"2,000 Years of Vietnam"
CHERNE, LEO
2,000 Years of Vietnam Reviewed by Leo Cherne Executive director, Research Institute of America The Smaller Dragon. By Joseph Buttinger. Praeger. 535 pp. $6.00. There are few readers for whom...
...On the basis of the most recent archeological research, Buttinger provides new answers to the complex question of the origin of the Vietnamese...
...On the evidence compiled in this new volume, it seems clear that the Vietnamese possessed their distinct characteristics more than 2,000 years ago and have preserved them despite a thousand years of Chinese domination...
...Buttinger has brought to this work the background of a man of action as well as of contemplation...
...Making use of recent publications, many hitherto secret official and private French documents, Buttinger provides an up-to-date account of the early French intervention in Vietnam and of the 19th-century conquest...
...They sketch the rise of the nationalist movement, the growth of Vietnamese Communism and the tragic events under French rule that led to the Indo-China War, America's reluctant support of an indefensible colonial regime, and the loss of North Vietnam to Communism...
...Since the Vietnamese gained their independence from China in the 10th century, they have defeated half a dozen major Chinese attempts to annex the rich rice bowls of the peninsula...
...Today, like Germany and Korea, Vietnam is divided by forces that cannot cease to fight each other until their peoples are reunited...
...This gives the American reader a unique survey and evaluation of the historical literature on Vietnam...
...the main narrative, however, is supplemented by approximately 500 notes, which contain vital additional information and many pertinent excerpts from older and now largely unavailable books...
...Starting from a little-explored period of early Vietnamese statehood in the third century b.c., Buttinger's narrative runs through more than two millenia up to the beginning of the 20th century, when the French, after a 40-year struggle to conquer and subdue the Vietnamese, were at last able to organize the systematic exploitation of their "richest colony...
...Until the publication of The Smaller Dragon, no book existed in English which could be in any way described as a history of Vietnam...
...To obtain their positions, the mandarins had to undergo competitive literary tests, after a training that can only be described as philosophical...
...Singling out but one aspect of Buttinger's tenacious re-examination of history, this reviewer was fascinated by his demonstration that the old idea of a government of philosophers has at least once been historical reality: Precolonial Vietnam was a state with a ruling class whose prestige and power rested neither on property nor on force but on education...
...Buttinger is as frank in his admiration for the heroism and self-sacrifice of the early missionaries as he is critical of their later role as advocates of French military intervention...
...He persuasively demonstrates that they do not belong to the "great family of the Chinese," as the Communist leaders of North Vietnam and many French scholars still maintain...
...No men of wealth, no holders of military positions, no leaders of ecclesiastic organizations threatened their monopoly of rule...
...Vietnam has been the main obstacle to Chinese expansion for more than one thousand years...
...No more than 300 clearly written pages cover the 2,000 years of Vietnamese history and give the general reader everything he needs to know about Vietnam's past...
...The Smaller Dragon is organized in a form that should make it useful for both laymen and scholars...
...The secret documents were released by the French Government after the fall of Dienbienphu...
...For thousands of years the people of Vietnam have played a decisive role in the struggle for Asia, occupying a crucial position between India and China...
...The Smaller Dragon also presents a comprehensive and impartial account of the role the missionaries have played in the history of Vietnam...
...Vietnam's history from 1900 to the present is treated separately in the form of a summary and chronology of all major events...
...The Smaller Dragon deals with ail the aspects of Vietnam's history that are relevant to the question of the country's political survival...
...As a leader of the Austrian underground movement against fascism, as the organizer of effective assistance to postwar displaced and escaping victims in Europe and Asia, and as a political scholar of distinction, he has brought to this history of Vietnam the additional capacity of explorer...
...Buttinger's unusual work will provide, for the first time in English, a fuller understanding of our Vietnamese friends and their rich and complex history...
...There are few readers for whom Joseph Buttinger's The Smaller Dragon will not open the door to the little known drama of an exotic, courageous, and strategic nation...
...Political power was exclusively in the hands of the mandarins, who were all intellectuals, and no intellectuals existed who were not directly or indirectly members of Vietnam's ruling class...
...Unlike their Chinese mentors, the Vietnamese mandarins had no competitors in the exercise of power...
...These concluding 50 pages are a richly documented and critical evaluation of French achievements and omissions...
...Vietnam's ruling class were its state officials, the mandarins...
Vol. 41 • May 1958 • No. 19
