One party-state as disease of the heart

en.reseauinternational

Op-Ed by School of Vice 

Following the "re-unification" of the two Vietnams in April 1975 and the end of the US-Vietnam war, there were reports of systematic and official discriminations directed against ethnic Chinese Vietnamese, particularly, in the newly "liberated" South of the country, where ethnic Chinese, though have been in Vietnam for centuries, formed a strong and thus enviable commercial community, as their ethnic cousins have tended to do everywhere else around the world. The brief but violent border war with China in 1979 also fuelled anti-Chinese sentiment among many in Vietnam; something Hanoi has always been prepared to exploit when it is expedient to do so, as the wave of another previous nation-wide anti-Chinese riots had demonstrated a few years back. 

In this period of ethnic-racial tension and climate of authoritarian repression, many ethnic Chinese have taken to the rickety boats and the high sea along with other Vietnamese in desperate search of freedom that their self-proclaimed "parent-state" at home simply could not and cannot offer them.




Some ethnic Chinese had also crossed the border into China while some fled into neighbouring countries, mainly Cambodia which is still not free from Hanoi's clutch, but at least better prospects beckoned. In the eighties many of these folks had taken a precarious journey across war-ravaged Cambodia with UN-sponsored refugee camps along the Thailand border with Cambodia as their destinations; a journey which exposed them to unimaginable horrors such as rape, robbery and even death. The Vietnamese had also allegedly set up or infiltrated anti-Vietnamese resistance guerrilla camps in the area with the aim of sabotaging the image and unity of the actual anti-Vietnamese resistance movement in Cambodia at the time. This is a classic tactic of the Vietnamese state that has been applied time and time again since the French colonial days right through the Pol Pot phase and, presently, the Hun Sen regime. As Hanoi would have understood only too well, killing a person with your own hands is not as safe as having someone else’s hands to do it for you.

What strikes some of us about the current outburst of anti-China protests is that the protesters and the ruling Communist party are mutually at odds with one another over their differences as to what defines national Vietnamese self-interests. Protests such as these may not be nothing unusual in the country but they are rarely allowed as Vietnam is still among those most draconian of states in terms of the restrictive lid it places on civic freedom and dissenting voices, especially, those deemed hostile towards the ruling party. Whereas in the distant past most Vietnamese would have meekly accepted the Will of the Emperor or even that of the modern ruling state as divine and binding; the necessity of territorial expansion and physical national survival whatever costs this might have brought to the hapless victims in its path [see the genocides committed against the people of Champa, the hill tribes of north and central Vietnam, the ethnic-indigenous Khmers of the Mekong Delta, the "genocidal Pol Pot regime", the hegemony over Laos and Cambodia, the on-going plunder and organised destruction of both nations' lands and natural assets of every kind...], more and more ordinary Vietnamese are beginning to realise that, perhaps, such ill-gotten gains and or their lasting benefits to them may be more illusory than real whilst a core of corrupt and exclusively over-privileged bunch who act as their "parents" remain indifferent over what they consider most precious and important in their lives and, somewhat abusive in their assumed parental guardianship as well as cynically and callously acting out that role in their name.

For freedom-loving Vietnamese, the words of one of China's past leaders - Chieng Kai-Shek - are probably worth pondering over. For this nationalist Chinese thinker, the invading Japanese [for all their military might and aggression at the time] were “a disease of the skin". The Chinese communists, on the other hand, were "the disease of the heart".    

It should be added that this aphorism is even more acutely relevant and timely in Cambodian people’s present time and context.