Universality, Modernity and Cultural Borrowing Among Vietnamese Intellectuals, 1877–1919

Abstract

After 1897, as the power of the Nguyen Monarchy was increasingly restricted by a centralizing administration in French Indochina, it sought to retain its relevance by grappling with reformist ideas, especially those associated with Xu Jiyu, Tan Sitong, and Liang Qichao. This paper examines the influence of those thinkers on the policy questions of 1877, 1904, and 1919 and proposes that even when the monarchy was defending more traditional ideas against reform, these new conceptions were fundamentally transforming the thinking of even more conservative elites.