THE PEASANTS AND COUNTRYSIDE IN VIETNAM TODAY (1988)
Written by historian Dinh Thu Cuc, this article was published in Tap Chi Cong San, the Communist Party’s theoretical journal, in May 1988, two years after Doi Moi was officially launched. He describes how “village bullies,” some of whom were associated with the local Communist Party, had managed to insinuate themselves as local power bosses inside the agricultural cooperatives, undermining farmers’ interests and national party policies. These new village bullies gained a new lease on life as Vietnam began to decollectivize its agricultural land, by levying exorbitant fees on farmers and other corrupt practices, which led to revolts and other mass actions. Tran Do also mentioned this problem in 1998,40 referring to Thai Binh Province. At the same time, this text echoes Nguyen Cu Trinh’s memorial to the Nguyen ruler (1751) decrying oppressive local officials and their exorbitant taxes and fees.41
As the ally of the working class and the largest and most powerful force among the masses led by our party, the peasant class has played a very large role in the nation’s revolutionary undertaking. History records enormous contributions by the peasant class to the success of the August Revolution and the victories over the French colonialists and U.S. imperialists. In addition, history has also witnessed profound social changes in the rural areas of our country in less than three decades. A feudal countryside in which the peasant class existed as tenant farmers or individual, small-scale producers, has become a new countryside in which the means of production has turned into collective ownership, and the peasant is the master of the countryside. Indeed, our country’s peasant class has taken a long stride forward in the struggle to abolish the feudal countryside in order to build the new, socialist countryside.
The victory of the national, democratic revolution has made Vietnamese peasants the true owners of their land. The special relationship of the party, the working class, and the peasant class has also helped peasants voluntarily follow the party, with their lofty dream of building a new, civilized, and happy society in the countryside where they work and live.
In productive labor, peasants gradually began earning their living collectively by increasingly highly developed forms of production. Today, large numbers of peasants nationwide are the members of 16,331 agricultural cooperatives, 39,380 agricultural production collectives, 4,000 forestry cooperatives, 961 marine products cooperatives, and 2,571 marine products production collectives.
Our country’s agriculture has undergone [many] changes in the level of development of production forces. Many scientific-technical advances have been applied to agriculture. A number of socioeconomic bases for transforming the psychology of small-scale production have emerged and are being nurtured.
These facts demonstrate that the socialist revolution has begun to establish a foundation in agriculture, the most backward economic field in our country, and that socialist production relations can gain a foothold in the countryside under certain conditions in the development of production forces.
Besides the preceding, we have, over the past several decades, placed too much emphasis on the collective ownership of the means of production and paid little attention to the factors of management and socialist distribution in the socialist transformation and construction of the agricultural economy. For this reason, the production forces in agriculture are underdeveloped and not only are unable to carry out expanded reproduction but also find it difficult to carry out simple reproduction.
The mechanism based on bureaucratic administrative management and state subsidies and the backwardness of many of the economic policies of the party and state concerning peasants have also severely constrained and exerted a negative influence on the countryside. Instead of being consolidated and improved, the initial bases of socialist production relations in the countryside have been weakened in many respects. There is a significant percentage of weak and deficient cooperatives and production collectives in nearly all provinces.
A search for an appropriate management mechanism for cooperatives and production collectives to open the way for the development of agriculture was launched in the early 1980s. When the “final product contract with groups of laborers and individual laborers” mechanism was officially established (secretariat directive 100 [January 1981]), it made a difference in agricultural production, particularly in the production of grains and foodstuffs.
But reality demands that we closely tie efforts to refine the contract mechanism to efforts to strengthen cooperatives and socialist production relations and to correctly use the various segments of the economy based on a comprehensive and coordinated renovation of the policies that apply to agriculture and peasant farmers. Many different kinds of work in the countryside (such as planning, financial and credit work, the trading of materials, pricing, marketing, agricultural taxes, and labor obligations) must be changed to be compatible with the ownership prevailing in the different segments of the economy.
The pressing needs of today are renovating the management mechanism within agriculture in order to liberate production capacity; develop the potential of labor, arable land, the trades, and material-technical bases; and develop the existing scientific potential in order to rapidly increase the supply of agricultural products to society and raise peasants’ incomes.
The situation of the peasant class in the Vietnamese countryside at the present time also raises social problems that must be resolved right away. These problems are no less pressing than the economic problems we face.
First is the need to constantly struggle against the negative vestiges of the past that linger in the countryside. These vestiges are persistent and have directly affected the life of the countryside, especially in recent years.
As just mentioned, Vietnamese peasants have taken a long stride forward in the struggle to abolish the feudal countryside in order to build the new, socialist, countryside. Peasants’ cultural standards have been raised gradually, giving them a new philosophy of life and worldview. But their traditional way of life is still quite deeply ingrained in their psychology, their habits, and the way they think and act.
Commendable expressions of the countryside’s traditional way of life, such as the spirit of solidarity and of helping one another in work, production, and everyday life, as well as in the struggle against oppression and exploitation and the closeness of each person to the common ideals of the village and the country, have been maintained. But the limitations imposed by the traditional way of life are also very large and have impeded efforts to build the new countryside. The feudal laws, ethics, rituals, and ceremonies that bound peasants in the old society continue to slow their progress today. Patriarchy, gerontocracy, and bureaucratism [local feudal despots], the last being the most salient, have left deep marks in the countryside. In the local bureaucratic order, [jockeying for] position gave rise to bitter disputes within the ranks of the feudalists, causing them to form factions and slander and overthrow one another.
The bureaucratic feudal system and private ownership gave birth to an evil product: village bullies. These persons exploited and oppressed peasants through embezzlement, pilfering, misappropriation, repression, and the appropriation of public property.42 In the past, these village bullies had many ways to exploit peasants using the public rice land. Today, the use of public funds and the rice land owned by collectives leads to many negative outcomes. Numerous investigations have shown that in more than a few localities, the party chapter, administration, and cooperative management board have actually been reincarnated as the old stratum of village bullies. From their positions as representatives of the people and the village, they have turned into people who oppress, exploit, and suppress farmers, becoming parasites who extort peasants. These “new village bullies” have been using their public positions and lineage ties—a problem that has become a grave concern in recent years—to control people, form factions, and oppress honest and legitimate laborers, resulting in the loss of internal unity. The community psychology of the village, a positive feature of peasants’ spiritual life, is slowly disappearing. In the past, peasants united to oppose the village bullies and wicked landlords. Today, many persons see injustice but do not dare to struggle against it for fear of being accused of opposing the party or the administration! In many places, a new class structure has formed, whose backbone is the people who hold public office and their supporters. This structure controls the socioeconomic system in the countryside and creates serious inequities in the distribution of grain and other foodstuffs, industrial goods, and agricultural materials; the allocation of land to build houses; the distribution of contract fields; and the appointment of local officials. These [officials] have established many unreasonable “funds” and “laws” to squeeze money from the peasants’ labor, resulting in an acute lack of democracy in the countryside.
In the past, the villages, with their strength as close-knit communities, used self-management and autonomy to struggle against oppression by landowners, officials, and the dictatorial monarchy and against intervention by the state in village affairs, and to protect the rights of laborers. Today, many people in public office have distorted this tradition of “the edict of the king stops at the village gate.” They violate the positions and policies of the party and state and have turned the locality they lead into their own “private space” in order to further their personal interests. In many places in the countryside, the division and the differences between rich and poor are becoming increasingly clear. Honest, hardworking laborers receive only a fraction of whatever they produce, which is not enough for them to live on. This is partly due to unreasonable state policies. It is due more to the local leaders taking the peasants’ output for themselves or using it carelessly. Clearly, illegitimate economic interests are what is behind the bureaucratic system and the “new village bullies.” The only way to get rid of them is for party cadres and working peasants to wage a forthright and determined struggle against them while combining economic policies with social policies in a correct and appropriate manner.
There is one other matter concerning those who make socioeconomic policies regarding peasants and the countryside and who guide agricultural production and the work of the peasant association. During the past ten years, the countryside’s overall cultural standard has been declining. Peasants pay little attention to cultural life or to raising their cultural standards, partly because of the leadership’s lack of concern. The basic cultural and social needs of farmers are not being met, particularly those in the border areas and on the islands. Shortages of teachers and schools, medical facilities, medicine, and doctors in rural areas are widespread. In contrast, economic difficulties and worries about contract land and private land (almost every farm family must farm with only crude implements and techniques and cope by themselves with the vagaries of the weather) have prevented peasants from broadening their knowledge, even though they have always wanted to learn and make technical improvements to produce higher yields. Many of the biological revolution’s achievements have been applied very effectively in the countryside, but they have received little attention in recent years. The activities of science-technology teams, libraries, clubs, and local artistic troupes have markedly declined [as well]. The “semi-illiteracy” and illiteracy in the countryside are alarming. More than a few peasant families have had to take their children out of school so that they can stay home and work.
During the past several years, many old customs have reappeared in the countryside (such as lavish and costly funeral and wedding ceremonies, and superstitious beliefs). The main reasons for this are the near absence of economic and cultural development and socioeconomic policies in the countryside, and those that do exist are inappropriate or have not been thoroughly implemented. Propaganda and efforts to educate peasants, especially rural youths, regarding politics, ideology, culture, and a new worldview and philosophy of life have been somewhat lacking. In the past, members of the village were pleased to be recognized and praised when they contributed to the community, and they considered building and strengthening the village to be their duty, with each generation being responsible for setting an example for the next [generation]. Today, even though their worldview and philosophy of life have been broadened, many people remain isolated [from the community], withdrawing into their families and looking out for only their own interests.
To rid ourselves of this selfish and individualistic way of life that has trampled on all the moral and cultural values accumulated by our people over the generations and to reestablish a new system in the countryside (as manifested in economic, political, and cultural-spiritual life), it will be necessary, first, to consolidate and strengthen the ranks of cadres at the basic level, including party chapters, people’s committees, cooperative and production collective management boards, the Peasant Association, the Communist Youth Union, the Women’s Union, and so on. This is the most important way of guaranteeing the success of the policies of renovation in the countryside today.
[Dinh Thu Cuc, “Nong dan va nong thon Viet Nam hien nay,” 43–46; trans. Jayne Werner]
MARXISM AND VIETNAMESE CULTURE (1948)
Truong Chinh, the Communist Party’s chief theoretician, issued a major statement in 1948 on culture and the arts as the party prepared to wage an all-out resistance war against the French. Breaking with the previous decade’s literary focus on individualism and romanticism and the convention of “art for art’s sake,” Truong Chinh argued that culture must serve the national cause and contribute to the defense of the country. He had declared in 1943 that Vietnamese culture should be national, scientific, and mass based, which he expands on here. Now that Vietnam was at war, artists and writers could no longer indulge in their personal aesthetic pursuits. The Communist Party would monitor all artistic and cultural production for their adherence to these principles. This cultural policy, which set the parameters for cultural production in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam until 1986, aimed to cleanse Vietnamese culture of French colonial and Chinese influence, instill socialist realist principles, and uplift the quality of a pure Vietnamese culture, viewing culture as a key component in an ideological struggle. The Communist state’s use of ideology and culture for political purposes reflected a time-honored practice in Vietnamese governance, as seen, for example, in the Book of Good Government of the Hong Duc Era (1540s), which issued moral and philosophical guidelines to the emperor’s officials.43 This selection is from a longer report.
The Character and Mission of New-Democracy Culture
Vietnamese new-democracy culture must have the following three characteristics: it must be national, scientific, and popular. Opposed as it is to the enslaving colonial feature that characterizes the old Vietnamese culture, Vietnamese new-democracy culture fights against all oppressive and aggressive forces wherever they come from, for the independence and freedom of the people, and respects the independence and freedom of the peoples of the world. It also seeks to banish all ideas that smack of weakness and manifest a lack of independence and self-reliance. New-democracy culture has all the characteristics and traditional marks of our people and must grow by developing what is good and beautiful and rejecting what is bad and ugly. It represents what is best in the national heritage, and at the same time, it stands ready to absorb the good, the beautiful, and the progressive in a foreign culture. It is neither xenophobic nor racist. It denounces hybridism and rootlessness and opposes the gulping down raw of other people’s cultures, parrot-fashion learning, or the mechanical introduction of a foreign culture into our own without taking into account the particularities and concrete conditions of the country and its people.
So that the national element in our culture may blossom, we must make vigorous propaganda for resisting the French colonialists and combine the offensive by pen and speech with the offensive by the gun. In paint and in ink, in each embroidered thread, in each cut of the sculptor, and in each sequence of thought lies a way to strengthen patriotism and intensify hatred for the enemy. We distinguish what constitutes the enslaving side of French imperialist culture from what represents the beneficent influence of French democratic culture, in order to eliminate the former and keep the latter. We learn from the advanced cultures of the world yet take a critical view of and censure its reactionary cultures.
We search for and study literary and art works bequeathed to us by our forefathers, but we put them under the microscope, criticize them, and pick out only the positive traditions of our national culture.
Vietnamese new-democracy culture must be scientific in character, as opposed to the backward, corrupt, and feudal character that still lingers in the old Vietnamese culture. It upholds freedom of faith but condemns superstition, idealism, mysticism, clumsiness, and carelessness, all those habits that are irrational or retrograde. It speeds up the campaign for a new life and opposes lax discipline and obsolete customs. It brings elementary science and information about preventive medicine to the masses. It propagates scientific thought and Marxist philosophy in order to counter prejudices and antiquated and fallacious viewpoints. A prominent feature of this new-democracy culture is that it takes practice seriously and seeks to combine it with theory. It rebels against the French policy of deceit and obscurantism and upholds the truth. It promotes progress and pushes aside what stands in the way of the people’s advancement. Not progress that is divorced from the past of the nation, but progress that is not hybrid, uprooted, imitative, or mechanical. [Not progress] in favor of the “primacy of science,” which claims that it is only with modern science that foreign aggressors equipped with high technology can be defeated and that we, for our part, must accept frustration because we are inferior in science and technology. With regard to artistic creation, new-democracy culture approves of socialist realism….
Since new-democracy culture opposes the estrangement and antipopular character of the ruling cultures in former times and in the present French-occupied areas, it must be popular. It serves the masses, the overwhelming majority of the people. It rejects any idea of culture’s being ethereal, that the higher it is, the more precious it will be, and the more complicated it is, the better it will be. On the contrary, it holds culture to be close to the masses so as to lead and educate them, to raise their cultural level, to single out and nurture the talents that blossom among them, and not to pander to them while learning from them. The joys and sorrows of the masses should be the joys and sorrows of the cultural fighters who, if they wish to fulfill the mission of enlightening them in thought and feelings and of solving their misapprehensions in time, ought to understand these joys and sorrows. A culture in service of the masses must faithfully reflect the aspirations and hopes of the people who are involved in fighting and production and make them conscious and enthusiastic, fortified by faith and will.
To that end, we, as vanguard cultural workers, are bound, on the one hand, to strive to completely liberate the masses from illiteracy and to awaken them politically, and, on the other, to eradicate with determination the erroneous tendencies in literature and art and the ailments that afflict our national culture or were passed on by the French colonialists’ decadent culture. Examples that can be cited are individualism, fence-sitting, escapism, neutralism, aestheticism, and the like.44
While the ruling culture in our country for almost a century of French domination was antinational, antiscientific, and antipopular, its present new-democracy culture must be national, scientific, and popular. The three traits coexist and are interwoven, inseparable one from the other….
As combatants on the cultural front, we can, in the light of these characteristics of new-democracy culture, advance three principles to guide our task to promote the new culture: to render it national, scientific, and popular. What is antinational, antiscientific, and antipopular will be vigorously rejected; what is compatible with the nation, science, and the people, we will work hard to strengthen, maintain, and improve. At the same time, we will adopt a proper attitude on the basis of these principles:
1. To be absolutely loyal to the fatherland and the resistance, neither to accept compromise with reactionary thought and culture nor to adopt either neutralism or the attitude of fence-sitters.
2. To strive to conduct scientific and technological research and to apply the results to benefit production, the struggle, and human life; to rely on Marxist theory as the compass for action; to combine knowledge with action and theory with practice.
3. To serve the people wholeheartedly; to remain close to the workers, peasants, and soldiers; to be in sympathy with the masses; and to learn from but at the same time to educate and lead the people.
This should be the proper attitude for us fighters on the cultural front, and the key to our success. Such an attitude is essential to carry out the mission ahead as President Ho has directed us:
Culture aims not only at boosting our people’s moral and material forces for resistance and nation building, but also at highlighting our people’s great achievements for the whole world to know. Our cultural workers must create deserving works, not only to glorify our present efforts, but also to bequeath to future generations shining examples of resistance and national building.45
Some Concrete Problems in Our Country’s Present Literature and Art
Those writers and artists who have the requisite conditions or feel inspired to work long and carefully on their creations to render their art “eternal” should by all means do so. It is certain that if they are faithful to their time and keep close to the struggle of the nation and the lives of their people, when their works reach the highest level of art, they will also have the highest propaganda value.
Another opinion is that during the war of resistance, because the people’s level of culture was limited, they [now] are interested only in prosaic and easy works; that acceding to their wishes would result in lowering the quality of art; and that if we keep doing this, what will be left of culture?
This is our answer: it is only natural, that after having been subjected to the exploitative, oppressive, and obscurantist regime of the French colonialists for so many years, the cultural level of the masses of our people would have limitations. But it would be wrong of us to think that they are not capable of artistic appreciation. They are bound to understand, feel for, enjoy, and love our works if they offer a lively description of reality.
The feelings of the masses are pure, sincere, and exceedingly warm. They are indifferent only to insincere, recondite, recherché, evasive, and preposterous works of art and hate the monsters of imagination.
The second problem that confronts a good number of our men of letters and art is, What is socialist realism?
As we understand it, socialist realism is a method of artistic creation that portrays the truth in a society evolving toward socialism according to objective laws. From objective reality, we must concentrate on “the typical features in typical situations”46 and reveal the inexorable motive force driving society forward and the objective process of evolution.
Alexis Tolstoy writes: “The task of the artist … is to draw from reality what is typical, what people can see at first glance, gather facts, ideas, and contradictions into a lively picture and indicate the right direction leading to the correct future.”47
The attitude of socialist realism is objective. Some objective truths are unfavorable to us. For example, shall we report truthfully a battle we have lost? We can, of course, describe a lost battle, but in doing so, we must see to it that people realize how heroically our combatants accepted sacrifices, why the battle was lost, what our gains were, and, notwithstanding the defeat, that our combatants never felt demoralized because all were eager to learn and draw the appropriate lessons in order to secure victories in future battles. We can describe a local defeat while showing that the war is going our way. It should be kept in mind that some truths are worth mentioning, but other truths are better left unmentioned, at least temporarily, and if mentioned at all, the question is where and how they should be revealed.
Another thing of note in socialist realist literature is that writers should let the facts speak for the opinions they wish to convey or propagandize. Engels says that “tendencies should spring from situations and actions, not be bared too candidly.” Nothing is worse than a drama in which the playwright uses the words of a character to argue interminably.
Another question asked is, Should we have criticism and controversy now? It is our opinion that we definitely should. It is well known that the cultural life of our people is too tranquil. Generally, we have no way of knowing whether new works of art are good or bad, are welcomed or rejected by the public. There is no one to criticize or appraise them! As soon as a policy, a point of view, is put forward, it falls straight into oblivion or is coldly received. As a result, Vietnamese authors have little chance to be patronized and encouraged, or criticized and helped to improve. Without criticism and controversy, our cultural movement is too placid, too uneventful! It is just like a horse trotting along with his head dropping, who needs the whip of criticism to set him galloping.
Some people fear that criticism may damage unity. What really matters is the manner in which criticism is made: this and not the criticism itself may damage unity. Criticism that is harmful to unity is criticism that is without tact and sincerity. On the contrary, criticism offered in a responsible spirit, with good intentions and in modest terms, not only does no harm but also helps us make progress and bring about mutual understanding. Facing the enemy of the nation, unity undoubtedly is necessary, but it does not require that we never raise any objection. Such unity is one-way unity. True unity must be founded on criticism motivated by unity and aimed at strengthening unity.
We sincerely await the appearance of conscientious critics in Vietnamese literature and art. Some friends object to criticism as tantamount to “washing our dirty linen in public” and thereby displaying our weaknesses for the enemy to seize and beat us with. [But] the criticism we have in mind is criticism that abides by principles and democratic discipline and not “free criticism.” Some people may wish to use criticism to sow dissension and doubt in the ranks of our people and supply the enemy with documents to be used against us. They are not critics but troublemakers, who seek not progress but provocation. Their place is not on the public debating platform of a democratic country but in the prisons of the people’s state.
The targets of our criticism should not be confined to fallacious tendencies in our own ideology, scholarship, and art; we must criticize and devote ourselves mainly to assailing the enemy’s reactionary thoughts, literature, and art. The ideological and cultural struggle cannot be divorced from the political, armed, and economic struggle. The enemy uses its pessimistic and hedonistic theories to indoctrinate the youth in the areas it controls; it stultifies the masses with egoistical and idealistic points of view; it propagates decadent and rotten art; it poisons the spirit of our people in the most wicked manner. Have we exposed the enemy yet? Duhamel48 came to Indochina to speak in defense of the colonialists’ policy of plundering. Who among the cultural circles answered him as he deserved? In the war against the imperialist aggressors, we must also join the ideological battle!
We eagerly await the master critics of imperialist culture in general and French colonialist culture in particular. We should not forget that decadent French literary and artistic ideas and their dangerous theories have more or less penetrated the minds of our young people, intellectuals and the current generation of writers and artists. Criticizing the decadent literature and art of the French colonialists is another way of changing the thinking of our intellectual and cultural circles.
For creating works of good art, we would like to offer the following opinions. A number of writers and artists feel that they are running in circles, left behind by the war of resistance, which is moving ahead at great speed, with everyone taking an active part in it and in the task of national reconstruction. Time flies, but they themselves are at a loss what to do or what to create or have created only little, with negligible results. The prevailing mood among them is a feeling of perplexity as to the “right path” to take. Our friend Nguyen Dinh Thi, writing in the Van Nghe [Art and Literature] periodical,49 has rightfully echoed the bewilderment, anguish, and anxiety that beset a whole generation of our country’s writers and artists who are trying to break out of the trammels of the past in order to surge ahead and remain abreast of the movement.50
Artistic creation is an important matter. Its process, as we see it, includes a series of tasks:
1. Choosing the topic.
2. Determining the audience for one’s creation.
3. Acquiring conditions necessary for realization.
4. Testing works by the reaction of the masses.
Topics are not really lacking. The war is being fought in a thousand and one forms and situations, which are reflected in our minds and stir our souls.
What is essential is to live among the masses of the people, that is, to live a worthy life, the militant life of our people. To investigate, research, collect information, study, be in sympathy with the masses, and commit oneself wholly to the movement; to let one’s heart beat in harmony with the heart of the nation; to share in its joys and sorrows; to labor and fight with the people; and to share their faith and hatred. If we do this, why [would we] fear that life will not be rich in ideas and emotions?
The audience for our artistic creation is the people. For any creation we should ask, Who is to enjoy and watch what we are creating? If our real purpose is to create for the people, then we should determine who the people are, of what sections they are composed, what their current cultural level is, what their aspirations are, and so forth. Only when the answers to these questions are clear in our minds can we produce realistic and worthwhile works. Many works are expensive cakes offered to the masses when they are crying out for bread. We must oppose subjectivity in artistic creation, that is, taking one’s own level as the general level. To thoroughly understand the cultural level of the people is not to lower one’s art to the lowest artistic level of the people but to use the average level of the majority of the people as the standard and to use one’s works to raise their cultural level.
The conditions for artistic realization consist of what is directly necessary to complete a work of art. Any writer or artist who wishes to create as he should requires the three following conditions:
1. To have the opportunity to hear, look, feel, and see; to get in touch with the masses; to work in the movement; or to keep close to the movement. On-the-spot observation has always been profitable to artistic creation (condition of place).
2. To have the time to polish, perfect, and revise one’s work (the time condition). Having time here does not imply abandoning action or seeking refuge in one’s ivory tower. The French writer Henri Barbusse wrote and acted at the same time without ever easing up.
3. To have the means necessary for subsistence and creation (the material condition).
Some other, secondary, conditions also are important: a propitious climate for artistic creation and the publication of creative works. Favorable circumstances drive and encourage people to create. The war has supplied writers and artists with such an atmosphere, and cultural organizations can complement this condition. The publication of works of art also is a necessary condition. Without being able to print and publish, those engaged in producing art would lose enthusiasm for it.
To be a good finished product, a work of art must be born of the movement and the masses and return to where it originated. If one does not live with the army or is not a member of an army unit, one cannot write a play about the army. Even a play written by someone in the army still must be performed in front of the army and the people and be revised on the basis of criticism from various army units and the people in order to ensure its artistic worth. The masses are the most impartial and perspicacious judge of art. When once created, if works of art are devoured, admired, enjoyed, adopted, applied, and chosen by the people as their daily spiritual nourishment, they must have value. In contrast, those works whose birth is heeded and cared for by no one will die an early death.
Do the masses have to learn about art before they are capable of criticizing art? No. They are the most expert art critics of all, precisely because they have the many ears and eyes, the sound judgment and feelings, of large numbers of people. In this respect, no art critic can compare with the masses. It is quite possible that the majority in the masses are not knowledgeable about some technical aspects, but the masses include both experts and nonexperts; what some cannot see, others can.
So, to my knowledge, eminent writers never feel condescension, complacency, and contempt for the masses; instead, they usually go to them for final control of their works and to listen attentively to their opinions with a view to improving and completing their creations.
The method of artistic creation outlined here, together with the right ideological stand and some definite aptitude or talent, will produce good works of art. Let our writers and artists use these suggestions when participating actively in the current movement for patriotic emulation that is sweeping over the country….
Let us hope that this cultural congress will provide an impetus for the movement of patriotic emulation by writers and artists.
[Adapted from Truong Chinh, “Marxism and the Issue of Vietnamese Culture,” 264–68, 270–71, 284–92, 294]
Despite most writers’ acceptance of the party’s political line on culture during the first resistance war,51 some writers struggled to retain their own artistic and creative freedom apart from the party’s strictures. One such figure was Tran Dan (1926–1997), who, as a political commissar, had written about the heroes on the ramparts at Dien Bien Phu. In early 1956, Tran Dan’s poem “We Must Win” appeared in a new journal, Masterpieces of Spring, which a group of prominent writers and poets in Hanoi started during a brief “hundred flowers” opening of the arts. This poem crystallizes and encapsulates the conflicts between intellectual and artistic freedom and the party’s control of art and literature in the so-called Nhan Van Giai Pham affair (1956/1957). The party charged that writers associated with this group were remote from everyday life, in effect acting as agents of the capitalist class, lacked the correct ideological position, and opposed the state. “We Must Win” expresses the poet’s ambivalence about the costs of war, especially the prospect of the renewal of war in the south, as well as disillusionment with the postwar society in the north. The sorrow and isolation of the poet and his lover are offset by a sense of the desolation of the city of Hanoi. At the end of this excerpt from the poem, these doubts move toward a cautious note of hope.
I live on Sinh Tu Street:
Two people
A small house
Full of love, but why was life not joyful?
although at peace
Is only in its first year
We have so many worries…
…
I was living with frayed nerves
A time dense with conversations about going south
The rain kept falling darkly
People kept dragging themselves away in groups
I became one who carried anger
I turned my body to block their way
—Stop!
Where are you going?
What are you doing?
They complained of lack of money, of rice
Of priests, of God, of this and that
Men and women even complained of sadness
—Here
They longed for the wind, for the clouds …
Oh!
Our sky faces a cloudy day
But why abandon it when it is our sky?
…
Who led them away?
Who?
Led them to where? And they kept crying
The sky still lashes down heavy wind
North and south, heartbreaking division
Kneeling down, I ask the rainstorm
Not to continue falling upon their heads
—enough hardship!
It is their bad fate—don’t punish them further
Neglected gardens and fields, empty houses
People are gone but they leave behind their hearts
Oh northern land! Let’s safeguard for them
I live on Sinh Tu Street
Those sorrowful days
I walk on
seeing no street
seeing no house
Only the rain falling
upon the red flag
You were out looking for work
Returning each day with bowed head
—My beloved!
They still say to wait
I do not ask more, what can be said?
It rains, it rains
Three months gone
You waited
Living by the future
Days and nights like orphans
Sadly leading each other on
You walk
in the rain
head bowed
A young woman of nineteen
…
The rain keeps dragging on
I have yet to write about north south
I still believe Poetry has to generate storm and wind
But today
I bow my head
Where did Poetry go?
Why do poetic lines
Not move the earth and sky?
It keeps raining
I want to abandon Poetry
to do something else
But today while it is raining I am a man absorbed
A little talent
I write political poetry
Those sorrowful days
I walk on
seeing no street
seeing no house
Only the rain falling
Upon the red flag
…
I am walking under the rainy sky of the north
My ears are filled with whispers
People talking and people shouting
—They’re violating the agreement!
—Will there be an agreement?
—Will it be general elections or not?
—Will the elections be on time? Or a few years later?
These questions in a midst of a disorderly life
Human beings have always distrusted their own kind
People are often frightened by the future
People forget that America is a paper tiger
People are still in a hurry, little patience
Their courage is not yet that of workers and peasants
They do not yet have hearts steely as iron
People should open their eyes wide to see!
A trumpet sounds
The heroic army
A sea of guns
A mountain of bayonets
Thousands of eyes
Our army is practicing in the streets
Fluttering flags redden the streets, redden the houses
That flag is ever victorious
That army is courageous in all battles
Rising from the earth
To be the proletarian army
Maturing with each step
…
Today
The whole country cries out: UNIFICATION
We believe in the demand of our slogan
—Return the south
I turn my face to the sky
Crying out—suddenly a piece of the sky falls down
A few drops of red blood fall upon me
My people!
The words we shout
Have the power to pierce the sky bloody
No enemy can hinder our desire
We walk on—like the giant earth
Very gentle, but with a determined walk
Today
The lines of poetry I have written are
Like a bayonet: pierce
Like a bullet: tear
Like a thunderstorm: scream
Like love: saturate
The whole country has elected me unanimously
I am the champion of faith
But why is it that tonight
I lower my face before the light?
Empty room, the night rat nests
So many worries appear
They become the rocks
blocking our path!
My love, it turns out
A believer like me
still has moments of doubt
Who has REASON? Who has FORCE?
…
Today
It has stopped raining, no more wind
The rising sun reddens the streets, reddens the houses
Reddens all hearts and lungs
My love, try counting how many rainy days!
Now
As you bring things out to air
Don’t forget
To also air out our hearts and souls
Look high into the sky
The streets below full of red flags!
You have found work
Low salary—Life is still hard
But blessed
The government has many concerns
But we would be worse off without its ability to dispel the storm
You hang the red flag above the house
The flag dispels the ghosts
Dispels their dark shadows!
The red wounds of the resistance
Have closed their dark shadows!
The red wounds of the resistance
Have closed their mouths, have began to heal
…
The flag flutters
reddens the streets
reddens the houses
The color of the flag is the medicine for my ailment
Who wins and who loses?
Who has REASON? And who has FORCE?
My love
Today
the sky is blue
dark blue
The rising sun
reddens the streets
reddens the flags
Demonstration after demonstration
Sorrowful days have passed
Peace
is more consolidated
I walk on
seeing the streets
seeing the houses
Not the falling rain
Only the sun rising
Upon the red flag
We live on Sinh Tu Street
My love
Today
Let’s close the door
And go out
to join the demonstration
Raise the red flag
and sing
until our lungs burst
Of everyone
in cities
and countryside
The hungry, the sated, the rich, the poor
Those who are happy
Those living in sadness
Everyone!
Out to the streets!
Let’s go!
in large groups
in large groups
Demanding the future:
PEACE
UNIFICATION
INDEPENDENCE
DEMOCRACY
the blood of our life
Livelihood! Love!
We must win!
[Tran Dan, “Nhat dinh thang,” in Ghi, 151–64; trans. Kim N. B. Ninh]
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM
LAW ON MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY (1959)
The innovative Marriage and Family Law, passed by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s National Assembly on December 29, 1959, and signed by Ho Chi Minh on January 13, 1960, was designed to reform such patriarchal marriage customs as child marriage, arranged marriage, and polygamy and to improve the status of women. Monogamy, marriage based on free will and mutual consent, as well as the protection of women’s and children’s rights in the family were among the guiding principles of the new matrimonial regime instituted by this law. In addition, women were given the right to divorce, along with the division of common property and the prospect of custody of their children. As in the Le Code, the regulation of marriage by the state was a standard practice in Vietnamese governance, similar to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century state guidelines on proper marriage rituals and social behavior.52
Chapter I: General Principles
ARTICLE 1
The state guarantees the implementation of a free and progressive matrimonial regime based on monogamy, equality between men and women, and protection of the interests of women and children, which is designed to promote a happy, democratic, and harmonious family whose members shall unanimously support and love one another and help one another so they can advance.
ARTICLE 2
The remnants of the feudalistic matrimonial regime based on the arbitrary superiority of men over women and the neglect of children’s interests are abolished.
Contracting for a premature marriage, concluding a marriage using force, hindering marriages based on free consent, requiring goods by reason of marriage or betrothal are prohibited. Violence toward and the ill treatment of women are prohibited, as are second-rank marriages.
Chapter II: Marriage
ARTICLE 4
Men and women who have attained the legal age shall have the full right to freely decide their marriage; neither party can impose constraints on the other; and no third person is allowed to use force or to cause hindrances.
ARTICLE 5
Married persons are prohibited from taking another wife or husband.
ARTICLE 6
A woman may marry only after reaching eighteen years of age; a man, only after twenty years.
ARTICLE 7
The period of mourning does not constitute a barrier to marriage.
ARTICLE 8
Widows have the right to remarry; in the case of remarriage, their rights and interests concerning their children and property are guaranteed.
ARTICLE 9
Marriage between relatives of lineal descent or between adoptive parents and adopted children is prohibited. Marriage between full brothers and sisters and between half brothers and half sisters on the father’s side or between half brothers and half sisters on the mother’s side is prohibited. Marriage between collateral relatives up to the fifth degree or between persons related by blood shall be regulated by custom.
Those persons completely incapacitated by sexual impotence and those affected by diseases such as leprosy, venereal disease, and mental illness shall not marry for the duration of these conditions.
ARTICLE 11
Marriages must be approved by the local administrative committee where the bride or the groom reside and must be entered into the register of marriage. No other marriage formalities have legal effect.
Chapter III: Obligations and Rights of Spouses
ARTICLE 12
Husband and wife are equal within the family in all respects.
ARTICLE 13
Spouses have the obligation to love, esteem, and care for each other; provide each other with assistance so they can advance; bring up their children; participate in productive labor; and establish a harmonious and happy family.
ARTICLE 14
Each spouse shall have the right to freely choose an appropriate profession and to freely engage in political, cultural, and social activities.
ARTICLE 15
Spouses have equal rights with respect to the ownership, use, and disposal of property acquired before and during the marriage.
ARTICLE 16
If one spouse dies and distribution of the property becomes an issue, the distribution shall be carried out in accordance with the provisions in article 29. Each spouse shall have the right to inherit property from the other.
Chapter IV: Relations Between Parents and Children
ARTICLE 17
Parents have the obligation to love, raise, and educate their children. Children have the duty to love and respect their parents, take care of them, and provide for their needs.
ARTICLE 18
Parents shall not mistreat their children or ill treat their daughters-in-law, adopted children, or children born of a previous marriage. Abandoning a newborn child or making an attempt on its life is strictly prohibited. Any person who abandons a newborn child or makes an attempt on its life, or anyone who is responsible for these crimes shall be criminally liable.
ARTICLE 19
Boys and girls have equal rights and duties in the family.
ARTICLE 20
After attaining majority age, those children still living with their parents are free to choose their profession, to engage in political and social activities, and to possess and own property. They also, however, shall be obligated to care for the overall life of their family.
ARTICLE 21
The acknowledgment by the father or the mother of a child born out of wedlock must be certified by the local administrative committee. In case of litigation, the people’s court shall resolve [the identification of the child].
ARTICLE 22
A child born out of wedlock shall have the right to ask the people’s court for the father’s or mother’s acknowledgment [of his or her identity].
The mother shall have the equal right to request the identification of the father of a minor child born out of wedlock. The guardian of a minor child shall also have the right, in the name of the child, to request the identification of the father or mother of a child born out of wedlock.
A child born out of wedlock who has been acknowledged by his or her father or mother or authorized by the people’s court to acknowledge his or her parents has all the rights and duties of a legitimate child.
ARTICLE 24
Adopted children shall have the same rights and duties as biological children. The adoption must be approved by the local administrative committee of the domicile of the adoptive parent or that of the adopted child and must be entered into the civil register. The people’s court can terminate an adoption at the request of the adopted child or other persons or organizations. This request must be made to protect the interests of the adopted child.
Chapter V: Divorce
ARTICLE 25
If an investigation is [undertaken] on petition for divorce filed by both spouses and is satisfied that both parties freely and fully consent to the divorce, the people’s court will approve the divorce.
ARTICLE 26
On petition for divorce filed by one of the spouses, the appropriate organs shall initiate an investigation and make an effort at reconciliation. If the reconciliation fails, the people’s court shall resolve the matter. If the situation between the spouses is grave, in which they cannot resume a life together and the purpose of the marriage is impossible to reach, the people’s court shall decree a divorce.
ARTICLE 27
During pregnancy of the wife or within one year after she has given birth to a child, the husband does not have the right to file a petition for divorce. The inadmissibility of a petition does not apply if the wife has filed for divorce.
ARTICLE 28
In case of divorce, all claims for the restitution of gifts and the cost of nuptials are prohibited.
In case of divorce, common property shall be divided, paying due consideration to the contributions made by each party, the state of the property, and the actual situation of the family. Household labor is considered equivalent to productive labor. In the distribution of property, the interests of women, children, and production are to be protected.
ARTICLE 30
In a divorce case, if one of the two parties in need requests support, the other party shall be obligated to pay alimony to the needy party within the limits of his or her own means. The amount and duration of alimony shall be fixed by mutual agreement of the two parties. If the parties disagree, the people’s court shall resolve the matter. If the spouse who is receiving alimony remarries, he or she will relinquish their right to further alimony.
ARTICLE 31
A divorced couple reserves all their duties and rights toward the children common to their marriage.
ARTICLE 32
In a divorce case, the guardianship, maintenance, and education of minor children shall be determined in every respect in the children’s interest. As a rule, a nursing infant is to be entrusted to the mother. The parent who is not awarded custody of the children has visitation rights and the right to give the children care and attention.
A divorced couple must, each according to his or her own ability, contribute to the cost of the upbringing and education of their children. If necessary, alternations in the guardianship of the children and the amount of contributions to their upbringing and education may be ordered in the best interests of the children.
ARTICLE 33
The parties shall agree on the guardianship, maintenance, and education of the children and the contribution to the cost of their maintenance and education. If they cannot agree or their agreement contains illegal elements, the people’s court shall resolve the matter.
ARTICLE 34
All acts that violate the current law shall be punished according to existing legislation.
ARTICLE 35
The current law goes into effect on the date of its promulgation.
Depending on the specific situation, in regions where ethnic minorities reside, provisions may be enacted to adjust the current law. These provisions must be approved by the Standing Committee of the National Assembly.
[Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Luat hon nhan va gia dinh Nam 1959; trans. Jayne Werner]
NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN POETRY AND SONG DURING THE VIETNAM WAR
When the American war divided Vietnam into two warring halves, writers, poets, and other artists tried to make sense of the intensity of the violence and its human costs. In the north, literature tended to hew to the principle of “serving the people,” but sometimes a poem struck a tender note about innocence, heartbreak, and loss.
“Secret Scent” (1969), by Phan Thi Thanh Nhan, is a subtle lament by a young woman unable to directly express her love to her young man, a soldier about to go off to war. She leaves him a bouquet of grapefruit blossoms, a scent with which they both grew up, to tell him of her love. This poem, a muted statement of loss during war, greatly affected urban audiences in the north during the massive mobilization of troops sent to the south.
In the south, poetry and songs were based on the traditions of the 1930s New Poetry movement, with their emphasis on individual freedom and passionate disengagements and concerns. Although sometimes seemingly unaffected by the war, the most powerful works captured the sense of dread and futility of war. One of the southern republic’s most important poets, Thanh Tam Tuyen, expresses in his poem “Resurrection” (1956) a sense of foreboding about the regime’s ultimate fate. His poems marked a departure from the 1930s New Poets but, at the same time, echoed those of Han Mac Tu by plumbing the depths of consciousness through mystical and surrealistic means.53 Often described as an existentialist, Thanh Tam Tuyen relied on intuition, imagination, and feeling to achieve his poetic effects.
The south’s preeminent folksinger, Trinh Cong Son, composed haunting melodies about death and destruction. “A Lullaby of Cannons for the Night” (1967) was written from the perspective of a city dweller, in the form of a lullaby. After the Tet Offensive of 1968, cities in South Vietnam no longer were safe. This song, with its cascading rhythms and chantlike cadences, reflected the quickening pace of the war and its increasing proximity to the cities, like a noose being tightened around them. Instead of a lullaby, cannons sound in the night, signaling an impending doom. Women poets in the republican south also became important interpreters of the wartime malaise, capturing both the mournful losses and the horrors of the war. One of the most distinguished poets, Nha Ca, wrote in a classical but distinctly modern mode. Her poems are known for their musicality and balance of form. Nha Ca’s poem “The Bell of Thien Mu” (1964) describes how the sound of the bell of the Thien Mu pagoda on the Perfume River in her birthplace of Hue, like other bells throughout Vietnamese history, drew her into memories about life’s journey and its vagaries.54
PHAN THI THANH NHAN
SECRET SCENT
The windows of the two houses at the end of the street
Always stayed open for no reason.
Two old friends who used to be classmates.
A grapefruit tree behind one house floats its scent to the other.
She hid a bunch of flowers in her handkerchief
And, hesitantly, crossed to her neighbor’s house.
Someone there would leave the next day for the front.
In silence they sat, lost for words.
Their eyes met, then turned away.
Who could dare say the first words?
The scent of grapefruit blossoms made them more shy.
The young man didn’t dare ask for the blossoms;
The young girl didn’t dare give them,
But the warm and refined fragrance
Could not hide itself …
And floated faintly by.
Like the blossoms, the young girl was silent.
She let their fragrance speak for her love:
How distant you seem; you still don’t know.
Don’t you see I come to you?
The fragrance will fill your chest.
When you leave
The fragrance will follow you, everywhere.
Leaving each other
They still didn’t speak,
Yet the fragrance sweetens the young man’s journey.
[Bowen, Nguyen, and Weigl, eds. and trans., Mountain River, 117]
THANH TAM TUYEN
RESURRECTION
I want to cry like I want to throw up
on the street
crystal sunlight
I call my own name to soothe my longing
Thanh Tam Tuyen
evening a star breaks against a church bell
I need a secret place to kneel
for a little boy’s soul
fearful of a fierce dog
a hungry dog without colors
I want to die like I want to sleep
although I’m standing on a river bank
the deep dark water is restless
I scream my own name to slake my rage
Thanh Tam Tuyen
night falls onto a sinful whispering realm
O child wearing a red kerchief Hey there wolf
a wandering sort of wolf
I crave suicide
an eternal sort of murderer
I scream my own name in distress
Thanh Tam Tuyen
strangle myself into collapsing
so I could be resurrected
into an ongoing string of life
mankind doesn’t forgive the crime of murder
the executioners kneel
the time of resurrection
a shout is a prayer
for the waiting centuries
I want to live like I want to die
among intersecting breaths
a flaming chest
I call softly
dear
open the door to your heart
my living spirit has turned into a child
as pure as the truth one time.
[Thanh Tam Tuyen, “Phuc sinh,” in Toi khong con co doc, 2; trans. Linh Dinh]
TRINH CONG SON
A LULLABY OF CANNONS FOR THE NIGHT
Every night cannons resound in the town
A street cleaner stops sweeping and listens
The cannons wake up a mother
The cannons disturb a young child
At midnight a flare shines in the mountains
Every night cannons resound in the town
A street cleaner stops sweeping and listens
Each flight of the planes frightens the child
Destroying the shelter, tearing golden skin Each night the native land’s eyes stay open wide
Thousands of bombs rain down on the village
Thousands of bombs rain down on the field
And Vietnamese homes burn bright in the hamlet
Thousands of trucks with claymores and grenades
Thousands of trucks enter the cities
Carrying the remains of mothers, sisters, brothers
Every night cannons resound in the town
A street cleaner stops sweeping and listens
Every night cannon shells create a future without life
Cannons like a chant without a prayer
Children forget to live and anxiously wait
Every night cannons resound in the town
A street cleaner stops sweeping and listens
Every night the cannons sing a lullaby for golden skin
The cannons become like a familiar refrain
And children are gone before they see their native land
[Trinh Cong Son, “Dai bac ru dem,” in Ca khuc da vang, 10–11; trans. John C. Schafer and Cao Thi Nhu-Quynh]
NHA CA
THE BELL OF THIEN MU
I grew up on this side of the Huong River
The river that defines patches of memory,
The fruits of Kim Long, the steel of Bach Ho bridge,
The pagoda gate welcomes the quickening pace of the river flow.
Clear water flowed through my untroubled childhood,
Ancient stupa, old bell, gentle river, inconsequential waves.
The nights were vast, the days laden with importance
Morning birds, evening crickets, cockcrows at the break of dawn
The sounds of the bell permeated deep under my skin,
The bell and I were intimate like evening and night.
I left home at the age of nineteen,
The night before I lay waiting for the bell to toll,
The end of madness, the beginning of sad slumber.
The sounds of the bell came and gently woke me up,
The sounds of the bell came and went as only I could see
Only I could see the sounds of the bell dissolve
The sounds of the bell dissolve, regular like the breaths of siblings
The sounds of the bell dissolve into fragments like a mother’s tears
The sounds of the bell dissolve yet linger on like the rain in the street
The sounds of the bell dissolve but take forever like a sleepless night
The sounds of the bell dissolve into pieces like the fragments of my heart
From the time when I parted way with my bell
I changed my name, took up writing and journalism
Life’s needs taught me to lie, to bend the truth
The pagoda gate lost touch with the wayward child
Ancient stupa, old bell, minor river in morning mist
Water flows through opaque misty eyes
Grass grows on the old roads in my heart
The old bell now sunken deep under my skin
My childhood fell in and drowned a long time ago
Times of the past receded like long gone floods
But somehow memories return tonight
The sounds of the bell suddenly come alive
The sounds of the bell of my childhood
Break into thousands of voices inside me
Into fragments of bronze, dark like the skin of the night
fragments of bronze, dark like the stirrings of the body
fragments of bronze dark like the blood of restoration
fragments of dark bronze advancing in uniform steps
I have woken up, my bell, oh my bell
I have woken up, I already am awake
I have truly woken up
Woken up with storms and devastations
woken up with history
Dear mother, this afternoon in the old city
The sounds of the bell came to me, like tears falling on my hand
on the water, on the people’s faces, on the road’s surface
let me return, to stand here with my gaze fixed in a daze.
[Nha Ca, “Tieng chuong Thien Mu,” in Tho Nha Ca, 25; trans. Ton That Quynh Du]
RETURNING TO MY HOME VILLAGE (1986)
This excerpt from Nguyen Thi Thap’s memoir, From the Land of Tien Giang, follows the standard format of a revolutionary narrative. Nguyen Thi Thap (1908–1996) was a founding member of the Viet Minh liberation committee in My Tho Province in southern Vietnam in 1945 and was a Communist militant during both the French and American wars. During the American war, she left for the north, where she became head of the Women’s Union, among other posts. In 1975, after the end of the war, she returned to South Vietnam. This translation captures what it was like to return home after forty years and her observations of the changes the war had wrought in her homeland.
The small car taking us from Ho Chi Minh City to the Mekong Delta rolled along at a good speed along National Highway 4. About five kilometers [a little more than three miles] from the provincial capital, it began to slow down, crossed the Trung Luong intersection, and headed toward my home village.
My heart began to race. I had kept calm up to now, despite my rising excitement. Soon I would be home. It had been forty years—since I left to join the revolution. Tam Canh, my comrade and brother, was traveling with me. He was happy and excited and could not sit still in the car, his head turning right and left to take in the scene along the road.
It was a day in mid-June 1975, after the liberation of Saigon and all of South Vietnam. We had flown from Hanoi to Saigon, where Mrs. Nguyen Thi Dinh and other members of the Liberation Women’s Association met us and took us to the association’s guest house. I was going to stay in Ho Chi Minh City for a few days to meet and chat with friends and acquaintances whom I had not seen since the signing of the 1954 Geneva Agreements and the regroupment of Viet Minh cadres to the north. But my brother was impatient to get home, so I arranged for us to make the trip the next day.
It was the beginning of summer, and the sun was shining brightly. From the paddy fields and fruit orchards lining the road, a mass of dragonflies of different varieties and hues rushed toward our car and hovered over the highway, rising in the air to avoid the windshield and then descending again. They seemed to make way for our car and brought back memories of my childhood when my friends and I used to chase them in the hope of catching a few. Other children would chant, “Dragonflies, dragonflies, fly away; watch out for the hands that try to nab you.” I would hold my breath and stealthily approach one, only to see it fly away just as I was about to catch it. Could it have heard the chant of the other children? It made a circle and then, when the danger seemed to have passed, landed at the exact same spot.
Later, after I joined the revolution, I left my village for Saigon to operate [as a militant] because my underground activities had been uncovered and I was about to be arrested. After a few years, however, I returned to my village—like the dragonfly that came back to the spot where it had landed. I came back because of the close ties I had to my home village—ties I felt unable to sever. But I would have to leave again, and this time it would be years before I could return—like the dragonfly that had to make numerous circles before it could come to rest.
But things had changed a lot. From the moment I could see Saigon from the air, I knew that things were different. It was as if I had never been here before. Houses crowded against one another. Tall buildings rose up in the air. Cars and motorcycles filled the streets, moving to and fro like the shuttle of a loom. It would be hard for me to recognize the areas where my comrades and I tried to lead the life of proletarians in order to penetrate the working class. The first time I traveled to Saigon from my village, I took the train. But now, the railway was gone—torn up and removed to be replaced by a wide asphalt road. In the old days, when we passed Phu Lam, we could see rolling paddy fields stretching to the horizon. Now, houses and shops lined both sides of the road all the way to Binh Dien and Binh Chanh. Gone were the small thatched peasant huts, with their wells, buffalo sheds, and bamboo hedges. In their places were brick houses with metal roofs, blue and red walls plastered with lurid advertisements, gas stations, administrative compounds, and old enemy outposts. I could not recognize anything. We sped past an unending succession of houses and orchards—particularly from Luong Phu to Ben Chua, and Trung Luong where the orchards formed a green mass of vegetation with their trees laden with mangoes and guava, and their heavy branches hanging over the irrigation ditches and creeks filled with water. I scrutinized the faces of people I passed, trying to see whether I could recognize someone I knew. But everything was unfamiliar. The baskets they carried, their hats, and their clothes had changed. Even the women peddlers carrying baskets suspended from bamboo poles were dressed differently from before.
After the long circle of the dragonfly, I was almost home. Mixed with the joy of home coming and the happiness over our great victory was a feeling of sadness. Almost all my comrades had perished. This day came at the cost of countless separations and losses. Ahead of us, we saw the Long Dinh bridge. Its white curve looked like the bleached half shell of a turtle. It was here that Ton Duc Thang directed the destruction of the bridge after he was released from the Con Dao penal island following the August 1945 Revolution, to block the French advance into Cai Lay and Cai Be.
We stopped about a kilometer from the village, left our car with a family living next to the road, and walked the rest of the way. I could hardly believe my eyes. Could this be my village? A few years before the Final Great Victory, some comrades who had been released by the enemy [that is, the Saigon government] as part of a POW exchange over the Thach Han River [separating North and South Vietnam], had come to visit me in Hanoi and told me about what Long Hung had become. But things had changed even more since then. We wanted to find the house of Mrs. Hau, my niece and the daughter of my brother Tam Canh. She was about forty years old by now. We had just finished asking some villagers, “Where is Mrs. Hau’s house?” when we saw comrade Sau Danh approaching. He was a member of the Province Military Committee, a native of Long Dinh. He was fifty years old, but he was agile and quick like a man in his prime. He shouted with joy when he saw us, “You are back! Let me take you there.”
But where was the road that led to our village? The old red laterite road, large enough for cars to pass through—the road that led to the Long Hung temple and that people from nearby villages had taken to participate in the 1940 uprising—was now just a narrow path. The comfortable houses that used to line the road had disappeared, replaced here and there by dilapidated, low, thatched huts. The trees had been cut down, and thorny underbrush spread along the path. I smelled the damp earth, the wild vegetation in the sunlight, the field crabs in their hollows, and the burned straw that the villagers had used to smoke out the field rats. These smells, which defy description, were the only things that had not changed since my childhood days in the village.
The news spread quickly. The whole village was now aware of our return. My brother Tam could not recognize his own wife. She was beautiful in her youth, and I was surprised to find her looking so old and weak, with a bent back—like an old woman. She embraced me and wept. Hau wrapped her arms around her father, and wailed, “Father, you have come back, but everyone has died; no one is left.” I had never seen my brother cry before—except at our parents’ funeral—but now he also shed tears. I had to turn away so that no one could see that I was doing the same.
Many visitors crowded in. A crippled neighbor also came, brought by his children. The thatched-roof house was too small to accommodate everyone. Some would enter and then leave to make room for those waiting in the courtyard to come in. Everyone cried—hosts and visitors, children, adults and old folks alike. No one could hold back tears, brought on by sadness and also by joy. I cried because I was overwhelmed by the emotion of homecoming. The visitors cried because they were happy to witness our family reunion but also because they grieved over their own losses. Since the 1930s, their family members had left one by one, but none had come back. So tears of joy mingled with tears of sorrow.
Mr. Hai Ty, who lived in a nearby hamlet, was passing by our house just as we arrived. He was on his way back from visiting a granddaughter who had just given birth. He stayed to visit with us until we departed. He was over eighty years old, but he was still mentally fit and of good humor. He sat on the edge of the bed, his feet dangling, and let the tears stream down his face. He said, “Hau, don’t tell your father that everyone has died. This is simply not true. During the nine-year war against the French, they swore they would exterminate the people in Long Hung. Then the U.S.-Diem regime swore they would bury the people of Long Hung. But, you see, your house is overflowing with people.” Then he laughed heartily and wiped off his tears with the sleeve of his shirt.
Yes, I still remember when a UMDC detachment [Catholic militia unit] set up a military outpost in Vam Xang in 1950. They swore to exterminate the people of Long Hung. They all were Catholics. The people nicknamed them the “drinkers of the people’s blood.”55 They were hooligans—abandoned illegitimate children who had been raised by reactionary Catholic priests. Men from Long Hung—whether revolutionary activists, guerrilla fighters, or innocent civilians—caught by the UMDC were invariably beaten and tortured to death. Their preferred method was to smash their victims’ genital organs with a hammer or wooden club, or burn them with a rag soaked with gasoline until they dropped off. They proclaimed that their goal was to exterminate the Communists in Long Hung and to nip off all revolutionary offshoots. But they could never achieve their objective. It did not occur to them that the red flag with the yellow star—now the glorious emblem of our fatherland—was unfurled for the first time in Long Hung and My Tho Province during the 1940 uprising. In the darkest years, when the enemy drowned the people of Long Hung and South Vietnam in a sea of blood, this flag was embedded in the hearts of the people, like red-hot embers that no force could extinguish.
Then, during the anti-French war, the first attack that set ablaze a whole enemy convoy took place on Giong Dua road in My Tho Province. It was followed by battles in Ham Vo, Hau My, and by the attack against enemy paratroopers in Gay Co. These attacks have become part of our nation’s history—forever. During the American war, it was no accident that the U.S. and Saigon army set up Binh Duc military sector near Long Hung. With their river flotilla and artillery units, they subjected Long Hung day and night to shelling and bombing, and used helicopters to catch cadres and guerrillas by surprise. They intended to exterminate all living things—from the grass to the trees to the insects and worms—hoping to destroy the fighting spirit of the people lucky enough to survive in this tiny land raked with shells and bombs day and night. Yet they could not prevent the people of My Tho from inflicting a staggering blow on the Americans and their Saigon puppets at the battle of Ap Bac. Nor could they prevent the emergence in Long Hung of Le Thi Hong Gam, the national heroine.
Who doesn’t fear death? But one also has to ask oneself: what kind of life is worth living? In February 1962, when I was in Hanoi, I heard that Vinh Kim had been liberated for the third time. The day before that battle, the inhabitants of Long Hung and the neighboring villages of Kim Son, Song Thuan, and Thanh Phu held a banquet for seventy-two fighters who had sworn to fight to the death. They sat under durian trees, talking and laughing. In front of them, sandalwood and incense was burning at the martyrs’ memorial monument that had been set up, with a banner bearing the words “The Fatherland Honors Your Sacrifice” written in bright golden letters, and a coffin painted in red symbolizing the spirit of sacrifice of the soldiers willing to give their lives so that the fatherland could live. Weeping, women were serving food to the soldiers. The next night, the troops attacked and liberated Vinh Kim in a fierce, fiery battle. Three of them were killed. Their toughness reminded me of the heroes of Rach Gam under the Quang Trung emperor and of the courage of the comrades who took part in the 1940 uprising—people who did not fear death. All these heroes seemed to have coalesced in these seventy-two fighters—they are perhaps one and the same, the past and the present merged together. No one can wipe out all the heroes of our land because they keep on appearing generation after generation.
We were determined to continue on the path of our struggle. If we kept forging ahead, we would overcome whatever difficulties were lying in our way, and eventually we would reach our goal. The poet To Huu once said, “In the south, wherever there is verdant vegetation, the people wither; and wherever the vegetation withers, the people thrive.” Looking down from the plane window, we could see green expanses and clusters of houses with red-tile roofs. These were formerly enemy-occupied areas, where the vegetation was luxuriant but the people were miserable because they were in the enemy’s grip like fish lying on a chopping board, subjected to repression and their children forced into military conscription to meet the demands of “changing the color of corpses.”56 Some people in the occupied areas could not fully share the national joy of final victory because they had committed mistakes under enemy pressure or had given in to enemy enticements. But in areas where the vegetation, animals, and inhabitants were subjected to the abundant spraying of noxious chemicals and had to live in makeshift thatched-roof houses, the people were jubilant. Their revolutionary optimism, which had persistently illuminated their hearts throughout the dark years since the Ngo Dinh Diem regime, was finally rewarded—expressed today in boundless exuberance and even exultation.
We stayed from 9 A.M. until late in the afternoon. Half the inhabitants of Long Thanh A hamlet had come to see us. Everyone wanted to tell us about the situation in the hamlet since we left for the north—about the struggles and the events, and about those who had died and those who were still alive. Many recounted their own close brushes with death—with gestures and laughter, as though they were telling mythological tales, proud that they had survived while others would have perished in similar circumstances.
All the visitors brought food—bananas, custard apples, ducks, chickens, and fish from their ponds—and then went into the kitchen to cook it. They prepared a sumptuous lunch in our honor. I was not dreaming. I was really back in my home village, eating the native dishes of deep-fried fish and sour soup. As we clinked glasses, Sau Danh exclaimed, “If I had only known you were coming, I would have asked a photographer to come and film this occasion.”
The smell of incense wafting from the altar gave the occasion the air of a festive ritual honoring ancestors. We wondered whether their souls were present to witness our happy reunion.
My brother Tam asked about Tamarind mound, where a group of comrades had killed themselves as the 1940 uprising was being repressed, in order to avoid capture by the enemy. We were told that the tamarind tree had grown to an enormous size. Tears welled up in my eyes as I looked at the altar. Now that the revolution had returned in triumph, these old comrades were no longer with us—they all had passed away.
At about 5 P.M., we heard gunshots. Sau Danh whispered to me, “You’d better go to My Tho or Saigon to spend the night. Not all the enemy troops have surrendered. Some of them remain in hiding and come out at night to look for food. We’re searching for them, but you’d better take precautions.”
I left when the sun was about to set behind the so tree. This tree had sprouted in the old foundation of my grandparents’ and parents’ house. The tree had shed all its leaves, but its branches were heavy with yellow fruit. A few early white flowers had appeared. A couple of birds flew in and landed softly on its curved branches. I could see the bases of the columns among the vines and wild vegetation. The old armoire made of hard wood that had been hidden in the bamboo grove since the days of the resistance against French domination was still there. Its glass panes had been broken, and most of the bamboo had died, but it was still standing at its old spot. The garden surrounding the house, once luxuriant, had become a wasteland, dotted here and there with the huts of people who had recently moved in. When we reached a canal that had been dug in recent times across my family’s paddy fields to block American tanks, I was seized with emotion and felt I could not go on.
In the evening breeze that carried the smell of the alluvial soil in the Mekong River and was blowing over the rice fields, I thought I heard the shouts of Quang Trung’s troops as they rushed over the waves in their boats to rout the ten thousand Thai troops in this section of the river. And I thought I could see faintly the gnarled tamarind tree that still stood erect on the mound near the edge of Phuoc Thanh village. So, our nation’s and party’s tradition of fighting against foreign intruders had continued uninterrupted from generation to generation in this part of the country.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the peasants in this region, under the leadership of the proletariat, rose up to demand the right to live. The waves after waves of people who marched to demand the reduction of taxes and land rents stimulated and influenced the movement in practically all the provinces of the south. After the French colonialists repressed the 1940 uprising and plunged it into a sea of blood, they were buoyed by the belief that the revolution would never be able to rise up again. But in August 1945, although we were still bearing the scars of the repression, we rose up again and joined the rest of the nation in a massive uprising to take back political power. Then during the nine years of fighting against the French and twenty-one years of fighting the Americans—the two wars during which we had to face much stronger enemies—we refused to let hardships and difficulties deter us, and the party poured all its political and military capabilities into defeating the French and then the Americans in succession. Waves after waves of people fell on the battlefield, but we kept rushing forward, determined not to cede an inch of the land that had been bequeathed by our heroic ancestors.
Someone said quite rightly, “It takes myriad blood drops to hold on to a bit of soil, and it takes several pieces of bone to hold on to a section of a bridge.” This sentimental recollection, this giving in to emotions, was perhaps inevitable for me as I returned to my home village after decades of absence.
All the vestiges—and even the sounds—of my childhood were gone. I could no longer hear the sound of mangosteens falling on the ground in the quiet garden. I could no longer smell the fragrant ripe durian in the moonlight. I could no longer hear the bats beating their wings as they flew back and forth over the orchard all night long.
All that tied me to this historic land infused with the long-standing tradition of struggle seemed to have disappeared. But at the same time, my feelings for the revolution were never as intense as they were now. And I felt excited at the prospect of reconstructing my home village and my country and at the plans to rebuild them and make them better, more magnificent, and more beautiful. Many unforeseen difficulties lay ahead on the road to this future; therefore my unbreachable faith had to be tempered with realism.
[Nguyen Thi Thap, “Xom cu lang xa,” in Tu dat Tien Giang, 11–22; trans. Mai Elliott]
THE MIRACLE OF MINDFULNESS (1975)
Thich Nhat Hanh (b. 1926) is known as the founder of “engaged Buddhism,” which views one’s personal awakening as tied to social activism. Seeking an end to the violence of the Vietnam War and based on the foundation of the Buddhist revival movement of the 1930s, Buddhist social activists in South Vietnam in the 1960s developed a philosophy of nonviolence to forge a middle way between dogmatic Marxist doctrine and the right-wing military dictatorships sponsored by the United States. Thich Nhat Hanh’s writings point to the interrelatedness of existence, practice, and action, and inner and outer worlds. Meditation or mindfulness is seen as the means to become aware of others’ suffering and the oneness of things. Liberation and other basic Buddhist tenets are redefined by Thich Nhat Hanh’s aphorisms: The raft is not the shore, and the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon. In other words, the journey is more important than the goal, and Buddhism must adapt to and confront the modern world’s problems. Engaged Buddhism grows out of the Mahayana tradition, and the enlightened being is a bodhisattva. The two attributes of enlightenment, compassion and wisdom, are regarded as inseparable and are expressed in action. Everyone is capable of enlightenment; hence, Thich Nhat Hanh’s precepts were written not just for monks but for laypeople as well. Nonetheless, Thich Nhat Hanh’s text resembles Ngo Thi Nham’s 1796 contemplative reflection on Buddhist principles.57 Thich Nhat Hanh wrote the following as a letter to his young practitioners in the School of Youth for Social Service, which he founded in 1964 as a branch of the Unified Buddhist Congregation of Vietnam (UBCV),58 so they could learn how to discipline and fortify their minds for nonviolent action under dangerous conditions, as they often were in the line of fire.
One Is All, All Is One: The Five Aggregates
Let me devote a few lines here to talk about the methods you might use in order to arrive at liberation from narrow views and to obtain fearlessness and great compassion. These are the contemplations on interdependence, impermanency, and compassion.
While you sit in meditation, after having taken hold of your mind, you can direct your concentration to contemplate the interdependent nature of certain objects. This meditation is not a discursive reflection on a philosophy of interdependence. It is a penetration of mind into mind itself, using one’s concentrative power to reveal the real nature of the object being contemplated.
Recall a simple and ancient truth: the subject of knowledge cannot exist independently from the object of knowledge. To see is to see something. To hear is to hear something. To be angry is to be angry over something. Hope is hope for something. Thinking is thinking about something. When the object of knowledge [the something] is not present, there can be no subject of knowledge. The practitioner meditates on mind and, by so doing, is able to see the interdependence of the subject of knowledge and the object of knowledge. When we practice mindfulness of breath, the knowledge of breath is mind. When we practice mindfulness of the body, the knowledge of body is mind. When we practice mindfulness of objects outside ourselves, the knowledge of these objects also is mind. Therefore the contemplation of the nature of interdependence of all objects also is the contemplation of the mind.
Every object of the mind is itself mind. In Buddhism, we call the objects of mind the dharmas. Dharmas are usually grouped into five categories:
Bodily and physical forms
Feelings
Perceptions
Mental functioning
Consciousness
These five categories are called the five aggregates. The fifth category, consciousness, however, contains all the other categories and is the basis of their existence.
Contemplation on interdependence is a deep looking into all dharmas in order to pierce through to their real nature, in order to see them as part of the great body of reality and in order to see that the great body of reality is indivisible. It cannot be cut into pieces with separate existences of their own.
The first object of contemplation is our own person, the assembly of the five aggregates in ourselves. You contemplate right here and now on the five aggregates that make up your self.
You are conscious of the presence of bodily form, feeling, perception, mental functioning, and consciousness. You observe these “objects” until you see that each of them has intimate connection with the world outside yourself: if the world did not exist, then the assembly of the five aggregates could not exist either.
Consider the example of a table. The table’s existence is possible because of the existence of things that we might call “the non-table world”: the forest where the wood grew and was cut; the carpenter; the iron ore that became the nails and screws; and countless other things related to the table, the parents and ancestors of the carpenter, [and] the sun and rain that made it possible for the trees to grow.
If you grasp the table’s reality, you will see that in the table itself are present all those things that we normally think of as the non-table world. If you took away any of these non-table elements and returned them to their sources—the nails back to the iron ore, the wood to the forest, the carpenter to his parents—the table would no longer exist.
A person who looks at the table and can see the universe is a person who can see the Way. You meditate on the assembly of the five aggregates in yourself in the same manner. You meditate on them until you are able to see the presence of the reality of one-ness in your own self and can see that your own life and the life of the universe are one. If the five aggregates return to their sources, the self no longer exists. Each second, the world nourishes the five aggregates. The self is no different from the assembly of the five aggregates themselves. The assembly of the five aggregates plays, as well, a crucial role in the formation, creation, and destruction of all things in the universe.
Liberation from Suffering
People normally divide reality into compartments and so are unable to see the interdependence of all phenomena. To see one in all and all in one is to break through the great barrier that narrows one’s perception of reality, a barrier that Buddhism calls the attachment to the false view of self.
Attachment to the false view of self means belief in the presence of unchanging entities that exist on their own. To break through this false view is to be liberated from every sort of fear, pain, and anxiety. When the bodhisattva Quan Am,59 who has been such a source of inspiration for peace workers in Vietnam, looked into the reality of the five aggregates giving rise to the emptiness of self, she was liberated from every suffering, pain, doubt, and anger. The same would apply to everyone. If we contemplate the five aggregates in a stubborn and diligent way, we, too, will be liberated from suffering, fear, and dread.
We have to strip away all the barriers in order to live as part of the universal life. A person isn’t some private entity traveling unaffected through time and space as if sealed off from the rest of the world by a thick shell. Living for one hundred or one hundred thousand lives sealed off like that not only isn’t living, but it also isn’t possible. In our lives a multitude of phenomena are present, just as we ourselves are present in many different phenomena. We are life, and life is limitless. Perhaps one can say that we are alive only when we live the life of the world and so live the sufferings and joys of others. The suffering of others is our own suffering, and the happiness of others is our own happiness. If our lives have no limits, the assembly of the five aggregates that makes up our self, also has no limits. The impermanent character of the universe, the successes and failures of life, can no longer manipulate us. After having seen the reality of interdependence and entered deeply into its reality, nothing can oppress you any longer. You are liberated. Sit in the lotus position, observe your breath, and ask someone who has died for others.
Meditation on interdependence is to be practiced constantly, not only while sitting, but as an integral part of our involvement in all ordinary tasks. We must learn to see that the person in front of us is our self and that we are that person. We must be able to see the process of interorigination and interdependence of all events, both those that are happening and those that will happen.
A Ride on the Waves of Birth and Death
I cannot leave out the problem of life and death. Many young people and others have come out to serve others and to labor for peace, through their love for all who are suffering. They are always mindful of the fact that the most important question is the question of life and death, often not realizing that life and death are but two faces of one reality. Once we realize that, we will have the courage to encounter both of them.
When I was only nineteen years old, I was assigned by an older monk to meditate on the image of a corpse in the cemetery. But I found it very hard to take and resisted the meditation. Now I no longer feel that way. Then I thought that such a meditation should be reserved for older monks. But since then, I have seen many young soldiers lying motionless beside one another, some only thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen years old. They had no preparation or readiness for death. Now I see that if one doesn’t know how to die, one can hardly know how to live—because death is a part of life. Just two days ago Mobi told me that she thought at twenty, one was old enough to meditate on the corpse. She has turned only twenty-one herself.
We must look death in the face, recognize and accept it, just as we look at and accept life.
The Buddhist Sutra on Mindfulness speaks about the meditation on the corpse: meditate on the decomposition of the body, how the body bloats and turns violet, how it is eaten by worms until only bits of blood and flesh still cling to the bones, meditate up to the point that only white bones remain, which in turn are slowly worn away and turned into dust. Meditate like that, knowing that your own body will undergo the same process. Meditate on the corpse until you are calm and at peace, until your mind and heart are light and tranquil, and a smile appears on your face. Thus, by overcoming revulsion and fear, life will be seen as infinitely precious, every second of it worth living. And it is not just our own lives that are recognized as precious, but also the lives of every other person, every other person, every other being, every other reality. We can no longer be deluded by the notion that the destruction of others’ lives is necessary for our own survival. We see that life and death are but two faces of life and that without both, life is not possible, just as two sides of a coin are needed for the coin to exist. Only now is it possible to rise above birth and death and to know how to live and how to die. The sutra says that the bodhisattvas who have seen into the reality of interdependence have broken through all narrow views and have been able to enter birth and death as a person takes a ride in a small boat without being submerged or drowned by the waves of birth and death.
Some people have said that if you look at reality with the eyes of a Buddhist, you will become pessimistic. But to think in terms of either pessimism or optimism oversimplifies the truth. The problem is seeing reality as it is. A pessimistic attitude can never create the calm and serene smile that blossoms on the lips of the bodhisattvas and all others who obtain the Way.
The Almond Tree in Your Front Yard
[I spoke earlier] … about the contemplation on interdependence. Of course, all the methods in the search for truth should be regarded as means rather than as ends in themselves or as absolute truth. The meditation on interdependence is intended to remove the false barriers of discrimination so that one can enter into the universal harmony of life. It is not intended to produce a philosophical system, a philosophy of interdependence. In his novel Siddartha, Herman Hesse did not yet see this, and so his Siddhartha speaks about the philosophy of interdependence in words that strike us as somewhat naïve. The author offers us a picture of interdependence in which everything is interrelated, a system in which no fault can be found: everything must fit into the foolproof system of mutual dependence, a system in which one cannot consider the problem of liberation in this world.
According to an insight of our tradition, reality has three natures: imagination, interdependence, and ultimate perfection. One first considers interdependence. Because of forgetfulness and prejudices, we generally cloak reality with a veil of false views and opinions. This is seeing reality through imagination. Imagination is an illusion of reality that conceives of reality as an assembly of small pieces of separate entities and selves. In order to break through, the practitioner meditates on the nature of interdependence or the interrelatedness of phenomena in the processes of creation and destruction. The consideration is a way of contemplation, not the basis of a philosophical doctrine. If one clings merely to a system of concepts, one only becomes stuck. The meditation on interdependence is to help one penetrate reality in order to be one with it, not to become caught up in philosophical opinion or meditation methods. The raft is used to cross the river. It isn’t to be carried around on your shoulders. The finger that points at the moon isn’t the moon itself.
Finally, one proceeds to the nature of ultimate perfection—reality freed from all false views produced by the imagination. Reality is reality. It transcends every concept. There is no concept that can adequately describe it, not even the concept of interdependence. To ensure that one doesn’t become attached to a philosophical concept, our teaching speaks of the three nonnatures to prevent the individual from becoming caught up in the doctrine of the three natures. The essence of Mahayana Buddhist teaching lies in this.
When reality is perceived in its nature of ultimate perfection, the practitioner has reached a level of wisdom called nondiscrimination mind—a wondrous communion that no longer distinguishes between subject and object. This isn’t some far-off, unattainable state. Any one of us—by persisting in practicing even a little—can at least have a taste of it. I have on my desk a pile of applications to sponsor an orphan. I translate a few each day. Before I begin to translate a page, I look into the eyes of the child in the photograph and look closely at the child’s expression and features. I feel a deep link between myself and each child, which allows me to enter a special communion with them. While writing this to you, I see that during those moments and hours the communion I have experienced while translating the simple lines in the applications has been a kind of nondiscrimination mind. I no longer see an “I” who translates the pages to help each child; I no longer see a child who received love and help. The child and I are one: no one pities; no one asks for help; no one helps. There is no task, no social work to be done, no compassion, no special wisdom. These are moments of nondiscrimination mind.
When reality is experienced in its nature of ultimate perfection, an almond tree that may be in your front yard reveals its nature in perfect wholeness. The almond tree is itself truth, reality, your own self. Of all the people who have passed by your yard, how many have really seen the almond tree? The heart of an artist may be more sensitive; one hopes that he or she will be able to see the tree in a deeper way than many others. Because of the artist’s more open heart, a certain communion already exists between him and the tree. What counts is your own heart. If your heart is not clouded by false views, you will be able to enter into a natural communion with the tree. The almond tree will be ready to reveal itself to you in complete wholeness. To see the almond tree is to see the way. When asked to explain the wonder of reality, one Zen master pointed to a cypress tree and said, “Look at the cypress tree over there.”
The Voice of the Rising Tide
When your mind is liberated, your heart floods with compassion: compassion for yourself for having undergone countless sufferings because you were not yet able to relieve yourself of false views, hatred, ignorance, and anger; and compassion for others because they do not yet see and so are still imprisoned by false views, hatred, and ignorance and continue to create suffering for themselves and for others. Now you look at yourself and at others with the eyes of compassion, like a saint who hears the cry of every creature in the universe and whose voice is the voice of every person who has seen reality in perfect wholeness, just as a Buddhist sutra hears the voice of the bodhisattva of compassion:
The wondrous voice, the voice of the one
who attends to the cries of the world
The noble voice, the voice of the rising
tide surpassing all the sounds, of the world
Let our mind be attuned to that voice.
Put aside all doubts and meditate on the
pure and holy nature of the regarder
of the cries of the world
Because that is our reliance in situations of pain, distress, calamity, death.
Perfect in all merits, beholding all sentient
beings with compassionate eyes, making the ocean of blessings limitless,
Before this one, we should incline.
Practice looking at all beings with the eyes of compassion: this is the meditation called “the meditation on compassion.”
The meditation on compassion must be realized during the hours you sit and during every moment you carry out service for others. No matter where you go or where you sit, remember the sacred call: “Look at all beings with the eyes of compassion.”
There are many subjects and methods for meditation, so many that I could never hope to write them all down for our friends. I’ve mentioned only a few simple but basic methods here. A peace worker is like any one else. She or he must live her own life. Work is only a part of life. But work is life only when done in mindfulness. Otherwise, one becomes like the person “who lives as though dead.” We need to light our own torch in order to carry on. But the life of each one of us is connected with the life of those around us. If we know how to live in mindfulness, if we know how to preserve and care for our own mind and heart, then thanks to that, our brothers and sisters will also know how to live in mindfulness.
[Thich Nhat Hanh, Miracle of Mindfulness, 45–60]
VIETNAMESE CATHOLICS, MARXISM, AND THE PROBLEMS OF CATECHISTIC INSTRUCTION (1977)
After the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 and the reunification of the country as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1976, Vietnamese Catholics were faced with an uncertain future under Communist rule. But in 1975, Monsignor Nguyen Van Binh, the archbishop of Ho Chi Minh City, immediately announced that he welcomed the return of peace, and he appealed to his fellow Catholics to participate in the new society and help reconstruct the country after years of war. This approach was further developed in Archbishop Nguyen Van Binh’s letter to his fellow bishops, written in October 1977, in which he charted a new course, claiming that Catholicism could coexist with Vietnamese Marxism because they had common goals. Nguyen Van Binh was able to adopt this stance because of the reforms stemming from Vatican II, stressing the Vatican’s dialogue and efforts to accommodate non-Western cultures. Thus the Catholic church itself had moved closer to the concept of “liberation” and respect for the customs and political integrity of developing countries, thereby facilitating the archbishop’s conciliatory stance. In his letter, the archbishop recommended to his bishops a specific approach to catechistic instruction, including questions and answers. This text was translated from the French version of his letter.
Vietnamese Catholics live in a socialist republic ruled by the Vietnamese Communist Party.
To define the sociocultural environment of Vietnamese Catholics, one need only analyze the preceding statement, since that analysis will enable us to discover the elements that constitute this milieu. Reflection on these foundations will permit us to identify the problems relating to catechistic instruction. Under the direction of the Vietnamese Communist Party, Vietnam is in the process of taking the socialist path. This fact with which you are all familiar is composed of three elements: (1) The Vietnam that is currently under construction is a Vietnam modeled on the Communist ideal. (2) The road toward it, the course to be followed, [and] the policy to be adopted all must conform to Marxist-Leninist doctrine, applied in an intelligent way that adheres to the Vietnamese creative spirit. (3) Above all, it is necessary to remodel the social structure and produce a man who conforms to the new pattern, namely, a Marxist-Leninist man. Catholic Vietnamese are therefore acting in a Marxist setting.
In this Marxist milieu, the Marxist Vietnamese approach religion in general and Christianity in particular from a Marxist point of view. This is clearly evident in both the courses of instruction and the public lectures that are reproduced in the official press.
Vietnamese Communists view the Vietnamese Catholic Church through the entire history of the evangelization of Vietnam, from its origin down to the present day. In turn, all the historic, political, economic, and social conditions exerted through evangelization and by the church in Vietnam are analyzed and evaluated through the light of Marxism-Leninism. Consequently, the picture of Vietnamese Christianity as painted by Vietnamese Marxists leaves much to be desired. According to them, the case of Vietnam shows the theory of Christianity as conceived by Marx to be true, the most salient feature being the collusion between the church and imperialism. We state this fact, not through any guilt complex but in order to demonstrate its seriousness as far as the church is concerned. Communists want only concrete facts, not theoretical arguments. Christians must therefore project a fresh image—an authentic image of Christ and the church.
The attitude of Vietnamese Catholics is cooperation in the spirit of the encyclical Gaudium et Spes.60 In a country where the established regime makes the unification of all its citizens an essential objective in order to build up the state, Catholics refuse to live in a “ghetto” and remain on the fringes of society.
In July 1976, at the Episcopal conference in the two ecclesiastical provinces of Hue and Saigon, we bishops unanimously and unambiguously launched an appeal to Catholics, inviting them to follow a life of commitment—in other words, to contribute to the construction of society. We do not consider that we have made a revolution in the church by adopting this attitude; we are merely conforming to the encyclical Gaudium et Spes of Vatican II. Indeed for us, cooperation with atheists in the spirit of this encyclical means, in concrete terms, living in the environment created by the Communists and building a new society with them.
We have taken a definite position, but the fundamental problem remains: how do we coexist with the Communists, how do we cooperate with them in the construction of the country while at the same time remaining Catholic and thereby making our specific contribution to the common task? On the pastoral level, the problems arising out of this new situation are really beyond the scope of our human strength. At the present time in Vietnam, the faithful, like those responsible for pastoral work, have had no preparation for life in a Marxist society. The Holy Spirit is still at work, but we, for our part, must work together with Him.
Problems Concerning Catechistic Instruction
In order to emphasize the fundamental points, we formulate the following four questions: Who is listening to me? What must I say? What objective must I aim at? and How shall I express myself?
Who is listening to me? Those who listen to me are members of Marxist-Leninist society; they were born into it and are growing up in it; they were initiated into Marxist-Leninist doctrine in their earliest school days. (It is worth noting that in our socialist republic, all the schools are administered by the state and the educational curriculum is designed to produce socialists.) Thus in the very near future, we shall have to give catechistic instruction to Catholics imbued with Leninist Marxism. This brings us to the second question.
What must I say? The answer will be determined by two elements: what I must say and what I am expected to say. What I must say: I must speak of the gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven, of God, the universe, and man within the framework of creation and redemption. I must say everything and omit nothing.
What am I expected to say? To succeed in my task, I must start with what is expected, with what people wish to hear. That means that the content of my teachings must take into account the questioning and the worries of the young people of tomorrow. Thus, and only thus, shall I be able to help them overcome these difficulties so that they may progress further. In the Marxist environment, the young will be perplexed by the human condition, by the question of the presence of God in the universe and in their own existence. Is this presence a cause of conflict? Is it an obstacle in the path of human progress? Do Christ and salvation, the Holy Spirit and the church, add something to the faith and the hope of Marxists? Does Christian eschatological hope neglect Marxist hope? Does it greatly exceed it? All these questions oblige me to give special emphasis to certain features in the contents of the catechism in order to satisfy my listeners yet without distorting the word of God through any flattery toward them.
What objective should I aim at? To be consistent with the position adopted and explained earlier, I must help my listeners understand and live out their faith in this Marxist environment. This means that I must lead them to view a faith in which they can place God, the universe, and mankind. I do not seek merely to dispel transitory objections and difficulties, but I also will help the young themselves face up to fresh problems that may arise.
This is why it will not be permissible for me to hide the differences between Marxism and Christianity. On the contrary, I shall have to set these out honestly—not in any spirit of antagonism but in one of openness and dialogue. I shall have to help the young live and converse with the Marxists. We believe that this exchange of views must begin and that we must produce a new generation equipped to pursue a dialogue with the Marxists. But the key to the solution of the problem lies under the fourth heading, which follows.
How am I going to express myself? In order for my listeners to understand me, I must use their language. God himself respected this necessity. To address mankind, he spoke through the prophets and, ultimately, he spoke to us “as his Beloved son”: “The word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” The young who were born and have been brought up in the Marxist environment will speak a Marxist language. Can the position of St. Paul, “to be a Jew to the Jew and Greek to the Greeks,” be applied to Christians living in a Marxist environment?
To present the Catholic faith today through the medium of Marxist language certainly does not signify the “Marxification” of Christianity. Indeed, when Aristotelian or existentialist vocabularies were used to present the Catholic faith, one did not thereby “Aristotelianize” or “existentialize” it—if I may be allowed to express myself thus. For God who had spoken to Israel did not consent to being identified with any other divinity, and neither did Jesus allow himself to be confused with any image of the Messiah conceived by the Jews of his time.
Conclusion
Such are the fundamental problems we face. We still have to answer more concrete questions, such as, Who is going to perform the catechism? Where, when, and how is it to be done? It must be added that all future activities of a religious character may take place only on church premises and also that priority is given to work and production.
Finally, allow me, my dear brothers in the episcopacy, to ask for the assistance of those among you who have some experience of these problems, and especially those who are proficient in the use of Marxist language.
[Nguyen Van Binh, “Le milieu socioculturel des catholiques vietnamiens,” 923–24; trans. C. Jon Delogu]
DECREE ON RELIGIOUS ACTIVITIES (1991)
Beginning in 1990, Vietnam adopted a more conciliatory approach to religious belief and religious organizations, in line with the cultural changes occurring under Doi Moi (Renovation). For the first time, the Communist Party acknowledged that religion could serve a positive spiritual need and that religious organizations could be considered part of Vietnam’s cultural heritage. The opprobrium associated with religion was finally lifted, although the state also sought to create a legal framework for the operation of religious organizations. While the government relaxed previous restrictions, it also required all religious organizations to register with the government and obtain prior authorization for most activities. This decree, passed on March 21, 1991, led to the official recognition and normalization of most religions organizations and activities in Vietnam in the 1990s, with the notable exception of the UBCV.61 Since the early Le dynasty, the Vietnamese state had sought to regulate religious and ritual activity.62
Chapter I: General Provisions
ARTICLE 1
The state ensures the freedom of all citizens to adhere or not to adhere to a faith and prohibits any discrimination on account of religion or belief.
ARTICLE 2
Religious and nonreligious citizens are equal before the law, enjoy citizens’ rights, and have the responsibility to discharge all the obligations of citizens.
ARTICLE 3
Religious activities must comply with the constitution and the laws of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
Religious activities in the legitimate and lawful interests of the believers are assured. Religious activities in the interests of the fatherland and the people are encouraged.
ARTICLE 5
Religious activities based on superstition are prohibited. Activities that misuse religious belief to undermine the country’s independence, oppose the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, undermine the solidarity of the entire people and harm the healthy culture of Vietnam, and prevent religious believers from carrying out their obligations as citizens shall be dealt with according to the law.
Chapter II: Specific Stipulations
ARTICLE 6
Every citizen has the freedom to follow or not to follow a religion and to relinquish or change his or her religion. All acts that violate this freedom shall be dealt with in accordance with the law.
ARTICLE 7
Religious believers have the right to carry out religious activities not contrary to the policies, positions, and laws of the state; to conduct worship ceremonies [and] prayers inside their homes; and to participate in religious activities held at places of worship. Believers are not allowed to disseminate superstitious beliefs [or] to impede productive or educational activities or the implementation of the obligations of citizens.
ARTICLE 8
Religious activities typically held at places of religious worship (prayer sessions, services, sermons, lectures on religious doctrine) that are registered annually and conducted in accordance with local religious customs need not receive prior permission from the authorities.
Religious activities that deviate [from this] or go beyond normal practices must receive prior permission from the authorities.
Meditation sessions of priests in the diocese, or clergy from various establishments and orders of the Christian faith, study sessions for Protestant ministers and missionaries of the Protestant faith, purification sessions for Buddhist monks and nuns, and similar religious activities must apply for permission from the appropriate Provincial People’s Committee or equivalent authority.
ARTICLE 10
Congresses and conferences of religious organizations at the national, regional, or local level must apply for permission from the Council of Ministers.
ARTICLE 11
The state protects the places of worship of religious organizations. Religious organizations are responsible for maintaining and safeguarding their places of worship. With respect to repairs and building extensions that change the architectural style of their buildings, approval from the Provincial People’s Committee or an equivalent authority must be obtained.
ARTICLE 12
In new settlements or new economic zones, religious followers who wish to construct new places of worship must seek permission from the Provincial People’s Committee or an equivalent authority.
ARTICLE 13
Religious dignitaries, clergy, and believers are permitted to use places of worship for regular activities that have been classified as such in accordance with the regulations of the [state] cultural authorities.
ARTICLE 14
Religious organizations are allowed to publish prayer books and religious books [and] to produce and import religious cultural items or instruments to be used for religious activities in accordance with state regulations relating to the publication, export, and import of cultural items.
The circulation and storage of books, newspapers and journals, and cultural items that contain propaganda and distortions against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, violate its laws, and are designed to drive a wedge between various religious organizations [and] among the ethnic minorities and the people are prohibited.
ARTICLE 15
Religious dignitaries and clergy may conduct economic, cultural, and social activities as other citizens may. They are encouraged to engage in labor, production, and service activities in their places of worship in order to improve their living conditions and to build, maintain, and repair their places of worship, provided that they fully comply with state policies and laws.
ARTICLE 16
Religious dignitaries, clergy, and religious organizations are permitted to conduct charity work in fields permitted by the state. Existing charity organizations sponsored by religious organizations shall operate under the guidance of the appropriate state agencies.
ARTICLE 17
Religious organizations are permitted to establish schools for training dignitaries and clergy but must seek permission and approval from the Council of Ministers.
The organization and activities of the schools training religious dignitaries and clergy shall conform to the regulations issued by the Government Committee for Religious Affairs and other state agencies.
ARTICLE 18
Provincial People’s Committees or the equivalent state authority shall, along with the Government Committee for Religious Affairs and the Ministry of Education and Training, examine the personnel, teaching, and instruction in schools for training dignitaries and clergy to see that the instruction is carried out in accordance with the approved program.
The promotion of religious dignitaries and clergy must receive the approval of the Provincial People’s Committee or an equivalent authority. The promotion of dignitaries such as senior Buddhist monks; Catholic bishops, archbishops, and cardinals, and equivalent dignitaries in other religions, must receive the approval of the Council of Ministers.
ARTICLE 20
The appointment and transfer of dignitaries and clergy and professional religious evangelists, including those elected by religious believers, must be approved by the government authorities in the area where they operate. These dignitaries, clergy, and religious officials can operate only after their appointment and transfer have been approved by the appropriate local authorities.
ARTICLE 21
Religious orders (or similar forms of collective religious practice) must seek the permission and obtain the approval of the Council of Ministers or an agency delegated by it to conduct their activities.
Religious orders are permitted to convert new adherents to their faiths. New adherents must fulfill the procedures relating to registration and administration with the local authorities where the monastery and/or the permanent residences of these members are located.
ARTICLE 22
International activities of religious organizations, dignitaries, and clergy must comply with the general regulations on foreign relations of the state.
ARTICLE 23
If foreign religious organizations appoint and promote religious dignitaries and practitioners, such appointments and promotions must receive the approval of the Council of Ministers of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
Before implementing a directive from a foreign religious organization, individual believers and religious organizations in Vietnam must seek the permission of the government authority.
Religious organizations and individuals who wish to send their members abroad for religious purposes or to invite foreign dignitaries and clergy or representatives of foreign religious organizations to Vietnam must seek prior permission and approval from the Council of Ministers.
ARTICLE 25
Assistance activities from foreign religious organizations or related activities must conform with the current policies and regime regarding the management of aid and must be channeled through [state] agencies entrusted by the Council of Ministers for the management of aid.
Religious organizations or individuals in the country who wish to receive purely religious assistance must obtain permission from the Council of Ministers.
Apart from believers’ voluntary and supportive financial contributions, religious organizations are not allowed to seek additional contributions that violate state regulations.
[Ban Ton Giao cua Chinh Phu, Cac van ban cua nha nuoc ve hoat dong ton giao, 8–13; trans. Jayne Werner]
ETHNIC AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
THE FOUNDING OF THE PEOPLE’S LIBERATION ARMED FORCES (1971)
This text describes the founding of the People’s Army of Vietnam, formerly called the People’s Liberation Armed Forces, in May 1945 from the merger of two guerrilla units operating along the China-Vietnam border. The first unit, the Army for National Salvation, was led by Chu Van Tan, an ethnic Nung, who became a ranking military commander in the Viet Minh army, which fought the French from 1945 to 1954. The second unit was led by Vo Nguyen Giap, an ethnic Kinh (Vietnamese) from central Vietnam, and was called the Vietnam Propaganda and Liberation Army. In their struggle against the French colonialists, the Vietnamese Communists depended on the support and assistance of the ethnic minorities to establish secure base areas in the highlands from which to organize attacks on the coastal areas and the deltas. This text illustrates the close relationship between the Viet Minh and the ethnic minorities in the Viet Bac and is excerpted from Reminiscences on the Army for National Salvation, Chu Van Tan’s memoir.
I will never forget that memorable last day of March 1945. A section of the Vietnam Propaganda and Liberation Army led by brother Vo Nguyen Giap arrived in Cho Chu. More than a year earlier, Vo Nguyen Giap and I had met on a high mountain peak, in a small Meo [Hmong] settlement and in a situation in which we had to keep our presence secret. This time, in this new situation of surging power and strength, we again met, on the soil of newly liberated Cho Chu, and this time around we were accompanied not just by a handful of cadres, but our meeting was also the meeting of two armies. What happiness it was for me to meet Vo Nguyen Giap again in broad daylight, right in the middle of a bustling and crowded market! There were so many things we wanted to tell each other!
Who could have guessed that what I had wished for at the end of last winter would come to pass within three months. So the Vietnam Propaganda and Liberation Army and the Army for National Salvation had met. And the two comrades who had met in the Lung Hoang conference63 and had become attached to each other since then and who had been concerned about each other during the enemy wave of terrorism found themselves face to face again, each man now stronger and more enthusiastic than before. We clasped hands tightly, laughed happily, and looked at each other with eyes bright with joy.
At the end of the previous year, I had vaguely heard that the Vietnam Propaganda and Liberation Army had been set up. Now, meeting Vo Nguyen Giap in Cho Chu, I finally found out about the concrete instructions of comrade Ho Chi Minh on December 22, 1944, and about the expansion of this army and its combat activities during the past few months….
Comrade Ho Chi Minh’s instructions concerning the formation of the Vietnam Propaganda and Liberation Army made me think about the situation and the mission of the Army for National Salvation in the past and from now on. The principle that armed propaganda and political activities were more important than military activities, that propaganda was more important than combat, that military operations would be used to protect, consolidate, and expand our political base and, at the same time, to consolidate and expand armed units and paramilitary units not only applied to the Vietnam Propaganda and Liberation Army but also lit the way for the Army for National Salvation in all its activities….
While on mission, I received a letter convoking a meeting of the Standing Committee of the Party Central Committee. The Standing Committee convened the North Vietnam Region Revolutionary Military Conference in Hiep Hoa (Bac Giang Province), which was presided over by comrade Truong Chinh, the party’s secretary-general. The conference lasted six days, from April 15 to 20, 1945. This was the first important military conference of our party….
Vo Nguyen Giap reported on the situation of the movement in Cao Bang-Bac Can and on the activities of the Vietnam Propaganda and Liberation Army there. I reported on the situation of the movement and the activities of the Army for National Salvation in Thai Nguyen-Tuyen Quang. This conference gave me an overall view of the situation everywhere in the country. It was only then that I understood that a high tide of anti-Japanese resistance was rising forcefully from north to south. Many armed demonstrations, each two thousand to three thousand strong, had moved to attack and seize rice depots in the plantations of French reactionaries and depots belonging to the Japanese to distribute rice to the poor people in Bac Ninh, Bac Giang, Ninh Binh, Thai Nguyen provinces, and so on. Many areas in the midlands had set up national minorities’ liberation committees. Political prisoners in Nghia Lo (Yen Bai) rose up and smashed the jail. In addition to the party’s armed forces in Viet Bac, there were many self-defense and combat self-defense units in the midlands, in the delta, and even in the big cities. In Quang Ngai Province, guerrillas also emerged; this was the guerrilla unit of Ba To. In the south, the Viet Minh were active in My Tho and in the lower Mekong Delta region (Hau Giang).
The conference pointed out the weaknesses and strengths of the anti-Japanese resistance for the national salvation of the Indochinese people. The conference affirmed that “the situation had placed the military task above all other important and urgent tasks at this juncture. Resolute efforts must be made to expand guerrilla warfare, build up the base areas to resist the Japanese, in order to make preparations for the general uprising and seize this opportunity in time.” With regard to this military task, we all felt that it was necessary to define clearly and assign specific tasks to each war zone; to clear communication and liaison corridors linking up the war zones of north, central, and south Vietnam; to build up base areas to resist the Japanese; unify, consolidate, and expand the various armed forces; unify [the] military command; organize special armed units, and so forth. In accordance with the resolution of April 1945, the Vietnam Propaganda and Liberation Army and the Army for National Salvation were merged. The conference designated the North Vietnam Revolutionary Military Committee to command the war zones of north Indochina, and at the same time this committee also had the task of providing military assistance to the entire country. The Central Committee appointed comrades Vo Nguyen Giap, Van Tien Dung, Le Thanh Nghi, Trang Dang Ninh, and Chu Van Tan to this committee. With regard to the question of cadres, a number of outstanding members of the various armed forces would be selected and trained to become unit commanders and political officers; anti-Japanese military and political training schools would be established; people of talent would be recruited; students would be recruited to go to the war zones for military training; and the cadres would [receive military training].
A new atmosphere full of enthusiasm and confidence pervaded everywhere. There were so many things to do. We had the impression that time was fleeing too rapidly.
After attending the North Vietnam Region Revolutionary Military Conference, Vo Nguyen Giap returned to Cho Chu (Dinh Hoa) exactly on International Labor Day of May 1. Carrying out the resolution of April 1945, he convened a conference in Dinh Bien Thuong to officially announce the merger of all armed forces and clarify the brothers’ ideological understanding concerning their immediate and long-term tasks. Besides Vo Nguyen Giap, the other key cadres included comrades Hien Mai, Mon, and Khanh Phuong.
After that, we heard the news that Uncle Ho was coming down from Cao Bang to the lowlands, and Vo Nguyen Giap galloped off on a horse toward Re pass to welcome him.
We continued to operate in the Cho Chu area. A few days later, a letter arrived from Vo Nguyen Giap saying, “Make preparations to welcome the Old Man.” Brother Quang Trung and we moved our troops to Deo So and deployed them to protect the route that Uncle Ho would take and to welcome him. Later on, however, another letter from Vo Nguyen Giap arrived, reporting that “Uncle Ho had taken the route farther inland. He would go to Son Duong.” We turned around and went back, passing Deo Re pass, going down to Dinh Hoa, into Thanh Dieu and Luc Ra, and then on to Hong Thai to welcome Uncle Ho….
Uncle Ho chose Tan Trao as his living and working headquarters to guide the movement in the entire country and to make preparations for the National Congress.
After listening to the reports on the general situation in the country and on the North Vietnam Region Revolutionary Military Conference, he issued the following instructions. Since the liberated area in the North Vietnam Region included almost all the provinces of Cao Bang, Bac Can, Lang Son, Ha Giang, Tuyen Quang and Thai Nguyen, and a number of adjacent areas in the provinces of Bac Giang, Phu Tho, Yen Bai and Vinh Yen, and since all these areas were linked together, a large revolutionary base should be set up and designated the Liberated Zone.64 It had been correct to unify all the armed forces and place them under the direct command of the Central Committee. This army should be called the Liberation Army because the term “liberation” was both simple and easy to understand, precise and penetrating—it denoted clearly the goal of fighting the French, driving out the Japanese, liberating the country, and aspiring to national independence.
To carry out these instructions, on June 4, 1945, the Viet Minh General Headquarters convoked a conference to officially announce the formation of the Liberated Zone, which was put under the leadership of the Provisional Command Committee and which should be firmly consolidated from the political, military, economic, and cultural points of view to become the springboard for the March Southward and the liberation of the whole country.
At that time, the concrete situation in the war zones and the areas within the Liberated Zone was very serious. Comrade Vo Nguyen Giap was designated as the permanent officer of this committee to maintain a liaison with the Central Committee in the [Red River] delta and also with comrades Le Thanh Nghi and Tran Dang Ninh in Bac Giang, on the one hand, and to maintain a liaison with the provinces of Cao Bang and Bac Son, on the other hand.
In the Liberated Zone, the People’s Revolutionary Committees elected by the masses were carrying out the ten big programs. These were
1. Liquidating the Japanese forces, eliminating traitors, and punishing criminals.
2. Seizing the properties of the traitors and of the lackeys of the foreigners, and—depending in each situation—using them as the common property of the people or distributing them to the poor.
3. Instituting universal suffrage and other free and democratic rights.
4. Arming the masses, motivating the people to support the guerrillas and join the Liberation Army to resist the Japanese.
5. Organizing the clearing of land, encouraging production, and creating a self-sufficient economy for the Liberated Zone.
6. Restricting the number of workdays and carrying out social security laws and the relief of people afflicted by calamities.
7. Redistributing communal rice fields, reducing land rents and interest rates, and postponing the repayment of debts.
8. Abolishing taxes and labor conscription and making plans for a light and unique progressive taxation.
9. Fighting against illiteracy and organizing popular military and political training classes for the masses.
10. [Assuring] equality among all ethnic groups and equal rights for men and women.
A new Vietnam was born. A section of North Vietnam was placed under the revolutionary government. More than one million people began to enjoy a new life brought about by the revolution.
With the merging of all armed forces, the Liberation Army became fairly large and was split up into detachments. Almost all the former members of the Vietnam Propaganda and Liberation Army and of the Army for National Salvation became command cadres.
The problem of forming and training cadres became very urgent. At the beginning of July 1945, in accordance with the resolution by the North Vietnam Region Military Conference, the Resist-Japan Military Academy was established under the direction of Hoang Van Thai in order to train platoon leaders and platoon political officers. The school was set up in Khuoi Kich, on the bank of the stream where the ceremony establishing the Army for National Salvation’s Third Platoon [had taken place]. The students were selected from the ranks of the Liberation Army and the youths from the delta who had been introduced by the National Salvation Associations.
The popular government in the Liberated Zone was reorganized by elections, with universal suffrage. Each village had a National Salvation Council Hall where the people frequently came to attend meetings, to listen to reports on the situation, and to discuss affairs of public interest.
Right after learning of the complete disintegration of the Japanese aggressors and their surrender to the Soviet Union and the Allies, on August 12, 1945, the Provisional Command Committee of the Liberated Zone issued the order for a general uprising to the Liberation Army, to the self-defense units, to the People’s Revolutionary Committees and to the entire population in the region.
On August 13, 1945, the National Party Congress opened in Tan Trao. Attending the congress were representatives of party headquarters in all three regions of Vietnam—north, center, and south—and also a number of representatives operating abroad.
In this extremely urgent situation, the congress worked for three days. In order to provide correct leadership to ensure the success of the general insurrection, the congress set forth three principles:
1. Concentration: concentration of our forces on major tasks.
2. Unification: unification of all military and political means, and unification of leadership and command.
3. Timely action: acting in a timely manner and not losing any opportunities.
The congress emphasized that “we must concentrate our forces in critical areas to attack” and “we must attack and immediately seize the areas where we were sure of success, whether urban areas or the countryside.”
Right in the night of August 13, 1945, the Insurrection Committee, set up by the Viet Minh General Headquarters, issued its military order no. 1, ordering the launching of the general insurrection.
Right after the National Congress broke up, the People’s National Congress also convened in Tan Trao on August 16. This congress chose the national flag and national anthem and designated the Vietnam National Liberation Committee, that is, the Provisional Government, with comrade Ho Chi Minh as president.
Implementing the order of the Liberated Zone’s Provisional Command Committee issued on August 12 and [the order] of the Insurrection Committee, units of the Liberation Army captured one after another the Japanese posts still remaining in the provinces of Cao Bang, Bac Can, Thai Nguyen, Yen Bai, and so on, and then advanced to liberate the towns and cities.
On August 16, a unit of the Liberation Army under the command of comrade Vo Nguyen Giap coming from Tan Trao, advanced and attacked the Thai Nguyen provincial capital to open the route to Hanoi.
On August 17, the Liberation Army attacked Tuyen Quang province town. The Japanese fascists returned fire, but in the face of the overwhelming force of the revolution, they were forced to offer to negotiate, and on August 21, the Viet Minh seized power in the province.
The Liberation Army was advancing in the surging revolutionary storm. Every Communist Party member, every Viet Minh fighter, and the population in the whole country showed their determination and their firm spirits in heroically fighting for the cause of national liberation, in accordance with President Ho’s instructions: “At this moment, the favorable opportunity has arrived. No matter what the sacrifices, even if the entire Annamese Chain [Truong Son] has to go up in flames, we must maintain our determination in order to win back our national independence.”
[Chu Van Tan, Reminiscences on the Army for National Salvation, 199–205]
LAWS ON VIETNAMESE NATIONALITY (1956)
In the mid-1950s, at the close of the French colonial period, the new states of northern Vietnam and southern Vietnam undertook measures to integrate non-Vietnamese minorities into their national collectivities. In the north, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam adopted an approach based on “one nation, many ethnic groups,” which tended to give priority to the majoritarian Kinh (Vietnamese), notwithstanding the Communist Party’s wartime collaboration with and reliance on the ethnic tribes in mountainous base areas. In the south, Ngo Dinh Diem’s Republic of Vietnam took measures to compel the Chinese community, the largest and most powerful ethnic minority, to take Vietnamese citizenship and names (as Chams were required to do in the fifteenth century after their conquest by Emperor Le Thanh Tong).65
The Chinese controlled the southern rice trade and much of banking and commerce in the region. Children born of Chinese–Vietnamese parentage were declared to be Vietnamese, and all ethnic Chinese born in South Vietnam after 1956 were deemed to be Vietnamese. Others were considered to be “foreigners.” In 1955, foreigners engaged in eleven trades were given up to a year to liquidate or transfer their businesses to Vietnamese citizens. Citizenship status for ethnic Chinese did not become a salient issue in the Communist part of Vietnam until 1975. After that date, however, the Chinese community was caught in the crossfire of increasingly hostile relations between Vietnam and the People’s Republic of China. In 1978, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam confiscated or outlawed large-scale private trade in the country, while China attempted to strengthen its influence among Chinese living as boat people in Vietnam, moves that contributed to the large-scale exodus of Chinese from Vietnam and the 1979 border war between the two countries. The Republic of Vietnam’s new laws regarding Vietnamese nationality and commercial activity took effect on August 21 and September 6, 1956.
ARTICLE 1
Article 16 of the decree dated December 7, 1955, regarding Vietnamese nationality, is hereby repealed and is now changed as follows:
NEW ARTICLE 16
A person born in Vietnam of a father and mother of Chinese descent is Vietnamese.
Children born in Vietnam before the issuance of the present decree of fathers and mothers of Chinese descent have Vietnamese nationality, except for the following:
1. Persons who have been expelled in accordance with edicts that have not yet been repealed in accordance with the forms with which they were initially promulgated.
2. Persons who have been convicted or sentenced for a crime or those who have been acquitted on grounds of insanity, except for offenses committed because of carelessness or unintentional acts without dishonest intentions.
3. Persons who have been put under surveillance or house arrest and the measure for whom has not yet been repealed.
[Republic of Vietnam, Cong Bao Viet Nam Cong Hoa, August 23, 1956; trans. Jayne Werner]
Restrictions of Commercial Activity by Foreign Residents in the Republic of Vietnam
ARTICLE 1
Foreign residents, foreign societies and companies are not allowed to engage in the following occupations throughout Vietnam:66
1. Buying and selling fish and meat.
2. Operating grocery stores.
3. Buying and selling coal, charcoal, or firewood.
4. Buying and selling gasoline, kerosene, and lubricants (except for imported items).
5. Pawnshops and mortgage companies.
6. Buying and selling coarse fabric and silk (up to a total of less than ten thousand meters [almost thirty-three thousand feet] for all these items), yarn, thread, and the like.
7. Buying and selling iron, copper, or bronze scraps.
8. Milling rice.
9. Buying and selling [other] grains.
10. Transporting goods and passengers by car, boat, or ship.
11. Serving as middlemen who charge commissions.
ARTICLE 2
Foreign residents engaged in the preceding occupations must cease their activities in accordance with the following schedules:
• For occupations numbered 1 to 7 within six months.
• For occupations numbered 8 to 11 within one year.
ARTICLE 3
All contracts concluded by foreign residents in the preceding activities that contradict this edict will be regarded as null and void.
ARTICLE 4
Foreign residents who violate this edict will be fined from 50,000 to 5 million piastres, not including other administrative measures such as expulsion.
ARTICLE 5
Any Vietnamese who colludes with foreign residents in violating this edict will receive a prison sentence from six months to three years and a fine of 50,000 to 5 million piastres, or both.
Existing laws and regulations that do not contradict the preceding articles will continue to apply.
[Republic of Vietnam, Cong Bao Viet Nam Cong Hoa, September 8, 1956; trans. Jayne Werner]
ALIGNING THE STRENGTH OF THE NATION WITH THE POWER OF THE AGE (1987)
With the adoption of market-oriented policies in 1986, Vietnam started to shift its foreign policy from socialist internationalism to a broader engagement with the world capitalist system. This was in line with its “new thinking” in foreign policy, which stressed economic interdependence, multilateralism, and peaceful relations with all countries. Theoretically, the Communist Party of Vietnam moved away from a class-based and anti-imperialist approach to international relations to integrating its economy into the global capitalist economy in order to fulfill its national development plans. This new approach also led to a shift in Vietnam’s relations with China. In the following article, published in May 1987 in Tap Chi Cong San (Communist Review), the Communist Party’s theoretical journal, Phan Doan Nam, a senior adviser to Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach, identified the theoretical basis for the new thinking in foreign policy, arguing that the world had fundamentally changed since the 1970s, particularly in the scientific technological revolution and the world economy’s interdependence. These changes required Vietnam to renovate its concepts of national security and to promote international cooperation and integration into the global economy. This article looks at the Vietnamese state’s historic concerns with international commerce and trade and how to achieve the correct balance between North and South.
The political report of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam to the Sixth Party Congress pointed out: “In all our revolutionary work, we must attach special importance to developing our nation’s interests in international factors, enhancing our traditions in accordance with current trends, and efficiently using every opportunity to expand trade, economic cooperation, and cooperation in science and technology with the outside world in order to build socialism [in our country] while always fulfilling our international obligations toward fraternal and friendly countries.”67
This is the lesson drawn by our party from the realities of the Vietnamese revolution during the past fifty years: aligning the strength of the nation with the power of the age. This also is a guideline for us in applying these experiences to the next stage of the revolution.
How has our party succeeded in aligning the strength of the nation with the power of the age, thus augmenting the comprehensive strength of our people and taking the Vietnamese revolution from one victory to the next? [We have been able to do so] because our party has had a good grasp of Marxism-Leninism and has firmly adhered to the working class in aligning our national interests with the interests of the world’s people and in harmonizing the patriotism of our people with international proletarianism.
The combination of the national and the international, of the traditional and the modern in our party’s revolutionary line [political position] is derived from two basic principles: First, the revolution in Vietnam is a part of the world revolution, and second, the revolution in Vietnam is taking place during the global transition from capitalism to socialism.
These two basic principles show the organic relationship between Vietnam and the world. This relationship is part of a whole that, although multifaceted, complicated, and fraught with contradictions, is also marked by interlinkages and interdependence. This relationship also demonstrates the laws and trends of development of the current age, whose power stems from these laws and trends. This power is the comprehensive strength of the forces of peace, national independence, democracy, and social progress, with the world’s socialist system serving as the pillar of these forces and the main factor determining the current content, direction, and major characteristics of the development of human society. The victory of revolution in each country results from the alignment of that country’s own strengths with the power of the age. It can be achieved when a country directs its development in accordance with the world’s common trends to mobilize a comprehensive and invincible strength. This has become a lawlike phenomenon.
Following the full victory of the war of resistance and national salvation against U.S. aggression, Vietnam’s revolution entered a new period of development. This new revolutionary step is taking place when the world revolution finds itself in what many call the “post-Vietnam era,” in which the world situation and international relations are qualitatively different from those of the previous era. As a result of these profound changes, new trends have emerged in the world economy and international politics and are creating new opportunities and challenges for the development of all nations.
First, starting in the early 1970s, the world’s balance of forces underwent a fundamental change. This change resulted from the strategic-military parity between the Soviet Union and the United States, between the Warsaw Pact and NATO, and between the two sociopolitical systems in general.68 This is a historic achievement of the forces of peace and revolution. It definitively ended the period when [the forces of] imperialism could rely on their military supremacy to threaten the world’s people and crush the forces of peace and revolution. For the first time in history, the world’s people have the real capability to prevent a new world war, gradually enforce disarmament, and create peaceful coexistence among countries with different social systems. [As a result,] the major form of the worldwide class struggle between this era’s two opposing forces has gradually changed from political-military confrontation to peaceful political-economic emulation and competition.
Second, a new cycle of the second scientific-technological revolution that started in the mid-1970s has had a profound impact on all aspects of humankind’s social life. It has “shortened” the distance between countries, changed not only the relations between humanity and nature but also international relations and has fundamentally changed the world economy. As a direct force on production, today’s science and technology have rapidly increased global material wealth on an unprecedented scale. At the same time, it has given humankind the capacity to destroy itself and all its material wealth in a heartbeat. On the one hand, today’s science and technology have created an opportunity for underdeveloped countries to catch up with the developed ones. On the other hand, they can be instrumental in upsetting the balance or widening the development gap, even among the most advanced countries. The science and technology race toward the twenty-first century is taking place not only among countries with different social systems but also among the imperialist countries.
Third, also beginning in the early 1970s, the world economy has undergone profound changes and moved into [a new stage of development characterized by] in-depth expansion [rather than horizontal expansion]. The world economy in general and each system [socialist and capitalist blocs] in particular are undergoing a vigorous process of internationalization and integration, resulting in a new international division of labor within each system as well as in the entire world. National economies are interconnected with the entire world economy, becoming both complementary and interdependent. The success of each country’s type of development depends on whether that country can create an optimal position for itself in the global economic chain. This is an objective phenomenon and thus a lawlike one.
The new characteristics of the global political and economic situation require us to adopt new ways of thinking and new methods of action in applying the lessons for aligning [our] national strengths with the power of the age. This means that we must not hesitate to change our thinking on the global political-economic situation and on our economic cooperation with other countries.
On the political and security front, we must take full advantage of the peaceful international environment over the next ten to fifteen years to focus on rebuilding our country after many years of war. This environment requires us to renovate our concepts of national security and the methods for protecting it. For in the current international context, no country, however powerful, can effectively defend its security if it tries to do so by itself, apart from the common security of the world and the region in which it is located. No country, however large, can be more secure than another. Today, the security of all nations must be even and equal within the common totality of world security. Today, the security of our nation is not merely military security but also must be comprehensive security, in which economic security is emerging as predominant. Therefore, at present, the best way to defend our national security is to incorporate it into the shared international security system, especially in the Asia-Pacific region and Southeast Asia. How can we do this? We can do this by increasing our contribution to the shared struggle of the Soviet Union, the socialist countries, the nonaligned countries, and other progressive forces for peace, disarmament, and the gradual elimination of nuclear weapons from the earth. We must continue to strive, along with the fraternal peoples of Laos and Cambodia, and other countries in Southeast Asia, to transform Southeast Asia into a zone of peace, friendship, and cooperation, first, by transforming it into a nuclear weapons–free zone. Only in the context of shared international and regional security can we ensure for ourselves rock-solid security. Only this can allow us to focus the bulk of our human and material resources on national construction. The new thinking on security and methods of protecting security in the new global situation will help us resolve the issue of development.
[For our economy], the alignment of national strengths with the power of the age under the new conditions also requires us to renovate our views on numerous issues relating to the line [official position] and policies of national development.
First, we must renovate our views on independence and sovereignty in planning economic strategy. Building an independent and sovereign economy does not mean building an autarkic economy that produces everything by itself and does not need anything from the outside world. In working out an economic strategy, we must take into account new factors such as the level of internationalization of the world economy, the tendency toward interlinkage in the international division of labor, and the interdependence of the national economies. In view of the current development of global productive forces and of science and technology, no single country, however strong and rich in resources, can develop its economy independently from the global economy and without relying on other countries. This is a matter of mutual dependence and not merely one-way dependence. It is this “interdependence” that gives rise to equality in countries’ economic relations. In the capitalist world, Japan imports 90 percent of its oil, but that does not mean that it is dependent on the oil-producing countries because Japan has other strengths vis-à-vis these countries. The United States is less dependent on raw materials and fuel imports than Japan is, but this does not mean Japan should have a slower growth rate than the United States. On the contrary, Japan is currently the most formidable economic competitor of the United States. Interdependence is also a solid basis for the struggle of the nonaligned countries against the developed capitalist countries for establishing a new, equitable, and rational world economic order.
Second, it is necessary to correctly perceive the relationship between protecting national security and expanding international cooperation. We cannot expand economic cooperation without playing host to foreign experts, businessmen, and visitors. We must study how to safeguard our national security while promoting cooperation with foreign countries and settle this question correctly in order to expand, rather than restrict, international economic cooperation. Far from being the responsibility of security agencies alone, it is the responsibility of the entire party, all the people, and particularly all the officials handling foreign relations.
Third, we need to decide between diversifying our foreign economic relations, on the one hand, and consolidating and intensifying our cooperation and integration with the socialist countries in the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), on the other. Vietnam is a developing country that is advancing toward socialism without going through the stage of capitalist development. Therefore, in our foreign economic relations, we must rely mainly on the socialist countries. This is a law [a generalization based on a recurring fact]. The socialist countries also regard their assistance in economic development for Vietnam and the elimination of the development gap among CMEA members as their international responsibilities.
Yet at the same time, Vietnam is part of the world economy. Therefore, it is natural for Vietnam to develop economic relations with countries [other than socialist ones]. But we should see this diversification as complementing and enriching our cooperation with the socialist countries. In contrast, the better and the more effective Vietnam’s cooperation with socialist countries is, the greater the possibility that Vietnam will be able to diversify its relations with other countries. This will both benefit Vietnam and promote cooperation among the CMEA countries. These relations are mutually complementary and not mutually exclusive.
Fourth, it is necessary to have a good grasp of the principles of equality and mutual benefit in foreign economic relations. Cooperation must be mutually beneficial and based on equality if it is to be lasting and fruitful, and this applies to cooperation among socialist countries as well as among capitalist countries. Of course, in our cooperation with the socialist countries, our friends will refrain from causing losses for us, but we should not abuse their goodwill and cause them losses. If we have only our own interests in mind and neglect the interests of our partners, this will lead to consequences detrimental to cooperation.
In regard to capitalist countries or capitalist companies, some people believe that “the capitalists will never ‘help’ us build socialism.” We argue that this view is not completely accurate because its proponents forget that the basic law of capitalism is [the law of] profit. As [Karl] Marx said, Capitalists will do anything to make a profit; they are not even afraid of selling us “the rope to hang them with.” Therefore, if they see a benefit in their business with us, they will not refuse it. [Thus, the question is] how to ensure our interests while making sure that our partners also benefit from the cooperation. To this end, we need experts, and we must change the way we manage [our] economy. Only by so doing can we make the most of the world’s scientific-technological knowledge and capital in order to serve our socialist construction.
In the future, the economic alignment of our national strengths with the power of the age can be focused on three main directions:
First, [we must] continue to solicit assistance from friendly countries, first and foremost the socialist countries. This is a lawlike issue and will last for a long time. To be able to secure further assistance from our friends, we must first and foremost make effective use of such aid and turn the fruit of labor of our friends into material and spiritual strengths that will fortify us. Binding political conditions are not attached to socialist countries’ assistance to Vietnam. But Vietnam must make it a rule to use this assistance effectively in order to increase our own strength and the strength of the socialist community, not to overburden and weaken us.
Second, [we must] identify the optimal position of Vietnam in the socialist economic system in particular and in the world economy in general. This is not simple, as it requires a deep knowledge of the world’s economic issues, science, and technology, the development strategies of the countries as well as about our own economic problems, our strengths and weaknesses, and our capacity to utilize scientific-technological achievements for the rapid advancement of our role in the international division of labor. Our participation in the program on reviewing the scientific-technological advances of the CMEA countries and the issuance by the Sixth Party Congress of three focus programs for our current five-year plan, especially the export program, are indeed the first steps in this direction.
Third, we must learn from the outside world’s experiences in using the achievements of the scientific-technological revolution in order to find the shortest and least costly path for Vietnam’s industrialization and to work out a long-term economic development strategy. In this regard, we must pay attention to the experiences of those countries whose initial development level was similar to Vietnam, in particular those in East Asia and South Asia….
The evolution of the global economic and political situation and the scientific-technological revolution are creating very favorable conditions for the Vietnamese people to fulfill their strategic tasks in the new revolutionary period. But as before, if we are to successfully align our national strengths with the power of the age, we first must develop our own strengths. In the past, our strengths were mainly political and military. At present, what is needed is political and economic strength, of which economic strength plays the decisive role. Without economic strength of our own, our nation cannot effectively absorb assistance from friends or the scientific and technological advances from the world, and indeed, we cannot actively and effectively participate in the international division of labor. The resolutions of the Sixth National Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam have charted the path forward for our people. We have only one path: renovation and advance in accordance with common world trends.
[(Phan) Doan Nam, “Ket hop suc manh dan toc voi suc manh thoi dai,” 53–57; trans. Luu Doan Huynh and Alexander Vu Ving]
1. See Tonkin Free School, “A Civilization of New Learning” (chap. 6).
2. Often depicting animals in scenes of daily life, Dong Ho paintings—that is, woodcuts from Dong Ho village in Bac Ninh Province—were very popular, particularly as decorations for homes during Tet, the Vietnamese lunar New Year.
3. The Mice Wedding is probably the best-known Dong Ho painting.
4. The Four-Point Position of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam:
1. Recognition of the fundamental national rights of the Vietnamese people: peace, independence, sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity. According to the Geneva Agreements, the United States must withdraw from South Vietnam and all its troops, military personnel, and weapons of all kinds; dismantle all U.S. military bases there; and cancel its “military alliance” with Saigon. It must end its policy of intervention and aggression in South Vietnam. According to the Geneva Agreements, the U.S. government must end its war acts against the north and definitively end all encroachments on the territory and sovereignty of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
2. Pending the peaceful reunification of Vietnam while Vietnam is still temporarily divided into two zones, the military provisions of the 1954 Geneva Agreements on Vietnam must be strictly respected: The two zones must refrain from joining any military alliance with foreign countries and there must be no foreign military bases, troops, or military personnel on their respective territories.
3. The affairs of South Vietnam are to be settled by the South Vietnamese people themselves in accordance with the program of the South Vietnam National Front for Liberation, without any foreign interference.
4. The peaceful reunification of Vietnam is to be settled by the Vietnamese people in both zones, without any foreign interference.
The Five-Point Position of the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam:
1. The U.S. imperialists are the saboteurs of the Geneva Agreements, are the most brazen warmongers and aggressors, and are the sworn enemy of the Vietnamese people.
2. The heroic South Vietnamese are resolved to drive out the U.S. imperialists in order to liberate South Vietnam; build an independent, democratic, peaceful, and neutral South Vietnam; and ultimately achieve national reunification.
3. The valiant South Vietnamese people and the South Vietnam Liberation Army are resolved to fulfill their sacred duty, which is to drive out the U.S. imperialists so as to liberate the south and defend the north.
4. The South Vietnamese people profess their profound gratitude to the peace- and justice-loving people all over the world for their wholehearted support and declare their readiness to receive all assistance, including weapons and all other war matériel, from their friends in the five continents.
5. Let our entire people unite, take up arms, continue to march forward heroically, and be resolved to fight and defeat the U.S. aggressors and Vietnamese traitors [note in the original text].
5. Tet Mau Than is the name used in Vietnamese military writings for the Tet Offensive. It refers to the lunar New Year, which in 1968 was the year of the monkey. In military terms, however, Tet Mau Than refers to the entire campaign of the general offensive and general uprising that began at the start of the lunar new year and lasted throughout 1968. This excerpt is part of a longer article that explains the timing and rationale for the Tet Offensive in light of the Vietnamese military planners’ assessment of the war from 1960 to 1967 and U.S. strategic options in 1967.
6. Quoted in documents of the puppet army’s general staff [note in the original text].
7. Agence-France Presse, Vietnam: L’heure decisive. L’ offensive du Tet (février 1968) (Paris: Laffont, 1968), 91 [note in the original text].
8. Ibid [note in the original text].
9. Quoted in The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decision-making on Vietnam, ed. Senator Mike Gravel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 4:538 [note in the original text].
10. Quoted in L’ offensive générale des Viet Cong au Tet Mau Than 1968 [note in the original text].
11. Pentagon Papers, 4:539.
12. Agence-France Presse, Vietnam, 87, 91–92 [note in the original text].
13. Ibid., 92.
14. American figures are considerably lower. James S. Olson puts U.S. casualties at 1,100 and ARVN casualties at 2,300 during the Tet Offensive, in Dictionary of the Vietnam War (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988), 442.
15. The Phoenix program was a CIA effort, in operation from 1968 to 1972, to destroy the civilian infrastructure of the National Liberation Front.
16. Pentagon Papers, 4:539 [note in the original text].
17. Ibid., 585.
18. Ibid., 603.
19. Ibid.
20. This refers to the “Christmas Bombings” of December 18–29, 1972.
21. The “long-haired army” refers to the female cadres and supporters of the National Liberation Front who lived in areas controlled by Saigon and who organized demonstrations and other propaganda work against the Saigon regime and the U.S. military. The “popular forces for multifaceted struggle” were the patriotic masses mobilized to wage many forms of resistance (legal, semilegal, illegal) against the enemy and in many fields of activity (political, military, economic, and cultural). The long-haired army was part of the popular forces for multifaceted struggle in the cities and countryside.
22. V. I. Lenin, “Letters from Afar, First Letter: The First Stage of the First Revolution,” in Collected Works, ed. and trans. M. S. Levine, Joel Fineberg, et al. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1981), 23:297.
23. At the Tehran Conference in late 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin agreed to form the United Nations. Then, at the San Francisco Conference in 1945, representatives from fifty nations adopted the United Nations Charter.
24. See Pham Quynh, “Intellectual and Moral Reform” and “Kim Van Kieu and the National Language” (both in chap. 6)
25. By all accounts, this referendum was rigged; Ngo Dinh Diem received 98 percent of the votes.
26. Because they lacked arms, the insurgents made dummy rifles out of wood.
27. These were administrative devices used by the government of Ngo Dinh Diem to ensure better control of the population.
28. The “heavy gun” was actually sections of bamboo filled with acetylene.
29. The “two legs” were military action and political action. The “three prongs” were chinh tri (political action), quan su (military action), and binh van (proselytization of enemy soldiers).
30. The People’s Revolutionary Party was the southern branch of the Vietnam Workers’ Party.
31. According to the theory of “permanent revolution,” the bourgeois democratic revolution would lead directly to the socialist revolution.
32. See, for example, Bui Si Tiem, “Ten Items for Reform”; Nguyen Cu Trinh, “Memorial Describing the Economic Crisis in the Nguyen Realm”; and Nguyen Thiep, “Memorial Regarding the Economic Crisis in Nghe An” (all in chap. 4).
33. See, for instance, Le Code, “Public and Private Lands” and “Private Property” (both in chap. 3).
34. See Le Thai To and Nguyen Trai, “Edict on Currency” (chap. 3), and Ngo The Lan, “Memorial on Currency Crisis” (chap. 4).
35. Paddy, used for storage and transport to reduce spoilage, is unhusked rice. The word state in this article includes the government, National Assembly, and judiciary but does not include the Communist Party. In Vietnam, the state or government runs the economy, the administration, and foreign affairs.
36. The average per-capita rice requirement is 240 kg of paddy a year.
37. Resolution 10 dismantled the agricultural cooperatives and returned land to individual peasant proprietors.
38. In the 1970s and 1980s, the salaries and wages of Vietnamese government officials and workers in state enterprises were indexed to the prices of a number of essential goods, including rice, sugar, kerosene, fish sauce, and meat.
39. In 1985, the government devalued the dong, causing its purchasing power to drop sharply and contribute to inflation.
40. See Tran Do, “Letter to the Communist Party Urging Democratic Reform” (this chap.)
41. See Nguyen Cu Trinh, “Memorial Describing the Economic Crisis in the Nguyen Realm” (chap. 4).
42. In the old village, public property included public rice paddies and village funds [note in the original text]. See Le Code, “Public and Private Lands” (chap. 3).
43. See “Rules of Behavior” (chap. 3).
44. Individualism refers to being solely concerned with one’s own interests, with big sales of one’s works, no matter whether they benefit or harm the masses.
Fence-sitting refers to the shirking of responsibility to the nation and the war of resistance, and aloofness from the people so as to enjoy life and pass the time.
Escapism refers to burying one’s head in distractions, in “pure art,” and not caring for the material and moral conditions of the people.
Neutralism refers to the doctrine according to which culture is set above social classes and strata, ignorant of the struggle of the people, not caring to serve it, and unmindful of politics.
Aestheticism aims at so embellishing the form that it becomes overrefined and likely to attract only a very few “aristocratic intellectuals” and the group of exploiters and parasites [note in original text].
45. Ho Chi Minh, “Message to the Second National Cultural Congress,” July 1948 [note in the original text].
46. Friedrich Engels, “Letter to Miss Harkness,” in Marx and Engels on Literature and Art, ed. Lee Baxandell and Stefan Marawski (St. Louis: Teleo Press, 1973), 114–16.
47. Alexis Tolstoy, Creative Freedom [note in the original text].
48. This presumably refers to Georges Duhamel, a French author and political activist in the 1930s.
49. Van Nghe was published by the Vietnamese Writers Association [note in the original text].
50. “Nhan Duong” (Recognizing the Path), Van Nghe, no. 1 [note in the original text].
51. See Truong Chinh, “Marxism and Vietnamese Culture” (this chap.).
52. See Le Code, “Marriage” (chap. 3), and, for example, Trinh Cuong, “Edict Regarding Local Customs,” and Pham Dinh Ho, “On Marriage” (both in chap. 4); and Minh Mang Emperor, “Ten Moral Precepts,” and Gia Long Emperor, “Edict Outlining Propriety and Ritual” (both in chap. 5).
53. See Han Mac Tu, “This Is Vi Gia Village” (chap. 6).
54. For other bells in Vietnamese history, see Nguyen Binh Khiem, “The Three Teachings” (chap. 3).
55. This play on the abbreviation UMDC turns it into Uong mau dan chung: “drinkers of the people’s blood.”
56. This phrase refers to part of the demands of the “Vietnamization” policy to replace American combat troops with Vietnamese soldiers.
57. See Ngo Thi Nham, “The Sound of Emptiness” (chap. 4).
58. The UBCV was part of the “third force” under the Republican regimes, and after Vietnam was reunified under Communist rule in 1976, the UBCV continued its independent posture vis-à-vis the new government. The Communist authorities still do not recognize the UBCV as a legitimate religious organization.
59. Quan Am (Guanyin) is the goddess of compassion and mercy.
60. The church’s new pastoral constitution issued by Vatican II stressed dialogue between Catholics and non-Catholics in order to create a better world.
62. See also Gia Long Emperor, “Edict Outlining Propriety and Ritual” (chap. 5).
63. Chu Van Tan and Vo Nguyen Giap met at a conference at Lung Hoang near the Vietnam–China border in January 1943 to coordinate and extend guerrilla activity from the border region southward toward Hanoi.
64. Tan Trao was chosen as the capital of the Liberated Zone.
65. See “Ordering Ethnic Groups to Conform” (chap. 3).
66. These restrictions refer to edict no. 53 (Cong Bao Viet Nam Cong Hoa, December 8, 1955).
67. Quoted in Tap Chi Cong San, no. 1 (1987): 30 [note in the original text].
68. The “two sociopolitical systems” refers to the socialist countries and the Western, primarily capitalist, nations.