Political Tribes

by Amy Chua

  It’s by now widely recognized that the decision makers in Washington, DC—David Halberstam’s “the best and the brightest”—overlooked the potency of Vietnamese nationalism, instead interpreting events through the Cold War lens of a worldwide struggle between freedom and communism. As Thomas Friedman puts it, the United States failed “to understand that the core political drama of Vietnam was an indigenous nationalist struggle against colonial rule—not the embrace of global communism, the interpretation we imposed on it.”

  But that’s still not the complete picture. To this day, we don’t fully understand what we got so badly wrong in Vietnam. Driving and shaping Vietnamese nationalism was a millennia-old ethnic conflict going back far longer than resentment against the West.

  The core reason we lost in Vietnam is that we failed to see the ethnic dimension of Vietnamese nationalism. But to understand this phenomenon, we need to understand ethnicity itself—its basis, its internal logic, and the source of its primal appeal, which goes to the heart of political tribalism.

  THE TRIBAL INSTINCT AND ETHNICITY

  In a recent study, children between the ages of four and six were randomly assigned to a red or blue group and asked to put on a T-shirt of the corresponding color. They were then shown edited computer images of other children—half of whom appeared to be wearing red T-shirts, the other half blue—and asked about their reactions to these children.

  Even though they knew absolutely nothing about the children in the photos, the subjects consistently reported that they “liked” children of their own group better, allocated more resources to them, and displayed strong unconscious preferences for in-group members. In addition, when told stories about the children in the photos, these boys and girls exhibited systematic memory distortion, tending to remember positive actions of in-group members and negative actions of out-group members. Without “any supporting social information whatsoever,” the researchers concluded, the children’s perception of other kids was “pervasively distorted by mere membership in a social group, a finding with disturbing implications.”

  The impulse to form group identities and favor in-group members has a neurological basis. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), scientists have scanned people’s brains while conducting experiments similar to the one just described. Their findings, as one writer puts it, suggest that: “group identification is both innate and almost immediate.”

  In social psychologist Jay Van Bavel’s recent experiments, participants randomly assigned to different groups were placed under an fMRI and shown photos of supposed rivals and teammates. When participants saw members of their own team, certain sections of the brain—the amygdala, fusiform gyri, orbitofrontal cortex, and dorsal striatum—tended to “light up.” These areas of the brain are thought to be associated with distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant stimuli and with perceptions of value. What this suggests is that our brains are hardwired to identify, value, and individualize in-group members, while “outgroup members are processed as interchangeable members of a general social category,” making it easier to negatively stereotype them. Even more striking, seeing other members of our in-group prosper seems to activate our reward centers—generating emotional satisfaction—even if we receive no benefit ourselves.

  The neurological processes of in-group recognition and favoritism start extremely early. Newborns shown images of people’s faces do not respond differently based on race. But as early as three months later, in Yale psychologist Paul Bloom’s words, “Caucasian babies prefer to look at Caucasian faces, as opposed to African or Chinese faces; Ethiopian babies prefer to look at Ethiopian faces rather than Caucasian faces; Chinese babies prefer to look at Chinese faces rather than Caucasian or African faces.” While we can take comfort in the fact that humans aren’t born racists, it’s unnerving to realize that racial preferences develop so early.

  Racial in-group empathy can operate neurologically even when we don’t realize or acknowledge it. When scientists showed Caucasian and Chinese college students images of a person being pricked by a large needle, the students’ reported pain evaluations showed no racial disparities; but fMRIs taken at the same time showed significantly increased activity in the subjects’ ACC/supplementary motor cortex—the area of the brain most associated with empathy for pain—when they were viewing people of their own race being injured.

  Perhaps most troubling, recent studies by Mina Cikara, the director of the Harvard Intergroup Neuroscience Lab, show that under certain circumstances our brains’ “reward centers” will activate when we see members of an out-group failing or suffering a misfortune. Normally, Cikara stresses, “very few people actually go out of their way to harm the outgroup.” But when one group fears or envies another—when, for example, “there’s a long history of rivalry and not liking each other”—it seems that schadenfreude has a neurological basis. Group members will take “sadistic pleasure” in the pain of their perceived rivals.

  Humans aren’t just a little tribal. We’re very tribal, and it distorts the way we think and feel.

  But not all group identities are equally potent. Some have a much stronger grip than others and are more politically galvanizing. Very few people have ever given their lives for the American Podiatry Association. One of the most powerful forms of group identity—and the focal point of political tribalism and violence all over the world today—is ethnicity.

  The key to ethnic identity is that it’s built around the idea of shared blood; in political scientist Donald Horowitz’s words, ethnicity is a sense of belonging to a people that is experienced “as a form of greatly extended kinship.” For most human beings, the family is primal—the ur-group—and ethnicity taps into those primal feelings. “The ethnic tie,” as Horowitz puts it, “is simultaneously suffused with overtones of familial duty and laden with depths of familial emotion.” Mixed together with the idea of shared blood is a sense of a shared heritage and history, a common culture, and a common language, all typically viewed as passed down from parent to child.

  It’s easy to scoff at myths of common ancestry. Little or no historical evidence supports the claim that today’s 1 billion Han Chinese all descend from the Yellow Emperor, a legendary figure who supposedly reigned five thousand years ago. The same is true of the claim that Jews all share the common forefather Jacob or that the Yoruba all descend from the emperor Oduduwa. But beliefs in “shared blood” are no less powerful for being mythic.

  Whether biologically based (as “primordialists” believe) or constructed by elites, culture, and power seekers (as “instrumentalists” believe), the experience of ethnic identification exists everywhere human beings do. It is one of the most combustible sources of political mobilization, and it is at its strongest when one group feels threatened—in danger of being extinguished—by another.

  VIETNAMESE IDENTITY

  Like China, Vietnam is a quintessentially ethnic nation, rooted in a form of “identity-by-blood.” The vast majority of the population are ethnic Vietnamese, who also give the country its name and language. At the same time, Vietnam’s national identity is practically defined in opposition to a Chinese enemy.

  China, of course, dwarfs Vietnam. In terms of size, China is roughly to Vietnam what the United States is to Ecuador. The two countries are also contiguous; if you look at a map, China looks vaguely like a five-hundred-pound genie sitting on top of a tiny tilted lamp, which is Vietnam. Because of its looming proximity and size, China is not just an enemy to Vietnam, but a constant threat to its very survival.

  In 111 B.C., China conquered the Viet people, incorporated Nam Viet (which in Chinese translates to “land of the southern barbarians”) into the Chinese empire, and for the next thousand years ruled it as a province of China. Under Chinese rule, the Vietnamese adopted much of Chinese culture, including Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, with its imperial examination system and mandarin bureaucracy. But the Vietnamese refused
to become Chinese. On the contrary, they became all the more “[i]ntensely ethnocentric.” Although Chinese was the official language during Chinese rule, widely used among the elite, the Vietnamese preserved their own language along with memories of pre-Chinese civilization. They never lost their veneration for local heroes who resisted the Chinese.

  Even after Vietnam won independence from China in 938, it remained under Chinese domination, paying tribute to the Chinese emperor for another millennium. During this period, China repeatedly invaded Vietnam, but against all odds China’s forces were repelled over and over again. Tales of Vietnamese bravery and David-versus-Goliath ingenuity in beating back Chinese invaders lie at the heart of Vietnamese lore.

  Contemporary Vietnamese national identity is also in part a twentieth-century construction. In the 1920s, during French colonial rule, a group of young Vietnamese intellectuals emerged, calling for “a new Vietnam, free of colonial domination and the weight of the past.” These intellectuals not only opposed the French; they zeroed in on China as well. Influential nationalists reminded the Vietnamese of their ancient struggle against China, resurrecting legendary figures like the Trung sisters, who in A.D. 40 freed Vietnamese lands from Chinese occupation, ultimately losing their lives (and supposedly their heads). The nationalists also attacked Confucianism as a “suffocating” tradition that stifled individual liberty and thought. According to historian Christopher Goscha, the nationalists’ message was simple: “Individual men and women had stood up in the past to resist a thousand years of Chinese occupation; they could do it again.”

  Mythic or not, every Vietnamese child learns of the heroic exploits of their forerunners, who are always fighting the same enemy: China. Indeed, the protracted fight against Chinese domination has been central in generating a sense of kinship and ethnic nationalism among the Vietnamese. As Vietnamese historian Tran Khanh writes, “The struggle for the survival of the Viet people against the [Chinese] enhanced the community spirit of the Viet people. They felt that they were brothers and sisters with common ancestors and did their utmost to safeguard their culture and race.”

  Yet astonishingly, U.S. foreign policy makers during the Cold War were so oblivious to Vietnamese history that they thought Vietnam was China’s pawn—merely “a stalking horse for Beijing in Southeast Asia.” This was a group-blind mistake of colossal proportions.

  In 1995, Robert McNamara, who was secretary of defense during the Vietnam War, met his former counterpart, the foreign minister of North Vietnam. “Mr. McNamara,” he recalls his former enemy saying, “you must never have read a history book. If you’d had, you’d know we weren’t pawns of the Chinese . . . Don’t you understand that we have been fighting the Chinese for 1000 years? We were fighting for our independence. And we would fight to the last man. . . . And no amount of bombing, no amount of U.S. pressure would ever have stopped us.”

  Cold War America saw North Vietnam’s revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh as a “puppet of China.” Again, this was a staggering mistake. As a child, Ho too had been raised on tales of Vietnamese heroes expelling hated Chinese oppressors. He had spent at least thirteen months in Chinese prisons, sometimes in solitary confinement and often forced to walk twenty-five to thirty miles in leg irons. Ho is often described as “soft-spoken” and has been compared to Gandhi, but lest it be thought that Ho was above anti-Chinese animus, after World War II, when one of his underlings suggested turning to China to fend off the French, Ho barked: “You fools! . . . Don’t you remember your history? The last time the Chinese came, they stayed a thousand years. . . . I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life.”

  Ho was also undoubtedly a Marxist. But if we had understood the Vietnamese people’s deep distrust of the Chinese, is it possible that when Ho wrote to President Truman pleading for support in Vietnam’s struggle against the French, a different strategy might have been open? Ho repeatedly likened Vietnam’s fight for independence to America’s; he even quoted the U.S. Declaration of Independence in Vietnam’s own Declaration of Independence. An OSS report from the Truman era, which would remain classified for many years, described Ho as saying that “although he formerly favored Communist ideals, he now realized that such ideals were impracticable for his country.” Could we have supported Ho against the French, capitalizing on Vietnam’s historical hostility toward China to keep the Vietnamese within our sphere of influence?

  We’ll never know. Somehow we never saw or took seriously the enmity between Vietnam and China. Thirty years after the Vietnam War, former South Vietnam premier Nguyen Cao Ky wrote:

  To many Americans in Vietnam we were just vaguely “Chinese.” We are not. We are Vietnamese. The Americans did not realize that . . . we almost alone in Asia, defeated [China], when the Viets, as we were then called, beat the soldiers of the T’ang dynasty and a century later defeated the troops of the Sung dynasty.

  Not only did we miss the animosity between Vietnam and China. We also missed an additional ethnic dimension, internal to Vietnam, which doomed us from the beginning in the battle for the hearts and minds of the people. Vietnam had within its borders a market-dominant Chinese minority.

  MARKET-DOMINANT MINORITIES IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD

  In 2003, I coined the term “market-dominant minority” to describe an ethnic minority that tends, under market conditions, to dominate economically, often to a startling extent, the poor “indigenous” majority around them, generating enormous resentment among the majority, who see themselves as the rightful owners of the land under threat from “greedy” exploitative outsiders.

  Market-dominant minorities are pervasive in the developing world. Examples include ethnic Chinese throughout Southeast Asia, Indians in East Africa and parts of the Caribbean, Lebanese in West Africa and parts of the Caribbean, Igbo in Nigeria, Bamileke in Cameroon, Kikuyu in Kenya, whites in South Africa, whites in Zimbabwe, whites in Namibia, Croats in the former Yugoslavia, Jews in post-Communist Russia, Parsis and Gujaratis in Mumbai—the list goes on and on.

  Groups can be market dominant for very different reasons, some completely unrelated to economics, including colonial divide-and-conquer policies or a history of apartheid. If, as was true of whites in South Africa, a minority uses brutal force and the powers of the state to relegate the majority to inferior education and inhuman conditions for more than a century—that minority is likely to be market dominant for reasons having nothing to do with superior entrepreneurialism.

  On the other hand, to be clear, market dominance does not refer to vague ethnic stereotypes, but rather to actual, starkly disproportionate control of major sectors of the economy. In Indonesia, Vietnam’s neighbor, the Chinese comprise just 3 percent of the population, but control as much as 70 percent of the private economy, including virtually all of the country’s largest conglomerates. For most of Bolivia’s history, a tiny minority of light-skinned, “Europeanized” elites controlled almost all of the nation’s wealth, while the indigenous majority lived in abject poverty. In the Philippines, the 2 percent Chinese minority controls the country’s corporate, banking, airline, shipping, and retail sectors; according to Forbes, in 2015 the top four wealthiest people in the Philippines (and ten out of the top fifteen) were ethnic Chinese.

  Market-dominant minorities are one of the most potent catalysts of political tribalism. When a developing country with an impoverished majority has a market-dominant minority, predictable results follow. Intense ethnic resentment is almost invariable, leading frequently to confiscation of the minority’s assets, looting, rioting, violence, and, all too often, ethnic cleansing. In these conditions, the pursuit of unfettered free-market policies makes things worse. It increases the minority’s wealth, provoking still more resentment, more violence, and, typically, populist anger at the regime pursuing such policies. All this held true in Vietnam.

  VIETNAM’S CHINESE MINORITY

  The Chinese in Vietnam—called the
Hoa—have been market dominant for centuries, historically controlling the country’s most lucrative commercial, trade, and industrial sectors. Resentment against their success, coupled with repeated Chinese invasions, sparked recurrent anti-Hoa reprisals, including the 1782 massacre in Cholon, Saigon’s sister city (often called Saigon’s Chinatown), in which an estimated ten thousand Chinese were slaughtered. According to official Vietnamese records, Chinese shops were burned and looted, and the victims, including “men, women, and children,” were indiscriminately “killed and their corpses thrown into the river. For more than one month no one dared to eat shrimp or to drink water taken from that river.”

  When the French arrived in the nineteenth century, they shrewdly cultivated Chinese entrepreneurship—in typical colonial divide-and-rule fashion—and welcomed Chinese immigrants. Under French colonial rule, the Hoa population rose from 25,000 in the 1860s to more than 200,000 in 1911. By the 1950s, the Hoa had amassed such “vast economic power” and political influence, they were viewed as “a state within a state.” Chinese magnates, almost all located in southern Vietnam, were known as “kings”—the “Petrol King, the Oil King, the Rice King, the Scrap Metals King, and so on.”

  The extent of Hoa economic dominance is hard to overstate. While the Vietnamese elite filled the ranks of the civil service, colleges, the military, and the professions, the Chinese had a “stranglehold” on Vietnam’s business and commerce. Although still only a tiny percentage of the population, the Chinese controlled a staggering 80 percent of South Vietnam’s industry. The Hoa also dominated Vietnam’s retail trade, its financial and transportation sectors, and all aspects of the rice economy. On top of that, they were disproportionately represented in the services sector; as of the mid-twentieth century, they owned more than 50 percent of all large hotels, and 90 percent of small hotels in the Saigon area, in addition to 92 large restaurants, 243 tea and beer shops, and 826 eating houses. According to one estimate, the Chinese in Vietnam controlled 90 percent of non-European private capital.