New Article – “Sinology in Vietnam”
An article that I wrote a year or two ago has just been published. It is called “Sinology in Vietnam.”There are people who would label anything that was written in…
Vietnamese Schools in China in the 1950s-1970s
Earlier this year as part of the “Vietnam ‘67” series of essays that appeared in the New York Times, historian Olga Dror published a piece about schools for Vietnamese that were set up in southern China during the Vietnam War called “How China Used Schools to Win Over Hanoi.”
The Rise of (Historical Scholarship on Vietnam in) China
I recently gained access to a database of PhD dissertations and MA theses in China. Out of curiosity, I did a search for “越南” (Vietnam) and was amazed at what I found. . .
From what I have been able to determine, so far in this century there have been close to 100 PhD dissertations completed in China that deal with some aspect of Vietnamese history, with the majority having been completed in the last decade. The number of MA theses is also very large, and many of those have been completed in the past few years (indicating that this trend of scholarship on Vietnam getting produced in Vietnam is only going to increase).
4. Going Backwards: Cherry Picking Outdated Information
In his Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present, Ben Kiernan argues that in the early history of Vietnam there were two important migrations of peoples into the Red River Delta.
To quote,
“By the time of the classical Chinese contact with northern Việt Nam, the early ethnolinguistic pattern there had been transformed by two external influences from the south and north, from mainland Southeast Asia and southeast China.
3. Going Backwards: The Yue Migration Theory
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, French missionaries, military officials and scholars all asked questions about the Vietnamese that the Vietnamese had never asked themselves: Who are these people? Where do they come from? What race do they belong to? What language family does their language belong to? etc.
By that time Vietnamese had of course already compiled texts about the history of their land, but those texts did not directly answer these questions. Instead, they were concerned with tracing a political genealogy that linked various rulers and dynasties together.
Lý Đông A, Lương Kim Định, Trần Ngọc Thêm and Terrien de Lacouperie’s Ancient Chinese Migration
As I’ve mentioned numerous times on this blog, there is an idea that is of central importance to Vietnamese ultra-nationalists, and that is that in antiquity the Chinese migrated into…
The Far East at the Crossroads, According to Kim Định
At the end of his book, Việt Lý Tố Nguyên, Kim Định has a few short chapters that discuss certain political and social issues of his day that can help…
August 1966
I was looking at an August 1966 issue of the magazine China Reconstructs. The first two articles in that issue dealt with Vietnam, and were entitled as follows: “China’s aid…
History and Anti-Foreign Discourses
The temperature is rising in Asia these days, and it has a lot to do with two countries that are very closely related but that pretend not to be –…
Chen Fu’s Visit to Đại Việt in 1293
I mentioned in the post below about the various Lý Công Uẩn films that there is an account that a Chinese envoy who visited Đại Việt in 1293 CE wrote.…