RUTINAS Y ACONTECIMIENTOS EN LAS PLAZAS DE LA CIUDAD
EL MERCADO Y DEMÁS ACTIVIDADES COMERCIALES
In a Conference of debate on literature and art held in Việt Bắc in September 1949, on behalf of the cadre who was in charge of arts business, Tố Hữu raised seven crucial and urgent tasks for Vietnamese writers and artists. The first six tasks were far from new: they aimed at mobilizing the energies and strengths of the nation, glorifying the victories of the anti-French resistance, laying bare the enemy’s schemes, and similar aims. They were what the Vietnamese Communist Party had already been called upon to do since its establishment in 1930. Only the seventh task, which was reported in the Văn Nghệ magazine nos. 17 and 18, published in November and December 1949, was remarkable: “to prepare to make contact with literary and artistic movements from the new democratic nations, especially China.”1 Twenty-four years
later, when this article was reprinted in the book entitled Xây dựng một nền văn nghệ lớn xứng đáng với nhân dân ta, với thời đại ta (Building a Great Literature and Art which are Deserved to our People and our Age) in 1973, the last phrase, “especially China”, was cut out.2
The disappearance of the phrase “especially China” reveals two things: first, the relationship between Vietnam and China in the 1970s was no longer as warm as before; and second, there was an attempt by the Vietnamese government to wipe out all vestiges of influence from China. This attempt became public in 1979 when the Vietnam - China war broke out. In Cách mạng kháng chiến và đời sống văn nghệ
1Văn Nghệ magazine, nos. 17 and 18 (November and December 1949), p. 6.
2 Tố Hữu (1973), Xây dựng một nền văn nghệ lớn xứng đáng với nhân dân ta, với thời đại ta (Building a
Great Literature and Art which are Deserved to our People and our Age), Hanoi: Văn Học, p. 57.
(Revolution, Resistance and Arts Life), Hà Xuân Trường, who headed the Party Committee responsible for art and literature, stated that although Mao Zedong’s writings, including the Talks at the Yan’an Forum, had been imported into Vietnam, their impact was not very deep or long-lasting.3
Maoist Influence
Historical accounts demonstrate that Hà Xuân Trường’s statement is not true. From 1949 onwards, particularly after Hồ Chí Minh’s trip to China in early 1950, as several historians have already remarked, “a crash campaign was launched to study the Chinese revolutionary experience, and 200,000 copies of some forty-three Communist Party books and articles were translated and printed.”4 In his Following Hồ Chí Minh, the Memoirs of a North Vietnamese Colonel, Bùi Tín reminisces:
The situation started to change towards the end of 1950 after we forced the French to abandon their garrisons along the northern border, and the Resistance of the Vietnamese people was able to link up with the People’s Republic of China which was founded in October 1949. The ever-increasing amount of military and civilian aid from China enabled the Viet Minh to strengthen its position. But it became more complex and tension grew. Many people left the Resistance and returned to the French-occupied zone as large numbers of Chinese advisers arrived and were attached to every unit at all levels. The friendly, even cosy atmosphere which had previously existed disappeared with talk of orthodox class warfare. Marxism had come to Vietnam via Maoism.
[…]
The wind from the north first engulfed the Viet Bac region and then all the other liberated zones. Chinese books, films, and songs were everywhere and all of us in the Resistance regarded them as first-class works. […] At the same time, a
3 Phong Lê and Lưu Khánh Thơ (eds.) (1995), Cách mạng kháng chiến và đời sống văn học, 1945-54,
Hanoi: Nxb Khoa Học Xã Hội, p. 213.
4 Zachary Abuza (2001), Renovating Politics in Contemporary Vietnam, Boulder: Lynne Rienner
campaign got under way to encourage the reading and speaking of Chinese while a constant stream of cadres was sent north to study in Peking, Shanghai, Nanking, Nanning and Canton. For instance, Peking University threw open its doors to hundreds of Vietnamese students. China was the immense rear area for the Vietnamese Revolution. It was a tremendous advantage but we had to pay very dearly for it. Having just escaped from the long night of being slaves to the French, we were dazzled by the new light of the Chinese Revolution which was acclaimed as our role-model. We accepted everything impetuously and haphazardly without any thought, let alone criticism.5
According to Kim N. B. Ninh, “[n]owhere was Chinese influence more evident than in the use of the rectification technique.”6 This technique was introduced into the
educational system as early as 1950, and into the literary circle in the winter of 1951. Tô Hoài’s recollection of his first rectification session provides some details:
Waking up in the middle of the night, in the middle of the jungle hundreds of torches were lit, slogan bands of black cloth with white words glittering: Disclose weakness… Measure loyalty… Gut-wrenching cold weather. Ink-dark jungle night. Filthy human beings, full of sins. Not enough. Not enough sincerity. Do it over. Do it over again. Each time doing it over, uneasiness and worry mounted. The wait to be cleared by the group remained long. Confessing to being degenerate [e.g., sleeping with someone to whom one is not married] was easiest, even if it were not true. Pounded the chest to say yes.7
After the Geneva Agreements, China’s influence in North Vietnam was even growing. More and more books were imported into Vietnam, many of them were translated into Vietnamese. Most of the Vietnamese who were sent abroad for education went to China.8 More importantly, Maoist influence can be seen in the
5 Bui Tin (1995), Following Hồ Chí Minh, Memoirs of a North Vietnamese Colonel, translated from the
Vietnamese by Judy Stowe and Do Van, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 14-5.
6 Kim N.B. Ninh (2002), A World Transformed, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, p. 112. 7 Quoted in Kim N.B. Ninh (2002), ibid., p. 113.
8 Ilya V. Gaiduk (2003), Confronting Vietnam, Soviet Policy toward the Indochina Conflict, 1954-1963,
thoughts of the top leaders of the Vietnamese Communist Party. The three principles, nationalization, popularization and scientific orientation, prescribed by the Theses of Culture9 drafted by Trường Chinh and cleared by Hồ Chí Minh,10 were clearly replicas
of Mao Zedong’s thoughts on China’s new democratic culture which would be “a national, scientific and mass culture.”11 In 1947, Trường Chinh published a book entitled Kháng chiến nhất định thắng lợi (The Resistance Will Win), which not only set forth a three-stage evolution of the war but, as Vietnamese critics eulogize, also became one of the basic documents of literary and cultural theory in the French War period.12 However, according to Melvin Gurtov, this book was Maoist “to the point of being plagiarized.”13 Hồ Chí Minh was also an admirer of Mao Zedong. In the second Congress of the Vietnamese Communist Party held in February 1951, Hồ Chí Minh announced that the Vietnamese Communist Party rested ultimately upon the foundations of Marxism-Leninism and it took Mao Zedong’s thoughts as its lodestar. At that moment, one of the representatives from the South, Mr. Nguyễn Văn Trấn, suggested: “Why don’t we write: Mao Zedong’s and Hồ Chí Minh’s thoughts?” but Hồ
Chí Minh refused: “No, I don’t have any thoughts but Marxism-Leninism.”14 Also at that Congress, Hồ Chí Minh declared: “Anyone can make mistakes with the exception of Comrade Stalin and Comrade Mao Zedong.”15 At another time, when being asked
why he did not write anything about the theory of communism, Hồ Chí Minh answered
9 The text of this work was reprinted in Nguyễn Phúc et al. (eds.) (1985), Một chặng đường văn hoá (Hồi ức và tư liệu về việc tiếp nhận Ðề cương văn hoá (1943) của Ðảng), Hanoi: Nxb Tác Phẩm Mới, pp. 15-20.
10 David G. Marr (1981), Vietnamese tradition on Trial 1920-1945, Berkeley: University of California
Press, p. 363.
11 Mao Zedong (1967), On New Democracy, Peking: Foreign Languages Press, p. 60.
12 Viện Văn Học (1986), Văn học Việt Nam kháng chiến chống Pháp, Hanoi: Nxb Khoa Học Xã Hội, p.
42.
13 Melvin Gurtov (1967), The First Indochina War: Chinese Communist Strategy and the United States,
New York: Columbia University Press, p. 16.
14 Nguyễn Văn Trấn (1995), Viết cho Mẹ và Quốc Hội, California: Văn Nghệ, pp. 150-152.
15 Olivier Todd, “Huyền thoại Hồ Chí Minh”, (translated from the French by Nguyễn Văn), in Hồ Chí Minh, Sự Thật về Thân Thế và Sự Nghiệp, published by Nam Á, 1990, p. 276.
sincerely that he did not need to write because everything had already been written by Mao Zedong.16
Hồ Chí Minh’s admiration for and allegiance to Mao Zedong was quite understandable. Recently, several scholars, eager to see Vietnam on “its own terms”, have demonstrated that, socially, Chinese influence over the centuries was deeper among the literati than among the peasantry; geographically it tended to wane with distance from the Red River delta; and chronologically it was particularly strong only during certain periods, the fifteenth, late seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.17 However, no one can deny the Chinese influence on Vietnam, a country dominated by China for over one thousand years, from 111 B.C. to 938 A.D. When Vietnam overthrew Chinese rule and restored her independence, the cultural influence of China continued, particularly at the official level, where the rulers of the new Vietnamese state looked at Chinese ideology and administrative organization as their models.18 It may be said that politically, militarily and culturally, China was for Vietnam both an aggressor and a teacher. Vietnamese learned from China's administration, education, philosophy, literature, the arts and even written language, while at the same time, continuously struggled against all of China’s schemes of assimilation in attempting to protect her national identity and cultural uniqueness.
From the mid-nineteenth century, when Vietnam was invaded and dominated by France, Vietnamese Confucians sought intellectual guidance from the leaders of the Chinese reform movement such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, whose writings were regarded as a source of ideas about Western civilization which, in the Vietnamese scholars' view, would be useful in the process of Vietnam's modernization.19 In 1902,
when Phan Bội Châu (1867-1940), one of the most prominent leaders of the early
16 Ibid., p. 277.
17 Victor Lieberman (2003), Strange Parallels, Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800-1830, vol. 1:
Integration on the Mainland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 340.
18 King C. Chen (1969), Vietnam and China, 1938-1954, Princeton (N.Y.): Princeton University Press. 19 See David G. Marr (1971), Vietnamese Anticolonialism 1885-1925, Berkeley: University of California
twentieth century Vietnam, went to China, there began a new revolutionary period when China became an important base for the Vietnamese nationalist movement. Several Vietnamese revolutionary organizations were established in China such as the League for the Restoration of Vietnam (Việt Nam Phục Quốc Đồng Minh Hội) in 1912 and the Heart to Heart Association (Tâm Tâm Xã) in 1923, among others.20
From 1924, when Hồ Chí Minh, under the alias Lý Thuỵ, went to Canton from Moscow as a Chinese translator at the Soviet consulate, China became a place where Hồ Chí Minh gathered and trained revolutionary cadres with whom he founded the Indo-Chinese Communist Party in 1930.21 Being educated in China, those people who later became the major leaders of the Vietnamese communist revolution were strongly influenced by their Chinese comrades. Following the Chinese model, Vietnamese communists led the hungry peasants to revolt and to set up the Nghệ An Soviet, which was suppressed immediately by the French army.22 It should be noted that “Trường Chinh”, the pseudonym of Ðặng Xuân Khu, who served as Secretary General of the Vietnamese Communist Party from 1941 to 1956, literally means “Long March”; he borrowed from the name of a well-known military campaign led by Mao Zedong in 1934 and 1935. According to Tô Hoài, Trường Chinh told him and some other writers that in the early 1930s he had learned the vernacular Chinese from Hoàng Văn Thụ and could read Mao Zedong’s writings on the “new culture” in the original Chinese.23 However, before 1949, in order to win over the Western countries, including the United States of America, and to unite the whole country to resist the French invasion, the Vietnamese communists had to adopt the camouflage of a nationalist movement.24
20 Ibid.
21 For further details, see Ellen J. Hammer (1955), The Struggle for Indochina 1940-1955, Stanford:
Stanford University Press, pp. 79-82; Ken Post (1989), Revolution, Socialism and Nationalism in Vietnam, vol. 1, Hants (England): Dartmouth, pp. 21-79; William J. Duiker (1996), The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam, second edition, Boulder: Westview Press, pp. 17-8.
22 Stein Tonnesson (1991), The Vietnamese Revolution of 1945, London: Sage Publications, pp. 100-1;
and William J. Duiker (1996), op. cit., pp. 33-45.
23 Tô Hoài (1997), Hồi ký, Hanoi: Nxb Hội Nhà Văn, p. 373.
They pretended to transform the Communist Party into the Marxist Studies Association and to hide their close relationship with the Chinese communists.25 This may be one of the real reasons why in The Marxism and Vietnamese Culture (1948), Trường Chinh did not refer to Mao Zedong’s talks on literature and art at Yan’an although he made many of the same points as did the Chinese communist leader.
Maoism began to be imported massively into Vietnam in late 1949, when Mao Zedong took power in China. His Talks on Literature and Art at Yan’an Forum was translated into Vietnamese and published in Vietnam in 1949. This book was reprinted in the same year.26 Furthermore, it was used as a textbook in several political workshops and classes organized by the Vietnamese Communists. In a memoir published in Cách mạng kháng chiến và đời sống văn nghệ, Nguyễn Thành Long wrote: “I read the Talks on Literature and Art at Yan’an Forum and I still remember a sentence which left a long-lasting impression on me: ‘Intellectuals are shits’. We had to believe that and we had to deny ourselves.”27
Apart from Mao Zedong’s Talks on Literature and Art at Yan’an Forum, many works of Chou Yang, the powerful cultural chief of the Chinese Communist Party, were also translated and widely quoted on all cultural matters. These works include:
Văn nghệ nhân dân mới (The People’s New Literature and Art) in 1950; Phấn đấu để sáng tạo những tác phẩm văn học nghệ thuật càng nhiều càng hay hơn (Strive to Create More and Better Works of Literature and Art) in 1951; and in Kim N. B. Ninh’s account: “In 1952, his recent speech to the Institute of Literary Research in Beijing, which elaborated Mao Zedong’s directives on art and literature, was translated and
Oxford University Press, p. 29.
25 Ellen J. Hammer (1955), op. cit., p. 141.
26 Vương Trí Nhàn, “Những vốn quý không nên để phí phạm”, Tạp chí Văn Học (Hanoi), no. 1 (1997),
p. 64.
given a prominent position in two issues of the journal Văn Nghệ, the organ of the Vietnamese creative community.”28
It can be said that Vietnamese literature in the period between 1949 and 1954 was mainly shaped by Mao Zedong’s Talks on Literature and Art at Yan’an Forum.
The Yan’an Forum on art and literature in May 1942 was widely regarded as “a landmark in the history of Chinese Communist cultural policy,”29 where Mao Zedong made two significant speeches. In the “Opening Remarks”, he emphasized the basic tenets of socialist realism: in the struggle against Japanese aggressors and Chinese nationalists, there were various fronts, among them the military and cultural fronts. In the latter, literature took an important part. What Mao Zedong wanted was to ensure that literature fitted well into the whole political machine of the Communist Party. In so doing, he set out several issues for discussion: the problems of the class stand of the writers, their attitudes, their audience, their work and their study. To these issues, Mao Zedong’s points of view were very firm and clear. The stand of writers had to be that of the proletariat and of the masses, and for those writers who were members of the Communist Party, “this means keeping to the stand of the Party, keeping to Party spirit and Party policy”.30 It seems that Mao Zedong regarded this view as a truth too obvious to need further explanation or analysis. Using this class stand as a dogma, he formulated the communist writers’ attitude towards different kinds of persons: with regard to the enemy, the writers’ tasks were to expose their duplicity and cruelty, and at the same time to point out the inevitability of their defeat; with regard to the allies, the writers’ tasks were to support their resistance against the common enemy, to criticize their impassiveness, and to oppose their reaction; with regard to the people, the writers’ tasks were to depict and praise their labour and the struggle to help them to make progress, and more importantly, as Mao Zedong insisted, “[a]s long as they do
28 Kim N.B. Ninh (2002), op. cit., p. 112.
29 Cyril Birch, “The Particle of Art” in Cyril Birch (ed.) (1963), Chinese Communist Literature, New
York: Frederick A. Praeger, pp. 21-2.
30Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Zedong, published by the Foreign Languages Press in
not persist in their errors, we should not dwell on their negative side and consequently make the mistake of ridiculing them or, worse still, of being hostile to them.”31
The original theory of socialist realism, which was formulated in the Soviet Union in 1934, consisted of three basic ingredients: popular-mindedness, class- mindedness, and party-mindedness. Of these, it is clear that party-mindedness is the most important. In the article “Party Organization and Party Literature”, published nearly three decades prior to the promulgation of socialist realism as a literary theory, Lenin stated that “literature must become part of the common cause of the proletariat, ‘a cog and screw’ of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism set in motion by