• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.177-206
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• 2022

At different times in the 19^th century, the Straits Settlements and Cochinchina were both colonies that the British and the French captured the earliest in their process of invasion of Malaya and Vietnam, respectively. This study examines the transitional stage from the traditional school system to colonial school system in the Straits Settlements and Cochinchina. This could also be considered an experimental stage for building later education systems in their expanded colonies, namely British Malaya and French Indochina, from the closing decades of the 19^th century to the middle of the 20^th century. This study, exploiting various sources and applying the comparative approach, identifies the factors that affected the different attitudes and choices of policy towards traditional education models of indigenous communities (the Malays and Vietnamese) pursued by the British in the Straits Settlements and the French in Cochinchina.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.185-202
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• 2019

The early years of the twentieth century introduced Vietnam, then a French colony, to feminism, which helped expose the problem of suicide among women, prostitution, and the trafficking. This article surveyed writings in three influential newspapers published for and by women, namely, "Phụ Nữ Tân Văn" (PNTV) (Woman's Newspaper) 1929-1934,"Phụ nữ Thời Đàm" (PNTĐ) (Women's Discussions on Topical Questions) 1930-1934, and "Đàn Bà"(ĐB) (Women) 1939-1945. The writings were analyzed to illustrate how feminism was perpetrated in this period, and how the writers were able to reconcile it with prevalent Confucianism, which this paper also argued as having put in place, gender inequality.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.69-108
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• 2021

Based on research of documents left by Vietnamese feudal dynasties, the current article reports how it initially reconstructed the process of Vietnamese tribute activity of Southeast Asia from the 10^th to 19^th century and demonstrates the significance of these activities to how Vietnam is considered central rather than peripheral as a nation. Tribute activity took place during a period when Vietnam was an independent country; feudal dynasties of Vietnam were independent and autonomous dynasties. Vietnam had just escaped from the 1,000-year invasion of China and more recently gotten out from the control of the French colonialists. From the demonstration of the tribute activity, otherwise called requesting investiture, the current article places it in relation to the contemporary Chinese "tributary system" to draw out the characteristics and its essence. At the time the current article explores the underlying causes that contributed to shaping the core characteristics of this "tributary system" and its significance to power relationships.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.109-131
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• 2022

This paper compares the French Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) and the Vietnamese Vũ Trọng Phụng (1912-1939), and explores transformations of their aesthetic experiences that led to the autonomization of French literary field in the nineteenth century and Vietnamese in the early twentieth century. Inspired from the term "archive" coined by Michel Foucault, this article argues that Flaubert, in abandoning the bourgeois tastes, contested realism and built his own writing ideology and style, which is called subjective realism. On the other hand, it also argues that Vũ Trọng Phụng, through the popular report genre, he gained success and evolved his own novel writing style, aptly called the realism of speech. It is ostensible that the transformation in the two authors' writing style and aesthetic experience was derived from the way they distanced themselves from their contemporaries' common tastes while making use of free indirect speeches, all with the aim of granting readers the autonomy of reading.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.109-132
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• 2017

This article is about the emergence of Islamic modernism among Cham Muslim communities in Cambodia and Cochinchina during the early 20th century. Based on a combined critical reading of existing scholarship, historicized first-hand anthropological accounts, as well as archival sources from the National Archives of Cambodia and the Vietnam National Archives II, it argues accounts of modernists in these sources were either (1) cast through a French colonial reading of a Buddhist state lens and (2) cast through a Malay lens, based upon the Kaum Muda/Kaum Tua divide. First, it proceeds with a historical explanation of the emergence of Islam and the discourse used to describe Muslim communities in Vietnamese, French, and Cham language sources. Then, it turns the narrative toward an examination of the emergence of the "Kaum Muda" or "New Group" of reformist-minded modernist Muslims in early 20th century Cambodia. Delineating the networks of these intellectuals as they stretched across the border through Cochinchina, also highlights a pre-existing transnational element to the community, one that well predates current discussions of twenty-first-century transnationalism. Through a combination of the study of multiple language sources and historical methods, the article highlights the importance of polylingualism in the study of the history of Muslims in Southeast Asia.

• Ocean and Polar Research
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.245-262
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• 2007

On 25 December 2000, China and Vietnam signed the Agreement on the Delimitation of the Territorial Seas, EEZs and Continental Shelves in the Tonkin Gulf. Three and a half years after signature, in June 2004, China and Vietnam both ratified a maritime boundary agreement for the Tonkin Gulf (Beibu Gulf) and the agreement entered into force. A potentially complicating factor in the negotiation process was likely to have been the status of the Sino-French Agreement of 1887. In the end, the agreement reached indicated that even if the status of the Sino-French Agreement of 1887 was part of the negotiations, both sides eventually agreed that it would not have an impact on the delimitation of maritime zones in the Gulf of Tonkin. Another crucial issue was the impact of the islands, in particular, the Vietnamese controlled Bach Long Vi Island and Con Co Island. Especially, Bach Long Vi Island was entitled to a half suite of maritime zones (3n.m. EEZ) and would impact the tracing of a line of equidistance in the Gulf of Tonkin. Minor as the point might be, Con Co Island also would have an impact for it would play a fixing terminal point for the boundary. Article 7 of the agreement is about minerals and hydrocarbons of cross-boundary deposit, and if any single geophysical structure of oil and gas or other mineral deposits should straddle the demarcation line, an agreement is to be reached on the development of the structure or deposit and on the most effective manner to equally share the profits resulting from the development.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.107-137
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• 2015

This article utilizes interdisciplinary methods in order to critically review the existing research on the Mother Goddess of Champa: Po Inâ Nâgar. In the past, Po Inâ Nâgar has too often been portrayed as simply a "local adaptation of Uma, the wife of Śiva, who was abandoned by the Cham adapted by the Vietnamese in conjunction with their conquest of Champa." This reading of the Po Ina Nagar narrative can be derived from even the best scholarly works on the subject of the goddess, as well as a grand majority of the works produced during the period of French colonial scholarship. In this article, I argue that the adaption of the literary studies strategies of "close reading", "surface reading as materiality", and the "hermeneutics of suspicion", applied to Cham manuscripts and epigraphic evidence-in addition to mixed anthropological and historical methods-demonstrates that Po Inâ Nâgar is, rather, a Champa (or 'Cham') mother goddess, who has become known by many names, even as the Cham continue to re-assert that she is an indigenous Cham goddess in the context of a majority culture of Thành Mẫu worship.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.43-52
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• 2020

The paper investigates the mechanism through which corporate credit ratings affect dividend payments by decomposing the mean difference of dividends into a part that is explained by the determinants of dividends and a residual part that is contributed by the pure credit group effect, in the framework of the traditional dividend model of Fama and French (2001). Historically, better credit rated firms have shown consistently higher propensity to pay dividends especially during the economic crisis period. According to the counter-factual decomposition technique of Jann (2008), better rated firms are more responsive to the firm characteristics that have positive impact on dividends and poor rated firms are more responsive to the negative dividend predictors. As a result, good (bad) credit ratings make corporate managers become more bold (timid) in their dividend payments and they tend to pay more (less) dividends than what their firm characteristics prescribe. The degree of information asymmetry increases for the poor group firms during crisis periods and they attempt to reserve more cash in preparation for future investments. The decomposition results suggest that the credit group effect can potentially exceed the effect of firm characteristics because firms of different credit ratings can respond to the very same firm characteristics in a different manner.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• summer
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• pp.103-109
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• 2004

In NLP (Natural Language Processing) tasks, the highest difficulty which computers had to face with, is the built-in ambiguity of Natural Languages. To disambiguate it, formerly, they based on human-devised rules. Building such a complete rule-set is time-consuming and labor-intensive task whilst it doesn't cover all the cases. Besides, when the scale of system increases, it is very difficult to control that rule-set. So, recently, many NLP tasks have changed from rule-based approaches into corpus-based approaches with large annotated corpora. Corpus-based NLP tasks for such popular languages as English, French, etc. have been well studied with satisfactory achievements. In contrast, corpus-based NLP tasks for Vietnamese are at a deadlock due to absence of annotated training data. Furthermore, hand-annotation of even reasonably well-determined features such as part-of-speech (POS) tags has proved to be labor intensive and costly. In this paper, we present our building an annotated English-Vietnamese parallel aligned corpus named EVC to train for Vietnamese-related NLP tasks such as Word Segmentation, POS-tagger, Word Order transfer, Word Sense Disambiguation, English-to-Vietnamese Machine Translation, etc.

• Journal of Daesoon Thought and the Religions of East Asia
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.41-59
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• 2022

Caodaism is a new religion from Vietnam which began in late 1925 and spread rapidly across the French colony of Indochina. With a broad syncretic aim, the new faith sought to revivify Vietnamese religious traditions whilst also incorporating religious, literary, and spiritist influences from France. Like Catholicism, Caodaism kept a strong focus on its monotheistic nature and today Caodaists are eager to label their religion a monotheism. It will be argued here, however, that the syncretic nature of this new faith complicates this claim to a significant degree. To make this argument, we will consider here the nature of God in Caodaism through two central texts from two important stages in the life of the religion. The first is the canonized Compilation of Divine Messages which collects a range of spirit messages from God and some other divine voices. These were received in the early years of the faith. The second is a collection of sermons from 1948/9 that takes Caodaist believers on a tour of heaven, and which is entitled The Divine Path to Eternal Life. It will be shown that in the first text, God speaks in the mode of a fully omnipotent and omniscient supreme being. In the second text, however, we are given a view of paradise that is much more akin to the court of a Jade Emperor within an East Asian milieu. In these realms, the personalities of other beings and redemptive mechanisms claim much of our attention, and seem to be a competing center of power to that of God. Furthermore, God's consort, the Divine Mother, takes on a range of sacred creative prerogatives that do something similar. Additionally, cadres of celestial administrators; buddhas, immortals, and saints help with the operation of a cosmos which spins on with guidance from its own laws. These laws form sacred mechanisms, such as cycles of reincarnation and judgement. These operate not in the purview of God, but as part of the very nature of the cosmos itself. In this context, the dualistic, polytheistic, and even automatic nature of Caodaism's cosmos will be considered in terms of the way in which they complicate this religion's monotheistic claims. To conclude, this article seeks to demonstrate the precise relevance of the term 'monotheism' for this religion.