December 30,2006 News

 
‘NOLI,’ PENGUIN CLASSICS
Rizal joins ranks of Dickens, Austen


By Lito Zulueta

Inquirer

Last updated 05:31am (Mla time) 12/30/2006


JOSE Rizal’s “Noli Me Tangere” has been published in a new English translation and released worldwide by Penguin Books, one of the major publishing houses of the English-speaking world, under the Penguin Classics imprint. The publication effectively canonizes the novel as one of the classics of world literature.

It is the first time that a Southeast Asian title has been included in the Penguin Classics, which was started in 1946 with the publication of E.V. Rieu’s translation of Homer’s “Odyssey.”

In the book’s blurb, Penguin bills the “Noli” as “the book that sparked the Philippine revolution” and “the great novel of the Philippines.”

“[It] was the first major artistic manifestation of Asian resistance to European colonialism, and Rizal became a guiding conscience—and martyr—for the revolution that would subsequently rise up in the Spanish province,” Penguin said.

The new translation of the “Noli” was done by an American writer, Harold Augenbraum, a scholar of Hispanic-American letters and the executive director of the National Book Foundation and the National Book Awards.

Filipino-American writer Jessica Hagedorn, author of the critically acclaimed and best-selling novel, “Dogeaters,” has said that Augenbraum’s “Noli” was a “beautiful new translation.”

Elda Rotor, Penguin Books Classics’ executive editor, said the publication “represents Penguin’s commitment to publish the major literary classics of the world.”

Rotor, a Filipino-American, said she was not the original acquisitions editor for the book, but “for me, it’s a particular joy on many levels, to place Rizal on the same shelf as Dickens and Austen, to share a classic that is read, studied and celebrated in parts of the world, yet unfamiliar to a wider audience.”

In Manila, the book is available at Powerbooks and Fully Booked.


Scathing portrayal

First published in Berlin in 1887, “Noli Me Tangere” tells the story of Crisostomo Ibarra, who returns from his European studies to find his old town in the grip of social iniquity and decay. His efforts to introduce enlightenment and modernism are defeated at every turn by the Spanish colonial establishment as represented by abusive civil and military officials and obscurantist friars.

Because of its scathing portrayal of Spanish colonial depredations, the book was banned in the Philippines, but copies of it were smuggled into the country for clandestine reading by educated Filipinos.

As a result, the “Noli,” along with its dark sequel, “El Filibusterismo,” which tells of the return of Ibarra as an avenging angel a la “The Count of Monte Cristo,” became the bible of the Philippine revolution against Spain in 1896.

Although Rizal denied any involvement in the revolution, his name became the password of the Filipino revolutionaries, and he was executed by the Spanish authorities on Dec. 30, 1896.


Fascinated

Augenbraum said he stumbled upon Rizal’s novel in 1992 while compiling a bibliography of North American Latino fiction writers. He said he came across the name of National Artist N.V.M. Gonzalez whom he thought to be Latino. He went on to read Gonzalez and “loved it” and thereby got “introduced to a whole world of Filipino and Filipino-American literature, which I began to seek out here in the US.”

“The name of Rizal came up several times, so I read the ‘Noli,’ which fascinated me,” he said. “Then I read the ‘Fili,’ which also fascinated me. Then I read the Austin Coates biography, and Rizal himself became one of my heroes.”

Augenbraum said he tried to get university presses interested in republishing the novels in the English translation by either Charles Derbyshire or Leon Ma. Guerrero, but none was interested. (The University of Hawaii Press has published the Soledad Lacson-Locsin translations of both books.)

In 2002, after editing and revising a Penguin book, Augebraum was asked by Penguin editors if he could recommend a new addition to the Penguin Classics line, and he suggested the “Noli.”


Very excited

“[They] knew very little [of the ‘Noli’], but when they began to investigate, they became very excited,” he said.

“This would be the first Filipino writer in the venerable classics tradition, and the Filipino-American community had been growing,” he said.

Penguin at first thought of adapting one of the existing English translations, but “concluded that it needed a new translation for the American eye and ear,” Augenbraum said.

Augenbraum said he enjoyed translating Rizal. “The ‘Noli’s’ Spanish was not particularly difficult to translate. Rizal wrote a clear, lucid Castilian without much slang and without overusing idioms,” he said.

“I would like to add that the pleasure of translating [and reading] the ‘Noli’ is that the non-central characters are extraordinarily rich,” he said.

Augenbraum said he found it more difficult to be editor than translator.


Bridging cultural divide

“The harder part was to compile the notes that would explain the many, many religious and cultural references Rizal used... The US is not steeped in the Catholic faith and many Americans will probably be reading about the Philippines for the first time,” he said.

Apparently, Augenbraum succeeded in trying to bridge the cultural and historical divide between the “Noli’s” 19th century-Philippines setting and American readers in the 21st century.

According to Hagedorn, Augenbraum’s introductory essay, “is smart and sensitively written, providing great background for Rizal’s rich, moving novel.”

Augenbraum said he liked the Derbyshire and Guerrero translations, but there should be new translations of Rizal’s work.

“Most translators will tell you that each generation should have its own translation of classic works. Language changes over time, political ideals change over time, information emerges over time, new critical thinking emerges. I hope that this translation will be the translation for our time,” he said.


Required reading

Augenbraum said the “Noli” should be required reading in Asian-American courses in US universities “because it is the foundational novel of the nation, with large implications for the diaspora and its influence on other writers.”

According to Rotor, Penguin has learned that the novel has generated interest among professors across the US who would like to make the novel a part of their curriculum.

The new English translation of the “Noli” comes at a time when Filipino critics and historians are starting to complain that there was too much lionizing and even deification of Rizal so that honest critical assessments of his work and legacy have become nearly impossible.

Florentino Hornedo, Unesco commissioner and a literature and history professor at the University of Santo Tomas, said rendering Rizal and his works as a “dogma” was “not good” since the novels were a “fiction” and a creative embellishment, with some exaggerations conditioned by Rizal’s masonic and liberal leanings.

Augenbraum agreed. “The Noli’ is fiction obviously, but [that’s] an interesting point about how historical fiction becomes perceived as history,” he said.

“In my introduction to the ‘Noli,’ I discuss Rizal becoming a sort of ‘santo’ in the Filipino diaspora, no longer a real personage, and I question whether he ever really was a real person, since he saw himself as part of Philippine narrative history and acted accordingly. Although some people have compared Rizal to Jose Marti [the 19th-century Cuban writer and patriot], Marti has never attained the supernatural status of Rizal,” said Augenbraum.

“[Rizal] is a prisoner of his own legend... Whoever he was in life has become irrelevant. He’s probably closer to Joan of Arc or St. George than he is to Jose Marti,” he said.





Copyright 2006 Inquirer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.



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Malaya : Bernard Karganilla Column

December 30,2006 - Saturday



‘Rizal was always conscious of his genera-tion’s loving responsibility to the Philippines and the next generation of Filipinos.’


Season’s greetings
from Rizal and Company

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Like modern Filipinos, the generation of Jose Rizal, especially those living outside the Archipelago, engaged in frequent and lively Yuletide greetings.

Their Christmas felicitations were blended with family concerns, business affairs, health news and, of course, political stuff. Notice Rizal’s December 28, 1888 letter to Mariano Ponce: "Enclosed are the manuscripts. See to it that ‘La vision de Fr. Rodriguez’ is published. Use the money from the sale of my remaining books there. Print some 3,000 or 4,000 copies and see to it that it is done as quickly as possible."

"Give my regards to all our compatriots; I will not write anymore here their names but let them know that I remember them all. Happy New Year!"

Rizal in London was asking Ponce in Barcelona to produce and disseminate his satirical rebuttal of a friar’s attack on the "Noli." A more elaborate greeting was Rizal’s December 31, 1888 letter to the activist Filipino colony in Spain.

"Without wishing to parody the sublime words of Christ, I shall say to you nevertheless why I think and feel thus, that wherever two Filipinos meet in the name of the native land and for her welfare, there also I should like to join them.

"How I would like now to be in your midst in order to think and feel with you, to dream, to wish, to attempt something so that those who will follow us may not be able to throw anything in our face, so that we may give something to that country that has given us everything, in spite of her unhappy fate!"

Rizal was always conscious of his generation’s loving responsibility to the Philippines and the next generation of Filipinos. He was mindful at all times of the future and his legacy.

Rizal thus concluded that particular letter by citing a stanza from his 1879 prize-winning poem, "A la juventud Filipina."

"Lift up your radiant brow,

This day, Youth of my native land!

Your abounding talents show

Resplendently and grand,

Fair hope of my Motherland!"

Though his present was exciting and his career progressing, Rizal put much stock in the future, pinning his hopes on the receptiveness of the Filipinos yet to come to the ideas and legacy of the Filipinos of his age.

Was Rizal mistaken?

The anniversary of Rizal’s martyrdom is a legal Philippine holiday. Though sandwiched by Christmas and New Year’s Day, Rizal Day is marked yearly by flag-raisings, forums, wreath-laying and assemblies of the Order of the Knights of Rizal (an NGO chartered under R.A. 646). Moreover, Presidential Proclamation 126, issued on November 26, 2001, declared the month of December of every year as "Rizal Month." With this declaration, the Executive Branch has called upon the instrumentalities of the State as well as concerned organizations like the Knights of Rizal to help attain the "full impact" of Rizal’s martyrdom upon the nation.

In this regard, the Knights have been organizing a National Rizal Youth Leadership Institute where careerist adults impart melodious words about character-building to the upcoming public officials, managers and assorted bosses. The 44th Institute held December 17-21, 2006 in Baguio City was addressed by a former Supreme Court Chief Justice.

In any case, the Knights work hard to circulate Rizalism across the Islands and its Code of Ethics defines a "Rizalist" as someone who loves his country and people, promotes international understanding, venerates the memory of the nation’s heroes, strives to do justice, believes in the value of education and upholds freedom at all costs, among others.

If you want to join the Order, you can visit the Knights of Rizal Building on Bonifacio Drive, Port Area, Manila.

Going back to Rizal himself and his fellows, Juan Luna’s letter of December 21, 1890 asked Rizal for help in motivating Antonio Luna to finish his studies. "Please advise him and encourage him. That he lacks money to satisfy some comforts should not be the cause of such a general discouragement as he tells me. He does not lack the most essential, nor will he lack it. As for me and our brothers, Pepe and Joaquin, we have done all that we can. Now, it is his turn to do the rest and not to get discouraged about so little.

"Advise him to study constantly, and not as some of our countrymen do, who study only when examinations are approaching. In short, you know what it is to be a student and all our countrymen-students should be inspired by your example, as they are the hope of our people. A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year."

Rizal had another Yuletide greeting, this time addressed to Baldomero Roxas. "Please thank all good friends who telegraphed. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year."

"Let us see if you can preach to them with your example. Precisely at the present moment, when we are engaged in a struggle, it is necessary to redouble all our efforts, it is necessary to sacrifice everything for the welfare of our native land. Without virtue there is no liberty…Only virtues can redeem the slave. It is the only way to make the tyrants respect us and foreigners to make a common cause with us." [Paris, December 28, 1889]

Who will heed Rizal’s words in 2007?




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National hero a prisoner of myths


By Ambeth Ocampo

Inquirer

Last updated 05:22am (Mla time) 12/30/2006


LAST July, a sepia photograph made the rounds of e-mail and blogs that had the look of archival material and was titled “National Hero.”

While most people recognized that it was Manny Pacquiao’s head superimposed with the use of Photoshop techniques on what appeared to be Abraham Lincoln’s body, others imagined it to be a long-lost or newly discovered mug shot of the national hero Jose Rizal.

Fortunately, this urban legend was nipped in the bud before it could take on a life of its own. However, some legends never die, like the one that suggested that Rizal fathered Adolf Hitler or, even more fantastic, that our Rizal was the infamous Jack the Ripper, an unidentified murderer who killed and mutilated at least six prostitutes in the Whitechapel district in the East End of London in late 1888.

Bayani and hero are words that have been used so much, and indiscriminately at times, that they have lost the power to inspire a people that sorely needs heroes. There are many people with great hearts, looks, minds and deeds in this world, but the true hero is one who has passed on from the extraordinary to myth.

In September 1896, three months to the day he was executed in Bagumbayan, Rizal scribbled an entry in his journal reacting to “fanciful stories about me.” In his lifetime he was rumored to be, among many things, a German spy and a miracle worker.

He could not have known how myths and legends would continue to spin after his death making one of his journal entries prophetic. He wrote: “I’m going to become a legendary personage. Friends and enemies invent fabulous stories which elevate me and improbable stories to harm me and they find people who are considered educated to believe them.”


Hitler or Charlie Chaplin?

That Rizal fathered Hitler is the easiest to debunk and its documentary source easily traced. The argument is that Rizal had a German connection. He studied at Heidelberg University and, being quite the Pinoy Don Juan, he probably sired a son—why not a daughter?—who later turned out to be Adolf Hitler. Well, Hitler was born in 1889, but Rizal left Germany for good in 1887. Unless Hitler was a delayed baby, that is highly improbable.

Although there is no resemblance between the two, it is argued that unlike the tall, blond and blue-eyed Germans that Hitler wanted to propagate into the “master race,” Hitler himself was small of stature and had dark hair and dark eyes, similar to the many statues of Rizal that dot the archipelago. These monuments to Rizal actually look more like Charlie Chaplin.

Contrary to popular belief, Hitler was Austrian and not a German, so where is the Rizal connection there? Rizal visited Austria in May 1887 and, according to his traveling companion Max Viola, Rizal spent a night with an Austrian woman whose name eludes history.

In his memoirs Viola wrote that they were billeted at the Hotel Metropole in Vienna where Rizal, “encountered the figure of a temptress in the form of a Viennese woman, of the family of the Camellias or Margarite, of extraordinary beauty and irresistible attraction, who seemingly had been expressly invited to offer for a moment the cup of mundane pleasure to the apostle of Philippine freedom who until then had enjoyed among his intimates the fame worthy of his glorious namesake, St. Joseph. With the exception of this case I knew of no other slip of Rizal during more than six months of our living together.”

It’s amazing what yarns can be pulled from an alleged one-night stand with a Viennese prostitute.


Jack the Ripper

The Jack the Ripper legend is more recent but more complicated. Textbook history states that Rizal was in London from May 1888 to January 1889, spending time in the British Museum Library copying Antonio de Morga’s “Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas (1609)” by hand because there were no photocopying machines at the time. Jack the Ripper was active around this time and, since we do not know what Rizal did at night or on the days he was not in the library, Rizal is now suspect.

The argument is that when Rizal left London, the Ripper murders stopped. They say that Jack the Ripper must have had some medical training, based on the way his victims were mutilated. Rizal, of course, was a doctor. Jack the Ripper liked women, and so did our own Rizal. And—this is so obvious that many overlooked it—Jose Rizal’s initials, JR, perfectly match those of Jack the Ripper!

For someone who wrote a great deal on the most ordinary things, Rizal only made passing reference to Jack the Ripper in an essay on the Guardia Civil he wrote in the April 30, 1890 issue of La Solidaridad. Can this be added to the flimsy but growing list of circumstantial evidence to suspect Rizal?

Rizal’s name appears on the long list of suspects in the Jack the Ripper website. There is even a forum dedicated to Rizal, begun by a certain “Amateursleuth” who posts allegedly from Canada and signs these simply “Karen.” Her first posting lists the following data:

“In 1888, [Rizal] was staying with the Beckett family at 37 Chalcot Crescent in Camden [London]; he was a doctor (ophthalmologist); he was good with weapons (was called ‘the swordsman’); he was a Malay; he was proficient in the martial arts; he would have been 27 at the time of the Ripper killings; he was short, had dark skin, dark hair and dark eyes; he came from a well-to-do family, was well-dressed and looked respectable; he came to London on May 24, 1888 on the ship City of Rome; he left London in January of 1889, and the Ripper killings stopped; he was multi-talented (could speak many languages, was a writer, poet, author, sculptor, artist); he was executed in the Philippines on Dec. 30, 1896 at the age of 35; had a romantic relationship with Gertrude Beckett, the daughter of Charles Beckett; he wrote letters to his friend Blumentritt from London, however there were no letters written to his family or friends from July 1888 to Nov. 14, 1888; after he died, his mother tried to procure his assets which consisted of some pretty nice jewelry, including gold cuff links and other baubles of diamonds and amethysts (gold chain with a red stone seal?); I think this man warrants further investigation, which I intend to do.”


Foreign suspects

A photo of Rizal was then uploaded from an Argentine website, leading a certain Glenn Andersson, writer and historian, to remark:

“An interesting character; good luck with the research and come back with more when you can. With such South American features, I doubt that he fits in well with the possible sightings, but then on the other hand, we can’t be sure that any of those witnesses saw the Ripper anyway. After all, foreign suspects from those parts were under investigation by the police at the time.”

Then somebody remarked that Rizal was in Paris at a time that one of the victims, Annie Chapman, was cut up leading “Karen” to reply: “OK, maybe he didn’t kill Annie Chapman, but he had a friend called Dr. Antonio Regidor who could have killed her. Rizal stayed with him in London prior to moving in with the Becketts. Dr. Regidor was also from Manila. They were quite close.”

It was also noted that one of the Ripper victims was buried in the same cemetery where Regidor and his family now lie in peace. Karen later added: “Since Dr. Rizal was in Paris between Sept. 4 and Sept. 10, 1888, it is therefore impossible for him to have killed Annie Chapman. However, after some digging, I discovered that Rizal had a good friend named Dr. Reinhold Rost who lived approximately one block from the Becketts’ at 1 Elsworthy Terrace, Camden.”

Most incredible

The most incredible—and absolutely untrustworthy—piece of information is that sometime in January 1986, the present owners of the London apartment where Rizal stayed discovered a trunk in their attic that contained a diary in which Rizal confesses to the Whitechapel murders and a glass jar with half a human kidney preserved in alcohol!

All these tales are ridiculous, further proving that both in life and death Rizal continues to fascinate, and tales continue to be spun around him, keeping him current and interesting more than a century after his execution.


(The author is chair of the National Historical Institute and a columnist of the Inquirer. Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu)




Copyright 2006 Inquirer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.





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Remembering Rizal


By Isagani Cruz

Inquirer


Last updated 03:46am (Mla time) 12/30/2006



Published on page A10 of the December 30, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


TODAY is the 110th anniversary of the execution of Jose Rizal in Bagumbayan. Without meaning any sarcasm or reproof, I am wondering how many of our young people today appreciate the significance of that event which made our country free.

It is regrettable that what they may choose to remember is not the martyrdom of Rizal but the killing of John Lennon 26 years ago in New York. It was he who boasted that the Beatles had become more popular than Jesus Christ, and perhaps he was right. Some of their fans, including not a few from our own country, may really consider the songsters and their rock music more appealing.

I recently found that the 2006 calendar issued by the Supreme Court apparently does not place much importance either on Dec. 30. It is simply printed in red and called Rizal Day. There is a brief note that it marks the oath-taking of President Manuel L. Quezon in 1941 and President Ferdinand Marcos in 1969, both for their second terms. But there is no reminder of Rizal’s sacrifice in 1896 as if it did not deserve any mention at all.

If the Supreme Court assumed that every Filipino knows about Rizal, it must be out of step with the times. Many citizens may now simply take Rizal as the name of a province or the statue at the Luneta or that old memorial stadium in Manila. Even the plaster busts of him that used to adorn the old libraries in my grandfather’s time have disappeared. The Noli-Fili books are compulsory reading in our schools, but many students prefer Harry Potter.

Before the war, Rizal Day was celebrated with programs and parades mostly organized by the Veteranos de la Revolucion. But the Katipuneros are all gone like the former veneration of the hero. The memory of the great man is dissipating except in the usual street signs, which are mixed with reminders of the martial law period like Imelda Avenue and Marcos Highway. Marcos tried to replace Rizal as the foremost Filipino hero but his ugly cement face in La Union was mangled instead by his irate victims.

Remembrance of Rizal is fast disappearing when it ought to be cherished and honored by all Filipinos. It was he who, more effectively than any one else among his compatriots, unified the disparate inhabitants of our archipelago into one nation. It was he who made them share a common rage against the foreign intruder and a common aspiration for the freedom of their land.

Without him, and I say this without offense to those who followed his leadership and example, our people may still be under the yoke of some alien ruler. Consider that we were oppressed by Spain for more than three centuries and it was only when Rizal protested its villainies that Bonifacio’s armed revolution began to smolder. It was the execution of Gomburza, to whom Rizal dedicated the “Noli Me Tangere,” that ignited the spark of resistance against the Spanish government. But it was Rizal who fanned the flames into a bright conflagration.

Rizal awakened the national conscience from its lethargy not through the force of arms but with the armies of his pen. These were the “Noli” and “El Filibusterismo,” his “Letter to the Women of Malolos,” his youthful poems for the Motherland, his “Mi Ultimo Adios” that he secreted in a lamp in Fort Santiago hours before his death, and other irrefutable accusations against the Spaniards. His words were like mighty legions that won for our country the freedom we now enjoy.

Let not the idiot who once criticized me for speaking in English at a nationalistic program belittle Rizal’s writings because most of them were in the tyrant’s tongue. That jingoist who is now a National Artist must think his expertise in Tagalog has exalted his empty mind. Sentiments are best expressed in words one knows best and Spanish was for Rizal his sharp and avenging sword.

That is why, if I may digress, I heartily support the bill restoring English as the medium of instruction in our public schools. During the pre-war years, that educational policy made us the most proficient English-speaking people in the whole continent of Asia and many other parts of the world. English is still, along with Filipino, our official languages under our Constitution. Filipino is a beautiful language that is easily learned without formal instruction, but it is not useful for international communication.

To go back to Jose Rizal, I hope we can revive the reverent sentiments of gratitude to him for his efforts in releasing us from foreign bondage. Political rhetoric is not enough to keep his heroism alive. Let us remember that he forsook the enticements of his youthful and gifted life and embraced instead the ultimate sacrifice for the welfare of his country. That is the best homage we can pay the greatest hero of our race.



Copyright 2006 Inquirer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.





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Rizal’s ‘Kalinga’



Inquirer

Last updated 03:13am (Mla time) 12/30/2006


Published on page A10 of the December 30, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


IN INTERNAL exile in Dapitan, Jose Rizal set about teaching the children and making himself useful to the local community. The outline of a Philippine map he created has been restored. We only have a reproduction of the house in which he lived, but we can claim that one of Rizal’s teaching aids has survived down the generations. What Rizal set out to do in Dapitan, he always espoused in his writings: to devote his knowledge to the building of a civic consciousness that, he believed, was the bedrock of a positive political consciousness.

Rizal was always aware that even as he was hailed as a prophet, there would be others who would be more than willing to be false prophets. In his essay, “The Philippines a Century Hence,” he observed: “All the petty insurrections that have occurred in the Philippines were the work of a few fanatics or discontented soldiers, who had to deceive and humbug the people or avail themselves of their powers over their subordinates to gain their ends. So they all failed. No insurrection had a popular character or was based on a need of the whole race or fought for human rights or justice, so it left no ineffaceable impressions, but rather when they saw that they had been duped, the people bound up their wounds and applauded the overthrow of the disturbers of their peace! But what if the movement springs from the people themselves and based its causes upon their woes?”

It is an irony of history that the man so hated by the institutional Church of his time should have expressed what has become a central message of the Church under a native hierarchy: what we do not need, he might as well have said, was not Charter change but character change. Put another way, and with an example also dear to the hearts of present-day Filipino prelates, what Rizal advocated in his day has finally seen fruition in the present. For what Rizal set out to do was the 19th century’s first stirrings of the movement we now know as Gawad Kalinga.

If the past year has been one of political failure, then it has also been one of tremendous success for those who would put community building ahead of politicking. Revolutionary transitional councils, military withdrawals of support, “calibrated preemptive responses,” and impeachment complaints decided on the basis of the numbers and not the merits -- all these have been facets of a destructive, desperate and, yes, degenerate political system, while what has caught the world’s imagination and respect has been Gawad Kalinga.

Indeed, if leaders of both the opposition and the administration have found themselves acting like generals with no foot soldiers, commanders of political forces met with indifference by the great democratic mobilizers -- the middle -- it is because the middle has been in the thick of efforts such as Gawad Kalinga and conspicuously absent from the political field of battle.

But efforts to bring different social strata together, and which strive to find a way for different economic classes to work together and not against each other, are only a fresh start but can never be the end-all and be-all of community involvement. And this is where Rizal’s example can inspire those who have found meaning and satisfaction in community-building. If in the past, the disappointments born of both Edsa people power revolts led to a drifting away from political action, then those involved in efforts such as Gawad Kalinga have to realize their building communities cannot absolve them of their duty to build a better nation.

A better nation will not arise simply because houses have been built. The empowerment and the breaking of the chains of despair and social mistrust must lead to clean, credible elections and bring to power a national leadership that reflects and lives up to a renewed sense of civic virtue. The honors that have been rendered Gawad Kalinga, for example, aren’t laurels on which its volunteers should rest. They are, instead, challenges to expand its achievements in the public sphere.

The past year has seen political divisions deepen in our society, and yet there have been earnest efforts to close that divide, economically and socially. As it was in Rizal’s lifetime, the Filipino still waits for those who can bridge the gap between social and political action.



Copyright 2006 Inquirer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Vietnam's history of struggle against imperialism -Ngô Van

Revolutionary witness:

Ngô Van, Vietnam's history of struggle against imperialism



Vietnam's history of struggle against imperialism
"The International", n° 17, January 1996




Ngo Van was born in 1913 into a peasant family living in a village near Saigon. He started work at the age of 14 and from 1932 was active in the revolutionary anti-colonial struggle in Vietnam. During the 1930s and 1940s he participated as a Trotskyist militant in workers' and peasants' demonstrations, strikes and protests, undergoing, as did thousands, torture and imprisonment at the hands of the French rulers.
The working class in Vietnam was small, but Trotskyist activists were influential in the important industries, and encountered the ruthless hostility not only of the colonial regime but of the Communist Party of Indochina (PCI) under the leadership of Hô chi Minh.
Forced into exile in Paris in 1948, Ngo Van spent many years researching the history of these years of struggle, told in full in his two books published in 1995: Revolutionaries They Could Not Break: the fight for the Fourth International in Vietnam (Index Books, London) and Vietnam 1920-45: révolution et contre-révolution sous la domination coloniale (L'Insomniaque Éditeur, Paris).
Ngo Van, now in his 80s, was able to attend the launch of the English book in London. He prepared a talk giving a background to the events he describes, which had unfortunately to be curtailed due to the limited time available. We are pleased to be able to print it now, in full.

Comrades and friends: I thank you with all my heart for coming to hear me today, and a particular thank you to the comrades from Workers Press and Revolutionary History, who have organised this meeting.
I presume that you already know something of the struggle of the Indochinese comrades from 1930 to 1945 from my book Revolutionaries They Could Not Break. For those who have not read the book yet, I would like to speak about the essential elements of the history of this struggle, which took place over half a century ago in the Far East ­ almost the other side of the world ­ in a backward country very little known to the French, let alone other Europeans, a country which suffered almost a century of colonial imperialism.


Indochina in history

But first it is necessary to dwell briefly on the nature of Indochinese society and the history of colonial conquest. Before the conquest, the Indochinese kingdoms of Annam, Laos and Cambodia were agrarian societies of which the basic unit was the peasant family. It was essentially a subsistence economy, dominated by rice growing. Fishing, hunting and artisanry were all on a very small scale.
In this rural setting, the intelligentsia was considered superior to the other three classes ­ the farmers, the artisans and the merchants. The labouring people stood outside any official classification. The intelligentsia was composed of those who could read and write Chinese characters, who knew the religious rituals, who had studied the Confucian classics ­ canons of morality, political philosophy and ancient history.
From this class came the mandarins or administrators of the kingdom‹the bureaucracy of the feudal regime. Those who failed in a career as a mandarin became doctors and schoolteachers in the villages.
From this class came poets and writers who ensured the survival of traditional culture. But members of the intelligentsia were also in the leadership of peasant revolts against the throne, and at the heart of popular insurrections against colonial domination.
Until 1954 Vietnam was divided into three different countries: Tonkin in the north, Annam in the centre and Cochinchina in the south. In the sixteenth century the Viet territory consisted of Tonkin (the present-day North Vietnam) and the northern part of Annam, down to Hue.
In the seventeenth century, the Viets began their advance on the south, destroying the kingdom of the Chams, between Hue and south Annam: then they occupied Cochinchina (the modern South Vietnam), where the Khmers lived. From this sprang the traditional enmity between the Khmers (Cambodians) and the Viets, encouraged by the colonial government, which pitted one against another. In the twentieth century it has been exacerbated by the extreme nationalism of Pol Pot and Hô chi Minh, and remains a potentially explosive source of conflict in the region. Nationalism is indeed the scourge of our times.
Each communal village was administered by a council of notables, and enjoyed considerable autonomy and independence from the central regime. The council was composed of a dozen members nominated by the intelligentsia, the rich and/or the "virtuous", and was led by the oldest and wealthiest in the village. The mayor was in charge of collecting taxes; other notables were responsible for the police, education, religion.
Traditionally, there existed a form of collective ownership. Paddy fields and other land was communally owned: the land was reassigned among villagers periodically and "fairly". A decree of 1897 alleviated the situation of the poor by forcing rich peasants to give three-tenths of their land to the commune.
The colonial administration failed to take account of the social character of this "collective" tradition which prevented any individual from falling into desperate economic straits. After the French took power, communal land was too often seized by the notables and the rich landowners. After the colonial takeover, only 2.5 per cent of the land in Cochinchina was still collectively owned, whereas before the French came "the land was owned entirely by the villages" (Jobbe Duval, La Commune Annamite, p. 42). During the colonial era the land was leased by process of law, and consequently inaccessible to the poor. The French, however, did retain the commune as the basic administrative unit, together with the councils of notables.
Merchants and missionaries first from Portugal and Spain then from the Low Countries and from England had been arriving in Indochina since the sixteenth century. French missionaries installed themselves from the seventeenth century onwards. Evangelicism and mercantilism ­ the cross and the counting house ­ were the forerunners of colonial conquest.
Christianity threatened not only traditional religion, but also the Confucian social order on which rested the authority of the aristocracy and the monarchy. But the aristocracy tolerated the missionaries because they needed them as intermediaries in obtaining arms from the western powers.
During the seventeenth century, the Viet people suffered under the rival powers of north (the Trinh) and south (the Nguyen): the civil war lasted from 1627 to 1787. The wars of the rival lords hastened the country's ruin and brought untold misery to the population.
In 1772, the peasants of Tay son, a village in south Annam, overthrew their local lords: two of their leaders installed themselves as kings and founded the Tay son dynasty (1776-1801).


Vietnam under the French

At the end of the eighteenth century, the epoch of the French Revolution, one of the Nguyen aristocrats of the south succeeded in taking over the whole country, from the Chinese border to the tip of Camau. This was done with the help of French missionaries, merchants, and deserters from the French king's ships moored at Pondicherry in India.
In 1801 he made Hue his capital and proclaimed himself emperor Gia long, founding the Nguyen dynasty which lasted until the 1940s. Nationalists and historians of all kinds have glorified Gia long as the unifier of the "Annamite fatherland". In reality, his l9-year reign saw the imposition of forced labour and taxes on the population: many villagers had to give up their land.
From 1802 to 1883, Gia long and his successors put down more than 400 uprisings by peasants and ethnic minorities, of which the best known were those of Phan ba Van (1826-27) and Ta van Phung (1862-65).


In gratitude to the missionaries, Gia long gave them the freedom 'o propagate the Catholic religion. But his successors revoked this, promulgating anti-Christian laws which called it a perverse religion which:

allowed for no rites for dead relatives, plucked the eyes from corpses to make a magic potion for hypnotising the people... The European priests, who are the most guilty, will be thrown into the sea with a stone around their necks... The Annamite priests will be tried to see if they will renounce their heresy. If they refuse, they will be marked on the face and e~iled to the unhealthiest places in the empire.

Many French and Spanish missionaries were beheaded.
Napoleon III launched a 'Catholic crusade', under the pretext of defending the missionaries and protecting those who had converted to Christianity, to win the support of Catholics at home in France. In two decades, through gunboat diplomacy and a series of punitive treaties imposed on the Annamite monarchy, the French bourgeoisie consolidated its hold on Vietnam.
Marx, writing in the New York Daily Tribune of 8 August 1853 about British colonialism in India, said 'the profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarity of bourgeois civilisation is revealed when it ventures out of its native surroundings, where it takes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it shows itself in its true colours.'

The capture of Saigon in 1859 was followed by the almexation of the whole of Cochinchina, which was completed in 1867.
The intelligentsia and the mandarins, threatened with the extinction of the regime of which they were the mainstay, joined with the peasants in a desperate struggle against the invader.
Bien hoa insurgents declared in December 1862:

Your country belongs to the west, ours to the east. We are as different as the horse and the buffalo, in our language, our writing and our customs... You have ships and guns, no one can stop you... But we are bound in gratitude to our king... If you continue to bnng us death and destruction, the price will be chaos without end. But we are following Heaven's laws: Heaven will help us and our cause will triumph in the end... Therefore we pledge ourselves to unending and inexorable struggle.

The French Third Republic, proclaimed on 4 September 1870, pressed on with the conquest of Vietnam. Jules Ferry, president of the council, characterised its colonial policy in this way:

Colonisation is the child of industrialisation. For the rich countries, where capital abounds and rapidly accumulates, where manufacturing enterprises are constantly growing... export is essential for general prosperity and potential of capital, and consequently the demand for labour is directly related to the extent of the foreign market.

After the occupation of Tonkin by the French, the royal court at Hue signed a treaty on 6 June 1884, accepting the French protectorate. In 1874, after the loss of the Cochinchinese provinces, the Annamite intelligentsia called on the people to 'chase out the Westerners and exterminate the practitioners of a perverse religion.' Thousands attacked Catholic villages. The movement was put down by the pro-French monarchy, and Christians avenged themselves by setting fire to the houses where non-Christians lived. In 1885, in response to a provocation, the Hue court launched a surprise attack against the French.
The king fled, and the mandarins and notables organised a rebellion which spread to the whole of Annam. To enforce 'pacification', the French brought up battalions of artillery, and the insurgents were faced with columns of soldiers under the command of the French. The rebellion was finally quashed in 1896, and the king deported to Algeria.
Thereafter the Hue court was to became the instrument of French domination‹but not always a docile one, as is shown by the deportation of two more kings to Île de la Réunion in 1909 and 1916.


French Indochina

From 1887 Indochina fell under the authority of a governor general based in Hanoi, who controlled administrative and military power in all five countries‹the kingdoms of Annam, Tonkin, Cambodia and Laos, which were protectorates, and the colony of Cochinchina. In the protectorates, the monarchy was under the control of the French presidents.
Cochinchina was directly administered by France through the governor of Cochinchina. A French administrator controlled every province, whereas in Annam and Tonkin, the mandarin in charge of a province was under the orders of a French resident.
A poll tax was instituted, and

salt, alcohol and opium monopolies were set up. The poll tax and salt tax, combined with the setting up of forced labour gangs to build the roads and canals, were the main sparks for the peasant revolts in 1908 and 1930.
Colonisation was to drag a country with a so-called 'Asiatic' mode of production out of its isolation, and impose a capitalist mode of production on it, transform it into a source of raw materials like coal, minerals, rubber, rice, cotton, to feed the industries in the metropolitan countries and to provide a market for exports manufactured in France. The colonisers found in Cochinchina a huge reservoir of cheap labour.
Exploitation of Indochina on this scale began around 1900. The first mineral industry started in 1889. Mines, the big conglomerates (dredging, public utilities, electricity, cement, distilleries), transport, all the new industries, gave rise to a pronounced social differentiation in a matter of a few decades.
The proletariat, born in conditions approaching slavery, was concentrated mainly in the coal mines of Tonkin, in the rubber plantations of Cochinchina and Cambodia, which belonged to the French conglomerates. In the towns, coolies‹ those who did hard, unskilled work‹and workers in native bourgeois enterprises were no less exploited than their counterparts in French and Chinese factories.
Traditionally, the homes of these coolies and workers were in the countryside. The peasantry constituted the majority of the population. The rich peasants were small proprietors who employed agricultural workers; the middle peasants cultivated their own paddy fields; the poor peasants possessed so little land they could not even feed their families, and had to sell their labour power, as did millions of landless peasants, the agricultural proletariat.
The poor peasants became farmers by renting land from landowners, who lent money at very high rates of interest. As well as paying rent for his paddy, the peasant had to work free for the proprietor for a certain number of days and take him presents on feast days. Always in debt, they were often reduced to the status of serfs, tied for life to the landowner. Those with no land, such as day workers and domestic servants, made up a dispersed agricultural proletariat, superexploited by the landowners and the rich peasants.
The landowning class was formed through the conquest - of Cochinchina by the French, and the confiscation of land abandoned by the old landowners who had been driven out by war. They increased their land through confiscations and seizures, by order or with the complicity of the French, as payment for their collaboration in the war of conquest and in the repression of rebels.
In Cochinchina in 1950, 2.5 per cent of the landholders controlled 45 per cent of the cultivated land. They increased their holdings through usury and plunder, with the tacit connivance of the colonial administration, to the detriment of the small peasants.
Landlords grew rich from the rent of land and from the rice paddies. They borrowed money from the Bank of Indochina and practised usury on a huge scale in the countryside. Through an intermediary, the landlord exploited the peasant through land rent‹ the basis of the feudal economy. But capitalist characteristics predominated over the remnants of feudalism, and finance capital held sway. It was not, as the Stalinists characterised it, a 'semi-feudal economy'.
The native bourgeoisie came out of the landed class. Most of them were also landlords. This section arose suddenly, artificially, and never succeeded in finding a place in the capitalist colonial system. Industrial development was barred to them to prevent competition with metropolitan industries, so they had to remain content with involvement in industries connected with agriculture (cloth, soap making, dehusking rice, and so on). They hardly formed part of the colonial regime, since the French capitalists had found in the Chinese more effective allies.
In 1925, they formed the Constitutionalist Party, demanding a constitution which would give them access to power. The colonial leaders agreed that they should be elected to consultative assemblies, such as colonial, municipal and provincial councils.
Both the indigenous bourgeoisie and the landlords owed their entire existence to imperialism. They always took the side of the colonial power against any revolutionary movement, always favouring a Franco-Vietnamese collaboration.
Intermediate layers grew up among the big social classes: artisans, small traders, teachers, intellectuals‹all constituted the petty bourgeoisie.
The intelligentsia, if one could give that title to the group of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois intellectuals, were faced with an unstable social situation that offered them no prospects. Colonial society consigned them to subordinate roles in every sphere. From the 1920s, this layer was the revolutionary contingent which took action against the colonial regime, a military and police dictatorship ever since its establishment.


Struggle against imperialism

We have already mentioned the two bloody rebellions by monarchists against the French occupation, that of the intellectuals from 1860-74 and of the mandarins from 1885-1896. Both were decisively crushed and, from 1897 onwards, the French enjoyed supreme power.
From 1900, intellectuals formed two different tendencies reflecting the aspirations of an indigenous bourgeoisie striving for modernisation. The first, in Annam, was led by the intellectual Phan chau Trinh. It was republican and democratic, demanding administrative reforms and modern training for industry from the protectorate‹to no avail. The second, epitomised by the intellectual Phan boi Chau, was monarchist, looking simultaneously towards education and a war of liberation, and seeking the support of Japan.
These reformers were decimated in 1908 during serious peasant disturbances in Annam against the poll tax and forced labour. Many were beheaded or deported to Poulo Condore. The partisans were utterly crushed in their terrorist attempts in 1913, as well as in their military campaigns of 1914-16, during the first world war.
In the 1920s we see the birth of a new nationalism, drawing in the young, French-educated intelligentsia. Four nationalist revolutionary groups sprang up between 1925 and 1929: the Tan Viet (New Vietnamese Revolutionary Party, 1925-29); the Hoi kin Nguyen an Ninh (Nguyen an Ninh Secret Society, 1928-29); the Viet nam quoc dan dang (VNQDD, National Party of Vietnam, 1927-30); and the Thanh nien (Association of Young Revolutionary Comrades, 19251930, which was to become the Indochinese Communist Party).
Faced with a colonial regime which would concede not even the most elementary democratic rights (freedom of the press, of communication, of association, of meeting, of travel... ), a regime which felt itself to be permanently under threat, these groups imposed on themselves an iron discipline. On pain of death, members were obliged to keep totally secret the affairs of their party and not speak of them even to relatives, friends and acquaintances. It was a dark, silent world.
Their common aim was to 'make revolution' through an armed insurrection, 'to free our country from the yoke of imperialism'.
For the Tan Viet, the final objective was the establishment of a socialist republic. The Nguyen an Ninh Secret Society would achieve, they said, some kind of agrarian socialism. The National Party of Vietnam (homologous with the Kuomintang) wanted a democratic republic. None of these three sought foreign help. The Thanh nien, created on the initiative of the Third International in 1925, had the perspective of founding a socialist republic in the image of the USSR. All drew members from the cultured middle classes. Both the Tan Viet and the Secret Society were destroyed by the repression of 1929.


The explosions of 1930

The National Party was annihilated after the failure of the Yen Bay insurrection on the night of 9-10 February, 1930, in Tonkin. Those who escaped took refuge in China. The party was not to reappear in Vietnam until 1945. The Trotskyist militant Ta thu Thau wrote of this attempted putsch:

It was the work of the left nationalist faction, which attracted students influenced by the Chinese revolution, and supporters of Sunyatsenism (a synthesis of democracy, nationalism and socialism), a faction which opted for the violent overthrow of imperialism.

Yen Bay, he added, was 'a barely organised revolt, localised, lacking contact with the civilian population and ideologically unprepared.'
The Indochinese Communist Party entered on the scene on 1 May 1930. The Thanh nien had a training school for militants at Canton, in China, and since 1925 had put down roots in Vietnam, with a proto-Bolshevik nationalist ideology. Reorganised in February 1930 as the Indochinese Communist Party (PCI), it was able, only three months later, to launch the peasant movement of 1 May.
The Vietnamese Trotskyist Left Opposition was formed in France in 1930. After the February demonstration in Paris against the death sentences on the Yen Bay insurgents, many comrades were deported from France to Saigon. The stalinists met them with thousands of leaflets denouncing them as counter-revolutionaries.
After the failure of the 1930-31 peasant movement and the crushing of the peasant soviets of Nghe Tinh in northern Annam, an opposition faction was formed inside the PCI, in north Annam, and the Baclieu-Camau region of Cochinchina. Those who had returned from France contacted the latter group and the Indochinese Left Opposition or Ta Doi Lap was launched in November 1931 in absolutely clandestine conditions.
The organisation was broken up in August 1932, with 65 arrests. The trial of 21 militants of the Left Opposition took place in Saigon on 1 May 1933, followed by that of 122 PCI militants from 3-7 May. Eight were condemned to death.
The United Front between the Stalinists and Trotskyists of 1933-37‹known as 'La Lutte' ('Struggle') was a last resort. Out of this came the splits in the Trotskyist organisation, at the time of the Laval-Stalin pact (1935), the Moscow trials (1936) and the Popular Front (1936).
The programme of the PCI from 1930 to 1935 was based on internationalism and the class struggle: it called for the overthrow of the imperialist colonial power. In 1935, the Laval-Stalin pact sealed the alliance between France and the USSR. The PCI followed the line of the French Communist Party (PCF), accepting the integrity of the French empire and choosing to 'defend France, which is threatened in Indochina' and calling for 'the defence of our country and our race'.
In 1936, the Stalinists defended the Popular Front, which upheld French imperialist rule in Indochina. The Trotskyists criticised this policy, and as a consequence won the confidence of the majority of workers in Saigon-Cholon. Their influence extended into the provincial centres.
The break-up of the united front, La Lutte, in 1937, was carried out by the PCF on orders from Moscow. The Trotskyists called for the building of a party of the Fourth International, which had been proclaimed by Trotsky in 1938.
War broke out on 3 September 1939, and wholesale arrests followed of all oppositionists‹Stalinists, Trotskyists, nationalists, members of politico-religious sects. They were sent in their thousands to the island prison of Poulo Condore or to the concentration camps.
After the Hitler-Stalin pact in August 1939, the PCI stopped collaborating with the French 'for the defence of Indochina' against Japan. In an abrupt about-turn, it launched a peasant insurrection in Cochinchina in November 1940‹ despite the repression, the party could still call on considerable forces in the countryside.
The uprising was quickly crushed, shelled and machine-gunned by Cambodian artillery. Thousands of villagers were massacred, 5,846 arrested (the official figure), 221 condemned to death (of whom 181 were actually executed), 216 sent to hard labour camps and a thousand to prison.
In July of this year Nguyen ai Quoc, the future Hô chi Minh, wrote in a report to the Comintern:

As far as the Trotskyists are concerned, concessions are out of the question. We should do everything to unmask them as fascist agents. They must be politically exterminated.

This call for 'extermination' was to be answered, and between 1945 and 1951 PCI activists were to systematically assassinate any Trotskyists who fell into their hands.
In 1945, events proceeded rapidly. On 9 March, French rule, which had survived for 80 years against generations of conspiracies and peasant uprisings, was ended in one night by the Japanese army, who installed themselves as sole masters of Indochina under martial rule.
In July, as the defeat of Japan drew closer, Truman, Churchill and Stalin decided at Potsdam how the country would be occupied: by the Chinese army from the extreme north down to the 17th parallel, and by Indo-British troops in the south.
On 18 August, after the Japanese surrender, Hô chi Minh took advantage of the political vacuum. Under his leadership, the Vietminh‹a nationalist organisation led by the PCI‹and its guerrilla fighters took power in Hanoi. On the 23rd they captured Hue, before the arrival of the occupying Chinese army, and on the 25th they proclaimed in Saigon the establishment of the Vietminh government in the south, pre-empting the coming of the Indo-British troops.
'All the nationalist parties at this time were pro-Chinese or pro-japanese, and together with the politico-religious sects were preparing the armed struggle against colonial reconquest and for independence. The two Trotskyist groups were also preparing. The La Lutte group proposed to work with the Stalinists to form an armed united front, but the Ligue des Communistes Internationaliste (International League of Communists), the other group, organised a workers' militia with the perspective of fighting independently of the Vietminh, for national liberation and the emancipation of the proletariat and the poor peasants, under the red flag and with the anthem of the 'Internationale'.
For a year, from 1945 to December 1946, that is, up to the beginning of the Indochinese war, Hô chi Minh consolidated his hold on power. He did this through manoeuvring and negotiating with the Chinese, the French and the Americans, and through the physical elimination of all other nationalist tendencies.
Workers and peasants were also reacting to the vacuum of power in the country. Still outside the totalitarian control of the Vietminh, 30,000 miners in Hon Gay elected their own councils to control mineral production. They took control of all the public services in the area, the railways, the telegraph system, and applied the principal of equal wages for all workers, manual or professional. Illiteracy was tackled and attempts were made to begin a welfare system. This new order reigned from August to November, 1945, to the apparent indifference of the Japanese.
But this movement was isolated and soon government troops encircled the area. When the miners refused to submit to the requirements of 'national unity', three elected workers' leaders were arrested by the Vietminh, who then replaced the people's councils with a new hierarchy‹the military-police regime of the 'democratic republic'.
The Trotskyists called for the land to be given to the peasants and the factories to the workers‹in other words, the implementation of the 1930 programme of the PCI. In one province of Cochinchina, the peasants began taking over the land: the de facto Vietminh government in Saigon immediately forbade this and instituted severe penalties for any act of expropriation.
At Tra vinh, the peasants began to share out the land, the livestock and agricultural implements. To conciliate the landlords, the Vietminh stopped these actions and forced the peasants to hand back what they had taken. This made the Vietminh very unpopular among the poor peasants. In numerous provincial centres and villages, notably in north Annam and in Tonkin, people's committees ordered the distribution of the land and the confiscation of goods of the rich. In November 1946 a Vietminh government circular to the provincial committees decreed that 'no paddy fields or cultivated land must be shared out'. It re-established a pyramid hierarchy of government, whereby the executive committee of each region was to be responsible for the implementation of government orders and every component of the pyramid was to control the one immediately below it. This is what the Stalinists called 'democratic government'.
The Commissioner for the Interior, Nguyen van Tao, issued threats against Trotskyists who sided with the peasants and agricultural workers. He wrote:

Those who urged the peasants to expropriate the landlords will be ruthlessly punished. The communist revolution, which will solve the agrarian problem, has not yet taken place. Ours is a democratic and bourgeois government, even though it is communists who are in

Tao was conveniently forgetting that the division of land among the peasants was, according to PCI theory in 1930, a task which the bourgeois-democratic government had to accomplish before passing over to the socialist revolution. Instead, the Vietminh had returned to the days of the Thanh nien, of 'national revolution' (national unity for independence) before any agrarian reform.
Let us return to the Trotskyists, chief target of the Stalinists. In Saigon, on the evening of "3 September, Le van Vung, secretary of the Saigon-Cholon comittee of La Lutte, was murdered outside his house. Some days later, the teacher Nguyen thi Loi who, like van Vung, had been instrumental in reviving La Lutte after the Japanese surrender, was killed in Cholon.
The month of October saw the worst of Stalinist crimes, with the assassination of Trotskyists and sympathisers throughout Cochinchina. The lawyer Hinh thai Thong was surprised by the Vietminh as he chaired a meeting of delegates from neighbouring village action committees: they were all arrested and he was murdered. His body was to be discovered only in 1951, along with a hundred other corpses who had been tortured, at Quon long.
The Co giai phong, organ of the PCI central committee, urged the slaughter of Trotskyists in its edition of 23 October 1945, justifying it in these terms:

At Nam bo, they [the Trotskyists] demand the arming of the people... and the completion of the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, with the aim of splitting the national front and provoking opposition from the landlords to the revolution.


And today?

The so-called 'victory of the heroic little people' in Vietnam was due to the Cold War between the Sino-Russian bloc and the USA. Without Russian and Chinese arms and advisers, Dien bien phu would have been inconceivable, as would the 'defeat' of the United States in the second stage.
Certainly, Hô chi Minh's party won the war, but did the Vietnamese people win anything more than slavery? In Indochina, the militants of the Fourth International fought to involve coolies, workers and poor peasants in political struggle, with the perspective that only a proletarian revolution can bring a true and lasting solution to the national and agrarian questions. They disappeared during the battle against

colonial reconquest, but due chiefly to the methodical assassinations ordered by Hô chi Minh. He, as a good pupil of his Kremlin masters, could not tolerate their intransigent adherence to the class struggle, their refusal to unite with the bourgeoisie and the landlords, their internationalism as opposed to the nationalism of the Stalinists.
The small proletariat, with as yet scarcely any revolutionary consciousness, was not able to take the lead in the liberation movement. The Stalinist party came to power through the terrible suffering and sacrifice of millions of peasants, who were rewarded by their renewed enslavement to the nationalist bureaucracy, as a workforce necessary for the primitive accumulation of capital... for the sole profit of a new variety of moneygrabbers.
'National independence' become dependence: the country, a satellite of the so-called Soviet empire, found itself caught up in the confrontation between the two great 'Party States', battling for power in southeast Asia. Its 'communist' army, revitalised by the Russians, drove out the 'communist' Pol Pot, protégé of the Chinese, and occupied Cambodia for a decade (1979-89).
The Vietnamese bureaucracy, this new ruling caste of the 'Socialist Republic of Vietnam', with its 'cultivated middle-class' background, master of a hierarchical one-party state, has done nothing but replace the bourgeoisie and the landowners in exploitation of the proletariat and the peasantry.
The working class today is even smaller, the new mandarins rule over producers who still do not enjoy collective ownership of the means of production, nor time for reflection, nor the possibility of making their own decisions, nor means of expression, nor the right to strike. A bureaucratic order reigns over social misery and inequality, with its military-police regime, its nomenklatura essentially motivated by careerism.
Ever since 1956, after Khrushchev's 'secret speech' on the crimes of Stalin, some poets and writers have dared to break the apparent consensus. In December of that year, Hô chi Minh issued a decree banning all opposition publications‹the penalty was indefinite imprisonment.
In November 1956, a serious peasant revolt ousted the bureaucrats in Nghe an, after agricultural reforms were arbitrarily decided. Fifteen thousand innocent people were executed, according to a report by the Ministry of Security in 1956, unearthed in 1961 in the Hanoi archives. In other words, an average of five executions in each of the 3,014 communes involved in the uprising. Estimates of the number shot put this at around 50,000. Many more peasants were thrown into prison or deported.
In 1975, after the unification of the country, agrarian reform in Cochinchina was no less disappointing. Demonstrations such as those by the peasants of the Mekong Delta and the Plaine des Joncs indicate the extent of injustice and oppression at this time.
A brutal collectivisation decimated livestock and in many places peasants themselves pulled their ploughs instead of buffalo. The hasty and equally brutal expropriation of commercial and industrial

The International No. 17 January 1996 enterprises, together with new laws on fishing, brought economic chaos and provoked the emigration of more than a million people. Social malaise grew to such an extent that internal party criticism burst out into the open.
On 21 December 1986, the Nhan dan (The People), the Communist Party's daily paper, published a statement by Duong quang Dong, party member in the south since 1930:

For eleven years now, the party has shown itself to be incapable of providing a single grain of rice, portion of meat or drop of brine; it has even been incapable of stabilising prices. The people are suffering too much... The best solution would be for the party to give them the freedom to produce, to live, to study.

On 27 October, 1988, Tran van Giau in Saigon wrote in the paper Tuoi tre (Young Age):

How did we revolutionaries manage to create such an unprecedentedly bureaucratic state? The province of Thanh hoa itself contains more functionaries than the whole Indochinese colonial apparatus. How can the country countenance such a state? I am over 70, and I have never seen the peasants as poor as they are now: once the harvest is over, they've nothing left to eat. Why? Because they are forced to sustain a bureaucracy as disproportionate as it is inefficient.

In 1989, Le quang Dao, a member of the PCI central committee and president of the National Assembly, declared :

Party dictatorship has taken the place of the dictatorship of the working class... the result is a totalitarial regime based on privilege... a regime based on social injustice which provokes revolt.

More recently, in October 1991, the novel The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh was published; it evoked the terrible drama lived out by the 27th brigade from 1959 to 1975, until the capture of Saigon, which was witnessed by only ten out of the original 500 members of the brigade.

Those who survived went on living, but their most ardent hope... was not realised... Look around you: isn't this post-war life mundane, coarse and violent? It seems to me that the masks of the past years have fallen, and everyone now reveals their true horrific faces. So much blood and bone lost, and for what?

The author does not condemn the war, without which 'there would have been no peace', but neither does he condemn the desertion of his anti-hero:

I am not afraid of dying, but to be always killing, it's destroying what is human in us... How many bastards are sitting back making a mint out of this war, while the peasant sons have to harden their hearts and go, leaving behind old mothers with the sky as their curtain and the earth as their mat... Victory or defeat... that means nothing to me any more... I've already killed too much.

In November 1991 Bui Tin, editor of Nhan dan, organ of the party central committee, left the government while on official business in ~aris‹a sure sign of the political and economic crisis ravaging the country. He said:

Our present situation concerns every Vietnamese person... bureaucracy, irresponsibility, egoism, corruption, fraud, are allowed free rein under this arrogant regime of privilege. The Communist Party of Vietnam is still firmly rooted in Stalinism and Maoism, in a tendency which is feudal, peasant, idealist, paternalist, authoritarian: it is conservative and degenerate, a complete stranger to any democratic instinct.

Russian aid has dried up; Chinese aid comes with punitive conditions; the bureaucracy is now appealing to foreign capitalist powers and an economic commission is discussing the 'free market economy'.
Whatever the problems which confront us, we know that what was called 'communism' in Vietnam, as in the USSR and China, was in fact a criminal and barren travesty, a kind of state capitalism, a politico economic monstrosity run for the benefit of a greedy, unscrupulous bureaucracy. This 'communism', in fact non-existent, used lying terms to disguise the bonds of its new form of slavery.
How could some historians apply the formulation 'national communism' to the unjust, unhappy regime of Hô chi Minh?
The Marxist utopia of a free, open, rational world order without classes and without capitalism, and therefore without exploitation and national antagonisms, has not been achieved anywhere in the twentieth century. Totalitarian, nationalist Stalinism, with its oppression, its lies and its assassinations, has presented a distorted picture of such a society.
Ho chi Minh, who always claimed allegiance to Marx and Lenin, did nothing but follow exactly the line of the Moscow bureaucracy as laid down by Stalin, its master‹down to the last wretched detail. So, in the 1940s, he called himself, and even signed documents as, 'Uncle Ho'‹a name with all the associations of a revered tutor in traditional Confucian society. When he gained power in Hanoi

At the age of 55, he proclaimed himself 'Father Ho'. In the hagiographical biography written by him but signed Tran dan Tien, An account of the active life of President Ho, we read:

President Hô chi Minh does not want to say anything about his own life... A man like our president, so virtuous and modest, and so busy, how could he tell me about his life... We have other great national heroes... but President Hô alone was able to complete the job... The people call him 'Father of the Nation-because he is the most loyal son of the Vietnamese fatherland.

In his testament the 'Father of the Nation', who died on 2 September 1969, expressed his wish that there should be no grand funeral rites:

I ask that my body should be burned... My ashes divided into three parts, one sent to the north, one to the centre and one to the south. My compatriots in these areas should choose a hill to bury the urn. I wish for no tombstone nor bronze statue, but instead a simple shelter, large and shady, so that visitors can rest there. A plan should be made to plant trees around the hillside. Each of my visitors could plant a tree of remembrance. . . The care of the place could be entrusted to elderly people.

What a way for the elderly to end their days‹caring for a hillside shrine!
In fact, after his death the Hanoi bureaucrats had Hô embalmed. The personality cult during his life was followed by the worship of his mummy on show in a mausoleum; Stalin did the same with Lenin's remains (one can imagine how sarcastically Lenin would have greeted such a proposal).
In Moscow, now, people are saying it is time to end this form of fetishism. Will the same happen in Hanoi tomorrow?
What is not in doubt is that one day, the oppressed and exploited masses will rise up and put an end to their suffering. That is our profound hope and conviction.




http://chatquipeche.free.fr/Revolutionary_witness.html

"Gangs of New York": Fact vs. Fiction --National Geographic News

"Gangs of New York": Fact vs. Fiction

by Ted Chamberlain

for National Geographic News

Updated March 24, 2003

Nominated for the Best Picture Oscar at the 2003 Academy Awards, director Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York brings to life 19th-century Manhattan's Five Points neighborhood. But what was it really like to live in what was once the world's most notorious slum?

Good-time girls swing from rafters in oversize canary cages, sword-slinging mobs rule the streets, and murder lurks in every corner. This is Manhattan's infamous Five Points slum, inhabited by Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz, and Daniel Day-Lewis in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York. But is it the real Five Points?

Digging through layers of sediment and stacks of records, archaeologists and historians are unearthing a truer, though no less compelling, picture of the neighborhood Charles Dickens called "a world of vice and misery."

When Dickens reported on Five Points in 1842, the neighborhood was on the edge of an explosion. Spurred on by the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s, waves of threadbare immigrants arrived in New York City with the wherewithal for only the most miserable lodgings—the drooping tenements of Five Points.

For the next two decades, the Irish ruled Five Points, overcrowding a roughly five-square-block area centered on the intersection of Cross Street (today's Park Street), Anthony Street (today's Worth), and Orange Street (today's Baxter). (See an 1859 view.)

In Five Points tenements, families and other groups lived crammed into one or two dark rooms. The outhouses were too few and often overflowing. Sewage and pigs ran in the streets. "The whole neighborhood just stank," says historian Tyler Anbinder, who wrote the book Five Points and reviewed the Gangs script for Scorsese.

Some holding camphor-soaked kerchiefs to their noses to ward off the stench, middle-class tourists would go "slumming" in Five Points—escorted by police—to see if the lurid tales given by reporters and missionaries were true.

"Five Points," wrote one Methodist reformer, had become "the synonym for ignorance the most entire, for misery the most abject, for crime of the darkest dye, for degradation so deep that human nature cannot sink below it."

Much of what was written in newspapers, tracts, and books, says archaeologist Rebecca Yamin, was colored by religious zeal, a desire to sell papers, or plain-old fear. "Middle-class outsiders looked at this neighborhood that was teeming with activity and street people selling food, and it was frightening. They just looked from the outside and assumed it was all very bad."


Exhuming Five Points

Yamin has as clear a view of tenement life as anyone. From 1992 to 1998 she led the team that analyzed 850,000 pieces of the Five Points puzzle—artifacts unearthed during the construction of a federal courthouse in what used to be Five Points. Housed at the World Trade Center, nearly the entire collection was destroyed on 9/11, but not before it had been inventoried for posterity.









"Gangs of New York": Fact vs. Fiction


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Taken together, the artifacts and historical records paint a picture of hard-working immigrants trying to make the best of a bad situation, and to make a home of a hovel. "They were doing what they could do for their families to live respectably," Yamin says. "They had ornaments on their mantels and pictures on their walls and teapots and teacups, and they were eating very well."

Even here meat was often on the table three times a day, animal remains and historical accounts show.

"In the Scorsese movie you have these scenes in a basement where there are skulls in the corners and people are draped in rags," Yamin says. "We didn't see anything to suggest that people were living like that. There were certainly no skulls rolling around in people's rooms." And few pewter cups, for that matter.

Watching the movie, Yamin says, "the thing I really noticed was those pewter mugs everyone was drinking out of. Well, they stopped drinking out of those in the 18th century."

Yamin recalls showing movie researchers, who visited her team to research period furnishings, the little glass tumblers Five Pointers drank from. Laughing, she says, "In other words, they didn't learn anything from us."

Historian Anbinder agrees with Yamin's appraisal of Five Pointers: "Most of them had real, legal jobs." Many were shoemakers, tailors, masons, grocers, cigarmakers, liquor dealers, and laborers.

"They were saving money, trying to improve their lives and bring loved ones over from Europe." But, he adds, "some of the hard-to-believe stereotypes are true."


"Every House a Brothel"

"Every house was a brothel, and every brothel a hell," wrote Five Points missionary Lewis Pease. New York Tribune reporter George Foster added in 1850, "It is no unusual thing for a mother and her two or three daughters—all of course prostitutes—to receive their 'men' at the same time in the same room."

Their claims aren't so far-fetched, though children seldom worked as prostitutes. In Five Points, Anbinder writes, police records reveal that, "for the blocks radiating from the Five Points intersection, nearly every building did house a brothel" in the 1840s and '50s.


The Real Gangs of New York

Scorsese based his movie on Herbert Asbury's 1927 book The Gangs of New York. But the names of the legendary Five Points gangs—the Bowery Boys (see photo), the Dead Rabbits, the Plug Uglies, the Short Tails, the Slaughter Houses, the Swamp Angels—may be among the few things that Asbury, who did little original research, got right, according to historians.

The perception of Five Points as an unrelievedly dangerous place is exaggerated, Anbinder says. "I looked at the statistics, and other than public drunkenness and prostitution, there was no more crime in Five Points than in any other part of the city."

"The book The Gangs of New York says there was one tenement where there was a murder a day. At the period of time he was writing about, there was barely a murder a month in all of New York City," Anbinder says.

Writing in the Al Capone era, Asbury interpreted the Five Points gangs as the precursors of 1920s organized-crime mobs, Anbinder says. Scorsese, the director of Mafia classics such as Goodfellas and Mean Streets, seizes on this idea in Gangs. "That's one of the big problems with the movie," Anbinder says.

In fact, gangs like the Dead Rabbits and Bowery Boys were political clubs that met at nights and on weekends to promote their candidates. "They would fight at the polls and sometimes beat up their opponents, but not just for fun or plunder," Anbinder says.

So why fight? Nearly every scuffle was designed to help a gang's chosen candidate into public office. Once there, the candidate would reciprocate, bestowing good, steady-paying patronage jobs and municipal funds on his constituency.

Anbinder also faults the movie for its emphasis on Catholic-Protestant conflict. Most fighting was among gangs of Irish-Catholic Five Pointers. And it was rarely as bloody or deadly as in the movie. "Rioters did not go about with swords and broadaxes. Every once in a while one person would have one, but never whole mobs armed like that."


Resurrecting Five Points for the Screen

In the post-Civil War period, the Irish gangs' efforts on behalf of political candidates were paying off. Now with more say in the halls of government and better livelihoods, the Irish gladly ceded Five Points to new nations of strivers, mostly Italians and Chinese. But the squalor stayed on.

Reconstructing Five Points and other Manhattan locales from scratch at a Rome studio, Gangs of New York production designer Dante Ferretti was determined to get that squalor—and the rest of the slum—just right.

Working from archival photographs, records, and illustrations, Ferretti says he "built everything as the original buildings were built—in brick, stone, cobblestones, and wood—not like in Gladiator or Lord of the Rings or other movies where they use a lot of digital effects."

Though accurate in terms of size and materials, the new Five Points was just that at first—too new. "I had a special crew for aging everything with plaster, paint, patinas," Ferretti says. "A really huge, huge job." In the end, he says, "everything was correct."

As proof of authenticity, Ferretti says, "In the movie you see many scenes that are like Jacob Riis pictures."


The Fall of Five Points

In the 1890s crusading photographer Jacob Riis's unprecedented images of crowded tenements, child laborers, and places like Bandit's Roost (see photo) incited a public outcry that led the city to raze Mulberry Bend, Five Points' most notorious block.

Its heart cut out, the slum was overtaken by neighborhoods to the north—Little Italy and Chinatown. Courthouses and factories replaced its southern tenements.

Today the Five Points intersection is buried largely beneath Chinatown's Columbus Park and a federal courthouse.

Though historian Tyler Anbinder has quibbles with Gangs of New York's Five Points, he gives the film points for overall accuracy.

"The overall theme of the movie Scorsese gets exactly right: When the Irish first came to America they were persecuted and they literally did have to fight for their fair share of what America had to offer," Anbinder says.

And as they say, it's only a movie. "Scorsese knows much more history than is portrayed in the movie," Anbinder says. "He wanted to make a dramatic statement, he didn't want to make a documentary."



PHOTOS:

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Chicago: The True Murders That Inspired the Movie

Nancy Gupton

for National Geographic News

Updated March 24, 2003


"Gin and guns—either one is bad enough, but together they get you in a dickens of a mess, don't they."—Accused murderer Belva Gaertner, 1924

Sizzle, sequins, sex, and murder. It sounds like the stuff of movies—and it is. But the Oscar-winning courtroom musical Chicago is based on true murder cases: a laundry worker and a cabaret singer both accused of killing their lovers in 1924.


The stage and screen versions of Chicago stem from one source. Former reporter Maurine Watkins based her 1926 play, Chicago, on her Chicago Tribune stories of two women—Belva Gaertner and Beulah Annan—accused of murdering under the influence of drink and jazz.

But were Gaertner and Annan anything like the characters played by Best Actress-nominated Rene Zellweger and Best Supporting Actress-nominated Catherine Zeta-Jones?

In 1924 Belva Gaertner—the model for Zeta-Jones's Velma Kelly—was a cabaret singer accused of shooting her lover in her car, then leaving his body there with a bottle of gin and a gun.

One month later Beulah Annan—the inspiration for Zellweger's Roxie Hart—was arrested for shooting and killing her lover in her house. There's no evidence the two ever met outside of jail.

In Chicago, the two women meet on Murderess Row and become rivals in and out of Cook County Jail.

So how do the real cases stack up against the Hollywood version?


Selective Amnesia?

In the movie, cabaret vamp Velma Kelly shoots her sister and husband after catching them together. Later she says, "I can't remember a thing."

In real life, twice-divorced cabaret singer Belva Gaertner—dubbed the "most stylish" woman on Murderess Row by reporter Watkins—was accused of shooting her lover in her car. Gaertner, 38, said she had been drinking and had no memory of what happened.


Intruder or Not?


Chicago's Roxie Hart, a married wanna-be cabaret star, shoots her paramour, Fred, because he can't further her singing career, as he promised. She says he was a burglar, but a neighbor rats her out.

In reality, twentysomething, married laundry worker Annan—the "prettiest woman" on Murderess Row—was accused of shooting her lover, co-worker Harry Kelstedt. She first said Harry had broken into her home. Later she admitted they were lovers and said she shot him after he told her he was through with her. Her story changed further over time.


Baby Bluff?

In the movie, after a new arrival to Murderess Row (played by Lucy Liu) steals media attention from Hart, she lies and says she's pregnant to draw it back.

In real life Annan announced she was pregnant the day after learning a fellow Murderess Row inhabitant received the death sentence for murdering her lover. She never gave birth.


No Hollywood Ending

After their trials Hart and Kelly go on to share a stage, bringing the house down.

In reality Annan had no such happy ending. After the trial she divorced her long-suffering husband, then wed another man, only to find that he was already married. A breakdown led her to a mental hospital, where she died in 1928 of causes not generally known.

Gaertner may have fared better. After her acquittal she said she planned on remarrying husband number two and traveling to Europe. What became of her is unknown.


"Pursuit of Wine, Men, and Jazz"

Watkins, a young reporter, hit the jackpot with the Gaertner and Annan cases. Her winking style helped land her articles on the front page of the Tribune.

"In the 1920s people began treating crime with a sense of humor in metropolitan cities," says English professor Thomas Pauly, whose book Chicago collects Watkins's play as well as several of her original Tribune articles. "They were trying to laugh at crime, to show a sense of sophistication."

Watkins's articles are full of subtle jabs and strong color.

She quoted Belva Gaertner as saying: "Why it's silly to say I murdered Walter. I liked him and he loved me—but no woman can love a man enough to kill him. They aren't worth it, because there are always plenty more."

A month after Gaertner's arrest, Beulah Annan was jailed and Watkins gave her case the same treatment.

Readers ate the stories up. "Her stories made Beulah and Belva celebrities—and helped get them acquitted" by showing them in a sympathetic light, Pauly says. Both women were pronounced not guilty by all-male juries apparently sensitive to their charms.

"So Beulah Annan, whose pursuit of wine, men, and jazz music was interrupted by her glibness with the trigger finger, was given freedom by her beauty-proof jury," Watkins quipped.


Chicago in the Twenties

Chicago accurately captures the feel of the city at the time, historians say.

"Movies always exaggerate, of course, but Chicago in the 1920s was a really vibrant, bustling city," says Russell Lewis, Andrew D. Mellon Director for Collections and Research at the Chicago Historical Society.

In 1924 Prohibition had been in effect for five years. Now that alcohol was illegal, it was more popular than ever. Gangsters were getting rich off bootlegged liquor, and speakeasies were popping up all over town.

"You had the introduction of jazz to the broader audience. You had Al Capone and other gangsters," Lewis says. "But Chicago was then, as it is now, a place of hardworking people.

"In the twenties there was also an explosion of mass culture," Lewis says. "It was the heyday of movies, advertising was coming into its own, radio was coming along—all these were avenues for mass communication, and people were hungry for this.

"In a lot of these avenues there was a tendency to sensationalize, especially in the newspapers," Lewis says.


From Reporter to Playwright

Soon after the Annan and Gaertner trials, Maurine Watkins left journalism and went to the Yale School of Drama. She wrote a play, Chicago, which satirized the trials and the media's role in them.

The play was turned into the movie Roxie Hart in 1942 and then into a Broadway musical by director Bob Fosse in 1975.

"Even from the time the play came out, Watkins tried to hide the fact that she had covered the crimes," Thomas Pauly says. Through his research he came to believe that Watkins later became a born-again Christian and may have been ashamed of her apparent involvement in the women's acquittals.

As to the popularity of Watkins's stories, Pauly says: "Crime as entertainment has been around since the Bible. Maurine Watkins made fun of the whole business. She delighted in the carnival that she herself created."

As Queen Latifah's Mama Morton character says in the movie, "In this town, murder is a form of entertainment."





"Gangs of New York": Fact vs. Fiction

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/03/0320_030320_oscars_gangs.html

China has become a status quo power ; China rising, India shining

‘China has become a status quo power’


By Wang Gungwu

Inquirer


Last updated 06:29am (Mla time) 12/03/2006


Published on page A12 of the December 3, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer



(This article is based on the notes taken by Juan V. Sarmiento Jr. while Wang was delivering a lecture titled “China: Economic Strength and Structural Weakness” at the 7th Asian-European Editors’ Forum in Singapore on Oct. 5. The forum was organized by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.)


WHAT made China’s economic jump possible? There are several things that existed before that helped China’s rapid economic expansion.

One is the strong risk-taking culture of the common people. Because a majority of the people have lived with uncertainty, they are ready to look for opportunities even if there are risks involved. The entrepreneurial risk-taking culture was not lost after 40 years of communism.

The Communist Party had earlier failed to realize China’s agricultural potential.
Deng Xiao Peng’s opening of the economy began by liberating the peasants from tight controls. The new freedom in the rural areas provides a major stimulus to kick-off other sectors of the economy.


Liberalization

Then, there’s the number of people trained with the basic skills needed for an industrializing economy. In 1980, this was 20 times larger than it was in 1949 [the year the Communists won]. These people were given new encouragement and fresh capital and equipment as part of the liberalization starting after 1978.

The economic stimulus in the neighborhood—[the rapid economic development in] Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore—also is a factor. The people are fully aware of what the neighbors have achieved. If the neighbors could do it, why not China?

All these led to an economic miracle, but it does not come from nowhere. There is continuity with what China has and also what its revolution started.


Power structure’s continuity

The power structure’s continuity in China is more obvious. The political party today is a reformed version of something that had first been modeled on the Soviet party.

There is also continuity from Chinese history where power is based on victory on the battlefield. The Chinese accept the legitimacy of whoever wins on the battlefield. Victory sustained all dynasties.

Like the dynasties, the Communist Party of China (CPC) won the mandate of heaven. On that basis, the Communist Party believes that it has the authority to do anything that needs to be done to unify the country and consolidate its power.


Sons of Heaven

Like earlier Sons of Heaven, the CPC thinks it is right for the party to be above the law in the same way that emperors were above the law. Theirs was the tradition of rule by man rather than rule by law. But the Communist Party says it wants to move to the rule by law. In practice, the party has found it difficult to be consistent. The son of heaven is beyond the law.

It’s a contradiction that is creating a lot of difficulties. For example, a CPC member accused of a crime goes first before the party. There the party judges him before he goes to court. This undermines a key principle of the rule of law.


Social unrest

As the economy moves forward, disturbances and peasant unrest have risen. [Many of the disturbances have been triggered by officials seizing land that people occupy or till without compensation. The seized lands are for factories or real estate development projects].

There have been local disturbances in all of Chinese history, but only a few, which were coupled with outside threat, succeeded. The central government that fell did so because it found itself fighting on many fronts.

The central government’s strategy is to keep internal conflicts local and make friends abroad. There is no external threat right now. Because China has no real enemy today, it can concentrate on development and keep local conflicts in check.

Is China a threat to its neighbors? For the most part [of history], it was defending itself. It built the Great Wall to keep overland invaders out. But the wall did not stop the Mongols and later the Manchus from conquering China. All of China was under Mongol rule for nearly 100 years and under the Manchus for more than 250 years. It was the Mongols who had tried to conquer Korea, Japan and Java, and the Manchus who extended China’s boundaries to make their lands safer from foreign conquest.

Sun Yat-sen pushed for nationalism to get rid of the Manchus on the principle that people have the right to rebel and overthrow rulers if they are governed badly. That, in a sense, is the Chinese idea of democracy.


International stage

Over the past 25 years, bright people in China have been studying the international system and have learned how it works. China will remain a player within the international system as long as it is good for China. The Chinese will resist moves to change the international system if the changes are not in China’s interest. In a sense, China has become a status quo power.

What is the role of overseas Chinese? The country has been attracting huge investments from overseas. But the investment of the overseas Chinese is small. The bulk comes from Hong Kong and Taiwan. The Chinese overseas tycoons are investing in the interior because they cannot compete with Hong Kong and Taiwanese Chinese in the coastal areas of mainland China.


Identity crisis

With the rapid economic development, the rural-based extended family is under threat. The one-child policy pursued by the government has undermined the deep-seated functions of Chinese families. All social values that the Chinese take pride in are under “threat.” Many are now seeking anxiously for ways to preserve these values.

The Shanghai syndrome (as seen in the coastal areas) is the dominant feature of Chinese change—rapid acceptance of Western ideas of development at all levels. But the interior where 70 percent of the population lives does not feel comfortable with that syndrome.

For example, people in Xi’an City, the ancient capital of China for over 1,400 years—once its center of political power, culture and civilization—continue to harp about the values that lie at the heart of China. The Xi’an response is characterized by deep concern for China’s heritage.

The interplay between the Shanghai syndrome and the Xi’an response must be watched as the Chinese are reforming toward a post revolution structure. The traditional past and the modernist revolution could be meshed together to produce a new system that is particularly suited to China’s needs.

It’s not economic revolution that will help China. It’s not political structure either. The rise of China cannot be secured if its strengths and weaknesses are not balanced.

(Wang is the director of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore. He was born in Surabaya, Indonesia in 1930, and grew up in Ipoh, Malaysia. He studied history in the University of Malaya, where he received both his Bachelor and Masters degrees. He holds a Ph.D from the University of London for his thesis on the structure of power in North China during the Five Dynasties.)



Copyright 2006 Inquirer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.






China rising, India shining



Inquirer


Last updated 06:29am (Mla time) 12/03/2006


Published on page A12 of the December 3, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


SINCE Deng Xiao Peng declared a generation ago that “to be rich is glorious” and that “it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice,” China has produced what is considered the most successful case of economic development in human history.

Over the past 25 years, its economy has expanded more than tenfold, making China the fastest-growing country in the world. It practically produces everything for the world market. As a result, China has accumulated about $1 trillion in foreign exchange reserves.

China’s surging economy is like a vortex, sucking foreign investments and raw materials from near and far. From carmakers such as General Motors and Toyota to retailers like Wal-Mart, foreign companies are investing in the Middle Kingdom.

To secure raw materials like timber, mineral ore and oil for its industries, China is investing in the Philippines, Brazil and Sudan. It is building roads in Burma, Laos and Cambodia, and is granting them loans with conditions better than those offered by the World Bank.

Ever wonder where the missing manhole covers, P1 coins or pilfered telephone cables are going? To metal-hungry China.

India, for its part, has become the second fastest-growing country in the world over the past 15 years. India is known for its galloping service-driven economy, thanks to its call centers and software exports.

In the next 25 years, China and India are expected to become the world’s dominant economies, a phenomenon that a former World Bank head considers “a return to form rather than a novelty.”



Copyright 2006 Inquirer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.