The Rebel Den of Nung Trí Cao: Loyalty and Identity along the Sino-Vietnamese Frontier

1. The Great King Nung Tri Cao: A Rebel's Role in Shaping Regional Identity along the Modern Sino-Vietnamese Border

I The Great King Nung Tri Cao: ARebel's Role in Shaping Regional Identity along the Modern Sino-Vietnamese Border Why should we in the early twenty-first century pay particular attention to the collective identity of and historical relationship between the regions now ruled as the People's Republic of China and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam? I once asked myself this question while standing in a valley near the commune of Hit Quang on the Sino-Vietnamese frontier, where Chinese tanks had rolled through as recently as 1979, retracing the well-trodden paths of cavalry and foot soldiers from centuries earlier. Identities forged in the eleventh-century borderlands remain surprisingly salient today, reminding us ofmore volatile examples from other regions of the world, such as the Basques, the Kosovars, and the Kurds. Transnational bonds are an important aspect of these groups' collective identities and are often a source of tension in their relations with their respective national governments. One important reason for paying attention to the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands is the modern reemergence of China as a regional power. Southeast Asian countries, once under the thumb of colonial masters, gained their independence just in time to face the effects of China's growing influence. Southeast Asia, Vietnam included, shows great 3 4 The Great King Nimg Tri Cao Figure 1.1. View from the border region at Soc Hc't Commune, Hc't Quang County, Cao B~ng, Vietnam (James Anderson) potential for vigorous growth and innovation, supporting the development ofan integrated, transnational economic power. Nevertheless, widespread confidence in the economic autonomy of this region, which suffered a financial crisis at the end of the twentieth century and the economic slump induced by severe acute respiratory syndrome at the beginning of the twenty-first century, may have been overstated. In this destabilized economic environment, China became more involved in Southeast Asian affairs, and the large northern neighbor's influence on the region could surpass that ofthe United States in the near future. However, the historical record reveals that the Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian peoples have resisted northern pressures for ages, even as they borrowed institutions and practices with which to create and perpetuate their own regimes of local control. To understand this complex north-south relationship, we must develop a stronger sense of its genealogy. Ifwe also take a closer look at the communities that reside along the political border separating modem-day Vietnam and China, we find numerous upland hillside- and plateau-dwelling ethnic groups The Great King Nitng Tri Cao 5 that historically have resisted total incorporation by their politically and economically more powerful neighbors. Moreover, leaders of the Kinh Vietnamese, riverine-valley and delta dwellers, were not alone in their dreams of territorial autonomy apart from the region's dominant power, China. Looking back through history, we see that the emergence of an independent Vietnamese polity in 968 created a Sino-Vietnamese frontier region over which the Vietnamese court maintained limited administrative control. Under these political conditions, upland leaders who resided north of the Red River and south of the most densely settled population centers of South China (Ling Piao) also envisioned separate domains of authority. By the late tenth century, some local leaders from this region had succeeded in establishing such domains, while others attempted to do so in the ensuing years. Map 1. Modem Political Map of Sino-Vietnamese Border (Elizabeth Nelson) 6 The Great King Nimg Tri Cao In terms of methodology, the general approach to frontier studies in Western scholarship has shifted direction in recent years, and this study has been influenced by that shift. Amy Turner Bushnell contends in a recent conference volume that both the "paradigm of power" and the related "paradigm of the victim" have given way to the "paradigm of negotiation" as an effective explanatory model in the study of relations between premodern core and peripheral communities. She writes that "the paradigm of negotiation examines the mechanisms other than force that deliver balance to relationships and keep disparate societies in equilibrium." 1 The paradigm of power, with its focus on agents of political, economic, and cultural hegemony, is only inverted by the paradigm of the victim, which accepts that power defined the terms of all essential core-periphery relationships. In this book, I note the importance of political and military power in certain situations, but I also note cultural and ritualistic power and highlight...