L. C. Kelley

Liam Christopher Kelley (born 28 December 1966), or Lê Minh Khải (Traditional Chinese: 黎明凱), is an American Vietnamologist and a professor of Southeast Asian history and lecturer at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam, he formerly taught at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Honolulu. His studies mainly focus on all periods in Vietnamese history, but he also teaches broadly on Southeast Asian, Asian and World History. Kelley also has a research interest in the digital humanities where he analyses and discusses the ways in which the Digital Revolution is transforming how scholars can produce and disseminate their ideas online and uses new digital media himself, such as a blog, for academic purposes. In 1989, he received his B.A. in Russian Language and Literature from Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. He has published a book on Vietnamese envoy poetry (known in Vietnamese as thơ đi sứ), co-edited a book on the southern borders of China, published articles and book chapters on the invention of traditions in "medieval Vietnam" (Việt Nam cổ trung đại), and the emergence of Vietnamese nationalism and spirit writing (giáng bút) in early twentieth century Vietnam under French domination. Kelley claimed that this resulted in an unwavering belief in what he calls the "not Chinese" theory of the history of Vietnam.

Together with Tạ Chí Đại Trường he criticised the authenticity of the Hùng kings claiming that they were later invented and that their supposed historicity had no basis in reality. The conference itself was established by Phan Lê Hà in 2009, then at Monash University in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, and has been held in Vietnam, Australia, the United States, and the Netherlands. The conference partners with a different university each year. During this time he had been back and forth in Vietnam, attending a number of seminars and publishing many articles largely to prove that the history and traditions of "anti-foreign aggression of the Vietnamese people" (Truyền thống chống ngoại xâm của dân tộc Việt Nam) are only recent pieces of fiction, and were cultural values that the Vietnamese people were proud to have only after establishing contact with the West. This working method has influenced the concepts and working methods of a number of authors, especially young authors, to change their views on Vietnamese history and how to research it. As an example he presented the book "Vạn Quốc Công Pháp" (萬國公法), a Chinese translation of The Elements of International Law, first published in 1836 by American lawyer Henry Wheaton, a book noted by many researchers to have made a profound contribution to the ideological transformation of the ruling elites in Qing China and Japan. In his paper Kelley argued that Wilhelm Solheim had built the theory of "Southeast Asia as the earliest agricultural center" based on false archeological data and that the amateur Vietnamese historians on the internet and some members of the Vietnamese diaspora try to push a nationalistic view of the prehistoric period in Vietnam based on Solheim's earlier arguments from 1975.

Envoy poetry

Beyond the Bronze Pillars: Envoy Poetry and the Sino-Vietnamese Relationship published in 2005 was based on research conducted at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan and the Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies in Hanoi, it focuses on the tributary ties between China and Vietnam from the late 16th to the early 19th centuries. While Patricia M. Pelley of the American Historical Association noted that while she finds the work to be "an extraordinary book based on some truly impressive research", she comments how some of the contents of the book are problematic. The most controversial point of these studies is that they emphasised that there were no major difference between Chinese and Vietnamese elite or high culture, in light of a trend that Kelley described where over the past decades in writing about Vietnam historical works tended to focus on the "division between Vietnamese and Chinese culture." and noted that many historians tended to focus more on the Vietnamese side of this bilateral relationship. While Kelley notes that what we today call "Chinese culture" was not perceived as being in any way alien or the possession of some other people by the Vietnamese envoys while noting that this poetry is not representative of how other members of the elites of Imperial Vietnam, but argued that "the passion and depth of these envoys’ beliefs suggests that they were probably not alone". But they noted that Kelley's works and research into the study of envoy poetry insufficiently investigated into the transformation and violation of Confucian manners and thoughts at specific historical moments by the official representatives of the courts. While Kiernan writes that he agrees that Vietnamese history cannot be fully understood without its Chinese cultural background, he claims that Kelley overemphasises the importance of being able to understand Classical Chinese to learn about both Vietnamese and Southeast Asian history.

"Medieval Vietnamese invented traditions"

Kelley argues that over the centuries, the traditions that historians from Imperial Vietnam created have become second nature, and that during the second half of the 20th century under the influence of nationalism, the invented traditions of Imperial Vietnam have become and are becoming irreversible truths which he calls "Medieval Vietnamese invented traditions" (như một truyền thống được kiến tạo của người Việt Nam thời trung đại). Vietnamese historian Nguyễn Hòa claimed that Kelley's view on the status of Đại Việt being a Văn hiến chi bang was flawed and that the status wasn't declared by the Vietnamese themselves but awarded to Đại Việt by the Hongwu Emperor. Hòa also criticised the notion that Vietnam had an inferiority complex in relation to China and that Kelley misguidedly came to these conclusions by only looking at the historical texts and documents without looking at the greater historical context.

Social Darwinism amongst the educated indigenous elite of French Indochina

During the late 19th century and early 20th century the mandarins of the Nguyễn dynasty and other educated elite of French Indochina were introduced to works from Europe and the Americas through Chinese revolutionaries and are known in Vietnam as Tân thư (新書), Through the Tân thư, Vietnamese intellectuals come into contact with and received new knowledge from the outside world. This contact was both due to traditional exchanges and due to being closely related to the situation and plight of Japan and China – peoples who share a similar cultural background and were all facing a new form of colonialism that plots to annex not only the territory, but also westernise their culture. In this context, the development of Japan, the movement of thoughts according to the progressive trends in China could not fail to affect the thought and sentiment of progressive intellectuals in Vietnam at that time. They hoped to find a new direction for the nation from the Duy Tân (維新, "Renovation") movements in these two countries and with the Tân thư (see: Meiji Restoration), the spirit of enlightenment and many works of historical, political and philosophical studies. The West's presence in Vietnam, leading to the birth of movements based on news school of thought (Phong trào Tân học) that showed a new aspiration, a new awakening in social awareness that dominated Vietnam's educated minds at the time. During this same period of both modernisation and Westernisation a lot of, not only social but also, scientific vocabulary started to enter the Vietnamese language, such as máy bay (Aeroplane), tàu hỏa (Train), ô-tô (Automobile), xe máy - mô-tô (Motocyclette), áo vét (Veston), dầu tây (Petroleum)... đến tự do (Freedom), bình đẳng (Equality), bác ái (Charity), dân quyền (Civil rights), độc lập (Independence), yêu nước (Patriotism), dân tộc (Ethnicity, ethnic group), Etc.

Kelley claims that the developments during this period made the Vietnamese elite fearful of the warnings of the social evolution that nations could "easily disappear" if they were not strong enough, in response the reformed intellectuals in the early 20th century began to write Vietnamese history in radically new ways. According to Kelley it was during this period when ideas of independence and cultural differences began to hold key positions in Vietnamese historiography.

Vietnamese criticism of Kelley's scholarship

Nhân Dân

Criticisms by Nguyễn Hòa

In February 2014 historian Nguyễn Hòa wrote two articles in Nhân Dân, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Vietnam, criticising Kelly as an example of foreign authors making unconvincing theses in part of a larger trend of the expansion of international relations of Vietnam. Nguyễn Hòa noted that Kelley is not interested in the "hidden" and "non-textous" content of history and culture as he only seeks to research surviving texts often attempting to refute the cultural and historical values that are quite unified in the Vietnamese research community, as well as in the public consciousness in Vietnam. Hòa gave an example that in his assessment of the transformation of Vietnamese society during the early 20th century, Kelley noted that this was merely a cultural transition but Hòa argued that it would be better to see these societal transformations as a way of molding the "national spirit" (Tinh thần dân tộc) in context of being colonised. Nguyễn Hòa noted that the Vietnamese were eager to adopt scientific advancements from the West such as cars, aeroplanes, motorcycles, Etc. but were having more issues in adopting spiritual and social concepts from the West. Nguyễn Hòa argued that these kinds of concepts (phenomena related to freedom, equality, charity, civil rights, independence, patriotism, ethnicity, Etc.) existed beforehand in Vietnamese but that the previous generations of Vietnamese people simply didn't have the vocabulary to express these concepts and that Kelley fails to make these connections, arguing that while concepts and ideas cannot create reality and only express what is already there those that cannot express concepts are still bound to them and that it's up to later generations to analyse the past with these new concepts. Hòa argues that Kelley fails to see analysis from the sense of the researcher who tends to "modernise the past" by separating the text from the context and that earlier Vietnamese struggles to regain their ancestral land was proof that, even without those words, the Vietnamese had subconscious concepts of things like independence, patriotism, the nation, Etc. and that these things are impossible to survey by strictly focusing on the historical texts themselves and separating them from these modern concepts.

Nguyễn Hòa claims that Kelley's assessments of the historicity of the Hồng Bàng dynasty are short-sighted and that Kelley holds on to colonialism's "mission of civilisational enlightenment". Hòa further notes that Vietnam's tributary relationship to China, like those of Japan, Korea, and Thailand, was not a sign of submission to the superiority of Chinese culture but a recognition of Vietnam's sovereignty and that it was forced to act submissive because it's the only way for a small country to survive next to a big country and maintain a stable relationship with its bigger neighbour. Likewise, Hòa notes that Vietnam's worship of Confucius wasn't a sign of submission to China but that the Vietnamese had adopted Confucianism as a part of their own culture much like how Buddhism was integrated into Vietnamese culture, citing that Emperor Trần Nhân Tông created his own order of Zen Buddhism.

Another criticism of Kelley by Nguyễn Hòa revolves around the argument by solely focusing on the written texts that one cannot feel "the spirit of the times" by removing the words from their greater historical context giving him an inability to grasp the "hidden" and "non-written" nature of some past problems and events that were not stored by documents, but propagated in folklore and have been imprinted on the unconscious community, saying that using Kelley's methodology "it will be difficult to find convincing solutions" and that it's "easy to get caught up in the trend of subjective speculation". Hòa claims that after a thousand years of Chinese colonisation not many (if any) written records of Vietnamese survived and that folklore has become a place to store information about many events, historical, and cultural phenomena over the centuries. While Hòa does admit that using folklore isn't an optimal tool for historical research it makes it possible to remember the past of the country and the nation which are preserved and transmitted through "the collective memory of the Vietnamese people". Claiming that it's through this method that one can find the authenticity of the Hồng Bàng dynasty and that Kelley's criticism of the stories surrounding the pre-Chinese history of Vietnam present a challenge rather than demonstrating the scientific vision of the research surrounding Vietnam's ancient past. For his denial of Vietnam's ancient past and supposedly demonstrated centuries of patriotism and longing for independence Nguyễn Hòa claimed that Kelley was holding on to what he defined as "spiritual colonialism" (chủ nghĩa thực dân tinh thần).

Nguyễn Hòa noted that in the past many countries created cultures and built a civilisation with their own writing systems but were later invaded and assimilated, and countries where the starting point in ancient times was still at a low level and were unable to record their history. Hòa claimed that only being dependent on the written record means that Kelley denies the legitimacy of passed on oral history in Vietnam saying that we can't treat all countries like his native United States which is a recently created nation and therefore has all of its origins thoroughly documented in a paper trial while the same cannot be said about Vietnam's ancient origins. Nguyễn Hòa states that the folklore of Vietnam surrounding its ancient origins can be compared with those of the modern-day Israel, where it is equally impossible to take the time of its establishment in 1948 without ignoring the history of thousands of years before Christ of the Jews; a people which have an equally legendary origin based on the story of Moses and that his staff was seen as a symbol of the Jewish people for countless of generations before the creation of their modern state. Meaning that Kelly's method of analysing ancient documents and criticising the folklore, which he claims are just "vivid fantasies", according Nguyễn Hòa is an irrational method as it denies the patriotic struggles of past heroes as the line between "history" and "folklore" can often become blurry which cannot be exclusively analysed using the scientific method.

Nguyễn Hòa warned people against quoting and analysing Kelley's works as he often requires authentic evidence, regardless of historical circumstance. Hòa pointed out that during the Fourth Era of Northern Domination the Yongle Emperor ordered that the Ming soldiers should destroy all and any works that they found written in the Vietnamese languages while all Chinese literature about Buddhism and Daoism should be preserved adding to the large gap in historical documentation of Đại Việt before this era. In the 20 years of Ming domination and destruction of Vietnamese books very little works were able to survive, which further makes Kelley's dependence on surviving works a flawed way to study Vietnamese history according to Nguyễn Hòa.

Criticisms by Lê Việt Anh

In June 2014 historian Lê Việt Anh wrote a piece in Nhân Dân, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Vietnam, criticising Kelly (whom he referred to as "L.C Ken-li") for his views on Vietnamese history and called him a "Temple burner" (kẻ/người "đốt đền"). Lê Việt Anh noted that Kelley's reputation has emerged not because of his contributions to Vietnamese studies, but mainly due to a number of controversial works and articles about the need to change the system of the study of Vietnamese history. Kelley noted that Trần Quang Đức's Thousand years of caps and robes proved that "the Vietnamese were hanised" (người Việt đã bị Hán hóa) which Việt Anh noted was used by Kelley to deny the notion that people in East and Southeast Asia had selected elements from foreign cultural traditions and then "localised" (bản địa hóa) them to indigenous circumstances, as Kelley pushes for using Chinese culture and Chinese concepts to learn more about how the pre-modern Vietnamese thought. Việt Anh added that Trần Quang Đức himself noted that the Vietnamese always added unique variations.

Lê Việt Anh criticised Kelley for claiming that seeing sovereignty in ancient maps is "modernisation of the past" (hiện đại hóa quá khứ) and that people in the past didn't view national sovereignty in the way modern people do, related to the Hoàng Sa and Trường Sa insular territorial disputes. This was as Kelley concluded that "It seems to me that the French were the first to demonstrate the "peaceful and continuous expression of state power" over the Paracels." (Với tôi có vẻ như có một thực tế là người Pháp là những người đầu tiên chứng minh "sự thể hiện hòa bình và liên tục quyền lực nhà nước" đối với Paracels) based on the facts that the Nguyễn dynasty was the first Vietnamese state to claim the area and that the French were the first to actually establish a permanent presence there during the 1930s. Lê Việt Anh claimed that the Vietnamese people had a "national consciousness" and that the modern concept of "sovereignty" could be applied to it but that the people simply didn't have a term to express this "national consciousness" and that Vietnam has always had heroes that fought for the sovereignty of the country, such as the many national heroes that fought against the Song and Ming dynasties, but that Kelley deliberately didn't recognise this because in his view Vietnam was "Sinicised" (Hán hóa) and that the tributary relationship was an expression of dependence on the Chinese.

Việt Anh noted a number of controversial stances that Kelley had taken such as the claim that the Bình Ngô đại cáo wasn't a declaration of independence but discussed factions in Vietnamese society that supported the Ming, which Việt Anh claimed cannot be found in the text. Lê Việt Anh also claimed that Kelley's work which criticised the historical basis of the Hồng Bàng dynasty with nearly 90 annotations misunderstands the origins of the Vietnamese nation.

According to Lê Việt Anh understanding the histories of Vietnam, Japan, and Korea through the Sinocentric texts from the elites of the time doesn't reflect the independent nature of the peoples of these countries, as French cultural researchers found a rich folklore discussing the Vietnamese past and other cultural assets in the face of the Vietnamese Imperial court being dominated by the French. Which is why the "Hoa tâm" method of studying Vietnamese, Japanese, and Korean history isn't a perfect model especially in light of their independence comparable to the "cultural coercion" of the colonial states. With Việt Anh stating that these challenges have forced many researchers to change their old notions, as these old notions are seen as "offensive" (xúc phạm) and "simplistic" (đơn giản hóa) and that even well-trained American scholars, influenced by the Vietnamese concept of "little China", have more or less changed their views over the years to "reduce their bias", something which Kelley considers a cognitive error.

In the end of his article Lê Việt Anh warned other authors not to adopt Kelley's methods and perspectives and that he perceives the trends that Kelley is setting as undesirable noting that historical research should be careful when considering, evaluating, and concluding on a particular issue that, otherwise, it will not only "disturb social knowledge", but may also "lead to insults and misrepresentations of the core and good values that are the pride of the whole nation".

Publications

Batavia through the eyes of Vietnamese envoys, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1998. “Thoughts on a Chinese Diaspora: The Case of the Mạcs of Hà Tiên,” Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 14.1 (2000): 71–98. Kelley, Liam Christopher. 2003. “Vietnam as a ‘Domain of Manifest Civility’ (Văn Hiến Chi Bang).” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 3 (1): 63–76. Beyond the Bronze Pillars: Envoy Poetry and the Sino-Vietnamese Relationship, Association for Asian Studies/University of Hawaii Press (Honolulu, Hawaii), 2005. L Kelley - Divine Lord Wenchang Meets Great King Tran: Spirit Writing in Late Imperial/Colonial Vietnam, Beyond Teleologies” conference on the Colonial History of Vietnam ..., 2007. The biography of the Hồng Bàng clan as a medieval Vietnamese invented tradition, Journal of Vietnamese Study 7 (2), 87-130, 2012. Liam C. Kelley, “Tai Words and the Place of the Tai in the Vietnamese Past,” Journal of the Siam Society 101 (2013): 55-84. Liam C. Kelley, “Inventing Traditions in Fifteenth-Century Vietnam,” in Imperial China and Its Southern Neighbours, edited by Victor Mair and Liam C. Kelley (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2015), 161-193. Liam C. Kelley, “Moral Exemplar, Our General, Potent Deity, Confucian Moralizer and National Hero: The Transformations of Trần Hưng Đạo,” Modern Asian Studies 49.6 (2015): 1963-1993. Liam C. Kelley, “Constructing Local Narratives: Spirits: Dreams, and Prophecies in the Medieval Red River Delta,” in China's Encounters on the South and Southwest: Forging the Fiery Frontier, James Anderson and John K. Whitmore, eds. (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 78-105. Liam C. Kelley, “From a Reliant Land to a Kingdom in Asia: Premodern Geographic Knowledge and the Emergence of the Geo-Body in Late Imperial Vietnam,” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 5.2 (2016): 460-496. Liam Kelley, “Lost in Translation,” Mekong Review, Issue 9, November 2017. John D. Phan and Liam C. Kelley, eds., “Buddhist Literacy in Early Modern Vietnamese Print Culture,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies Vol. 13, No. 3 (2018). UN-IMAGINING “SRIVIJAYA” – A SERIES, 2020. Phan Lê Hà, Liam C. Kelley, and Jamie Gillen, “Introduction: The Collaboration Project between Engaging With Vietnam and the Journal of Vietnamese Studies,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies Vol. 15, No. 1 (2020): 1–5. Kelley, L. C. 2020. The centrality of “fringe history”: Diaspora, the Internet and a new version of Vietnamese prehistory. International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies 16 (1): 71–104, Vol. 16, No. 1 (2020). Jamie Gillen, Liam C. Kelley, and Le Ha Phan - Vietnam at the Vanguard: New Perspectives Across Time, Space, and Community Editors, XIII chapters, 263 pages. Hardcover ; Softcover ; eBook . Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. (2021).