Festival and revolution in the highlands of Vietnam: A Vietnamese artist shows how the revolution came to a mountain people in Central Vietnam

Abstract

Spring Festival on the High Plateaus (figure 1) is the name given by Vietnamese artist Tran Huu Chat to an engraved, painted, and lacquered wooden panel executed in 1962 and acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts in Hanoi. As so often in Vietnamese art of recent decades, this large (120 × 96 cm), elaborate, and richly populated composition is socially and politically charged, but it is also of exceptional ethnographic significance. The theme of solidarity in revolutionary struggle between ethnic minorities and the Vietnamese majority is that of much Vietnamese art of the U.S. war period, especially poster art. Moreover, this homage to Vietnamese “primitives” is in the spirit of President Ho Chi Minh's own repudiation of racism; his 1945 Declaration of Independence avoids any equivalent of the term “merciless Indian savages” contained in its model, the U.S. Declaration of Independence.     

The Vietnamese experience and the third world

Abstract

Based on Vietnam's experience over the past years, I wish to make some general observations about development in the third world. The major consideration, though not the sole one, for my treating such a topic is undoubtedly my own participation in the Vietnamese experience and my personal familiarity with many of the aspects involved. Furthermore, the historical process has moved so fast over the past years in Vietnam that my country has passed rapidly through a succession of different phases. Over a period of 15 years, an adult would have lived under totally different social, political and economic regimes, directly experiencing such important movements as a war of national liberation, land reform, and the transition from a colonial and feudal regime to an independent and finally socialist state.     

The Vietnamese People Resolutely Support the Chilean People

Scholars disagree over the consequences of economic reforms on regional inequality in China. This article has found that dramatic disparities exist among the provinces in China's coastal region. While coastal provinces like Jiangsu have experienced dramatic growth, the relative position of Liaoning has declined, and Shanghai has experienced a decline and a recent recovery. These changing patterns of growth have contributed to the decline of interprovincial inequality, but led to the rise of the coast-interior divide in China. The analysis of the diverse coastal provinces is critical to improve the understanding of regional inequality in China.     

The Vietnamese refugees in Thailand: Minority manipulation in counterinsurgency

Abstract

The purpose of this brief survey is to clarify the political role of the Vietnamese minority in recent Thai history. The importance of this subject derives from the long-held but unexamined assumption on the part of the Thai ruling classes and, since World War II, U.S. academic ideologues of neo-colonialism, that social revolution is somehow extraneous to Thai history. If it does rear its ugly head—so the thinking goes—it must be the result of transborder subversion and not of factors indigenous to Thai social history. One villain in this piece of wishful thinking—and the principal one since the 1950s—has been the Vietnamese revolutionary movement. The immediate scapegoats have been those militant anti-imperialist Vietnamese who took temporary refuge in Thailand from the destructive effects of French and later American expansion into their homelands. They have long been viewed—and are still seen by the present regime in Bangkok—as virtual “saboteurs,” frontline agents of revolution that would otherwise be alien to “happy” Thailand.     

The National Liberation Front and the transformation of Vietnamese society

Abstract

Like vultures swarming over a dying carcass, American establishment intellectuals have been swift to dissect the agonizing war in Vietnam. Yet poring through the massive scholarly, journalistic and official works heralding American attempts to crush the Vietnamese resistance, one is struck by the void of information concerning the National Liberation Front. The enemy remains almost as elusive in the literature as in the swamps of Vietnam. After more than a decade of fighting, the NLF is virtually as ‘faceless,’ unknown, unfathomable as ever to the American people. Indeed a careful search reveals not a single significant scholarly work on the subject. In the absence of independent scholarship, the officially sanctioned work of Douglas Pike, an officer of the United States Information Service with long tenure in Vietnam, has gone virtually unchallenged. Consider Pike's conclusions about the NFL:     

The politics of China's peasant revolution

Abstract

Efforts to explain the success of the Chinese Communist revolution have preoccupied more than a few American historians and political scientists in recent years. Most of these scholars, following the trail blazed by George Taylor's The Struggle for North China, have focused attention on the War of Resistance period (1937–1945) in search of the factors responsible for the phenomenal growth in Communist power. Chalmers Johnson, with his famous thesis of “peasant nationalism,” emphasizes the importance of the Japanese invasion for rural mobilization in China. Mark Selden, by contrast, identifies the Communist Party's positive wartime policies—the “Yenan Way”—as the key to revolutionary victory. Carl Dorris, while agreeing with much of Selden's explanation, locates the source of these successful wartime policies not in the capital of Yenan, but in the guerrilla bases of North China, especially Jin-Cha-Ji.     

The origins and development of the Jihadist movement: from anti-communism to terrorism

Gilles Kepel is Professor, Institute of Political Studies, Paris (1985 to present); Senior Researcher, CNRS (National Board for Scientific Research), Paris (1984 to present); Director of the Doctoral Program on the Muslim World, Institute of Political Studies (1994 to present). He was Visiting Professor, Columbia University, New York (1996–1997); Researcher, CEDEJ (Egyptian–French Center for Scientific Cooperation), Cairo, Egypt (1980–1983). He is the author of several books on Islam, including Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, published by IB Tauris in 2002 (reviewed in this issue of Asian Affairs, p. 158) and Bad Moon Rising: A Chronicle of the Middle East Today (Saqi, 2003). An earlier version of this article was published in Ramse`s, 2003     

Bhopal revisited: The view from below

Abstract

The night of 2–3 December 1994 will mark the tenth anniversary of the world's largest industrial disaster. Over the years the attention Bhopal has attracted has centered on the extended legal negotiations between the Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) and the Indian government. What is less known is that despite a settlement in 1989 and a review in 1991, the gas survivors continue to suffer untold misery. Indeed their lives are more insecure today than they were in 1984.