We often think of language as a democratic field, but it is not quite the common property of its speakers, argues Jeffrey Weng, APARC’s 2020-21 postdoctoral fellow on contemporary Asia. Rather, language is a skill that must be learned, says Weng, and it creates social divisions as much as it bridges divides. 

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What has shaped your interest and research into the study of language and linguistic dissemination?

As a first-grade student in the early 1990s attending Chinese school in central New Jersey on Saturday mornings, I learned how to write my first complete sentence in the language: “I am an overseas Chinese.” Now, this was a curious sentence to teach to a class full of American-born children of Taiwanese parents, and it’s a reminder that language is never a neutral conveyor of meaning. Language cannot but be freighted with social, cultural, and political import, a lesson reinforced in my high-school Spanish classes, in which I made my first forays into literature in a foreign language: stories by the great writers of Spain and Latin America not only spoke a wholly different language, but they told wholly different stories from those of their British and American counterparts.

Linguistic difference also is a signal of individual and social difference: my childhood visits with family in Taiwan opened my ears to a cacophonous Babel in the media and on the streets—though we spoke Mandarin at home, whenever we went out, people speaking Taiwanese were everywhere to be seen and heard. This was further amplified when I visited mainland China for the first time in my early 20s. Beijing, the supposed wellspring of the nation’s language, was bewildering—I could not understand much of the unselfconscious speech of the locals. And traveling several hundred miles in any direction would only deepen my incomprehension. And yet, on the radio and on TV, during formal events and on university campuses, there was always Mandarin to clear the way. I wanted to learn more about how this language situation came to be. For me, studying the social, cultural, and political nature of language is a way to a deeper understanding of how people are united and divided in vastly different contexts across the globe.

As you’ve looked deeper into how language shapes society and society shapes language, what is something surprising you’ve come to realize about that relationship?

People often see language as the ultimate democratic field when it comes to cultural practice. No matter how much you might tell people not to split their infinitives or end their sentences with prepositions, popular practice will always win the day. Or so we English speakers think. Ever since Merriam-Webster came out with its infamously descriptivist Third New International Dictionary in 1961, Anglophone language nerds have fought over whether dictionaries should be “prescriptive”—that is, rule-setting—or “descriptive”—reflective of popular usage. But really, these are two sides of the same coin. We take it for granted that privately-owned publishers of dictionaries spell out the supposed norms of our language. Not only that, we even think this ought to be the case. French is the usual counterexample: when government language authorities in Quebec or Paris try to stem the Anglophone tide, we think it absurd that so-called authorities would ever try to rule over something so fundamentally unruly as language.

In my research, however, I learned how fundamentally invented Mandarin as a language is—from its highly artificial pronunciation to the way its orthography has been stabilized. There used to be a lot of variability in how characters were written and how they could be used, much like English spelling before the 18th century. Mandarin, both spoken and written, was standardized only in the 1920s to facilitate mass literacy and national cohesion. So linguistic change might often follow and reflect social change, but the process can also operate in reverse—a government can change language in hopes of facilitating social change.

In your latest journal publication, you argue that language nationalization in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam between 1870-1950 was a state-led, top-down process directed at remaking society rather than the more traditional view of diffusion through trade, economics, and cultural exchange. Why is this an important distinction to make?

Again, we often see language as a democratic field, the common property of its speakers, but it isn’t really. Sociolinguists are often quick to remind us that linguistic differences reflect class differences—“proper” language is that of “educated” speakers. But language is a skill, and skills must be learned. Some people can learn skills more easily than others, whether through natural ability or, more importantly, the life circumstances they were born into. Rich people can more easily get a good education. Educational disparities are now part and parcel of today’s broader debates about inequality. But the very fact that we think this is a problem is a product of developments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Before then, broad swaths of humanity were totally illiterate and had no chance at being educated, and most people did not think this was a problem. In Europe, the language of the Church and academia, even to some extent in Protestant areas, was Latin until the 18th century. Local vernaculars had gradually developed as independent media of communication in government chancelleries and popular literature since the Middle Ages, but they did not really gain ascendancy until the age of print-capitalism and nationalism in the 18th and 19th centuries. Marxian-influenced scholars have therefore concluded that the rise of national languages coincided with the rise of the bourgeoisie, whose own languages became those of the nations they constructed.

In France, for example, while revolutionaries in the 1790s advocated the use of Parisian French to unify a country divided by hundreds of local forms of speech, into the mid-19th century, even journeying 50 miles outside Paris found travelers having trouble making themselves understood to the locals. It took more than a century for French to gain a foothold in most of the country. Asia, too, was a polyglot patchwork for millennia, unified at the top by an arcane language much like Latin—Classical Chinese. This situation became politically untenable in the 19th century as European imperialism encroached on traditional sovereignties in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. In order to counter the foreign threat, governments sought to strengthen their societies by educating their populations, which required making it easier to learn how to read and write. While standard languages have been described by historians and sociolinguists as “artificial” for less-privileged learners, Asia’s standard languages were artificial even to their bourgeois inventors.

Our understanding of the present is invariably colored by our interpretation of the past: if we understand a national language to be a bourgeois imposition that diffused via economic development, then we more easily see its continued imposition as a perpetuation of class prejudices. If on the other hand, we see an invented national language as a tool for bridging regional divisions and expanding economic opportunity for our children, then we feel much more positively about the spread of such languages. Both interpretations can be true at the same time, but we must remember that one is inseparable from the other.

Do you see any parallels between how language nationalization has occurred in the past to how language and society are shaping one another in the present?

The number of “standard” Mandarin speakers in the early 1930s could be counted on one hand. Today, it’s the world’s largest language by a number of “native” speakers. Though it began as an elite nationalizing project that was largely ignored by the masses of people in China, Mandarin is now more often seen as a hegemonic threat to local languages and cultures. Language can thus bridge divides, but also create new divisions. People in China are often ambivalent about the pace of change these days. When I visited cousins in rural Fujian during the Lunar New Year a few years ago, I noticed that all my nieces and nephews spoke Mandarin in almost all situations, to their parents, and especially to one another. Only my grandparents’ generation used the local Fuqing dialect as a matter of course. My parents’ generation spoke dialect to their parents, but a mix of Mandarin and dialect to their children—the cousins of my generation, who were able to speak the dialect, but were more comfortable speaking Mandarin among themselves and to their children. One of my young nieces who’d grown up in Beijing, where her parents had moved for work, even had a perfect Beijing accent. In a span of three generations, migration due to expanded opportunity had wrought enormous change in language habits. Much had been gained, but also much had been lost.

How has your time at APARC as one of our Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellows aided your research project?

It’s certainly been a strange year to be a postdoc, given how we’ve all been operating remotely. Nevertheless, life and work have continued, and we’ve all been able to find new ways of building community and getting things done. I’ve personally benefited from the access to the vast academic resources of Stanford—library access, even online alone, is a lifeline to any researcher. Moreover, I’ve had the opportunity to chat on Zoom with Stanford faculty about research and connect with my fellow postdocs to support one another as we figure out how to move forward in our careers in these challenging times.

With your recent appointment as an assistant professor at National Taiwan University in Taipei, how do you anticipate your research interests growing and developing given the tension between Taiwan and China?

I am gratified to begin my academic career in a place of such diversity and openness as Taiwan. Language and identity are constant sites of contention in Taiwan's politics, and I look forward to expanding my on-the-ground understanding of these issues as I begin teaching in the sociology department at National Taiwan University. It is nothing short of miraculous that democracy has flourished at such an intersection of empires, colonialism, repressions, and struggles. And it is unsettling to see that flourishing takes place in such a precarious geopolitical location. NTU's sociology department is at the forefront of understanding all of these vital issues as we barrel forward into an ever more uncertain future.

This week in Hanoi, the city’s streets are lined with Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party flags and posters to promote the 13th Party Congress, the most important political event in the state. Held every five years, the weeklong congress meets to approve future policy and help select Vietnam’s highest-level leaders. This time, the announcement of the next leadership team will determine key questions that will have major implications for the evolution of the role of the state’s legislative body, the Vietnam National Assembly (VNA), says Paul Schuler, APARC’s former Lee Kong Chian fellow on Southeast Asia and former Shorenstein postdoctoral fellow.

Schuler, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Arizona’s School of Government and Public Policy, is an expert on politics in Vietnam and the author of the new book United Front: Projecting Solidarity through Deliberation in Vietnam’s Single-Party Legislature (Stanford University Press, in its monograph series with APARC). In this volume, Schuler examines the past and present functioning of the VNA. Applying a diverse range of social science methods on a wealth of original data, his findings shed light on the role of institutions in Vietnam as well as in authoritarian regimes more broadly.

Here, Schuler explains how the electoral process works in Vietnam’s one-party system, discusses the ways in which the VNA differs from the conventional image of single-party legislatures, and offers insights into how the 13th Party Congress currently underway is poised to shape Vietnam’s future.

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Your book explores why Vietnam, a single-party state, has well-developed electoral and legislative institutions. How is the state’s legislative body, the Vietnam National Assembly, organized and how has it evolved in recent years?

Schuler: Vietnam’s electoral and legislative institutions are some of the most open and active in the communist world. Unlike China, Cuba, and North Korea, as well as most former communist countries in Eastern Europe, Vietnam allows direct elections for National Assembly candidates with more candidates than seats available. Additionally, the legislature allows public debate, including televised queries of high-ranking government officials, including the prime minister.

In terms of its evolution, the legislature has gradually become more professionalized and active since the Doi moi economic opening in 1986 largely to deal with the increased legal complexity required to integrate with the global economy. The electoral process, however, has not changed as much, meaning that the party exerts tremendous control over who is nominated to participate in the elections. The control over the election process is key, because this gives the party a key lever it can use to moderate debate in the legislature. 

How does the electoral process work in a one-party system like Vietnam’s and what does your research reveal about Vietnamese voting behavior?

Schuler: Vietnam’s electoral system is somewhat unique compared to other communist regimes, past and present. Cuba, for example, allows direct elections for its legislature, but only one candidate is allowed to compete for each seat. China’s National People’s Congress elections are indirect, with lower-level legislatures essentially choosing the candidates for the national level. In Vietnam, by contrast, more candidates are allowed than seats. Furthermore, some non-party members are allowed to compete in these direct elections.

Despite this relative openness, the elections are limited in important ways. First, local election committees retain veto power over who gets to run. This means that while in the past few elections, some independent voices have tried to run, they have been barred from competing. Second, there are strict limits on campaigning. Candidate lists are only finalized a few weeks before the elections, and candidates are not allowed to reach out to voters independently and draw contrasts between themselves and their opponents. They are only allowed to campaign in a handful of party-controlled events with a limited number of attendees.

This has several implications for voting behavior. Because of the vetting process, voters may perceive the candidates as indistinguishable. Furthermore, even where there might be differences between the candidates, voters have little opportunity to learn about these differences. Hence, voters have low levels of awareness of their candidates and representatives and are forced to rely on observable cues such as gender, age, or party membership when voting. Interestingly, voters actually prefer party member candidates to independents. Other research I have done with Professor Edmund Malesky suggests that this is because voters at least have some information about the ideological orientation of party member candidates and because they presume these candidates will have better access to government resources.

According to your research, what is the primary role of the VNA? How do your findings differ from the conventional wisdom about legislative institutions under authoritarian rule?

Schuler: Recent research challenges the conventional image of single-party legislatures as rubber stamps, suggesting that legislatures can provide some constraints on leaders in these regimes and provide regime leaders with information about citizen preferences. In terms of the VNA, I don’t find evidence that its main role is to constrain the party. Furthermore, it rarely provides information that the party doesn’t already have through other channels. Instead, the role of the VNA, since 1986, has been to take some of the increasing lawmaking burden that resulted from opening Vietnam’s economy from the party and the government. VNA participation lends legitimacy to these laws.

How, then, do we explain cases where the legislature appears active and critical? For example, how do we explain the case in 2010 where a delegate challenged the prime minister to a vote of no confidence? More recently, ahead of the current party congress, how do we explain a delegate challenging a deputy prime minister to explain the government’s delayed investigation of a company’s producing fraudulent fertilizer? I suggest these incidences are best seen as efforts by party leaders to restrain government officials through the VNA. This, in turn, reflects a key difference between Vietnam and other communist regimes, which is the relative balance of power between the prime minister and general secretary. Given this greater separation, the party has greater use for the VNA to challenge the government than the Chinese party leadership does.

The 13th National Congress of the Vietnamese Communist Party is taking place this week. What are its expected outcomes and how will they shape Vietnam’s future?

Schuler: The Party Congress is the most important national political event in Vietnam, as this is when the top-ranking positions for the next five years are selected. The announcement of the next leadership team will answer three key questions that will have implications for the evolution of the role of the VNA. First, will Nguyen Phu Trong continue as general secretary? If he does, this will likely mean the continuation of Vietnam’s anticorruption campaign. Just as important, it will also contravene an important norm, which is a two-term limit for the general secretary. While age exceptions have been made in the past, the term limit exception could set a precedent for future leaders to remain in power.

Second, will the presidency once again be separate from the general secretary position? Unlike China and other communist nations, in Vietnam, the presidency has traditionally been held by separate officials. This has contributed to an overall more balanced distribution of power in the Politburo than in other contexts, where the general secretary is a far more powerful position. This separation ended with the death of Tran Dai Quang in 2018, when Trong was appointed to replace him. If the position is once again handed to a different leader, this signals that the party will remain committed to some degree of power sharing at the top.

Third, to what degree will the party move to merge state and party functions? Consistent with the decision to merge the positions of the general secretary and president, one of the contenders for power in the Politburo, Pham Minh Chinh, experimented during his leadership of Quang Ninh province with merging party and state positions at the local level. Vietnam has also reestablished party committees, such as the Central Economic Committee, which could exert more direct control over the government. An important question, therefore, is whether the party continues its policy of merging party and government positions and bolstering party policymaking organs.

The answers to these last two questions have particular importance for the VNA. Given that the party uses the VNA to ensure the government is following its direction, if the party bolsters its own direct control mechanisms, either by empowering party committees or merging party and state positions, this could render legislative institutions increasingly superfluous. We could thus see a less visible legislature, and one focused mainly on ironing out technical details of legislation rather than playing a visible role in challenging the government.

APARC’s Southeast Asia Program recently hosted the U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Dan Kritenbrink, who joined faculty members from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and other Stanford experts for a roundtable discussion about U.S.-Vietnam relations and U.S. strategy in Southeast Asia.

Ambassador Kritenbrink outlined the priorities of the U.S. Mission Vietnam and commended the Vietnamese leadership on its cooperation on a range of issues that span economic development, nuclear nonproliferation, regional security, and people-to-people ties.

The year 2020 marks a quarter of a century since the United States and Vietnam established diplomatic relations. Vietnam is now the fastest-growing economy in Southeast Asia and has emerged as a U.S. partner in pushing back against Beijing's claims in the South China Sea. Yet there are limits to the partnership, as Vietnam is not a democracy and its communist government, having adopted a hedging strategy, is pursuing a multi-country foreign policy, including advancing defense ties with Russia. 

Roundtable discussion participants listening to Ambassador Kritenbrink..

The issues considered during the roundtable discussion with the Ambassador included some of the challenges and opportunities for Vietnam, which has more leverage to engage the region this year as it serves as chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). It certainly has a full agenda for its chairmanship amid geopolitical tensions in the region, the need to balance the U.S.-China friction, the spread of COVID-19, a slowdown in global trade, and the looming environmental and social impacts posed by the threats to the Mekong river.

Ambassador Kritenbrink began his posting in Vietnam in November 2017 and has served as an American diplomat since 1994. He has completed multiple assignments related to Asia, including the roles of senior advisor for North Korea policy at the Department of State; senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council, where he worked on Vietnam and oversaw the negotiation of two Joint Statements regarding the U.S. Comprehensive Partnership with Vietnam; seven years in senior roles in the U.S. Embassy Beijing; and three prior diplomatic postings in Japan.

Southeast Asia, home to over 640 million people across 10 countries, is one of the world’s most dynamic and fastest growing regions. APARC just concluded the year 2019 with a Center delegation visit to two Southeast Asian capital cities, Hanoi and Bangkok, where we spent an engaging week with stakeholders in the academic, policy, business, and Stanford alumni communities.

Led by APARC Director Gi-Wook Shin, the delegation included APARC Deputy Director and Asia Health Policy Program Director Karen Eggleston, Southeast Asia Program Director Donald Emmerson, and APARC Associate Director for Communications and External Relations Noa Ronkin. Visiting Scholar Andrew Kim joined the delegation in Bangkok.

With a focus on health policy, our first day in Hanoi included a visit to Thai Nguyen University, a meeting with government representatives at the Vietnam Ministry of Health, and a seminar on healthy aging and innovation jointly with Hanoi Medical University.

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Throughout the day, Eggleston presented some of her collaborative research that is part of two projects involving international research teams: one that assesses public-private roles and institutional innovation for healthy aging and another that examines the economics of caring for patients with chronic diseases across diverse health systems in Asia and other parts of the world. We appreciated learning from our counterparts about the health care system and health care delivery in Vietnam.

Shifting focus to international relations and regional security, day 2 in Hanoi opened with a roundtable, “The Rise of the Indo-Pacific and Vietnam-U.S. Relations,” held jointly with the East Sea Institute (ESI) of the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam (DAV). Following a welcome by ESI Director General Nguyen Hung Son, the program continued with remarks by Shin, Emmerson, ESI Deputy Director General To Anh Tuan, and Assistant Director General Do Thanh Hai.

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The long-ranging conversation with DAV members included issues such as the future of the international order in Asia; the U.S. withdrawal from multilateralism; the concern about a lack of U.S. engagement in Southeast Asia, sparked by President Trump’s absence from the November 2019 summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) at a time when China is bolstering its influence in the region and when ASEAN hopes to set a code of conduct with China regarding disputed waters in the South China Sea; the priorities for Vietnam as it assumes the role of ASEAN chair in 2020; and the challenges for the Vietnam-U.S. bilateral relationship amid the changing strategic environment in Southeast Asia.

In the afternoon we were joined by members of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hanoi at an AmCham-hosted Lunch ‘n’ Learn session on Vietnam's challenges and opportunities amid the U.S.-China rivalry. The event featured Emmerson in conversation with AmCham Hanoi Executive Director Adam Sitkoff.

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Moving to Bangkok, delegation members Shin, Eggleston, Emmerson, and Kim spoke on a panel for executives of the Charoen Pokphand Group (C.P. Group), one of Thailand’s largest private conglomerates, addressing some of the core issues that lie ahead for Southeast Asia in 2020 and beyond in the areas of geopolitics, innovation, and health.

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We also enjoyed a tour at True Digital Park, Thailand’s first startup and tech entrepreneur’s campus. Developed by the C.P. Group, True Digital Park aspires to be an open startup ecosystem that powers Thailand to become a global hub for digital innovation.

The following day, Shin and Emmerson participated in a public forum hosted by Chulalongkorn University’s Institute of Security and International Studies (ISIS Thailand), "Where Northeast Asia Meets Southeast Asia: The Great Powers, Global Disorder and Asia’s Future.” They were joined by ISIS Thailand Director Thitinan Pongsudhirak and Chulalongkorn University Faculty of Political Science Associate Dean for International Affairs and Graduate Studies Kasira Cheeppensook. The panel was moderated by Ms. Gwen Robinson, ISIS Thailand senior fellow and editor-at-large of the Nikkei Asian Review.

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As part of that discussion, Emmerson speculated that – driven by deepening Chinese economic and migrational involvement in Southeast Asia’s northern tier – Cambodia and Laos, less conceivably Myanmar, and still less conceivably Thailand could become incorporated de facto into an economically integrated “greater China” that could eventually reduce ASEAN to a more-or-less maritime membership in the region’s southern tier. Emmerson’s speculation was made in the context of his critique of ASEAN’s emphasis on its own “centrality” to the neglect of its lack of the proactivity that would serve as evidence of centrality and of a desire not to be rendered peripheral by the growing centrality-cum-proactivity of China. The event was covered by the Bangkok Post (although that report’s headline and quote of Emmerson are inaccurate, as neither the panel nor Emmerson predicted the “break-up of ASEAN.”)

Our delegation visit in Bangkok concluded with a buffet dinner reception and panel discussion jointly with the Stanford Club of Thailand.

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Moderated by Mr. Suthichai Yoon, a veteran journalist and founder of digital media outlet Kafedam Group, the conversation focused on the changing geopolitics of Southeast Asia, innovation and health in the region, and the opportunities and challenges facing Thailand-U.S. relations. It was a pleasure to meet many new and old friends from the Stanford and IvyPlus alumni communities.

APARC would like to thank our partners and hosts in Hanoi and Bangkok for their hospitality, collaboration, and the stimulating discussions throughout our visit. We look forward to keeping in touch!

We sat down with our 2018-19 Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow in Contemporary Asia Ketian Zhang to discuss China's use of coercion in foreign policy; her research on  South China Sea disputes; her forthcoming articles; and the fellowship experience in general. To hear more from Ketian, RSVP for her April 16 seminar "Killing the Chicken to Scare the Monkey: Explaining Coercion by China in the South China Sea."

President Trump caught the world by surprise once again yesterday with a decision not to sign a deal with his North Korean counterpart, Chairman Kim Jong-un, in Hanoi, Vietnam. While walking away is a common tactic in working-level negotiation, what happened in Hanoi was a rare case and the least expected outcome.

Read the full article on Axios.

This post was originally published on Axios.

Where it stands: Trump and Kim each face immense pressure, both international and domestic, to make progress.

• Trump needs to earn political trust back in Washington to continue negotiating with North Korea. His strategy so far has been to convince Kim that North Korea’s denuclearization would bring the country a “bright future.”
• At the same time, Trump must address Kim’s concerns about whether any agreement reached with his administration will withstand the Democrat-controlled House and survive the post-Trump era.

Between the lines: Successful diplomacy sometimes entails purposeful ambiguities, and the ambiguities of the first Trump-Kim summit might indeed have been strategic. At this critical juncture, however, a failure on Trump’s and Kim’s part to commit to defined objectives could hurt the bilateral relationship.

The bottom line: Trump and Kim need support more than ever to advance their diplomatic endeavors. While spectators have good reason to be skeptical, and one can only be cautiously hopeful with North Korea, a return to confrontation or "strategic patience" is in no one’s interest.

Gi-Wook Shin is the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea and director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University.