French historiography

The historiography of Vietnam under Chinese rule has had substantial influence from French colonial scholarship and Vietnamese postcolonial national history writing. During the 19th century, the French promoted the view that Vietnam had little of its own culture and borrowed it almost entirely from China. They did this to justify European colonial rule in Vietnam. By portraying the Vietnamese as merely borrowers of civilization, the French situated themselves in a historical paradigm of bringing civilization to a backwards region of the world. French scholar Leonard Aurousseau argued that not only did Vietnam borrow culturally and politically from China, the population of Vietnam was also directly the result of migration from the state of Yue in China. This line of thought was followed by Joseph Buttinger, who authored the first English language history book on Vietnamese history. He believed that to fight off the Chinese, the Vietnamese had to become like the Chinese.^[11]

Vietnamese national historiography

Another narrative, the national school of Vietnamese history, portrays the period in "a militant, nationalistic, and very contemporary vision through which emerged a hypothetical substratum of an original Vietnam that was miraculously preserved throughout a millennium of the Chinese presence."^[11] The national Vietnamese narrative depicts the Chinese as a corrupt and profit-driven people and merely the first of the foreign colonizing empires that were eventually driven from Vietnam. According to Catherine Churchman, this is not an entirely new historical tradition but a rewriting or updating of it, and has roots in Dai Viet, which portrayed itself as the Southern Empire equal to the Northern Empire (China). Dai Viet literati of the Trần and Lê dynasties sought an ancient origin for their autonomy prior to Chinese rule and traced their genealogy to Triệu Đà or the semi-legendary Hồng Bàng dynasty. They recorded that the Northern Empire suffered defeat for not respecting these views. However, scholars such as Nhi Hoang Thuc Nguyen argue that "the trope of a small country consistently repelling the China’s cultural force is a recent, postcolonial, mid-20th-century construction".^[12][13] Works by Japanese scholars in the 1970s as well as in the English language in the 1980s have taken on elements of the national school. Katakura Minoru's Chūgoku shihaika no betonamu emphasizes the innate characteristics of the Vietnamese people. Keith Taylor's The Birth of Vietnam (1983) asserts a strong continuity from the semi-legendary kingdoms of the Red River Plain to the founding of Dai Viet, which was the result of a thousand-year struggle against the Chinese that culminated in the restoration of Vietnamese sovereignty. Jennifer Holmgren's The Chinese Colonisation of Northern Vietnam uses Sinicization and Vietnamization as terms to refer to political and cultural change in different directions. Works following the national school of Vietnamese history retroactively assign Vietnamese group consciousness to past periods (Han-Tang era) based on evidence in later eras. The national school of Vietnamese history has remained practically unchanged since the 1980s and has become the national orthodoxy.^[14]

Anachronisms

The argument for an intrinsic, intractable, and distinctly Southeast Asian Vietnamese identity in the Red River Plain throughout history has been categorized by Catherine Churchman as context, cultural continuity, and resistance.^[15] Context refers to the downplaying of similarities between Vietnam and China while emphasizing Vietnam's Southeast Asian identity in the postcolonial period. Cultural continuity refers to an intrinsic Vietnamese "cultural core" that has always existed in the Red River Plain since time immemorial . Resistance refers to the national struggle of the Vietnamese people against foreign aggressors. Proponents of this historical narrative, such as Nguyen Khac Vien, characterize the history of Vietnam under Chinese rule as a "steadfast popular resistance marked by armed insurrections against foreign domination", while opponents such as Churchman note the lack of evidence, anachronisms, linguistic problems, adherence to Chinese political and cultural norms, and similarities as well as differences with other peoples under Chinese rule.^[16]

The Vietnamese national narrative has introduced anachronisms in order to prove a unified Vietnamese national consciousness. The word Viet/Yue is often used to refer to an ethnic group when it had various meanings throughout history. There was no terminology to describe a Chinese-Vietnamese dichotomy during the Han-Tang period nor was there a term to describe a cohesive group inhabiting the area between the Pearl River and the Red River.^[17] During the Tang period, the indigenous people of Annan or Jinghai Circuit were referred to as the Wild Man (Wild Barbarians), the Li, or the Annamese (Annan people).^[18][19] In addition, the national history tends to have a narrow view limited to modern national boundaries, leading to conclusions of exceptionalism. Although it is true that the political situation in the Red River Plain was less stable than in Guangzhou to the north, such circumstances were not restricted to the area. The Vietnamese national narrative retroactively assigns any local rebellions, the rise of local dynasties, and their local autonomy with the motive of seeking national independence.^[20] These early moves toward autonomy in the 10th century were fairly tame compared to the activities of people who cushioned them from more direct contact with Southern dynasties empires.^[21] Language has also been used as evidence for a distinct Vietnamese identity in the Han-Tang period. However, some research points to the formation of a Vietnamese language only afterward as the result of a creolization and language shift involving Middle Chinese.^[22]