Understanding China as practicing Chineseness: selected cases of Vietnamese scholarship

Abstract

The notion of post-Chineseness is enlisted to analyze Vietnamese Sinology as a comparative agenda. Post-Chineseness refers to the cultural preparation and the political process of mutual acknowledgement among those who consider one another sharing (some kind of) Chineseness, practically defined according to the context and its trajectories, at each time and each site. Chineseness can thus have various, if not entirely irrelevant, meanings. Vietnamese Sinologists have relied on different kinds of post-Chineseness to make sense of their relationship with the encountered Chinese to select and determine the mode of self-understanding, the purpose and a strategy to reconnect, and the normative criterion to assess and manage the relationship. Chinese Vietnamese are significantly less numerous than Chinese Malaysian, Thai, and Indonesians. However, the history of Vietnam is considerably closer to China than are those of Korea and Japan, in terms of length of merger. The post-Chineseness of Vietnamese scholarship therefore complicates its role-identity vis-à-vis China, intellectually as well as practically.

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