Vietnam Related Panels and Paper Abstracts at the Association for Asian Studies Conference 1996

Session 39: The State in Southeast Asia

Organizer and Chair: Craig J. Reynolds, Australian National University
Discussant: Aihwa Ong, University of California, Berkeley

In most history writing about Southeast Asian states and societies "the state" is not problematized and is simply taken for granted, as Adrian Vickers has noted in a recent critique of a project called "The Last Stand of Autonomous States" (Vickers, Asian Studies Review, July 1994). This comment holds for the standard histories of Southeast Asia (Steinberg, In Search of Southeast Asia, 1987; Tarling, Cambridge History of SEA, 1992) as much as for the journal literature. Some of the disquiet felt by one of the reviewers of The Cambridge History, when he rues "the general state of thinking about Southeast Asian history," doubtless has to do with the absence of healthy and constructive debate about such issues as state-society relations.
This interdisciplinary panel has been put together in order to address in a broad, comparative perspective the effect of certain constructions of the state on the way histories of the region have been written. The four papers strive to deal with questions of agency, identity, globalization, and relations of power as these relate to the way Southeast Asia is represented in the historical and social scientific literature. While it would be impossible to cover the region as a whole, we have taken care to look at case studies from across the region, both the mainland and the archipelago.

Nationalism, Revolutionary Socialism, and Post-Socialist Reform: Comparative Reflections on State-Society Relations in Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos
Thaveeporn Vasavakul, Australian National University
This paper proposes to examine the state, society, and their political, economic, and cultural relations in Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia from the period of revolution to the period of reform. Writings on socialist revolutions, revolutionary change, and post-socialist reform in Southeast Asia have hardly used the concept "state" as an analytical tool to discuss state-society relations in these countries from a comparative perspective.
The paper compares and contrasts the two generations of socialist regimes in Indochina, the 1945 generation, mainly consisting of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam, and the 1975 generation consisting of the Republic of Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia. It focuses on the following aspects. First, it discusses revolutionary crises in these four cases, addressing both international and domestic factors which caused the collapse of the old regime and the outbreak of the revolution. Second, it examines state-building and nation-building during the post-revolutionary period in these countries focusing on the redefinition of economic, political, and cultural relations between the state and society. Third, it discusses post-socialist reform, comparing and contrasting problems related to state/nation-building and their impact on the sequences of reform.

Session 88: Transforming Asian Socialism: China and Vietnam Compared: Part One (See Session 111)

Organizer: Anita Chan, Australian National University
Chair: Mark Selden, SUNY, Binghampton
Discussant: James E. Nickum, East-West Center

While the former Soviet Union and Eastern European block have succeeded in establishing new political institutions, their economies tend to be in a shambles and some countries are being ripped apart by internal ethnic strife. Meanwhile, China and Vietnam, two of Asia's principal socialist countries, are enjoying economic booms while significantly changing their economic systems but without undergoing the convulsions of tumultuous political or social upheavals.
To start to understand this broad difference, the authors of the papers in this proposed set of panels think that we need to have a deeper appreciation for the similarities and differences between China and Vietnam. Virtually no comparative work has been done on these countries, particularly since they both began major economic transformations in the late 1970s-early 1980s. The papers in the proposed two panels compare China and Vietnam on each of eight themes. They are the result of collaborative analyses by specialists from three continents. The authors draw on their own primary research in the two countries as well as an array of pertinent secondary resources.

The Latecomer Notion and its Difficulties in the Chinese and Vietnamese Economic Reforms
Alexander Woodside, University of British Columbia
Chinese comparisons of contemporary Chinese and Indian economic reforms are numerous, and have important latent functions in Chinese reform thought itself. But comparisons of Chinese and Vietnamese economic reforms are rare in China and perhaps too sensitive for extensive public discussion in Vietnam. This paper will argue nonetheless that there are important intellectual stakes in the comparative study of Chinese and Vietnamese reforms. It will then look at the reformers' particular notion of themselves as "latecomers" whose modernization involves the assimilation of external capital and technology and market "models"; the changing legends of Japanese success which lie behind this notion in both Beijing and Hanoi; and some of the difficulties of the latecomer notion when it is applied in a Chinese or Vietnamese political environment.

Asian Socialism's Open Doors: Guangzhou and Ho Chi Minh City
William Turley, Southern Illinois University
Brantly Womack, University of Virginia
A comparison of Guangzhou (Canton) and Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) is immediately attractive for two reasons. First, the cities seem similar in many respects. They are both major urban centers, the leading metropolises of the southern halves of their respective countries, and the most advanced centers of international openness. Second, they are each the leading cases of the growing autonomy and diversification of both countries, and therefore they would each merit special treatment in a general study of modernization and openness in China and Vietnam. Nevertheless, they are very different places in very different countries, and the comparison should help to understand these differences as well as to explore the similarities.
The paper is organized in five sections. The first discusses the absolute and relative masses of Guangzhou and Ho Chi Minh City, and the differences in their national roles. The second and third sections narrate the political and economic histories of Guangzhou and Ho Chi Minh City, the second in the pre-reform periods, and the third in the current, post-reform period. The fourth section addresses the changed role of intermediate governments such as Guangdong/Guangzhou and Ho Chi Minh City in the new political and economic context being created by reform. We distinguish between decentralization, which involves granting greater freedom of activity to lower units of government, and decontrol, which involves the loosening of restrictions within a level of government and in that level of government's oversight of societal activities. The fifth and final section treats the similarities and differences in international openness.

Wealth, Power, and Poverty in the Transition to Market Economies: The Process of Socio-Economic Differentiation in Rural China and Northern Vietnam
Hy Van Luong, University of Toronto
Jonathan Unger, Australian National University
Both Vietnam and China have experienced rural economic reforms that in most respects are parallel. But the consequences have not been similar thus far in terms of their socio-economic effects. This paper seeks to show how several systemic differences in the interplay of governmental policies and community processes between China and northern Vietnam have led to greater intra-community differentiation and the faster emergence of a composite monied class in rural China than in rural northern Vietnam.
One set of reasons involves the weakness of rural industry in Vietnam in comparison to China. This means that such rural enterprises in Vietnam provide employment to a considerably smaller number of rural workers, that they employ far fewer workers from outside local communities, and that rural accumulation of wealth and the economic differentiation between households is far more limited than in China.
Also, government programs in the two countries differ. In general, the dynamics of government policies and community pressures in northern Vietnam helped to contain the wealth gap within villages, while in the case of China, the lack of strong community pressures in face of "bet-on-the-strong" governmental policies and a two-tiered price system for grain and other staple crops have had regressive effects on income distribution in communities.

Session 92: Individual Papers: Traditions and Modernities in Contemporary Southeast Asia

Organizer and Chair: Barbara Watson Andaya, University of Hawai'i

The Game of Hui: An Economic Analysis of Private Financial Arrangements in Vietnam
Trien T. Nguyen, University of Waterloo
Hui is a popular form of private financial arrangement in Vietnam, similar to the Chinese concept of mutual-aid societies, which provides outlets for both credit demands and investment opportunities. Due to the lack of a fully-developed formal financial sector in the economy, typical financial institutions such as commercial banks, stock brokerages, investment houses, credit unions, or savings and loans associations, have not been usually available to many average Vietnamese households. Consequently, for centuries, Vietnamese households, rural villagers and city dwellers alike, have resorted to Hui as an alternative to local "loan sharks" or investment banks for their financial needs. Because of the locality aspect of the Hui game and the risk involved in putting up money for loans in exchange for interest earned, people are hardly willing to engage in a Hui game with total strangers. A brief account of Hui practices in rural Vietnam has been given in classic works such as James Hendry's "The Small World of Khánh Hâu" and Gerald Hickey's "Village in Vietnam." This paper provides a formal analysis of the Hui game within the framework of modern economic theory. Economic concepts such as efficiencies of the game, optimal bidding strategies, and characterizations of the solution for players are defined. Numerical computer simulations of the game have been obtained and their implications are discussed. The role of Hui in the development of a modern financial sector in the economy is also explored.

Session 108: The Transformation of Vietnamese Political Economy in Asian Regional Context: Case Studies of the State, Firms, and Foreign Capital in the Vietnamese Textile and Garment Industries (Sponsored by the Vietnam Studies Group)

Organizer: Ngoc (Angie) Tran, University of Southern California
Chair: Hy V. Luong, University of Toronto
Discussant: David W. P. Elliott, Pomona College

Vietnamese political economy has been undergoing transformation since the economic reform process started in the late 1980s, shifting from a very high level of state intervention (a command economy) to a lower level (a more market-oriented system). Within the context of global restructuring and economic liberalization in the Asian Pacific region, Vietnam has been facing opportunities as well as challenges to integrate with other regional economies and to position itself in the world economy. Using a comparative and interdisciplinary framework, the three panelists analyze the Vietnamese Textile and Garment Industries (VTGI) in relation to other Asian textile and garment industries, and examine how both Vietnamese state and non-state sectors respond to an important presence of foreign capital.
David Smith provides a global perspective, detailing the effects of global restructuring on the garment industry in three Asian countries (South Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam). He illuminates the complexities and nuances of the shifting of garment production away from already-industrialized countries to "offshore" production sites in the developing countries in Southeast Asia. Ngoc (Angie) Tran integrates the developmental state and global commodity chains frameworks to analyze the interactions between the Vietnamese government, domestic firms and foreign capital. From the five-month field research in Vietnam, she presents findings assessing the developmental role of the Vietnamese state within the context of the global garment industry. From the context of the Vietnamese political economy, Hy V. Luong examines the competitiveness of state and non-state industrial enterprises, and provides an in-depth analysis of the interactions among domestic actors, especially the development of the private sector in the VTGI. He also presents findings from interviews with many firm managers and workers throughout Vietnam.
For the first time, an AAS panel focuses explicitly on the political economy of a major industry in Vietnam with concrete findings from primary research in a comparative and interdisciplinary framework. Moreover, it touches on larger issues about global restructuring, state in transition and developmental state relevant to many other countries.

The Contemporary Restructuring of East Asian Apparel Production: Implications for the Vietnamese Garment Industry
David A. Smith, University of California, Irvine
The textile and garment industries are extremely interesting cases of global economic restructuring. This paper illustrates the factors promoting the shift of apparel production (and other light industries) away from core and semiperipheral regions in the world economy, illuminates some of the complexities and nuances of that process, and discusses the implications of this for the emergence and consolidation of export-oriented apparel manufacturing in Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries. My story begins in South Korea, where apparel manufacturing, which grew rapidly during the 1970s and 1980s, faces an uncertain future in the 1990s, due to escalating wages and severe labor shortages. This forces Korean garment makers to seek "offshore" production sites. Southeast Asia, along with Central America and the Caribbean, became attractive targets for Korean apparel investment. In the 1980s, Indonesia, with its cheap and abundant labor and a state eager to welcome foreign investment, was a powerful magnet for garment capital from Korean and the other Asian NICs. Despite some recent wage pressure and labor unrest, this country (along with China) seems well-positioned to continue as a major global "sourcing" area. More recently, Vietnam, with a nominally Communist regime pushing a policy of "market liberalization," and gradually improving relations with its old enemy the United States, appears poised to become a big player in world apparel production. Garment manufacturers from South Korea and elsewhere have begun to set up factories in Vietnam to take advantage of the country's large, industrious, and extremely cheap labor force. Dealing with a rapidly changing global apparel production and marketing system presents special challenges to the Vietnamese state, local capital, and workers.

Can the Vietnamese State Play a Developmental Role? Integrating the Vietnamese Textile and Garment Industries into the Global Economy
Ngoc (Angie) Tran, University of Southern California
This paper presents findings from five months of field research in Vietnam. It examines the extent to which the Vietnamese government has tried to be a developmental state in facilitating the development of Vietnamese Textile and Garment Industries (VTGI), especially in terms of upgrading garment export and vertical integration. The context is the globalization of the textile and garment industry in general, and a rapid economic transition in Vietnam (characterized by a shift from a relatively-closed command economy to a more open market-oriented economy) in particular.
This paper integrates the developmental state and the global commodity chains (GCCs) frameworks in analyzing the relationships between the Vietnamese government and both domestic and foreign actors in the VTGI. It goes beyond the "state versus market" debates by showing that state and firms are intertwined, demonstrating how the Vietnamese government is involved in the VTGI at both production and policy levels. Moreover, it analyzes how the VTGI is linked to the global economy through the triangle manufacturing (Vietnamese producers, foreign buyers, foreign middlemen), and how government policies address challenges and opportunities arising from this arrangement.
Within the integrated framework, this paper presents findings from interviews with government officials and over 60 firm managers, analyzing specific interactions between Vietnamese actors (from both state and non-state sectors) and foreign actors. Moreover, it assesses the developmental role of the state through an examination of the effectiveness of specific state policies intended to promote the production and export of textile and garment products in the context of the global garment industry.

The Competitiveness of State and Non-State Enterprises and the Transformation of the Textile and Garment Industries in Vietnam
Hy V. Luong, University of Toronto
This paper examines the competitiveness of state and non-state industrial enterprises in the Vietnamese garment and textile industries, as Vietnam undergoes economic restructuring and becomes more integrated with regional economies in East and Southeast Asia. While the more capital-intensive textile industry has encountered major difficulties and has not been vertically well integrated with the labour-intensive garment industry, the latter has grown considerably in the 1990s. Vietnamese garment firms have primarily provided labour, while foreign firms provide designs, virtually all materials, and quality control for foreign markets.
Within the domestic context of the Vietnamese political economy, despite the oft-quoted inefficiency of the state sector, state enterprises in these two industries have held their own grounds vis-à-vis the non-state sector. Among their advantages are the easier access to capital and land for production purposes. Within the latter, private firms have grown at the expense of cooperatives. Even in the more capital-intensive textile industry, some private firms have prospered in their own niches through a flexible production strategy, including subcontracting to selected household producers for semi-finished products, and providing high-quality raw materials and giving the products finishing touches before distribution to domestic and international markets. In the more labour-intensive garment industry, private firms also build their growth strategy on greater production flexibility and competitive pricing. They have grown faster in southern Vietnam where industrial entrepreneurs have a long tradition of sensitivity to the world market.
The paper is based on survey and interview data from 50 northern and southern Vietnamese firms of different sizes, and from approximately 1,200 workers in these firms. The paper also examines the theoretical implications of the Vietnamese data on the competitiveness of these enterprises in relation to the neoclassical economic tradition, dependency theory, the statist perspective, and the institutionalist approach.

Session 111: Transforming Asian Socialism: China and Vietnam Compared: Part Two (See Session 88)

Organizer and Chair: Anita Chan, Australian National University
Discussant: Bruce Koppel, East-West Center
Political Reform In China and Vietnam
Barrett L. McCormick, Marquette University

This paper compares the political response to economic reform in China and in Vietnam. Both of these countries have tried to maintain key Leninist institutions while promoting economic reforms that have dramatically changed the political landscape. Market-oriented reforms have created an expanding sphere of relatively autonomous social and economic activity. An increasing portion of the population is no longer directly dependent on the state for employment and other social services and necessities. Media are increasingly dominated by messages that may not explicitly contradict official ideology, but unlike former times, play little role in promoting it. Foreign influences are increasingly evident. Institutions such as party committees and political study that formerly kept watch on society and asserted party leadership are increasingly irrelevant to the needs of economic reform. In response, both regimes have attempted to build legal institutions and to establish mechanisms of macro-economic control that could replace traditional Leninist institutions, but these new institutions remain tentative and incomplete. The result, in both countries, is a society that is not actively organized to resist the state, but is nonetheless increasingly beyond the state's control. Both Vietnam and China, then, have yet to reach any point of political stasis or stability, and we may expect fluid and dynamic politics in both countries.

Youth, Education, and Cultural Change in China and Vietnam
David Marr, Australian National University
Stanley Rosen, University of Southern California
Using popular magazines and newspapers, as well as interviews and survey material, this paper analyzes discussions in China and Vietnam about the implications of changing economies for education (school curricula, research priorities, institutional structures), employment priorities, and politics (patriotism, role of the Communist Party, and political values). The emphasis will be on how the youth in both countries talk about these issues.

Cycles of Agrarian Transformation in China and Vietnam: Land Reform, Collectivization and the Household Economy
Mark Selden, SUNY, Binghamton
In the half century since 1945, China and Vietnam have completed two major cycles of agrarian reform. The paper explores temporal and institutional congruences of both cycles as well as important processual, institutional, and performance differences. The hallmarks of the first cycle in both countries were land reform, which landless and land poor villagers in both countries pressed for, and collectivization, which had little popular basis but was imposed by each country's Communist party. Collectivization was more thoroughly implemented in China than in Vietnam, in part because in Vietnam it came during rather than after the war for national liberalization. The second cycle, from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, redistributed to households land and other collectivized means of production, reduced state control over production, and restored markets. This sharp change was principally fueled by a quiet revolt by rural producers. In China, successors to collectives-township and village enterprises-continue to play an important role in the second cycle, whereas in Vietnam they do not, at least thus far. Second cycle reforms in both countries have contributed to accelerated agricultural growth and higher levels of commodification but the effects in Vietnam on urbanization, industrialization, employment, and poverty reduction have been far less than in China.

Vietnamese and Chinese Labor Regimes: On the Road to Divergence
Anita Chan, Australian National University
Irene Norlund, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Copenhagen
The economic reforms in Vietnam and China are affecting the labor regimes in the two countries in many similar ways. The core industrial workforce is shrinking while the peripheral workforce is on the rise. Very different labor regimes are emerging from these two sectors. As a whole, the labor regime on the shopfloor has become harsher. Labor protests in both countries are now a daily occurrence. The trade unions are under great pressure from the workers to react to the new situation. However, due to the countries' recent historical developments, the precondition under which Vietnam and China began their economic reforms were quite different. Further, by comparing these two countries' political changes, trade unions reforms, changes in state-society relationship, the trade union laws and labor laws, the emergence of civil society, and the degree of dominance of political orthodoxy, the authors argue that the two countries' labor regimes are on the road to divergence. Though both countries began with a state corporatist structure in which the trade unions were under state dominance, the emerging trend witnesses the Vietnam's trade unions beginning to function with more political space than the Chinese trade unions. The authors conclude that as the chance of Vietnam going the way of societal corporatism is higher, the Vietnamese trade union is likely to build up more independence from the state and the party.

Session 134: Past Forgetting: War and Revolution in Vietnamese Memory: Part One (See Session 157)

Organizer and Chair: Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Harvard University
Chair: Rubie S. Watson, Harvard University
Discussant: Marilyn B. Young, New York University

The experience of war and revolution remains vivid in Vietnamese collective memory and still shapes the way history is written. But whose vision of war and revolution should prevail? The leadership's vision that they were part of a long tradition of heroic resistance against foreign domination is enshrined in a commemorative project which draws on a wide array of visual, verbal and performative instruments. But, on both sides of the 17th parallel, it is being contested, subverted or merely circumvented.
Local people shun commemorative structures that do not retail their experience. Official rites for the war dead are found inadequate on a personal level. In some cases, the symbols are redeployed; terms used to construct the master narrative are inverted. Familiar symbols used to celebrate heroic sacrifices are reinterpreted as emblems of senseless suffering. The official project also suffers from the collision between political and economic aims. Thus, the lucrative transformation of war sites into tourists sights is having a profound impact on their commemorative power. Meanwhile, young Vietnamese are intent on forgetting.
In examining how war and revolution are represented, remembered or forgotten by different actors, the papers in this panel shed light on the tensions between past and present, official history and private memory in postwar Vietnam.

Reading Revolutionary Prison Memoirs
Peter Zinoman, University of California, Berkeley
On May 1, 1960, in a speech celebrating the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Vietnamese Communist Party, Ho Chi Minh declared that the thirty-one current members of the VCP's Central Committee had spent a cumulative total of 222 years in French colonial prisons. Available evidence does support Ho's general point that imprisonment in colonial jails was an experience shared by most of the VCP's top leaders. Ho's speech signalled the start of a campaign to highlight the prison credentials of the VCP's founding fathers. The campaign's main feature involved the creation of a new literary genre: "revolutionary memoirs" produced by both leading and ordinary members of the VCP. A striking proportion of these memoirs relate tales of political imprisonment and of prison resistance by communist revolutionaries.
But the picture of penal imprisonment under French colonialism painted in these memoirs is partial and misleading. Not only does the genre impose artificial uniformity on the diverse experience of political prisoners, but it also conceals, distorts or belittles the experience of the non-political prisoners who constituted the majority of the penal population.
The production and dissemination of these revolutionary memoirs since l954 provides insight into attempts by VCP leaders to construct a usable image of themselves and their history. My paper attempts to explain why imprisonment became an integral component in the collective public identity of the VCP leadership and to explore the tensions generated through the promotion of this particular experience.

Framing the National Spirit: Viewing and Reviewing Painting Under the Revolution
Nora A. Taylor, CIEE, Hanoi
Beginning in the 1940s, painters were hired to make propaganda posters and encouraged to produce paintings that embodied the "national spirit." After Doi Moi, art critics began reviewing the art from the 1940s to the 1980s and selected three painters as "Masters of Vietnamese Contemporary Art." Unlike other artists in their generation, the chosen three, Bui Xuan Phai, Nguyen Sang and Nguyen Tu Nghiem, had not taken part in the revolutionary struggle, or participated in propaganda painting campaigns. They were not admitted to the National Artists Association until late in their careers because their work did not contain what was considered to be the "national spirit." Ironically, since his death in 1988, Phai, famous for his paintings of desolate Hanoi streets, has become revered as a portrayer of the spirit of the people.
This paper will argue that, although artists who had previously been rejected by the Artists Association are finally receiving recognition, their current prestige is based on criteria not very different from those used by the Association earlier; but the content of the criteria has changed. During the revolution, "national spirit" was defined as heroism, optimism and solidarity. After the revolution, it became collective despair, sadness and loss. The revisions in art history echo the changing views on revolution and war elsewhere in Vietnamese public discourse. The hero is now the one who suffered the most, the true artist the one who painted what he wished in spite of restrictions.

"The Motherland Remembers Your Sacrifice": Commemorating the War Dead in North Viet Nam
Shaun Kingsley Malarney, International Christian University
The outbreak of the American War in Viet Nam presented a fundamental challenge to the leadership of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam. As North Vietnamese soldiers died in increasing numbers, ways had to be found so that war death did not seem like meaningless annihilation. The main response to this need at the village level was the creation of an innovative funeral rite held by state officials to commemorate fallen soldiers. Based on field research carried out in northern Viet Nam, this paper will explore the nature of this rite and the local response to it. As will be discussed, official rites, which drew heavily on local practices, sought to publicly express the state's gratitude to the families of those who had given their lives while simultaneously integrating the deceased into Viet Nam's heroic tradition of sacrificing one's life for the good of the country. Although official rites were appreciated by those who lost loved ones, their message was largely political and did not address local concerns about the ultimate fate of a dead soul, particularly one in which the body was mutilated or not present for burial. To this end, a different set of innovative family rites, which also drew on local practices, was created to help put the dead souls to rest. The paper will therefore argue that although state declarations of the nobility of war death were compelling, they were ultimately inadequate for resolving the fundamental existential problems that war death created.

Museum-Shrine: Revolution and its Tutelary Spirit in My Hoa Hung Hamlet
Christoph Giebel, Cornell University
In 1988, the Commemorative Area for Ton Duc Thang was inaugurated in Ton's village of My Hoa Hung in An Giang Province, in time for the 100th anniversary of this revolutionary hero and second president of the DRV. The site consists of Ton's childhood home-restored and made into a shrine-and a newly constructed exhibition hall in the vicinity which mostly duplicates the contents of the Ton Duc Thang exhibit in the An Giang Provincial Museum in nearby Long Xuyen.
Unlike my previous, more general investigation into forms and functions of state-sponsored history museums in contemporary Vietnam, my focus in this paper will be on just this one commemorative area and its place in the historical, political, and especially cultural landscapes of Vietnam. While the site's symbolic, ideological and cultural messages are manifold, the paper will be primarily concerned with the ways in which revolutionary history becomes increasingly localized in the late socialist era, consciously roots itself in traditional practices and regional identities, and liberally quotes from the pre-modern Vietnamese cultural repertoire. Not unlike the heroes of the 14th-century compilation of Vietnamese protective spirits-the Viet Dien U Linh Tap-the shrine of Ton Duc Thang can be seen as mediating between "power" and "people" in their symbiotic relationship, especially in times of crisis, between political authority and its ideal image, and between history and memory

Session 135: Direction and Priorities of Research on Southeast Asia (Sponsored by the Southeast Asia Council): Part One (See Session 158)

Organizer and Chair: Leonard Y. Andaya, University of Hawai'i, Manoa
Discussant: Yoneo Ishii, Sophia University

In an article written more than three decades ago, an American scholar called for the writing of an "autonomous" history of Southeast Asia which truly reflected an indigenous framework (1). For many of the young scholars who heeded the call then, attempting an "autonomous" history meant shifting the focus of research from the activities of the Europeans to those of Southeast Asians. One of the methods employed was to re-examine colonial sources, not to write the history of the colonial power, but to reconstruct the history of indigenous groups in the region. In addition to the European archives, oral and written local Southeast Asian sources were consulted.
Among more recent scholars of Southeast Asia, the methodology has become much more sophisticated as they experiment with a rich offering of post-modernist and post-post-modernist ideas flowing from Europe. Along with these ideas has come an awareness of the danger of an outside authority interpreting and presenting his or her voice as that of the Southeast Asian. Cautious and oftentimes ingenious strategies have therefore been employed to juxtapose the outsider and the insider perspective in the study of Southeast Asia (2). While there is little doubt that vital and innovative research on Southeast Asia is being done by scholars from outside the region, many of the concerns, priorities, and methodologies are clearly those of outsiders. What is needed is the voice of the Southeast Asian scholars themselves so that there can be a true dialogue between them and outsiders writing on Southeast Asia.
The panel is intended to be a platform for Southeast Asian scholars to present their particular concerns, their research priorities, and their specific methodologies. Too often the research and methodological agenda are set by outsiders with the Southeast Asian either adopting or responding to it. The dominance of outside scholarship has provoked various reactions within Southeast Asia, including rejection of the outsider's language as the vehicle of dominance (3). This is one type of intellectual movement which often lies outside the purview of foreigners who lack a reading knowledge of Southeast Asian languages. However, there are others who write in their own national languages as well as in other national languages whose works express a desire for a particularly Southeast Asian approach and who focus on issues which are not dictated by the outside world. Members of the panel would be asked to discuss such trends along with their own particular research priorities.
The growth in Southeast Asian studies around the globe and the upsurge in indigenous Southeast Asian scholarship itself makes this panel a timely one. One scholar each from Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Myanmar, Malaysia, and the Philippines will be invited to participate. They will be asked to represent their own particular views but also, when appropriate, to refer to the works and concerns of the colleagues in their country.
1. John Smail, "On the Possibility of an Autonomous History of Modern Southeast Asia," Journal of Southeast Asian History 2, ii (July 1961), 72-102.
2. An excellent example of such a strategy can be seen in Anna Tsing's In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place (Princeton, 1993).
3. Examples of this reaction are seen with the group represented by Nidhi Aeusrivongse in Thailand and the pantayong pananaw movement among Filipino historians who reject the "reactive" history of Filipinos and advocate an exclusively Filipino viewpoint. Both Nidhi and the pantayong pananaw group write exclusively in the national language.

Toward a National and Modern Historiography of Vietnam
Phan Huy Le, Vietnamese Studies Center
After Vietnam attained a complete liberation from the forces of imperialism, her historiography continued to feel the direct impact of Western methodology as well as of Western historiographical issues. But a new tendency slowly emerged that took Vietnamese historians back to their historical tradition so as to develop a national and, at the same time, a modern Vietnamese historiography. The national characteristic compels Vietnamese historians to amend errors and fallacies of earlier histories in order to establish accurate accounts of the national past, to solve historical problems raised by the needs of building up the nation, to create a methodology and an approach that respect the sources of Vietnamese history. The modern characteristic demands that we open up to international exchanges, so as to harmonize our research with that of other historians in the various countries within the region as well as in the world.
In recent years, Vietnamese historiography has tallied a few achievements; it has also shown quite a few limits. Vietnamese historians are working hard to overcome these limits with the aim, one day, of achieving a national and modern historiography

Session 137: Rethinking Confucianism in Asia: Part One (See Session 160)

Organizer: Benjamin A. Elman, University of California, Los Angeles
Chair: Herman Ooms, University of California, Los Angeles
Discussants: Hoyt Tillman, Arizona State University; Alexander Woodside, University of British Columbia

This two-session panel proposes to "rethink" in historical terms the contemporary resurgence of positive interest in Confucianism in light of the resurgence of "Pacific Rim" nations and their economic success in East and Southeast Asia. The "invention of the Pacific Rim" as an academic field, for example, coincides with a selective amnesia about the 19th- and 20th-century eclipse of Yi Korea (1392-1910), Japanese Tokugawa (1600-1857), Le-Nguyen Vietnam (1428-1884), and Manchu-Chinese Qing (1644-1911) sovereignty, when Confucianism, particularly Neo-Confucianism, was more influential in East Asian political and intellectual life. We must also forget that an earlier generation of influential Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Japanese intellectuals condemned Confucianism as an obstacle to modernity. The recent linkage of Neo-Confucianism as the moral "software" informing the "hardware" of East Asian authoritarian capitalism, for example, has become a fascinating growth industry that yielded the new field of "Pacific Rim Studies" in the social sciences.
These "dissenting" papers on China, Vietnam, Japan, and Korea in the "Rethinking" panels will critically address how social scientists, feminists, humanists, and post-moderns, as non-specialists in the study of Asian Confucianism, have developed oversimplified accounts of Confucianism to reach unnuanced global conclusions that few serious students of Confucian thought would accept. Confucianism as the cultural glue that held premodern East Asian culture together is a very convenient generalization for non-specialists and socio-economic historians to master. One cannot imagine many Western scholars taking very seriously an equivalent agenda for Europe, Africa, and the Americas called the "Atlantic Rim." Non-specialists translate such generalizations about Confucianism into positive claims about Neo-Confucianism as the moral software in China's modernization or negative claims about its role in legitimating patriarchal social relations and authoritarian political habits. "Neo-Confucianism is responsible for the subjugation of Asian women" is one common theme even while studies of elite women in late imperial China increasingly challenge this stereotype. Another is: "Neo-Confucianism provided a liberal vision of human agency and mitigated against autocratic government," even though most Confucians since antiquity willingly served authoritarian rulers and most late-20th-century Confucians favor neo-authoritarian governments. Or, "Neo-Confucianism and market capitalism were compatible since "early-modern times," although historians have shown the folly of comparing premodern Asian economic development to the transition from feudalism to capitalism in early-modern Europe. Or, again, "Neo-Confucianism was a socio-political ideology of East Asian elites that legitimated the status quo in state and society," although recent studies show that Buddhism and Daoism permeated elite and popular culture and that Neo-Confucianism was not the common faith of all or even most premodern Asian peasants, artisans, women, monks, or merchants. Moreover, we know that Confucianism in East Asia was rife with dissension among elites in the face of state orthodoxy.
Based on a preliminary day-long mini-conference held at UCLA on April 29, 1995, where each paper was presented in preliminary outline form, the revised 1996 papers in the two parts of the "Rethinking" panel will historically reevaluate Confucianism from the regional perspective of East and Southeast Asia and from the unique national perspectives of China and Vietnam, Japan and Korea.

The Confucianization of Vietnamese Buddhism
Keith Weller Taylor, Cornell University
This paper will be a study of two texts printed by woodblocks in northern Vietnam in 1752. Both texts narrate the "origins and deeds" of the supposed first Buddha to appear in Vietnam, an event dated at the end of the second century C.E. One text is prose, in Han (classical Chinese) with Nom (Vietnamese demotic characters) "translation," and comes from the hands of monks. The second text is a highly Confucianized version of the first text written in Nom poetry according to the "six-eight" Vietnamese poetic style. I am interested in analyzing the different layers of language, literary form, and cultural-intellectual commitment evident in cultural statements appearing at different places in the Vietnamese mental landscape of 1752. I am also interested in using this print episode as an occasion for saying things about how Confucianism and Buddhism have been narrated in conventional twentieth-century versions of the Vietnamese past.

Session 157: War and Revolution in Vietnamese Memory, Part Two (See Session 134)

Organizer: Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Harvard University
Chair: Marilyn B. Young, New York University
Discussant: Rubie S. Watson, Harvard University

Re-presenting Vietnam's War Experience: The Manufacture of Nostalgia in Vietnam's Tourist Industry
Laurel Kennedy and Mary Rose Williams, Denison University
Since 1986, when Vietnam initiated the development of its tourist industry as a means of generating foreign currency, tourism has grown rapidly. The number of visitors has increased more than ten-fold, foreign investment in hotels, resorts, and recreational venues has outpaced all other sectors except oil, and governmental bureaucracy has been substantially reduced to facilitate both entry to Vietnam and travel beyond major cities into the interior. While many of the visitors are Viet Kieu, the majority are Europeans and, increasingly, Americans-often Vietnam War veterans or students of that war's history, for whom there is natural tourist appeal in the war experience. Vietnam's quasi-governmental tourism boards, often in joint ventures with foreign capitalists, have responded to this particular interest in three primary ways: by developing significant war sites such as China Beach and Cam Ranh Bay as recreation and resort areas catering to wealthy foreigners; by reorienting the experience of war memorial sites to mute travellers' memories of defeat; and by erasing from tourists' view those historical images and experiences which would most dampen and disturb holiday spirits. This paper examines some of the political economic causes and consequences of this re-presentation of Vietnam's engagement with France and the United States as a tourist attraction. It examines the discursive and non-discursive symbols used to promote Vietnam as a tourist destination, considers the nature and packaging of the country's tourist attractions, especially those associated with the war, and the implications of this re-presentation for Vietnam's political memory and its political agenda.

Heroic Mothers and Grasping Wives: Remembrance and Amnesia in Postwar Vietnam
Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Harvard University
In Vietnam as elsewhere, gender and memory are contested terrains. What happens when they are merged?
In 1994, the Vietnamese National Assembly set out criteria for granting the title of Heroic Mothers to women who had lost sons in the revolutionary cause. This paved the way for numerous photographic exhibits, ceremonies and parades throughout the country, and unleashed a flood of commemorative articles in the press. Honoring the war dead by paying homage to their mothers has proved a popular aspect of official commemoration. But the state has not been entirely successful in shaping collective memory. The figure of the mother is capable of being reworked into a counterhegemonic version of war and revolution. Furthermore, in honoring heroic mothers, the state unwittingly opened the way for a critical look at its failure to provide for them adequately in their old age.
As cultural emblems, heroic mothers must also compete with an equally familiar figure, that of the greed-driven woman who turns her back on memories of war and on the public good. How can women represent both the power of memory and the will to forget, both the revolutionary spirit of sacrifice and capitalist selfishness? This paper argues that contradictions within Vietnamese gender ideology have been made more salient by the unhealed pain of war, the contested legacy of revolution, and ambivalence about the emerging market-oriented society

Session 204: The Issue of Order: History, Culture, and Politics in Postcolonial Southeast Asia

Organizer: Patricia M. Pelley, Texas Tech University
Chair and Discussant: Laurie J. Sears, University of Washington

Postcolonial politics is inevitably premised on the idea of a dramatic break with the colonial past and on the fantasy of a well-ordered social domain. But in practice the postcolonial is always postponed: the social domain is filled with contention and colonial norms linger on long after the scholars, soldiers, and bureaucrats have gone. The issue of order figures in two different ways: first, as a topic or a problem. This panel as a whole explores how order-in its broadest sense and as both a practice and an ideal-is conceived, articulated, represented, or enforced in the postcolonial societies of Southeast Asia. Individual papers examine key problems in the institution of postcolonial society: the danger (to elites) of mass politics in postwar Malaya, the effort to decolonize representations of the Vietnamese past, the "disorder" of civilian government in Burma, and the proliferation of religious heterodoxy in Malaysia. Each paper also addresses the unintended consequences of order: in other words, what kinds of chaos inadvertently issue from a particular practice or ideal of order? By taking a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to the problem of decolonization, this panel does not plan to reduce the singularity of each experience to a taxonomic scheme; but it does seek to link the discussion of national histories to a broader regional context and to open it up to the global dimensions of decolonization.

The Cult of Antiquity in Postcolonial Vietnam
Patricia M. Pelley, Texas Tech University
The rituals and practice of history in postcolonial Vietnam routinely affirmed that Vietnamese national essence lay in its tradition of resistance to foreign aggression. As the outcome of the Second Indochina War became more assured, however, this "tradition" lost its exaggerated role and in its place the cult of antiquity, with its roots in prehistory, assumed new prominence. This paper begins descriptively by observing the cult of antiquity as it was (and is) manifested in the visual culture of everyday life; it documents the cult's salience in civic rituals and explores its prominence in official histories. It goes beyond the descriptive level by asking what kinds of problems-social as well as intellectual-the cult of antiquity resolves. Whereas colonial histories insisted on the derivative status of Vietnam, the cult of antiquity decolonizes Vietnamese history and celebrates its generative powers. By shifting Vietnam's geographic orientation from the border in the north (which connects it to East Asia) to the long coastline that opens to the Malay world (and links Vietnam to Southeast Asia), the cult of antiquity desinicizes Vietnam and makes it the author of its own "authentic" traditions. At the same time, it smooths over internal divisions: just as siblings in a single family are all inextricably related, each is also different from the other. The cult of antiquity proposes that all Vietnamese-not only ethnic Vietnamese-trace their descent to the Hung kings of Van Lang.

Session 205: The Politics of the East-Asian Model: Culture and Capitalism in the Asia-Pacific

Organizer: Mark T. Berger, Murdoch University, Australia
Chair: Lily Ling, Syracuse University
Discussant: Stephen Frost, University of Western Australia

The coming of the Pacific Century has been increasingly proclaimed over the past decade. The dynamic economic growth of East Asia (particularly Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore) was already setting the region apart from the rest of the world by the 1970s. By the 1980s the trend was seen to have spread southward to Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, while China's coastal provinces had also become integral to the wider regional economic boom. Now the governments of the Philippines, Vietnam and even India are attempting to follow East Asia, while the people of Australia and the U.S., and a growing number of other countries in the Americas and beyond, are also being exhorted to meet the challenge of the rise of East Asia. The world is clearly in the midst of an important shift in regional and global power relations with immense cultural significance. Against the backdrop of the gradual alteration of an international socio-cultural hierarchy which conferred particular privileges on and assigned particular agency to 'occidentals,' the discursive power of the East-Asian model of capitalist development continues to grow. This is the main point of departure for this panel. All of the papers in this panel seek to engage with the dominant visions of the Pacific Century and the debate over the East-Asian "Miracle" by looking at specific themes and/or particular sites in the Asia-Pacific.

Fragmented Visions of Asia's Next Tiger: Vietnam in the Pacific Century
Gerard Greenfield, Murdoch University
After a decade of 'renovation,' a renewed optimism pervades commentaries on Vietnam. Now its future has become tied to the shift in the locus of global economic power to the Asia-Pacific that signifies the beginning of the so-called 'Pacific Century.' Within this vision of Vietnam as 'Asia's next tiger' there is an easy convergence of political commitments. The rationalist teleology of modernization in Anglo-American narratives on Vietnam's market transition once more promises economic development, while East Asian triumphalists welcome yet another member to the East Asian club. It is this latter paradigm of the 'East Asian model' which now defines the modern imaginings of Vietnam's elites as they remake themselves into an authoritarian regime presiding over capitalist industrialization. In this paper it is argued that the vision articulated by Vietnam's political and economic elites is due as much to their nationalist aspirations and an ongoing nation-building project as it is to the fact that they, more than anyone else, are benefiting from linkages to transnational capital and a resurgent indigenous capitalist class, and the looting of state assets under economic liberalization. However, the growing 'social disorder' among the subaltern classes has challenged not only the prospects of such a vision being realized, but the very process by which it is manufactured and maintained. This dominant vision is contested not at the national level but at localized sites. It is in places such as the mining areas of Quang Ninh where the roots of fragmentation can be found.

Return to top of page