Vietnamese nationalism

Vietnamese nationalism (Vietnamese: Chủ nghĩa dân tộc Việt Nam) is the nationalism that asserts that the Vietnamese are a nation and promotes the cultural unity of the Vietnamese. It encompasses a broad range of ideas and sentiments harbored by the Vietnamese people for many centuries in the history to preserve and defend the national identity of the Vietnamese nation.

Unlike any type of nationalism in the world, Vietnamese nationalism appears in every aspect of the society, from cultural, folklore and even military, which led Vietnam into becoming one of the world's most nationalistic countries. Most of Vietnamese nationalism focuses on the military history of the country; however there are also other aspects of the nationalism in Vietnam.

However, most of Vietnamese nationalist concepts aim mainly on China, which has many times fueled the anti-Chinese sentiment in Vietnam, although there are other anti-Thai, anti-Cambodian and anti-Western as well, with nothing much significant.

Vietnamese nationalism appeared since the independence of Vietnam around 2,800 years ago, when Vietnam was made up of the independent kingdoms under Văn Lang and Âu Lạc. In there, Vietnam was one of the oldest-formed nations in Southeast Asia and the world.

However, following with the later Chinese millennium in Vietnam, several attempts against Chinese occupation resulted with many wars that happened throughout thousand years of Chinese rule, after which Vietnam finally regained independence in the 10th century following the battle of Bach Dang. Through then, Vietnam remained very militaristic and nationalistic due to the history of Vietnam often had brutal past with China and later, with its neighbors like Champa, Khmer Empire, and later with Siam, which led to many wars.

Lý Thường Kiệt's famous declaration of Vietnam's independence, Nam quốc sơn hà (Mountains and Rivers of the Southern Country), is a patriotic and nationalistic poem that still lives on in Vietnamese society generations later and now.

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Wikipedia