Let's Talk About the Chinese Period in Vietnamese History

is the concept useful to our understanding of premodern Vietnamese history?

Several concepts in premodern Vietnamese historiography hinder our understanding of the broader, more meaningful picture. A good example is the popular periodization created by modern scholars, referred to as the “Chinese period,” spanning from 111 B.C. and 939 A.D. More important, it’s often a shortcut to say: “Vietnam was under one thousand years of Chinese domination.”

As I wrote earlier this week, part of the modernity’s project is to seek total equality. The concept of the Chinese period and its associated moral valuations say that the Vietnamese have always sought self-determination, asserting their independence at every opportunity, much like they did against the French and Americans in the twentieth century. But this raises a question: Is suffering domination a prerequisite for freedom? As I wrote about Nietzsche linking modernity to Christianity, are we moderns, including the Vietnamese, all just non-religious Christians who must suffer in order to be saved?

But what sort of domination, repression, or exploitation existed during this period? No one has speculated on what happened, let alone conducted more serious studies. For instance, did the Han Chinese force the Vietnamese to write Han characters or force them to resettle from their ancestral lands, or inflict racial violence like how U.S. government did to the Native Americans as recounted by modern historians in the works like American Settler Colonialism: A History (2013). The book concludes with the following judgment:

settler colonialism was a zero-sum game. Settlers—operating from the bottom up but backed by all levels of government—would accept nothing less than removal of Indians and complete control of the land. As they carried out Indian removal across the breadth of the continent, Americans internalized a propensity for waging indiscriminate violence against their savage foes. Born of settler colonialism, this boomerang of violence would play out over the sweep of US history and help define an “American way of war” in the process.

These statements convey the magnitude of systematic efforts—federal military and policies and judicial decisions—to eliminate the Indians over a hundred-year period. When we talk about the Chinese period, which is ten times longer and has much less information available, to say nothing of the classical texts that few people how to read anymore, how can anyone be so confident to know what happened?

Another problem with the periodization is that during this time modern Vietnam was part of a state called Nanyue (南越), which included modern-day China's Guangxi and Guangdong provinces, as well as the islands of Hong Kong and Hainan. So, this historical state of Nanyue does not correspond to modern northern Vietnam. If we talk about Chinese domination of Vietnam during this period, what should we say about today's Chinese provinces? Since these provinces were also under the control of the Han dynasty, would we characterize that period as "Chinese domination" for them as well?

Historian Liam Kelley has argued this concept is a distraction stating:

If we take history to be the study of past human societies, then how does designating a period of one thousand years and calling it “the Chinese period” help us understand past societies?

Kelley revealed that this concept emerged from French colonial project in Vietnam and was deployed as a moral and political justification for their conquest of the country. He writes:

In the twentieth century, colonial-era French scholars like Henri Maspero saw the thousand-year period of Chinese rule as one that had been of critical importance as “the Chinese” had introduced “the Vietnamese” to a higher level of civilization.

I believe this process of colonialism, often underanalyzed and overlooked, involved the imposition and later embracing of ideas derived from modern biology and taxonomy. In addition to military weapons like cannons and gunboats, the French deployed the arsenal of modernity—racial and hierarchy distinctions and ethnic origins—to explain to themselves the people they would call Annamese. By viewing these people as racially distinct, the French could justify displacing Chinese influence and claim suzerainty over Đại Việt, the premodern state of Vietnam. The arsenal of raciality did not just create new categories between Europeans and the other of Europe but also ethnic distinctions between Chinese and Vietnamese.

I take the idea of the Chinese period as a discursive strategy rather than a statement of truth or a rational historical account. As I wrote earlier about the mass politics of modernity, the concept of a united people sharing the same history, culture, and language is necessary for any modern republic, including Vietnam. When the concept of Chinese domination is deployed, the modern distinction of ethnicity between Vietnamese and Chinese is reproduced. Without this distinction, from the perspective of modern (European) way of life, it is a morally indefensible position because we need to have “Vietnamese living in Vietnam.” The concept of Chinese period is very important: without it Vietnam would cease to be Vietnam. The same concept cannot work in modern China because the people living in today’s Guangxi and Guangdong identify themselves as Chinese: thus, in the sense of modern, Westphalian international relations as well as political philosophy, how can the Chinese be dominated by the Chinese?

This concept is not unlike one of America's founding myths, rugged individualism, which allows the descendants of Americans to believe that they earned the land west of the Mississippi River themselves and that there was no federal government intervention. More, it suggests that the ancestors of contemporary European Americans were self-determined and not affected by those we now call Amerindians. Again, a key ingredient in any modernity project is having the spirit or psychology of self-determination. This self-determination implies that one cannot be affected by those of a different race or culture.

What would an alternative perspective of the “Chinese period” look like? When I read modern European histories, for example, British history during the time of the Roman era, I think scholars and people of today’s Britain in general view Roman rule as having shaped British culture and institutions in many worthwhile ways, including technology and the arts. It is not too controversial to say that contemporary British people are even proud of the Roman period and that their Western heritage is Western because it derived from classical Roman culture. For example, in A History of Roman Britain (1997), British historian Peter Salway wrote:

It is also the age for the greater part of which Britain was absorbed into an empire based on the Mediterranean, subject to the direct impact of classical culture, and closely involved with the fortunes of Europe at one of the most formative periods of its history.

If we were to replace Britain with Vietnam and the Mediterranean with Continental, how might that give us a fresh perspective on the premodern history of Vietnam? The concept of the Chinese period tells us more about modern anxieties about the self rather than what actually happened in the past.

NTD 17/9/2024