Political Tribes

by Amy Chua

  “outgroup members” . . . negatively stereotype: Gary G. Berntson and John T. Cacioppo, ed., Handbook of Neuroscience for the Behavioral Sciences 2 (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 977.

  activate our reward centers: Piore, “Why We’re Patriotic.”

  Newborns shown images: David J. Kelly et al., “Three-Month-Olds, but Not Newborns, Prefer Own-Race Faces,” Developmental Science 8, no. 6 (2005): F31–36.

  “Caucasian babies prefer”: Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil (London: The Bodley Head, 2013), 105.

  people of their own race: Xiaojing Xu et al., “Do You Feel My Pain? Racial Group Membership Modulates Empathic Neural Responses,” Journal of Neuroscience 29, no. 26 (2009): 8525–29; see Shihui Han, “Intergroup Relationship and Empathy for Others’ Pain: A Social Neuroscience Approach,” in Neuroscience in Intercultural Contexts, ed. Jason E. Warnick and Dan Landis (New York: Springer, 2015), 36–37.

  take “sadistic pleasure”: Piore, “Why We’re Patriotic”; see Mina Cikara and Susan T. Fiske, “Bounded Empathy: Neural Responses to Outgroup Targets’ (Mis)Fortunes,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23, no. 12 (2011): 3791–3803.

  “as a form of”: Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 57; see also Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (New York: Anchor Books, 2004), 14–15.

  “The ethnic tie”: Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 60.

  Mixed together with: Ibid., 63, 73; see Kanchan Chandra, “What Is Ethnic Identity and Does It Matter?,” Annual Review of Political Science 9 (2006): 397–424; Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995), 7.

  the Yellow Emperor: Frank Dikköter, “Culture, ‘Race’ and Nation: The Formation of National Identity in Twentieth Century China,” Journal of International Affairs 49, no. 2 (1996): 596–97; James Leibold, “Competing Narratives of Racial Unity in Republican China: From the Yellow Emperor to Peking Man,” Modern China 32, no. 2 (2006): 192.

  from the emperor Oduduwa: Kanchan Chandra, ed., Constructivist Theories of Ethnic Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 75.

  as “primordialists” believe: See Francisco J. Gil-White, “Are Ethnic Groups Biological ‘Species’ to the Human Brain? Essentialism in Our Cognition of Some Social Categories,” Current Anthropology 42, no. 4 (2001): 515–53; Francisco J. Gil-White, “How Thick Is Blood? The Plot Thickens . . . : If Ethnic Actors Are Primordialists, What Remains of the Circumstantialist/Primordialist Controversy?,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 22, no. 5 (1999): 789–820; see generally Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture and the Child’s Construction of Human Kinds (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Eugeen Roosens, “The Primordial Nature of Origins in Migrant Ethnicity,” in The Anthropology of Ethnicity: Beyond “Ethnic Groups and Boundaries,” ed. Hans Vermeulen and Cora Govers (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 1994); Pierre L. van den Berghe, The Ethnic Phenomenon (New York: Elsevier, 1981).

  as “instrumentalists” believe: See Chandra, Constructivist Theories of Ethnic Politics, 2–3; Fredrik Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1969), 22–23, 28; Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 43, 56; Michele Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 241; Daniel Posner, Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 276.

  one group feels threatened: See, e.g., Lauren M. McLaren, “Anti-Immigrant Prejudice in Europe: Contact, Threat Perception, and Preferences for the Exclusion of Migrants,” Social Forces 81, no. 3 (2003): 909–36; Roger Brown et al., “Explaining Intergroup Differentiation in an Industrial Organization,” Journal of Occupational Psychology 59, no. 4 (1986): 273–86.

  a form of “identity-by-blood”: Patrick Lloyd Hatcher, The Suicide of an Elite: American Internationalists and Vietnam (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 124.

  a province of China: Chua, World on Fire, 33; Christopher Goscha, Vietnam: A New History (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 16; Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking Press, 1983), 99; Henry Kenny, Shadow of the Dragon: Vietnam’s Continuing Struggle with China and Its Implications for U.S. Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2002), 23, 25.

  adopted much of Chinese culture: See Kenny, Shadow of the Dragon, 45; Goscha, Vietnam, 19–21; Olson and Roberts, Where the Domino Fell, 3; Keith W. Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 73–83.

  refused to become Chinese: Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam, 299.

  all the more “[i]ntensely ethnocentric”: Olson and Roberts, Where the Domino Fell, 3.

  preserved their own language: Kenny, Shadow of the Dragon, 27–28; Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam, 298–300.

  independence from China in 938: Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam, 269.

  remained under Chinese domination: Kenny, Shadow of the Dragon, 31, 47.

  repelled over and over: Ibid., 31, 47–48; see also Keith W. Taylor, “China and Vietnam: Looking for a New Version of an Old Relationship,” in The Vietnam War: Vietnamese and American Perspectives, ed. Jayne S. Werner and Luu Doan Huynh (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), 271.

  Tales of Vietnamese bravery: See Lan Cao, Monkey Bridge (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 56–57; Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam, 90; see also Goscha, Vietnam, 21, 132, 231.

  twentieth-century construction: Goscha, Vietnam, 130–33.

  “a new Vietnam”: Ibid., 132.

  the Trung sisters: Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam, 38; see also Goscha, Vietnam, 21, 132, 231.

  “suffocating” . . . “Individual men”: Goscha, Vietnam, 132.

  the protracted fight: Olson and Roberts, Where the Domino Fell, 3–4.

  “The struggle for the survival”: Tran Khanh, “Ethnic Chinese in Vietnam and Their Identity,” in Ethnic Chinese as Southeast Asians, ed. Leo Suryadinata (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1997), 269.

  “a stalking horse”: Jeffery Record, The Wrong War: Why We Lost in Vietnam (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1998), 12.

  “Mr. McNamara,” he recalls: Transcript of The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, directed by Errol Morris (Hollywood, CA: Sony Pictures Classics, 2003), http://www.errolmorris.com/film/fow_transcript.html.

  “puppet of China”: Robert P. Newman, Owen Lattimore and the “Loss” of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 519.

  raised on tales: Olson and Roberts, Where the Domino Fell, 5.

  Chinese prisons . . . leg irons: Harrison E. Salisbury, introduction to The Prison Diary of Ho Chi Minh, by Ho Chi Minh, trans. Aileen Palmer (New York: Bantam Books, 1971), xiv; see also Mai Luan, Dac Xuan, and Tran Dan Tien, Ho Chi Minh: From Childhood to President of Viet Nam (Hansi, Vietnam: Gioi Publishers, 2005), 90.

  “soft-spoken” . . . Gandhi: Neil L. Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 181; Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, 576.

  Ho barked: “You fools!”: There are many slightly different translations of Ho’s statement. The one quoted is from Karnow, Vietnam, 153; see also Michael Maclear, The Ten Thousand Day War: Vietnam, 1945–1975 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 17.

  wrote to President Truman . . . quoted the U.S. Declaration: Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, 342, 357; Salisbury, introduction to The Prison Diary of Ho Chi Minh, x.

  An OSS report: Maclear, The Ten Thousand Day War, 15.

  “To many Americans”: Nguyen, How We Lost the Vietnam War, 11.

  the term “market-dominant minority”: Chua, World on Fire, 6.

  Examples incl
ude ethnic Chinese: Ibid.

  Parsis and Gujaratis: Parsis: Zubin C. Shroff and Marcia C. Castro, “The Potential Impact of Intermarriage on the Population Decline of the Parsis of Mumbai, India,” Demographic Research 25 (2011): 549; see also Jesse S. Palsetia, The Parsis of India: Preservation of Identity in Bombay City (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2001), xii; T. M. Luhrmann, The Good Parsi: The Fate of a Colonial Elite in a Post-Colonial Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); “Not Fade Away: India’s Vanishing Parsis,” Economist, September 1, 2012. Gujaratis: Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (New York: Knopf, 2004), 19; Dipankar Gupta, Justice Before Reconciliation: Negotiating a “New Normal” in Post-Riot Mumbai and Ahmedabad (London: Routledge, 2011), 169.

  very different reasons: Chua, World on Fire, 63–65, 95, 99.

  as much as 70 percent: Ibid., 43; see Leo Suryadinata, “Indonesian Politics Toward the Chinese Minority Under the New Order,” Asian Survey 16 (1976): 770; “A Taxing Dilemma,” Asiaweek, October 20, 1993, 57, 58 (reporting that, according to the Sakura Bank-Nomura Research Institute, in 1991 Indonesian Chinese comprised 3.5 percent of the population but commanded a 73 percent share of the country’s listed equity); see also Linda Y. C. Lim and L. A. Peter Gosling, “Strengths and Weaknesses of Minority Status for Southeast Asian Chinese at a Time of Economic Growth and Liberalization,” in Essential Outsiders: Chinese and Jews in the Modern Transformation of Southeast Asia and Central Europe, ed. Daniel Chirot and Anthony Reid (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 312 n. 2 (offering similar estimates).

  For most of Bolivia’s: Chua, World on Fire, 49–55.

  In the Philippines, the 2 percent: The government of the Philippines does not provide information on ethnicity. The Taiwan government’s Overseas Community Affairs Council estimates that there were 1,459,083 Chinese Filipinos in 2010, representing about 1.55 percent of the country’s population. See Qiaoweihui Tongjishi (The Statistics Office of Overseas Community Affairs Council), Feilübin 2010 nian Huaren Renkou Tongji Tuigu (A Statistical Estimate of the 2010 Population of Ethnic Chinese in the Philippines), Zhonghuaminguo Qiaowu Weiyuanhui (Overseas Community Affairs Council, Republic of China [Taiwan]), November 7, 2011, http://www.ocac.gov.tw/OCAC/File/Attach/245/File_241.pdf; see also Carmen N. Pedrosa, “Contribution of Chinese-Filipinos to the Country,” Philippine Star, May 23, 2015 (“Today, there are 1.5 million Filipinos of pure Chinese ancestry or just over 1% of the total population”).

  controls the country’s: Chua, World on Fire, 36–37.

  according to Forbes: “Philippines’ 50 Richest in 2015,” Forbes; Doris Dumlao-Abadilla, “PH’s 50 Richest Families Based on 2015 Forbes Ranking,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, August 27, 2015, http://business.inquirer.net/197986/phs-50-richest-families-based-on-2015-forbes-ranking.

  When a developing country: Chua, World on Fire, 124–25.

  The Chinese in Vietnam: Ibid., 33–34; Frank H. Golay et al., Underdevelopment and Economic Nationalism in Southeast Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969), 395; Tran Khanh, The Ethnic Chinese and Economic Development in Vietnam (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1993), 41–42; Pao-min Chang, Beijing, Hanoi, and the Overseas Chinese (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1982), 4, 16.

  Cholon, Saigon’s sister city: Justin Corfield, Historical Dictionary of Ho Chi Minh City (New York: Anthem Press, 2014), 60–62.

  an estimated ten thousand: K. W. Taylor, A History of the Vietnamese (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 374.

  burned and looted: George Dutton, The Tây So’n Uprising: Society and Rebellion in Eighteenth-Century Vietnam (Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2008), 202–3.

  “men, women, and children”: Taylor, A History of the Vietnamese, 374.

  “killed and their corpses”: Dutton, The Tây So’n Uprising, 203.

  When the French: Goscha, Vietnam, 78.

  “vast economic power” . . . “a state within a state”: Chang, Beijing, Hanoi, and the Overseas Chinese, 4, 8.

  the “Petrol King”: Ungar, “Struggle Over the Chinese Community in Vietnam,” 606.

  Vietnamese elite filled: Olson and Roberts, Where the Domino Fell, 48; see also Goscha, Vietnam, 345–46.

  “stranglehold” on Vietnam’s: Alexander Woodside, “Nationalism and Poverty in the Breakdown of Sino-Vietnamese Relations,” Pacific Affairs 52 (1979): 405; see also Olson and Roberts, Where the Domino Fell, 47.

  only a tiny percentage: Olson and Roberts, Where the Domino Fell, 47.

  staggering 80 percent: Woodside, “Nationalism and Poverty,” 405; see also Steven J. Hood, Dragons Entangled: Indochina and the China-Vietnam War (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), 149; Li Tana, “In Search of the History of the Chinese in South Vietnam, 1945–75,” in The Chinese/Vietnamese Diaspora: Revisiting the Boat People, ed. Yuk Wah Chan (Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2011), 58.

  The Hoa also dominated: Chua, World on Fire, 33–34; Golay et al., Underdevelopment and Economic Nationalism in Southeast Asia, 395–96; Khanh, The Ethnic Chinese and Economic Development in Vietnam, 41, 47, 57. The Hoa produced much of the laundry powder, salad oil, candy bars, soft drinks, and cigarettes, not just for Vietnam but for all of Southeast Asia. Woodside, “Nationalism and Poverty,” 393.

  they owned more than: Khanh, Ethnic Chinese and Economic Development in Vietnam, 59.

  controlled 90 percent: Chua, World on Fire, 33.

  in wealthy enclaves: Philip Taylor, “Minorities at Large,” in Minorities at Large: New Approaches to Minority Ethnicity in Vietnam, ed. Philip Taylor (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011), 23.

  schools and temples: Chang, Beijing, Hanoi, and the Overseas Chinese, 8, 16; Hood, Dragons Entangled, 137–38.

  typically marrying only: King C. Chen, China’s War with Vietnam, 1979: Issues, Decisions, and Implications (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1987), 51.

  “ethnic and cultural exclusivism”: Martin Stuart-Fox, A Short History of China and Southeast Asia: Tribute, Trade, and Influence (Crows Nest, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2003), 131.

  seen as exploiting: Taylor, “Minorities at Large,” 23; Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam, 52; Hood, Dragons Entangled, 140.

  were impoverished peasants: Joe Allen, Vietnam: The (Last) War the U.S. Lost (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008), 7; Golay et al., Underdevelopment and Economic Nationalism in Southeast Asia, 398.

  the Chinese minority stayed “apolitical”: Taylor, “Minorities at Large,” 23.

  defeated the French: Maclear, The Ten Thousand Day War, 45; Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, 462.

  Vietnam was divided: Goscha, Vietnam, 279; Maclear, The Ten Thousand Day War, 49; Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, 458–60.

  The Geneva Accords . . . some 800,000: Goscha, Vietnam, 280; Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, 465; Maclear, The Ten Thousand Day War, 51.

  “Frenchified” Vietnamese elite: Record, The Wrong War, 136; see also Goscha, Vietnam, 349, 356.

  about 1 million out of 1.2 million: Chang, Beijing, Hanoi, and the Overseas Chinese, 9.

  unified Vietnamese tribe: Hatcher, The Suicide of an Elite, 125–26.

  “We have the same”: Walker Connor, “Beyond Reason: The Nature of the Ethnonational Bond,” in New Tribalisms: The Resurgence of Race and Ethnicity, ed. Michael W. Hughey (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 47.

  In 1959, Ho: Allen, Vietnam, 28.

  In 1965, we began: Maclear, The Ten Thousand Day War, 128–29.

  We fought . . . more troops: Record, The Wrong War, 141–42.

  chiefly benefiting—the Chinese: Woodside, “Nationalism and Poverty,” 404–5.

  also wealthy Vietnamese: Khanh, Ethnic Chinese and Economic Development in Vietnam, 80.

  “the ethnic Chinese controlled”: Tana, “In Search of the History,” 53.

  “the capitalist heart”: Ibid.

  more than $10
0 billion: Ibid., 56.

  best position to deliver: Khanh, Ethnic Chinese and Economic Development in Vietnam, 41–73, 80.

  “handled more than 60 per cent”: Ibid., 58.

  Many Chinese made: Ibid.; Tana, “In Search of the History,” 57.

  84 percent were: Khanh, Ethnic Chinese and Economic Development in Vietnam, 58.

  “[g]old watches” . . . venereal disease: Maclear, The Ten Thousand Day War, 144; see also Hood, Dragons Entangled, 141.

  owned twenty-eight of: Khanh, Ethnic Chinese and Economic Development in Vietnam, 61.

  cultivated and bribed: Ibid., 80; Nguyen, How We Lost the Vietnam War, 101–2.

  “[T]he slime of corruption”: Nguyen, How We Lost the Vietnam War, 104.

  created a rice shortage: Ibid., 102.

  Being police chief: Ibid., 106; William S. Turley, The Second Indochina War: A Short Political and Military History, 1954–1975 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), 167.

  more than one hundred thousand: Nguyen, How We Lost the Vietnam War, 106.

  the U.S.-backed regime: Maclear, The Ten Thousand Day War, 148.

  “Dinks and Gooks”: Nguyen, How We Lost the Vietnam War, 138.

  “We didn’t even”: Jinim Park, Narratives of the Vietnam War by Korean and American Writers (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2007), 30.

  more than 2 million: Olson and Roberts, Where the Domino Fell, 146.

  indiscriminate bombing, napalm: Goscha, Vietnam, 326–28; Olson and Roberts, Where the Domino Fell, 160–61; Record, The Wrong War, 86.

  U.S. “friendly fire”: Olson and Roberts, Where the Domino Fell, 146.

  in a puppet state: Maclear, The Ten Thousand Day War, 148; see also Record, The Wrong War, 125–26, 139.

  soldiers wore trinkets: Olson and Roberts, Where the Domino Fell, 2.

  “[u]nfortunately our military”: Record, The Wrong War, 139 (quoting Henry Kissinger).

  “The South Vietnamese”: Ibid., 135 (quoting Guenter Lewy).

  lost their sons . . . to the other side: Ibid., 86, 134–35, 138; Olson and Roberts, Where the Domino Fell, 63.