9 - Vietnamese Language and Media Policy in the Service of Deterritorialized Nation-Building

Summary

LANGUAGE AND MEDIA POLICY FOR GLOBALIZATION

Until the mid to late 1990s, Vietnam's language and media policies were almost exclusively oriented towards issues of national unity, security and “territorialized” nation-building. In more recent years, a consciousness of the need to re-tool language and media policy to face the challenges and seize the opportunities of globalization has emerged. A subset of this new policy direction is concerned with the Vietnamese diaspora, which the State estimates to number 2.7 million. This population is believed to reside in more than ninety countries, and eighty per cent of it is estimated to be located in developed nations (Politbureau 2004).

As part of a more general policy to engage the diaspora's economic and intellectual resources, Hanoi is currently in the process of implementing diaspora-specific media and language directives. These include a project to encourage and support Vietnamese language teaching in overseas Vietnamese communities, and renewed attempts to project homeland print and broadcast media overseas. This latter initiative is being pursued by means of online versions of domestic newspapers and magazines, and satellite transmission and webcasting of a specially- packaged TV station, VTV4. These media initiatives have the twin goals of breaking the hegemony of anti-communist media producers in the diaspora, and fostering the maintenance and “updating” of the Vietnamese language overseas, especially among the younger generation(s). The ultimate aim of these policies is to create a sense of connectedness and nationalist affect in overseas Vietnamese communities, and thus to sustain links to the homeland across diasporic generations.

THE DIASPORA

The Vietnamese diaspora is made up principally of those who left as refugees during the Second Indochina War and its aftermath. In the United States alone, there were 1,122,528 Vietnam-born according to the 2000 Census. Other significant communities include those in Australia (154,830 in 2001), Canada (148,400 in 2001) and France (about 300,000). Overseas Vietnamese communities also exist in the former Eastern Bloc countries and in Vietnam's neighbours: Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and China.