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Postcolonial Vietnam
New histories of the national past
By Patricia M. Pelley Duke University Press
ISBN: 0-8223-2966-2
Chapter One
Constructing History
The Vietnamese have a rich historiographical tradition that can be traced to the thirteenth century. Court historians during the Tran and Le dynasties (1225-1788) devoted significant resources to historiographical works. Once a new dynasty claimed the throne, it was obliged to write the history of the previous dynasty and to contribute scholarly works, including biographies of exemplary figures, geographical data, and compilations of folklore, reflective of the new era. Before the French occupation (1862-1945), historians of the Nguyen dynasty (1802-1945) were extremely prolific. The distinguished scholar Phan Huy Chu composed two renowned works: Annal of Imperial Orders through the Ages and Account of Things Seen Abroad. By the 1860s, as the French were converting six southern provinces into the colony of Cochinchina, Nguyen historians had finished more than half of the monumental Veritable Records of Dai Nam, which ultimately consisted of over five hundred books. As the French transformed the northern provinces of Vietnam into the protectorate of Tonkin, and as they created the protectorate of Annam out of the central provinces, Nguyen historians continued working, and in 1890 concluded the final sections. Modeled on earlier historiographical patterns, theVeritable Records covered the period of the Nguyen lords (1558-1777) and the Nguyen dynasty from its origins in 1802 to the end of Dong Khanh's reign in 1889. Some years earlier, in 1884, Nguyen historians published The Comprehensive Mirror of Viet History. This widely cited chronicle covers the entire pre-Nguyen span of Vietnamese history, from the prehistoric kingdom of Van Lang to the collapse of the Le dynasty. During the reign of the Nguyen emperor Tur Duc, court historians also completed The Geography of United Dai Nam. This gazetteer, which devotes one book to each of twenty-eight provinces, is divided into three sections, each of which represents the major regions: North, Center, and South. Because of its description of provincial resources and historical sites, as well as its attention to demography, this source is invaluable for research on nineteenth-century topics.
Nguyen scholarship is now considered indispensable, and even during Nguyen times its importance was clear. And yet, because the Nguyen emperors presided over Vietnam's loss of independence, postcolonial historians often viewed their accomplishments as compensatory devices that masked a state of disgrace; in other words, there appeared to be no correspondence between the Nguy3n court's intellectual interest in history and its political resignation vis-a-vis the French.
Like the Nguyen historians, those associated with the occupation forces -including adventurers, administrators, merchants, scholars, and missionaries-were also enormously productive. Far more than their Nguyen contemporaries, however, colonial authors spoke from a position of power. In addition to the scholars Leonard Aurousseau, Gustave Dumoutier, Maurice Durand, Pierre Huard, and Henri Maspero, a number of writers with missionary backgrounds (Leopold Cadiere), commercial interests (Alfred Schreiner), or in military positions (Charles Gosselin) also presumed to speak authoritatively about the Vietnamese past. Institutions such as the French School of the Far East (Ecole francaise d'Extreme-Orient) issued innumerable works that because of their distinguished imprimateur enjoyed quasi-official status.
Finally, a number of Vietnamese who allied themselves with the occupation also published extensively. Although some of these writers can be linked to specific institutions, such as schools, others were associated with journals or publishing houses in Hanoi, Haiphong, Hue, or Saigon. These writers probably had the greatest impact on how the Vietnamese thought about-or were supposed to think about-the past. In the 1870s, for example, the Catholic convert Truong Vinh Ky (a.k.a. Petrus Jean-Baptiste), a man characterized by postcolonial writers as the "exemplary lackey," published (in French) a two-volume history of Vietnam. Colonial administrators promoted the use of his work in public schools, first in the colony of Cochinchina, then in the protectorates of Annam and Tonkin. Truong Vinh Ky's quasi-canonical status was further enhanced by colonial scholars who based much of their own research on what he had already written. Decades later, new pedagogical texts, such as those written by Tran Van Thuoc, Ngo Van Minh, and Duong Quang Ham, were widely circulated in colonial schools. In addition to viewing the occupation in a favorable light, some of these writers even thanked the French for having sparked their own interest in the history of Vietnam. In his preface to Lessons in the History of Annam, which was adopted by the Textbook Commission in 1930, high school teacher Duong Quang Ham declared:
No one doubts the educational value of instruction in history, and national history must be considered among the most important of subjects taught in primary school. This pedagogical truth, so evident all on its own, was nevertheless unknown to Annamites before the arrival of the French. In the traditional Annamite curriculum, in fact, pupils only studied the Chinese chronicles: the history of Annam was not mentioned, neither in the program of study nor in the meetings at which the various programs were determined.
For postcolonial writers, Duong Quang Ham's declaration was disturbing because of its essential truth. In precolonial times, the Vietnamese did indeed equate historical literacy to a knowledge of Chinese texts: the Five Classics, the Four Books, and chronicles of the Han, Tang, Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties. During the French occupation, when popular narratives of Vietnamese history were composed, the most influential ones were written by Tran Trong Kim, whom postcolonial writers condemned as "feudal," "colonial," "petit bourgeois," "reactionary," "antinational," and "ahistorical," and Pham Quynh, for whom they reserved still greater contempt.
In sum, one can justifiably state that during the French colonial period, histories of Vietnam were issued from three principal arenas: the Nguyen court, the occupation forces, and Vietnamese who basically accepted the colonial mission. The published works of the latter group were often in French. After Vietnam's declaration of independence in 1945 and, more spectacularly, after 1954, historians in the DRV continued on the Viet-centric (as opposed to Sino-centric) path promoted by their "reactionary" predecessors. Similarly, they also sought to disseminate a basic understanding of the national past among "the people." To construct new interpretations, postcolonial writers relied on new kinds of evidence, used familiar data in unfamiliar ways, and approached the past according to new paradigms, even though traditional motifs often reemerged. Refining the techniques of their colonial predecessors, they also saturated public life with depictions of canonical figures and fragments of official narratives. Because the attempt to "build" or "construct" history (xay dung lich su) constituted a key component of postcolonial recovery, this chapter examines how historians in the DRV gave voice to new visions of the past.
HISTORY AND THE PEOPLE, HISTORY AND THE STATE
In December 1953, with the Viet Minh victory over France nearly assured, the Communist Party's Central Committee issued a decree that formally established the Research Committee. Within this committee were three separate groups, one for each of the disciplinary divisions: history, geography, and literature. To historians appointed to the Research Committee-most of whom were still in the combat zone of Viet Bac-fell the task of composing a new general history of Vietnam. In June 1954, having returned to Hanoi, they began to publish the first issues of the Journal of Literary Historical and Geographical Research. In this journal, which appeared every month or so (until 1959), postcolonial scholars advanced tentative and experimental versions of "new history" (lich su moi). When the Research Committee was reorganized as the Institute of History (Vien Su hoc) in 1959, official historians debated evidence, methods, and models in a new forum, the Journal of Historical Research. Many of the scholars at the Institute of History had been affiliated with the original Research Committee, and they continued to work on its assignment: to compose a new, general history of Vietnam.
It should be noted here that committee and institute historians did not monopolize historical discourse. Historians in the Department of History at the University of Hanoi, the textbook division of the Ministry of Education, the Committee for Party History, the Museum of History, the Museum of the Revolution, the Ministry of Culture, and so forth all published extensively on a wide range of topics. And yet, even though a great number of scholars devoted themselves to the task of constructing history in the aftermath of colonial rule, because of their direct (or occasionally indirect) link to the party, the work of committee and institute historians was more clearly accorded canonical status. For this reason, they also played an essential role in establishing a new collective memory of the past; more critically, their research provided the foundation for new rituals of state.
At any given moment, the mechanisms of state involvement in historiographical projects were more or less opaque, and they also varied over time. Nevertheless, certain dynamics are clear. When the Central Committee founded the Research Committee in 1953, official historians were supposed to answer directly to the party. Committee historians acknowledged this hierarchy in a number of ways. Tran Huy Lieu, the leading figure in the postcolonial historiographical project, summarized the relationship this way: "The Research Committee, belonging to the Central Committee, has the good fortune to be guided, criticized, and assisted in essential ways by the Central Committee." Expressing a positive view of this arrangement, he used the form of the passive voice (duoc) that suggests good fortune (as opposed to bi, which hints at misfortune). Historians also addressed their self-criticisms to the Central Committee. In a curious aside that alludes to a more open conception of historical work, Tran Huy Lieu also mentioned that the Research Committee consisted of historians who were members of the Labor Party and of nonparty members as well. At the same time, however, that he tried to minimize the party's control over intellectual life, he also noted that the composition of the Research Committee was itself a result of a Central Committee decree. At the end of 1956, when the Research Committee was redefined as a part of the government (the Ministry of Education to be precise), a similar strategy seemed to be in place because the political structure of the DRV was doubled. Next to, and ultimately above, the institutions of government were the institutions of the party (identified in more recent sources as the state). Thus, as the party appeared to loosen its grip over historiographical production in 1956, it actually maintained it, but through a different bureaucratic web. Control over the Research Committee, which was never really removed from the party, officially reverted to it in 1958, just as plans were announced to dissolve the Research Committee and create in its place a number of successor institutes. At this point, the new Institute of History was classified as a component of the State Committee for Science and Technology, which was redefined in the following year as the State Science Committee.
Although the Institute of History has functioned continuously since 1959, the wider institutional context has been revised a number of times: subsequent restructurations resulted in the Institute of Social Sciences in 1965, the Committee for Social Sciences in 1967, and the Academy of Sciences in later years. Whether they were institutionally linked to the government as opposed to the party, most committee and institute historians viewed themselves as faithful executors of the state's will. Year after year, they compiled month-by-month progress reports that they forwarded to the Central Committee, directly or indirectly (through the Ministry of Education), depending on the institutional structure in place at that point. Underscoring their proximity and obligations to the center of state power, committee and institute historians often lauded the "wise leadership" of the government, the party, and Chairman Ho Chi Minh. Other historians, Phan Khoi most notably, claimed greater autonomy for themselves and played more adversarial roles.
Overall, though, the state-centered ethos of the Research Committee was evident in the many connections it had to other state institutions, both domestic and foreign. A survey of its activities in 1955, for example, reveals collaborative projects with the Ministry of the Interior, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Office of Foreign News and Propaganda, the Association of Vietnamese Writers and Artists, and Teachers for Popular Education. In 1959 and 1960, while they prepared to commemorate the 950th anniversary of the founding of the national capital at Hanoi, institute historians worked with the city's Administrative Council and the Ministry of Culture. The journals published by the committee and the institute were peppered with excerpts from official decrees, accounts of national gatherings, and references to annual reports submitted to the government or party. Moreover, the specific projects to which committee and institute historians devoted their attention were not determined by the historians themselves; instead, triennial (in 1958) and quinquennial (beginning in 1961) plans established the research agendas, which were also subject to revision by party and government decree. Committee and institute historians attended study retreats at state-sponsored regional schools (khu hoc xa trung uong). At national congresses, Tran Huy Lieu and other luminaries were advised how to organize their research and urged to stress particular themes. At the congress held in 1955, for example, historians were formally instructed to emphasize "the fighting spirit" of the Vietnamese.
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Excerpted from Postcolonial Vietnam by Patricia M. Pelley Excerpted by permission.
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