This path was created by Michitake Aso. The last update was by David Ambaras.

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Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

Orientation: Cartographies of Northern Vietnam

The question of how northern Vietnamese culture and society have interacted with those of East Asian is a long standing one. Scholars such as Alexander Woodside, Emmanuel Poisson, and Liam Kelley have analyzed textual and administrative influences that China had on Vietnam. Jamie Anderson and Brad Davis have looked at the borderlands between Northern Vietnam and Southern China. Michele Thompson has written about exchanges of plants, materia medica, and medical knowledge as well as the ecological zones of this region. And Li Tana and others have looked at the watery space of the Gulf of Tonkin.

Studies placing the Vietnamese of the north in their Southeast Asian context are fewer. Christopher Goscha has studied how communist party members and revolutionaries circulated throughout Southeast Asia. He has also looked at the debate over Vietnam versus Indochina in revolutionary geographies. And Christian Lentz has recently placed the world historic battle at Điện Biên Phủ in its local context.

This side path considers the place of northern Vietnam through its representation in cartographic maps. The procession of pages suggests a Vietnamese imaginary initially shaped by a Sinosphere spatial imaginary. Then, reoriented by colonial experience, Vietnamese intellectuals began to place themselves in maps of France and its colonies. Finally, the nation, and the Vietnamese geobody, have played their dominate roles in forming spatial imaginaries. While the cartographies shown in the path all continue to coexist, the trend through the twentieth century among Vietnamese has been towards a Viet-centric spatial imagination. Empires remain but they are for the most part absent from cartographic representation - with the exception perhaps of the Vietnamese empire.

As you consider mapping and mobilities, consider the relationship of these two processes. They may seem to exist in tension: maps define and solidify, while mobility destabilizes. Yet, the two processes have been inextricably intertwined. On the one hand, maps could not be created without movement and exploration. There was the physical movement of the explorer and the material and symbolic flows that happened through knowledge networks. Starting in the colonial era, airplanes aided this mapping. They also created aerial views that, as Sakura Christmas and David Fedman note, elided the violence they enabled. On the other hand, understanding, and therefore engaging in, movement was difficult if not impossible without some kind of map. These maps could be official, state created maps or they could be unofficial and personal, from individual mental maps to communal song lines to airplane routes. So mapping and movement have been two complementary, intertwined processes.

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Mapping Invasion: Vietnamese Responses to Biological Warfare During the First Indochina War
This module analyzes Vietnamese responses to the French military's possible use of biological warfare during the First Indochina War (1946-1954). Beginning in 1952, the Việt Minh, the anti-colonial popular front forces led by Ho Chi Minh, collected reports of French airplanes releasing powders, worm-infested leaflets, and other strange substances over Việt Minh-controlled territory in and around the Red River Delta. These reports assumed that the strange substances were biological weapons, including insects and microbes meant either to sicken or kill humans directly or to infect plants and animals and threaten the Vietnamese food supply. Such reports lasted until at least the battle of Điện Biên Phủ in 1954.
This module argues that Vietnamese responses to biological warfare were inherently spatial. They depended, for example, on mapping information gathered from dispersed sources, from conferences held in China to surveys of farmers in the Red River Delta. Moreover, this intellectual geography overlapped, and existed in tension, with a political geography of civilizations, regions, and nation-states, an emotional geography of fear, and a medical geography that linked airplanes, environments, microbes, and humans. Unpacking the (non) event of biological warfare shows, in turn, how responses to biological weapons had complicated effects on Vietnamese spatial imaginaries. From a Vietnamese perspective, germ warfare helped place northern Vietnam in reconfigured Sinosphere and borderland relationships and created newer nationalist and revolutionary worlds. In other words, this period shows a mix of old and new maps being used to understand new hybrid environments of microbial, human, and machine movement.
To make maps useful for combatting biological warfare, the Việt Minh had to understand conditions in local places at specific moments. Moving from generalized knowledge about the Sinosphere to specific knowledge about places in the Red River Delta took hard work. This module seeks to trace and, in a limited way, reproduce the labor needed to map the mobilities and immobilities of invasion. In other words, the structure of this module mimics the movement from general to specific, and old to new, and the intellectual and physical labor needed to make such a move. Such a structure encourages users to reflect on how historical actors moved between scales that were different in quantity and in quality, shifting between different geographic scales—global, regional, national, and local—and different types of maps—civilizational, emotional, and biogeographical. In other words, this module examines what certain Vietnamese thought about biological warfare and to explain what those actors thought with and how these structures changed over time.
This module is divided into three pathways, each of which explores a different theme in biological warfare. Path A is called "Learning from the Korean War." It encourages users to explores communist charges of biological warfare in North Korea and northeast China leveled against the United States military. It examines notes from a Vietnamese delegation to an international conference about biological warfare along with Chinese posters produced as part of a patriotic hygiene movement. A side path shows how northern Vietnam has been incorporated into various spatial imaginaries. Path B is called "Surveying Northern Vietnam." It encourages users to explore biological warfare in northern Vietnam during the First Indochina War. Drawing from reports of the Committee to Prevent Germs, this path traces the steps that the Việt Minh took to produce knowledge about biological warfare. A side path explores the life of one of the committee's leaders, the famous Vietnamese medical doctor Tôn Thất Tùng. Finally, this path offers a Google map of a few suspected incidents of biological weapons use drawn from the committee's work and other Việt Minh reports. Path C is called "Preparing for Biological Warfare." Such efforts included included producing and distributing a pamphlet meant to popularize knowledge about the history of American and Japanese use of biological weapons. This pamphlet sought to mobilize domestic Vietnamese audiences to fight. It aimed as well to show international audiences the Vietnamese connections to the communist revolutions that had taken place in China and Korea. Finally, the Việt Minh organized a Vietnamese Patriotic Hygiene Movement modeled on the Chinese Patriotic Hygiene Movement.
Invasions in the Sinosphere
During the Cold War, what was a biological invasion and how it would happen were questions that caused anxiety and fear. This type of warfare involved the intentional use of microbes, and the living and non-living vectors that carry them, to weaken or kill humans considered enemies. In the context of total war, biological warfare was also directed at the animals and plants that helped sustain those people. And by ending stories, biological warfare could, no less than the firebombing of Tokyo analyzed by David Fedman, annihilate place.
The fear of invasion has been explored in the US context but less so for other societies, especially in the “Third World,” which was the site of so many types of invasions. Traditional understandings of invasions, or unwanted border crossings, in Vietnamese society have revolved around humans including Mongols, Chinese, and French armies. But biological warfare techniques developed in the twentieth century meant that non-human nature, and the environment itself, could become an invasive threat. Việt Minh medical doctors and cadre became concerned about insidious invasions that would go undetected until after it was too late to resist them and they had to grapple with several questions:
What were the geographies of invasion? At what scale could they happen? What would an invasion look like? How could an invasion be differentiated from “natural” processes? Who, and what, would invade? How, in short, could invasions be mapped? And then, perhaps most importantly, how could these invasions be stopped?
In order to start to answer these questions, the Việt Minh drew on, and modified, existing spatial imaginaries. After 1949 and the victory of the communists in China, Việt Minh leaders envisioned Vietnam rejoining a recreated Sinosphere world, this time linked not by Confucian culture but by communist party rule. In this Sinosphere world, a newly established PRC was at the center (though peripheral to the Soviet Union), with parts of Vietnam and Korea joined to this world. By the early 1950s, Japan and South Korea were under US control, and thus out of the communist Sinosphere. Not surprisingly, the Việt Minh turned to Chinese investigations in order to better understand potential biological warfare in Northern Vietnam. In addition to Vietnamese medical doctors and students traveling to China for study, the PRC held a conference in Beijing to present the evidence of US biological warfare in North Korea and Northeast China.
If you are unfamiliar with the historical geographies of East and Southeast Asia, you may wish to explore a side path on cartographic maps of Northern Vietnam. Otherwise, you can continue on the main path about biological warfare during the Korean War.