible and never-ending process and constituted the only appropriate topic for historical studies (Liang 1999: 739). To make out the direction of jinhua, modern historians needed to shed light on the materials and data of the past with their hermeneutic insight so as to tease out from the phenomena in the process of jinhua “universal principles and examples,” namely, the philosophy of history. He believed that these principles and examples could help to maintain the state of civilization that people had achieved and advance its development in the future (Liang 1999: 740–741).

Liang’s conception of the new historiography was reflected in the history textbooks compiled in China at the turn of the twentieth century. The goal of these textbooks, according to Peter Zarrow, was to delineate the evolution of the Chinese nation and convey a sense of continuity with the past that provided students with an identity in the present (Zarrow 2015: 147). Exposed to the copies of Liang’s works and these newly compiled Chinese history textbooks, Vietnamese intellectuals of different political stripes started to apply the view of history as a universal, linear, and homogenizing process in their construction of Vietnamese national history, through which they endeavored to make the historical experience of Vietnam universally relevant so as to justify their projects to make their country a civilized nation-state. Because of the traditional educational background of these Duy Tân intellectuals, most of their historical works were written in classical Chinese, as it was only in the 1920s that modern Vietnamese written in the Romanized script started to significantly replace the use of classical Chinese in the writing of history (Kelley 2012: 4).

2.5 The Emergence of a Reformist New Historiography in Vietnam

The earliest appearance of the idea of a new historiography in Vietnamese historical writing can be traced back to the preface to the Complete Compilation of the New Testament of Việt History (Việt sử tân ước toàn biên 越史新約全編) in 1906 compiled by Hoàng Đạo Thành 黃道成 (1835–1908), a mandarin and participant of the Duy Tân Movement. In fact, Thành’s book was merely a recompilation of the extant historical materials without providing a new narrative framework; however, the preface written by his friend Đào Nguyên Phổ 陶元溥 (1861–1908) marked the advent of the new historiography in Vietnam. A former Confucianist mandarin of the Nguyễn Dynasty, Đào Nguyên Phổ resigned from his office and went to Hanoi as a journalist in 1902. Together with Lương Văn Can and Nguyễn Quyền, he became a cofounder of the renowned Free School of Tonkin (Đông Kinh Nghĩa Thục 東京義塾) in 1907. He committed suicide to avoid arrest after the French colonial authorities closed the Free School. In his manifesto-like text, Phổ articulated the significance of history in constructing a modern and civilized nation:

Regardless of whether a country is large or small, it certainly has a history. That history should reflect and take into account the whole nation as well as its people, its dynasties, and its politics. Europe, America, and Japan are all civilized countries. In all of these places, history is regarded as an important subject. They not only pay specific attention to the field of world history, they also make the history of their countries a general course. Students from the age of seven, when they first enter school, are requested to study their own country’s literature and recite their national histories. Women also do this. The word “nation” is therefore etched in each of their minds. When they grow up and finish school, none of them will be ignorant about the close relationship between their fatherland and their own family. Thereupon, they will view the nation’s territory as their own property and will treat their fellow countrymen as compatriots. United as community, each of them will fulfill their obligation and provide their efforts to protect the public security and interests. In this sense, it is not a coincidence that their countries become prosperous and powerful. (Hoàng 1906: 1)

Similar to the problems that Liang Qichao had pointed out in his criticism of traditional Chinese historiography, histories in Vietnam before the twentieth century were mostly written as moral guides for monarchs and the officials who served them. In contrast to his predecessors, Đào Nguyên Phổ proposed to place the nation at the center of the new historiography, arguing that it was the national consciousness in the Western countries that made them states of civilization. In Vietnam, however, the idea of the nation was not a familiar one to most people. Phổ attributed the lack of national consciousness to the civil service examination system, as the curriculum for the exams was confined to the classics from China which did not include the history of his own land. Therefore, to cultivate people’s national consciousness, he argued, it was necessary to reform the current examination system and, more importantly, to compose a national history for the Vietnamese people (Hoàng 1906: 3–4).

Although Đào Nguyên Phổ did not author a historical monograph, his brief preamble nevertheless became influential among other Vietnamese reformist intellectuals. In 1911, Ngô Giáp Đậu 吳甲豆 (1853–?), a Confucian scholar born in a family renowned for traditional historical studies wrote a four-volume Summary of Việt History for Secondary Schools (Trung học Việt sử toát yếu 中學越史撮要), in which Đậu delineated the development of Vietnamese history from the legendary Hồng Bàng era to the modern time under French administration. Three years later, Hoàng Cao Khải 黃高啟 (1850–1933), the retired viceroy of Hanoi and the most famous collaborator with the French colonial government, published the three-volume Essentials of Việt History (Việt sử yếu 越史要) as an expansion of his 1909 work, the Mirror of Việt History (Việt sử kính 越史鏡). The Essentials of Việt History was based on a series of articles which Khải published in the Indochina Journal (Đông Dương tạp chí 東洋雜誌), a newspaper funded by the French colonial government. Based on his interpretation of Vietnamese history, Khải systematically elaborated his pro-French proposition and harshly criticized his anti-French counterparts, especially the revolutionary Phan Bội Châu (1867–1940) who encouraged young Vietnamese to go east to Japan to study, in the hope of training a new generation of revolutionaries to overthrow French colonial rule.

As will be shown in the following sections, both scholars adapted a narrative framework from Japanese historiographical paradigms in their respective writings and employed ideas about evolutionary theory and Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism that were translated through the Sinographic translational network in their writings on Vietnamese national history.

2.6 Periodization and the Historical Continuity of the Vietnamese Nation

As a hermeneutic method, periodization provided reformist Vietnamese historians with an important tool to reinterpret the past. Through a reconfiguration of the traditional historical narrative based on dynastic succession, reformist Vietnamese historians rendered the past of Vietnam into a series of analytical stages, each of which could be evaluated according to modern criteria. In the Summary of Việt History for Secondary Schools, Ngô Giáp Đậu divided the history of Vietnam into four periods and five time spans. As shown in Table 2.2, Đậu incorporated these periods and time spans into four volumes named in sequence after the appellation of the four seasons, which, to some extent, resembles the vicissitudes of human history. He singled out, in the autumn volume, the time span from the establishment of the Later Lê Dynasty in 1428 CE to the fall of the Tây Sơn Dynasty in 1802 CE without attributing it to any period.

Table 2.2 Ngô Giáp Đậu’s historical periodization
Full size table

As Ye Shaofei has pointed out, Ngô Giáp Đậu’s four-stage narrative framework was largely inspired by the work of Japanese scholar Kuwabara Jitsuzō (1871–1931) (Ye 2018: 64–65). In his 1898 book entitled Intermediate Oriental History (Chūtō Tōyōshi 中等東洋史), which was translated into Chinese as The Outline of Oriental History (Dongyang shi yao 東洋史要) and published by The Commercial Press in Shanghai in 1908, Kuwabara employed the following four-stage framework to periodize the history of China:

(1) Ancient times (shanggu 上古): from remote antiquity to the establishment of the Qin Dynasty.

(2) Medieval times (zhonggu 中古): from the Qin to the end of the Tang Dynasty.

(3) Late medieval times (jingu 近古): from the Five Dynasties to the rise of the Qing Dynasty.

(4) Early modern times (jinshi 近世): from the early Qing to the first Sino-Japanese War (Kuwabara 1998).

Kuwabara’s periodization divided Chinese history into two parts, of which the first half from the ancient to the end of the Tang witnessed the rise and expansion of the Han people, while the other half belonged to the domination of the Mongols and Manchus over the Han. Moreover, Kuwabara employed neither the modern discourse of civilization, nor the traditional framework based on the dichotomy between the Hua (the civilized) and Yi (the barbarous). Instead, his periodization of Chinese history focused on the continuous competition between the Han people and other ethnic groups living to the north of China. By doing so, Kuwabara challenged the Sino-centric historical narrative and deconstructed the continuity of the history of China in which the Han people constituted the dominant ethnic group in China.

In contrast with Kuwabara, Ngô Giáp Đậu employed a dual narrative thread throughout his four-stage periodization to emphasize the continuity of the Việt people and the Việt-centric history of Vietnam. It should be pointed out that Đậu did not provide a clear definition of the Việt people. According to him, Hua immigrants from “the North,” as he referred to “China,” whose origin could be traced back to the convicts sent by the Qin and Han dynasties to garrison the region of Lingnan up to the Ming loyalists and who arrived when that dynasty fell to the Qing, constituted the majority of the population of what he termed “the Southern Land.” Because of their advanced civilization, these people “expanded daily and forced the original inhabitants of Jiaozhi into the remote areas” (Ngô 1911, Vol. 1: 7–8). In his dual narrative framework, Đậu on the one hand placed the Việt people as the major participants in the international competitions and clashes between the regimes of Vietnam and that of China over the past millennium. On the other hand, he devoted a good deal of space to the territorial expansion and military conflicts between the Việt regimes with other non-Việt peoples such as the Cham and Khmer. In both narrative threads, Đậu viewed the Việt people as the historical subject of the Vietnamese nation who had been constantly engaging with the missions of defending their national independence and expanding their territory southward to the Mekong Delta. Similar to Đậu, Hoàng Cao Khải also applied this dual narrative to divide the history of Vietnam into five periods in his Essentials of Việt History (Table 2.3).

Table 2.3 Hoàng Cao Khải’s historical periodization
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Compared to Ngô Giáp Đậu, Hoàng Cao Khải’s five-stage periodization combined the formation of a unified Việt people with the process of competing against foreign countries (mainly from the north) and expanding toward the south. Mirroring Liang Qichao’s statement that “competition is the mother of progress” (Liang [1902] 1999: 683), Khải attributed the development of the nation, from a poorly organized cluster of some primitive tribes to a civilized country, to internal and international competition (Hoàng 1914: Vol. 1, 11). According to him, since the time of King An Dương who had conquered the legendary state of Văn Lang in 258 BCE, competition emerged among the peoples living in the land of what is today northern Vietnam. And since being conquered by the Qin Dynasty in the third-century BCE and ruled by various Chinese empires in the following one thousand years up until the late Tang Dynasty in the tenth century CE, the scale of competition had significantly expanded from domestic to international, which led to the unprecedented evolution of the Việt people from the stage of savagery into civilization/văn minh.

Based on the discourse of giáo hoá, Khải argued that the earliest Việt people, what he called “Jiaozhi people,” were descendants of generations of intermarriage between Han immigrants from the North and the indigenous people in the South since the invasion of the Qin Dynasty. During the period under the direct rule of the Han Dynasty, administrative and educational institutes were established and the “old race of Jiaozhi” was gradually assimilated into the Han civilization and eventually became the Việt people who were racially the same as the Han people living in China (Hoàng 1914: Vol. 1, 5). From the autonomous period onward, Khải pointed out, the Việt people expanded southward the specific văn minh they obtained from the North to the land of the Chams and other indigenous peoples whom they regarded as barbarians. They launched several expansionist wars against these non-Việt peoples, through which, “The barbarians were gradually transformed and assimilated into a great nation of prosperity and văn minh” (Hoàng 1914: Vol. 3, 15–17). By “great nation,” Khải referred to a homogenous Việt society that was created by eliminating ethnic differences:

Since our Nguyễn dynasty moved its administrative capital to Huế, it, in the following two hundred years, conquered the land of the Cham and established three prefectures (Phú Yên, Khánh Hòa, and Bình Thuận). It also conquered Zhenla and divided the land into six provinces. The Nguyễn arranged officials to manage the annexed land and gradually transformed the barbaric peoples, which made the peoples living between An Giang and Quảng Ngãi a great nation of văn minh (civilization) and prosperity. (Hoàng 1914: Vol. 3, 17)

In other words, Khải placed the historical continuity of the Vietnamese nation in a dynamic process, central to which was the development and dissemination of civilization. As will be demonstrated in the next section, the notion of civilization that Hoàng Cao Khải and other reformist historians held was based on the social organism theory of evolution.

2.7 Social Organism Theory, Văn Minh, and the Pro-Collaboration Version of Vietnamese Nationalism

Reformist Vietnamese intellectuals in their historical narrative combined the Vietnamese people’s continuous competition and expansion toward the south over the past centuries with their pursuit of civilization and regarded the latter as the crucial impetus behind the formation and evolution of the Vietnamese nation. As will be demonstrated in this section, Herbert Spencer’s social organism theory provided them with an important theoretical basis to construct the internal logics of this narrative.

Spencer’s theory of social organisms entered the intellectual world of East Asia during the early Meiji period of the 1870s and 1880s. As a specific version of Social Darwinism, social organism theory provided the Meiji reformists with a “scientific” model of progress to understand social development (Nagai 1954; Howland 2000). In their adaptation of Spencer’s theory, the Meiji reformists, especially those who were critical of emergent popular rights movements, placed the state as the basic unit in the natural context of the “survival of the fittest” (Howland 2000: 67–76). According to Shiraishi and Tai, this version of Social Darwinism was introduced to Vietnamese intellectuals around 1900 through Chinese writings (Shiraishi 1990: 97; Tai 1992: 20–21), which provided them with a persuasive explanation for the origins of the difference among nations, i.e., between the stronger and wealthier and the weaker and poorer. This specific version of Social Darwinism was adapted by the reformist Vietnamese scholars to understand not only the history of their country under the rule of China in the past but also the present situation under French colonization.

Hoàng Cao Khải, for instance, believed that the collective ability to compete was the decisive criteria to gauge the level of civilization. In the Essentials of Việt History, he attributed China’s annexation of Vietnam to the former’s overwhelming superiority in international competition. According to him, this superiority derived from the achievements of the Chinese people in the domains of civilization/văn minh, including the feudal system, bureaucracy, tax law, military organization, and educational pedagogy. Again, according to Khải, during the long period of Chinese rule, the inferior Vietnamese people were exposed to the advanced teachings of Confucianism and obtained unprecedented and comprehensive development, which eventually brought Vietnam into “the whirlpool of civilization/văn minh” (Hoàng 1914: Vol. 1, 11–14). Thanks to whole-scale assimilation for more than one thousand years, argued Khải, Vietnamese people were transformed into civilized people and acquired the “characteristics of civilization” as well as the “capacity to compete,” which enabled them to restore their national independence (Hoàng 1909: 2). In this narrative, China was viewed as the model of civilization for its superiority in competition. In this sense, being assimilated into the Sinitic culture meant being civilized.

With the defeat of China in its competition with the West in the nineteenth century, however, the model of civilization for Vietnamese to follow shifted to “Great France” (Đại Pháp 大法). Based on Social Darwinism, Hoàng Cao Khải explained this paradigm shift from a universalistic perspective and pointed out that this phenomenon was inherent in the development of civilization:

The relationship between the strong and the weak determines the result of competition in the present world. The inferior has to rely on the superior in order to develop and the weak has to turn to the strong for survival. This principle is not only applicable to our nation… In the past, we were under Chinese governance for one thousand years and France was ruled by the Roman Empire for four hundred years. Eventually, our assimilation into China enabled us to be independent, and France’s integration into Rome made it civilized. (Hoàng 1909: Vol. 1, 1–2)

According to the original text of the above quote, Hoàng Cao Khải employed the Sino-Vietnamese concept of 化 (hua/hoá, meaning “to transform”) which was based on the discourse of giáo hoá to explain the historical relationships between Vietnam and China and between France and the Roman empire.

The logic underlying this analogy was reminiscent of the ideas that French scholars in the colonial period developed to understand the history of Vietnam. According to these French scholars, Vietnam developed through its contact with China, and it would only be able to advance its development through contact with France. In his 1909 Introductory Outline of the History of Annam (An Nam sơ học sử lược 安南初學史略), for example, French Sinologist Charles Maybon (1872–1926) emphasized the significant role that France played in enlightening and civilizing the Vietnamese people and assisting them to obtain full independence from the Qing empire (Ye 2018: 68). In other words, this model of historiography emphasized that the major transformation to Vietnam was brought about from nothing but external contact.

Since the 1990s, the ideas of French colonial scholars at the turn of the twentieth century, especially the model they developed to understand the past of Vietnam, became an important academic topic into which many modern scholars of Vietnamese studies provided their insights (Cooke 1991; Pelley 2002; Kelley 2005). Despite the nuances in their opinions toward such a model of narrative about the past of Vietnam, most of these scholars generally agreed to refer to it as the “little China theory.” This French theory argues, according to Liam Kelley, that Vietnam became a miniature replica of China during the millennium under the rule of various Chinese empires. Prior to its contact with the Chinese, the Vietnamese did not develop sophisticated political and social institutions. It was precisely through adopting many of Chinese customs and political institutions, that Vietnam was subsequently able to maintain its autonomy for the next thousand year until the advent of French colonization in the nineteenth century. By employing this historical narrative to interpret the past of Vietnam, the little China theory implied that Vietnam, at the turn of the twentieth century, would obtain its strength to become autonomous under the tutelage of the French (Kelley 2005: 9).

Most of the criticism toward the little China theory revolves around its depiction of the image of pre-colonial Vietnam as “nothing but China in all essentials” and that “its people, culture, and institutions had remained unchanged from when China had ruled a thousand years before and were thus fully understandable in Sinic terms” (Cooke 1991: 37). In this perspective of viewing the past of Vietnam, argues Patricia Pelley, the autonomy and subjectivity of the Vietnamese people as historical agents who acted in specific ways in pursuit of specific goals were concealed (Pelley 2002: 7–8). This criticism rightly reveals the French hegemonic discourse of colonialism underlying the seemly objective narrative of Vietnamese history; however, it fails to include in its analysis the perspective of the Vietnamese elite that the French concealed and scrutinize how these Vietnamese perceived, adapted, and transformed the modern discourse of civilization in their construction of the past of Vietnam. As has been analyzed in the previous sections, this specific discourse of civilization was introduced into Vietnam through the interaction between Vietnamese and other intellectuals of East Asia via the Sinographic translational network. Based on this discourse, Vietnamese intellectuals, from anti-French revolutionaries like Phan Bội Châu (1867–1940) to the reformist collaborators like Hoàng Cao Khải, developed a narrative of văn minh in their construction of the national history of Vietnam.

In their Sino-Vietnamese history writings, both the anti-French revolutionaries and the reformist collaborators shared a “contact and transformation” view of history, which looks similar to the “little China theory” that the French colonial scholars developed. Phan Bội Châu, for example, regarded the Vietnamese people and society over the long stretches of time from remote antiquity to the Tự Đức reign (1847–1883) as essentially stagnant and barbarous. In a writing from 1909, he stated that it was not until the recent years of the early-twentieth century when “winds and rains from Europe and America” blew into Vietnam that Vietnamese people ushered in a time of enlightenment (khai-hóa 開化). Moreover, he envisioned that if Vietnam followed the model of the West, it would eventually achieve the stage of văn minh in the next couple of decades (Phan 2000: 456–58).

Compared to Phan Bội Châu who regarded the history of Vietnam as stagnant and barbarous, other reformist intellectuals viewed it as a continuous process toward văn minh. More importantly, they stressed the autonomy and subjectivity of the Vietnamese people as historical agents in the pursuit of văn minh. According to these scholars, the transition of Vietnam from barbarous to văn minh had already began since the educational transformation (giáo hoá) initiated by the Chinese and continued by various Vietnamese dynasties. Once independent of China, the civilized Việt people launched their own mission civilisatrice over the past centuries to conquer and colonize the “barbarous” regimes such as the kingdoms of Champa and Zhenla. Through a series of direct and indirect methods of rule over distant, multi-racial peoples, they established a Viet-centered imperial administrative order in the eastern Indochinese Peninsula, a region that included today’s Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

In the Mirror of Việt History, Hoàng Cao Khải regarded this process as the manifestation of the “universal principle of evolution” (Thiên diễn chi công lệ 天演之公例) that no one could ever evade (Hoàng 1909: Vol. 1, 32). He highly praised the Nguyễn Dynasty for its active participation in this process and its effort to conquer and homogenize various peoples into a Việt-centered nation through this southward expansion:

In fact, the conquered area was merely a cluster of wasteland. However, [our Nguyễn dynasty] spared no effort in its administration and management. It transported landless people and Chinese immigrants to the conquered land where they either constructed roads to communicate with the outside, or established villages to unite the various groups of people. Local customs were reformed and local education was revived. […] The peoples of Champa [Chiêm Thành 占城], Zhenla [Chân Lạp 真臘], Jiuzhen [Cửu Chân 九真], and Jiaozhi [Giao Chỉ 交趾] became integrated into a great nation of Vietnam. (Hoàng 1909: Vol. 1, 36)

Furthermore, Hoàng Cao Khải employed a progressive framework to understand the development of nationalism and broadly linked the formation of the Vietnamese nation to a global process. According to him, nationalism originated in Europe in the fourteenth century and had already developed into the form of imperial nationalism since the nineteenth century. In the past, nationalism referred to the “integration of multi-racial peoples within a state into a homogenous nation.” In his day, however, Khải argued that it had evolved into “imperial nationalism” which is based upon “the assimilation of the various races of different countries into a homogenous nation of the world” ( HYPERLINK "SPS:refid::bib19" Hoàng 1909: Vol. 1, 37). In this sense, the southward expansion of the Việt people and the attendant formation of the Vietnamese nation represented the earlier phase in the development of nationalism. In face of the dominant historical trend of imperial nationalism in the early-twentieth century, Hoàng Cao Khải and other like-minded Vietnamese scholars on the one hand warned their Vietnamese compatriots to take the historical lesson from the fall of Champa and Zhenla. On the other hand, they encouraged the Vietnamese people to follow the steps of their Việt antecedents and voluntarily participate in the self-transformation under the tutelage of the French ( HYPERLINK "SPS:refid::bib19" Hoàng 1909: Vol. 1, 39–40).

In the above historical image constructed by reformist Vietnamese historians, Vietnam was by no means depicted as stagnant in pre-French times. Quite the contrary, it actively implemented colonialist projects as a significant part of the building of an imperial nation-state. Integrating the premodern discourse of giáo hoá into the modern notion of civilization and nation, Vietnamese reformist historians related the model transition from China to France to an intersecting of imperial projects that combined the unfinished Vietnamese imperial project of internal colonization with the French colonial conception of the Indochinese Union.Footnote 6 By so doing, the reformist Vietnamese intellectuals provided a specific version of Vietnamese nationalist historiography.

2.8 Conclusion

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, a Western version of civilization entered East Asia and gradually replaced the hegemony of the Sinitic wenming, the central ideology of the Sinocentric political system which had profoundly influenced the political entities and the world view of elites in East Asia for millennia. In parallel to this was the introduction of a specific perspective of philosophy of history based on the Social Darwinist ideas of evolution and competition. Through the mediation of the Sinographic translational network based on the shared knowledge of Literary Sinitic among East Asian intellectuals, these ideas pertaining to the Western concept of civilization were widely adapted to understand and describe the development and progress of human society. This process led to a significant reconfiguration of the meaning of the Sinitic word 文明 (wenming/bunmei/văn minh) and eventually made it a neologism and matching word to translate “civilization.” In the second part of this article, I demonstrated that in the context of the early-twentieth century East Asia, this neologism simultaneously included the Western experience-based view of history on the one hand, and the premodern Sinitic concept and its cognitive framework of “educational transformation” (jiaohua/giáo hóa 教化), on the other.

The conceptual transformation of civilization, as Yufen Chang pointed out, ushered in the dual projects of nationalism and modernization, which manifested through pan-East Asian reform movements aiming to achieve “civilization and enlightenment,” first in Japan in the late 1860s, then in China in 1898, and finally in French colonial Vietnam in the 1900s ( HYPERLINK "SPS:refid::bib7" Chang 2017: 649). Taking advantage of what Benedict Anderson termed the “print capitalism” emergent in East Asia (Anderson 2006: 37–40), participants of these reform movements wrote in various literary forms to expound and disseminate their ideas pertaining to civilization, among which national history emerged as an important genre.

The conception of national history was meticulously elaborated by the prominent Japanese reformist Fukuzawa Yukichi and his compatriot Tōyōshi, or “Oriental history,” scholars in the second half of the nineteenth century and was theoretically synthesized by the famous Chinese reformist Liang Qichao in his manifesto-like article “New Historiography” in 1902. Based on the unilinear evolutionary historical view, this nation-centered historiography rendered the past into collections of data and materials awaiting illumination by historians with their hermeneutic insight ( HYPERLINK "SPS:refid::bib29" Kuo 2014: 278–79). As part of the Chinese “new books” imported into colonial Vietnam at the turn of the twentieth century, Liang Qichao’s historical theories were widely read and discussed among the Vietnamese intelligentsia. Under his influence, Vietnamese intellectuals of different political stripes started to apply the view of history as a universal, linear, and homogenizing process in their construction of Vietnamese national history, through which they attempted to make the historical experience of Vietnam universally relevant to justify their projects to make their country a civilized nation-state. In their historical writings, the neologism văn minh functioned as the key concept that helped them to interpret the past and envision the future of the Vietnamese nation.

This chapter analyzed a group of historical texts written in Literary Sinitic by reformist Vietnamese intellectuals who chose to collaborate with the French colonial authorities at the turn of twentieth century. These texts adapted the framework from the Japanese writings of Tōyōshi to periodize the history of Vietnam into a series of phases from the state of savagery to civilization. By employing the dual narrative threads, namely, “competing with the foreign forces (Chinese, in most cases)” and “expanding toward the south,” these reformist intellectuals constructed the historical continuity and subjectivity of the Vietnamese nation. In the first thread, China was depicted as the representative of the civilizing force that transformed the barbarous Vietnam into a domain of civility through assimilative and sometimes even oppressive approaches. Under the rule of China, Vietnam adopted many of the Chinese customs and political institutions, which enabled it to eventually restore its independence and maintain its autonomy.

Superficially, this historical narrative is reminiscent of the “little China theory” developed by French Orientalists during the colonial era to understand the colony and, more importantly, to provide a justification for colonization. This theory, as many modern scholars of Vietnamese studies have noticed, depicted the history of Vietnam as stagnant and passive, which could not develop without external contact and intervention, whereby concealing the autonomy and subjectivity of the Vietnamese people as historical agents. Focusing on the theme of “expanding toward the south” that appeared in the historical writings composed by the reformist Vietnamese scholars, the last section of this article demonstrated how they depicted the image of Vietnam as a positive if not aggressive force of civilization that engaged in the mission of establishing a regional empire in the eastern part of the Indochinese Peninsula. In the historical narrative of these reformist scholars, the non-Việt multi-racial peoples were barbarous. Therefore, the assimilation and homogenization of these non-Việt peoples into a united nation and the southward aggression and expansion of the Việt regimes were regarded a great yet unfinished cause that manifested the “universal principle of evolution.” For them, the conception of the French Indochinese Union shared the same object with Vietnam of establishing a nation-state with regional imperialist hegemony.