Communication in Southeast Asia and its Influence

By the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, colonial rulers in Malaya, Burma, Indochina, and the Dutch East Indies were introducing formal Western education. Colonial governments established schools, teacher-training institutions, medical colleges, and universities. Where colonizers wanted to develop a class of indigenous civil servants, instruction was given in European languages. In the Dutch East Indies, for example, Malay and Dutch were both taught in Roman characters, and in Vietnam instruction was in French. In Laos, however, which had already been staffed with French-speaking Vietnamese administrators, the colonial government of 1941 to 1945 actively encouraged Lao language standardization and the creation of a distinct Lao identity to enlist local support for French rule.

Daniel Marr notes that "among all the countries of Southeast Asia, Vietnam probably enjoyed the most favorable conditions for meaningful intellectual activity" (pp. 32–33). For one thing, 85 percent of Vietnamese spoke the same language. Literacy, however, was a major issue. At the beginning of the twentieth century, four different writing systems were available: (1) Chinese characters; (2) nom (demotic characters); (3) French; and (4) quoc-ngu (romanized script developed by seventeenth-century French missionaries). Chinese knowledge had been important for civil exams in the nineteenth century but declined in the twentieth. Although only about 5 percent of the Vietnamese population could read by the mid-1920s, school enrollment increased, and people learned quoc-ngu informally after that. The French established the University of Indochina (now the University of Hanoi) and upgraded it in the 1930s because too many Vietnamese were going to France and learning anticolonial ideas. Both government and private Vietnamese schools expanded in the 1930s, while French works were translated into quoc-ngu.

The French conquerors brought the first modern printing press to Vietnam, and French-language bulletins were published in Saigon as early as 1861; the first Vietnamese (French-language) newspaper went to press in 1917. By the 1930s, however, both Vietnamese nationalism and quoc-ngu were developing together. Intellectuals sought to use the script as a vehicle to modernize Vietnamese culture, while revolutionaries, particularly after the founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945, made the elimination of illiteracy a top priority. Vietnamese publication was remarkably prolific, unparalleled by any other Southeast Asian country: roughly fifteen million bound publications were produced in the two decades before the August 1945 revolution (about eight or nine books or pamphlets per literate individual).

The most important European concepts to influence Southeast Asia were probably nationalism and the idea of the nation-state, made possible by growing literacy in indigenous languages and the development of the local press. Prenationalist movements grew not only because of direct experience with colonial injustice but also as the result of influences from abroad, including the Meiji Revolution in Japan and the 1911 Chinese Revolution of Sun Yat-sen. The 1917 Russian Revolution led to the establishment of Communist Parties in Southeast Asia. Young men (including the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh) were attracted to the Communist Party abroad because of its anticolonialism. Marxist ideas, such as nationalization and state-controlled economies, kept their popularity in several Southeast Asian countries after independence.