Vietnam and China: Acculturation's Apparitions And Certain Realities Behind Them"The Vietnamese people have a lengthy history that dates back at least two millennia. The ancestors of modern Vietnamese people lived in the Red River delta of northern Vietnam and were subsequently conquered by the Chinese, becoming part of the early Chinese empire. By the first century CE, Vietnam succeeded in becoming a suzerainty of the Chinese empire and it remained in this capacity for the next 900 years. During these ten centuries, the Vietnamese people were heavily influenced by several aspects of Chinese culture and society, including its political theories, academic standards, administrative practices for government operation and religious orientations. As a result, Vietnam became sinicized long before other regions in Southeast Asia that are now a part of China.
It is important to note, though, that this dependency on China also served to create a sense of national identity in the Vietnamese people. For instance, the author notes that, "Chinese rule gave the Vietnamese people -- through the imposition of Chinese social, bureaucratic, and familial forms -- a cohesion that guaranteed their permanence, on the eastern edge of a subcontinent where impermanent states were the rule rather than the exception" (p. 7). Moreover, this cohesion also served the Vietnamese people well by helping them resist future Chinese invasions and to become a regional hegemon in their own right.
Nevertheless, many Vietnamese historians maintain that China's broad-based influence on Vietnam for a millennia shaped its culture and society in ways that made the two countries virtually indistinguishable from each other across a wide spectrum of features. Indeed, one Vietnamese historian argues that, "When Vietnamese independence from China was indisputably established after centuries of Chinese rule, it was merely an instance of a fruit ripening and dropping from its mother tree in order to begin a related but geographically separate life" (p. 8). The author makes the point that the degree to which Vietnam was acculturated to China during any given period in its history remains a timely and relevant issue today: "The question is important to Vietnamese history because Vietnamese emperors and bureaucrats privately hardly ever ceased asking it" (p. 8).
The point is also made that despite the uniqueness of the Vietnamese experience vis a vis China, it shared a common feature with other Southeastern Asian countries in being the importer of foreign influences rather than an exporter to China. In addition, Chinese influence throughout Southeast Asia was a powerful force on all of these countries due in large part to expansionist goals of sea-going communities in southern China. The Chinese influence on Vietnam even extended to include their belief in meritocracy and the importance of education. While Vietnamese leaders during the 19th century enjoyed a near god-like status, they were also regarded as more accessible to the common people than their Chinese counterparts. Notwithstanding this difference, though, Vietnam's leadership remained heavily influenced by Chinese culture even while they were developing their own uniqueness as a people. In this regard, the author points out that during the 18th and 19th centuries, "The Vietnamese elite's sense of Chinese history was strong. Its faith in Chinese allusions, classical and historical, momentous and trivial, was romantic and unlimited" (p. 13).
Beginning in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, though, Vietnam also experienced significant influence from Western nations such as Portugal and France as a result of their efforts to forge relations with other Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand, but the Vietnamese leadership carefully balanced the need for Western technologies and political philosophies with Vietnam's own history and traditions. By the 19th century, the Vietnamese language began to reflect the growing disillusionment with Chinese culture and influence to the point where Vietnam's leaders could not be compared in a wholesale fashion to the Chinese leaders. The Vietnamese language also began to reflect these fundamental differences in their society from China's: "Then as now the Vietnamese language responded to China's proximity and importance in Vietnamese life by developing a variety of terms for different areas of contact with China" (p. 19).
Likewise, Vietnamese historians helped to forge a sense of nationalism separate and distinct from China based on isolated military victories. In this regard, the author reports that, "Nationalism or proto-nationalism did not stimulate Vietnamese historians so much as a gravely treasured sense of cultural discrepancies between China and Vietnam" (p. 21). Other cultural divergences also contributed to this sense of distinction from the Chinese, but these were met with some degree of concern by Vietnamese authorities...
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