SECTION 3:i

CHOLON DIASPORA

AND THE CHINESE CONNECTION

by Hugh M. Lewis

The North/South structural dialectic was part of a much broader and more diffuse structural patterning of sinicization which began in northern China at the Great Wall and rippled southward down into Southeast Asia in successive waves of Chinese invasion, migration and cultural imperialism. Moreover this patterning is well rooted in the basic dynamic structure of the cultural ecology of Classical Chinese Civilization, (Stover 1974) that perennially generated excessive population of "vagabonds, criminals, bandits, beggars and landless laborers" who were dispossessed from the limited fruits of limited land and forced into the "Sink of Death." "Two limited possibilities exist for the Agrarian State to relieve its surplus population without pouring it down the Sink of Death. They are opening up new geographic frontiers or new economic frontiers. The former opportunity was given with colonization of southern China; the latter was given around AD 1000 when a manorial elite moved to the cities and opened up a field of supply and service industries operated by merchants. In time these possibilities were exhausted." (Stover 1974:81) There is an interesting convergence of historical themes in this power structure in terms of the composition of the phoenix people. Ostensibly they present an ethnic front of Vietnamese solidarity, though statistically there is a large proportion of Chinese.

It may well be argued that Vietnam itself was populated by Chinese who arrived in successive waves and intermarried with the indigenous peoples to produce a Sino-Vietnamese Civilization. Chinese immigrants have long been a minority in Vietnam that regularly intermarried with the Vietnamese. They did not become outstanding as a pariah merchant class, however, until Vietnam gained her Independence. They filled a functional middle-man slot in the traditional Sino-Vietnamese class structure as merchants who rapidly accumulated independent sources of wealth and power. The floating Chinese of Nanyang were soon spread throughout Southeast Asia as a socio-economically predominant alien merchant class. 

They came to settle in the Cholon and Hai-phong areas of Vietnam and captured the local markets in rice. They had a distinctive ethnic and class identity, but they were never until the twentieth century organized into an ethnic group. There occurred periodically massacres of these Overseas Chinese by the indigenous peoples. "If ethnicity was not a prime feature at the outset, it was sure to increase in salience as the situation developed. And in each situation, underlying immediate events were the endemic insecurity and vulnerability that have been the lot of the overseas Chinese, persisting as constants over time throughout the region." (Strauch 1980:1-2)

Chinese immigration became especially intense during the French Colonial era, as new opportunities as middlemen and as laborers on the plantations were opened up. The Chinese had virtually a monopoly on the rice production in Vietnam. They frequently came into direct competition with the Vietnamese entrepreneurs and labor. Their success has been attributed to many factors, not the least of which was a common ethnic stereotype of clannishness—of banding together to exclude outsiders from competition, and to their remarkable facility and capacity for social organization and social strategy. 

The colonial setting created a marketplace for ethnic and class group contact, where different groups interacted only for transactions. Group boundaries were largely formed by, or in relation to, and were reinforced by, the Colonial rulers. Ethnic group interrelationships were characterized not by competition but by political interdependency, even though the role of the Chinese may have been to a larger extent exploitative, "each recognized the other as the provider of needed goods and services." Colonial rule ethnized economic roles (Hamilton 1978) in order to control and exploit these roles. Post –colonial ruling elite perpetuated this market structure to their own advantage—maintaining the Nanyang in a pariah social status, "with limited political rights and privileges", while exploiting its roles in the economy. Nationalism and colonial independence breed racial competition and the formation of ethnic groups from the old cognitive maps of ethnicity. Chinese and indigenous communities began to separate, and intermarriage became less common.

The Nanyang of today are caught in the throes of a national identity crisis, or of a double national identity. With the removal of Colonial rule their social visibility became quite prominent as a pariah class. The modern era became the era for competitive race relations in a new pluralistic situation of complexity. Relations between ethnic groups is characteristically marked by ambivalence and ambiguity. The Chinese are faced with the problem of a double identity (Strauch 1980) in which factors preserving their characteristic ethos of Chineseness came into conflict with factors related to their characteristic pragmatism in social relations and business. They were seen to come into direct competition, as an ethnic group, politically, economically and socially with the indigenous peoples. They have faced an existential choice of redefining their ethnicity either in terms of cultural assimilation with the host society or in terms of systematic exclusion from its political, economic and social life. Despite growing competition, their roles and assets as merchant middlemen are not easily expendable and replaceable within the new retarded economies of the independent nations. "Economic interests viewed in an ethnic framework come to be seen as structured by that ethnic framework. The Shift is so subtle as to be easily overlooked, or ignored. " (Strauch 1980:11)

Though ethnicity was not the only factor of the Vietnamese exodus, it was a factor. "That Chinese ethnicity was a prominent factor in this flight cannot be denied (though the specific connection between ethnicity and the decisions that tens of thousands of individuals made to leave their homes and risk their lives at sea is neither simple nor necessarily obvious). (Strauch 1980) "The flight of the boat people then became a disorderly, massive exodus." (Pilger 1981:2)

What is the Chinese connection between the "Cholon Diaspora" and the "plight of the phoenix people?" Ethnic Chinese "boat people" and Vietnamese "refugees" by and large present a common front in their new homeland. The boundaries between the two groups are not always clear cut or well defined. There is probably a modicum of "passing" "I would know who is Chinese and who is not, but from comportment rather than from features or race or anything else. The young Chinese are often more Vietnamese than Chinese, and many speak Vietnamese as their first language…" Ethnic Vietnamese often regard their Chinese counterparts here with disdain, though they may themselves be of Chinese descent, a fact often denied, and even though they may frequently come into Contact with the Chinese on a day-to-day basis.

The whole broad categorization of ethnic Vietnamese itself is suspect of any precise meaningfulness—denoting more a diffuse ideology or identification in existential circumstances, often a matter of simple expediency, rather than for enlightened elucidation of any broad, monothetic, homogeneous reality which it subsumes. The label Vietnamese lends itself to no simple formula, generalization, or pat, stereotypical characterization—it is a broad ethnic metaphor of "family resemblances," between Vietnamese brothers or Chinese cousins. The quality and reality of "Vietnameseness" exists and ranges somewhere between the extremes of "Chineseness" and "being Southeast Asian," and real differences are often as not only mythological. "Passing" and its converse "labeling" are central themes of this continuum.

The speciousness of this existentiality of the label of Vietnamese has until now been unchallenged, though it has long remained an implicit question. "Since the Second World War the Vietnamese have been waging a struggle not merely over the form of their state but over the nature of Vietnamese society and the very identity of the Vietnamese. It is the grandeur of the stakes involved that has made the struggle at once so intense and so opaque to Westerners." (Fitzgerald 1972:17-18) Traditionally, typical Asians did not identify with national boundaries or power structures, but in an alternative idiom of a sense of rootedness to tradition, in terms of "civilization" emanating outward from some common core of existential being. Power radiated from central courts in ever "dimmer circles" which overlapped with other circles of power. The conception of national boundaries did not exist before the French. (Hue Tam 1983:8)

It is not the existential ethnic identity of Vietnamese or Chinese that is so problematic, rather our own rationalistic conception. Such labeling exists in a "loose, rubbery kind of way", flexible with existential circumstances and structural context. Both Chineseness and Vietnameseness alike have a certain "chameleon-ness" in Western eyes. The common elements of the existential ethnicity of the phoenix people exists mainly as a politically well defined ethnic boundary/label in reference to extrinsic "significant others" than for any other well marked internal class differences, namely, in relation to the new American culture as well as to a common identity in relation to the Communist Government of Vietnam, whom for both "Vietnamese" and "Chinese" has become public enemy number one.

Consideration of the vagaries of Chinese ethnicity leads to consideration of the other side of the coin of ethnic Vietnamese. If Chineseness presents a retiring, low profile, then its counterpart is the most prominent representative of Vietnamese ethnicity—namely the petit bourgeoisie middle class which had been the ruling elite of South Vietnam and who descended from the colonial administrative class fostered under French tutelage. The high correlation of this class with Catholicism is connected with the obvious advantages Catholicism conferred upon "little brown Frenchmen" within the colonial milieu. The most common ethnocentric ascription and stereotype of this class is one of corruption. "Many Catholics and landowners occupy teaming positions in government employment and economic life; corruption is rife…."This class is heavily criticized in the literature as a "parasitic group, preoccupied with grabbing such administrative crumbs as were dropped to it from the white man’s table….Such elite groups today constitute one of the heaviest millstones around the necks of some of the emerging Southeast Asian peoples…." (Buchanan 1967: 81) "….Their predicament is to have become the flotsam of greatest consumer society in the world that produced little except dollar millionaires, Coke and drug addicts. 

When the American left, and pulled the intravenous tubes, which fed that society, their own creation, they left these people with nothing, except a desire to follow." (Pilger 1981: 27) "Corruption shades into virtue and becomes the highest virtue of increasing family wealth." (Lewallen 1972: 50) The corruption of this group was the corruption of Western colonialism and Americanization. It was a consequence of many factors associated with this particular class grouping, but not its cause. One of the main lessons of Vietnamese history is that corruption begins with Chinese conquest, and has been a chronic affliction ever since. Corruption, defined as "immoral, depraved, open to bribery, dishonest, decaying, putrid", is a wholly relative value judgment, one furthermore based upon the relativity of power itself. "Power corrupts, Absolute power corrupts absolutely." There are then, relative degrees of "corruption" locked up in the corruption of the Western Rational mind that cannot think outside of non-relative categorical imperatives of right and wrong. Who is the true hypocrite who does not admit the relativity of values to power when even our own might of a deadly nuclear arsenal makes us right.

It seems that a margin of corruption was traditionally socially tolerated and maybe even sanctioned within the traditional social structure of Vietnamese society. This refers us to another ideal-type continuum that is related directly to the other models of "olk-urban, core-periphery and heartlands-hinterlands structural differentials. This is the paternalistic-competitive continuum. The paternalistic type of social structure occurs in rural, pastoral, handicraft, mercantile and large scale plantation economies, such as prevailed in traditional Vietnam throughout most of its history. It features a division of labor between a servile peasant mass and a small ruling elite class, which is fairly homogeneous is social status. Traditional authority prevails in this structure, and a wide, unbridgeable class differential in terms of "living standards, income, occupations, education, death rates, etc." 

Status is crystallized and sharply defined by etiquette that is elaborate and rigid, serving as a primary mechanism of social control—a social distancing mechanism in situations of intimate social contact. The class/caste barriers become skewed on the competitive end of the continuum, which is associated with large-scale industrial economies featuring complex division of labor. Labor proficiency becomes the predominating criterion of selection, achieved status becomes as important as ascribed status. Social distancing mechanisms like etiquette breakdown—status and roles are ill defined and ever changing. The most important feature of paternalistic and competitive type social structures is in the kind of prejudice that prevails and is fostered from within that structure. Paternalistic authoritarianism, or paternalism for short, is well integrated with the code of etiquette and the predominating value system, reinforced with religious systems. It is a form of structural prejudice, and a kind of pseudo-tolerance. "Paternalistic master-slave relationships are an extension of the nuclear family situation" and are characterized by Oedipal tensions. Competitive prejudice is that which is known as the authoritarian personality with high F values, characterized by repressed forms of fear, sexuality, perversity, leading to projection of suspicion, hatred, antagonism leading to certain well-marked in-group/out-group stereotypes of inferiority/superiority.

Such "Character" types of authoritarianism are a direct reflection of the prevailing power structures rooted in the existential social context, whether traditional, competitive and pluralistic. Traditional culture and character in Vietnamese identity can be seen to corroborate this form of paternalism, explaining the chronic corruption of officials which was deeply embedded in the structural context of Vietnamese civilization. It is a kind of prepossessing patriarchal male chauvinism epitomized by the natural or sacred authority of the father over his family. If there is perchance a predominating patterning of a particular Vietnamese flavor of paternalistic authoritarian character traditionally operating in social structural interrelationships, preserving itself in a traditional sense of cultural ethos and historical heritage, expressed in terms of ethnic symbolism as the dominant "dragon" male, then it should be possible to identify and characterize this patterning.

Authoritarianism is negatively correlated with achievement motivation. Achievement motivation is in turn correlated with adaptive and successful economic enterprising. Elaboration of political religious symbolism focal in traditional Vietnam are indicative of social patterning, and patternings of socialization, leading to high power motivations for political status and high affiliation motivation for religious status. On the other hand there is evidence of patterning of low achievement motivation in the presence and relative success of the Chinese merchant class, in this class’s derogated and proscribed status within traditional Vietnam, as well as in the absence and official discouragement of independent economic activities in traditional Vietnam among the Vietnamese. Vietnamese rulers and bureaucrats discriminated merchants because "their acquisitiveness seemed grotesque and immoral", as well as "invidious." "Originally this attitude may have been more a consequence than a cause of the general weakness of Vietnamese commerce, but it did reinforce economic stagnation." Vietnamese literature traditionally employed fool ascription against the merchant class as a mechanism of "status reduction and social control." "Assigning the role of fool to a certain social type was a collective process of status adjustment, related to conceptions of propriety of conduct, because the fool represents a collective notion of a person or type of conduct believed to be inferior." (Woodside 1983:31) Much more evidence suggests a characteristic paternalistic patterning of traditional Vietnamese culture, marked by Oedipal ambivalence in the political religious dialectic between male and female symbolism.

In the birth of a new Vietnamese ethnicity, we are witnessing a radical transformation of collective consciousness, a transition process that will evince a unique combination of mixed-types between the paternalistic and competitive ends of the continuum. This is part of the more general Modern Migration Experience of Humankind locked as it is in a transitional status between rural tribe and urban slum, with all its associated stress disorders of mental illness, crime, suicide, related to the overcrowding, the competition for scarce resources, the congestion and pollution. And this transformation of consciousness from countryside to cityscape involves a radical restructuring of psycho-social relationships. There is a subtle shift from emphasis upon spatial organization to temporal organization.

While in India and China proper the movement is in terms of extended families, clans and whole jati-groups—or their representatives. In Vietnam it is in terms of smaller units of primary families, large or small but not so quite so extended or removed. The Vietnamese personality might be living under their Ancestor’s Shadow, but this shadow is much more distant and diffuse—the penumbra of oedipal ambiguity and social marginality is less well defined and more extensive. It is the shadow of a distant Chinese Great Uncle or a second cousin, but not a direct heir of the patri-lineage. The principle dialectic of filial piety and familial amorality is not strict conformity to lineage expectations but the disquisition of more immediate resources between male and female within a marriage relationship. The gain is not so removed success in providing well for the family under one’s wing, and of their eventually providing for you. 

Division under the same roof is not quite so imperative, but rather it is aggregation in the same vicinity. If the principle of caste is endogamy, then there are, strictly speaking, no castes in Vietnam, but there is much hypergenation and miscegenation. There is an ideology of parental love, authority and devotion, but often it is a false ideology of empty love social expression disguising infra-familial exploitation, abuse, social and political dependency. This ideology is as genuine as the Vietnamese person himself/herself, sharing the same extremely deep autochthonous roots of culture and character. It is interesting to speculate whether or not this vague structure of Vietnamese society will replicate or preserve itself, at least in form and symbolism if not in function and purpose, in the stratification and crystallization within the little Saigons of the phoenix people, to what extent it may diverge, or not.

Within a very short period of time the United States government evacuated some 130,000 Vietnamese in anticipation of Communist victory. These were real refugees in the sense of being political émigré’s, if Kelly’s definition of refugees as being people who do not want to leave and who planned to return is correct. But the existential motivations which led so many more refugees to make such a momentous one way existential decision to risk their lives, as well as the lives of their families, by escaping on small boats upon the open seas are not so clear.