some of you people really need to research some history -_-' Nope never part of china during han and tang dynasty , it was tributary state which Dai Viet govern its own people, the country just gave offerings to china Back then vietnamese caligraphy, governement adminstration was written in chữ nôm Not widely used anymore unfortunately Currently using latin alphabet quốc ngữ languaged was not based on the french -_-' French Jesuit missionary named Alexandre de Rhodes based on the works of portugese missionare Gaspar de Amaral modified the language , which was a good thing literacy rate went up 99% Roughly I think language has about 65% pre middle chinese loan words , 10-15% Han Viet, 30- 40% Viet Muong In terms of Culture , Yes the country is apart of the sinosphere of "East Asian" with Western and South East Asian Flare ( Ao Dai, Lunar New Year (Tet), Pho, Family Surname, Archeticture ( Western Culture- French, East Asian -China , South East Asian - Cham ) Religion ( Mahayana Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism ) In terms of location, its in South East Asia In terms of genetics , người Kinh / Jing with more then 54 ethnic minority Vietnam beat the beat Chinese ( Dai Viet ) , Sino Viet war 1979 , beat the Mongols 3 times ( Tran Hung Dao ) , beat French in the battle Dien Bien Phu, beat the US ( Im no commie or south vietnam supporter) One of my favourite Female Heroine : Trung Sisters To make it simple there were 100 yue tribe in Southern China including the Viets which consist of Bai Yue and Bac Viet there was no such thing as viet at the time . Hans came in invaded the south land , forced all the tribes to assimalte into Han Culture. The remaining Bai yue tribe fled to what is callled North Vietnam or Chinese called Nam Viet. The Bai Yue mixed with Au luc "Natives of the land. the only reason why some people claim that some viets look southern chinese 1) either they are chinese ( Hoa )- Cantonese, Hakka, Teo Chiew, Fujainese, San Diu (mountain Chinese) and the Ngai. 2) mixed chinese ( Cantonese, Hakka, Teo Chiew, Fujainese, San Diu (mountain Chinese) and the Ngai. ) 3) few viets are ashamed of the culture pretend to be chinese wannabe I can definetly say northern and southern chinese people look different from each other Hopefully nobody has that stupid stereotype that viets are gangaster ... because some of us arent -_-" Vietnamese were never chinese -_-' Vietnamese dont look chinese at all. not even cantonese.... Even though there is some chinese influence doesnt make vietnam chinese -_- Oh only about less then 1% of viets are mixed with french I can tell most asian ethnicity because have a friends whos from HK and one from mainland , a girl I know whos from Taiwan and have a korean friend hes a big guy... Im no Nationalist but Im a patriotic and proud of who Iam Toi la nguoi Viet Nam
You should go to www.dictionary.com and read a little more about Vietnam. I hope you have nothing against Chinese because I said Vietnam was part of China. Half of my family is from Vietnam. Yes we can tell the difference because we are all Asians.
thxs ......for the viable source -rolleyes I have nothing against them ..... All Im doing is stating the facts that some of these people are unware of Guangdong, GuangXi and Yunnan used to be under Viet Rule Triệu Đà http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chao_Tuo If your going to say Chao Tuo was of Han ethnicity you could say that but he was acustomed to yue culture (vietnamese)
On second thoughts, since my post on 5th July, you question can never be simply answered because of the huge complexity of people migration. Much depends on what your terms of reference is by using just one word Vietnamese and Chinese. Do you mean race, linguistics, genetics/blood line, nationality or geographical origins....so on and so forth. Then you need also to state the time of reference. Is it now, 500 years ago, 1000, 2000, 5000, 10,000, 50,000.... years' ago. Another complexity is that even China itself is difficult to define as it had changed so much. There is no one single definition as to what Chinese means. Likewise there is no one single definition of what is a Vietnamese in the true academic definition. However, as is indicated by many comments on this thread, the more you learn by research the more you will get closer to the answer to your question but you will unlikely get to the definitive final answer!
I was just looking up Asterix Le Gaulois and I came upon this web site by accident! This will answer the thread owner's simplistic question to which there is NO simple answer! http://www.offroadvietnam.com/eng/13-45.php A key to this thread's question is this statement in this article: Little is known about the origins of many of these people, some of whom already inhabited the area before the ancestors of the Viet arrived from Southern China around four to five thousand years ago. Therefore the indication seems to be that there will never be a correct answer as to whether Vietnam and/or China is one. Similarly that modern Thai people in Thailand came from South Western China and the ones in China now are called Dai or Tai whereas the modern Thai are Thai in Thailand! Here no one seems to want to say that China and Thailand were one!
i have had viet bffs in the past. I feel like we're almost the same. chiense and viet people except the dialect, country, culture, haha. Most viets know how to speak chinese.
Not quite true anymore. Many Chinese growing up in Vietnam today are becoming more and more assimilated into the Vietnamese culture. They will even deny their Chinese heritage, and call themselves Vietnamese (true fact... I know some Chinese who grew up in Vietnam, but don't know any thing about Chinese culture or language - they are completely Vietnamized) After the Vietnam War, many Chinese born in Vietnam have since left Vietnam for other countries, such as Hong Kong, Canada, United States, etc. Another point: When the Chinese were around in Vietnam, many Vietnamese (true ethnic Vietnamese) did know how to speak Chinese because of business and economic competition. Knowing how to speak Chinese back then was an asset. If I am not mistaken, the Chinese population in Vietnam is only about 2 million out of the total of 50-something million. (I'm too lazy to cite my source XD... but I read Wiki as a hobby ... so ya...)
People just like to forget their roots and history. Just like Asians living in America say they are Americans, but are they true Americans?
lol the hell do you get your info from.. that is the biggest bull ive ever heard of. you should listen to viety cent, and people who actually know a thing or two about vietnam's history. and fyi, i am a full viet blood, and did learn my history correctly.
It was part of the history. If you have not learned about it, does not mean that was that part of history.
^ please teacher. teach me the history of vietnam and how it was part of china before the french colonized it. please teach me how its not possible that vietnam has been defeating china everytime vietnams been invaded. oh please, show me your sources.
"vietnam has been defeating china everytime vietnams been invaded" then why did the Chinese control for so long? Vi·et·nam A country of southeast Asia in eastern Indochina on the South China Sea. It comprises the historical regions of Tonkin, Annam, and Cochin China, much of which was under Chinese control from the 3rd century B.C. to the 15th century A.D.
I think you two are just referring to different periods of time in history. Shingo is referring to from 3rd century to 15-16th century history, while I think Dann is talking about more recent history, ie. 19th century and up. You guys are both right - to an extent.
nice website , So many ethnic minority groups , I like cultural diversity FYI , Vietnamese is a nationality not an ethnicity the only real way to determine a true ethnic kinh / jing is to do a dna test and trace back your family history as many people may not realized that they could be partially mixed with a minority group Im not saying that kinh are mixed.. your right, my family used to go family get together with mixed chinese/viet family , We celebrate Tet, go on vacatation, barbaque, etc When I was younger I was friends with a kid name micheal, His father was chinese not sure which chinese group but he looked like a northern chinese he spoke viet very fluently , and his wife was vietnamese..unforuntately she passed away so we lost in touch with the family. His older brother was very tall and his sister was very annonying when I was very young she used to pinch my cheeks .. aww the good old days ..Im 20 now so ..
Why Vietnam loves and hates China For more than 2,000 years, Vietnam's development as a nation has been marked by one fixed and immutable factor - the proximity of China. The relationship between the two countries is in many ways a family affair, with all the closeness of shared values and bitterness of close rivalries. No country in Southeast Asia is culturally closer to China than Vietnam, and no other country in the region has spent so long fending off Chinese domination, often at a terrible cost in lives, economic development and political compromise. China has been Vietnam's blessing and Vietnam's curse. It remains an intrusive cultural godfather, the giant to the north that is "always there". Almost a thousand years of Chinese occupation, between the Han conquest of Nam Viet in the 2nd century BC and the reassertion of Vietnamese independence as Dai Viet in AD 967, marked the Vietnamese so deeply that they became, in effect, an outpost of Chinese civilization in Southeast Asia. While the other countries of Indochina are Theravada Buddhist, sharing cultural links with South Asia, Vietnam derived its predominant religion - a mix of Mahayana Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism popularly known as tam giao or "Three Religions"- from China. Until the introduction of romanized quoc ngu script in the 17th century, Vietnamese scholars wrote in Chinese characters or in chu nho, a Vietnamese derivative of Chinese characters. Over the centuries, Vietnam developed as a smaller version of the Middle Kingdom, a centralized, hierarchical state ruled by an all-powerful emperor living in a Forbidden City based on its namesake in Beijing and administered by a highly educated Confucian bureaucracy. Both countries are deeply conscious of the cultural ties that bind them together, and each is still deeply suspicious of the other. During the long centuries of Chinese occupation, the Vietnamese enthusiastically embraced many aspects of Chinese civilization, while at the same time fighting with an extraordinary vigor to maintain their cultural identity and regain their national independence. During the Tang Dynasty (6th-9th centuries AD), Vietnamese guerrillas fighting the Chinese sang a martial song that emphasized their separate identity in the clearest of terms: Fight to keep our hair long, Fight to keep our teeth black, Fight to show that the heroic southern country can never be defeated. For their part, the Chinese recognized the Vietnamese as a kindred people, to be offered the benefits of higher Chinese civilization and, ultimately, the rare privilege of being absorbed into the Chinese polity. On the other hand, as near family, they were to be punished especially severely if they rejected Chinese standards or rebelled against Chinese control. This was made very clear in a remarkable message sent by the Song Emperor Taizong to King Le Hoan in AD 979, just over a decade after Vietnam first reasserted its independence. Like a stern headmaster, Taizong appealed to Le Hoan to see reason and return to the Chinese fold: "Although your seas have pearls, we will throw them into the rivers, and though your mountains produce gold, we will throw it into the dust. We do not covet your valuables. You fly and leap like savages, we have horse-drawn carriages. You drink through your noses, we have rice and wine. Let us change your customs. You cut your hair, we wear hats; when you talk, you sound like birds. We have examinations and books. Let us teach you the knowledge of the proper laws ... Do you not want to escape from the savagery of the outer islands and gaze upon the house of civilization? Do you want to discard your garments of leaves and grass and wear flowered robes embroidered with mountains and dragons? Have you understood?" In fact Le Hoan understood Taizong very well and, like his modern successors, knew exactly what he wanted from China - access to its culture and civilization without coming under its political control or jeopardizing Vietnamese freedom in any way. This attitude infuriated Taizong, as it would generations of Chinese to come. In 1407, the Ming Empire managed to reassert Chinese control over its stubbornly independent southern neighbor, and Emperor Yongle - no doubt, to his mind, in the best interests of the Vietnamese - imposed a policy of enforced Sinicization. Predictably enough, Vietnam rejected this "kindness" and fought back, expelling the Chinese yet again in 1428. Yongle was apoplectic when he learned of their rebellion. Vietnam was not just another tributary state, he insisted, but a former province that had once enjoyed the benefits of Chinese civilization Continued 1 2 and yet had wantonly rejected this privilege. In view of this close association - Yongle used the term mi mi or "intimately related" - Vietnam's rebellion was particularly heinous and deserved the fiercest of punishments. China on top Sometimes a strongly sexual imagery creeps into this "intimate relationship", with Vietnam, the weaker partner, a victim of Chinese violation. In AD 248, the Vietnamese heroine Lady Triu, who led a popular uprising against the Chinese occupation, proclaimed: "I want to ride the great winds, strike the sharks on the high seas, drive out the invaders, reconquer the nation, burst the bonds of slavery and never bow to become anyone's concubine." Her defiant choice of words was more than just symbolic. Vietnam has long been a source of women for the Chinese sex trade. In Tang times, the Chinese poet Yuan Chen wrote appreciatively of "slave girls of Viet, sleek, of buttery flesh", while today the booming market for Vietnamese women in Taiwan infuriates and humiliates many Vietnamese men. It's instructive, then, that in his 1987 novel Fired Gold Vietnamese author Nguyen Huy Thiep writes, "The most significant characteristics of this country are its smallness and weakness. She is like a virgin girl raped by Chinese civilization. The girl concurrently enjoys, despises and is humiliated by the rape." This Chinese belief that Vietnam is not just another nation, but rather a member of the family - almost Chinese, aware of the blessings of Chinese civilization, but somehow stubbornly refusing, century after century, to become Chinese - has persisted down to the present day. During the Second Indochina War, Chinese propaganda stressed that Vietnam and China were "as close as the lips and the teeth". After the US defeat, however, Vietnam once again showed its independence, allying itself with the Soviet Union, in 1978-79, invading neighboring Cambodia and overthrowing China's main ally in Southeast Asia, the Khmer Rouge. Once again Chinese fury knew no bounds, and Beijing determined to teach the "ungrateful" Vietnamese a lesson. Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader, openly denounced the Vietnamese as "the hooligans of the East". According to one Thai diplomat: "The moment the topic of Vietnam came up, you could see something change in Deng Xiaoping. "His hatred was just visceral. He spat forcefully into his spittoon and called the Vietnamese 'dogs'." Acting on Deng's orders, the Chinese army invaded Vietnam in 1979, capturing five northern provincial capitals before systematically demolishing them and withdrawing to China after administering a symbolic "lesson". But who taught a lesson to whom? Beijing sought to force Hanoi to withdraw its frontline forces from Cambodia, but the Vietnamese didn't engage these forces in the struggle, choosing instead to confront the Chinese with irregulars and provincial militia. Casualties were about equal, and China lost considerable face, as well as international respect, as a result of its invasion. Over the millennia, actions like this have taught the Vietnamese a recurring lesson about China. It's there, it's big, and it won't go away, so appease it without yielding whenever possible, and fight it with every resource available whenever necessary. Just as Chinese rulers have seen the Vietnamese as ingrates and hooligans, so the Vietnamese have seen the Chinese as arrogant and aggressive, a power to be emulated at all times, mollified in times of peace, and fiercely resisted in times of war. In 1946, 1,700 years after Lady Triu's declaration, another great Vietnamese patriot, Ho Chi Minh, warned his Viet Minh colleagues in forceful terms against using Chinese Nationalist troops in the north as a buffer against the return of the French: "You fools! Don't you realize what it means if the Chinese remain? Don't you remember your history? "The last time the Chinese came, they stayed a thousand years. The French are foreigners. They are weak. Colonialism is dying. The white man is finished in Asia. But if the Chinese stay now, they will never go. As for me, I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than to eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life." Yet Ho was an ardent admirer of Chinese civilization, fluent in Mandarin, a skilled calligrapher who wrote Chinese poetry, a close friend and colleague of Chinese leaders Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Ho wasn't as much anti-Chinese as he was pro-Vietnamese. It was his deep understanding of and respect for China that enabled him to recognize, clearly and definitively, the menace that "a close family relationship" with the giant to the north posed, and continues to pose, for Vietnam's independence and freedom. It's ironic, then, that as the current Vietnamese leadership strive to develop their economy along increasingly capitalist lines while at the same time retaining their monopoly on state power, the country they most admire and seek to emulate is, as always, the one they most fear. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/ID26Ae01.html
