Tag: Vietnam

War Photos and Peace Signs from Vietnam

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A review of Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam, Thy Phu, Duke University Press, 2022.

Warring VisionsIn April 2015, the Institut Français in Hanoi held a photography exhibition, Reporters de Guerre (War Reporters), marking the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Curated by Patrick Chauvel, an award-winning photographer who had covered the war for France, the exhibition showcased the work of four North Vietnamese photographers (Đoàn Công Tính, Chu Chi Thành, Tràn Mai Nam, and Hùa Kiêm) whose documenting of the Vietnam War was often overshadowed by photographers from the Western press working from the South. The poster for the cultural event at L’Espace used an iconic image: a black-and-white picture of North Vietnamese soldiers climbing a rope against the spectacular backdrop of a waterfall, taken in 1970 along the Ho Chi Minh trail. Đoàn Công Tính, the photographer, had caught a moment of timeless beauty and strength, an image of mankind overcoming physical hindrances and material obstacles in the pursuit of a higher goal. However, a scandal erupted when Danish photographer Jørn Stjerneklar pointed out on his blog that this iconic image was doctored. He compared two versions, the recent print that appeared in the exhibition and the “original,” which was published in Tính’s 2001 book Khoảnh Khắc (Moments). Tính apologized profusely for “mistakenly” sending the photoshopped image, claiming that the original negative had been damaged and that he accidentally included a copy of the image with a photoshopped background in a CD to the exhibition’s organisers. But in a follow-up article on his blog, Stjerneklar pointed out that even the “original” had been retouched, as evidenced by the repeating pattern of the waterfall, and was likely a montage of another photograph which is displayed at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. Stjerneklar’s story was picked up worldwide and ignited a lively debate around the presumed objectivity of photojournalism and the role of photography in propaganda.

Photography and propaganda

That photography was, and still is, part of propaganda in Vietnam was never a secret. Along with my colleagues, I experienced it firsthand during my term as consular counsellor at the French Embassy in Vietnam. When the Institut Français organized photo exhibitions at its flagship cultural center L’Espace in Hanoi, every picture had to be vetted by controlling organs of the government. The answer often came at the last minute, and many photographs were rejected on the basis of obscure criteria. Still, young Vietnamese photographers were enthusiastic about events organized by the French culture center. With the help of French photographer Nicolas Cornet and other professionals, young photography apprentices honed their skills in creative workshops and attended seminars on portfolio building. Some talented photographers held their first solo exhibition at L’Espace before embarking on an international career. In April 2023 (after I had left Vietnam), the Institut Français in Hanoi and its director, Thierry Vergon, initiated the first International Photography Biennale in Hanoi, a major cultural event placed under the aegis of Hanoi’s People’s Committee in partnership with a network of Vietnamese and international partners. More than twenty exhibitions organized on several locations allowed the general public and professionals to discover the wealth of contemporary photography and the treasures of heritage photography in Vietnam. A series of outreach activities were scheduled throughout the Biennale, including workshops to connect stakeholders, roundtables and debates, training sessions, film screenings, and portfolio reviews. The initiative was used by Hanoi City, part of UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network, to bolster its image as a regional hub for culture and innovation. Still under the strictures of a socialist government, a new Vietnamese narrative on photography is slowly emerging. It is based on creativity, not control, and its aim is to put Vietnam’s capital on the map for cultural professionals and creative workers. Alternative visions of Vietnam are seeping through the web of censorship and are flourishing in the rare spaces of unrestricted freedom offered by social networks or independent cultural venues.

Thy Phu’s book Warring Visions shows that creativity was also present in the photographs taken during the Vietnam War (known in Vietnamese as the Resistance War against America.) Vietnamese photographers working for the Hanoi-based Vietnam News Agency (VNA) were no less talented than their Western counterparts operating from the South. War pictures published by the Western press (or by Japan’s) were as much involved in political propaganda as the “socialist ways of seeing Vietnam” that filled the pages of Vietnam Pictorial, an illustrated magazine run by the communist state. War was fought on the front of images, both in Vietnam and within America. Propaganda pictures were also waged by the South Vietnam government, with less international success. For Americans, the Vietnam War still haunts the national psyche with the ignominy of defeat. The war was a watershed in visual history, and the many pictures taken by Western reporters and photographers laid the foundation for battlefield reporting and contemporary photography studies. But as Thy Phu notes, “in addition to overlooking unspectacular forms of representation, the Western press, then as now, neglects Vietnamese perspectives, emphasizing instead the American experience of this war.” The role of Vietnamese photographers, including the many stringers and fixers working for full-time foreign correspondents, is systematically downplayed, although some of them took the most iconic photos that were to shape the imaginaries of the war (such as Napalm Girl, the picture of a naked girl running away from an aerial napalm attack.) But placing the spotlight on photographs taken by Vietnamese war photographers is only half of the story. According to Thy Phu, we need to enlarge the category of war photography, a genre that usually consists of images illustrating the immediacy of combat and the spectacle of violence, pain, and wounded bodies. Pictures depicting wedding ceremonies, family reunions, and quotidian rituals are also part of the Vietnamese experience during the war. Drawing from family photo books from the Vietnamese diaspora, discarded collections found in vintage stores in Ho Chi Minh City, or her own family records, Thy Phu reconstitutes a lost archive of what war in Vietnam might have been like for ordinary citizens.

Socialist ways of seeing Vietnam

The canon of war photography, as well as its most basic principles, were established during the Vietnam War. Pulitzer-winning images exposed the brutality and injustice of war, its toll on the body and on the mind of soldiers, its devastating consequences for civilians and their living environment. According to the profession, war images should by no means be staged or manipulated. They should expose reality as it is, captured on the spur of the moment by a neutral observer. It will come as no surprise to learn that North Vietnamese photographers obeyed to different rules and aesthetic principles. The images that were taken by these propaganda workers are full of positivism and youthful energy. Unlike the photos taken from the South showing the terrible effects of war, the images taken by photographers from the North show young soldiers smiling in front of the camera or caught in the middle of disciplined action, images of incredible romanticism in the middle of war. The goal was, of course, to highlight their heroism in order to stimulate other soldiers and citizens seeing the images. Ideology informed the subject matter of these photographs and guided practitioners into what to look at and how to represent it. Harsh material conditions also shaped the way photographs were taken and circulated. The photographers were foot soldiers in uniform who had been selected from among Hanoi’s university elite and given a crash course training in journalism and photo reporting before being sent to the frontline. Communist allies abroad provided cameras and lenses that were made in East Germany and the USSR. Equipment and film were in such short supply that they were not issued to individual photographers but were stored at the headquarters of organizations such as the Young Pioneers, the Army’s photographic department, and the VNA. In such conditions of scarcity, photographers were forced to shoot sparingly, to compose and stage their images prior to shooting, and to improvise solutions to compensate for the lack of equipment. In the absence of flash bulbs, the flare of rockets fired against a dark sky provided the light necessary for nighttime pictures. Piecing together several shots created an improvised panoramic view without need of a wide-angle lens. War photos were displayed in makeshift jungle exhibitions or village fairs, along with propaganda posters, to uplift the masses and disseminate a “socialist way of seeing” things. Photographs were also distributed to foreigners beyond the Communist bloc, especially to members of antiwar organizations, some of whom received copies of Vietnam Pictorial, an internationally circulated illustrated magazine.

Reviewing past issues of this magazine, three central subjects stand out: the heroic struggle of soldiers, the toil of factory workers and farmers, and the sacrifices of revolutionary Vietnamese women. Beautiful portraits of women harvesting lotus flowers, of young girls playing in poppy fields, or children riding on the back of water buffaloes also adorned the color covers of Vietnam Pictorial, with vibrant colors denoting artificially painted photographs and reminding readers of the bright socialist future for which war was fought. For Thy Phu, the revolutionary Vietnamese woman was more than just an image: it was a symbol, embodying contested visions of women’s role in anticolonial resistance and national reunification. The battle for this symbol was fought on two fronts. On the leadership side, the figure of Nguyễn Thị Bình, the Viet Cong’s chief negotiator at the Paris Peace Conference in 1973, opposed the fierceful Madame Nhu, the de facto First Lady of South Vietnam from 1955 to 1963. Both used feminity for political aims, wearing different styles of áo dài, Vietnam’s traditional dress, as a gendered display of nationalism. In contrast to Madame Bình’s demure attire which singled her out as the sole woman at the negotiating table, Madame Nhu favored a more risqué style of áo dài and did not hesitate to pose in masculinist postures, such as in the famous closeup picture where she is seen firing a .38 pistol. Both camps also sought to glorify women’s contribution to nationalist struggle by enrolling them in mass movements. In the South, Madame Nhu founded the Women’s Solidarity Movement of Vietnam (WSM) in order to give women military training and enroll them in paramilitary groups assisting the armed forces. Women in uniform included Hồ Thị Quế (the “Tiger Lady”), member of the Black Tigers Ranger Battalion, pictured in full battledress looking fiercely at the camera. In the North, young women were recruited en masse in the Youth Shock Brigades, also known as TNXP, and sent to the frontline in order to assist male soldiers or build the Ho Chi Minh trail. The image of “girls with guns” or “long-haired soldiers” stood in stark contrast with the more traditional pictures emphasizing motherhood and family that were used to appeal to the solidarity of women’s antiwar organizations in the United States. But pictures offer fertile ground for projection, misrecognition, and reinvention: the Vietnamese revolutionary woman was reclaimed as a radical chic symbol for American feminist struggles in which she had no part. The Vietnamese Communist Party won the day in the fight over images and symbols associated with womanhood. But as French historian François Guillemot reminds us, Vietnamese women, who represent half of society, suffered more than their half as a result of military conflict and civil war.

Lost archives

The Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), now known as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, ultimately claimed victory in the war of images and symbols. As a result, war images from the South were censored, erased, and eliminated from the record. They survive as embodied performances of reenactment and remembrance in the dispersed archives of the Vietnamese diaspora. To illustrate the war as seen from the perspective of South Vietnam, Thy Phu takes the example of Nguyễn Ngọc Hạnh who was one of the most respected Vietnamese photographers of his time. He served in the French Army until 1950, then transferred to the Armée Nationale Vietnamienne, which in 1956 became the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). He attended the French Army photography school during the mid-1950s, was designated the official ARVN combat photographer in 1961, and ultimately attained the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, he was sent to a “re-education camp” with his fellow officers, but survived until he was released through the intervention of Amnesty International in 1983. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1989, where he passed away in 2017. Published in 1969 in collaboration with civilian photographer Nguyễn Mạnh Đan, his book Vietnam in Flames ranks in the top echelon of great Vietnam photobooks, right alongside Philip Jones Griffiths, David Douglas Duncan, and the best of the Japanese photographers. Hạnh made no secret that his photos were staged: he even explained in painstaking detail how he used drops of olive oil to place “tears” on one of his most notable photograph, Sorrow, the portrait of a lovely young woman weeping over the dog tags of her missing companion. As Thy Phu notes, manipulation has been a defining characteristic of war photography from the nineteenth century to the present. Indeed, some of the mots famous war photographs, such as Robert Capra’s The Falling Soldier, are said to be restaged or reenacted. Hạnh nevertheless insisted that his images are authentic documents that register the intensity of the emotions the war engendered. Photographs, like tears, are a social ritual. Whether they are authentic or inauthentic, induced or spontaneous, matters less than the fact that they are to be seen and recognized. As they circulate among the Vietnamese diaspora while they remain censored in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City, pictures from Vietnam in Flames contribute to a sense of community through collective suffering, sacrifice, and remembrance.

The two waves of Vietnamese refugees, those who fled in 1975 after the fall of Saigon and the “boat people” who left the country from the late 1970s into the early 1990s, left behind all their personal belongings, including family pictures and photo albums. Those who stayed behind pruned their photo collections of all images reminiscent of the old regime: men in ARVN uniform, pictures betraying friendly connections with Americans, or scenes denoting bourgeois proclivities such as foreign travels and private vacations. Remarkably, however, thousands of those photos have resurfaced in the marketplace in the form of orphan images and albums separated from their original owners and stories. These are images that have been “unhomed”: scattered, lost, or left behind. Together they provide a counter-narrative of the war, a testimony of Southern Vietnamese experiences that have been erased from the record and banished from official history. How to deal with those missing archives, lost memories, and orphaned pictures? What can be learned of family pictures in the absence of a story, when the memories that bring photographs to life are missing from official records and even personal collections? In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, only a scholar is capable of speaking with ghosts. Similarly, only artists can speak to the ghostly presence of these anonymous faces. Thy Phu, who herself assembled a community archive of family photographs and the stories about them, presents the artistic démarche of Dinh Q. Lê, a diaspora Vietnamese artist now based in Ho Chi Minh City and whose work was recognized by major exhibitions in Singapore, Tokyo, New York, and Paris. Since 1998, Lê has been working on a trilogy of installations that feature family photographs, objects that fascinate him because he lost all of his own photographs in the course of his family’s forced migration. Images are stitched together to form fragile-looking, rectangular installations like mosquito nets, or they are cut into enlarged strips that are weaved to form a new picture, superposing the initial faces on the strips and an emerging bigger picture. In his 2022 exhibition at the Quai Branly Museum, one of the weaved picture represented Madame Nhu waving a pistol, an image still taboo in Vietnam but that the artist was able to reinterpret through his own eyes. In another installation, onlookers from the Vietnamese diaspora were invited to pick up images covering the gallery floor and to consult an online database that draws on crowdsourcing to identify lost images of their own family, merging the acts of collecting, remembering, and archiving.

War photography in the age of generative AI

What does Thy Phu’s book tell us about photography censorship and creativity in contemporary Vietnam? How can we interpret war photography in the light of warring visions, ragged memories, and contested identities? The first lesson I learned from Warring Visions is that the distinction between propaganda pictures and war reporting is artificial: in the end, what matters is not political intent, but what we make of it. War pictures will always be used for political purposes. But those that remain in public memory transcend the immediacy of a cause and express universal values, sometimes at odds with the intention of their sponsors. The second lesson is that we need to expand our notion of war photography. Vernacular pictures representing quotidian rites of family life also tell stories about wartime conditions, and these stories must be collected and made known. As a third lesson, we should think hard about authenticity and manipulation of images in the age of generative AI and deep fakes. The indignation that followed Jørn Stjerneklar’s blog article exposing the manipulation of Đoàn Công Tính’s poster in 2015 was in a way misplaced: war pictures can be staged, reframed, doctored, reenacted, and, yes, photoshopped. As historians of war photography tell us, this has always been the case, and we should anticipate more of the same in our technologically savvy future. In my perception, Vietnamese nowadays have a more relaxed attitude to Photoshop than people in Europe or in North America. When I took ID pictures in Hanoi, the result came heavily retouched, with bright eyes and rosy cheeks. To tell the truth, I like the picture more than the original, and I still use it on my identity documents or CV profile. This tradition of retouching pictures goes back a long way, as evidenced by the family portraits and painted photographs from colonial Indochina. It is also linked to the highest levels of Vietnamese statesmanship: as is well known, prior to establishing the DRV in 1945, Hồ Chí Minh led a peripatetic life and worked a number of odd jobs. According to the records of the French police, around 1915-17 he worked as a photo retoucher in Paris by day and meeting leading Communist agitators by night. It is said that this humble experience with visual restoration led him to grasp photography’s political potential. It also taught him to be wary of photography’s role for state surveillance and identity control: only one portrait remains from this period, recognizable by the chipped upper part of his left ear that allowed the French police to check the identity of the Vietnamese revolutionary leader who changed his name and civil status several times over the course of his career.

Chinese Women Students in Australia

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Dreams of Flight: The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West, Fran Martin, Duke University Press, 2022.

Dreams of FlightReading Dreams of Flight made me reexamine my preconceptions about Australia, China, and university studies abroad. When I was a graduate student in France back in the early 1990s, I didn’t identify Australia as a land of opportunity for academic studies. In the disciplines that I have studied, Australia is (or was) a scientific backwater, an outlier when compared to North America or Western Europe. I don’t trust university rankings that much, but last time I checked Australian universities ranked quite low in terms of research output, number of Nobel Prizes, well-identified schools of thought, or emerging paradigms. I was under the impression that an academic career in an Australian institution was a second- or third-best choice for aspiring scholars who failed to land the position of their dreams in North America or in Europe. Spending more than a decade in East Asia made me revise that opinion. I have met many Asian scholars for whom Australia was definitely on the academic map. For a prospective graduate student in South Korea, in Taiwan, or in South-East Asia, pursuing a degree in Australia, applying for a faculty position, or doing research as a post-doctoral student in an Australian university are serious options to consider. Australia’s attractiveness is not only linked to geographical proximity. Language, lifestyle, natural environment, diasporic presence, and academic freedom in well-funded research universities also weigh in the decision for an academic destination. Besides, the international students who form the focus of Dreams of Flight—a cohort of about fifty young Chinese women that the author follows across the full cycle of international study between 2012 and 2020—did not wish to pursue an academic career in science or in the humanities. Their ambition was to acquire a degree in a practical field such as accounting, finance, or communication and media studies, to broaden their horizon by getting an experience of living and studying abroad, and to follow a career marked by international mobility and promotion opportunities. Australian universities could build on these expectations to attract a growing number of students from China: in December 2019, just before Covid, there were over 212,000 Chinese students studying in Australia. Students from China represented the largest proportion of international students, while Australia was the third foreign destination for Chinese students after the United States and the United Kingdom.

Study in France, Study in Australia

Reading that higher education in Australia is also a commercial venture wasn’t really a surprise for me. In my previous posting as cultural counsellor at the French Embassy in Hanoi, I was involved in managing a Study in France programme and in attracting Vietnamese students to French educational institutions. Australian universities were clearly our direct competitors. La Trobe University had an admission office and a partnership program within Hanoi University, while RMIT was the first completely foreign-owned university granted permission to operate in Vietnam, delivering Australian degrees for a hefty tuition fee. But even with this experience in mind, I personally don’t like to think of academic studies abroad as a field ruled by competition and marketization. For France, attracting foreign students is a matter of public policy, not market development: it is a way to promote our model and our values, to uphold the position of French as an international language, to train potential recruits for French multinational firms or research labs, and to build long-lasting influence through a network of alumni who will keep a close connection to France. This assumes, of course, that foreign students will adhere to the values conveyed through education and living abroad, that they will practice French in the classroom (where courses are increasingly taught in English) and in everyday life, and that they will keep a positive attitude toward France after their study period (remember that Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot both worked and studied in France.) Unlike many universities in Australia, in the US or in the UK, French universities and Grandes Écoles offer high-quality training without imposing unaffordable tuition and fees. In fact, the French government offers many foreign students a benefits programme that reduces tuition fees to almost nothing. Although this is not the case for every institution of higher education, these fee structures are still lower than other universities in Europe, let alone Australia or North America. This is not always the best selling point among prospective students and their families: especially in Asia, quality comes at a price, and what is low-priced tends to be perceived as low-quality. But in countries like Vietnam, the affordability of studies in France, coupled with the known quality of French curricula, was clearly a strong argument to attract students to France and to persuade them to study French in our cultural institutes located in Vietnam’s four main cities.

Australia has a different approach to attracting foreign students. Australia has been recognized as having “the most organized and aggressive international recruitment and marketing strategy” for its universities abroad, and yet the central government has little involvement in higher education promotion. Universities, and in some respects provinces, are in charge of attracting foreign students to Australia and building an image of academic excellence and cosmopolitanism. They compete among themselves and against foreign education institutions for private income from international students, with the students themselves conceptualized essentially as consumers. To attract new students and maximize revenue, they maintain a network of commercial education agents abroad, organize student fairs and promotion events, open offices on the campus of partner universities, and sign agreements with local institutions. They use marketing strategies to target the public and divide the market into various segments: the cohort of young students studied by the author, who belong to the “post-90” (jiuling hou) generation, were more likely than the previous generation to be female, to study business and management as opposed to sciences or engineering, to start studying at the bachelor’s level, and to apply for permanent resident permit after their studies. The selling points for studying in Australia increasingly focus on urban lifestyle, natural scenery, food and beverage, and opportunities for tourism. International student offices at Australian universities emphasize the quality of students’ live & learn experience. They offer a range of support, advice and information about housing, daily life, and job opportunities. The objective is to create value and maximize consumer experience, not to promote a particular model of democracy and use education as a policy instrument. If exposure to daily life in Australia makes student acquire a taste for freedom and democratic ideals, so much the better. But studying in Australia is responding to economic rationality, not to the logic of a sovereign state. The education sector is Australia’s third export market after agriculture and mining. It generates indirect revenues by contributing to nation branding, tourism, and export promotion. If anything, dependence on Chinese student income was construed as a problem, especially at the end of the period studied by Fran Martin. Excessive market concentration affects product quality and exposes producers to increased political risk.

Preconceived ideas

As Fran Martin writes in her preface, “the young Chinese women whose stories are told in this book represent the human face of this marketization of education.” I was surprised by the description of their social background as middle class: they were the (often only) daughters of middle-rank party cadres, local officials, small business entrepreneurs, or corporate executives, who could afford to pay tuition fees and living expenses abroad. By comparison, in Vietnam, studying abroad remains the preserve of the elite or the upper middle class, and parents are making huge sacrifices to send their children abroad. Even in France, where secondary education is mostly state-led and university tuition fees are very low, sending one’s child to study abroad is a tough financial decision, and most French students content themselves with a one-year mobility in a different European country under the Erasmus student exchange program. Getting a degree in the United States, in Australia, or even in post-Brexit United Kingdom is out of the financial reach of most French families. The huge number of Chinese students abroad (over 700 000 in 2019) made me realize how rich China has become, and how devoted Chinese parents are to the education of their children. A related surprise was to read that for these young urban Chinese women, Melbourne and other Australian cities felt provincial and underdeveloped. Words like Mocun (“Melvillage”) and TuAo (“native Oz”) disparage the cultural and economic backwardness of Australia as a whole, while complaints about the nation’s backward infrastructure and early shop closing times were frequent among Chinese students. For some students, the village-like living conditions in Melbourne felt safe and friendly, while other complained against the unfriendliness of the locals, the unavailability of jobs in non-Chinese-run businesses, the ethnic concentration of Chinese students and migrants in clustered urban areas and housing, and racism and violence in public places. The dream of immersing oneself in the local culture and to get to know local people often ended in disillusion and fear. Indeed, many respondents in the study found that they had left China only to arrive in a subworld populated by Chinese friends, Chinese landlords, Chinese classmates, Chinese flatmates, Chinese bosses, Chinese media, and Chinese businesses. Everyday verbal interactions were held mostly in Mandarin, and the city was experienced as a sociospatial network of connected clusters.

Another preconceived idea I had about China was that increased openness through foreign travel and studies abroad might change Chinese society for the better and steer its citizens toward more liberal attitudes on the political and social fronts. This is a delusion I share with many people in the West: the notion that exposing young Chinese people to our ideas and values will make them think and behave more like us and will turn China as a whole into a responsible stakeholder on the global scene. In France, international education is recognized as a significant tool of soft power, a mechanism of attraction and persuasion. Through student exchange programs and cultural institutions such as Alliance française and Campus France, countries convey particular cultural, social, educational and political images of themselves abroad. These not only enhances their global visibility and influence but also their ultimate goal to reach and win the hearts and minds of people worldwide. It seems hard to deny the fact that internationalized higher education, with its cross-cultural and multi-national exchange activities, lays the ground for an intensified cross-border dialogue, contributes to a greater understanding between countries as well as enhances international cooperation. Education as a global phenomenon attracts people, and generates interest in the languages and cultures of other places. But Australia doesn’t seem to make such assumptions. For Australians, education is a lucrative business, not a policy tool, and promotion efforts focus on short rather than long term objectives. If anything, the increased number of Chinese students in Australian universities, and their dependence on partnership agreements with China, are perceived as a threat to academic freedom and domestic sovereignty. After Fran Martin completed her study, it was announced that Australia’s federal government was to shut down Chinese learning centers, known as Confucius Institutes, after the latter has been suspected of functioning as a plank of the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda. In 2021, Human Rights Watch published a report entitled How China’s Long Reach of Repression Undermines Academic Freedom at Australia’s Universities, giving voice to students and academics who felt forced to self-censor their views about the human rights abuses of the communist regime in China. Cases of nationalist outbursts and peer harassment have been reported among Chinese students abroad, making true the Chinese regime’s assertion that “leaving the country is more effective than a hundred patriotic education classes.”

Competing models of identity

This is not to say that international education had no effect on the Chinese students who responded to Fran Martin’s questions or discussed together on their WeChat group. The author identifies two competing models of identity among the young Chinese women from the post-90 generation: neoliberal-style enterprising selfhood, and neotraditionalist familial feminity. The first one values mobility, individual freedom, cosmopolitanism, professional orientation, gender equality, and consumerism. The second one prefers stability, family orientation, filial piety, collective discipline, job security, and traditional gender roles. Studying abroad accompanied a shift from the second to the first model. Contacted a few years after the study, women in the focus group were more likely to be unmarried, independent, focused on their professional career, following a flexible life course, and geographically mobile. They valued professional ambition, cultural reflexivity, and leisure consumption. All were not able to translate international studies into higher-status jobs in the private sector, in China or in Australia, and a significant number experienced downward social mobility. Some remained in Australia, navigating the state immigration regime and accumulating points in pursuit of permanent resident status while doing odd jobs in precarious conditions. Other graduates returned to China and faced gender-based discrimination in their job searches, competing with a large number of haigui returnees and having less guanxi than those who had stayed behind. Most of them delayed marriage and childbearing, with the risk of falling behind the gendered life script of marrying before their late twenties and becoming shengnü, or “leftover women.” The other model of gender neotraditionalism also retained its influence, in alliance with family structures and the modern apparatus of the socialist state. Pressures to marry and have children on a fixed schedule were difficult to escape, and heteronormativity weighed on some women who had developed same-sex leanings while in Australia. In political terms, Chinese students abroad tended to manifest expressions of “long-distance nationalism” and “patriotism from afar.” Faced with “insults to China”, the ethics of national representation demands that one make counterclaims to defend the national honor against hostile outsiders: “A son never complains that his mother is ugly; a dog never complains that its household is poor.” But nationalist feelings were also complicated by time spent abroad: the author observes a growing tendency to distinguish patriotism (aiguo) from attachment to the party or government, as well as a growing appreciation of the heterogeneity of Chinese identity. As she observes, “national feelings on the move are characterized by multiplicity, mutability, and ambivalence.”

Interestingly, the only institutions who really care about the subjectivities of Chinese students in Australia and who want to win their “hearts and minds” are proselytizing churches and religious sects. Among evangelical churches in the West (and in South Korea), China is seen as a new frontier for Christianity, a continent ripe for mass conversion and heavenly salvation. Some churches selectively target foreign students in evangelizing strategies: their personal alienation, disorientation, and insecurity resulting from their immersion into an unfamiliar environment make them easy targets for street preachers and door-to-door missionaries. The church to which there are drawn acts as a “service hub” for foreign students, providing spiritual comfort and material orientation as well as free language classes, outdoor excursion opportunities, and a quick way to meet new friends. In France, where secularism is part of the national identity, proselytizing has a bad image in the general public. It is perceived as undue influence and foreign meddling: evangelicals are routinely characterized as “Anglo-saxon,” and Seventh-Day Adventists or Latter-Day Saints are categorized as “cults.” By contrast, I was surprised to read that Chinese students had a rather positive image of proselytizing churches; despite being warned against “heterodox cults” (xie jiao) in their home country, they were curious about what they perceived as part of the cultural foundation of Western societies, and were favorably impressed by the selflessness and genuine sympathy of Christian missionaries. Some Chinese women used Bible-study classes and Pentecostal church sermons as a type of introspective self-cultivation and self-improvement, not necessarily leading to long-term religious engagement. For others, the church became the center of their social activities and spiritual life. For many Chinese students drawn to religious activities, churches were one of the few places where conversation and friendship with locals could occur. The LDS (Mormon) Church is not allowed to proselytize in China, but it trains its missionaries in Mandarin and tasks them with targeting Chinese citizens abroad in order to expand the faith into Chinese communities. For other churches as well, returnee converts may appear as an efficient means of spreading the faith in China while complying to the strict limitation imposed by the communist authorities on their activities. For the author, “churches’ provision of social services to international students raises some questions when considered in relation to ‘education export’ in Australia”: she sees it as “neoliberal privatization” and “outsourcing” of welfare services that ought to be provided by the secular state. She notes that the LDS Church and Pentecostal megachurches promote “deeply conservative positions on gender identity, (hetero)sexuality, and marriage.” But she also acknowledges the limitation of academic approaches when it comes to religious affects and expressions of faith: “the affective experience of immersion in religious scenes—even in the scholarly guise of ethnographic observation—tends to elude the clinical grasp of academic analysis.”

Market research

I wish I had with me a similar book about Vietnamese students abroad when I was posted at the French Embassy in Hanoi, covering the education sector. In our efforts to attract Vietnamese students to France, we were more or less walking in the dark. We had no market research reports, no focus group results, no customer satisfaction surveys, no communication strategy. When we organized a Study in France fair in a big hotel in Hanoi and in Ho Chi Minh City, we were overwhelmed by the number of young Vietnamese who showed up to gather information. We did invest resources to create and sustain a network of Vietnamese alumni: they were our best salespersons, and often took an active role in attracting their junior peers to the same institutions and programs from which they had graduated. A private philanthropist, who was particularly fond of elite institutions such as Ecole Polytechnique, played a tremendous role in attracting the best and the brightest Vietnamese students to France through a scholarship program. The “bourses de l’ambassade” (scholarships at the graduate level) were also very sought after, and a process was designed to guarantee the total independence of student selection. For many students, the French language was a barrier, as most courses in France were taught in French, but it was also an incentive to enroll in French language classes in Vietnam and develop a deeper engagement with French society. In our efforts to attract Vietnamese students to France, we stood halfway between economic rationality and the logic of a sovereign state. Higher education was not identified as a business sector that could generate revenue and contribute to economic growth, but as a tool of national influence and soft power. We were in competition with other foreign destinations or domestic programs, but we tended to present the Study in France experience as unique and special, not as a competitive option amongst many. Of course, a book like Dreams of Flight is not a market research report or an exhaustive survey of Chinese students in Australia. The insights it generates are, in my view, more relevant for public policy than for private sector development. In this way, it confirms my preconception that studies abroad should not be left to market forces and wealth considerations.

The Creative City, From Providence, Rhode Island, to Hanoi, Vietnam

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of The Creative Underclass: Youth, Race, and the Gentrifying City, Tyler Denmead, Duke University Press, 2019.

The Creative UnderclassI want to use Tyler Denmead’s book as an opportunity to reflect on my past experience as director of Institut Français du Vietnam, a network of four cultural centers supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Danang, and Hue. On the face of it, our situations could not have been more different. I was a mid-career diplomat posted as cultural counsellor at the French Embassy in Hanoi for a four-year assignment. My roadmap for managing the culture centers was simple and laid down in a few words: engage youth, be creative, and balance your budget. Tyler Denmead was the founder and director of New Urban Arts, an arts and humanities studio primarily for your people of color from working-class and low-income backgrounds in Providence, Rhode Island. Coming back to the arts studio as a PhD student doing participatory observation, he comes to realize he has been a mere instrument in the city’s program of revitalization through culture, unwittingly supporting a process of gentrification and eviction of the ethnic minorities he was supposed to empower through cultural activities and economic opportunities in the creative economy. No two cities can be further apart than Hanoi, Vietnam, and Providence, Rhode Island. And yet there are some commonalities between the two. They were both labelled “Creative Cities” and implemented strategies of economic revitalization through cultural activities. They both faced the forces of gentrification, land speculation, urban renewal, and the challenge of dealing with former industrial facilities and brownfields. New Urban Arts and the Institute Français in Hanoi were both tasked with the same missions of engaging youth, expanding access to culture, building skills, and securing public and private support. And, as directors of cultural institutions, we were both entangled in contradictions and dilemma that put our class position and ethnic privilege into question.

Revitalization through culture

Richard Florida is the urban theorist who is credited with coining the term “the creative class”. Visiting Providence in Rhode Island in 2003, he celebrated the city’s future as a creative hub. Successive mayors embarked on a program of urban renewal, rebranding Providence as a “Renaissance City” or a “Creative Capital”. Revitalizing post-industrial cities through arts, culture, and creativity has been a standard script since the 1990s. The conventional strategy includes a marketing and public relation campaign to rebrand the city’s image; supporting and promoting cultural assets including arts organizations, festivals, and cultural events; reshaping abandoned factories and warehouses into cultural spaces; and providing tax incentives to redevelop property into locations of historical, aesthetic, and economic value. According to Florida, Providence exported too much of its college-educated talent from Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design, or RISD. He thus advocated for strategies to retain young creatives from these highly selective and private universities by offering incentives to launch dynamic start-ups and host cultural events, thus attracting inward investment, tourism, and additional creative workers. In retrospect, the strategy has been a failure. In his reassessment of Providence’s future as a creative city, Florida recognized that these programs have only exacerbated urban inequalities without creating lasting economic or social value. He noted that technology has been the region weak spot and has failed to provide “real jobs” for young people in local industries. Providence’s new growth strategy now focuses on technology startups, business incubators, and quality of life. Providence now ranks as number 15 in the list of “Best Cities to Found a Startup Outside Silicon Valley and New York” and also boasts itself as one of the “10 Best Cities to Raise Kids in America.”

Tyler Denmead uses critical race theory to show that the color blindness of “creativity” dissimulates the ways in which the creative city reproduces and reinforces racial and class inequality. There is a long tradition of criticizing urban policies by exposing their racial underpinnings. James Baldwin in the 1960s described “urban renewal” as just another word for state-sponsored “negro removal” as he examined change in San Francisco at the time. And bell hooks, writing in the 1990s, described these urban renewal projects as “state-orchestrated, racialized class warfare (which) is taking place all around the United States.” Denmead’s expression, the “creative underclass”, is meant as a bridge between Florida’s “creative class” and the term “underclass”, which in the American context has often been used to explain poverty through cultural deprivation. His mission in New Urban Arts was to transform Providence’s “troubled youth,” meaning young people from ethnic minorities and low-income backgrounds, into “creative youth” equipped with the skills and talent to seize job opportunities in the creative economy. He leveraged public support for engaging teenagers and young adults in cultural activities such as art mentoring and poetry writing, even while arts education was being suppressed from the curriculum of Providence’s public schools and welfare support to poor families was being eroded. Most of the state subsidies under the creative city program were channelled toward real estate development and the restoration of old industrial buildings, fueling land speculation and gentrification. Through the promotion of a bohemian lifestyle, young people from the creative underclass were encouraged to choose to live in poverty, inhabiting abandoned warehouses and taking low-wage service jobs in the hope of gaining popularity and recognition in the white hipster scene. But there were very few “real job” opportunities for those who did not want to become “starving artists,” and public efforts to attract media companies or high-tech business activities proved ineffective. In the end, according to the author, the creative city only supports “a brand of capitalism that has legitimized the erosion of support for those who are poor.”

The Creative City

Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, also stakes its future development on culture and the creative economy. It has been admitted in 2019 in UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network, and has identified creativity as a strategic element for sustainable urban development. Home to 7.9 million people, the political capital of Vietnam has gone through several attempts to rebrand itself. It was granted the “City of Peace” title by UNESCO in 1999, and has built on this image to position itself as a hub for international political events, such as the APEC Summit in 2006, the East Asia Summit in 2010, the World Economic Forum on ASEAN in 2018, and the second DPRK-US Summit in February 2019. The thousandth anniversary of the foundation of the capital (then named Thang Long) by the emperor Ly Thai To was the occasion of major celebrations in 2010, insisting on the city’s long history and its tradition of resistance against foreign aggression. Faced with the economic might of Ho Chi Minh City (former Saigon) in the south and the entrepreneurial spirit of Danang in central Vietnam, Hanoi can play on its distinctiveness as an ancient capital of culture, national politics, and higher education. The Creative City strategy insists on several dimensions: architecture and urban heritage, handicraft and craft villages, traditional cuisine and gastronomy, and ancient arts preserved and performed with new style. The main French cultural center in Vietnam was located in Hanoi. The French institutes in Danang and Hue were of smaller scale and focused mostly on teaching French, while the French institute in Ho Chi Minh City operated from the precinct of the French Consulate General, using outside facilities (including a residence for artists, Villa Saigon) to stage cultural events and festivals.

L’Espace, the flagship building of the French cultural presence in Hanoi, was located in the historic central district that was at the core of the city’s urban renewal strategy. Only one block away from the early twentieth century’s opera house, next to the five-star Hôtel Métropole that attracted rich tourists through a cultivated image of colonial chic, the French cultural center was a landmark location in Hanoi’s cultural life. Artists remembered having given their first concert on its stage or displayed their first solo exhibition in its art gallery. They also kept a fond memory of the lectures and intellectual debates organized in its book library, or of the French language classes that offered a window to the outside world and a prized ticket for studying abroad. When I became cultural counsellor at the French Embassy, the Hanoi center was still very active: its language classes were fully packed, its concerts and cultural events well frequented, and its aura as a showcase of French culture and lifestyle still intact. New activities such as pop concerts, hip-hop tournaments, street art exhibitions, or technology displays attracted a younger generation and encouraged collaborations between French and Vietnamese artists. But its finance were in dire straits: the yearly rental charge was regularly adjusted upward to keep pace with the rise in the property market; advertising events through Facebook and other communication channels cost money; and salaries had to be paid to the dedicated local staff and the native teachers of French. A vast public of middle-class families coming to the central district for their weekend stroll just passed us by, with little interest for French culture and low budgets to devote to cultural or educational activities. For L’Espace, the Covid epidemic was the coup de grâce: priced out of the real estate market, the center was forced to relocate its French language classes and student orientation offices in a less prestigious location, and lost its ability to host cultural events on its own stage or gallery.

France’s cultural policy in Vietnam

We campaigned hard to convince local authorities and private sponsors that subsidizing cultural activities was in their best interest. We found a sympathetic ear in the person of the city mayor, who offered the district’s central plaza for a two-day outdoor festival of French culture and gastronomy. French culture still has a good image in Vietnam: France is seen as a romantic location for tourism, a country with a rich heritage and glamorous lifestyle, and a prime destination for studying abroad. French food and wine obtain high rankings, and French luxury brands dominate the market. But only a small minority of Vietnamese people have the financial means and educated tastes to indulge in such proclivities. For younger generations with lower budgets and more familiar longings, South Korea and its culture proves the most attractive. The Korean wave has hit Vietnam in full swing, and young Vietnamese are passionate about K-pop, Korean drama, kimchi, and K-fashion and cosmetics. France simply cannot compete with this attractiveness primarily led by private actors and mediated by the digital economy. Instead, France’s main selling point is to be found in cultural heritage. French colonial history has left a deep imprint in Vietnam, from city planning and architecture to baguette bread and loanwords taken from the French language. Vietnamese leaders are eager to solicit French expertise to help them reclaim and showcase their own cultural heritage, from the recent past to ancient history. City-to-city cooperation and French government’s support have helped preserve and promote Hanoi’s Old Quarter and its Thang Long Citadel, building on France’s long experience in heritage preservation. The same goes with the city of Hue, Vietnam’s ancient capital and the cradle of Vietnamese culture, that has been a partner of French cultural cooperation for more than thirty years. The Hue Festival, a major cultural event with an international audience, was first called the Vietnamese-French Festival and celebrated in 1992.  

As a French intellectual versed in cultural studies and post-colonial theory, I was fully aware of the ambiguities and contradictions involved in promoting French culture in Vietnam. For post-colonial scholars, imperialism manifests itself not only through physical domination of geographic entities, but also through the colonization of the imaginary. But contemporary Vietnam is very forthcoming with its colonial past, and harbors no complex towards former imperial powers. After all, it has won two major wars against two dominant world powers, and has resisted more than a thousand years of Chinese imperialism. Still, the terms of cultural trade between France and Vietnam were premised on unequal exchange and an imbalance between center and periphery. As much as we sought to foster collaboration and joint projects between artists from the two countries, Vietnam was always on the receiving end, and France was always the initiator. We faced many practical dilemma in our daily activities. Could we, for instance, display the photographs of Vietnamese women from various ethnicities taken by a French artist who sold mostly to rich tourists and foreign collectors? Or should we promote the emergence of a local art scene through photography workshops and cross-exhibitions? Could we invite French intellectuals to ponder about the risks posed by Facebook and other social networks in a country where Facebook represented one rare window of free expression? How could Vietnamese historians debate with their French counterparts about the battle of Dien Bien Phu, and could they develop a common understanding of history? And how to explain the enduring success among Vietnamese audiences of the films Indochine and L’Amant that we showed repeatedly in our cinema-club? The image of colonial chic that I perceived as an expression of imperial nostalgia and ethnic prejudice among French nationals proved to be equally attractive among young Vietnamese, who had no memory of the Indochinese past but found its modern expressions romantic and glamorous.

White privilege?

For us, the ethnic question was raised in different terms than for Tyler Denmead. He denounces the myth of the “good white savior” who is supposed to transform “troubled youth” of color into “creative youth.” Well aware of his white privilege, he is careful to avoid “performative wokeness” and “virtue signaling” and to distinguish his auto-ethnography from a quest for redemption. He concludes his book with a series of recommendations based on the very words used by young people who hung around in the arts studio: troublemaking (or “fucking up white notions of what it means to be black or brown”), creating a hot mess (a place where they can be random, irrational, and disrespectful of authority), and chillaxing (temporarily opting out of the system). Our goal in Vietnam was not to encourage youth resistance and rebellion. And we did not understand “white privilege” in the way Tyler Denmead applies it to his own case. Still, it could be argued that our cultural policies and management practices were based on structural inequalities. Although our recruitment policy was open and nondiscriminatory, three of the four directors of the French culture centers in Vietnam were French, while their assistants were all Vietnamese. The presence of native French teachers was a major selling point for our language classes. Accordingly, most if not all full-time teachers were French nationals (of various ethnicities) while the part-time lecturers were Vietnamese. With very few exceptions, French managers and teachers could not speak Vietnamese, while all Vietnamese staff, including technicians, were required to have at least some mastery of the French language. Expat salaries exceeded the paycheck of locally hired staff by an order of magnitude. As for our public, we didn’t target the expat community for our cultural events. But France’s image was associated with elitism, and we were expected to keep a high profile and an upmarket brand image. Not unlike Tyler Denmead’s Urban Arts center in Providence, the French culture center in Hanoi was an instrument in a wider movement of gentrification, and was in the end forced to relocate due to the very forces it supported.