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2 Why Vietnam loves and hates
China By Andrew Forbes
For more than 2,000 years, Vietnam's
development as a nation has been marked by one
fixed and immutable factor - the proximity of
China. The relationship between the two countries
is in many ways a family affair, with all the
closeness of shared values and bitterness of close
rivalries.
No country in Southeast Asia is
culturally closer to China than Vietnam, and no
other country in the region has spent so long
fending
off Chinese domination, often at a terrible cost
in lives, economic development and political
compromise.
China has been Vietnam's
blessing and Vietnam's curse. It remains an
intrusive cultural godfather, the giant to the
north that is "always there". Almost a thousand
years of Chinese occupation, between the Han
conquest of Nam Viet in the 2nd century BC and the
reassertion of Vietnamese independence as Dai Viet
in AD 967, marked the Vietnamese so deeply that
they became, in effect, an outpost of Chinese
civilization in Southeast Asia.
While the
other countries of Indochina are Theravada
Buddhist, sharing cultural links with South Asia,
Vietnam derived its predominant religion - a mix
of Mahayana Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism
popularly known as tam giao or "Three
Religions"- from China. Until the introduction of
romanized quoc ngu script in the 17th
century, Vietnamese scholars wrote in Chinese
characters or in chu nho, a Vietnamese
derivative of Chinese characters.
Over the
centuries, Vietnam developed as a smaller version
of the Middle Kingdom, a centralized, hierarchical
state ruled by an all-powerful emperor living in a
Forbidden City based on its namesake in Beijing
and administered by a highly educated Confucian
bureaucracy.
Both countries are deeply
conscious of the cultural ties that bind them
together, and each is still deeply suspicious of
the other. During the long centuries of Chinese
occupation, the Vietnamese enthusiastically
embraced many aspects of Chinese civilization,
while at the same time fighting with an
extraordinary vigor to maintain their cultural
identity and regain their national independence.
During the Tang Dynasty (6th-9th centuries
AD), Vietnamese guerrillas fighting the Chinese
sang a martial song that emphasized their separate
identity in the clearest of terms:
Fight to keep our hair long, Fight
to keep our teeth black, Fight to show that
the heroic southern country can never be
defeated.
For their part, the Chinese
recognized the Vietnamese as a kindred people, to
be offered the benefits of higher Chinese
civilization and, ultimately, the rare privilege
of being absorbed into the Chinese polity.
On the other hand, as near family, they
were to be punished especially severely if they
rejected Chinese standards or rebelled against
Chinese control. This was made very clear in a
remarkable message sent by the Song Emperor
Taizong to King Le Hoan in AD 979, just over a
decade after Vietnam first reasserted its
independence.
Like a stern headmaster,
Taizong appealed to Le Hoan to see reason and
return to the Chinese fold: "Although your seas
have pearls, we will throw them into the rivers,
and though your mountains produce gold, we will
throw it into the dust. We do not covet your
valuables. You fly and leap like savages, we have
horse-drawn carriages. You drink through your
noses, we have rice and wine. Let us change your
customs. You cut your hair, we wear hats; when you
talk, you sound like birds. We have examinations
and books. Let us teach you the knowledge of the
proper laws ... Do you not want to escape from the
savagery of the outer islands and gaze upon the
house of civilization? Do you want to discard your
garments of leaves and grass and wear flowered
robes embroidered with mountains and dragons? Have
you understood?"
In fact Le Hoan
understood Taizong very well and, like his modern
successors, knew exactly what he wanted from China
- access to its culture and civilization without
coming under its political control or jeopardizing
Vietnamese freedom in any way. This attitude
infuriated Taizong, as it would generations of
Chinese to come.
In 1407, the Ming Empire
managed to reassert Chinese control over its
stubbornly independent southern neighbor, and
Emperor Yongle - no doubt, to his mind, in the
best interests of the Vietnamese - imposed a
policy of enforced Sinicization. Predictably
enough, Vietnam rejected this "kindness" and
fought back, expelling the Chinese yet again in
1428.
Yongle was apoplectic when he
learned of their rebellion. Vietnam was not just
another tributary state, he insisted, but a former
province that had once enjoyed the benefits of
Chinese civilization
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