Fire in the Lake Read online

  Just why the Vietnamese alone among the Viêt tribes should have resisted grafting onto the great trunk of China remains a matter of scholarly debate. The most southerly of the Viêt peoples, they alone possessed a distinct territory: the circle of mountains all but isolated the Red River Delta. But the Chinese empire had broken through so many natural frontiers. Of course, even after ten centuries the inhabitants of the Delta had not become precisely Chinese — but then neither had the peoples of what is today Yunnan and Canton. Secreted within the demotic language of every southern tribe, the old gods and the old customs lingered like the memories of early childhood. How much more the Vietnamese differed from their northern conquerors was a matter of subtle distinction, a difference of degree that approached a change in quality. From the tenth century onwards they defended themselves from China with a ferocity that perhaps could only come from a consciousness of the fragile borders of their identity. In the great patriarchate of the empire Vietnam was the unfilial son.

  The Emperor of the South rules over the rivers and mountains of the southern country.

  This destiny has been indelibly registered in the Celestial Book.

  How dare you, rebellious slaves, come violate it?

  You shall undoubtedly witness your own and complete defeat. 2

  The declaration of Vietnamese independence was in itself ironic. Writing in Chinese, the great Vietnamese military leader, Ly Thuong Kiet, rebuked the Chinese for claiming sovereignty over a state whose very identity depended on her relationship to the Empire of the Center. But then the claim to independence was no more paradoxical than the method of achieving nationhood.

  Like their rivals, the Ly princes were warlords. They took control of the Red River Delta shortly after the first war for independence, in A.D. 1010. They united the nation and established a dynasty — but only at the price of rebuilding the entire apparatus of government by which the Chinese had ruled them. Though fervent Buddhists, they called upon the sacred powers of the Confucian tradition to establish a claim to legitimacy. Through the institution of the mandarinate with all its rank and ritual, they persuaded the other warlord families to give up their armies and compete for power as dutiful sons within the one great household of the empire. In effect the Ly took on the role of the Chinese governors, adopting the Chinese universal empire in order to reject the universalism of the Chinese. After a new war with China in the fifteenth century the court poet to the hero-emperor Le Loi wrote in defense of Vietnamese autonomy:

  Our state of Dai Viet [Greater Vietnam] is indeed a country wherein culture and institutions have flourished. Our mountains and rivers have their characteristic features, but our habits and customs are not the same from north to south. Since the formation of our nation by the Trieu, Dinh, Ly and Tran, our rulers have governed their empire in exactly the same manner in which the Han, Tang, Sung and Yuan did theirs.3

  In other words, according to the poet, the justification for Vietnamese national independence rested on the double foundation that while Vietnamese “habits and customs” differed from those of the Chinese, their governments conformed most faithfully to the Chinese models. Five centuries later Ho Chi Minh invoked the same reasoning to explain Vietnam’s relation to China within yet another universalist system:

  The Chinese Communist Party, under Mao Tse-tung’s leadership, succeeded in combining the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism with the revolutionary practice of China, thereby taking steps proper to the Chinese society.… At present, in building socialism, although we [the Vietnamese] have the rich experiences of brother countries, we cannot apply them mechanically because our country has its own peculiarities.4

  Given the geographical and cultural proximity of Vietnam to China, it is perhaps understandable that the two major historical changes within Vietnamese society — the building of a Confucian state in the tenth to eleventh centuries and the Communist revolution in the twentieth — should follow the same pattern. In both cases the Vietnamese leaders assumed Chinese political culture while rejecting, or at least attempting to reject, Chinese political domination. The relationship of Vietnam to China runs not only through lines of force but through the deep channels of a civilization.

  Today Vietnam’s continued success in maintaining her independence from China rests on a very different set of conditions than it did in the past. In medieval times the mountains and the limited technology of war served as insulation for Vietnam. Now the Vietnamese can defend themselves only by opening themselves out to other countries. Ho Chi Minh, who spent many years in France, China, and the Soviet Union in preparation for the struggle for independence against the French, understood that Vietnam’s survival depended upon her putting an end to her isolation. During his lifetime he counseled his countrymen to become internationalists, to learn from other nations and to take from them what would be useful in the development of their small and backward country. In the 1950’s and 1960’s he looked to the Soviet Union and to Eastern Europe to compete with China for influence in Vietnam. But the French and then the American war restricted his choices and threatened from time to time to close off even those apertures he had made onto the rest of the world.5

  Historically the Vietnamese have been accustomed to isolation and to encirclement by larger rival powers. Until the fifteenth century Vietnam remained confined to the Red River Delta, to the small basin of arable land pressed against the China Sea. To the south the great kingdom of Champa, the last on the arc of Hindu states that ran eastward from India, occupied the coastal plain of what is today central Vietnam. Always hostile to the Vietnamese, the Chams had warred with them throughout the period of their colonization by the Chinese, threatening occasionally in the slow lurch of the military balance to crush them and take over their territories. Only when Vietnam had gained her independence and closed her border with China did she grow strong enough to check, and finally turn, the waves of invasion from the south. In the fifteenth century, after defeating an invasion by the Ming dynasty, the Emperor Le Loi began the “March to the South,” the succession of military campaigns by which, a century later, the Vietnamese armies would reduce the kingdom of Champa and push the frontiers of Vietnamese settlement down to the bottom of the Annamese littoral.

  As the Vietnamese empire breached the Gates of Annam, near the 17th parallel, its whole history changed course. From a small kingdom that had looked only north towards China, Vietnam became a major power in Southeast Asia. During the seventeenth century the Vietnamese entered the nearly virgin plains of the Mekong Delta, and under pressure from a continual growth of population pushed south to the Gulf of Siam and west across the Bassac river deep into the kingdom of the Khmers.

  Once the Vietnamese had reached the plain of Southeast Asia, they entered into the battle for territory that the kingdoms of the south had intermittently waged across the lowlands for the centuries of their history. These wars seemed to have no end and no beginning. Like the wars in Europe before the Reformation, they went on through the rise and decline of a dozen kingdoms. At the time the Vietnamese entered the conflict, the fortunes of Siam were in the ascendant over those of the princedoms of Laos and the other two Buddhist states, Burma and Cambodia, the kingdom of the Khmers. Though beset by Burmese armies from the west, Siam was in the process of building an empire out of the territories of Laos and Cambodia. From the point of view of Laos and Cambodia, the Vietnamese arrived at exactly the right moment — except that they too had territorial ambitions. After a series of battles with the Thais that lasted over a century, the Vietnamese concluded a treaty with Siam whereby the Khmer kingdom recognized the suzerainty of both empires and gave each of them rights over the provinces adjoining their territories. Laos was similarly embattled and overcome. At last one Lao prince offered himself as a vassal to the Vietnamese emperors in Hue and ceded some of his territory to the capital beyond the mountains in return for protection from the Thais, against whom he had no geographical defenses.

  These eighteenth- and nineteenth-c
entury wars seemed like ancient history to most Americans in Vietnam, but they were very much present in the minds of the Southeast Asian leaders during the American war. In the intervening period of eighty years the five countries had held a merely artificial peace — a peace imposed by the British and the French colonial administrations. With the coming of independence the old territorial disputes broke out again, fired by the same old fears and ambitions. Even the balance of power remained much the same. Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia remarked in 1961:

  Westerners are always astonished that we Cambodians are not disturbed by our future in which China will play such a powerful role. But one should try to put himself in our place: in this jungle, which is the real world, should we, simple deer, interest ourselves in a dinosaur like China when we are more directly menaced, and have been for centuries, by the wolf and the tiger, who are Vietnam and Thailand?6

  In the 1950’s and 1960’s the Cambodians and the Lao had only one hope for maintaining their independence, and that was for one or more of the great powers to insure their territorial integrity against their two more powerful neighbors. In 1954 France, Britain, the Soviet Union, and China made an agreement at Geneva to this end. In 1962 the United States appeared to take over the protective role of France and Britain by agreeing, tacitly in the case of Cambodia, overtly in the case of Laos, to support neutralist regimes in both countries acceptable to the Communist powers. Later, however, in the pursuit of the Vietnam War it was to wreck these agreements and destroy the fragile basis on which the independence of Laos and Cambodia rested. Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia and Souvanna Phouma of Laos did their best to maintain neutrality and resist participation in the war. But like Belgium or Poland, their countries were finally helpless before the larger powers. Their future depended on an overall political settlement. Thailand, however, being larger and more distant from the conflict, had somewhat more leverage. The military-supported regime in Bangkok granted all the American requests for bases and staging areas in return for princely sums of American aid. Their bargain did not, however, entail an ideological commitment to the Americans or even full support for the American war in Vietnam. The Bangkok politicians had no interest whatsoever in helping the Vietnamese, Communist or non-Communist. Their obligation to the United States for feeding and strengthening them domestically was strictly limited by their desire not to interfere while the Vietnamese destroyed each other and by their calculations as to the final outcome of the conflict. There is an old Thai proverb to the effect that it is worthwhile to try and help an elephant that is trying to stand up, but perfectly useless to help one that happens to be falling down.

  It was one of the inconsistencies of American public relations that while the American officials painted over these acute national differences with the rubric of “Asian dominoes” or “Free World Allies,” they simultaneously brought into sharp relief the differences between northern and southern Vietnamese. The American public thus had the impression that while all Southeast Asians were alike — that nationality stood for little among them — the South Vietnamese were a nation distinct from the northerners. Certainly there were differences between the two groups of Vietnamese, but these were small by comparison with the separate culture and the thousand years of history that distinguished the Vietnamese from the Thais and the Cambodians. For until the eighteenth century there was no such thing as southern Vietnam. The demilitarized zone at the 17th parallel, drawn by the members of the Geneva Conference in 1954, corresponded roughly to the line that for a millennium and a half had marked the border of Vietnam and the kingdom of Champa. Only in the fifteenth century did the Vietnamese break through that border and begin their colonization of the south. Gradually, as the nation expanded, it lost its political cohesion, and for a period of time the 18th parallel marked the division between two warring Vietnamese states. It was during this period and afterwards under the colonial regime that the southerners grew slowly away from the northerners. In the twentieth century the southerners had different accents and to some extent different customs from the northerners. But would this difference sustain a new political division of the country? From the American point of view the question was not simply whether the difference was great enough, but whether it implied southern strength and independence. The question is political in the most profound sense. To answer it it is necessary first to have some notion of the foundations of the precolonial Vietnamese state and the changes that occurred within that part of Vietnamese society that colonized the south.

  In his defense of Vietnamese sovereignty Le Loi’s court poet himself pointed out the sources of the weakness of the Vietnamese state from its beginnings. On the one hand, he said, the early Vietnamese monarchs governed their country in exactly the same manner as the classical Chinese dynasties. On the other hand, the Vietnamese “habits and customs” differed from those of the Chinese. The contradiction was an important one, for the reason that the Confucian government was essentially a family affair. The Chinese empires achieved their breadth and duration largely by virtue of the extraordinary length of their patrilineal loyalties. Even today Chinese who have lived in Thailand, Indonesia, or Vietnam for generations maintain their attachments to relatives in China and, by extension, to China herself. Up until the twentieth century a Chinese aristocrat might have understood his family loyalties to include everyone in his district or canton — or other noblemen a thousand miles away. But the Vietnamese of the empire drew their boundaries closer to home. Even in the Red River Delta, the region of Chinese occupation, the peasants worshiped their ancestors only to the ninth generation. After ramifying through several nuclear families, their clans would split apart into separate hierarchies unbound by any tie of community.

  As a result of this difference in “habits and customs,” the Vietnamese government had never operated in exactly the same manner as the Han, the T’ang, and the Sung, even during its first four hundred years of stability. The emperors followed the rituals of state (each gesture a déjà vu) so that time would not flow through the empire, but the “natural order” of the universe did not hold throughout the society. “The laws of the emperor are less than the customs of the village,” runs the best-known of Vietnamese adages. In Vietnam it was the village rather than the clan that stood as the primary community. The village was an informal association of families. An institution peculiar to Vietnam, it had probably developed during the period of Chinese occupation as a response to the decline of the feudalistic principalities. At that point it had served to weld the small and otherwise autarchic families into communities large enough to meet the demands of the traditional rice culture. The village was always the efficient unit of local government, but in the fifteenth century, when the court abandoned the village mandarinate and retired the lowest order of its officials from the villages, it became a quasi-autonomous unit.

  In the 1960’s the shells of the central Vietnamese settlements — even voided and half-destroyed by the war — showed what strength the villages must have had in that traditional landscape. The villages of northern and central Vietnam stood like small fortresses in the center of their rice fields, closed off from the world by bamboo hedges. When the mandarin rode out from the stone ramparts of his citadel, he traveled quite alone, a fish out of the water of the population. The mandarin was more an ambassador from the court than a governor in his own domain. He had only the authority to negotiate with the village council for the amount of taxes and the number of army recruits to be submitted to the empire. If the negotiations broke down, he had no resort except the final one of calling in the imperial troops and burning down the hedges of the village.7

  Almost self-sufficient, the villages required from the government only the planning of large-scale public works (the dikes) and external defense. Their councils of notables, selected by co-optation from among the senior, the well-educated, and the wealthy men of the village, conducted their external affairs, organized their religious and social life, and managed their administrations. Th
e councils reserved a certain proportion of the land for common use, organized cooperative enterprises, and apportioned the common burden of the tax and the draft. The councils were organized hierarchically on the pattern of the Confucian family, yet they retained enough flexibility to adjust the economic as well as the purely Confucian relationships between various families. Rather than referring misdemeanors and petty disputes to the mandarins, they dealt with them themselves on the basis of informal, customary law. For below the brittle network of family relationships lay the reality of the land and its production of rice. In times of war or revolution the villages shut like oysters, protecting their essential substance from the disorder of the outside world.

  In their very self-sufficiency the villages gave Vietnam hidden powers of resistance. In times of war they provided not only a source of recruitment for the regular army but a base for guerrillas. Their high bamboo hedges shut out strangers better than any jungle redoubt. When the guerrilla slipped into the village, he became invisible among other men.8 Because he belonged to the village, he had a ready-made system of logistics and supply, a community that trusted and cooperated with him against all enemies from the outside. In the path of the Chinese armies, as in the path of the French Expeditionary Corps several centuries later, the guerrillas carried out a scorched earth policy with the consent of the villagers. When the empire was divided during the Mongol invasion, the villages themselves opposed the Chinese until national leadership was restored. This deep, underground resistance constituted an important element of the Vietnamese national identity. It was one of the “habits and customs” that distinguished the Vietnamese. As an eighteenth-century Chinese emperor said: “The Vietnamese are indeed not a reliable people. An occupation does not last very long before they raise their arms against us and expel us from their country. The history of past dynasties has proved this fact.”9