Copyright © 2016 by Christopher Goscha

Published in the United States by Basic Books™, an imprint of Perseus Books, a division of PBG
Publishing, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced
in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied
in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 250 W. 57th St, 15th floor,
New York, NY 10107.

Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United
States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the
Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200,
Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail
special.markets@perseusbooks.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Goscha, Christopher E., author.
Title: Vietnam: a new history / Christopher Goscha.
Description: New York: Basic Books, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016017630 (print) | LCCN 2016018484 (ebook) | ISBN 9780465094370 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Vietnam—History. | Vietnam—Colonization.
Classification: LCC DS556.5 . G66 2016 (print) | LCC DS556.5 (ebook) | DDC 959.7—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016017630

Editorial production by Christine Marra, Marrathon Production Services. www.marrathon.net

BOOK DESIGN BY JANE RAESE

Set in 12-point Bulmer

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FOR GEETA & NAYAN CHANDA
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
A Note on Terms
List of Abbreviations
Maps
Introduction: The Many Different Vietnams
1. Northern Configurations
2. A Divided House and a French Imperial Meridian?
3. Altered States
4. Rethinking Vietnam
5. The Failure of Colonial Republicanism
6. Colonial Society and Economy
7. Contesting Empires and Nation-states
8. States of War
9. Internationalized States of War
10. A Tale of Two Republics
11. Toward One Vietnam
12. Cultural Change in the Long Twentieth Century
13. The Tragedy and the Rise of Modern Vietnam
14. Vietnam from Beyond the Red River
Conclusion: Authoritarianism, Republicanism, and Political Change
Notes
List of Illustrations
Index
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Over the last fifty years, a wide range of scholars has produced an exciting
body of scholarship on Vietnam. Without access to it, I would have never
been able to write this book. In many ways, I’m standing on their shoulders
and I hope that I have done them justice in the pages that follow. It is
impossible to cite each of them here; the list would go on for pages. While
they may not always agree with everything I advance, I wish to thank them
and those who kindly took the time out of their busy schedules to read and
comment on draft chapters, provide references, or make suggestions for
improving the book. In no particular order, they are: Agathe Larcher, Nola
Cooke, Liam Kelley, Li Tana, Philip Taylor, Kathlene Baldanza, George
Dutton, Jon Heit, Mark Lawrence, Keith Taylor, Christopher and Susan
Bayly, Shawn McHale, Geoff Wade, Phi Van Nguyen, François Guillemot,
Sophie Quinn-Judge, Nguyen Quoc Thanh, Tuong Vu, Nasir-Carime
Abdoul, Philippe Papin, David Marr, Charles Keith, Peter Zinoman, Olga
Dror, Emmanuel Poisson, and William Turley.
 A NOTE ON TERMS

Words matter. Most problematic of all in this book is the word ‘Vietnam’
itself. While tribes referring to themselves as ‘Viet’ emerged in around the
third century BCE from present-day southern China to the Red River valley,
at no time before 1802 did these people ever call their kingdoms, dynasties,
or states ‘Vietnam’. Upon creating a unitary state running from the Red
River basin to the Mekong delta in 1802, Emperor Gia Long had first
wanted to call his new country ‘Nam-Viet’ or the ‘Viet of the South’.
Worried that the use of this term implied expansionist designs on China’s
southern territories, the Chinese emperor reversed the word order to form
the term ‘Viet-Nam’ (which I render in English simply as ‘Vietnam’). In
1804, Gia Long accepted this Chinese-devised coupling as recognizing the
independent state he had just created running from north to south. The
Chinese continued to refer to it by their old appellation dating from Tang
times, ‘An-Nam’, meaning the ‘Settled Land of the South’. The term
Vietnam did not last long under the Nguyen, however. In 1813, the court
briefly revived the term Dai Viet (Greater Viet) and, in 1838, Gia Long’s
son, Minh Mang, who ruled after him, changed the kingdom’s name to Dai
Nam (the Greater South). Subsequent Nguyen rulers used this term until
mid-1945. ‘An artificial appellation then’, Alexander Woodside writes of
the term ‘Vietnam’, ‘it was used extensively neither by the Chinese nor by
the Vietnamese’. The word only took off when nationalists like Tran Trong
Kim and Ho Chi Minh used ‘Vietnam’ as the name for the nation-states
they declared independent in 1945.1
Further complicating the matter is the multitude of Vietnams under
study in this narrative. Not only is the use of the term Vietnam for the
period prior to 1945 anachronistic (except between 1802 and 1813), but the
question also arises as to which Vietnam we mean. From the seventeenth
century onward, two ‘Vietnams’ existed: one in the Red River delta based
around Hanoi, the other expanding into the Mekong delta with its capital in
Hue. The same problem arises after 1945, when Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic
Republic of Vietnam competed with Bao Dai’s Associated State of Vietnam
and Ngo Dinh Diem’s Republic of Vietnam. For the sake of clarity, I use the
term Red River Vietnam or Dai Viet to refer to the Vietnamese polity that
first emerged in the north and lasted in one form or another until the late
eighteenth century. For the period between the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, when civil conflicts gave rise to the region fracturing into several
polities, I distinguish among them by speaking of ‘Trinh Vietnam’, ‘Nguyen
Vietnam’, and ‘Tay Son Vietnam’. These were the three main military
houses at odds with each other. This shorthand allows me to maintain
clarity without burdening the reader with confusing qualifying statements.
For the French colonial period, there was no Vietnam and I have mainly
refrained from using the term, except from the point in time when
nationalists began to revive it from the start of the twentieth century. For the
post-1945 period, I use the term ‘Vietnam’ to refer to the nation-states run
by leaders such as Ho Chi Minh, Bao Dai, and Ngo Dinh Diem. However,
when referring to these states, I will use the proper terms for each—the
Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the Associated State of Vietnam, and the
Republic of Vietnam, respectively. I will not use the terms ‘Viet Minh’, ‘les
Viets’, or ‘Viet Cong’ to refer to the ‘Vietnamese communists’. Nor should
we resort to the politically charged term ‘Saigon regime’ for the Republic of
Vietnam. This is not an ideological bias on my part. Rather, these words
obscure a complicated but in the end fascinating story of contested
sovereignties.
Finally, ‘Vietnam’—whatever its name, shape, or form—has never been
an ethnically homogeneous polity. A wide range of ethnic groups—and they
did not become ‘ethnic minorities’ (‘dan toc thieu so’) until the emergence
of nation-states in the mid-twentieth century—dominated large parts of
present-day Vietnam. These peoples occupy an important place in the
history of modern Vietnam and cannot be simply subsumed under the
homogenizing, nationalist term ‘Vietnamese’. For centuries, they were not
‘Vietnamese’, and many still do not want to be. Chapter 14 of this book is
specifically the story of these non-Viet peoples. When I need to make an
ethnic distinction between the two groups, I will use the word ‘Viet’ instead
of ‘Vietnamese’, much as one distinguishes the ‘Han’, the ethnic Chinese
majority in China, from other ethnic groups there, such as the Tibetans or
Uyghers. Again, this is not mere political correctness on my part. Words
count, and by using them precisely and carefully, they can help us to shed
new light on the complexity of Vietnam in a plural rather than singular or
homogenizing sense. That said, I have done my best not to let these
semantic concerns muddle the narrative or side-track readers. There will
admittedly be times when the words ‘Vietnam’ or ‘Vietnamese’ as well as
‘China’ and ‘Chinese’ appear in my narrative in a general way, because not
to have done so would have simply risked losing the reader.
 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ARVN: Army of the Republic of Vietnam

ASEAN: Association of South East Asian Nations
ASV: Associated State of Vietnam
BIC: Banque de l’Indochine or Bank of Indochina
CCP: Chinese Communist Party
CIA: Central Intelligence Agency
COSVN: Central Office of Southern Viet Nam (the communist party’s
apparatus in southern Vietnam)
DRV: Democratic Republic of Vietnam
FCP: French Communist Party
FULRO: Front unifié de lutte des races opprimées or United Front for the
Struggle of Oppressed Races
GDP: Gross Domestic Product
GMD: Guomindang, or Chinese Nationalist Party
ICP: Indochinese Communist Party
MAAG: Military Assistance Advisory Group
MACV: Military Assistance Command, Vietnam
MEP: Missions étrangères de Paris or Paris Overseas Missions
MRP: Mouvement républicain populaire or the Popular Republican
Movement
NLF: National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (under communist
control)
PAVN: People’s Army of Vietnam (under communist control)
PLAF: People’s Liberation Armed Force (army under communist control
operating below the seventeenth parallel)
PRG: Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South
Vietnam (under communist control)
RV: Republic of Vietnam
SEATO: South East Asia Treaty Organization
SRV: Socialist Republic of Vietnam
SV: State of Vietnam
TLVD: Tu Luc Van Doan or the Self-strengthening Literary Movement
UNHCR: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
Viet Minh: short for Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh, or Vietnamese
Independence League
VNQDD: Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang or Vietnamese Nationalist Party
VWP: Vietnamese Workers Party (replaced the ICP in 1951)
 INTRODUCTION

THE MANY DIFFERENT VIETNAMS

M OST AMERICAN READERS will remember ‘Vietnam’ as the decade-

long war that bogged down the US Army in a struggle to prevent
the Soviet and Chinese communists from marching into Southeast
Asia. The Vietnam War ended in a humiliating defeat for the United States
in 1975, and to this day, images of helicopters scrambling to evacuate
people from the US Embassy in Saigon to aircraft carriers waiting off the
Vietnamese coast remind Americans of that loss.
However, the United States was hardly the first ‘great power’ to send
their warships into the waters off Vietnam’s coastline. Indeed, if Vietnam is
recognizable to so many today, it is largely because this small country is
located in one of those coveted parts of the world where the ‘great powers’
repeatedly collide. Attracted by trade with the Indian Ocean and determined
to project its power by sea, the Chinese empire ruled northern Vietnam for
almost a thousand years beginning around the first century BCE. The
Chinese saw in Vietnam a gateway for trading with Southeast Asia and
tapping into Indian Ocean markets extending to the Middle East. The
Vietnamese regained their independence in the tenth century but briefly lost
it again to the Chinese in the early fifteenth century as the Ming dynasty
sent its armadas across the Indian Ocean as far as Africa and the Red Sea.
Meanwhile, a new set of imperial powers soon expanded into the region
via the Pacific and Indian Oceans. This initially European imperialism
assumed a particularly aggressive form in the nineteenth century when the
French colonized Vietnam and the British confiscated Singapore, Burma,
and Malaya. Meanwhile, the Americans crossed the Pacific Ocean to take
the Philippines from the Spanish while the Japanese focused their colonial
attention on Korea and Taiwan. Together, these colonial powers also
divided up the long Chinese coastline into enclaves, treaty ports, and
concessions.
The French were perfectly aware of the strategic importance of their
Vietnamese colony in this wider imperial competition, perched as it was at
the spot where the Indian and Pacific Oceans and the Eurasian continent
converge. At the turn of the twentieth century, they finished building the
deep-water port of Cam Ranh Bay, located off the southeastern coast of
Vietnam. Russian warships dispatched from the Baltic to stop Japanese
colonial expansion into China and Korea gathered there before being
defeated by the Japanese at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905. Following the
Japanese invasion of China in 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt closely
followed Japanese movements down the Chinese coastline and imposed an
embargo on Tokyo as Japanese imperial troops started occupying Vietnam
in 1940. His fears of a wider Japanese thrust southward were well founded.
In early 1942, having attacked Pearl Harbor and occupied all of Vietnam,
the Japanese then concentrated their ships in Cam Ranh Bay before
attacking Southeast Asia and striking as far as the Andaman and Nicobar
Islands in the Indian Ocean. Created in 1942, the American 7th Fleet helped
roll back the Japanese empire and remained to protect America’s postwar
control of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The 7th Fleet first called on
Vietnam in 1950 to reassure the French following the Chinese communist
victory of 1949. The Americans went on to station the bulk of their naval
forces in Cam Ranh Bay during the Vietnam War. And when they withdrew
from the country in April 1975, the Russians took over.1
Today, geopolitical tensions are again on the rise in the waters off
Vietnam’s coast. For the first time since the Ming recalled their armada
from the Indian Ocean in 1433, the Chinese are actively seeking to expand
their naval presence into the Pacific. The United States is in conversation
with its former enemies in Vietnam about how best to respond. The
Russians have taken a renewed interest in Vietnam and Cam Ranh Bay
since the end of the Cold War, and, worried by growing Chinese naval
power, the Japanese are also improving their ties with the Vietnamese.
Vietnam remains to this day at the center of intense global rivalries, and it is
tempting to view the country and its history in terms of the conflicts of the
‘great powers’.
The problem, however, is that such accounts of Vietnam are driven by
the views of those who coveted, occupied, and fought over this country. By
casting Vietnam as a former colony or a strategic zone, or reducing it to a
single war or a series of wars, the history of Vietnam becomes the story of
its relationship with—outside powers. There is nothing necessarily wrong
with an external take on Vietnam’s past. However, such accounts tend to
present the history of this country in rather one-dimensional ways: Vietnam
was acted upon by the big powers; it was not quite an actor itself. In the
great power account, Vietnam is the victim of colonization and domination,
never a colonizer or a conqueror itself. Its own internal divisions, ethnic
diversity, and conflicts are obscured.
Things are changing, however. Thanks to a flood of new research on
Vietnam in recent years, the opening of the country to the outside since the
1980s, and the distance now separating us from the heated political debates
generated by Western intervention in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, it is now
possible to write a new history of Vietnam. This book tries to do just that. It
still takes into account this country’s position in a coveted part of the world
where empires collide, but it also emphasizes Vietnam’s own role in
shaping its history and highlights the country’s extraordinary diversity and
complexity.
Most importantly, it emphasizes that there has never been one Vietnam
but several remarkably varied ones. During the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, at least two polities existed, one anchored in the Red River delta
around Hanoi, another pushing southward past Hue into the plains of the
Mekong. Vietnam only appeared in something of its present S-like form
when, in 1802, the emperor of the Nguyen dynasty, Gia Long, following
decades of civil strife, united the country. Even then, Vietnam hardly
remained inert. Until the 1840s, Nguyen leaders fairly successfully tried to
expand their imperial state to include Cambodia and swathes of today’s
eastern Laos, declaring the empire of Dai Nam (the Greater South) as they
did so.
French colonizers had no qualms about invoking earlier Dai Nam
imperial pretensions to justify their own colonial expansion up the Mekong
River in search of a Chinese Eldorado. However, if the Indochinese Union
they announced in 1887 placed Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia within the
same colonial structure, the French divided Vietnam territorially into three
separate sub-units—Cochinchina (the south), Annam (the center), and
Tonkin (the north). Between 1862 and 1945, the independent Nguyen state
that had unified Vietnamese lands in 1802 was no more. That changed as
the Second World War drew to a close in 1945, toppled French Indochina,
and nationalists declared the independence of Vietnam and reaffirmed its
territorial unity along the lines largely established by Gia Long. Such unity
was, however, short-lived. Decolonization, the Cold War, and civil conflicts
intersected violently to divide Vietnam into several competing states
between 1945 and 1975. In its entire history, Vietnam has only existed in its
present national form for about eighty-three years and some months (as of
2016)—never before 1802, for forty-three years in the nineteenth century,
six months in 1945, and for forty years since 1976. The ‘great power’ take
on the Vietnamese past tends to overlook this multiplicity.2
The expansion of Red River Vietnam southward into populous areas
also transformed this country into a mosaic of peoples, languages, and
cultures. Ethnic Viet, or the kinh, may constitute the majority of the
Vietnamese population today (85.7 percent in 1999), but they share the
national territory with over fifty other ethnic groups. Centuries before the
kinh—‘the people of the capital’—moved out of the Red River basin, the
Tai, Jarai, Cham, Khmers, and others were the dominant populations in the
highlands which hug the Red River lowlands, along the central coast, and
throughout the Mekong delta. Until the late fifteenth century, the history of
Vietnam below the Red River—even within it—was a very non-Viet one.
There was no ‘S’ shape to Vietnam. And well into the twentieth century, the
non-Viet peoples now living within Vietnam’s borders outnumbered the
kinh in the highlands, an area comprising over half of the country. It is
precisely its multiple territorial forms, ethno-cultural heterogeneity, and
diverse colonial experiences—Chinese, French, and Vietnamese—that
make the history of Vietnam so fascinating.3
Specialists inside and outside Vietnam know this, and scholars are
increasingly fascinated by the country’s diversity. This new general history
moves in similar directions. Rather than positing one Vietnam, one
homogeneous people, one history, one modernity, or even one colonialism,
this book investigates Vietnam’s past through its multiple forms and
impressive diversity.4 Let us take a closer look at what this might mean.

MULTIPLE VIETNAMS
Until recently, Vietnam has commonly been understood to mean today’s
Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV), first declared independent by Ho Chi
Minh in September 1945 as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV).
The conventional narrative moves rapidly from the French attack on
Nguyen Vietnam in 1858 to the emergence of the Democratic Republic of
Vietnam in 1945 by way of a discussion of French conquest, colonial
development, and modernity, and the rise of Vietnamese anticolonialism,
nationalism, and communism. Ho Chi Minh stands out as the main
character in this narrative of modern Vietnam, allowing historians to follow
him (and his Vietnam) from Saigon in 1911 to Paris in 1919, and then on to
Moscow and Hong Kong as he embraces communism as the best ‘road’ to
attaining Vietnam’s national independence in 1945. This popular account
then culminates in the French and American military defeats in Indochina
as the DRV marches to final victory over the Republic of Vietnam in 1975.
It’s the story of one Vietnam.
American journalist Frances FitzGerald’s highly influential and Pulitzer
prize-winning book, Fire in the Lake, went furthest in establishing what has
become the standard account of modern Vietnam in the English language.
Even before the communist victory in 1975, she had proclaimed Ho Chi
Minh’s Vietnam as the real one. Not only were the Americans supporting
the wrong Vietnamese leaders, first Bao Dai, the French-backed leader of
the Associated State of Vietnam, then Ngo Dinh Diem, who replaced it with
the Republic of Vietnam in 1955, but in so doing they were also placing
themselves on the wrong side of history—Vietnamese history, as defined by
FitzGerald, as being a timeless, deep-seated culture of resistance to foreign
invasion and colonial domination which Ho and his Vietnam incarnated.
Like other righteous rulers before him, in FitzGerald’s hands, Ho became
the rightful new sovereign, who had emerged in a time of great disorder to
seize the ‘Mandate of Heaven’, with the support of the people. Published at
the height of the anti-war movement, Fire in the Lake sought above all to
show how the Americans and their empire, just like the French and theirs,
were doomed to failure.5
Whether one is for or against American intervention in Vietnam, there
are serious problems in terms of how American-focused accounts of the
wars like this represent the Vietnamese past. By assuming that Ho Chi
Minh’s Vietnam of 1945 incarnated a timeless, traditional Vietnam with its
roots deep in an antiquity which was destined to win in the present, Fitz-
Gerald gives us a very essentialized, unchanging Vietnam. This teleological
framing of the Vietnamese past prevents us from seeing the multiplicity and
complexity of Vietnamese historical experience and the different
possibilities for the future that were present at the time. Communist
nationalists led by Ho Chi Minh were certainly important, as this book will
demonstrate; but communist Vietnam was but one of several possibilities.
No history of this country is complete without taking into account
competitor states and their leaders, such as French Vietnam (1858–1955)
under men like Albert Sarraut, Pierre Pasquier, and Léon Pignon; the
Associated State of Vietnam led by Bao Dai (1949–1954), the Republic of
Vietnam forged by Ngo Dinh Diem, Nguyen Van Thieu, and others (1955–
75), and highland Vietnams marshalled by Léopold Sabatier, Deo Van
Long, and Y Thih Eban.
These alternative polities undeniably failed, often miserably so, but their
stories spanning more than a century deserve our attention if we are to
understand today’s Vietnam. After all, Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam had to
engage with each in order to prevail, starting with Sarraut’s in the 1910s. As
one astute observer put it in relation to the American Civil War, ‘to exclude
all thoughts of the alternative is to lose contact with how it felt to peer into
the inscrutable future’. In short, it is no longer necessary to write the history
of ‘Vietnam’ as the unique story of the winners. We need to recognize that
the history of Vietnam, like any other place in the world, is a series of
interlocking forces and people, occurring and acting at specific points in
time and space, each generating its own range of possibilities and
eliminating others at the same time. So let us try in the pages that follow to
peer into the Vietnamese past with at least a few ‘thoughts of the
alternatives’.6

MODERN VIETNAMS
We might also try to think of ‘modernity’ in similar terms. Much ink has
been spilled over the rather slippery notions of the ‘modern’ and
‘modernity’, to say nothing of ‘postmodernity’. For many, ‘modern’ simply
means something ‘recent’, not ‘old’. For partisans of this periodization, the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries usually fit the bill best for delineating
modern Vietnam as something recent. For others, ‘modern’ refers to a
specifically Western historical transformation which culminated in Europe
and North America in the nineteenth century with the advent of
industrialization, urbanization, secularization, scientific and bureaucratic
rationalization, capitalism, and the rise of the nation-state. One can quibble
over a precise definition—and there may never be one—but most would
agree that these are the main ingredients making the ‘modern’.
According to this school of thought, Western colonial expansion in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries exported these components to the non-
Western world in one form or another. It could be done independently as in
the case of Japan, Thailand, and Turkey, or it could arrive through direct
Western colonial connections as in Vietnam, Burma, or Algeria. Until
recently, most histories of modern China began in 1842, with the Chinese
defeat at the hands of the British during the First Opium War. Only then, the
story goes, did China embark on the road to ‘modernization’ and ‘progress’.
As one specialist of China has pointed out, we tend to use the term ‘un-
modern’ to refer to ‘what existed in Europe before 1800 and what existed in
the rest of the world until Europeans arrived and changed the way people
did things or alternatively, until European ideas and opportunities were
made available to people in other parts of the world to adopt and adapt to fit
their local situations’. The history of ‘modern Egypt’ starts the same way,
with Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion in 1798 and the opening of the country
to the West.7
A number of scholars writing on Vietnam and colonial Indochina
subscribe to this Western-centric conception of modernity and its
accompanying periodization. Pierre Brocheux goes so far as to make the
French ‘colonial moment’ the cornerstone of his recent history of modern
Vietnam. In their landmark general history of French Indochina, he and co-
author Daniel Hémery insist on the modernizing nature of the French
colonial project. While they certainly recognize colonialism’s exploitative
character and the importance of pre-colonial Vietnam’s achievements, the
authors conclude nonetheless that French colonialism introduced modernity
in the form of infrastructure, urbanization, science and medicine, capitalist
development, bureaucratic rationalization, and the nation-state. Like the
1842 date for those writing on China or 1798 for Egypt, Brocheux and
Hémery’s account begins with the point of Vietnam’s colonial contact with
the French in 1858. More than anything else, they argue, French
colonialism created modern Vietnam from that point in time. They are by
no means alone. I myself once attached similar importance to French
colonial modernity in the making of Vietnamese nationalism at the expense
of exploring pre-existing connections and modernities.8
That Western colonialism was a major modernizing force in Vietnamese
history, few would disagree. I do not. However, the periodization, defining,
and framing of all that is modern in Vietnam in such terms comes with real
problems. For one, they create a ‘great divide’ in Vietnamese history
between a ‘pre-colonial’ or a ‘pre-French’ past and a much more detailed
‘nineteenth- to twentieth-century Vietnam’ during which the country
becomes ‘modern’. Secondly, by assuming that modern Vietnam began with
the French attack of 1858, we lose sight of the complex set of pre-existing
historical phenomena and a plurality of ‘lost’ or ‘multiple modernities’ that
went into the making of a series of ‘new Vietnams’. The meritocratic
Confucian examination system and the rational though contested
bureaucracies it nurtured were essential components of modernity present in
China, Korea, and Vietnam. Voltaire waxed lyrically over China’s laws,
institutions, and secularism in the eighteenth century, contrasting them
favorably to the things he so wanted changed in France. Thirdly, far from
replacing the pre-existing bureaucracy and its civil servants, French
administrators often grafted their colonial state on to it as an effective
mechanism of social control, an efficient method of political administration,
and a source of information without which ‘the colonial moment’ would not
have lasted for long. French efforts to develop Vietnam’s roads, canals,
dikes, and the lucrative Asian rice trade also built on pre-existing projects.
Minh Mang’s reign in the early nineteenth century deserves perhaps more
than a footnote in the history of ‘modern Vietnam’. His administrative
policies were aimed at territorial integration, state centralization,
bureaucratic rationalization, economic development, and ideological
homogenization. This is not to say that he achieved all of this (he did not!),
but rather to suggest that modernity is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon. It
exists in multiple forms, at different points in time and space, and often
blends with and builds upon pre-existing ones. It can disappear as fast as it
arrives. It can even co-exist with the ‘un-modern’. French and Vietnamese
women did not obtain the right to vote until 1945.9
While there is no need to construct an Asian-centered approach to
modernity in the place of the Western-centered one, it is useful to keep
these wider spatial and temporal considerations in mind in the pages that
follow, for they allow us to see the Vietnamese past in new ways. This is
why I have intentionally left open the precise timing of modernity’s birth in
Vietnam, rather than insisting that ‘modern’ Vietnam only emerged from
1858 onward. This makes room for multiple modernities, colonial grafts,
and wider connections that the Franco-centric approach misses. It is
admittedly a more complicated story, pushing ‘the modern’ further into the
past than most are accustomed, but such an open-ended periodization makes
it a much more interesting one. One of the reasons why the brief Chinese
colonization of Vietnam in the early fifteenth century was so important was
because it provided the Vietnamese with access to some of the most modern
gunpowder weapons of the time, a sophisticated bureaucratic model, and a
colonial ideology needed for their own rethinking and building of a new
Vietnam long before the French arrived on the scene.10

IMPERIAL VIETNAMS
This latter point is important; for by starting in 1858 one would not know
that today’s Vietnam is the product of its own colonial history, not just the
French one. One need only look a little before 1858 to see that the French
were not the first colonizers in the Mekong delta or the Red River basin.
The latter zone, the cradle of Vietnamese civilization, was part of a Chinese
empire for a millennium. Once independent of China, the Vietnamese began
building and pushing their own empire southward, establishing
protectorates over far-flung regions, promoting settlement colonies,
alternating between ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ methods of rule over distant,
multi-ethnic peoples, testing cultural assimilation, and developing their own
mission civilisatrice. They were far from finished when the French arrived.
And rather than stopping Vietnamese expansion in its tracks, the French
often reinforced the Vietnamese imperial project in many places by making
them their privileged partners in building another colonial state. The French
colonial project in Indochina thus carried within it a second, pre-existing
Asian one, that of the Vietnamese themselves. These intersecting imperial
projects are central to understanding modern Vietnam.
 Some will object to this focus on ‘pre-French’, Asian empires in the
making of modern Vietnam. However, such critics forget that colonial
connections and empire-states were not unique to the West or to the
nineteenth century. They are part of a wider global history made up of
empires running from one end of Eurasia to the other since antiquity. Qing
colonial expansion into central Asia—Tibet, for example—in the eighteenth
century is vital to understanding China today. Indeed, by ignoring the role
of pre-existing Asian colonialisms, we fail to pick up on the complexity of
countries such as China and Vietnam and the novelty of their territorial
forms. This wider view of imperial projects helps to guard against
projecting homogenizing notions of ethnicity and national identity back into
and on to a much more diverse and, in the end, fascinating past. It also
provides a glimpse into state formation as a work in continual progress and
sheds light on how power operated in Vietnam across time and space
before, after, and often right through ‘1858’. And lastly, like their Chinese,
Russian, American, and French counterparts, Vietnamese colonialism
generated a complex historical experience marked by violent confrontations
with indigenous peoples whom they conquered as well as peaceful
exchanges with them, each of which has had important ramifications to this
day. Today’s nations are often the historical products of pre-existing, multi-
ethnic empires. Vietnam, like the United States and the Russian Federation,
is the product of several imperial pasts, including its own.11

DIVIDED VIETNAMS
The need to go beyond 1858 is important for a final reason of periodization.
For if one ventures one last time beyond this conventional date, it becomes
rapidly clear that Gia Long’s creation of a unitary Vietnam in 1802 was in
fact more the exception than the rule. After breaking with each other
violently in 1627, the Trinh and Nguyen military lords came to rule
Vietnam as two separate states (but under the nominal unitary rule of the Le
dynasty) until the Tay Son brothers charged out of the central highlands to
add a third polity in the late eighteenth century. That is over a century and a
half of a divided Vietnam. There was thus nothing necessarily aberrant
about the existence of ‘two Vietnams’ during the second half of the
twentieth century. Nor was the twentieth century the only time during which
Vietnamese fought each other. Internecine conflicts racked Vietnam in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (and long before), some of which
expanded into regional conflagrations with the Thais and the Chinese, as
they would in the late twentieth century. Nor was inter-ethnic violence
unheard of as non-Viet peoples, like the Cham, Tai, and the Khmer, resisted
Vietnamese conquest, or attacked the Viet to expand their own empires. The
implications of all of this are important to understanding Vietnam to this
day.12
While this book admittedly zooms in on the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, the three pre-1858 chapters provide more than just rapid
‘historical background’ on the ‘pre-French period’. They are an important
part of this book’s goal of providing a new account of the plurality of
Vietnams from the past to the present, one that avoids creating a great
divide at the ‘French colonial moment’ of 1858, between ‘East’ and ‘West’,
‘modern’ and ‘un-modern’, ‘before’ and ‘after’, ‘unified’ and ‘divided’,
‘Viet’ and ‘non-Viet’. Some will object that by exploring Vietnam’s
colonial, diverse, and divided past, I’m engaging in a postmodernist fetish
for ‘deconstructing’ or, worse, that I will end up legitimating ‘conservative’
justifications for foreign intervention in Vietnam. I politely disagree. If I
take issue with anything in the politics of writing the Vietnamese past, it is a
persistent tendency inside and outside Vietnam to exceptionalize it. This is
particularly the case in American diplomatic history where the Vietnam War
remains central to critiquing—or defending—‘American empire’ and
‘American exceptionalism’. While I have no problems taking American
empire and nationalism to task, I do not believe that we have to
exceptionalize the Vietnamese and their past to do so. Those who do so run
the risk of practicing a form of Western-centered Orientalism that Edward
Said warned us against.13
Balancing all this has been extraordinarily difficult. I have inevitably
left out things some would have wanted to see. I certainly could have solved
this problem by increasing the size of the book and the level of detail.
However, I remain convinced that bigger is not always better. The reader
will be the judge of how well I have done. Will specialists of Vietnam find
anything of interest for them in this book? I do hope so, for I owe each of
them my deepest gratitude. For those specifically wishing to teach and
study from this book, I have created a website which includes an online
bibliography and material on the historiographical debates about Vietnam,
as well as short essays on differences in interpretation among scholars. It is
on my home page at www.cgoscha.uqam.ca.