1 14 Towards a geo- history of Asian 2 3 Communism 4 5 The case of early Sino-Vietnamese 6 revolutionary overlaps 7 8 9 Christopher E. Goscha 10 11 12 Introduction 13 14 The anti-Communist “Red Scares” in the United States and parts of Asia 15 obsessed with Chinese Communist “expansionism”, the Vietnam War and its 16 radicalisation of intellectual and political circles, and especially the violent melt- 17 down of Asian Communism in the late 1970s have never made it easy to study 18 Asian Communism in cool- headed ways. During the height of the Cold War, 19 only anti- Communists and defenders of the “domino theory” spoke of the 20 “spread” or “expansion” of Chinese and Vietnamese Communism into East and 21 Southeast Asia. Anti- Communist states in Southeast Asia often transformed 22 long- standing Chinese communities into “Fifth Columns” working secretly for 23 Beijing. The “Overseas Chinese” were often equated with “Communists” by 24 Indonesian offcials, while the Thais adopted remarkably similar policies towards 25 the “overseas Vietnamese” concentrated in northeast Thailand. If the Sino- 26 Vietnamese Communist alliance in the early 1950s convinced many Western 27 leaders that the Asian dominos would fall to the Chinese communists, the violent 28 fall- out between Vietnamese and Chinese Communists in 1979 saw Chinese and 29 Vietnamese Communist allies break, violently, over the control of former French 30 Indochina and purge their longstanding interactions from the offcial historical 31 record. He or she who writes on Asian Communism in transnational ways must 32 still tread very carefully because offcial and not so offcial historiographies of 33 the Cold War in Asia remain mined. It is only recently, thanks to our distancing 34 from the wars for Indochina, the end of the Cold War and the concomitant 35 opening of new Communist archives, that the de- mining of the feld has begun, 36 and scholars can venture into heretofore dangerous areas of the past. 37 Aware of the risks, I would like to revisit the regional or transnational nature of 38 early Asian Communism. If a variety of scholars have provided sophisticated, 39 multidisciplinary and transnational studies of the spread of Western and Asian reli- 40 gions on the ground and in peoples’ heads, the study of the expansion of major 41 secular belief systems into and throughout Asia lags behind. This is particularly 42 the case for Communism, in large part for the reasons outlined above. A plethora 43 of studies exists on Communism, to be sure. But they almost always focus on 44 national Communisms and concentrate largely on politics and state- building. Rare 45 740_14_China and Southeast Asia.indd 314 15/8/18 11:42:10 Towards a geo-history of Asian Communism 315 1 are the specialists who examine the spread of Communism in a wider geographical 2 and historical context than the modern nation state. Even rarer are those who try to 3 look at how communism worked itself out on the ground and in people’s heads: 4 how it was accepted, rejected or adapted as it moved throughout the region. If reli- 5 gions have rightly received important attention, many scholars would, I think, still 6 scoff at the idea of studying Communism on the same level as say Buddhism or 7 Islam. 8 While Communism is not a religion, I would nonetheless suggest that con- 9 ceptually and methodologically there is a need to rethink our study of Com- 10 munism in wider geo- historical terms than simple national Communism. We 11 might examine Communism seriously as another layer of historical, social and 12 even cultural experience that arrived, spread or challenged many Asian societies 13 in the twentieth century. For many, this secular religion was a “modern” answer 14 to under- development and a roadmap out of colonial domination to national lib- 15 eration. For some it was a source of individual salvation. For others it was a 16 heretical credo to be combatted.1 17 In this chapter, I would like to try to examine the spread and the expansion of 18 Asian Communism from the bottom- up and in a wider regional context than the 19 nation- state or even regional strait- jackets like “East” or “Southeast Asia”. I 20 adopt a geographical and historical approach2 in order to track, across a longer 21 stretch of time and a wider spatial swath, that which would connect Chinese and 22 Vietnamese Communisms running between East and Southeast Asia. Rather than 23 assuming that Southeast Asia and China existed independently in time and space 24 or that they were cut off by the formation of Western and Japanese colonial 25 states, I would like to suggest that regional linkages fowing out of the “pre- 26 colonial period” continued to exist in the late nineteenth and right into the twen- 27 tieth century; and that such links are crucial to understanding how this secular 28 religion moved into and throughout Asia. To track this wider context, I focus on 29 how Sino- Vietnamese revolutionary links developed in the southern Chinese 30 provinces of Yunnan, Guangxi and Guangdong and how they would extend into 31 the “Nanyang” (South Seas) region via Chinese and Vietnamese émigré com- 32 munities, and the overland and overseas routes connecting East Asia and South- 33 east Asia by way of southern China. In many ways, southern China and Vietnam 34 are parts of both East and Southeast Asia. While this chapter does not draw upon 35 a mass of new research as such, it tries to sketch out an alternative way of 36 rethinking Asian Communism beyond the polemics of the past and the borders 37 of the day. The Sino- Vietnamese connection is my way of running between East 38 and Southeast Asia. 39 40 Early Sino- Vietnamese overlaps in Southern China 41 42 Exchanges between southern China and northern Vietnam have ancient roots. 43 Tributary relations certainly ensured diplomatic contacts. So did war. During 44 these times, peoples, goods, ideas, and technologies moved across borders, as 45 chapters in this volume demonstrate diversely. For example, if the immigration 740_14_China and Southeast Asia.indd 315 15/8/18 11:42:10 316 Christopher E. Goscha of Chinese merchants southwards into Vietnam is well known, Vietnamese could 1 also move northwards into the Middle Kingdom. In the early ffteenth century, 2 during the Ming occupation of Đại Việt, the Chinese commander Zhang Fu sent 3 over 7,000 Vietnamese artisans to the Chinese capital of Nanjing, where their 4 technical talents were much appreciated. Ming records reveal that in 1408 Viet- 5 namese were already working in various Chinese government ministries. A 6 certain Lê Trừng was Vice-Minister of Public Works in Nanjing. Some Viet- 7 namese carpenters or architects would even join in the building of the imperial 8 fortress in Beijing, to where the Chinese capital was moved in the 1420s.3 Many 9 centuries later, other Vietnamese would fnd their way to Hong Kong, Macao, 10 and elsewhere in southern China as part of larger, overland and overseas trading 11 networks, run by Chinese, Europeans, and sometimes Vietnamese. Far from 12 shutting down pre- existing Asian movements, Western colonialism built upon 13 them from the nineteenth century for their own state- building and economic pur- 14 poses. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, French colonialism would accel- 15 erate Vietnamese immigration northwards into the southern Chinese provinces 16 bordering on their new colonial creation, French Indochina. Between 1903 and 17 1913, for example, the French would send around 25,000 northern Vietnamese 18 into Yunnan province to help build, staff, and run the railway linking northern 19 Vietnam to Kunming.4 20 Similar exchanges extended southwards into what the Chinese called the 21 Nanyang, a space extending roughly from southern China to Singapore and 22 linked by maritime routes, commerce, and increasingly overseas Chinese 23 sojourners (Huaqiao) trading and/or living outside China. China’s trade with the 24 region and Vietnam is treated by other authors in this collection. What needs to 25 be stressed for our purposes here is that long before the twentieth century, the 26 nature of Chinese immigration to Southeast Asian coastal cities had always pro- 27 vided Chinese political refugees with bases from which they had sought shelter, 28 collected funds, regrouped and tried, as best they could, to oppose their oppon- 29 ents in China. Many of these political refugees stayed on in Nanyang countries 30 to make important historical contributions to local states. On the run, the famous 31 Mạc family played a notable role in the economic, political, and cultural devel- 32 opment of the Hà Tiên region, long before the ethnic Vietnamese got there. 33 Similar things can be said for the Chinese in the Gulf of Thailand.5 “Triad Soci- 34 eties” and “Heaven and Earth Associations” originally seeking to restore the 35 Ming emerged from the seventeenth century in Taiwan and throughout most of 36 the Nanyang. The Vietnamese king Tự Đức would turn to these secret societies 37 for help as the French consolidated their hold on southern Vietnam.6 38 Vietnamese regional movements were much more limited in time and space 39 than those of their Chinese counterparts. Compared to the Chinese, Vietnamese 40 regional immigration was mainly overland and southwesterly in its geographical 41 fow. Its offshoots into Laos, Cambodia and Thailand were parts of the larger 42 Vietnamese overland colonisation of what eventually became today’s southern 43 Vietnam. By the turn of the twentieth century, small, overland Vietnamese 44 sojourners (Việt Kiều) could be found living and working in Bangkok, Phnom 45 740_14_China and Southeast Asia.indd 316 15/8/18 11:42:10 Towards a geo-history of Asian Communism 317 1 Penh, Nakhon Phanom, and a few as far away as Singapore.7 As in southern 2 China, the French would build upon these pre- existing patterns of Vietnamese 3 immigration to build an Indochinese colonial state with ethnic Viet bureaucrats, 4 workers, and customs agents at the helm on the ground.