Where the Vietnamese are concerned, the debate about the differences between Asian values and Western ones was promoted in a particularly pressing way almost thirty years ago, not by Marxists in Hanoi, but by Henry Kissinger.
As the leader of the American side in secret negotiations with the Vietnamese communists to end the second Indochina War, Kissinger published an apparently magisterial book in 1969 about American foreign policy. In it he argued that the West and underdeveloped Asian countries were divided not by the former’s wealth and the latter’s poverty but by two different “philosophical perspectives.” The West’s perspective was “Newtonian,” Kissinger claimed. American policymakers such as himself wrongly seemed to Asians to be “cold, supercilious, and lacking in compassion” because, as good Newtonians, they were committed to accurate knowledge classification and to the notion that the real world was external to the observer. Economically underdeveloped Asians such as the Vietnamese, in contrast, were allegedly “pre-Newtonian.” They were inclined to think that the real world was almost completely internal to the observer. Their epistemological immaturity allowed them “great flexibility” in altering the perceived realities of “revolutionary turmoil,” to the detriment of American policy makers.1
Contrast Henry Kissinger’s wartime pronouncements with the way in which the Vietnamese worldview was defined more recently by Vietnamese elite figures themselves. The occasion was a 1994 Hanoi conference on “Asian Social and Cultural Development,” sponsored by the Toyota Foundation and the Vietnamese Social Sciences and Humanities Center. In his summarizing speech at this conference, Professor Hoang Trinh, a senior Vietnamese scholar, singled out one great thinker from the past as rightly having special authority for Asian peoples. This was not Confucius but Francis Bacon (1561–1626). Bacon, according to HoangTrinh, spoke from his grave in warning the Asian “dragon” economies that mastery over nature must be combined with respect for nature’s laws, in the modern form of environmental planning.2 And indeed Bacon, as the English father of experimental science and of the scientific belief that knowledge is power, has been a major inspiration to both the modern Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions ever since Yan Fu, the great Chinese translator of Western thought, named him back in 1895 as the founder of the West’s material superiority over Asian civilizations. Contrary to Kissinger, Descartes and Newton have been celebrated right along with Bacon.
Certain predictable reflexes appear and reappear when the world talks about human rights these days. Westerners from outside the United States keep reminding their Asian conversational partners that the “West” is not the same thing as the United States, whose possibly pre-Newtonian addiction to capital punishment, for example, is no longer shared by Canada or Europe. Asian spokespeople for their part keep demanding a more pluralistic approach to human rights, not one based entirely on Western history, in which locally practiced notions of economic and cultural rights will be given attention along with civil and political rights. We oscillate between a naive universalism and a plaintive relativism. But in present-day Vietnam, the official state ideology is still communism. And communism began its life as a creed that embodied many of the values of the eighteenth-century Western Enlightenment. These included the desirability of the overthrow of mentally enslaving authority by the experimental philosophy that Francis Bacon advocated and for which major Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire were to praise him.
When Ho Chi Minh announced the independence of his Democratic Republic of Vietnam to Hanoi crowds in September 1945, he publicly invoked the French Revolution’s “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” and its secularizing determination to separate political authority from divine authority, in the name of fighting human ignorance, was almost immediately combined by Ho with the offer of a mass literacy campaign. Its utopian objective, not fulfilled even now, was to impart literacy to all Vietnamese by the end of 1946. The literary campaign was to create an awareness in all Vietnamese, including women and such marginal groups as fishermen, monks and nuns, and prostitutes, of their rights (quyen loi) and duties (bon phan) in the new republic. The Vietnamese revolution has never been a haven for local moral philosophers of the skeptical Western Alasdair MacIntyre type, who assert that human rights are merely moral fictions, intrinsically no more credible than witches or unicorns.3
Of course Ho Chi Minh’s association of his revolution with the French Revolution’s faith in the rights of man was partly designed to manipulate the sympathies of foreign public opinion, especially French and American. And for a Western scholar to explain the Vietnamese communist revolution almost entirely in terms of an unnaturally idealized Marxism would be a little like a Tibetan with a theoretical knowledge of progressive Christian theology trying to explain from a distance the behavior of a complex Western country such as the United States. But there is little doubt that human rights ideas and practices in the Vietnamese revolution have not been determined exclusively or perhaps even primarily by the residual “Asian” values of premodern Vietnam. They have been determined by a very particular indigenous experiencing of the originally Western Enlightenment. Indeed, Francis Bacon and the specific ideals of scientific mastery and experimental reasoning that he bequeathed to that Enlightenment may mean more in Hanoi at the end of the twentieth century than they do in London or Washington, where Baconian thought was tamed, domesticated, and pigeonholed centuries ago. We are not dealing with starkly contrasting Asian and Western civilizations, as Kissinger so self-servingly pretended in 1969. But we may be dealing with a Baconian Asia confronting a tired, post-Newtonian West that is losing its faith in foundational certainties.
The ways in which the Vietnamese experienced the Enlightenment and the revolutionary programs that descended from it were critical. This is no doubt generally true of other Asian countries, too. Human rights in them cannot be elucidated without an understanding, not just of local practices and traditions, but also of the compromises and even the pathologies involved in the imperfect global diffusion of Enlightenment values, by Westerners and non-Westerners alike. The general term for “human rights” (nhan quyen) itself probably entered Vietnamese thought at the end of the 1800s. It would have been imported from China and Japan; the Chinese version of it appears as early as 1878, in the diaries of the famous scholar-official Guo Songtao, and its meaning was assessed in terms of its early applications in Japanese politics in a celebrated Chinese book about Japan (which Vietnamese scholars could read) by Huang Zunxian, published in 1890.4 But the Enlightenment values that stood behind the term were dislocated at the outset by French colonialism (lasting from 1885 to 1954). The French conquest of Indochina brought with it the works of Rousseau and Victor Hugo and the claims that French civilization could cure Vietnam of the “leprosy” of its Chinese-style mandarinate (as Edouard Petit characterized the old-fashioned Confucian elite, in a book about Vietnam published in Paris in 1887). Precolonial Vietnam’s mandarins, or ruling scholar-officials, educated in classical Chinese, were further vilified in French colonial propaganda as being at best as backward as “medieval” European scholastics, and at worst the torturers and murderers of French Catholic missionaries and Vietnamese Christians. But the French colonists themselves were to practice racial discrimination outside their schools while teaching Rousseau and Hugo inside them.
The Enlightenment in Vietnam was thereby undermined from the start by the colonizers’ own ambivalence about it or daily contradictions of it. Such a circumstance could almost be said to resemble the coexistence of Jeffersonian democracy with black slavery in the early United States. There were differences. Unlike black slaves, a small number of venturesome Vietnamese could make limited escapes from the mocking false universalism of the colonizers’ Enlightenment by going to France itself, where they were sometimes better treated and where they discovered that colonialism’s double standards were not written in the stars but were situational. A famous Vietnamese novelist traveled to France for the first time, before he had become famous, in 1927. He described graphically what it was like to leave behind in Vietnam an Enlightenment that had metabolized into a manipulative colonial civilizing mission:
The farther the ship got from Vietnam and the closer it got to France, to the same degree the more decently the people aboard the ship treated me. In the China Sea they did not care to look at me. By the Gulf of Siam they were looking at me with scornful apprehension, the way they would look at a mosquito carrying malaria germs to Europe. When we entered the Indian Ocean, their eyes began to become infected with expressions of gentleness and compassion ... and when we crossed the Mediterranean, suddenly they viewed me as being civilized like themselves, and began to entertain ideas of respecting me. At that time I was very elated. But I still worried about the time when I was going to return home!
Other Vietnamese were ludicrously reputed to have tried to circumvent racially based justice in French Indochina by asking court-appointed doctors to certify that they had enough French flesh and skin to merit French citizenship.5
So to ask why human rights ideals have remained stunted in the Vietnamese communist revolution is to ask, in part, why they were stunted in the practice of the colonizing West itself during the high noon of colonialism. Ho Chi Minh, the architect of this revolution, began it by being one of the young Vietnamese “mosquitoes carrying malaria germs to Europe” who wanted to rethink the Enlightenment’s message in the freer air of Paris, French Indochina’s colonial metropolis. As a fiery communist journalist living in Paris in the early 1920s, Ho helped to organize an “Intercolonial Union” of the France-based representatives of oppressed peoples in French colonies such as Algeria, Morocco, Senegal, Guinea, Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Vietnam itself. Ho also edited, published, and personally sold on Paris streets a journal, Le Paria (The Outcast), with titles in French, Arabic, and Chinese. It aimed at preparing the way for an anticolonial reinvention of the Enlightenment, this time an Enlightenment for the world’s “outcasts.” The journal supplied its outcast readers, and anyone else to whom it could be sold, with articles Ho had written himself on such subjects as racial hatred, the sufferings of Vietnamese women, Algerian martyrs, and the evils of torture in colonial jails. Le Paria was secretly carried back to Vietnam by Vietnamese (and other) sailors who worked for international shipping lines. They played the part of pilgrims spreading the word of masterless freelance preachers such as Ho, in a manner—though secular and much more far-flung geographically—not without similarity to the missionary groups of the Protestant Reformation in Europe.
In his writings at this time, Ho’s major theme was the West’s systematic betrayal of its own eighteenth-century Enlightenment in its colonies. The French goddess of justice, he wrote, had lost her weighing scales and had kept only her sword when she traveled to Indochina. Choosing examples from different kinds of French colonists—high officials, railway service employees, priests—Ho tried to show how they all debased French claims to be enlightened by their abuse of the peoples they ruled. Read today, the charges that Ho made against French colonialism in the pages of Le Paria seem monotonous in tone and substance, cartoons of infamous behavior rather than a solid documentation of it. They are presented with an irony so overwrought that it is hard to believe they could have been very persuasive to the few French readers who came across them. Ho’s journal for “outcasts” had a run of only about 5,000 copies and ceased publication in 1926.
But we may forget that the abuses actually happened; we also forget what energies of mythmaking were devoted to the presentation of Western colonialism as a benevolent enterprise, before World War II, by the leaders of the Western countries that had Asian colonies. Crude as he was in literary style, Ho was a Vietnamese Marxist precursor of the Western thinkers, two or three decades later, who were also to be shocked by the sinister discovery of the West’s own falsification of its Enlightenment values. After 1945 many Western writers were to note, bitterly, that Voltaire had celebrated the beginning of the end of torture in eighteenth-century Europe, but that it had returned to Fascist and Nazi Europe; they were to lament as well the intimate geographical proximity of the centers of central European humanism to centers for the mass murder of Jews. But the West’s subversion of its own Enlightenment was first demonstrated in the prisons of Western colonies before it became obvious in the West itself. And the young Ho Chi Minh was a witness.
Ho promised in the 1920s that the Enlightenment could be saved by being transferred to Asia by revolutionaries. This makes bitterly ironic, or worse, the subsequent history of the Vietnamese communist republic that Ho inaugurated in Hanoi in 1945 and which has ruled all Vietnam since 1975. But as some pessimistic Western thinkers themselves had come to see, systematized Enlightenment had always had “totalitarian” potentialities. 6 In Vietnam itself before the communist rise to power, Buddhist thinkers had criticized the Western Enlightenment differently. They had argued that its natural-law egalitarianism was too narrow in scope, and thus dangerous if it were treated as an end in itself rather than as a means, given its relativist and discriminatory tendencies by Buddhist standards. They tried to replace it with a more broadly egalitarian renewed Buddhism, in which the central right of all creatures was to escape from suffering. But they foundered in their inability to provide plausible techniques for Vietnam’s political decolonization. Instead, some of them took refuge in a romantic nostalgia for an alleged golden age of Vietnamese Buddhism (back in the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries), during which emperors had supposedly married humble farm girls.7
After decolonization came a global Cold War in which each side divided the planet into areas that were saved and areas that were damned, with paranoia flickering like lightning behind all the geopolitical calculus. In this period, from the 1940s to the 1980s, the Vietnamese communist state attempted a smaller tropical reproduction of the structure and history of the Soviet Union. This involved the terror of revolutionary tribunals, secret police, and prison camps and the use of class warfare as an instrument of governance, rather than as the tragic necessity Marx might have thought of it as being. Even the state funerals of Vietnamese communist leaders in Hanoi resembled their Moscow counterparts, right down to the processions, gun carriages, flowers, military uniforms, and serried rows of official mourners. Ho Chi Minh’s own embalmed body in its mausoleum in Hanoi today imitates Lenin’s in Moscow. The peculiarity of this imitative political body snatching is made all the more apparent by the fact that the Lenin body worship in Russia was designed by the Bolsheviks in the 1920s to be a politically correct counterattraction to the mass veneration of saintly relics by the old Russian Orthodox Christian church—for which Vietnam knew no equivalent.
One of Ho’s most eminent political prisoners, the poet Nguyen Chi Thien, evoked the ghostly, tubercular atmosphere of the countless “reeducation camps” in which he had been imprisoned by Ho’s regime in a remarkable 1972 poem, “The Swampland.” In the poem he commented that “Uncle Ho” had really become the cunning seducer “Uncle Fox.” (The Sino-Vietnamese term for “fox,” Ho-ly, resembles the “Ho” in Ho’s name.) Ho was the “king of the devils,” whose rubber sandals really had the weight of a hundred pairs of iron boots.8 But in contrast to this Vietnamese characterization of him as an evil revolutionary who understood very well what ideals he was betraying, hostile French intelligence analysts back in 1945 had apparently thought that Ho and his associates were merely pitifully confused. They assessed the speech in which Ho had invoked for Vietnamese the French “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” as “a bastard combination of bookish internationalism and chauvinistic patriotism, a melange of intellectual Marxism and primitive social demands, corresponding exactly to the aspirations of a section of the backward masses of these Asiatic deltas.”9
No matter what explanation of Ho himself will ultimately be found, the relics of the old Enlightenment universalism that he once proposed still nonetheless survive in Vietnamese life, even if they are like the debris from some great shipwreck floating on the ocean’s surface. In the early 1990s, for instance, the World Publishers Company in Hanoi, whose function is to disseminate information about Vietnam to the outside world, was still publishing tracts in Esperanto, for Esperanto was the language that Asian revolutionaries of years ago once thought could undergird what the young Ho Chi Minh himself praised as the only thing that could save humanity and bring universal compassion: a “genuine world republic” without capitalist boundaries.10 Visitors to Vietnam in the early 1990s also encountered English-language customs declaration forms inscribed with the terms “Independence, Liberty, Happiness”—not language one would find on the customs declaration forms of neighboring revolution-free countries such as Brunei or Singapore.
It is safe to assume that the “Enlightenment project” culture still overlies Confucian-Taoist-Buddhist civilization in Vietnam, feebly or not, in roughly the same way that that civilization overlay Chain Hindu civilization in central Vietnam centuries ago, in the late medieval period. Internal as well as external pressures compel the communist republic to explore the legal definition of “civil relationships” in its society (as in its first civil law code, approved in 1995, some fifty years after Ho’s “rights of man” speech) and to search for an ethical postrevolutionary sense of purpose that will minimize corruption, and which must come in part from below. The pressures are revealed in the communist regime’s encouragement of a rapid increase in the numbers of the country’s newspapers and journals (from 185 in 1993 to 450 in 1996), in the name of the old Enlightenment goal of elevating the “people’s intelligence” (dan tri), the theme as well of Ho’s not completely successful literacy education blitzkrieg in 1945. There are even finely statistical public discussions of how backward Vietnam still is, with respect to its neighbors, in the popular accessibility of print journalism. The theoretical journal of the Communist Party Central Committee, for example, complained to party cadres in 1997 that the average annual per capita consumption of newsprint in Vietnam was still less than one kilogram per person, as contrasted with Japan’s fourteen kilograms. (Here is a good example of what Horkheimer and Adorno call the Enlightenment’s conversion of mathematical procedures into rituals of thinking.11) But the press is still controlled. Amnesty International still has all too little difficulty in compiling lists of the names of Protestant churchmen, Buddhist monks, and Catholic bishops whom Vietnam is imprisoning for their religious beliefs. Communist Party theoreticians still warn ominously of how “negative” newspapers destabilized the “systems” of Chile in 1973, Romania in 1989, and the Soviet Union itself in 1991.
Perhaps a discussion of how long hypocrites can remain uncrippled or undisturbed by an awareness of their own hypocrisy—a question not unknown to the history of human rights in the West, too—would require the services of a theologian. All historians can do is suggest that the Jekyll-and-Hyde, split-personality nature of the Vietnamese revolutionary regime has been the product both of theory and contingency. In general terms, the regime is the blurred reenactment of a marriage originally consummated elsewhere between the Enlightenment vision of human perfectibility and the less happy conviction that political life is a lethal conspiracy and revolutionary politics are the theoretical dignification of a justified paranoia. Marxism, it is worth recalling, was a theory of liberation. Part of its liberating impulse was directed against nature. (Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno grumble, “behaves toward things as a dictator toward men.”12) Through technologies of various kinds, human beings could conquer nature and master their own existences better, making them yield more plentiful economic surpluses. The conquest had to occur through collective means and collective economic ownership, which alone could transcend the reflexes of endless accumulation, whatever the human costs, of capitalism and its class-divided societies.
To this Lenin added the notion (not entirely original with him) of a vanguard political party, bent on such liberation, that must be designed as a counterconspiracy to fight the conspiracies that it saw threatening its constituents. If the entire structure of the hostile political and social order, whether Russian tsarist or French colonialist, was imagined as an all-embracing enemy plot, the revolutionary party opposed to it would have to model itself upon its enemy to succeed. In fact, because of the ambitions inherent in their ideology of liberation, the Leninist party dictatorships that seized power in Moscow and Hanoi went beyond the Russian tsars or the French colonialists. They required not merely obedience but public enthusiasm and active mobilization in the name of their ideology. People who rejected the ideology and its party would have to be crushed.
Bullying purges became a specialty of the Vietnamese party during its resistance war against the French from 1945 to 1954. Imitating Lenin, Pham Van Dong—usually regarded as one of the more mild-mannered elders of Vietnamese communism—told a party congress in the borderlands of north Vietnam, in early 1950, that all means had to be used to “exterminate” enemies and reactionaries who harmed the communist cause. He explained that he spoke for a “people’s democracy” that could be “dictatorial” toward its enemies because it was “democratic” toward the “people” (nhan dan). At that point the “people” were defined, more liberally than later, as workers, peasants, petty bourgeoisie, patriotic bourgeoisie, and progressive landlords. But in the next breath, Pham Van Dong complained that party members had little idea of what governmental power was or how to create a state, either during their struggle or for the future when the French were defeated.13
Here unfavorable contingencies played a part. The Vietnamese communists were not merely using Maoist methods to create a supposed revolutionary consciousness where its social class basis did not exist; they were also trying to construct political power, in the forest, with even fewer reference points than the Chinese Maoists had as to what modern administrative machinery or modern management methods looked like. French colonialism had preserved a mummified premodern monarchical order in northern and central Vietnam, behind which French power lurked. The Vietnamese missed the experimental constitution making of Sun Yat-sen and his successors in Nationalist China, let alone the “German phase” of state building of late nineteenth-century Japan, in which German legal thought had been imported and indigenized enough in Japan to begin to allow the creation of a “hard,” rationalizing political order. Thirty years of war with the French, and later the Americans, induced the Vietnamese communists to exalt war, as well as class struggle, over concern with state formation. In this they were encouraged by the dictum of Stalin (the architect of their Soviet Union ally’s victory over Germany in 1945) that the decisive test of a “system” was its success in warfare, not the quality of its law-based administration. By one calculation, even in the early 1990s more than half of Vietnam’s state functionaries were military people (quan nhan).14 The state itself, as the embodiment of a higher good to which all are subject, remained chronically underconceptualized.
The expansion of patterns of global connectedness, it has been said, encourages the prospects for individual self-actualization.15 At first this sounds a little like an economist or a sociologist whose job is safe talking about “restructuring.” But the principle has not been fully tested. The era of world history that has recently ended was, for Americans, an era of New Deal liberalism and racial segregation, for Vietnamese an era on the one hand of Victor Hugo and Rousseau and on the other of French colonial contractors buying Vietnamese peasants for twenty-five francs a head and shipping them to mines in the South Pacific. It was not an era of real globalization either in the universal accessibility of its advanced thought or in the moral wholeness of its master narratives. The threat was always that it might suffocate in the normative ambivalence of its own practices. This was true even for communism. The Vietnamese revolution was based upon mere fragments, largely Leninist and Stalinist and Maoist, of communist thought. (In the 1990s, the Vietnamese government is finally publishing the complete works of Karl Marx and Engels in Vietnamese.) Such fragments, in turn, were first imparted haphazardly to many revolutionary partisans in makeshift classes in the forest, or secretively in French colonial prisons. As recently as the fourth Party Congress in 1976, an astonishing 200 of the 1,008 delegates claimed to have spent time in colonial prisons, including the ex-carpenter and painter from Hanoi (Do Muoi) who was to become party general secretary in the 1990s.16
Cold War politics brought a misplaced taste for seclusion from the non-communist world, which further deepened the provincialism of the Vietnamese revolution. This trend and an American trade embargo imprisoned Vietnam until the late 1980s in a largely European, Moscow-directed trading system whose remote markets and high transportation costs removed much chance of real economic growth. Even Vietnam’s critical shortage of freshwater fish in the 1980s had to be repaired with imported fish stocks from Cuba, the Ukraine, and Hungary. This long and severe circumstantial parochialization of what were supposedly global doctrines and forces of emancipation is the soft foundation upon which new approaches to human rights have to be attempted as Vietnamese revolutionaries enter a less Manichean period.
Western liberal intellectuals cannot help but be concerned with counterpart intellectuals in other countries who are denied freedom of speech. But the way in which societies treat their least privileged, least accepted members may well be an even better test of human rights in them than the way they treat their intellectuals. Nowhere was the Vietnamese revolution’s parochialization of Enlightenment values more obvious than in its treatment of the country’s real underdogs: not just Vietnamese peasants, but ethic minority ones. The mountainous and midland regions of Vietnam where the non-Vietnamese minorities live occupy about two-thirds of Vietnam’s national space. Vietnamese revolutionaries armed themselves with the belief that the traditional highland economy was primitive, but that the highland peoples themselves could not only be made to speak Vietnamese but also could be liberated by lowland elites’ evangel of collectivized farming. From the 1960s to the early 1980s, therefore, state planners imposed agricultural cooperatives the size of larger lowland Vietnamese villages upon mountain villages whose inhabitants had historically had different, and smaller, conceptions of the proper size of community structures. The special economic and cultural characteristics of the Hmong, the Tai, the Nung, and the Yao societies were resisted for attempted homogenization on Vietnamese terms. In this false universalism era of Esperanto and reeducation camps, it turned out to be a very short jump from the Enlightenment belief in a preformed universal humanity to the self-deceiving identification of that humanity with purely Vietnamese traditions and values. But here retribution did not come at the hands of Amnesty International. Severe rice deficits in the eight mountain provinces north of Hanoi forced the beleaguered Vietnamese state not only to begin to accept the principle of “local knowledge” in mountain region economics, but also to ship 250,000 tons of scarce rice and cereals of its own each year to these provinces in the early 1980s to ward off famine.17
The Vietnamese communist oligarchy to which Ho Chi Minh’s revolution led at the end of the twentieth century, is not representative of its people. Since it is not really elected, its unrepresentativeness cannot be compared to that of the many millionaires in the U.S. Senate, even if they are as remote from Tom Paine as the oligarchy is from Ho Chi Minh’s outcasts. We see here rather a neotraditional unrepresentativeness, like that of the premodern patriarchal Vietnamese scholar-gentry. Committed to legal gender equality, the Vietnamese Communist Party’s membership was only 16.9 percent female in 1995; committed to the rescue of the poor and the young, party members are becoming wealthier and older. Almost half of its members joined it before 1975.18 Postrevolutionary oligarchies may nonetheless choose to be more enlightened about human rights than their more militant revolutionary predecessors. But if treatment of social underdogs, not intellectuals, is the greatest test of human rights, the ways in which the powerful imagine the less powerful and the powerless, or are compelled to imagine them, will be crucial in determining the immediate future of human rights in Vietnam (and elsewhere).
It has not been a good century in which to have been a Vietnamese peasant. Some evidence even suggests that between the 1940s and the 1980s—the years of war with the French and the Americans and of failed economic experiments and embargoes and malnutrition—the average size of young Vietnamese actually shrank while that of their Thai and Japanese counterparts was growing.19 In the eyes of the more powerful “others” who rule them or who influence their lives, Vietnamese peasants’ imagined essences or externally imposed identities have changed dramatically in this period, far more rapidly than their real substance. They have gone in a few years from being the “filthy nhaques” of the French colonialists to the commu-nalistic revolutionary warriors of the Viet Minh to the objects of the fledgling “macroeconomics” management of doi moi reformers. A variety of would-be foreign custodians of their identity have come and gone: Rodgers and Hammerstein (the Vietnamese peasant “Bloody Mary” in South Pacific), Lenin, Chaianov, the World Bank.
But the Vietnamese revolution has also produced on its own soil thoughtful and sympathetic interpreters of the past and future of Vietnamese peasants. One of them suggested at the end of the 1980s that the real defeat for Vietnamese peasants would be defeatism itself, either in their own eyes or in the eyes of their rulers. Looking at the densely populated Red River delta of northern Vietnam, where the struggle to produce sufficient rice was engendering pessimism if not defeatism, Dao The Tuan warned that the “Green Revolution,” with its high capital investment, chemical fertilizer demands, and irrigation requirements, could not by itself save the Red River delta peasants. But if such peasants were imaginatively reconcep-tualized one more time—this time as being the potential equals of the Japanese and Dutch family farmers who successfully farmed even more densely populated parts of the world than northern Vietnam—defeatist assumptions about the eternal poverty of the Red River might, with hard work, eventually turn into a mirage.20
Here the residual hope of the revolution blends with the much greater accessibility now of global ideals and means for vernacularizing them. An era in which their rulers really thought of them as potential Dutch polder farmers might be remarkable in its human rights significance for Vietnamese peasants, since most Dutch polder farmers are the economic embodiments of a more general knowledgeable historical capacity to create middle-class citizenship, with all its qualities of self-empowerment.
The twentieth century ended as a century of liberation movements that hadn’t entirely liberated, in which people seeking to make themselves and others into angels became bureaucrats if not beasts instead, and in which cautious improvers killed fewer people than utopia-seeking perfectionists. The problems of the Vietnamese revolution, however, have had little to do with what Kissinger called the “pre-Newtonian” non-Western resistance to the Western Enlightenment or the scientific culture that lay behind it. Even at its more autarkic, the Vietnamese communist revolution usually tried to remain open to as much global thought as seemed manageable and understandable to its mostly poorly educated leaders, who have had to move, in a few kaleidoscopic decades, from speaking French to speaking Russian to speaking English and to speaking French again. It never took rhetorical refuge in tribal “Asian” values to the same degree as some of its nonrevolutionary neighbors. Even the primitively Russified icon worship of Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum reflected a debased or muddled universalism more than a self-contained tribalism.
The problem has been, rather, the attempt to attach the wings of an eagle to the body of a sparrow. This was the attempt to apply a Marxist version of the Enlightenment ideal of the designed society, and one much more intense and historically condensed than the versions of the ideal in the wealthier West itself, to a poor, overpopulated, preindustrial society in which the better side of the Enlightenment ideal had already been confused by Western colonialism. The search that resulted for an earthly paradise led Vietnamese revolutionaries into far too many “swamplands,” with far too many victims. But their revolution still has harbored what most revolutions harbor and what may be an important human right in itself. That is the right to hope. The denial of hope about the future, and total despair about building earthly paradises, might lead to swamplands of a different kind. Even the nearly always-deceived optimism in which revolutions seem to specialize may be better than unrelieved pessimism.21
Henry A. Kissinger, American Foreign Policy: Three Essays (New York: Norton, 1969), 48–49.
Reported in Nhan dan chu nhat, Hanoi, December 4, 1994, 6.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 69–70.
Xiong Yuezhi, Zhongguo jindai minzhu sixiang shi [A History of Modern Chinese Democratic Thought] (Shanghai: Renmin chtibanshe, 1986), 11–12.
Alexander Woodside, Community and Revolution in Modern Vietnam (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 4, 22.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cummitig (New York: Continuum, 1975), 24.
Nguyen Trong Thuat, “Nghia binh-dang cua Dao Phat” [The meaning of equality of Buddhism], Duoc Tue [The torch of enlightenment], Hanoi, August 1 and 15, 1937, 6–12 and 3–10.
See the masterful translation by Huynh Sanh Thong: Nguyen Chi Thien, Flowers from Hell (New Haven: Yale Center for Area and International Studies, Council on Southeast Asia Studies, 1984), 73–99.
Quoted in David G. Marr, Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 539.
Ho Chi Minh toan tap [Collected works of Ho Chi Minh], vol. 1 (Hanoi: Su that, 1980), 115–16.
Ho Bat Khuat, “Nhung van de cua mot nen bao chi dang phat trien” [The problems of a developing press], Tap chi Cong san (The Communist Journal) 12, no. 6 (1997): 25; Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, 24–25.
Horkheirner and Adorno, Dialectic, 9.
Pham Van Dong, Nhung bai noi va viet chon loc [Selected speeches and writings], vol. 1 (Hanoi: Su that, 1987), 37–53.
Hoang Chi Bao et al., comp., Co cau xa hoi-giai cap o nuoc ta: ly luan va thuc tien [The social class structure in our country: theory and practice] (Hanoi: Tliong tin ly luan, 1992), 181–87.
Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 158.
Le Mau Han et al., Cac dai hoi dang ta 1930–1986 [Our party congresses, 1930–1986] (Hanoi: Su that, 1991), 88.
See the article by Lam Quang Huyen in Tap chi Dan toe hoc [Journal of ethnology], Hanoi, 1 (1983): 23–26.
Le Quang Thuong, “Mot so van de ve cong tac dang vien trong tinh hinh nay” [Some problems with respect to the work of party members in the present situation], Tap chi Cong san 14, no. 7 (1996): 14–20.
See the assessment by Dr. Nguyen Ky Anh in Nhan dan chu nhat, Hanoi, August 1, 1993, 5.
Dao The Tuan, “Dong bang song Hong co the san xuat du an duoc khong?” [Can the Red River delta produce enough to eat?], Nhan dan, October 21, 1988, 3. The author heads the Hanoi Institute of Agricultural Science.
E. J. Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries (New York: Meridian Books, 1975), 136–41.