Racism in Vietnamese Scholarship (Part 1)
So I was reading Trần Ngọc Thêm’s Searching for the True Nature of Vietnamese Culture (Tìm về bản sắc văn hóa Việt Nam), a textbook on Vietnamese culture that has…
The Great Agricultural (Nông Nghiệp) – Pastoral (Du Mục) Divide, or how Kim Định and Trần Ngọc Thêm Distorted Will Durant’s Ideas
One of the core tenets of Vietnamese ultranationalism is the idea that there is a fundamental division between Han Chinese and Vietnamese. In particular, the argument of Vietnamese ultranationalism is…
Duplicity in Chinese Scholarship?
Yesterday the New York Times had an article on a new scholarship that is being created that will enable non-Chinese to study in China. “The private-equity tycoon Stephen A. Schwarzman,…
Deconstructing Trần Ngọc Thêm’s Nationalist Propaganda
Whenever I feel the need to be reminded of how deceitful nationalist “scholarship” can sometimes be, I open up one of Trần Ngọc Thêm’s books and start to read. It…
Wikipedia and Vietnamese Historical Scholarship
Ok, I know Wikipedia is not “scholarship,” but I’m going to use it to talk about scholarship anyway, because I just read an entry on the Vietnamese version of Wikipedia…