Vietnamese nationalism

Vietnamese nationalism (chủ nghĩa dân tộc Việt Nam) is a form of nationalism that asserts the Vietnamese people are an independent nation and promotes cultural unity in Vietnam. It encompasses a broad range of ideas and sentiments harbored by the Vietnamese people for many centuries to preserve and defend the national identity of the Vietnamese nation. Vietnamese is recognized as the only language in the country. Vietnamese nationalism focuses on the nation's military history, although there are cultural and civil aspects to it as well. Some modern nationalist concepts in Vietnam focus on China, where anti-Chinese sentiment in Vietnam has been fueled in various forms, from the Vietnamese believing they were defending visages of Sinitic civilization from Manchus and Mongols during the Mongol invasions of Vietnam, or to promoting Baiyueism. Nationalism that promoted anti-French views has been prominent in the past. Vietnam's current socialist government-sponsored form is also regarded as a synthesis of nationalism and communism. Although within the East Asian cultural sphere, Vietnamese nationalism also affirms a Southeast Asian identity, in contrast to the general East Asian identity, which is seen to be more Northeast Asian. The historiography of Vietnam under Chinese rule has had substantial influence from French colonial scholarship and Vietnamese postcolonial national history writing. During the 19th century, the French promoted the view that Vietnam had little of its own culture and borrowed it almost entirely from China. They did this to justify European colonial rule in Vietnam. By portraying the Vietnamese as merely borrowers of civilization, the French situated themselves in a historical paradigm of bringing civilization to a backwards region of the world. French scholar Leonard Aurousseau argued that not only did Vietnam borrow culturally and politically from China, the population of Vietnam was also directly the result of migration from the state of Yue in China.