THE VIETNAMESE MANDARIN

...After a century of such criticism, the word "mandarin" has now become a term of abuse...

...The Frenchmen who roamed Asia between 1820 and 1860 soon convinced themselves that this evil was greater in Vietnam than in China itself, where Confucianism was born and a literary training for public office had been required long before the Vietnamese could read and write...

...All children are convinced that to know means to be powerful, and so are all primitive people...

...Intellectual sterility," in brief, became the accepted explanation for the technological and economic backwardness of the Asian world...

...Thus it came about that the country's ruling class, after the seedbeds of feudal power were destroyed, became identical with the country's educated minority...

...Only the wicked would dare to object to a system of government under which the wisest and best of men were given the highest positions...

...In the offices of the Vietnamese state, new ideas by inventive and experimentally disposed individuals could only be an element of political disturbance, and no individual mandarin could advance himself by either learning or trying to do something new...

...asking the mandarins to promote a transformation of society was asking them to cooperate in the liquidation of their rule...

...The best of this class never abused their powers to add material comfort to the enjoyment of status...

...Ruling classes are not in the habit of abdicating, and even less are they disposed to question the moral and intellectual values on which their power rests...

...the incomparable prestige of the teacher and professor...

...It is taken from the book's fifth chapter, which gives a detailed analysis of Vietnamese Mandarin society as it existed before the conquest of Indochina by France...

...MINH MANG'S views on government, which had been part of mandarinaI ideology since the system had been in force, came close to answering the question of why a philosophical education was regarded as essential for all governmental tasks...

...Elsewhere the ambitious wanted to be rich...

...Our country has maintained itself in its present condition for a long time," they contentedly retorted, "and we hope that it will continue to maintain itself in the future...

...Vietnam was administered and ruled by its intellectuals, and no Vietnamese intellectuals existed who were not either members or associates of the country's ruling elite...

...But the thinkers from the West confused them forever with their complex reasoning about the peculiarities of the "Eastern mind...

...Their training, the mandarins felt, had always prepared them adequately for their functions, which for the vast majority were local and purely political, so that they saw no reason at all to acquire new knowledge in order to fulfill their changeless tasks...

...147...

...For a Vietnamese mandarin or even a mere "man of letters," it was indeed quite possible to combine the condition of a beggar with the standing and dignity of a king...

...BUT IF THE TRAINING of these men was functional, and if they succeeded in preventing an inner development that would have threatened their monopoly of rule, their minds could not have been as inferior as Western criticism of their immobility implied...

...It generated little impulse for social change...

...but even this is an insight of little value without an answer to the question of why Vietnamese society lacked the forces, and the mandarins themselves the motives, to break the mold of an antiquated mind...

...TtiE EDITORS There can be no doubt that the mandarins, whose authority derived from the acquisition of knowledge, were the country's only wielders of power, nor that as a class they were firmly opposed to technical progress and social change...

...emperor Vietnam has known, a king who based his own qualifications for government and his right to exercise absolute power not on royal 140 blood but on his role as moral philosopher and head of the nation's intellectual elite...

...For the mandarins, therefore, social immobility was a condition of survival, and one task of their clever minds was to invent reasons why this immobility was also a condition for the survival of Vietnam...

...Clearly, the "closed mind" of the mandarins was not just a deplorable result of the antiquated intellectual training...

...By exploiting the nationalist sentiments of a later time, some Vietnamese thinkers have actually succeeded in making these virtues more attractive to the intellectuals of their country than the mandarins themselves could have known them to be a century ago...

...What is the use of all these mental exertions, the men from the West would ask the mandarins, if the purpose of study was only to possess the knowledge of the past, if the learned would admit no previously unknown ideas, pursue no scientific investigations, strive for no new insights into nature, and decline to experiment and invent...

...In this duel of minds, which continued after Western arms had triumphed over Eastern philosophy, both sides had sharp eyes for their opponents' moral conceit and intellectual errors, but they had little understanding for each others' motives and none at all of the social forces behind their colliding actions...

...They were recruited from the whole people, and recruited in one manner only, to which every aspirant for office was compelled to submit: in order to become a mandarin, a young Vietnamese had to go through the required studies and pass the prescribed number of official tests...

...The bulk of the curriculum consisted of ancient Chinese philosophy, with history and poetry as mere handmaidens of Confucianism...

...Its undeniably positive expressions were numerous, such as the low esteem for force compared to knowledge...

...But their policy of isolation and their refusal to permit social change accelerated Vietnam's loss of independence, and with independence lost, the mandarins were doomed as Vietnam's ruling class...

...The West might destroy the prisons in which the mandarins held the bodies and minds of the Vietnamese people, but it would replace it with one stronger and more dreadful than all their prisons of the past...

...In order to have knowledge," Confucius had said, "one has to read about the past...

...One was the size of China, which created the need for an intercontinental system of communication, as well as the old and permanent Chinese interest in foreign trade...

...He was the truest mandarin...

...They saw that mandarinal mentality rejected the idea of change and progress, and they consequently connected the mandarins' intellectual habits with the state of stagnation in which they found Vietnam...

...But in China political power had never become a monopoly of the bureaucrats trained in Confucian scholastics...

...It was the right kind of mind for an antiquated society, the only permissible kind of mind if the mandarinal system should continue to exist, and a fully adequate mind for the functions of an elite within the social structure of Vietnam...

...Under the first Nguyen emperors, whose dogmatic Confucianism promoted a strictly mandarin-made scale of social values, the main feature of mandarinal ideology reached its most extreme form...

...Vietnam's alleged intellectual stagnation, social immobility, and suicidal policy of isolation from the West were directly ascribed to the conservative attitudes of the mandarins, and to a governmental system that gave them control of the state...

...But Vietnam did not have what it needed to break the rule of the mandarins and thus to revitalize its thinking and open its mind for the knowledge of the West: a class of people interested in the development of industry and trade...

...No instruction in any kind of technical skill was required for the official tests...

...It took the superior military forces of the West to unseat the Vietnamese mandarins, who were truly one of the world's most enduring political elites...

...The existing material conditions, these Westerners thought, would have made economic progress almost inevitable if the mandarins had not opposed all trade and economic innovation...

...Only the very brilliant were able to get to the summit as young men, after absorbing no less than all the knowledge that existed, or was recognized as existing under the prevailing Confucianist views...

...But this made as little impression on the men from the West as Western praise of science, industry, and trade made on the mandarins whenever white visitors argued with them on board their un145 welcome ships...

...The mandarins, apparently, were men who studied for their vocation as no government officials studied ever before them or after, but what they learned was hardly related to their specific tasks...

...When the pressure for change became serious, it unfortunately also became quite easy for the mandarins to show that change was a greater evil for Vietnam than the preservation of existing economic conditions...

...These tests, which were competitive and strictly impartiaI, made sure that only the fittest among all students received their diplomas as "men of letters," and that the best of these men, in terms of the established criteria, could obtain the highest official degrees...

...WHEN THE FRENCH reappeared in Vietnam in the first half of the nineteenth century, there occurred a clash between Western and mandarinal mentality, which preceded by more than thirty years the clash of arms that brought about the end of the mandarinal state...

...another was the changes produced in China's political structure by barbarian invasions, which as a rule led to the replacement of the established ruling groups...

...To know more than a mandarin was a challenge to his right to rule...

...what survived of the whole system gradually became a tool in the hands of Vietnam's new foreign masters...

...But the young man "most likely to succeed" was one with an unusual memory, great rhetorical skill, and a capacity for verbal analysis and abstraction...

...Thus, if it is true that Vietnam could have avoided the loss of her independence by changing and progressing, the mandarins must be held largely responsible for the failure of Vietnam to defend herself against the West...

...A deteriorated mind was the cause of Asia's much lamented refusal to progress along Western lines...

...The men from the West were not interested in the early achievements of the mandarins...

...From the time of Gia Long to the fall of Vietnam, the mandarins' intellects, keen and active as ever, fully upheld the Vietnamese status quo against a people as ready for new social activities and intellectual adventures as any in the West...

...To know them all, interpret them well, apply them faultlessly, and transmit them to the next generation of the learned were the signs of a well-trained and therefore superior mind...

...What they resented was the mandarins' opposition to Western ideas and proposals, and what they could not understand, and did not learn from the mandarins either, was why the system was able to survive in nineteenth-century Vietnam...

...Fear of the West thus became the strongest weapon of the mandarins in their struggle against the forces aspiring to social and political innovation...

...144 As to the causes of this obnoxious mandarinal mentality, however, there was general agreement that the Confucian training imported from China had ruined the Vietnamese mind...

...Many finished their careers, and even their lives as determined opponents of the colonial regime...

...Indeed, a closer examination of Vietnamese society during the first half of the nineteenth century reveals a surprising historical phenomenon: a state had come into being in which the ancient dream of a goverment by philosophers was literally fulfilled...

...IN REPLY TO SUCH PRESUMPTUOUS V1eWS about the causes of Asian stagnation, the mandarins were quick to point out what the East had achieved before the year 1000 A.D., when the West, in relation to China, was technologically backward and intellectually in a state of inaction...

...The basic vice of this training was correctly diagnosed...

...Knowledge indeed had a social value in Vietnam for which it would be hard to find a parallel in the history of civilization...

...Vietnam had indeed survived every threat to its existence and grown bigger and stronger during the many centuries of mandarinal rule...

...Although some aspects of Vietnamese life became quite plausible through this approach, as they would in every effort to show the correlation of mind and society, this Western theory has also done a great deal to obscure the realities of social and intellectual life in nineteenthcentury Vietnam...

...The mandarins obviously were not an economically anchored ruling class, or even a firmly closed group of Vietnamese society, but rather a group of changeable composition with all the main features of a so-called elite...

...It was easier for a mandarin to extract a favor from a man of wealth than for the wealthy to make a mandarin bow to his wishes...

...the honors bestowed by the state upon the great thinkers of the nation...

...to introduce and spread the knowledge of the West was therefore no less than an attack upon the foundations of Vietnam's Confucian society...

...They succeeded even in the nineteenth century...

...To give them such authority was the purpose of their endless studies and difficult tests...

...For the Westerners of adventurous disposition who traveled or traded in Asia during the first half of the nineteenth century, the attitude of the Vietnamese mandarins was senseless enough to make them believe there was something basically wrong with the "Eastern mind...

...But before a Vietnamese youth could compete for the highest honors, the years of study and the passing of preliminary examinations might well have made him a middle-aged or elderly man...

...Nor is it an exclusively Asian concept, as was the mandarinate itself, but rather a basic and universally recognized human insight...

...This made the mandarins' seemingly quite irrelevant intellectual training as practical a preparation for the exercise of power as ever was designed...

...knowledge, at least in principle, also determined official degree, which was the measure of status in Vietnamese society...

...They sensed evil in a spirit that would not stay at rest...

...The mandarinal system of government, its modern defenders proclaimed, allowed for a maximum of democracy in a precapitalist civilization and was free of the universal evils that go with all class and caste rule...

...the pride and joy of families and villages if one of their own passed a difficult test...

...The old order consequently continued to exist, and within this order the mandarins and their training were as sufficient for the tasks of government as was the water buffalo as working animal and power supply within the economy of Vietnam...

...The secret of its adequacy and durability was Vietnam's primitive economy...

...The contrast 141 between the misery of the masses and the luxury of the few was less odious than in other civilizations, and the difference in status between the wealthy and the poor was smaller than that between the plain citizen and the official...

...To be the emperor's prolonged arm on the lower levels of administration, and to exercise local political power in the name of the state, did not depend on special knowledge or a training in particular skills...

...The mandarins were not a closed and self-perpetuating group, or selected only from one level of the people, as are most ruling classes in other civilized societies...

...The possession of knowledge became thus inseparably connected with the right to exercise authority, and intellectual capacity became the only sure basis for a man's claim to an office of the state...

...The concept of power as a derivative of knowledge, however, was not as exclusively mandarinal as it appeared in these extreme manifestations during the final phase of Vietnam's Confucianist regime...

...Besides, public office led as safely to the modest material welfare that was customary for the upper classes as did the pursuit of wealth through economic activity...

...For this reason, and because the fateful and still ongoing clash between East and West is here shown in a new light, we reprint these pages, with the kind permission of the author and of the publisher, Frederick A. Praeger...

...There were the neglected mines, the forests waiting to be exploited...

...To the frustrated French promoters of trade and progress, the damage caused by the mandarins' alleged intellectual sterility therefore appeared infinitely greater in Vietnam than in the country where the mandarinal system was invented...

...Some people in Vietnam were deeply disturbed by these questions, but to the mass of mandarins they made very little sense...

...143 The men from the West, whom the explosive forces of early in dustrialism had propelled to the shores of Asia, encountered this man darinal immobility primarily as an obstacle to their commercial and political projects...

...When the blows of the imperialist aggressor began to fall on the country, the mandarins as a class were still in undisputed control of Vietnam...

...They have to be overthrown by force or replaced in a long process of gradual social transformation...

...It was "stagnant" and "petrified," said many of the learned visitors from Europe, and mortally afraid of any kind of innovation or change...

...The country, it was generally thought, did not participate in the world's technical and economic progress because the mandarins had imposed their own intellectual immobility upon the social body of Vietnam...

...It was more than a systematic ideological indoctrination...

...To say that the mandarins' intellectual formation contributed to Vietnam's state of social immobility is no doubt correct...

...and the high status of the scholars, or "men of letters," even if they preferred a life of study and teaching to the advantages of a mandarinal career...

...The mind, which most thinkers in the West had come to regard as the motor of all historical progress, could apparently also become inert and unproductive...

...There were spices and exotic fruits, and no doubt also other treasures of nature not yet discovered that could be extracted by Vietnamese labor, which was cheap, willing, and abundant...

...The centers of population lay close to the ocean and could be quickly reached by river from the many harbors along the coast...

...The subjects to be mastered were exclusively literary, and the skills to be acquired purely rhetorical and scholastic...

...The reasons for this difference between China and Vietnam were many...

...Ix THIS CLOSE association of knowledge and power, the prestige of learning was always greater than that of mere force...

...they were as meaningful for the mandarins under Tu Duc in the 1860's as they had been to their predecessors in the 1460's under the Emperor Le Thanh Tong...

...The selection of the country's officials, in short, was based on a democratic principle long before anyone in the West could ever dream of such governmental progress...

...Western observers in particular, ever since they began to study Vietnam's strictly mandarinal system of government, have concentrated on discovering and exposing its flaws...

...Mandarinal rule in China, consequently, never reached the classical perfection that distinguished the system under the Nguyen dynasty in nineteenth-century Vietnam...

...When the conquest of Vietnam was completed, the mandarins were faced with a bitter choice...

...If the mind could somehow become an obstacle to all progress, a government of philosophers was manifestly more pernicious than one dominated by men with economic interests, and perhaps even worse than the rule of naked force...

...And the learned alone, Confucius had established, traveled the roads of wisdom, which were also the roads that led to the moral perfection of man...

...The mandarins have indeed been blamed by their critics for almost everything that went wrong in nineteenth-century Vietnam...

...The mandarins' particular intellectual training, which was responsible for their habits of mind, was diagnosed as the whole system's basic fault...

...This, the philosophers of European industrialism and colonial expansion concluded, is what had happened to the "Eastern mind...

...And the mandarins would not have opposed the Christian religion with such acrimony if the concept of God introduced by 142 the West had not undermined their authority as custodians of all knowledge...

...What the mandarins needed was not technical proficiency for complicated governmental functions but a claim to authority that no one would dare to attack...

...It was above all a profound and immensely successful system of justification of governmental authority, erected upon the only universal and indestructible foundation for any man's claim to be obeyed by other men: intellectual and moral superiority, demonstrated in impartial tests that only a man who was thoroughly learned could pass...

...To acquire knowledge, after all, was the only generally accessible gateway to power...

...Originality and creativeness were obviously no advantage for a mandarinal career...

...Even before they realized how profoundly Western ideas and inventions would affect the society they ruled, considered to be perfect, and wanted to maintain, the mandarins had had only contempt for an educated Vietnamese who desired his country to imitate the West's unnatural craving for innovation...

...This view, which as a weapon of anticolonial propaganda became quite popular among Vietnamese nationalists, does not agree too well with the evidence of history produced by modern research...

...And even as a beggar among beggars, the mandarin was still the beggars' king...

...Learning thus became memorizing the old and venerable Confucian books...

...The prevailing philosophical ideas and moral maxims about family and state were indispensable for the maintenance of the existing order...

...On the contrary, it is doubt146 ful whether any ruling class has ever been more successful than the Vietnamese mandarins in justifying the present by praising the past, and holding off economic and social developments detrimental to their monopoly of political power...

...If the traders from France had been free from all ideological indoctrination, they would no doubt have discovered the right answer to the question of why the Vietnamese mandarinal system continued to exist...

...Minh Mang himself, the most scholarly of the Nguyen emperors, expounded these views in his remarkable political and poetic writings...

...the training of the mandarins was philosophical in the fullest sense of the word...

...The office of mandarin was neither hereditary nor for sale, and since education was always free in Vietnam, the mandarinate was equally accessible to the poor and the rich...

...THE MANDARINS' character as a governing elite was emphasized both by the nature of the training they received and by the tests they had to undergo...

...in Vietnam they preferred to become officials...

...Besides, the power of appointment was always reserved to the emperor, and the emperor was never obliged to appoint a man merely because he had passed his tests...

...How easy it would be, the traders and political ad venturers exclaimed, to initiate the economic activities necessary for a transformation of this country into a haven of profitable business...

...This alone could explain why intellectual achievement became the yardstick of individual greatness and posthumous fame...

...The weak forces aspiring after change were easily suppressed by the mandarins, whose position was founded in the social immobility of Vietnam...

...The curriculum for the training of a Vietnamese mandarin therefore remained always up to date, but after centuries of mere verbal exercise, the minds of the mandarins certainly did not crave novelty and adventure...

...But there were other reasons...

...Only one kind of training could properly qualify these men for their governmental functions, and that was the Confucianist indoctrination a mandarin had to receive before he was able to pass his tests...

...In a manner quite typical for the mandarins' own intellectual predisposition, Vietnam's economic backwardness and political inflexibility in the face of colonial aggression were explained by the intellectual matter that fed, and the educational methods that formed, the mandarins' 138 minds...

...A spirited independence of thinking or an everlasting curiosity of mind were not praised as virtues but condemned as vices...

...The pressure for change came from the West, and to give in to the West, most Vietnamese knew, meant to become a victim of the West...

...But neither social injustice nor temporary abuse, such as the sale of offices at some times under the Trinh, could quite nullify the principle of access to the mandarinate for all...

...Moreover, no supreme being was ever conceived by human minds as omnipotent without also being conceived as omniscient...

...For a discussion of the book, see Page 189...

...There were no special courses in administration...

...No other road to public office existed in Vietnam, and no dispensations from the labor of study and the trials of examination were granted either to the wealthy and noble or to a mandarin's own sons...

...Here, for once, knowledge was power in a literal sense...

...Rich traders and mighty landlords often became the centers of local political independence, and there was seldom a time when China was without men of great military power whom the civilian mandarins were in no position to subdue...

...They were certainly closed against most ideas from the West, but from their own point of view they closed their minds to these ideas for very good reasons, and in their praise and defense of the existing order they were far from "immobile," "sterile," or "inert...

...The mass of mandarins, however, was a plague to the people such as only a bureaucracy with too much power and not enough pay could ever become...

...It stresses only one element in a complex pattern of causes, and uses as an explanation what needs to be explained...

...A great mind might at best think up some new reason why individual and social perfection depended on the wisdom of the past...

...A mind apparently could be as closed as an oyster, and as content to be sterile as a well-fed mule...

...But how was it possible for people with such minds to remain in power...

...In this they succeeded, in spite of the pressures and temptations to which they themselves and their country had been exposed in more than three hundred years of contact with the West...

...The country's restricted economic activity kept the number of wealthy and the size of their fortunes unusually small...

...The moral authority of these people was great, and it has transmitted a puritanical streak to their political grandsons of the twentieth century that is as noticeable in the Communist Ho Chi Minh as it is in the Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem...

...THE RULE OF THE MANDARINS could hardly have lasted for so many centuries if the system had not been adapted to the social structure of the country, and if it had not also had some virtues to recommend it to so many generations of the educated Vietnamese...

...The main function of such a mind was not to invent or produce, but rather to absorb the accumulated knowledge, which was regarded as sufficient and impossible to improve upon...

...The functions of government in Vietnam's pre-industrial and pre-mercantile society were still too simple to require the kind of abilities that only a technical training could provide...

...It consequently found also its apologists, who would not allow these virtues to remain forever obscured by the views of Western critics, which were at least in part due to a desire to destroy mandarinal Vietnam...

...These pages reveal—to our knowledge for the first time—a curious and probably unique feature in the development of society, to which we would like to draw the attention of our readers...

...The realities of Vietnamese social life, as less romantically inclined Vietnamese 139 thinkers have pointed out, gave to the rich and the poor no equality of chances to become officials, and the sons of mandarins enjoyed advantages that even the law acknowledged in various forms...

...From this premise the philosophers of Western expansion in Asia derived a melancholy insight into the relationship of society and mind...

...These were essentially political, and in the field of politics, teaching was never of tangible use...

...The following is an excerpt from Joseph Buttinger's newly published work, The Smaller Dragon, a political History of Vietnam...

...No Western system of intellectual training could have produced mandarins eager to promote a transformation of Vietnamese society...

...The aim of all studies was to absorb the accumulated wisdom of the past, in order to achieve the moral perfection that qualified a man to rule...

...It stemmed from the notion that knowledge was an existing quantity of established historical facts and philosophical truths...

...This was the reason why the mandarins held their old knowledge in higher esteem than all the scientific ideas and technical skills developed in the West...

...If the missionaries, in presenting their own supreme being to the Vietnamese people, had not been able to present God as the highest, the wisest, and therefore also the most powerful of all mandarins, they would not have converted so large a number of their listeners to the Christian faith...