The Development of Social Organizations in Vietnamese Cities in the Late Colonial Period

Abstract

R APID URBANIZATION iS one of the more celebrated phenomena of the history of modern Southeast Asia, and Vietnam has not escaped it. In 1931, it is true, the population of Saigon, the largest city, was considered to be only approximately 120,000 people (about 76,ooo Vietnamese, 34,000 Chinese, and 10,000 Europeans and others), as opposed to its more than three million people in 1970. Yet even in the colonial period, considerable social differentiation, and the expansion of new social classes, were unmistakable trends in the cities of Vietnam. Such differentiation and expansion created concomitant needs for social reform and new types of social integration. This article examines the structural vagaries and the ideological idiosyncrasies of some of the professional associations, mutual aid societies, philanthropic groups, cooperatives, and assorted fellowship organizations that arose to answer many of these needs. It is concerned essentially with non-political groups, rather than Vietnamese political parties which are usually less neglected by analysts. And in looking at selected social organizations of urban Indochina in the i920's and 1930's, and at the organizational abilities and tendencies of the new urban professional classes which supported them, one comes at once across a major controversy. Captious Western observers have never hesitated to identify a lack of social cohesiveness as one of the predominating negative themes of modern Vietnamese history, at least in its non-Communist phases. Vietnamese reformers themselves have hardly been idle in condemning their society's fragmentation. One of the most zealous of Vietnam's urban, middle class reformers of the late colonial period was Nguyen Tuong Long (1907-1948), a northern lawyer, journalist, novelist, and politician who commonly wrote under the pseudonym of Hoang Dao. In his abrasive, coolly evangelical guide to the needs of the future, Muoi dieu tam niem (A Sequence of Ten Fundamental Concepts), written for Vietnamese youth in i939, Hoang Dao pointed to the number of transitory social enterprises (produced by Vietnamese rather than by Frenchmen) which had been launched with fanfare in the Indochina colony and then abandoned as lost causes-special schools, maternity houses, and financial assistance societies. They had all failed, ac-