SECTION:1:iii

WESTERNIZATION AND FRANCOIZATION

Westernization permanently transformed Vietnamese worldview. Beginning with early efforts of merchant-missionaries and missionary merchants and culminating four hundred years later in the Indo-Chinese wars, this chapter has been somewhat euphemistically referred to as the modern era of Western penetration into Vietnam. But until the mid-nineteenth century this was a process of penetration in reverse—a dribble at the faucet of western acculturation Vietnamese emperors sought to shut off completely. In this early phase of the process it was often impossible to distinguish between the activities and policies of merchants and missionaries. They were heads and tails of the same coin of colonial capitalism. Trafficking in Christian souls became inseparable from the trade in exotic oriental goods. Missionaries and merchants merged in form and function.

Invidious cut throat trade warfare between competing merchant groups chastizing with both whips and scorpions turned the mandarin’s nose against any social innovations from the West. Vietnamese interests to the exclusive military form of gunpowder, weapons, expertise and mercenaries. The mandarins were well equipped with both military might and political diplomacy to underplay the best and worst intentions of the merchant missionaries. These early missionary merchants were regularly outlawed and persecuted for interfering and threatening the values of their culture and their political order. The mandarins soon found Catholicism, with its denunciation of ancestor worship as a form of pagan idolatry, clearly a threat to the political-religious social order of traditional Vietnamese culture.

Catholicism was officially viewed as a foreign and hence illegal political power, leading directly to the persecution of its members that in turn provoked French military intervention ostensibly on behalf of the lives of the missionaries. Western Europe, caught in the internal throes of industrialization, was frantically searching abroad for markets and resources. The ideological rationale for "humanitarian" intervention which led to military colonization of Vietnam by the French was only a rationalization, a myth of the "White Man’s burden" for disguising real motivations unambiguously economic and political in character, quite in keeping with general colonialist/capitalist interests.

In 1847 two French ships of war bombarded for seventy minutes the harbor of Tourane, under false provocation and erroneous premises, claiming over 10,000 Vietnamese lives—"a hundred times more lives than all the Vietnamese governments in two centuries of religious persecution." (Buttinger 1959) It was bombarded twice more, with only a total two French casualties.

Assimilation made a clean sweep of all native institutions, transformed forever virtually overnight the social structure of a traditional Vietnamese society which took thousands of years to develop, was the rationale of the French style of colonial paternalism and cultural imperialism that attempted to turn the Vietnamese into "little brown Frenchmen" who could want little more than a "jug of wine and a loaf of bread" at the hands of benevolent French masters. French IndoChine became but another province of the Grand Union of French Civilization with its Parisian Metropole at its hub.

French colonial authorities administered harsh repressive doses of assimilationism that from the beginning fed a fire of growing social foment and dissatisfaction warming Vietnamese reactionaries and revolutionaries alike. All revitalization movements spawned and fueled French colonialism had in common a burning desire for National Independence and freedom from the French yoke, and apocalyptic–millenarian orientations predicated upon an inevitable destruction of the existing social order and the coming of the new order. French political persecution and repression fostered their secretive, independent underground survival and prevented them from becoming co-opted out of existence by nationalization or politicization or associationism.

French colonial "paternalism" was premised upon a tacit racist ideology of the superiority of French civilization. French cultural imperialism and snobbery has world renown and ridicule. "The taproot of French imperialism in the Far East from first to last was national pride—pride of culture, reputation, prestige, and influence." (Cady, 1954)

A cancerous, explosive growth of lazy, inefficient, over paid French bureaucrats, who habitually left burdensome work loads upon underpaid native clerks, who frequently humiliated traditional customs of natives, whose "ignorance and apathy" of native culture translated forcefully into effrontery, indignity, and attitudes of prejudicial superiority and paternalism by the resident toward the native, whose primary interests were in getting rich quick speculative enterprising, coupled with feelings of incompetence, racial and cultural inferiority, and structural dependency by the native in relation to the resident. Insufficient pay, lack of advancement opportunities, lack of respect, inferior education drove many capable Vietnamese into the pitfall of rugged individualism undermined their oriental milieu with all its cases of neglected parents and unfeeling sons and daughters.

But "the administrative picture of the Indo-Chinese Union was not entirely blurred by hostilities between natives and whites, taxation evasions, financial disorganization, stubborn legal problems, and rapid growth of French personnel…(Ennis 1973) But, heads I win, tails you lose, the economic coin of French colonialism in Indochina was certainly most imbalanced in favor of the residents. The ancient saying money is the root of all evil is more than just a trite’ cliché—it explains France’s main raison d’etre for creating the colony of the "Indo-Chinese Union" in the first place. Political policies and religious programs always were secondary and supportive adjuncts in service of the primary colonialist and capitalist role of exploitation of the entire region.

Rice mono-culture, sericulture, rubber, tobacco, cotton, tea, exotic hard woods, minerals—these in essence constituted the astonishing economic improvements under the French thumb. Vietnam was agrarian at a "primitive stage in which it grows and exports agricultural products and raw materials, and imports manufactured products…the colonial economy was characterized by the restriction of the number of production items, on the one hand, and the intensification of the output of these items, on the other, regardless of the living conditions of the people or the impact on the economy as a whole." (Do Van Minh 1963:92) In spite of dire poverty and enforced impoverishment, Vietnam was a dependent consumer society of French manufacture—serving simultaneously as a zone of exploitation and a dumping ground for the French economy.

French colonial capitalism proved to be short-sighted, long term failure, inducing passive resistance amounting cumulatively to active resistance, the impoverishment and mal-nourishment underlying the "tropical lethargy" of the "lazy native" and eventual economic depression of French Indochina. Per capita rice consumption steadily fell, flood, bad crop and famine recurred often, poor nutrition aggravated vulnerability to disease infection and reduced resistance and recuperation, allowing less energy for physical work, resulting in high infant mortality and infamous tropical lethargy. The only palpable benefits of French colonial paternalism, "Medicine, Labor and Education," were "too few and too French"—"paid for by oppressive taxation and ruthless exploitation of the former royal monopolies of salt, opium and alcohol…"

The rural majority had no more opportunities than plantation corvee labor, or working in anthracite mines or cotton mills, of whom 75% were women and children between the ages of 10 and 18. Immunization combined with "improvements" of extensive transportation and communication networks of railroads, roadways, telegraphs and telephone lines, to produce a major population explosion, fueling a growing exodus of rural opportunists to over-crowded, unsanitary slums. Doctors were fewest and furthest in between than any other Southeast Asian colony, mortality rates were the highest. "Quality schooling in Southeast Asia is still the prerogative of the few." Only 1.1 percent of the children received even a secondary education—prerequisite for entering one university with a total enrollment of 631 students designed primarily for pharmacists, clerks, interpreters and petty bureaucrats for "French business and governments." 80% of the rural population relapsed into a condition of abject illiteracy. "By 1942, the monopolies provided 16.8 per cent of government revenues, with more than half derived from the sale of opium, reflecting a growing addiction throughout the country."

The debits far out weigh the credits when we balance the social costs and economic benefits of France’s civilizing mission in Indochina. Censorship, repression, persecution, slavery—plantations were developed "at a terrible cost to human life." An inevitable revolution of rising expectations and of equality was built into the very style and framework of French colonial paternalism. The more that "Natives" are given the promise of the carrot, "the more do they agitate against these self same masters."

…With this in mind, the West should remember that colonies cannot be "held" forever within the vicious cycle, composed of armed force, large doses of assimilation, and promises of association. (Ennis 1973:10)

Vietnam today, war-torn, poverty-stricken, embittered "international pariah," is struggling with a colonial legacy it cannot completely shake off—agrarianization, mushroom growth of parasitic slums, gulfs of development between core and periphery widening to unbridgeable and destabilizing proportions in a process of "cumulative causation", epidemic underemployment and unemployment, phenomenal population growth with remains a veritable time bomb. The price paid for France’s economic development has been Vietnam’s underdevelopment. "Death control" takes predominance over birth control and revolution in Vietnamese is a young mother who realizes her baby’s starvation is not a natural, necessary fate. "Politically and economically they became mere appendages of Europe, one section of that great belt of tropical slums—the Third World—whose exploitation provided part of the basis for the greatly increased well-being of the peoples of the West." (Buchanan 1967:24)