1.0 Introduction

Pham Quynh (1893-1945) was a prominent Vietnamese public intellectual and politician, who wrote for the pro-French publication, Nam Phong Tap Chi, for which he was a publisher.1 Written in French in November 1930,2 Pham’s article, ‘Intellectual and Moral Reform’, aims to persuade his French-educated Vietnamese elite readers to adopt a culturalist Vietnamese nationalism, advocating for a meticulous modernising of traditional values to achieve the ends of Vietnamese independence. He discourages anti-colonial rejection of French powers, believing such opposition would harm the cause. Instead, he instructs his readers to reframe their colonised context as an opportunity to develop a future Vietnam, fit to compete with the global West.

2.1 Uniting the Elites

Pham’s article engages with a number of ideologies held by his French-educated readership in order to articulate an elitist nationalism. Written in French, he dedicates much of the article directing his ‘elite’ readers to avoid the trappings of ‘foreign’ and imported ‘modern ideas’.3 His deliberate generalisation of Western ideologies suggests a diversity of ideological difference within his already narrow elitist readership. For example, his warning that ‘libertarian and individualistic theories’ can cause ‘dissolution and destruction’ appears in one reading a rebuke to anti-colonialist republicans, whose political activities had resulted in an unsuccessful uprising at Yen Bai earlier in February 1930.4 This uprising had been orchestrated by a Kuomingtang-inspired Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang (VNQDD), an anti-colonialist republican group that had adopted the KMT’s principles of democratic and populist liberal values.5 Perhaps in reference to the insurrection and the chaos that ensued, Pham seems to be criticising such political movements, describing its ideological weakness as pretext for its ‘certain failure’.6 The VNQDD instigated the uprising with the hopes of stirring nationwide revolution, only to have ended in failure, inspiring only a few scattered peasant revolts, which were quickly suppressed by French authorities.7 Pham labels the mobilisation of any ideology as a ‘delicate matter’, ordering his readers with VNQDD sympathies to measure their ‘dosage’.8 For Pham, the simple dissemination of ideas should not be left to the impulsive, declaring that it requires ‘foresight and tact’ to bring about a meaningful nationalist consciousness.9 While he does appear likely to be criticising anti-colonialists, he does not appear to be discriminatory, approaching the matter from a seemingly pragmatic sense. This ambiguity is effectively used to bolster a sense of unity in their shared elite status and goals, focusing instead on adopting a rational persona to convince his readers of his ideology.

2.2 Returning to Traditionalist Values

In keeping to a more generalised elite, Pham’s solution to return to traditionalist values positions his younger and more sceptical readership view his culturalist ideology as an ideal space for collaboration. Due to French language and education reforms, Vietnam was now producing a generation primed to view traditionalist values with disdain; the Western- educated pointing to the failures of Confucianism and the monarchy for holding the Vietnamese back from advancing as a competitive and formidable race. Despite these reservations, Pham reassures his readership by referencing the Japanese state, as an ideal model for Vietnamese nationalism. He enlists the ‘Annamese elites’ towards the ‘development of a “national life”’ in order to avoid ‘inextricable difficulties’ and ‘certain failures’.10 Already cognisant of failed uprisings and a ‘developing, and intensifying’ nationalism in his country,11 he devises what he believes to be an ideological framework to avoid colonial suppression and violence, and ultimately secure independence. In the example of the Japanese, he concedes that ‘sacrifices’ need to be done, and that the Japanese had only been successful because their elites had developed a strong moral ideology.12 Using their example, perhaps because of their shared Sinitic cultural heritage, he advises the Vietnamese elites to become a united coalition, ‘conscious and organised’, setting aside their personal ideologies for a ‘health[ily] 4volve[ed]’ nation.13 He transforms his invocation of a the Darwinian ‘backwardness’ of Confucian past into a revolutionary and defiant undertaking. His admission that this is a ‘dangerous’ mission characterises his own nationalism as a military campaign,14 one that need not draw blood. Pham creates a feeling of triumph over Western interference through the invocation of the glorious victory of Japan’ over ‘czarist Russia’ – a powerful Western country rivalling France, suggesting that this victory could very well be shared by his elitist readers. He cites further that the Japanese elites had evolved their premodern devotion to ‘clan spirit’ and redirecting the mass’ feudal loyalties to the ‘worship of honor’ for their Emperor.15 The end result is a successful nationalism embraced by its people. Pham believes that the Vietnamese have this potential too, persuading his readers to ‘incorporate’ modern ideas ‘cautiously’, and build this ‘harmonious synthesis of ideals’: ‘the Occident and the Orient’.16 In effect, Pham invokes his wider French-educated readers’ patriotism, channelling their revolutionary instincts to an ideological battleground, one that uses neo-traditionalism as the centrepiece for their objective.

2.3 Unveiling the True Enemy

In an attempt to distance himself from criticisms by young elites who saw Pham as a collaborationist and a mouthpiece for French colonialists, his nationalism subverts these assumptions, positioning his own detractors as engaging in a battle amongst themselves.17 His readership may have been well-aware that his contributions in a French-backed magazine would have been sufficient ground to accuse him of spinning French propaganda to the Vietnamese elites.18 Similar to its predecessor, Dong Duong Tap Chi, Nam Phong was a part of a propaganda enterprise that sought to persuade educated Vietnamese elites to support Governor-General Sarraut’s economic and social policies.19 In a rebuke to such accusations, Pham’s article seems to position the enemy as not merely a colonial power or pro-French against anti-colonialists, but an ideological one, one that would – he claims – be strategically supported by the French. By advocating for a wider consensus among his readership with the older traditional class, his calling for an elitist nationalism adopts a more pragmatic appeal, one that is not sullied by factional disagreements. With the threat of the ‘West’ and their ‘harmful theories’,20 Pham antagonises ideological differences within their own class in order to procure support for a nationalism that does not concern itself with political affiliations. He concludes:

‘What the Japanese were able to do, we can do too – helped by France, which, we are certain, will prove itself generous and skilful enough to encourage the blossoming and growth of a good, conscious, and enlightened Annamese patriotism’.21

Focused on an ideological unity, Pham attempts to provide an ‘antidote’ to the disagreements among his elites, including with those who antagonise him. In his piece, he suggests that their woes had not been with the occupying forces, but had in fact been because they had unwittingly drunk the poison of foreign ideas ‘imported from abroad’.22 That the French can be part of their scheme, Pham positions his French-educated readers to reconsider anti- colonial and populist rhetoric, in favour of more diplomatic and less belligerent ideology. Pham promotes his elitist culturalist nationalism to his readers as a particularly inviting solution to this problem, where the elites would have authority over the fate of Vietnam.

3.0 Conclusion

Pham’s article captures an important historical moment in Vietnamese colonial history, revealing context to the development of a nascent Vietnamese nationalist consciousness. His nationalist ideology is concerned with pragmatics and cooperation among his readers, betraying perhaps a real struggle for developing a nationalist identity in a colonised context. It highlights discourse around an elitist brand of culturalist nationalism that contrasts the diverse nationalist ideologies in wider Vietnamese society.

While Pham’s views may have been his own, it is also important to consider the sophistication of colonial interference in controlling printed media. This includes its distributors such as their selection of Pham; its content through censorship, as well as education policies that curtailed access to a wider readership. Pham’s article written in French is notable with censorship laws limiting Quoc Ngu publications to non-political topics, restricting political readership to the elites only.23 Moreover, such absorption of important mass-communication technologies by colonial forces would have limited and indeed suppressed other viable nationalist discourse and its distribution.

Pham’s expression of a culturalist nationalism presents us with one of many written accounts on the burgeoning question of Vietnamese independence and nationhood. It also provides historians with an immediate historical account on nationalist consciousness in 1930 Vietnam, and reveals perhaps the limits of nationalist expression in printed media.

FOOTNOTE

1 Yen N Vu, “Phạm Quỳnh, Borrowed Language, and the Ambivalences of Colonial Discourse,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 51, no. 1–2 (June 2020): 114–15. doi:10.1017/S0022463420000181.

2 George Dutton, Jayne Werner, and John Whitmore, Sources of Vietnamese Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 593.

3 Quynh Pham, “Intellectual and Moral Reform,” in Sources of Vietnamese Tradition, trans. C. Jon Delogu, eds. George Dutton, Jayne Werner and John Whitmore (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 390.

4 Ibid.; DR SarDesi, Vietnam: The Struggle for National Identity (Colorado: Westview Press, 1992), 49.

5 SarDesi, Vietnam, 48.
6 Pham, “Intellectual”, 390.
7 SarDesi, Vietnam, 49.
8 Pham, “Intellectual”, 390.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., 389-90.
11 Ibid., 391.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 390-391.
14 Ibid., 392.
15 Ibid., 391.
16 Ibid., 390-391.
17 Vu, “Phạm”, 125.
18 Ibid., 115.
19 David Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial 1922-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 151-2.

20 Pham, “Intellectual”, 392.
21 Ibid., 393.
22 Ibid.
23 Philippe MF Peycam, The Birth of Vietnamese Political Journalism: Saigon 1916-1930 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 77-8.

REFERENCES

Primary Sources

Pham, Quynh. “Intellectual and Moral Reform.” In Sources of Vietnamese Tradition, translated by C. Jon Delogu, edited by George Dutton, Jayne Werner and John Whitmore, 389-393. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

Secondary Sources

Dutton, George, Jayne Werner, and John Whitmore. Sources of Vietnamese Tradition. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

Marr, David. Vietnamese Tradition on Trial 1922-1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.

Peycam, Philippe MF. The Birth of Vietnamese Political Journalism: Saigon 1916-1930. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/peyc15850.8

SarDesi, DR. Vietnam: The Struggle for National Identity. Colorado: Westview Press, 1992. Tai, Hue-Tam H. Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Vu, Yen N. “Phạm Quỳnh, Borrowed Language, and the Ambivalences of Colonial Discourse.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 51, no. 1–2 (June 2020): 114–31. doi:10.1017/S0022463420000181.