Organizer and Discussant: Helen R. Chauncey, University of Victoria
Chair: Sinh Vinh, University of Alberta
Historically intended to explicate the relationship between individual citizens and their state, the term civil society has evolved into a complex, contentious tool for analysis of public identity, practice, and power. Civil society has gained in fashion at a cost. "Reading for context," appreciating the role of history in contemporary society, for example, can be too easily forgotten.
The papers in this panel address such shortcomings with a sequenced argument. The panel begins with a critical reassessment of the colonial-era emergence of a Vietnamese public sphere in which discourse could explore the parameters of social and state identity. This first paper argues, contrary to official orthodoxy, that the colonial era provided a certain measure of open discourse which has had an uncertain welcome in the post-independence period. The articulation of anti-colonial discourse is further explored in the next paper, with regard to both public rights in relation to the state and contending understandings of freedom, including national independence. This work elucidates its argument through a comparative lens, exploring the Vietnamese experience in juxtaposition to the Philippines. It reinforces suggestive conclusions of the first paper in highlighting the past’s contentious legacy in the present.
Two case studies build on these findings. Both focus on local community in northern Vietnam. The first draws on the medium of colonial-era newspapers to explore an emerging expression of social responsibility, in this case as defined in relationship to local poverty. In this discourse, the state is not an explicit adversary, but the growth of public morality and identity outside direct state control, as the final paper demonstrates, make possible the open contention between community and central state of the late 1990s explored in the panel’s final paper.
Commentary will be provided on the panel’s theoretical arguments, with particular attention to discourse and the public sphere, the historical past in the present, and paradoxes of community-state relations.
The Creation of a Public Realm: Colonial and Postcolonial Developments in Modern Vietnam
Shawn McHale, George Washington University
Discussing colonialism in Africa, Crawford Young has stated unequivocally: "Nothing was more alien to the telos of the [African] colonial state and a civil society." Southeast Asianist James Scott has argued that revolutionary and colonialist regimes have both embraced "authoritarian high modernism" in part because they tended to face "prostrate civil societ[ies]." But how true are these assertions? A look at Vietnam suggests that these generalizations do not fit the Vietnamese historical experience.
This presentation focuses on the development of a public realm of discourse in Vietnam during the late colonial period (1920–1945). It argues that the blanket assertions of Young and Scott on colonialism and civil society poorly fit the Vietnamese case, in which the colonial state had an uneven impact on public debate. French colonial law imposed some limits on the arbitrary imposition of censorship: the police violated some of these laws, but they could not do so with impunity. The French repressed sensitive political topics, but Vietnamese often found ways around this repression. In short, evidence shows that Vietnam had a vibrant public realm during the colonial period. At times (1936–1939 and 1945–1946), this realm was more free of state control than it has ever been since.
Postcolonial governments have had an ambiguous relationship with the public realm. The Viet Minh and its successors initially granted complete freedom of the press in 1945. As war loomed in 1946, they imposed strict controls on the press and publications, borrowing their methods and regulations from their colonial predecessors. Control slowly tightened throughout the 1940s and 1950s, with 1958 marking a turning point in the consolidation of the state’s control over public debate. It has only been in the 1990s in particular that we have seen a marked move to openness in the public realm.
Reverberations of Freedom in the Philippines and Vietnam
Ben Kerkvliet, Australian National University
Three discourses on freedom were pronounced during anticolonial struggles and revolutions by Filipinos against Spain and Vietnamese against France: freedom from foreign domination and for self-governance; freedom to openly and publicly express ideas without fear of coercion; and freedom from impoverishment and gross social-economic injustice. In subsequent phases of each country’s evolution during the twentieth century, these discourses have continued to reverberate and have often been in contention with each other. The pattern of contentiousness has been different in each country. Issues concerning national independence and civil liberties have been most contentious in Vietnam while struggles for social-economic freedoms have been most persistent and controversial in the Philippines. Differences in how the two countries became independent and in the political regimes that have ruled each nation help to explain these two patterns. The analysis in the paper is based on primary materials (particularly writings in Tagalog and Vietnamese by participants in the debates over freedom) and on secondary sources.
The Discourse on Charity in French Colonial Vietnam
Van Nguyen-Marshall, University of British Columbia
This paper will explore the various ways the idea of charity and poor relief was discussed in Vietnamese language newspapers and journals in the early twentieth century. The Nguyen Imperial records of the nineteenth century (such as the Kham Dinh Dai Nam Hoi Dien Su Le) show that charity, especially in times of famine, was encouraged and expected from the wealthy. For the most part, this type of charity was not nationally or regionally based. Rather, it was predominantly locally based with donations going, for example, to the local granary or to help those in the donor’s own village. In the early twentieth century, with the growing numbers of newspapers and journals being published in vernacular Vietnamese (quoc ngu), Vietnamese readers were exposed to vivid descriptions of disasters and miseries beyond their immediate surroundings. For example, newspaper articles reported of the thousands of hungry and ragged people who were victims of floods in central Vietnam. Passionate appeals for aid were made through the papers and journals and charity became regionally or nationally based.
A key issue will be how these newspaper writers attempted to mobilize support and arouse the readers’ sympathy. What sentiments did they exploit in order to get people to participate in the various fund-raising campaigns? Certainly ethnic solidarity was a dominant theme in these calls for donations, but also important was an appeal to readers’ "modern" sensibility (i.e. a civilized—van minh—way of behaving). These articles suggest that there was a growing belief that membership in a modern and civilized society entailed civic and collective responsibility for the well being of all members, even if those in need are strangers.