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In Search of Kilometer Zero: Digital Archives, Technological Revisionism, and the Sino-Vietnamese Border

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 September 2008

Ken Maclean
Ken Maclean
Affiliation:
Clark University
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Extract

Bùi Minh Quốc left for the border in late 2001. His clandestine trip, which took nearly a month to complete on a 50cc Honda Cub motorcycle, retraced the perimeter of Việt Bắc, the name for the mountainous region that stretches across ten provinces in northeastern Vietnam. Quốc, a poet of considerable repute, documented the highpoints of the ride in verse. But the region’s rugged beauty, which holds a prominent place in official histories of the anti-colonial struggle against the French and those who collaborated with them, was not the real reason for his quest. Nor was the region’s more recent reincarnation as a socialist battleground during the Third Indochina War with the People’s Republic of China, a conflict that killed and wounded an estimated one hundred thousand people in the space of a month. Instead, Quốc’s self-appointed task was to find the current location of “Kilometer Zero” (Cấy số không) along the Sino-Vietnamese border—a difficult proposition since it appears nowhere on official maps of the country. Nonetheless, the toponym is commonly used to refer to the precise spot in Lạng Sơn Province where National Highway 1A, the only paved road to traverse the entire length of Vietnam, begins its long journey south.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , October 2008 , pp. 862 - 894
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2008

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References

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41 For other opinions, see the thirteen-page chat-room debate that the Institute of Vietnamese Studies, a non-profit research group based in Hanoi, placed on its archive: www.viethoc.net.

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44 Search results on file with author.

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47 For example, the U.S.-based Asia-Pacific Strategic Research Institute inserted fifty-nine explanatory notes to the original interview transcript, doubling its length: http://www.viettrade.net/ban_dat_vn/phong_van_lcphung.htm.

48 www.ykien.net/pictures/05_WEBMAP_SVR.png. At the time of research, the firewall blocked direct access to this archive—www.cidala.gov.vn—from within Vietnam. However, an image search using cruft, that is, “svr.png,” made it possible to locate a cached copy on another server. Storage limitations forced the ykien.net to divide into a series of linked archives in late 2007, http://ykien0711.blogvis.com/. A reposted copy of the above map can be found at: http://home.scarlet.be/mykvn/tl_viettrung.html.

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53 From http://www.lenduong.net/spip.php?article2485.

54 Lê Đoàn Việt, “Hai Năm Sau Ngày….”

55 The link, http://www.nhandan.org.vn/vietnamese/today/bai-ctluat.html, is now dead. For a reposted copy: http://home.scarlet.be/mykvn/tl_hiepuocbgdl.html.

56 “On the Settlement of Vietnam-China Border Issue” (14 Sept. 2002).

57 Ibid.

58 “Nhân Đọc Bài Phỏng Vấn Lê Công Phụng.” For a reposted copy: http://www.trungtam.de/danchu/biengioi/LyCongLuan_DocBai_LeCongPhung.htm.

59 Security officials placed Professor Trần Khuê, the co-editor of Dialogue, under house arrest in March after he emailed an open letter of protest regarding the territorial agreements to the President of China shortly before his official visit to Vietnam. “Thư Ngỏ Gửi Tổng Bí Thư Giang Trạch Dân” (20 Feb. 2002): http://www.ptdcvn.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=218.

60 Diệu Vân, “Chiến Tranh Internet….” Curiously, the maps have been deleted from some reposted versions of the essay. See: http://www.mevietnam.org/lanhtho-lanhhai/lcl-trithucvn.html.

61 bnlclbangioc.jpg, ibid.

62 bnlclnamqua.jpg, ibid.

63 Interviews, Lạng Sơn, Aug. 2005.

64 See also, Bruun, Ole, “The Fengshui Resurgence in China: Conflicting Cosmologies between State and Peasantry,” The China Journal 36 (1996): 47–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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66 Interviews with cross-border traders, Lạng Sơn, Aug. 2005 and July 2006.

67 “Nam Quan: Ải, Cửa Ải và Biên Giới” [Nam Quan: Frontier pass, border pass, and frontier], Diễn Đàn 128 (2003), http://www.diendan.org/tai-lieu/bao-cu/so-128/mucluc-128/?searchterm=%E1%BA%A3i%20nam%20quan; “Từ Nam Quan đến Bản Giốc” [From Nam Quan to Ban Gioc], Diễn Đàn 129 (2003), http://www.diendan.org/tai-lieu/bao-cu/so-129/mucluc-129/.

68 Partially reposted in “Nam Quan.”

69 i128nngiao4.jpg and i128nngiao5.jpg, ibid.

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72 Trần Quang Lê et al., “Kiến Nghị Thư của 20 Cử Tri Yêu Cầu Quốc Hội Cộng Sản Việt Nam Không Thông Qua Hiệp Định Biên Giới Việt Trung” [Petition of twenty voters requesting the National Assembly of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam not ratify the Sino-Vietnamese Land Border Treaty] (18 Nov. 2001), http://baotoquoc.com/baotoquoc/index.php?view=story&subjectid=1412.

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77 For a critique of this narrative, see Liam Kelley, Beyond the Bronze Pillars: Envoy Poetry and the Sino-Vietnamese Relationship (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005).

78 Interview N.K.V., Hanoi, July 2006.

79 Taylor, “Surface Orientations in Vietnam”: 951.

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81 Interview N.A.H., Lạng Sơn, Aug. 2005.

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86 The ongoing dispute over the South China Sea and its resources offers a perfect example. For the past five decades, both states have used a wide range of historical, legal, and extra-legal methods, including lethal force, to assert their overlapping sovereign claims to much of the South China Sea, which all Vietnamese speakers pointedly refer to as the “Eastern Sea” (Biển đông) to denaturalize the Sino-centric connotations of the more widely used toponym. Further discussion of this conflict and the role technological forms of revisionism have played in it are beyond the scope of this essay, however. For background, see Tönnesson, Stein, “Locating the South China Sea,” in, Kratoska, Paul, Raben, Remco, and Nordholt, Henk, eds., Locating Southeast Asia: Geographies of Knowledge and Politics of Space (Singapore: Singapore National University Press, 2005), 203–32Google Scholar; “Vietnamese in Second Anti-China Rally over Disputed Islands,” Agence France Press (16 Dec. 2007). For a reposted copy: http://ykien0711.blogvis.com/2007/12/16/vietnamese-stage-second-anti-china-rally-over-disputed-islands/.