Vietnam Related Panels and Paper Abstracts at the Association for Asian Studies Conference 2004

Session 6: Poetry as a Window on History and Change in Southeast Asia: Sponsored by COTSEAL

Organizer and Chair: Carol J. Compton, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Discussant: Thomas John Hudak, Arizona State University
Keywords: Southeast Asia, poetry, history, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand.

Traditionally poets have played an important role as critics and commentators in Southeast Asian societies, and poetry has been the foundation of much of the literature in the area. Poetic license has allowed poets to comment critically on culture and history, providing us with windows on Southeast Asian societies at particular points in time. Contemporary poets and songwriters in Southeast Asia have continued in this tradition, creating and adapting their poetic styles to reflect sociocultural, economic and political changes in the region.
This panel provides a sample of the views to be seen through the window of contemporary poetry. Ruth Mabanglo discusses the power of poetry to give voice to the issues and suffering of those Filipino women at the margins and in diaspora. Chiranan Pitpreecha, a student activist and poet, presents poetry that was a means of recording vividly the details and emotions of people's lives during a critical period in recent Thai history. Khe Iem traces the changes in poetic themes and approaches in North and South Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s and then discusses the current transformations taking place in the work of Vietnamese poets both in Vietnam and in diaspora. Finally, John C. Schaefer discusses the life and work of the famous poet and songwriter Trinh Công Sõn, whose poetry in song spoke of love, war, and the human condition. In each presentation, the historical changes of recent times are viewed through the eyes of the poets of the period.

Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry: On the Path of Transformation
Khe Iem, Poet and Editor-in-Chief, Tap chi Tho (Poetry Magazine)
This presentation focuses on two periods of modern Vietnamese poetry. During the period from 1960 to 1975, Vietnam itself was divided, with North Vietnam under a communist regime and South Vietnam under a capitalist regime. Khe Iem discusses how Vietnamese poetry was transformed, in both the North and the South, during those war years. In the period from 1975 to the present, Vietnam became one country. Analyzing the situation of recent Vietnamese poetry, Khe Iem explores who and what can reconcile the differences that have developed between North and South Vietnamese poetry; how and why Vietnamese poetry is being transformed; and the role of the poets, in and out of Vietnam, who are contributing to this change.

Trinh Công Sõn: A Songwriter and a Poet
John C. Schafer, Humboldt State University
When Trinh Công Sõn died three years ago, news of his passing spread rapidly throughout Vietnam and to all the cities of the Vietnamese diaspora. Vietnamese mourned the passing of a singer and composer who had moved them deeply with his songs about love, war, and the human condition. Some antiwar songs composed in the 60's made him famous in central and southern Vietnam, where he became a spokesperson for all those who yearned for peace and the reunification of the country. Because he remained in Vietnam after the war and continued to compose, he eventually became a national figure, known and loved not only in the South but throughout Vietnam.
While there are several reasons for Trinh Công Sõn's popularity, chief among them is the fact that he was a poet and used poetic techniques skillfully. He first demonstrated these techniques in some early love songs written in the late 50's, songs whose lyrics broke with the clichés of pre-war songs. He continued to reveal his poetic skills in songs written during and after the war. In my remarks I will attempt to reveal his talent by looking closely at several songs: "Diem of the Past," "Lullaby of Cannons for the Night," "A Place for Leaving and Returning," and "Like the Wing of a Flying Heron." I will provide translations of these songs and play one or two if time allows.

Session 67: Autonomous Histories in South Vietnam's Republican Era: 1955-1975

Organizer: David A. Biggs, University of Washington
Chair: David Elliott, Pomona College
Discussant: Ngô Vinh Long, University of Maine

Nearly three decades after the fall of Saigon, the history of South Vietnam's Republican period (1955-1975) remains poorly understood. If they were not actively involved as "patriots," then most Southerners appear in historical works as counter-revolutionaries or neo-colonials. These histories lack what John Smail once described as a local "autonomy." Works that focus on American intervention and the war frequently marginalize the actions and visions of local people during this era. Southerners made difficult, often contradictory choices in their forts to build a nation that was still very much Vietnamese. While none of the papers deny the profound impact of the Revolution or the "American War," they re-examine diplomacy and economic development during this period from local, South Vietnamese "thought worlds" where these projects occurred.
David Biggs (University of Washington) discusses Vietnamese projects to reconstruct the rural landscape through new infrastructure and massive resettlement. While Americans played a role supporting the Public Works Ministry and projects were often derived from earlier, colonial-era documents, each implementation was wholly Vietnamese. Edward Miller (Harvard University) presents a view of Ngô Ðinh Diem, examining how Diem and the U.S. government tried and failed to collaborate in administrative reform. Lien-Hang Thi Nguyen (Yale University) examines how President Thieu (1968-1973) steered not only an independent course from Nixon and Kissinger, but oftentimes collided with Washington's policies as the allies pursued different ends. The panel will feature two experts on modern Vietnam, historian Ngô Vinh Long and political scientist David Elliott, who will critique the papers and connect them to broader trends and problems in the study of the Republican era.

Engineering Peace in the Countryside: The Rise and Fall of Land Development Projects, 1954-1960
David A. Biggs, University of Washington
One major economic and strategic issue for the Saigon government was the "rural problem": disposessed farmers, abandoned lands, and an infrastructure crippled by neglect and sabotage during the First Indochina War. Public Works engineers and officials were soon overwhelmed in 1956, not only by the demands of postwar reconstruction but also by the sudden, exponential growth in American material and financial aid. During the "six years of peace" from 1954 to 1960, engineers and administrators experimented with various forms of resettlement and land redistribution, especially in more remote parts of the Mekong Delta that were strongholds for the Viet Minh.
While Americans associated with USAID, the American Embassy, and the U.S. Operations Mission enjoyed influence at higher government levels, the trials and failures associated with these projects were intensely local problems. After thousands of families had relocated to these areas, quite often the irrigation schemes failed, causing severe flooding as well as epidemics and infestations. While American advisors and diplomats envisioned a New Deal form of hydrologic development that was politically neutral and technically specific, the RVN government was very careful to construct each resettlement area as a modern garrison or "don dien" a bulwark against communist insurgency. This paper draws from archival sources in the Public Works folios of the National Archives No. 2 in Ho Chí Minh City to argue that despite involvement at higher levels by Americans and other foreign players, success and failure in each project was tied more to the handling of locally specific environmental and political conflicts.

My versus Diem: American and Vietnamese Approaches to Nation Building and Administrative Reform in South Vietnam, 1955-1963
Edward G. Miller, Harvard University
It has long been supposed that the "nation building" strategies pursued by Ngô Ðinh Diem during his tenure as leader of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) were American in inspiration and design. At first glance, this seems reasonable; after all, the U.S. provided huge amounts of aid to Diem's government and also dispatched legions of advisors to South Vietnam to assist in various nation-building tasks. While most historians have rejected the notion that Diem was a puppet of the United States, many still argue that the largesse he received from the US obliged him to tailor his programs and policies to conform to American ideas and assumptions about development and modernization.
This paper presents an alternative view: Diem refused to let the Americans take the lead on nation building because he had very different and definite ideas of how South Vietnam could and should become a modern nation. Specifically, this paper examines how the U.S. and the Diem government tried and failed to collaborate in the field of administrative reform. Though the two sides agreed that the South Vietnamese ship of state needed to be overhauled at the national and local levels, they clashed frequently over the form and content of the changes. This paper uses these clashes to reveal the key differences between the Diemist and American visions for South Vietnam, and also to suggest how these differences contributed to the unraveling of the U.S.-Diem alliance in 1963. This paper is based on research in both U.S. and Vietnamese archives.

Saigon Diplomacy, 1968-1973
Lien-Hang Thi Nguyen, Yale University
Saigon diplomacy during the Second Indochina War has received scant attention from scholars in the field of Vietnam studies. The historical scholarship that does exist on the foreign policy of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) consists primarily of memoirs and accounts by former officials of the Saigon regime. Based on archival materials in Vietnam, the U.S., and France, as well as secondary literature in both Vietnamese and English, this paper will examine what it calls Saigon's "international strategy" in the latter half of the Second Indochina War. In particular, this paper will trace the course of Saigon's diplomacy towards South and Southeast Asia during the period of negotiations from late 1968 to early 1973. In an attempt to shore up world support for its war against Vietnamese communists both north and south of the seventeenth parallel, the RVN embarked on an accelerated diplomatic struggle during this period.
Not only did the RVN wage war against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and the National Liberation Front (NLF)-Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG), Saigon undertook a battle of wills against its major patron, the United States. This paper will argue that RVN diplomacy following the Tet Offensive to the signing of the Paris Peace Agreement originated in Saigon and not Washington. In other words, the Thieu administration from late 1968 to early 1973 was no puppet of the United States. The foreign policy of the RVN steered not only an independent course from Nixon and Kissinger, but oftentimes collided with Washington's policies as the allies pursued different ends in the war against Vietnamese communists.

Session 88: Reading Vietnamese Literary, Religious, and Social History through Nôm Texts: Sponsored by the Vietnamese Studies Group

Organizer: Nhung Tuyet Tran, University of California, Los Angeles
Chair and Discussant: Cuong Tu Nguyen, George Mason University
Keywords: vernacular, nôm, gender, Buddhism, Catholicism, folk religion, Trinh.

In every national history, certain features embody that country's unique cultural heritage. In the literature on Vietnam, the emergence and use of a vernacular demotic script (nôm) since the medieval period has become a key signifier of contemporary national identity. While the script has been reified as a sign of proto-national greatness, most historical research (in any language) only makes use of classical Chinese or French sources, silencing vernacular perspectives present in the nôm sources. The papers lift local voices from the historical record by reading early modern Vietnamese literary, religious, and social history through nôm texts.
This panel challenges contemporary constructions of Vietnamese history through local narratives. Dr. Thi An Tran's paper provides the theoretical background to exploring Vietnamese history and literature by examining how literary figures are transformed into cultic heroes. Dr. Thuân's uses vernacular literature to trace the cultural, religious, and social transformations of the Le-Trinh period, particularly the revival of Buddhist practices and emergence of Christianity. Tran's paper builds on Thuân's findings by exploring the vernacularization of Buddhist and Christian feminine virtuousness, emerging from Trinh family support, in the seventeenth century. Finally, Nam Nguyen's paper turns the narrative of religious transmission on its head by tracing the story of Lady Vu from forsaken wife to proto-national heroine to transnational cultic deity. His meticulous research demonstrates that traditional narratives of Vietnamese folk religious practices transcend regional and national boundaries. These four papers, all grounded in sources written in the demotic script, present rich [re]readings of local experience in Vietnamese history. While the first two papers revise the conceptual paradigms in Vietnamese history and literature, the second two explore the gendered dynamics of religious practice and transmission in the "Vietnamese context." They explore the links between language, text, and historical processes and provide a nuanced picture of early modern Vietnamese society.

Truong Hong, Truong Hat: Reciprocal Relations between Folk Legends, Cults, and Hagiography
Thi An Tran, Harvard University
Students of Vietnamese history, religion, and culture are familiar with fantastic narratives of heroines and heroes who embody Vietnamese cultural uniqueness. The stories, many of which emerged in the initial period of independence from Chinese domination (10th-15th centuries) have been employed as historical sources in the writing of Vietnamese linear history. Although these sources present rich pictures of the literary imagination, the details of the stories are often used uncritically to bolster contemporary narratives of national greatness. This paper seeks to move beyond this method by examining both content and form to explore Vietnamese religious history.
Using the example of stories of Truong Hong and Truong Hat, this paper examines the Viet Ðien U Linh as literary narrative and studies how the stories informed and were transformed by folk religious practices. It draws upon field research from over three hundred sites of worship to the heroes and literary and narrative sources to present a theory on the transformation of Vietnamese hagiography and cult practices. The paper also explores the influences of such literary models on contemporary cults in Vietnamese society and presents a theoretical backdrop for understanding the relationship between "orthodox" and folk religious practices by exploring the links between the Vietnamese literary text and religious practice.

Re-representations of Trinh Family Rule through Nôm Poetry
Khac Thuân Ðinh, Institute of Han-Nôm Studies
The period of Trinh rule in Vietnamese history (17th-18th centuries) is marked in the national narrative as one of usurpation of power by a rapacious family, spiraling the country into two hundred years of civil warfare. However, extant sources suggest that immense transformation in cultural, economic, and religious life accompanied Trinh rule. This paper modifies contemporary representations of Trinh family rule by exploring the cultural and economic development through nôm poetry of the period.
The poems, the majority of which were recorded in stone steles found throughout contemporary northern Viet Nam, describe a period of economic prosperity, peace in the kingdom, and religious revivalism. The paper specifically explores the rules of Trinh Can and Trinh Cuong and their economic and cultural policies and representations of those policies in vernacular poetry. During their rule, a Buddhist revivalism swept over the country as Vietnamese economic and cultural trade between the northern state (Ðàng Ngoài), the Southern State (Ðàng Trong), and Western countries filled the coffers of the state. While the Trinh lords promoted economic development at the state level, female members of the family extended the largesse into villages through direct and indirect support of Buddhist temples and Catholic churches. That the period of Trinh rule marked such drastic transformations in economic and religious life affords closer study, and this paper proposes to do so from the perspective of poetic sources.

Feminizing the "Orthodox": Images of Buddhist and Christian Deities in Seventeenth-Century Nôm Texts
Nhung Tuyet Tran, University of California, Los Angeles
Literature describing Buddhist and Christian practices in early modern Vietnamese society often notes the feminine character of practice but seldom addresses the links between the two. This paper explores the relationship between text, language, and religious experience by examining how Vietnamese monks and local and foreign missionaries retold stories of feminine virtue to their gendered audiences. The Buddhist narratives of Quan Âm Thi Kính and Nam Hai Quan Âm, feminine "Vietnamese" incarnations of the Avelokitesvara, and the feminine representations of saints in the Majorca and Philipê Binh documents serve as the two genres of writing to be explored.
The stories from Buddhist texts emerged out of a religious revivalism of the seventeenth century and detail stories of virtuous women who protect their female followers. The two incarnations, the Thousand Arm Buddha and the Mother Offering a Child, embody the hopes of sonless Vietnamese Buddhist faithful. Stories of virtuous feminine Catholic saints likewise appealed to female converts, whose adoption of Christian notions of an afterlife for all presented hopes for their spirits to survive. The paper attempts to determine how the two genres of writing influenced one another and why such texts (which were read to their audiences) resonated with the lives of the faithful.
Rubbings of stele inscriptions from Buddhist temples and Catholic burial grounds and ethnographic observations from local and European observers will be used to illuminate the religious texts. Research for this paper was performed in archives in Hà Noi, Paris, and Rome.

The Account of the Young Woman from Nam Xuong: Literary Texts and the Making of a Cult
Nam Nguyen, Harvard University
This paper explores the canonization of a woman by examining how folk religious practice becomes orthodox in early modern Vietnamese literature. It demonstrates how a story of a virtuous woman underwent a canonizing/mystifying process and emerged as a fixture in the Vietnamese canon.
"Nam Xuong Nu Tu Luc (The Account of the Young Woman from Nam Xuong) is one of the most appealing stories in Truyen Ky Man Luc (TKML, Collection of Chuanqi Tales Casually Recorded). It recounts the story of Lady Vu, who was wrongly accused of adultery, leading to her suicide. Moved by her tragic death, inhabitants of her local region built a shrine to her spirit. Official approval of the cult came with the emperor Lê Thánh Tông's praising of Lady Vu in two of his nôm poems.
In TKML, she was first fictionalized, mystified, and canonized in a unique atmosphere that mixed Daoist and Southeast Asian religious factors. Later texts, such as Vu Thi Liêt Nu Than Luc (Hagiography of the Virtuous Woman from the Vu Family) and Nam Xuong Liêt Nu Vu Thi Tân Truyên (New Story of the Virtuous Woman Vu from Nam Xuong) carefully constructed her heavenly biographical background, describing her not only as a fairy exiled to this world, but also a divine rescuer and/or national heroine saving the emperor Lê Thánh Tông from dangers in his expenditory campaign against the Champa. In the twentieth century, Lady Vu was worshiped by Vietnamese and the French as a goddess of fecundity. The cult of Lady Vu continues to be popular today, and many other anecdotes have been incorporated into her "official" biography published by the local government.

Session 125: Contending Alternative Modernities in Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam

Organizer: Clarissa Adamson, George Washington University
Chair: Christophe Robert, Cornell University
Discussant: Suzanne A. Brenner, University of California, San Diego

Modernity in Southeast Asia has often been understood as a consequence of modernization and development, i.e., improvements in infrastructure, industry, agriculture, and education. Our aim in this panel is not to define "modernity," but to see how people "locally" view it, and what they try to articulate in debates about "development" and visions of the future. In Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam developmental modernity as a state project has led to ambivalence and anxiety about emergent forms of consumption, community, and belonging. Ideas of alternative modernities arise when groups imagine ways of being modern as correctives to hegemonic or nationalist models of modernity perceived as too Western or as benefiting only privileged segments of the population.
We argue that what social scientists and the people they study identify as alternative modernities often involves modes of social alignment and community building that appeal to notions of morality-whether based in religious resurgence, discourses of good and evil, defense of "authentic" culture (however reconstructed), or social justice. Does the idea of alternative modernities help us understand these social movements or does it reflect a misrecognition (from researchers and/or "local" people) of the broader economic and political contexts in which such movements emerge? We examine how negotiating modernity involves constructing a moral community and attempts to lessen anxieties about the rapid social changes resulting from the global reach of capitalist forms. Panelists analyze these questions with reference to debates about gender in Java, rural social protest in Thailand, and debates over sexuality in Vietnam.

Emergent Sexualities and the Search for the Modern in Urban Vietnam
Christophe Robert, Cornell University
The communist project involved a different orientation toward modernity. An alternative, communist modernity was going to be achieved through a radical, non-capitalist reorganization of relations of production and social life. In Vietnam this project entailed first of all establishing an independent nation after decades of French colonialism and subsequent American military intervention. The notions of modernity and progress the French and Americans imported into Vietnam were tainted with foreignness. They had to be expelled from the social body-by war if necessary-in order to build a new socialist society.
On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork on youth culture in Ho Chi Minh City, I examine the emergent discourses and changing practices of sexuality in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam after almost twenty years of market-oriented reforms. Sexuality has become a central issue through which Vietnamese articulate discussions of modernity. I argue that contentious debates about prostitution and the sexualities of urban adolescents and middle-class families are areas where the reformulation of gender roles are most visible. The proliferation and liberalization of new print and audiovisual media have multiplied the forums for these debates. Local anxieties about sexuality are linked to ongoing debates about the preservation and construction of a national Vietnamese culture in a rapidly globalizing economy. This indicates that the search for an alternative modernity is an abiding concern for both the ruling Communist Party and the people in whose name it is supposed to speak.

Session 126: Cultural Biographies of the Morally Suspect

Organizer: Jennifer Foley, Cornell University
Chair: Ken MacLean, University of Michigan
Discussant: Peter Zinoman, University of California, Berkeley
Keywords: Southeast Asia, morality, historiography.

Desire, demand, power, and sacrifice interact with each other in specific historical and cultural milieus to create different forms of economic value. Arjun Appadurai has previously described this process, where objects move and out a commodity situation as "regimes of value." This panel will draw upon his idea, originally proposed to describe the social life of things, to explore how people similarly acquire and lose value, especially moral value, over time and space. We draw upon recent archival and ethnographic research in Vietnam and Cambodia to explore how different men acquired cultural biographies as their lives and achievements moved through different political and historical contexts. Each of the papers is concerned with how these biographies shape and hide the production, exchange, and consumption of moral currency in often unexpected ways, particularly with regard to activities that are considered to be illegitimate in one moment and not another. What strategies have been used to control the impact of the morally suspect on broader social norms? What are the consequences of these shifts on culturally specific understanding of credibility, authenticity, legitimacy, and the past? The papers will examine these issues by focusing on the struggles which have redefined how we perceive and value the lives of General Tran Do, a war hero turned dissident, Alexandre Yersin, a renowned Pasteurian whose research for the good of man often harmed many, André Malraux, who parlayed a criminal record into a ministry position, and former ARVN troops, some of whom have gone from being traitors to entrepreneurs.

Patriot or Apostate? Debating the Life and Writings of General Tran Do
Ken MacLean, University of Michigan
This paper explores the rapid transformation of retired General Tran Do from a national hero to a suspect citizen. A decorated war veteran, the General had held numerous high-ranking posts during the course of his long career, including the head of the Communist Party's Ideological and Cultural Committee. Increasingly disenchanted by pervasive corruption and other abuses of power by Party cadres, the General began writing "open" letters in 1995 to high-ranking officials. These long and often scathing letters called on the Communist Party to make radical reforms and to abandon socialism if that was what was necessary to ensure the country's economic development. The General was finally expelled from the Party in 1999 after 58 years of loyal service. Although the General's writings were censored at home, they circulated privately among Party elites and widely on the Internet where he became a potent symbol of political dissidence to members of the Vietnamese diaspora and international human rights community. This paper draws upon the General's letters and memoirs and interviews conducted with and about him, as well as other relevant materials. This information is used to analyze how the General's life and writings have been used by different actors inside and outside Vietnam to shape competing narratives about the legacy of socialist revolution. Specifically, I will illustrate how the themes of "sacrifice," "betrayal," and "debts" form the common currency for this contentious debate over political and moral legitimacy, a debate which offers interesting insights into neglected aspects of the reform process.

Alexandre Yersin: A Misanthropic Man of the People
Sokhieng Au, University of California, Berkeley
In every major Vietnamese city, amongst streets named after Vietnamese national heroes, one often finds a Duong Pasteur or Yersin. While Pasteur's name is familiar worldwide, Alexandre Yersin's reputation is obscure outside of the history of microbiology. Yet, in Vietnam, no scientist seems more beloved than Alexandre Yersin. Standard historiography portrays him as a selfless researcher, a keen intellectual, a quiet and apolitical man who was devoted to and beloved by the local people, and a key figure in the development of the overseas Instituts Pasteur (IPs) as well as science in Indochina generally. However, a review of the historical archives belies this reputation. His scientific productivity peaked in the third year of his 53-year career in Vietnam, when he isolated the plague bacillus in 1894. For the next 50 years, he was plagued with controversies around the plague, and was continually involved in institutional, governmental, and personal conflicts. Yet, even as internal documents revealed the difficulties fellow Pasteurians and the French government had with Yersin, none of these doubts were publicly revealed. Rather, the IPs and the French colonial government presented a united front in quashing all negative rumors.
It would seem that the appearance of infallibility in the scientific endeavor is integral to state building in both the colonial and the nationalist context, but for different reasons. In tracing the roots of the popularity of Yersin and the IPs, I will reveal important links between science and state building for both the French colonial and the Vietnamese nationalist government.

Revaluing Morally Suspect Memories and Knowledge in Southern Vietnam's Tourism Industry
Christina Schwenkel, University of California, Irvine
There is arguably no greater morally suspect figure in southern Vietnam than the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) veteran. After the country's reunification in 1975, ARVN soldiers were subject to harsh measures and political reformation in order to integrate them into the imaginary of a united socialist homeland. Although discriminatory policies have somewhat eased during the doi moi period, these veterans and their families continue to carry the stigma of having worked for the "enemy." With the expansion of tourism in the early 1990s, ARVN veterans have increasingly found jobs as tour guides, thus providing new opportunities for a previously marginalized population banned from state employment. In this paper, I examine how these guides have emerged as important social actors who can apply their knowledge of history, the geography of southern Vietnam, and their ability to speak English to their advantage. I argue that this new social formation reveals a critical site where social memory is renegotiated as previously suppressed knowledge and memories are redirected, reshaped, and revalued to simultaneously benefit the tourist market and the state, as well as the veterans themselves. What once branded these men as morally suspect-their experiences, memories, and cultural capital-has now become a marketable product. ARVN tour guides thus assume an exchange value on account of their unique perspective on the past that is often sought out and consumed by foreign tourists who are interested in counter-hegemonic, non-Communist "truths."

From Colonial Prison to Minister of Culture: André Malraux, Banteay Srei, and La Voie Royale
Jennifer Foley, Cornell University
André Malraux is known to many as an award-winning author and a French patriot. He fought against Franco, was imprisoned by the Vichy government, and was France's first Minister of Culture. He is less famous today for his youthful adventures in French Indochina, where he edited a newspaper in Saigon, was an outspoken anti-colonialist, and was a thief.
In the early 1920s, Malraux and three accomplices hacked the lintels from a remote temple in Northwestern Cambodia and sent them to Phnom Penh, where Malraux hoped to sell them to American museums. He was caught, arrested, and jailed. His experiences are written into his nearly forgotten novel, La voie royale (The Royal Way).
Stealing temples would seem an odd qualification for the first Minister of Culture. Malraux, however, was a master of re-invention: this is a man who managed to get himself named a colonel in the Spanish air force without ever having flown an airplane. I will argue that it is because Malraux was caught in the process of fencing stolen antiquities that he would eventually become the Minister of Culture. In this paper, I will also examine the way in which Malraux's theft played a role in making the small, dazzling temple of Banteay Srei one of the most visited in Cambodia. Many of those tourists are still hoping to find the lost gem, hidden in the jungle on the road the once linked Angkor and Phimai: The Royal Way.

Session 146: Globalizing Vietnam: Transnational Work, Gender, and Sexuality

Organizer: Angie Ngoc Tran, California State University, Monterey Bay
Chair: Danièle Bélanger, University of Western Ontario
Discussant: Thu-huong Nguyen-vo, University of California, Los Angeles

This social science panel brings together international and interdisciplinary scholars to examine the impacts of globalization on the Vietnamese as the country further integrates into the capitalist global system. With years of fieldwork in Vietnam, six researchers examine negative and positive impacts of global forces on work, family relations, sexuality, rural/urban migration, and poverty. Through transnational and gender lenses, we examine how women and men are affected differently under the impacts of market integration and globalization. By bringing out perspectives of workers, peasants, men, and women from field sites in Vietnam and California, we share findings and raise questions to stimulate discussions and further research.
First, we examine impacts of macroeconomic changes and consequences on people's livelihoods, poverty levels, and the rising gap between the rich and the poor with sensitivity to regional differences. We analyze how rural workers migrated to the cities searching for jobs with further market integration and globalization. Second, we analyze ways in which the sexuality of female adolescents in a Vietnamese rural village is constructed under global forces with effects that may lead these young women to transgress expected moral limits. Third, we investigate the transformations of family relations between rural daughters and their parents when these young unmarried women are employed in global garment production. Fourth, we examine the effects of the global sub-contracting system, as they transcend national boundaries of Vietnam and the U.S., on garment workers (in Vietnam) and Vietnamese American electronic workers (in California), both on the factory floor and at home.

Diversifying Livelihood and Lifestyles under the Impact of Market Integration and Globalization
Irene Norlund, Roskilde University
In the 1990s, Vietnam opened up for deepening of the doi moi reform agenda leading to increased liberalization and integration in the world market. While the poverty level has been reduced substantially, social differentiation is at the same time increasing. The cooperation with multilateral and bilateral donors has pushed in the direction of liberalizing and globalizing the economy.
The paper aims to analyze some of the changes taking place at the community level in four different regions. Changes in livelihoods depend on wider socio-economic systems in each region and integration in the global economy. The main argument is that the household and its members react differently depending on the type of crops, labor, and markets available in each region. Labor is migrating to the cities as a solution in some cases, including work in the informal sector and employment as casual labor, with crop diversification, and off-farm employment being more important in other cases. Women and men have different options for sustaining the livelihoods of the household, and new lifestyles are emerging with quite strong generational conflicts.
Some changes are taking place in most of the regions where education, health, and access to credits are important measures in the government's poverty strategies. Policies in social fields create in some cases more opportunities for the poor, but in others are less useful for the households with sources of livelihoods depending on their own initiatives. The communities are diversifying in poorer and more affluent households, which the government's poverty strategies are not aiming to tackle.

Global Changes and Local Boundaries: Female Sexuality in Rural Vietnam
Helle Rydstrom, University of Linkoping
Vietnam's increased integration into the global market economy entails rapid and dynamic changes that foster new ways of acting, interacting, and rendering the world meaningful. This paper addresses the ways in which ongoing processes of transformation in contemporary Vietnam are epitomized by the ambivalence and ambiguity with which female sexuality is imbued. Female sexuality is ideally restricted to marriage and motherhood, meaning that females' premarital or extramarital sexual relations tend to be associated with the category of social evils (te nan xa hoi). Being vague in definition, the category of social evils broadly is recognized as powers of demoralization that have been introduced to Vietnamese society by virtue of the country's increased involvement in a global and morally polluted world.
By drawing on two periods of long-term anthropological fieldwork (1994-1995 and 2000-2001) in a northern rural Vietnamese commune, this paper highlights the ways in which female sexuality, in a local field site, is constructed as a desire which is deeply intertwined with anxieties about the forces of a global and poisonous culture (van hoa doc hai) that may lead young women to transgress moral limits, for example, by having premarital sex. For many rural female adolescents, sexuality thus means a need of self-imposed and governmentally-imposed control in order to guarantee appropriate morality in young women. For others, though, sexuality means the involvement in premarital sexual relations and, by so being, a crossing of moral boundaries.

Globalization, Work, and Daughters in Vietnam
Kate Pendakis, University of Western Ontario; Danièle Bélanger, University of Western Ontario
This paper examines how gender and culture are reshaped through economic globalization. In neighboring countries of East and Southeast Asia, research points to both negative and positive effects of globalization on women. Among the criticized outcomes of globalization has been the increasing circulation and displacement of women for domestic work and for the sex industry. On the other hand, women have also enjoyed new work opportunities that have led to an increase in their earning power and financial autonomy.
In this paper, we study the relationships between the status of daughters, globalization, and new work opportunities for young unmarried women in Vietnam. Since Vietnam's implementation of economic reforms and recent incorporation into the world market, there has been a rapid expansion of export-led industries. Our focus is on the garment industry in particular, which relies heavily on the labor of unmarried rural daughters. Given the potential for an increase in the earning power of daughters, we examine whether and to what extent intergenerational relations and the value of daughters to parents are being reshaped. Research documenting the importance of having a son amongst rural Vietnamese parents indicates the superior economic value that is attributed to sons. New work opportunities for rural daughters, however, might contribute to daughters' negotiations of new roles, identities, and strategies for increasing their value to their parents. Based on existing data and on qualitative interviews, we examine how gender and culture are being reshaped and renegotiated by rural daughters and their parents.

Global Assembly and Gender Negotiations: Vietnamese Garment and Vietnamese-American Electronic Workers
Angie Ngoc Tran, California State University, Monterey Bay
The fall of Saigon in 1975 led to the formation of Vietnamese diasporas in the U.S., especially in California where many Vietnamese Americans joined the electronic industry workforce in San Jose (dubbed Silicon Valley). Focusing on assembly home-working, I examine similarities and differences between these two industries in production, work conditions, and gender negotiations. To what extent do Vietnamese American home-workers in the high-tech electronic industry share with Vietnamese workers in the low-tech, labor-intensive garment industry in Vietnam, considering different cultural and economic environments? How are gender expectations practiced on the shop floor and at home? How are female and male workers affected differently by flexible global subcontracting, which dictates these two industries?
I find that subcontracting and home-working are alive and well not only in Vietnam but also in big U.S. cities. While the electronic and garment industries are different in capital and skill intensiveness, they share some surprising transnational similarities in global production, pay structure, work conditions, gender expectations, and division of labor. However, differences exist when examining reasons for those Vietnamese Americans' participation in home-working, and the risks they faced working in close proximity with toxic materials.
I integrate secondary and primary sources, including in-depth interviews with Vietnamese American electronic home-workers in Silicon Valley (2000-2003) and garment/textile workers in Vietnam (1996-2003). The analysis expands beyond the shop floor and into these workers' homes. Their narratives serve as testimonies to explain varying effects of global production processes and gender negotiations on their lives, both at work and at home.

Session 162: GIS in Historical-Geographical Analysis: Case Studies from Japan and Vietnam: Sponsored by the Early Modern Japan Network

Organizer and Chair: Philip C. Brown, Ohio State University
Keywords: GIS (Geographic Information Systems), geography, historical geography, geo-spatial analysis, cartographic analysis.

History and geography have had a long and close relationship, and while it can be argued that this relationship lapsed during the 1960s to 1980s, once again scholars from both fields are showing a robust interest in each other's work. Rapid movement in this direction may be dated from the late 1980s with the increased interest in historical maps, developments reflected in the early work of David Woodward (for the field of cartography), Hugh Cortazzi (for Japan), and others. At the same time, new computer-based techniques for sampling the earth's qualities-topography, natural resources, etc.-and even subterranean forms laid a foundation for Geographical Information Systems software and related technologies.
Although initially stimulated by interests of military defense concerns, Earth Sciences, and Architectural Landscape specialists, geographers and historians alike (along with anthropologists, archeologists, economists) now actively explore the potential for GIS to help us understand our world. The papers in this session are all linked by efforts to apply this social science/natural science approach to issues of historical-geographic and historical interest. They are case studies of the ways in which GIS can be employed for a variety of useful purposes.
While a number of applications of GIS may well fall into the category of "eye candy," the papers assembled here involve attempts to use this new technology as an analytical tool. Loren Siebert (Geography, University of Akron) has been developing a digital cartographic history of the Tokyo region (mid-nineteenth century to the present) and spent the past two years in Tokyo at the National Institute of Historical Literature, Division of Manuscripts, working with archivist Koichi Watanabe (NIJL) to extend that work ("Mapping Settlement Patterns and Characteristics around Edo in the 1800s Using a Geographic Information System [GIS]"). Philip Brown, History, Ohio State University, found that many explanations for the rise of corporate forms of village landholding in early modern Japan relied explicitly on assumptions about the frequency and severity of floods and/or landslides; he has begun to use GIS as a means of investigating the relationship between the natural environment and the presence of village control over who farms what piece of land ("Arable as Commons: Land Reallocation and the Natural Environment in Early Modern Japan"). Brian Zottoli, UNESCO Consultant and Ph.D. candidate in History, University of Michigan, began to employ GIS to map and analyze cadastral rolls in pre-colonial Vietnam for his dissertation on state-local relations ("Equal Fields, Different Charters: Vietnam's Communal Farmers before the French"). Brian Ostrowski (Ph.D. candidate in History, Cornell University) examines spatial influences on the development of early Christian missionary efforts in the seventeenth century ("GIS Approaches to the Early History of Christianity in Vietnam").

King's Law: State and Village in Precolonial Vietnam
Brian Zottoli, University of Michigan
"The king's law stops at the village gate." This proverb echoes through Vietnamese society and has helped create the sense of the Vietnamese village as a unit unto itself, even one that has preserved the essence of being Vietnamese (against the ever changing superstructure). Beginning in the fifteenth century, Dai Viet transformed and centralized its government, for the first time seeking to establish a direct contact between capital and village. The unification of Dai Nam over a much larger territory and the shift of the capital from the north to Hue in the center during the early nineteenth century brought a new effort by the central state to control the Vietnamese countryside. This process, taking place mainly in the 1830s as Minh-mang sought to integrate his entire land using the Qing model, came to be a form of central/local negotiation over the state's access. The villages acted to meet the government efforts partway and to maintain a degree of their autonomy. The result was a set of documents usually seen as local in origin-land records, village charters, and other such. We should interpret these as the results of the village/state negotiation-reflecting the tensions of the attempted political, economic, and cultural integration.
Drawing on GIS analysis of village and dynastic records, I investigate the social and political structures of the localities and their relationship to the Neo-Confucian bureaucracy. The resulting negotiations are reflected in patterns of public and private landholding and in the makeup of village and district elites. In particular, I examine the situations before and after the centralizing reforms of Minh-mang. During these years, village charters and other mechanisms served as means for the centralizing state to bring localities into a greater degree of conformity with the set of overarching normative patterns while allowing for localized cultural variation. How did the village/state negotiation play itself out?

GIS Approaches to the Early History of Christianity in Vietnam
Brian Ostrowski, Cornell University
GIS technology offers several tools for historians of religion and of the history of missions in particular. This presentation uses the example of Christianity in seventeenth-century Vietnam as a basis for exploring some of the uses of GIS technology in writing and teaching about the history of religion.
Christianity took root in Vietnam during the first half of the seventeenth century, a time of diversity and experimentation in forms of religious devotion in Vietnam generally that also saw the rise of new or previously obscure forms of Buddhist and Taoist devotion. It was the Jesuits who took the lead in Christian missionary work in Vietnam at this time, establishing the first sustained missions in both Cochinchina and Tonkin.
This presentation discusses how GIS technology can provide an understanding of the geospatial orientation of the early Vietnamese Christian communities and certain factors that influenced the development of these communities. First, it probes why the Jesuits succeeded or failed in certain geographical areas, suggesting how variables such as war and economic conditions affected rates of conversion. Second, the presentation addresses the relative roles played by the Jesuit missionaries and indigenous Christian spiritual leaders, showing how the work of these two groups of individuals affected the growth of Christian communities. Third, the uses of GIS technology in understanding both the causes and the impacts of official support and repression of Christianity are considered.
The presentation concludes by assessing the types of problems that historians of religion can expect GIS technology to help solve, and by noting certain limitations of GIS technology in the study of the history of religion.

Session 182: Representing Traumatic Captivity in Modern Vietnamese and Chinese Literature

Organizer: Yenna Wu, University of California, Riverside
Chair: Ginger C. Hsu, University of California, Riverside
Discussants: Chia-lin Pao Tao, University of Arizona; Michael S. Duke, University of British Columbia
Keywords: prison, trauma, modern, Vietnam, China.

This panel explores prison writings from Vietnam and China about traumatic events and features memoirs, fictional works, and poetry. These works offer points of comparison with memories of traumatic events in other cultures, such as those of the Soviet Gulag and the Holocaust. Prof. Lam examines the cultural politics surrounding the publication of prison writing following the Vietnam War, and the impact on American readerships, as well as the role of a politics of democratic amnesty in literary production and distribution. Critiquing Foucault's claim that modern-day bureaucracies have long since discarded the dimension of public spectacle in the punishment of criminality in favor of the surveillance and regimentation of convicts in isolation from society, Prof. Williams argues that public ritual may well continue to play a significant role in even a highly bureaucratized criminal justice system, especially when its rules of criminal procedure are underdeveloped, as in the PRC. Critically utilizing Western theories on trauma, Prof. Wu analyzes various forms of literary representation of traumatic experience, psychological pathology, and "post-laogai syndrome" in some Chinese prison camp fiction and memoirs. All three papers in this border-crossing panel examine representations of the contemporary prison in China and Vietnam as an often overlooked barometer of state-society relations.

Trauma and Memory: The Three Sides of the Vietnam War
Mariam Beevi Lam, University of California, Riverside
This paper offers an introduction to the published forms of prison writing following the Vietnam War under various authorships and competing political stances. It begins with a brief perusal of U.S. veteran literary history and moves quickly to the more recent poetry by Vietnamese writers, both those of Southern Vietnamese officers and civilians imprisoned in the re-education camps of the Socialist Republic following the war and those of the Viet Cong soldiers held by the U.S. and the Army of the Republic of (South) Vietnam throughout the war. Three questions are answered. Why have so many of these works appeared in recent years? Why have mainstream U.S. presses stepped up publication of works by former "enemies" of the U.S.? In contrast, why has there been very limited publication of the Southern Vietnamese (compatriot) prison writing in the U.S., except by smaller community presses? The second goal of the paper is to unpack the cultural politics surrounding the publication of these texts to describe what crucial social and political suturing they accomplish for their American audiences and to examine the role of a politics of democratic amnesty in literary production. Finally, the paper wishes to call attention to the dependence of these discourses upon a gender-coded rhetoric of internationalism, which affects the domestic political agency of ethnic minorities within particular nation-states as well as the global political efficacy of developing nation-states.

Session 183: INDIVIDUAL PAPERS: Nature and the State in Asia

Organizer and Chair: Mary M. Steedly, Harvard University
"Forests Are Gold": A History of Nature Conservation in Vietnam
Pam McElwee, Yale University

State-dictated nature conservation has a relatively short history in Vietnam. In French Indochina the colonial government created no official "national parks" within Vietnam, in contrast to the British in other parts of Asia and Africa. French administrators concentrated instead on regulations for managing "sustainable" yields from forest and game reserves, and limiting "native" harvesting of wildlife and timber. Some colonial hill stations also served functional roles as sites of managed and conserved nature during this period. State interest in a more ecologically-centered view of nature conservation increased only in post-colonial Vietnam. President Ho Chi Minh himself personally dedicated Cuc Phuong National Park, Vietnam's first national park, in 1962. He said then, "Forests are gold. If we know how to conserve and use them well, they will be very precious." Since then, his phrase Rung La Vang (forests are gold) has become a slogan for various state conservation plans, and more than 100 state-managed national parks and nature reserves have been demarcated. Yet these plans have not stopped the trends of deforestation and a reduction in wildlife levels throughout the country, and the transition to a market economy in the last fifteen years seems only to have increased them. Based on both colonial archival records and ethnographic fieldwork, this paper will explore the checkered history of nature conservation in Vietnam and look particularly at how management of national parks and nature reserves remains fraught with controversy in post-colonial states, even in areas with few vestiges of colonial nature making.

Session 186: The Organized Body: Medical Issues and Organizations in Vietnam and Cambodia

Organizer and Chair: Michele Thompson, Southern Connecticut State University
Discussant: David Bello, Southern Connecticut State University
Keywords: Vietnam, Cambodia, medicine, organizations.

This panel will examine, from a variety of scholarly disciplines, the complex interface between medicine and medical issues and the growth and development of health care organizations in Vietnam and Cambodia. Annick Guénel will discuss the Pasteur Institutes, which laid the foundation for organized Western scientific research and education in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. She will focus on the Vietnamese actors at these institutes, their participation in the work done there, and the post-colonial development of the institutes within a totally Vietnamese framework. John Marston will present the story of an institution, the Monks Hospital of Cambodia, which was founded as an alternative to the secular French health care system in Cambodia. The hospital represented an accommodation between the secular and the religious and this accommodation is still a point of debate in Cambodia. Michele Thompson's paper will analyze the relationship between Vietnamese educated in Western science and medicine and those trained in Vietnamese traditional medicine and pharmacology, their cooperation within the Viet Minh Medical Corps, and the development of a national health care system in Vietnam which "accommodates" both systems of health care. Jennifer Sowerwine's essay will challenge the picture the Vietnamese State presents to the international community regarding its health care system and will emphasize the role played by ethno-medicine in the health care of the majority of the population of Vietnam.

Traditional Vietnamese Medicine, the Viet Minh Medical Corps, and the Development of the National Healthcare System in Vietnam
Michele Thompson, Southern Connecticut State University
In 1994 the Vietnamese Army published a book, Mot Sô Rau Dai An Ðuoc Ò Viet Nam (Wild Edible Vegetables of Vietnam) "to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the People's Army of Vietnam." 1994 was the fortieth anniversary of the Battle of Ðien Biên Phu and there were many publications celebrating the Vietnamese military. The book was compiled by a military research group which investigates the properties and uses of wild plants. Founded in 1954, the group has produced several manuals intended to help Vietnamese troops live off the land. This information is both medical and logistical, intended to enable soldiers to ingest sufficient calories to survive and to prevent and treat various medical problems with sources available in the wild. The plants are medicine as well as food and the discussion is imbued with Vietnamese traditional pharmacological lore, thus reflecting the structure and organization of the Vietnamese Military Medical Corps (Quân Y Quân Ðoi Nhân Dân Viet Nam, hereafter Quân Y). In its recruitment, training, and standard medical practices the Quân Y is an amalgam of traditional Vietnamese and Western medicine. The national health care system of Vietnam is the direct organizational descendent of the Quân Y and is also a mixture of Western and traditional Vietnamese medical practices. Thus, an understanding of the Viet Minh Medical Corps has implications for understanding the current health care system. This essay will discuss the founding of the Viet Minh Medical Corps and the development of the national health care system of Vietnam.

The Pasteur Institutes in Vietnam: A Long History
Annick Guénel, CRNS, Paris
This paper aims to examine the role the Pasteur Institutes, formed in Vietnam during the colonial period, played in the emergence of a national scientific community there. A brief survey of their development, organization, work, and their location within the colonial health system will allow us to reconsider the opposition between "centre" and "periphery," which has long served to describe scientific practices in Europe and the colonies. To what extent did Vietnamese participate in the Pasteur Institutes' work during the colonial period? What was their access to higher forms of scientific education? These questions lead us to the development of national health institutes with the advent of independence. If the history of this question differed in Vietnam for almost thirty years due to postcolonial differences between the North and the South, the successors to the colonial institutes, reunited within one department, are once again combined into the international network of the Pasteur Institutes and they have maintained, to varying degrees, the strong influences of the French model.

Ethno-Medicine and the Development of the Modern Vietnamese State
Jennifer Sowerwine, University of California, Berkeley
The contemporary representation of Vietnam to the international community is one of a modern society that is rapidly progressing towards a market economy based on scientific principles. Vietnam's health care strategy equally champions the communist state's successes in effectively maintaining a healthy population through a combination of the state's outreach campaigns and innovations in health care technology. This modern front belies the highly integrated nature of health care today, which combines both scientific and ethno-medicine in treating the populace. It also masks the importance of traditional, or ethno-medicine in effectively treating the Vietnamese population during the tumultuous warfare of the twentieth century and the role traditional medicine played in the foundation of the modern Vietnamese state. This paper explores the role that ethno-medicine played in laying the foundation of the modern Vietnamese health care system as well as the significant role it plays in meeting primary health care needs of much of the rural population. This paper will attempt to destabilize commonsense notions about the divide between traditional and modern medicine by reflecting on the Vietnamese experience.

Session 202: China and Vietnam in an Era of Normalcy

Organizer: Brantly Womack, University of Virginia
Chair: Katherine Kaup, Furman University
Discussants: Shuxian Wei, Center for Economic and Political Study of Southeast Asia; William S. Turley, Southern Illinois University
Keywords: interarea, political science, international relations, economics, China, Vietnam, ASEAN.

In February 1999, the secretaries of the communist parties of China and Vietnam, Jiang Zemin and Le Kha Phieu, met in Beijing and formulated a "16 Word Statement" to be the general line of their bilateral relationship. China and Vietnam should enjoy "long-term stable, future-oriented, good-neighborly and all-round cooperative relations." Since 1999 the "16 Word Statement" has been repeated and elaborated by the new leadership in both countries. The new era of normalcy has been marked by treaties regarding the land border and the Tonkin Gulf as well as vast increases in trade and tourism. Moreover, the agreement in November 2002 to establish an ASEAN-China Free Trade Area situates the Sino-Vietnamese relationship in a regional context of increasingly active cooperation.
This panel will address the transformation of the Sino-Vietnamese relationship since 1990 and the implications of normalcy for domestic politics, bilateral relations and regional relations. Brantly Womack addresses the progress of the relationship from normalization in 1990-1999 to normalcy, highlighting the challenges of managing an asymmetric relationship. Xiaosong Gu describes the concrete changes in the contemporary relationship. Alice Ba analyzes the shift in China's interactions with ASEAN and consequent impacts on Sino-Vietnamese relations. Together, these papers present a comprehensive overview of the origins, effects, and prospects of the new era in Sino-Vietnamese relations. William Turley and Shuxian Wei will pull them together in their commentaries.

Normalization, Normalcy, and Asymmetry in Sino-Vietnamese Relations
Brantly Womack, University of Virginia
The process of normalizing Sino-Vietnamese relations was begun at a secret summit meeting in Chengdu in September 1990 and formalized in Beijing in November 1991. Normalization ended thirteen years of hostility and was a prerequisite to the completion of regional integration in Southeast Asia. But the agreement to end conflict and to avoid it in the future also marked the beginning of an evolution in Sino-Vietnamese relations, and by 1999 the expectation of peace and economic integration became embedded in the relationship. From 1998 to 2001 Sino-Vietnamese trade tripled, and almost one-third of foreign tourists in Vietnam are Chinese. Nevertheless, the structural asymmetries between China and Vietnam are not overcome by normalcy. Rather, the management of disagreements has become institutionalized.
This paper is part of a comprehensive research project on Sino-Vietnamese relations and the problems posed by asymmetry. It presents an analysis of the course of developments in the political and economic relations from 1991 to 2004. It also pays particular attention to the effects of the vulnerability of Vietnam to China's greater capacities in the framework of a peaceful relationship. In contrast to theories of international relations that assume that larger countries dominate smaller countries unless the smaller countries balance against them, this research emphasizes the importance of negotiation in normal asymmetric relations and the role of regional relations in buffering asymmetry.

Vietnam's Relations with China: The ASEAN Factor
Alice D. Ba, University of Delaware
In 1995 Vietnam joined the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). On both their parts, interest in Vietnamese membership in ASEAN reflected important concerns about Chinese influence in Southeast Asia. Concerns during the first half of the 1990s focused especially on China's military modernization program and increased activities in the Spratly Islands. China, meanwhile, was wary that Vietnam's membership-and the expansion of ASEAN membership and processes in general-were directed at containing China. Since then, however, China's relations with both Vietnam and ASEAN as a whole have undergone significant changes and improvement. While important concerns about Chinese power and influence remain, the intensification of political, economic, and institutional linkages between China and the others has also led to a stability of expectations about their regional roles and relations.
This paper traces developments and trends in Sino-Vietnamese relations in the context of Sino-ASEAN relations. It pays special attention to China's efforts to engage and improve relations with ASEAN, especially since the latter half of the 1990s, and how such efforts have affected and shaped Vietnam's particular relations with China. In this context of improving Sino-ASEAN relations, this paper also offers a discussion of the evolving role of ASEAN in Vietnam's ongoing negotiation of relations with China.

Building Bridges: Reform and Openness in China and Vietnam
Xiaosong Gu, Guangxi Academy of Social Sciences
Both China and Vietnam are underdeveloped socialist countries. The command economies pursued by both during the 1950s and 1960s encountered increasing difficulties by the early 1980s. The leadership in both nations recognized the need for reform and openness and began major reforms in the 1980s. At the beginning of the reforms, Sino-Vietnamese relations were still antagonistic and Vietnam leaned toward the Soviet Union for support. Vietnam's reforms gradually deviated from the Soviet model. As the global communist movement slumped into a low tide in the late 1980s, it became of the utmost importance for Vietnam to develop friendly ties with China in order to strengthen the socialist road and communist leadership. Great achievements have been reached in Sino-Vietnamese relations over the past twenty years. In order to maintain these strides in the development of economic and state power, both countries need to continue the reform and openness policy and foster friendly relations.
This paper builds on and refines my research, which has produced more than four books and several articles on Vietnamese politics. It traces the primary factors involved in the renormalization of Sino-Vietnamese relations as well as the key opportunities and challenges this era of normalcy poses to each nation.

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