SECTION 1:ii

SINIZATION AND SINICIZATION

by Hugh M. Lewis

Traditional Vietnamese History formally began with the chapter of Sinization and Sinicization, with the introduction of tax and census records, and covered nearly two millennia neatly split in half between the first sub-phase of Sinization and the second sub-phase of Sinicization associated with the Independence Era. The difference between the two sub-phases is analogous to the differences between Hellenic and Hellenistic—by Chinese and like Chinese. The overarching ethnohistorical dialectic is referred to as "Sino-Vietnamization.

Imperial Chinese history in the colonization of Vietnam was primarily coastal access for a southern sea route—A Southeast Asian entrepot for highly priced exotic merchandise, but interest in the form of tribute and agricultural taxation remained strong. From the beginning Chinese reforms in Vietnam aimed at increasing dividends from taxation. The earliest marriage reforms, introduction of Confucian patriarchal values, ancestor worship, monogamy, were designed to increase the taxable hearth count and went hand-in-hand with agricultural reforms like iron plow-shares and hydraulic engineering and techniques of transplantation to increase agricultural productivity to insure a generous surplus to make the enterprise profitable for everyone except the peasant.

From the beginning Chinese conquest opened the doors for southward Chinese migration that was part of a continuous impulse of southward oriented expansionism and imperialism against a backlash of Nan Yueh Barbarians rooted in the dynamics of Chinese Civilization, made up mostly of a mixed lot of males who frequently married local women. This was never a mass migration but one of a dominant minority that appropriated for itself the special prerogative and sumptuary privileges that come with authority. Few in number but great in magnitude, whose foreign presence exerted enough decisive influence upon the delicate and precarious metabolism of the indigenous social system to create repeated, cyclical reverberations which clearly led to locally catastrophic consequences, their regular intermarriage into the local ruling elite for mutual advantage created a distinctive Sino-Vietnamese ruling class whose interests were ambivalently both local and imperial. It also created a middle class caught between the Chinese blade and the Vietnamese grindstone—frequently both gaining and losing in the process of mediation between local and foreign interests.

The entire dialectic of Sino-Vietnamization"was fueled by an inherent trait of the Chinese colonial apparatus, tutelage of political domination and dependency and peonage of extraction created local conditions ripe for exploitation, a pernicious corruption in the form of graft, blackmail, usury, bribery, extortion, embezzlement and nepotism. Corruption was an inherent and endemic weakness of the "semi-feudal" social system, legitimated and ideologically reinforced by the whole Confucian ethical code and providing a substrate for cyclically recurring pattern of Sino-Vietnamization of inexorable local rebellion and foreign conquest.

Filial corruption provoked local unrest and political turmoil, which in turn provoked re-conquest from the North inevitably entailing, in its turn, administrative reform-- a temporary purging of local administration of corrupt and inefficient people and practices. With reform there would ensue a prolonged period of local peace and prosperity which would fuel demographic growth. With demographic increase there would also occur a concurrent growth in new local corruption, pressure for land, and nepotism. Land and opportunity would soon be foreclosed in the interests of the few and for the disadvantage of the many. Eventually this cancerous growth of local population pressure and corruption would result in another occurrence of revitalization"—rebellions, upheaval, feudal bouts for over-lordship, foreign invasion of a local social economy ripe for the picking, piracy, etc. This would again provoke a northern response and a new reconquest with a new train of immigration of people seeking renewed opportunity in the south when none is available in the north.

As this dialectic between north and south accelerated and grew in dimensions of scope and complexity, with periods of peace and prosperity becoming shorter, rebellions and corruption and reconquest more frequent, China and Vietnam stood in contrapuntal structural interrelationship. When the North was weak, corrupted, over populated, the South was strong, prosperous, united and gambling for local independence. When the North was strong, the South would be weak. From this Sino-Vietnamese dialectic emerged a gradual development of political centralization in Vietnam, culminating in an Independent, but domestically divide, Vietnamese country.

This entire two millennia of Sino-Vietnamization demonstrated a remarkable synergism of process and patterning, conservative and continuous in character, stable in its dynamic repetition in spite of periodic imbalances and chaos, that bespeaks a remarkable degree of symbolic integration—actors performing in relation to one another in coherent symbolic structures within a very consistent external framework. If this Great Cycle was fueled by the greed of local land lords and the sweat and blood of peasants and landless vagabonds, then it also had an internal dynamic motor embedded in the social structure of Sino-Vietnamese civilization, driving this whole ethnohistorical process and conferring its tremendous synergistic momentum. Then there must not be forgotten the many complex motivations—the human energy source of this engine. This dialectic refers us to rational ideals like the stable stereotype of the conservative peasant and his family, of the peasant village with its autonomous conservatism, of a conservative semi-feudal social economy and a dynamic continuum of a regal-ritual/administrative city-state political centralization.

The fundamental structural relationship was the social relationship between many human beings and the fixed, finite land—environmental/social circumscription and constriction of resources. Wet-rice cultural adaptation favors intensification of the agricultural process—a labor intensification favoring rapid and excessive growth of high local densities of local over population, growing inevitably beyond the optimum local range of resource-to-human interrelationships to diminishing returns from the amount of labor invested. There is a predominant tendency for local land-holdings to subdivide and diminish in net returns. This favors a growing tendency of familial atomization and of closed familial hoarding units who struggle divisively and desperately against misfortune and competition not just to retain their small land holdings, but to increase the size and number of their holdings. Excess population of landless laborers was only partially able to be mobilized within the local economy, many peasants are driven by poverty into debt peonage and land tenancy. A few large landowners emerge from the fateful competition from many essentially "land less" peasants, and the population pressures are driven to the breaking point.

Patrimonial inheritance, a form of mobilization of the land, or of structurally defining the human social relationship to the land, encouraged the aggregation of land within familial hoarding units. To reinforce centralization of authority, later Emperors encoded laws that made inheritance of prebendal domain illegal or which encouraged equal subdivision among both sons and daughters in order to increase the already predominating divisive tendencies among small land holdings and to break down the development of large landed estates.

Ancestor worship, patriarchal ethical values, and patrimonial inheritance combined with prebendal domain, official embezzlement, usury and tenancy, and communal village land, to counteract and stabilize these divisive tendencies in land holdings, and counterbalance this process and aggravate its resonating consequences by encouraging and perpetuating the growth of a few disproportionately large land-holdings for the profit of the few and the expense of the many. A worldview of limited good, a zero sum model in which one’s gains are unavoidably another’s losses (in land holding) and a just Confucian world order made this entire social system quite conservative in the renowned pessimism and resignation of the peasant. Though communal village land for the poor and disinherited mitigated somewhat the overall tendencies of this entire process, nevertheless the essential mechanism generated inexorable social pressures which could only be alleviated by expansionism and acquisition of new land through imperialism, or through revitalization in political rebellion and warfare.

Found within this patternings are a key set of socialization tendencies and enculturation practices and formal educational systems that fostered and perpetuated the symbolism associated with the great Confucianist Circle of Conservatism and Traditionalism which reinforced and fueled this entire process. Archetypal character configurations embodied within the ethos of the culture polarized about the dynamic extremes of peasant and mandarin, soldier and scholar. Good times followed bad, polluted emperors followed the heels of pure emperors, in a perpetual "misery-go-round" quickening in tempo and intensity as Sino-Vietnamization developed in structural complexity and in centralization of authority. Greater highs of power and prosperity were followed by greater lows of depravity and depression. In all this there was an extraordinarily strong familial ethic from peasant to emperor, which made nepotism, favoritism, domestic hoarding and strife, justified within a strict Confucian straightjacket. Personal psychological identification was completely with the success or misfortune of the family—big families were not only happy but fortunate in the eyes of their ancestors. 

Misfortune and poverty were contemptible not so much because of personal deprivation and suffering but because these processes inevitably meant the destruction and disintegration of the family—psycho-social atomization and anomie were the consequences of the state of abject familial poverty. A strong prosperous family tied to large land-holdings was the only guarantee of social and personal security. Strong parent-child identification meant that if parents were successful, children would be spoilt and corrupt while children of poor hard working peasants, though often abused, imbibed values of hard work and obedience and shrewdness in not getting caught. There is built within this social order a proclivity and predisposition to gamble obsessively for higher stakes, a compulsion toward achieving success and security that was social and familial in character. Life is a never ending poker game of gambit and ruse, where control of critical information can make or break a person’s chance for success and fortune—bluffing and deception are socially sanctioned, being discovered, getting caught the penalty and the crime—calling another’s bluff as obsessive social preoccupation.

Chinese civilization impacted upon all levels of articulation, and yet became assimilated into Vietnamese culture as a permanent overlay only selectively along central aspects of politico-religious and socio-economic symbolism, ideologies and structure, like a Chinese superego over a Vietnamese id, resulting in an inherently divided "Sino-Vietnamese" traditional ego—a cultural and character ethos both alike and unlike Chinese and Southeast Asia. The period of sinicization witnessed the same fundamental patternings in the development of Sino-Vietnamization as occurred during Sinization, only that there was a crucial and critical symbolic reversal of forms acquired from the Chinese. A threat and a permanent nuisance persistently externalized became internalized as a basic, inherent social conflict, an intrinsic contradiction within the Vietnamization process. In usurping traditional patriarchal authority from the North, the Vietnamese national character developed an Oedipus complex that became obsessive compulsive in symbolically resurrecting things Chinese, while simultaneously needing to reaffirm an independent political-religious identity in relation to China. The structural meta-logic of Vietnamization survived, but not unchanged.