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A rising China has upended the academia in many fronts. One of the challenges has been the reinvented ideal of Tianxia All-Under-Heaven, which first appeared in the eighth century BCE and has been offered by China as the alternative to the Westphalia system of nation-states on the basis that it will bring peace and harmony to the war-ridden international world. Nevertheless, ongoing international controversies regarding the "forced Sinicization" of the Uyghurs, the Tibetans, and the Mongols under its rule has given rise to the questions of the nature of both Tianxia and Sinicization. Analyzing a famous Vietnamese literary trope of the "principal graduates of the two kingdoms" that emerged no later than the 15th century, this essay proposes a concept of civilization envy to discuss the nuances of Sinicization. Civilization envy is a competitive mentality that desires to prove one's civilizational parity with or even superiority over China, the center of Tianxia. This mentality of civilization envy continues to modern era, and the "principal graduates of the two kingdoms" have been promoted to national heroes to show that Vietnam is a "Domain of Literature." The evolution of the trope shows that China and Vietnam had different understanding of civilizing missions. For China, it involved transforming mores and customs of the peoples under its direct control. For Vietnam, when dealing with China, it involved acquiring literary competence, especially the skills in mastering Sinitic script and poetry composition.

AbstractAcademic dependency theory argues that scholars of developing countries uncritically imitate Western academia. Anglophone Vietnamese studies presents a puzzle: many scholars, particularly historians, follow the research frameworks developed in Vietnam and emphasize Vietnam's agency since the field emerged in the 1960s. To explain, this essay conducts content and citation analyses of 25 key texts on history of Vietnam. The findings show that they are influenced by Vietnamese official historiography in the following ways. First, they adopt Vietnam's "nation to nation" framework and essentialize China into a Confucian Other in dealing with the asymmetrical dimension between the two societies. Second, while their works utilize sources in Literary Sinitic, they seem to rely on modern Vietnamese translations and reinterpretations rather than on original primary sources. Third, the scholars are more attentive to Chinese authors' ethnocentrism than to their Vietnamese counterparts, even though ethnocentrism is inherent in both. By following Vietnam's nationalistic historiography and emphasizing Vietnam's agency, Anglophone scholars are wittingly or unwittingly involved in the power struggles between the United States and China, a current hegemon and a historical one that has been rising rapidly in the twenty‐first century.

Vietnamese studies in China is a contentious field that is dominated by three frameworks: the central-regional relationship, the tributary relationship, and the diffusion thesis. It emerged in the late nineteenth century in response to French scholars' questioning of the extent and duration of Chinese influence on Vietnam. It then became highly politicized between the 1970s and 1980s due to the issues of both the ethnic origins of the bronze drum and the nature of Sino-Vietnamese relations. In the twenty-first century, even though China began to address the issue of Sinocentrism, its claim to the South China Sea has been a source of great tension among the scholars in the two communist countries.