From: nguyenxuan@uiuc.edu
Subject: Re: POL/HIS Some books: Hoang Van Chi
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Date: 20 Dec 92 17:07:52 GMT




>Date:         Wed, 16 Dec 1992 13:51:00 EST
>From:         EEMOISE@CLEMSON.BITNET
>Subject: Re: POL/HIS Some books: Hoang Van Chi
...
>Dear Hie^?n
>
>     I have read "From Colonialism to Communism" and found it most
>unreliable.  The mistranslations from "Nhan Dan" are the most
>famous errors in this book; see pages 210 and 225 of the American
>edition of the book, where among other things Chi uses the word
>"executed" in English translations of passages that had not, in
>the original Vietnamese, mentioned executions (the page numbers
>would be different in the edition published in India).  Among the
>other striking errors is the claim on page 163 that the land reform
>was temporarily halted in late 1954 and early 1955, a period when
>in fact the program was not halted but accelerated.  In general,
>I would place no faith in this book.
>
>     Could you please provide more details on the publications
>that Tra^\n Tha'i Linh has sourced?
>
>Edwin E. Moise
>History Department
>Clemson University
>EEMOISE@CLEMSON.BITNET


Dear Professor Moise:


I would like to express my apreciation for your generous comments on a
large number of publications about the Vietnam war.  However, I beg to
to differ in a few points.


I have no Vietnamese versions of the "Nha^n Da^n" articles to verify how
inaccurate Mr. Chi was in translating them. He did not quite specify the
same period of temporary interruption of land reform as you claim he wrote
in his book. ["...The second campaign was interrupted in 1955 owing to the
mass exodus of nearly a million people from North to South Vietnam...
The communists temporarily halted the terror in order to avoid an
even larger exodus..." (p. 163)]


However, I believe Mr. Chi did make errors in writing "From
Colonialism to Communism".  An example is in pages 95-96 in
which he described the account of the death of Dr. DDa<.ng Va<n
Hu*o*'ng in the Land Reform program despite the fact that Dr. Hu*o*'ng
himself was a minister in the Ho Chi Minh government and his son was
the famed Colonel DDa<.ng Va<n Vie^.t, who defeated the French in
the Cao-Ba<'c-La.ng battle in '50.  Chi wrote that it happened in Dr.
Hu*o*'ng's native village and "it must have been a severe shock
to him to find himself denounced and beaten as a reactionary, while
his colleagues in the central government did nothing to intervene.
Both he and his wife committed suicide after that incident."


Actually only his wife committed suicide.  Hu*o*'ng was put in starvation
and died one day after being released from prison.  No common peasants
for no reason dared to torture their own high level government official and
father of their much praised "Tiger of the Colonial Route No 4" who commanded
the troops that gave France what B. Fall called its greatest colonial
defeat since the fall of Quebec to the British in 1759.
It was in fact carried out through an order issued by Ho Chi Minh himself
because Ho suspected Dr. Hu*o*'ng being a spy after receiving the
news that Dr. Phan Huy Qua't, one of Hu*o*'ng's sons-in-law, became the
Minister of Defense in the Bao Dai government.  [Dr. DDa<.ng Ta^m-
Hu*o*'ng's daughter- said that she later met in Geneva the communist agent
who conveyed Ho's order to local party members, and had him confirm this story.
Col. Vie^.t was forced out of the Vietnam People's Army after 1954 and has
lived in obscure and in poverty since then.  Recently he has been somewhat
rehabilitated and allowed to publish his memoirs on the war.]


Mr. Chi was not a communist.  But he held several important positions
in the Ho government and knew many inside stories among the Party's high
level officials.  For example, as a brother-in-law of Nguye^~n So*n's wife,
Chi gave a  rather informative description of this general who was made
a hero in the Chinese Communists' Long March and received much admiration
in the war against the French from his subordinates in the interzone IV [for
example, see the famous songwriter Pha.m Duy's recent memoirs.] Chi's FCTC
contains vivid personal accounts that the author himself witnessed or told
by those who experienced through.  I consider part IV of the book very
helpful in studying the communists' techniques in "thought struggle."
Sure, there are shortcommings in this part of FCTC, too.  And the
same thing can be concluded on  his Vietnamese work "Tra<m Hoa DDua
No*? Tre^n DDa^'t Ba<'c," which was about the intellectuals' rebellion
against Ho's regime during the so-called Nha^n Va<n & Giai Pha^?m movement.
But one can still gain a good knowledge of what really happened in
North Vietnam right after the Geneva Accord by carefully reading Chi's works,
and by comparing it with accounts from the many who suffered in that
period and with works published in Hanoi, especially the recent ones-
around 1987-1989 when some degree of freedom in the press was given-
have revealed clearly the terror committed by the communists.


Discarding Chi's FCTC for its errors without considering its helpful
information is a pretty harsh judgment- in my point of view.  Should we
discard all publications from North Vietnam because as one of the North
Vietnamese writers, Ms Duong Thu Huong, recently commented: they are allowed
to carry only half the truth?  How about works by French and American authors?
To clarify the matter further, let's consider Karnow's "Vietnam: A History",
which you have nothing to say but praising "quite good".  I'd like to
have a quick look on chapter 2 - which I wish to choose  since it deals
with Vietnam's much known past history, thus avoiding any dispute on
purely political subjects which may be difficult to be judged.


P. 47: "Francis Garnier, a heroic French officer, led an attack against the
Citadel in Hue'.  He was killed..."
 Should be corrected as the Citadel in Hanoi.


P. 48: Karnow's note under the sketch of "the City of Cha-Cho" was: "An
eighteenth-century European view of Tonkin, the northern area of Vietnam."
That's untrue.  The picture was drawn by a Vietnamese artist in the 17th-
century.  It was about the city of Ke? Cho*. [the common name of the
present Hanoi- and was collected by a Vietnamese-Dutch author, Mr. Samuel
Baron.  Samuel Baron's "A Description of the Kingdom of Tonqueen" was
written around 1683 and published in Churchill's "A Collection of Voyages
and Travels" (1732).  All European "factories" ceased to exist in North
Vietnam in the 18th-centuries, however their presence was clearly noted
in that sketch.


P. 49: Karnow's note on Alexandre de Rhodes: "An accomplished linguist,
he devised a system, still in use today, to transcribe the Vietnamese
language in Roman letters instead of Chinese ideographs."
De Rhodes by himself did not devise the Quo^'c Ngu*~ writing system. It
was the work by many Jesuit priests who came to Vietnam and mastered the
native language.  Among them, de Rhodes was not one of the most fluent
as his manuscripts still preserved in Rome reveal his shortcomings. His
great achievement was having his works published in Rome including a
dictionary in which he credited the works for two other Portuguese priests.


P. 50: "The port of Faifo, ... was founded by Portuguese merchants..."
P. 57: "But the first European to plant a durable settlement there was
Anto^nio Da Faria, who in 1535 found a suitable site for the harbor
at Faifo..."
Also in p. 57: "In 1557, the Portuguese built a base at Macao".
The Portuguese in no doubt founded a settlement in Macao first.  It is
hard to imagine any port at Faifo in 1535 when the area was probably
unpopulated.  The first Nguyen lord was assigned to Thua^.n Hoa' (the province
around Hue^') in 1558.  There is no proof that the Portuguese founded
Faifo.  Many Japanese and Chinese merchants and immigrants arrived in Faifo
(and still left many building structures there) at the time Nguyen lords
developed commerce with foreigners.  It can be said more accurately that
the Portuguese craft from Macao followed the Chinese and Japanese junks to
do business in Faifo.


P. 57: "They [the Portuguese] labeled the area Cauchichina, deriving
"Cauchi" from "Giao Chi," the Chinese characters for Vietnam, and adding
"China" to distinguish it from Cochin, another of their colonies in India."
The term "CochinChina" and its variations had been used before the
Portuguese arrived in Vietnam.  The Spaniard priests used it in the 16th-
century for Vietnam which at that time was limited only to the present
northern part.  In the 17th-century, it became the European name for
the land the Nguyen lords controlled which is the present central Vietnam.
The French colonists used it to call the southern part of Vietnam.
The term probably originated from the much earlier Persian and Arabian
"Kawci Min Cin" [see Leonard Aurousseau in BEFEO (1924) for a complete
discussion.]

P. 59: "The Vietnamese rulers were particularly disturbed by the
achievement of Alexandre de Rhodes, the seventeenth-century French
Jesuit who perfected the simplified script quoc ngu ... The innovation
endangered the traditional Vietnamese structure..."
Karnow must have extracted the above statement from some French source
which gave de Rhodes a more important place in history than he deserved.
He was in fact one of two (or three) Jesuit priests in Macao who voted
against the use of Vietnamese in baptism.  That explained why he was not
allowed by his superiors to return to Vietnam during 1630-1640, according
to Father DDo^~ Quang Tri' in his "Li.ch Su*? Chu*~ Quo^'c Ngu*~" [History
of the Quoc Ngu Script.]  Karnow might not realize a simple fact that
Quoc Ngu was taught only to a limited number of missionaries and catechists,
and indeed in his work, de Rhodes wished that "it might be useful for
those who would like to come help us preach Jesus Christ in these languages,
which have been used up to now only to honor the demons."  There is no
proof that Quoc Ngu was used extensively among the Vietnamese Catholics,
not considering the entire Vietnamese population in that period!


P. 59: " ... the imperior court was never without a contingent of
Jesuit physicians, astronomers, mathmaticians, and other scholars."
This is exaggerated, too.  The Vietnamese lords occasionally gave Jesuit
priests audience because they admired the priests' knowledge in mathematics
and astronomy.  But  "never without a contingent" is an overstatement. In
medicine, for example, western science did not achieve much advance yet, and
Jesuit priests such as de Rhodes and Borri(1631) were thankful for receiving
medical care from Vietnamese physicians, who they said could cure many
diseases which European physicians considered hopeless.


Pp. 59-60: "Rhodes came to Vietnam under Portuguese tutelage in 1627,
when he was twenty-eight...  Impressed by his linguistic skills, the
Jesuit hierarchy assigned Rhodes to Hanoi, where he wooed the northern
emperor, Trinh Trang,..."
Rhodes was born in March 13, 1593, and first landed in central
Vietnam at the end of December, 1624 and stayed there until 1626.
He arrived in Thanh Hoa, north Vietnam in 1627 and met Lord Trinh Trang
there- not the Le emperor.


P. 62: "After subduing the south, they [the Tay Son brothers] marched
north, eventually ousting the Trinh rulers and unifying Vietnam for
the first time in a century."
Vietnam was never unified by the Tay Son brothers since they were in
conflict themselves once gaining power and de facto divided the country
into three separate states.  The credit for Vietnam reunification
after two centuries of division should be given to Nguyen Anh.


P. 63: "On November 28, 1787, Pigneau and the Comte de Montmorin, the
French foreign minister, signed a treaty...  Vietnam would cede Tourane
and the island of Poulo Condore to France..."
Actually, from La Correspondance Generale III (1785-1791),  Article III
of the treaty was: "... La Roi de la Cochinchine, dans l'attente du
service important que le Roi Tre`s Chre'tien est dispose'  a` lui rendre,
lui ce`de e'ventuellement, ansi qu'a` la courone de France, la properie'te'
absolue et la souverainete' de l'i^le formant le port principal de la
Cochinchine, appele' Hoi-nan, et par les Europe'ens Touron ..."
The names in that article were very confusing indeed.  The port which
the Vietnamese called Hoi-An (Ho^.i An) is Faifo to the Europeans, and
the port of Danang (DDa` Na<~ng) is Touron (or Tourane).  It was because
Pigneau had never visited the central part of Vietnam and had an
inadequate knowledge of the geography of the area.  However, by mentioning
the "i^le formant le port principal", it had to be refered to Cu` Lao
Cha`m (Cham island), which is a small island east of Hoi-An (Faifo),
not the much larger port of Tourane.


P. 65: On Pigneau's tomb:  "...Nguyen Anh later built a tomb on the spot...
The tomb has since disappeared."
Up to the late 1970s, I believe the tomb was still there under the
name "La<ng Cha Ca?" [the Mausoleum of the Principle Father].  Unless
the communist government removed it just like they did to all cemeteries
in South Vietnam's cities in the '80s.


P. 66: On Emperor Minh Mang's character: "A gentle, almost effeminate
scholar, Minh Mang reinforced the Confucian administration..."
Minh Mang was effeminate?  Just wonder where Karnow got this information
from for a man who was known for his callousness, willing to use forces
to occupy land from Cambodia and Laos or to fight against the Thais,
having harsh treatment to his subordinates, and using capital punishment
against his own relatives.  Not counting he had about 150 children ;-)...


P. 51 & p. 78:  "Phan Thanh Giang"
 Should be written as "Phan Thanh Gian" or "Phan Thanh Gia?n".


P.84: "The humiliated Vietnamese governor, Hong Dieu, hang himself..."
The correct name is "Hoang Dieu" or "Hoa`ng Die^.u" [in SCV writing style.]


P. 85: "In August 1883... "The word 'Vietnam' will be erased from history." "
I'm suspicious that Francois Harmand really knew and used the term "Vietnam".
It existed then only in a few correspondence with the Chinese government.
The official name was "DDa.i Nam" chosen by the Nguyen court since Emperor
Minh Mang, while the common name for the country was still "Nam" or "An Nam."


p.87: "The former ruler [Emperor Ha`m Nghi] betrayed by Hmong mountaineers..."
Emperor Ha`m Nghi was betrayed by the Mu*o*`ng- a minorities sharing
the same origin with the Vietnamese.  "Hmong" is a newer name for different
mountaineers whom were called earlier by the Vietnamese and Chinese as
"Me`o" or "Mie^u" (cat people) and whom the CIA had good cooperation with
during the Vietnam War.
...


Still, I think Karnow's work is very informative.  I read it with a
caution on biased opinions- that's understandable since he relied mostly
on other western authors' works, on Vietnamese governments' official
publications in French and in English, and on contact with many high level
Vietnamese officials through interpreters (one of those turned out to
be a communist colonel named Phan Xua^n An.)


Regards,


nguyenxuan@uiuc.edu