Archives par mot-clé : Viêt-Nam

H-Diplo Roundtable XX, 2 on Vietnam’s Communist Revolution: The Power and Limits of Ideology

[ndlr] Une table ronde sur le dernier ouvrage de Tuong Vu, à lire sur le site de H Diplo.

Roundtable Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse

Roundtable and Web Production Editor: George Fujii
Introduction by Peter B. Zinoman

Tuong Vu.  Vietnam’s Communist Revolution:  The Power and Limits of Ideology.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2017.  ISBN:  9781107154025 (hardback, $105.00); 9781316607909 (paperback, $35.99).

URL: http://www.tiny.cc/Roundtable-XX-2

Contents

Introduction by Peter B. Zinoman, University of California, Berkeley

© 2018 The Authors.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.

 

Introduction

by Peter B. Zinoman, University of California, Berkeley

I this forum on Tuong Vu’s Vietnam’s Communist Revolution: The Power and Limits of Ideology, four distinguished historians address critical questions raised in the book about the history of Vietnamese Communism. They include Christopher Goscha (the most important historian of Vietnam writing today in English), Sophie-Quinn Judge (author of the best biographical study of Ho Chi Minh in any language), Stein Tønnesson (a prolific scholar of the ‘international’ history of Vietnam in the 1940s) and Alec Holcombe, (a brilliant young historian of Vietnamese Communism). The four participants sort themselves into two factions, a war-era faction (Quinn-Judge and Tønnesson) who reject Tuong Vu’s central claims, and a post-war faction (Goscha and Holcombe) who endorse them. The division on exhibit here confirms that, despite the passage of over four decades, old disputes over interpretations of the Vietnam War remain unresolved.

While many Western-language studies have explored discrete periods in the history of Vietnamese Communism, Vietnam’s Communist Revolution is the first sweeping examination of the movement from its origins in the 1920s through the post-Vietnam War era. Based on a trove of vernacular-language sources of unparalleled scope and depth, it proposes a novel and interesting periodization of Vietnamese Communism (1917-1930, 1931-1940, 1940-1951, 1953-1960, 1957-1963, 1964-1975, 1976-1979, 1980-1991, 1991-2010) and offers a wide-ranging account of its evolution over time.   The historical insight featured in the book is especially impressive given Tuong Vu’s disciplinary background in political science. Supplementing his arguments about continuity and change, Tuong Vu advances the straightforward thesis that the most influential factor in the history of Vietnamese communism has been its leaders’ unwavering devotion to the political ideas of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong. This thesis makes a modest contribution to the political science scholarship, Tuong Vu notes, by adding “another case to the comparative literature, demonstrating the salience of revolutionary ideology in world politics” (13). In the context of Vietnam War studies, on the other hand, Tuong Vu’s thesis represents a forceful intervention into one of the oldest and most contentious debates in the field.

During the Vietnam conflict, ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’ disagreed about the fundamental political orientation of America’s enemy. For hawks, both the northern Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and the guerilla insurgency that it supported in the southern Republic of Vietnam (RVN) were principally motivated by a version of Communist internationalism. As evidence, hawks pointed to Ho Chi Minh’s long career as a Comintern agent, the integration of the DRV into the Eastern bloc, the violent social revolution (including the land reform and collectivization) that the Party spearheaded in the North, and the Vietnamese movement’s formal veneration of Mao and Stalin.  For hawks, the Communist leadership’s relentless and ultimately successful drive to conquer South Vietnam derived from a quasi-religious desire to liberate countrymen oppressed by capitalism and imperialism.

For doves, on the other hand, the Vietnamese Communist leadership’s core motivation was nationalism. As evidence, they pointed out that the two great causes animating the movement between 1925 and 1975 were freedom from colonial rule and territorial unification. They also found an intense nationalism in the trope of ‘resistance to foreign invasion’ that saturated the historical narratives and political culture promoted by Vietnamese Communism.  For doves, the critical nationalist agenda of the Vietnamese Communists was an important reason why the containment doctrine should never have been applied to the country and why the American intervention was misguided from the start.

Tuong Vu’s argument about the devotion of Vietnamese Communist elites to a radical leftist ideology reprises the hawkish position but he fortifies it significantly by mobilizing a massive new body of corroborating evidence. “In researching his topic,” Holcombe points out, “Tuong Vu took advantage of thousands of Party resolutions, orders, circulars, and general policy statements made public by the Vietnamese government in its 2001 Party Documents series. He appears to have read, cover to cover, every one of this series’ fifty-nine volumes, along with a variety of newspapers, archival materials, memoirs, and secondary scholarship.” Tuong Vu’s exceptionally wide reading impresses even his toughest critics. Tønnesson praises his “thorough research and impressive erudition” while Quinn-Judge, in an otherwise unsympathetic review, acknowledges that the “author has gone farther and deeper into this topic than any previous writer in English.”

While they do not map on to each other with complete precision, the dovish and hawkish positions dovetail with contending schools of historical interpretation of the Vietnam War known as orthodoxy and revisionism. The persistence of these tendencies in the field may be seen in two issues raised in the Forum about which reviewers express conflicting views. The first is the so-called ‘lost opportunity thesis’ which argues that an irrationally anti-Communist United States rejected friendly overtures from Ho Chi Minh during the 1940s and 50s thus driving the Vietnamese Communists into the arms of Beijing and Moscow. Citing copious textual evidence, Tuong Vu rejects this thesis, arguing that the zealous ideological partisanship of the Vietnamese leadership at the time made an alliance with America unlikely in the extreme. Goscha and Holcombe support Tuong’s Vu’s rejection of the ‘lost opportunity thesis,’ with Goscha noting that a similar argument about a lost American opportunity in communist China has been called convincingly into question by scholars such as Chen Jian.[1] Quinn-Judge and Tønnesson, on the other hand, continue to endorse ‘the lost opportunity thesis,’ with Quinn-Judge arguing that it was American intransience that radicalized the DRV.

A second issue over which reviewers disagree is Tuong Vu’s argument about internal factionalism within the Communist leadership. For Tuong Vu, factionalism in the Party has been overrated, as has a theory that the leadership was split between a moderate nationalist wing headed by Ho Chi Minh and a radical, internationalist wing led by Le Duan. Calling into question the characterization of Ho Chi Minh as a moderate nationalist, Tuong Vu suggests that what is most striking about the Vietnamese Communists was their shared commitment to the same overarching ideological project.   With some minor caveats, Holcombe endorses this interpretation adding that doves inflate the significance of factionalism within the Vietnamese Communist leadership for two instrumental reasons: it evokes the presence of moderate Communist elites who deserved American support and it heightens a contrast between a flexible, moderate Ho Chi Minh and a rigid extremist United States. Quinn-Judge and Tønnesson remain unconvinced by this revisionist argument.  The former argues that Ho Chi Minh was a moderate pragmatist with a strong nationalist streak. The latter attempts to resuscitate the fifty-year old interpretive scheme advanced by Huynh Kim Khanh which highlighted a conflict between ‘national patriots’ (led by Ho Chi Minh) and ‘proletarian internationalists’ (ultimately the Le Duan and Le Duc Tho faction).[2]

Contributors to the Forum raise additional questions and concerns. In response to Tuong Vu’s analysis of ‘factional divides within the party’ during the latter stages of the War, Goscha requests more historiography through additional engagement with the work of scholars who hold differing views. Holcombe attributes greater significance to Ho Chi Minh’s struggles with rivals in the 1930s and he disputes Tuong Vu’s optimistic speculation that the War was ‘winnable’ for the RVN. He also questions Tuong Vu’s conclusions about the ‘rationality’ of Hanoi’s post-war foreign policy. Quinn-Judge and Tønnesson question the book more aggressively. Quinn-Judge challenges its mono-causal explanatory framework and its static portrayal of Communist ideology. She restates her essentially sympathetic interpretation of Ho Chi Minh as a moderate, pragmatic nationalist, an argument of Tønnesson’s as well. Tønnesson rejects Tuong Vu’s overly rigid view of Communist ideology which, he claims, changed over time and included space for the expression of diverse positions.  He also argues that patriotism, not Communism, “carried the greatest normative weight for Vietnam’s Communist leaders.”

The critiques of Quinn-Judge and Tønnesson affirm the durability of divisions that date back fifty years. But they also introduce little new concrete evidence to back up their claims. This contrasts with the massive excavation of primary source material carried by Tuong Vu. Owing to his prodigious labors, the weight of the empirical record tips significantly in favor of his revisionist thesis.

Lê Xuân Phán : L’enseignement au Vietnam pendant la période coloniale, 1862-1945 : la formation des intellectuels vietnamiens

[ndlr] Avis de la soutenance de thèse de Lê Xuân Phán.

Le 31 août 2018 à 14h, M. Lê Xuân Phán soutiendra sa thèse de doctorat intitulée : “L’enseignement du Vietnam pendant la période coloniale, 1862-1945, la formation des intellectuels vietnamiens”. Cette thèse a été préparée sous la direction de Christine Cornet, professeur à Sciences Po Lyon. La soutenance aura lieu à l’amphithéâtre Benveniste, campus Berges du Rhône.

Membres du Jury :
Christine Cornet, Professeur des Universités, Sciences Po Lyon
Guy Faure, Directeur de recherche émérite, CNRS
François Guillemot, Ingénieur de recherche, CNRS
Phuong Ngoc Jade Nguyen, Maître de conférence HDR, Université d’Aix-Marseille

L’enseignement au Vietnam pendant la période coloniale, 1862-1945 : la formation des intellectuels vietnamiens

Résumé :

Le principal objet de ce travail est l’enseignement au Vietnam pendant la période coloniale française dans la formation des intellectuels vietnamiens. En effet, dans le bouleversement historique de la période coloniale (1862-1945), la société vietnamienne a connu des transformations radicales. L’enseignement au Vietnam a connu des changements sans précédent. En Cochinchine, après qu’elle soit devenue colonie française (1862-1864), les concours des lettrés ont été supprimés. Au Tonkin et en Annam, après les réformes de 1906 à 1917, le système de l’enseignement traditionnel a été supprimé en 1919. Au début, l’enseignement en langue française a comme but de former des interprètes. Mais seule une partie de la population vietnamienne accepte d’envoyer ses enfants dans les écoles françaises. Après les mouvements vers l’instruction occidentale dirigée par des lettrés dans la première décennie du XXe siècle, la population a changé d’attitude par rapport à l’école française. Avec l’application du Règlement Général de l’Instruction Publique de 1917, le système d’enseignement en français est devenu le seul système de l’enseignement officiel.

Pendant la période 1862-1945, on constate la disparition progressive de la classe des lettrés et l’émergence des nouveaux intellectuels modernes. La majorité des intellectuels de cette période est issue de l’école française en Indochine. Même si le nombre d’écoles est faible, on constate que la qualité est bonne. Les écoles en français au Vietnam 1862-1945, notamment, les écoles post primaires et supérieures, sont des établissements importants pour répandre les connaissances, la culture et les sciences. Les collèges et les lycées franco indigènes sont les lieux d’étude de la majorité des intellectuels vietnamiens formés avant 1945. L’École de Médecine et de Pharmacie, l’École supérieure des Sciences ont formé des chercheurs vietnamiens célèbres. Il y a des professeurs vietnamiens remarquables qui sont issus de l’École supérieure de Pédagogie de l’Indochine. L’École supérieure de Droit d’Hanoi a formé des élites intellectuelles. L’École des Beaux-arts de l’Indochine est à l’origine de la première génération des artistes modernes vietnamiens.

Mots clés : Vietnam, Indochine, enseignement, école, université, intellectuel.

 

Khai Nguyen : A democratic revolution has just begun in Vietnam [Asia Times]

[ndlr] Analyse de la situation vietnamienne par le journaliste Khai Nguyen. Pas d’indication de sources pour les données chiffrées.

Massive but orderly protests across the country hint at the beginning of the end of Communist Party rule

On June 7, a group of about 300 ordinary Vietnamese in Phan Ri Cua City of Binh Thuan province formed the first rally against a draft law on special economic zones (SEZ). They had trouble before with an ongoing Chinese thermal power plant investment project in their own province and were opposed to more such Chinese investments.

Two days later, tens of thousands of workers at Pouyuen footwear company in Tan Tao Industrial Park, Ho Chi Minh City, went on strike against the SEZ draft law.

The following day, on June 10, many demonstrations sprung up in other cities throughout the country, including the capital of Hanoi, Nghe An, Da Nang, Khanh Hoa, Dac Lac, Binh Duong, Dong Nai, My Tho, Vinh Long, Kien Giang, and Ho Chi Minh City.

[…]

The government now spends about 82.1% of the national budget to pay salaries to government officials, military, police, 205 public security generals and five million Party members. The remaining 17.9% is earmarked for development investments.

Lire la suite : Asia Times, 08/07/2018.

Illustration “à la une” : Vietnamese protesters shout slogans against a proposal to grant companies lengthy land leases during a demonstration in Ho Chi Minh City on June 10, 2018  © AFP/Kao Nguyen

Cybersécurité au Vietnam: les militants se ruent sur l’internet jugé sûr

[ndlr] Stratégie de contournement pour les internautes vietnamiens. Un article de l’AFP, à lire.

Des dizaines de milliers d’utilisateurs de réseaux sociaux du Vietnam se sont inscrits sur une plateforme dédiée à la “liberté d’expression” après l’adoption d’une loi sur la cybersécurité qui verrouille internet, ont déclaré le site et des militants à l’AFP.

Le texte draconien qui entrera en vigueur en janvier prochain, oblige les plateformes du web à retirer sous 24 heures tous les commentaires considérés comme une menace à la “sécurité nationale”.

Elles seront également dans l’obligation de stocker les informations personnelles et les données des utilisateurs.

La loi fait scandale parmi les militants et autres bloggers. Le Vietnam n’a pas de médias indépendants et ils considèrent le géant Facebook comme une bouée de secours. Le premier réseau social mondial compte 53 millions d’utilisateurs au Vietnam pour une population de 93 millions d’habitants.

Beaucoup se tournent à présent vers Minds, une plateforme open-source américaine qui se présente comme un site sûr et fait la promotion de la liberté d’expression, craignant que Facebook ne se conforme aux nouvelles règles.

Lire la suite : TV5 Monde, 05/07/2018.

François Guillemot : Le “Renouveau” vietnamien, bilan provisoire [Fils Rouges Vietnam]

[ndlr] Résumé de notre intervention à la conférence Fils Rouges Vietnam du samedi 30 juin 2018.

Dans cette présentation succincte de trente minutes, l’auteur balaie 30 ans de la politique vietnamienne du “Renouveau” (Đổi Mới) en partant de la chute de Saigon. L’objectif de cette introduction générale est d’offrir aux étudiants une grille de compréhension et un cadre de réflexion sur cette politique vietnamienne à travers ses forces et ses faiblesses, ses réussites et ses défis en cours et à venir. Décrétée lors du VIe congrès du Parti communiste vietnamien en décembre 1986, le Đổi Mới, véritable “révolution dans la révolution”, a façonné le Viêt-Nam actuel autant par son ouverture que ses limites. L’intervention sera suivie d’un débat avec le public.

Pour approfondir :

  • Brocheux, Pierre, Histoire du Viêt Nam contemporain . La nation résiliente (Fayard, 2011)
  • Catherine Earl, Vietnam’s New Middle Classes, Gender, Career, City (NIAS Press, 2014).
  • Christopher Goscha, The Penguin book of Modern Vietnam (Penguin, 2016).
  • François Guillemot, Viêt-Nam, fractures d’une nation. Une histoire contemporaine de 1958 à nos jours (La Découverte, 2018).
  • Pamela D. McElwee, Forests are Gold. Trees, People, and Environmental Rule in Vietnam (University of Washington Press, 2016).
  • Minh T. N. Nguyen, Vietnam’s Socialist Servants. Domesticity, Class, Gender, and Identity (Routledge, 2015).
  • Keith W. Taylor, A History of the Vietnamese (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
  • Benoît de Tréglodé (dir.) Histoire du Viêt-Nam de la colonisation à nos jours (Editions de la Sorbonne, 2018).
  • Benoît de Treglodé & Stéphane Dovert (dir.), Viêt Nam contemporain (Les Indes savantes / Irasec, 2009, nouvelle édition).
  • Documents IRASEC en ligne (Hien Do & Pham Quang Minh, Leroy Nguyen, Vigne…)
  • Articles « Viêt-Nam », de Gédéon/Guillemot dans L’Asie du Sud-Est (Irasec, 2011-2016).

Lectures en complément :

Nicholas Chapman, The Beginning of a Political Doi Moi? Takeaways From the VCP’s Seventh Plenum, The Diplomat, 15/05/2018. The Vietnam Communist Party steps up efforts to reform its inner workings.

Nguyên Quynh – Hoàng Phuong/CVN, L’intégration mondiale, clé du succès économique, Le Courrier du Vietnam, 24/06/2018. C’est l’intégration internationale qui a permis au Vietnam d’obtenir des résultats encourageants, surtout dans le secteur économique. Mais si celle-ci peut créer des opportunités, elle est également source de défis. Recommandations d’économistes et de dirigeants.

VNA/CVN, IDE au Vietnam: 30 ans d’attraction, Le Courrier du Vietnam, 05/07/2018. La conférence bilan des 30 ans d’attraction des investissements directs étrangers (IDE) au Vietnam aura lieu le 4 octobre prochain.

World Bank, Country Partnership Framework for the Socialist Republic of Vietnam for the period FY18-FY22, 4 May 2017.

Illustration “à la une” : détail d’une affiche de propagande © FG / Virtual Saigon

MàJ : 10/07/2018

Kirsten W. Endres, Ann Marie Leshkowich (eds.) : Traders in Motion. Identities and Contestations in the Vietnamese Marketplace

[ndlr] Parution. Présentation de l’éditeur.

Traders in Motion

Identities and Contestations in the Vietnamese Marketplace
Edited by Kirsten W. Endres, Ann Marie Leshkowich

With essays covering diverse topics, from seafood trade across the Vietnam-China border, to street traders in Hanoi, to gold shops in Ho Chi Minh City, Traders in Motion spans the fields of economic and political anthropology, geography, and sociology to illuminate how Vietnam’s rapidly expanding market economy is formed and transformed by everyday interactions among traders, suppliers, customers, family members, neighbors, and officials.

The contributions shed light on the micropolitics of local-level economic agency in the paradoxical context of Vietnam’s socialist orientation and its contemporary neoliberal economic and social transformation. The essays examine how Vietnamese traders and officials engage in on-the-ground contestations to define space, promote or limit mobility, and establish borders, both physical and conceptual. The contributors show how trading experiences shape individuals’ notions of self and personhood, not just as economic actors, but also in terms of gender, region, and ethnicity. Traders in Motion affords rich comparative insight into how markets form and transform and what those changes mean.

Ref. : Endres, Kirsten W., and Ann Marie Leshkowich, eds. Traders in Motion: Identities and Contestations in the Vietnamese Marketplace. Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University Press, 2018.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Space, Mobility, Borders, and Trading Frictions
ANN MARIE LESHKOWICH AND KIRSTEN W. ENDRES

PART I. Space, Place, and Contentious Politics of Market Redevelopment
Introduction: The Spatial Politics of Marketplaces
LINDA J. SELIGMANN

Chapter 1
Making the Marketplace: Traders, Cadres, and Bureaucratic Documents in Lào Cai City
KIRSTEN W. ENDRES

Chapter 2
“Run and Hide When You See the Police”: Livelihood Diversification and the Politics of the Street Economy in Vietnam’s Northern Uplands
SARAH TURNER

Chapter 3
Grand Designs? State Agendas and the Lived Realities of Market Redevelopment in Upland Northern Vietnam
CHRISTINE BONNIN

Chapter 4
Ghost Markets and Moving Bazaars in Hanoi’s Urban Space
GERTRUD HÜWELMEIER

PART II. Circuits of Mobility, Identities, and Power Relations
Introduction: Moving and Shaking
ERIK HARMS

Chapter 5
A Mobile Trading Network from Central Coastal Vietnam: Growth, Social Network, and Gender
HY VAN LUONG

Chapter 6
Money, Risk Taking, and Playing: Shifting Masculinity in a Waste-Trading Community in the Red River Delta
MINH T. N. NGUYEN

Chapter 7
“Strive to Make a Living” in the Era of Urbanization and Modernization: The Story of Petty Traders in a Hanoi Peri-urban Community
NGUYỄN THỊ THANH BÌNH

Chapter 8
Dealing with Uncertainty: Itinerant Street Vendors and Local Officials in Hanoi
LISA BARTHELMES

PART III. Borderwork
Introduction: Constructing, Maintaining, and Navigating Boundaries
CHRIS GREGORY

Chapter 9
Regulations and Raids, or the Precarious Place of Gold Shops in Vietnam
ALLISON TRUITT

Chapter 10
Moralities of Commerce in a Northern Vietnamese Trading Community
ESTHER HORAT

Chapter 11
Fuel Trade: People, Places, and Transformations along the Coal Briquetting Chain
ANNUSKA DERKS

Chapter 12
Arbitrage over the Beilun/Kalong River: Chinese Adjustments to Border Trade Practices in Vietnam
CAROLINE GRILLOT

Afterword
GRACIA CLARK

Contributors:
Lisa Barthelmes, Christine Bonnin, Gracia Clark, Annuska Derks, Kirsten W. Endres, Chris Gregory, Caroline Grillot, Erik Harms, Esther Horat, Gertrud Hüwelmeier, Ann Marie Leshkowich, Hy Van Luong, Minh T. N. Nguyen, Nguyen Thi Thanh Binh, Linda J. Seligmann, Allison Truitt, Sarah Turner.

Source : Cornell University Press

Projection rencontre : Finding Phong [19 juin 2018]

[ndlr] Projection d’un film de la réalisatrice Tran Phuong Thao.

Projection le mardi 19 juin à 20h00 au Luxy à Ivry-sur-Seine

La projection sera suivie d’une rencontre avec Loan Rocher (massothérapeute, psychothérapeute, transgenre), Tran Hai Hac (responsable du ciné-club vietnamien Yda), Nguyen Dac Minh (responsable de la section Sông Viet de l’UGVF), Nam Trân, responsable du MCFV, Nicole Trampoglieri (Présidente du Comité Choisy 94 de l’AAFV).

Finding Phong

De Phuong Thao Tran et Swann Dubus Mallet – Vietnam – 2018 – 1h32 – vo

Phong a grandi dans une petite ville perdue au centre du Vietnam. Depuis son plus jeune âge, elle s’est toujours considérée, souvent avec souffrance, comme une fille prise au piège d’un corps de garçon. Portrait touchant et plein d’humanité, Finding Phong est le récit délicat, sans fard ni fausse pudeur, d’une métamorphose, d’un changement de vie.

 

Lire aussi :

Jacques Mandelbaum, « Finding Phong » : face aux troubles du changement de sexe, Le Monde, 14/02/2018.