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Vietnam THE SOCIAL SYSTEM
Traditional Patterns
For centuries Vietnamese society was knit together by
Confucian norms based on five relationships: the subordination of
subject to ruler, son to father, wife to husband, and younger
brother to elder brother, and the mutual respect between friends.
These norms influenced the evolution of Vietnam as a hierarchic,
authoritarian society in which Confucian scholarship, monarchical
absolutism, filial piety, the subordinate role of women, and the
family system were regarded as integral to the natural order of
the universe.
The traditional society was stratified on the basis of
education and occupation into four groups: scholar-officials or
mandarins, farmers, artisans, and merchants. At the pinnacle was
the emperor, who ruled with the "mandate of heaven." Next were
the scholar-officials, recruited through rigorous civil service
examinations in Chinese classical literature and philosophy. Once
a person passed the triennial examinations he became an
accredited scholar or degree holder and was eligible for
appointment to the imperial civil service, the most prestigious
route to power, status, and wealth. Together, the emperor, his
family, and the scholar-officials constituted the ruling class.
In theory, the mandarinate was not a closed social group.
Commoners were permitted to apply for the examinations, and the
status of scholar-official could not be inherited. In practice,
however, these officials became a self-perpetuating class of
generalist-administrators, partly because their sons could afford
years of academic preparation for the examinations whereas most
commoners could not. Education, the key to upward mobility, was
neither free nor compulsory and tended to be the preserve of the
mandarins.
Although social eminence and political power were thus
concentrated in the hands of the mandarins, economic power was
based on landholdings and was more widely diffused as a result of
progressive dismantling of the hereditary feudal nobility after
the fifteenth century. This process was accomplished by breaking
up the nobility's vast holdings and redistributing smaller
parcels to others, such as families of royal blood, prominent
scholar-officials, and influential local notables. The wealthier
of these notables formed a kind of landed gentry that wielded
influence in the rural towns and villages.
The society was further transformed in the nineteenth century
by the imposition of French rule, the introduction of Western
education, the beginnings of industrialization and urbanization,
and the growth of commercial agriculture. The establishment of a
new, French-dominated governing class led to a rapid decline in
the power and prestige of the emperor and the mandarins, whose
functions were substantially reduced. When the triennial
examinations were held in 1876 and 1879, an average of 6,000
candidates took them; in 1913, only 1,330 did.
In place of the old imperial bureaucracy, in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a new intellectual elite
emerged that emphasized achievement in science, geography, and
other modern subjects instead of the Confucian classics. The new
Vietnamese intelligentsia was impressed by the power of the
French and by the 1905 naval victory at Tsushima of a modernized
Japan over tsarist Russia. Having viewed some of the achievements
of Western culture in Europe during World War I, when nearly
150,000 Vietnamese were recruited for work in French factories,
the new elite proclaimed their country's need for a modern,
Western educational focus. By 1920, even in the conservative city
of Hue, the last Confucian outpost, wealthy families refused to
marry their daughters to the sons of distinguished scholarofficial families unless the young men had acquired a modern,
Western-style education. The traditional civil service
examinations were held for the last time in 1919.
Traditional Confucian village schools, accustomed to teaching
in Chinese, introduced instruction in Vietnamese and French into
the existing curriculum. Vietnamese who had successfully acquired
a higher education at home or abroad entered government service
as administrators or were absorbed as doctors, engineers, and
teachers as the government expanded its role in the fields of
health, public works, and education. Others took up professions
outside government, such as law, medicine, chemistry, and
journalism. The new elite was composed mainly of Vietnamese from
Tonkin and Annam rather than from Cochinchina, a regional bias
perhaps attributable to the location in Hanoi of the country's
only institution of Western higher education
(see
fig. 6).
The French period also produced a new group of Vietnamese
absentee landowners who possessed riches far in excess of the
wealth anyone in the older society had enjoyed. This new group
came into existence as a result of the French development of vast
new tracts of land in Cochinchina. A few of these large holdings
were retained by French companies or citizens, but most were held
by enterprising, Western-oriented, urban Vietnamese from Annam
and Tonkin who lived mainly in Hanoi and Hue. By investing in
light industry and medium-sized trading concerns, they became
Vietnam's first modern industrialists and entrepreneurs.
In urban centers the demand of both the expanding French
government bureaucracy and the private sector for secretaries,
clerks, cashiers, interpreters, minor officials, and labor
foremen created a new Vietnamese white-collar group. The
development of mining and industry between 1890 and 1919 also
introduced a new class of workers. Because most of the natural
resources as well as a large labor pool were located in the
North, industrial development was concentrated there, and Hanoi
and Haiphong became the country's leading industrial centers. At
the same time, conditions of overcrowding and intensive farming
in the North provided little room for agriculture on a commercial
scale. In order to expand agriculture, the French turned their
attention to the underdeveloped, warmer South, where French
cultivation of such crops as rubber, coffee, tea, and, in
Cochinchina, rice gave rise to a group of agricultural and
plantation wage earners.
The colonial period also led to a substantial increase in the
Hoa population. The country's limited foreign and domestic trade
were already in the hands of Chinese when the French arrived. The
French chose to promote the Chinese role in commerce and to
import Chinese labor to develop road and railroad systems,
mining, and industry. French colonial policy that lifted the
traditional ban on rice exports at the end of the nineteenth
century also attracted new waves of Chinese merchants and
shopkeepers seeking to take advantage of the new export market.
Vietnam's growing economy attracted even more Chinese thereafter,
especially to the South. Already deeply involved in the rice
trade, the Chinese expanded their interests to include ricemilling and established a virtual monopoly.
They also were a significant presence in sugar refining,
coconut and peanut oil production, lumber, and shipbuilding. Many
who began their careers as laborers on the French rubber
plantations of Cochinchina eventually started their own tea,
pepper, or rice plantations to supply local market needs. Chinese
gardeners in the suburbs of Saigon monopolized the supply of
fresh vegetables consumed in that city, and Chinese restaurants
and hotels proliferated in virtually every urban center.
Data as of December 1987
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