What do you think?
Rate this book
Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory
Print and Power: Buddhism, Confucianism, and Communism in the Making of Modern Vietnam
The role of print publications played a central part in the rise of the public sphere in Vietnam in the 1920-1945 period, argues McHale (history and international affairs, George Washington U.). He looks at the print culture of Buddhism, Confucianism, and communism, arguing that the lattermost played a far more negligible role in shaping modern Vietnamese intellectual discourse than commonly understood. Annotation (c) Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
- GenresHistory
264 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 2003
47 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 2, 2025
This was a fantastic history of printing culture and intellectual thought in French colonial Vietnam. I loved reading it and engaging with its ideas and arguments. All fascinating stuff to me!
July 9, 2020
too broad ... to general ...
April 9, 2022
The information is fine but the analysis is rather strange.
"Confucianism did not attack but on the contrary was sympathetic to communism, and it can be said that it created the conditions for Marxism to enter our thought.’’While the last phrase in this explanation may have some merit, the first part of the quotation is puzzling at best. It marks an attempt to link communism to Vietnamese tradition and thus, in nativist fashion, to mask communism’s European (and thus alien) origins."
Why is it puzzling? The seeming point of stating similarities between the two was so that its ideas could be easier adopted.
The point is that people can better understand and adopt concepts, they are already familiar with...which the author writes about: "Vietnamese grasped the Confucian concept of t§´ daˆn (the four social orders of scholars, agriculturalists, craft workers, and merchants) far more easily than the modern notion of class."
"While most were aware of the Buddhist notion that life is a sea of suffering, few grasped the Marxist idea that class exploitation leads to misery" Why? The two are mutually compatible.
"Sitting and listening attentively to my friend explain, I felt something both strange and interesting. It was all words that I had never ever heard before: ‘masses,’ ‘organize,’ ‘struggle,’ and so on. . . .Although I did not yet understand the full meaning of those words, I understood deeply the ideas that my friend was bringing up.
This statement is contradictory and begs the question of the extent to which listeners and readers really understood the communist message."
How is it contradictory? You can understand what a rose is even if you don't know the word for it.
Strange analysis.
"Confucianism did not attack but on the contrary was sympathetic to communism, and it can be said that it created the conditions for Marxism to enter our thought.’’While the last phrase in this explanation may have some merit, the first part of the quotation is puzzling at best. It marks an attempt to link communism to Vietnamese tradition and thus, in nativist fashion, to mask communism’s European (and thus alien) origins."
Why is it puzzling? The seeming point of stating similarities between the two was so that its ideas could be easier adopted.
The point is that people can better understand and adopt concepts, they are already familiar with...which the author writes about: "Vietnamese grasped the Confucian concept of t§´ daˆn (the four social orders of scholars, agriculturalists, craft workers, and merchants) far more easily than the modern notion of class."
"While most were aware of the Buddhist notion that life is a sea of suffering, few grasped the Marxist idea that class exploitation leads to misery" Why? The two are mutually compatible.
"Sitting and listening attentively to my friend explain, I felt something both strange and interesting. It was all words that I had never ever heard before: ‘masses,’ ‘organize,’ ‘struggle,’ and so on. . . .Although I did not yet understand the full meaning of those words, I understood deeply the ideas that my friend was bringing up.
This statement is contradictory and begs the question of the extent to which listeners and readers really understood the communist message."
How is it contradictory? You can understand what a rose is even if you don't know the word for it.
Strange analysis.
November 22, 2025
There were some interesting points, but some of the analyses felt very Eurocentric and even a bit audacious. As a foreigner, how much does he really know about Vietnam’s social life to be critiquing the experiences of Vietnamese scholars with Confucianism?
Read
July 5, 2017IBS - Ball State University Libraries
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews