The Smaller Dragon : a Political History of Vietnam

UNDER the attractive title of The Smaller Dragon, Joseph Buttinger has written a history of Vietnam that lays claim to being the only one in existence in English. Surprisingly, in view of the author's original intention, as indicated in the foreword, to write about the political situation of contemporary Vietnam, the book which he has actually written concentrates on the history of the country from pre-history to I900. The twentieth century is given only some forty-five pages, and even these pages, appearing under the heading "Chronology," consist of relatively brief entries presented on a year-by-year basis but becoming somewhat more elaborate for the period since I945. It is fortunate that the decision turned this way; another study of today's politics would no doubt be valuable, but it could not have the lasting value of this solidly based study of the long road the Vietnamese people have taken to arrive at the partition now inflicted on them by world discord.

In surveying this road, the one theme which Buttinger most heavily stresses is the unity and continuity of Vietnamese history for over two thousand years, from its pre-Chinese past to the present day. The survival of the Vietnamese people as a unit in their long thin homeland he attributes in part to the peculiarities of the rice culture on which their economy rests but even more to their social organization whose "rapid emergence and continuing stability are unthinkable without the impact of Chinese technical civilization and Chinese civil and moral law." The thousand years of Chinese rule made an immense contribution to the shaping of Vietnamese culture, including the establishment of mandarin rule, but the people were never absorbed into China and maintained a struggle that brought them ultimate independence.

Although he tells his story primarily from the standpoint of the Vietnamese rather than from that of the conquering West, the author necessarily devotes much time to the series of European encroachments. The long and intricate his- tory of the French missionaries, merchants, and adventurers-one category often running indistinguishably into another-is explored in detail from its starting point in the seventeenth century to the complete taking over in the latter part of the nineteenth. It is Buttinger's contention that the people's attitude toward the French was shaped in the four decades following Napoleon III's first imperial intervention in the country, four decades in which the new conquerors brought to Vietnam only "death and destruction."

Buttinger writes with skill and vitality as well as with learning. He has covered a vast terrain of French and other Western-language literature on Vietnam and related areas and supplements his book with a bibliography of fifty pages. Several maps contribute to the usefulness of the volume. Special attention deserves to be called to the notes, which themselves cover a very wide range of history, literature, and opinion. Indeed, it may be that they sometimes cover too wide a range, as when Hong Kong is spoken of as a Chinese city prior to its being taken by the British or when two notes give different versions of the British seizure of Singapore, one of them specifying conquest during the Napoleonic war.