Liam Kelley

In 2020 Kelley published The centrality of “fringe history”: Diaspora, the Internet and a new version of Vietnamese prehistory in the International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies which criticised the "new prehistory of Vietnam" and a lot of the scholarship surrounding the Hòa Bình culture. In his paper Kelley argued that Wilhelm Solheim had built the theory of "Southeast Asia as the earliest agricultural center" based on false archeological data and that the amateur Vietnamese historians on the internet and some members of the Vietnamese diaspora try to push a nationalistic view of the prehistoric period in Vietnam based on Solheim's earlier arguments from 1975. This work was later translated into Vietnamese by Võ Xuân Quế of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities (Ho Chi Minh City) [vi] (Trường Đại học Khoa học Xã hội và Nhân văn) in Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam, a part of the Vietnam National University.

During the late 19th century and early 20th century the mandarins of the Nguyễn dynasty and other educated elite of French Indochina were introduced to works from Europe and the Americas through Chinese revolutionaries and are known in Vietnam as Tân thư (新書), Through the Tân thư, Vietnamese intellectuals come into contact with and received new knowledge from the outside world. This contact was both due to traditional exchanges and due to being closely related to the situation and plight of Japan and China – peoples who share a similar cultural background and were all facing a new form of colonialism that plots to annex not only the territory, but also westernise their culture. In this context, the development of Japan, the movement of thoughts according to the progressive trends in China could not fail to affect the thought and sentiment of progressive intellectuals in Vietnam at that time. They hoped to find a new direction for the nation from the Duy Tân (維新, "Renovation") movements in these two countries and with the Tân thư (see: Meiji Restoration), the spirit of enlightenment and many works of historical, political and philosophical studies. The West's presence in Vietnam, leading to the birth of movements based on news school of thought (Phong trào Tân học) that showed a new aspiration, a new awakening in social awareness that dominated Vietnam's educated minds at the time. During this same period of both modernisation and Westernisation a lot of, not only social but also, scientific vocabulary started to enter the Vietnamese language, such as máy bay (Aeroplane), tàu hỏa (Train), ô-tô (Automobile), xe máy - mô-tô (Motocyclette), áo vét (Veston), dầu tây (Petroleum),... đến tự do (Freedom), bình đẳng (Equality), bác ái (Charity), dân quyền (Civil rights), độc lập (Independence), yêu nước (Patriotism), dân tộc (Ethnicity, ethnic group), Etc.

In 2018 Kelley wrote on his blog challenging the narratives surrounding the Nguyễn dynasty's Tự Đức Emperor, while typically Tự Đức is presented as being Conservative and that his Conservatism and Confucianism didn't allow him to reform and modernise the country as had happened in contemporary Japan which eventually led to the French being able to overtake and conquer Đại Nam, on his blog Kelley states that he found two instances where the Tự Đức Emperor had ordered the Chinese edition of several classic books on science and industry from the West to be read by the mandarins and soldiers of the country. As an example he presented the book "Vạn Quốc Công Pháp" (萬國公法), a Chinese translation of The Elements of International Law, first published in 1836 by American lawyer Henry Wheaton, a book noted by many researchers to have made a profound contribution to the ideological transformation of the ruling elites in Qing China and Japan. It is noted that the very slow adoption of the ideas from this work in the Nguyễn dynasty showed how slow its elites adopted Western ideas and despite learning about Western ideas they were slow to adopt them or adapt to them.

French historian Gerard Sasges stated in 2018 that "Despite Professor Kiernan's claims to the contrary, Kelley's wide-ranging and trenchant critique still stands." to rebuff a number of criticisms Kiernan presented against Kelley.

Historian Benedict F. Kiernan criticised Kelley for exaggerating the role that a more Sinitic culture has defined Vietnam. While Kiernan writes that he agrees that Vietnamese history cannot be fully understood without its Chinese cultural background, he claims that Kelley overemphasises the importance of being able to understand Classical Chinese to learn about both Vietnamese and Southeast Asian history. Kiernan claims that Kelley disregards and diminishes Vietnamese scholars’ contributions to the field of Vietnamese history if they are unable to understand the Classical Chinese language, which Kiernan claims undervalues their works as he claims that Kelley overestimates the value of Classical Chinese. On his blog Kelley dismissed a number of passages from Kiernan's 2017 book Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present based on the premise that Kiernan wasn't able to understand Vietnamese and Classical Chinese (despite Kiernan claiming to be able to speak some of the former), Kiernan criticised a number of assumptive claims made by Kelley in response on 1 December 2017 in the 23rd issue of the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus.

In February 2014 historian Nguyễn Hòa wrote two articles in Nhân Dân, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Vietnam, criticising Kelly as an example of foreign authors making unconvincing theses in part of a larger trend of the expansion of international relations of Vietnam. Nguyễn Hòa noted that Kelley is not interested in the "hidden" and "non-textous" content of history and culture as he only seeks to research surviving texts often attempting to refute the cultural and historical values that are quite unified in the Vietnamese research community, as well as in the public consciousness in Vietnam. Hòa gave an example that in his assessment of the transformation of Vietnamese society during the early 20th century, Kelley noted that this was merely a cultural transition but Hòa argued that it would be better to see these societal transformations as a way of molding the "national spirit" (Tinh thần dân tộc) in context of being colonised. Nguyễn Hòa noted that the Vietnamese were eager to adopt scientific advancements from the West such as cars, aeroplanes, motorcycles, Etc. but were having more issues in adopting spiritual and social concepts from the West. Nguyễn Hòa argued that these kinds of concepts (phenomena related to freedom, equality, charity, civil rights, independence, patriotism, ethnicity, Etc.) existed beforehand in Vietnamese but that the previous generations of Vietnamese people simply didn't have the vocabulary to express these concepts and that Kelley fails to make these connections, arguing that while concepts and ideas cannot create reality and only express what is already there those that cannot express concepts are still bound to them and that it's up to later generations to analyse the past with these new concepts. Hòa argues that Kelley fails to see analysis from the sense of the researcher who tends to "modernise the past" by separating the text from the context and that earlier Vietnamese struggles to regain their ancestral land was proof that, even without those words, the Vietnamese had subconscious concepts of things like independence, patriotism, the nation, Etc. and that these things are impossible to survey by strictly focusing on the historical texts themselves and separating them from these modern concepts.

In June 2014 historian Lê Việt Anh wrote a piece in Nhân Dân, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Vietnam, criticising Kelly (whom he referred to as "L.C Ken-li") for his views on Vietnamese history and called him a "Temple burner" (kẻ/người "đốt đền"). Lê Việt Anh noted that Kelley's reputation has emerged not because of his contributions to Vietnamese studies, but mainly due to a number of controversial works and articles about the need to change the system of the study of Vietnamese history. Kelley noted that Trần Quang Đức's Thousand years of caps and robes proved that "the Vietnamese were hanised" (người Việt đã bị Hán hóa) which Việt Anh noted was used by Kelley to deny the notion that people in East and Southeast Asia had selected elements from foreign cultural traditions and then "localised" (bản địa hóa) them to indigenous circumstances, as Kelley pushes for using Chinese culture and Chinese concepts to learn more about how the pre-modern Vietnamese thought. Việt Anh added that Trần Quang Đức himself noted that the Vietnamese always added unique variations.

During the mid-2010s he was researching the efforts to discover the origins of the Vietnamese people by various people in modern times, from French scholars during the period of French domination to various later Vietnamese scholars that were active in the post-colonial era. During this time he had been back and forth in Vietnam, attending a number of seminars and publishing many articles largely to prove that the history and traditions of "anti-foreign aggression of the Vietnamese people" (Truyền thống chống ngoại xâm của dân tộc Việt Nam) are only recent pieces of fiction, and were cultural values that the Vietnamese people were proud to have only after establishing contact with the West. This working method has influenced the concepts and working methods of a number of authors, especially young authors, to change their views on Vietnamese history and how to research it.

Together with Professor Phan Lê Hà in the Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Institute of Education (SHBIE), Professor Kelley organises an annual conference called "Engaging With Vietnam: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue". The conference itself was established by Phan Lê Hà in 2009, then at Monash University in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, and has been held in Vietnam, Australia, the United States, and the Netherlands. The conference partners with a different university each year.

In his first book Beyond the Bronze Pillars: Envoy Poetry and the Sino-Vietnamese Relationship published in 2005 Kelley examines much of the early scholarship concerning the Sino-Vietnamese relationship and noted that this early historical scholarship presented Vietnam as a "little China" (小中華, Tiểu Trung Hoa), while subsequent research made after World War II focused more on critiquing this theory. Kelley claimed that this resulted in an unwavering belief in what he calls the "not Chinese" theory of the history of Vietnam. Writing that many past historians in the field have often misinterpreted many historical Vietnamese documents and writings as a "literature of resistance to domination", instead Kelley presents that a large number of these historical writings did not concern Chinese domination over the country but internal problems and hostilities within Vietnam. According to Kelley in some instances the Vietnamese actually welcomed the Imperial Chinese military to take sides in Vietnam's own internal struggles, which he supports by pointing to specific historical Vietnamese texts and their authors who embraced the Chinese. American historian Keith Taylor claimed that "Liam Kelley has opened a new topic with his study of poetry written in classical Chinese by Vietnamese envoys to the Ming and Qing courts during the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries," adding that the book points out the "East Asian" connection of the educated Vietnamese of the time, which is often suppressed by Vietnamese nationalist historiography. In 2006 Kelley's works on "envoy poetry" were translated by Overseas Vietnamese Lê Quỳnh into the Vietnamese language.

Beyond the Bronze Pillars: Envoy Poetry and the Sino-Vietnamese Relationship published in 2005 was based on research conducted at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan and the Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies in Hanoi, it focuses on the tributary ties between China and Vietnam from the late 16th to the early 19th centuries. While Patricia M. Pelley of the American Historical Association noted that while she finds the work to be "an extraordinary book based on some truly impressive research", she comments how some of the contents of the book are problematic. According to an article from Vietnamese-language BBC News, Kelley asserted that his analysis showed that these poems, which its author referred to as porcelain poems (Gian thơ đi sứ, rough translation: "compartment [containing] poems [written by] envoys going [abroad]"), showed that the Vietnamese elite at the time believed themselves to be a part of a "domain of manifest civility" (文獻之邦, Văn hiến chi bang) and that many envoys exclaimed their joys over witnessing many sights in China that they had only read about in their youths. The most controversial point of these studies is that they emphasised that there were no major difference between Chinese and Vietnamese elite or high culture, in light of a trend that Kelley described where over the past decades in writing about Vietnam historical works tended to focus on the "division between Vietnamese and Chinese culture." and noted that many historians tended to focus more on the Vietnamese side of this bilateral relationship. According to Kelley this antagonism couldn't be found in the documents of the time which rather reaffirmed an amicable and shared cultural understanding between the countries.

After returning to the United States he received his M.A. in 1996 and then his Ph.D. in 2001 both in Chinese history from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where he would later teach himself. During the late 1990s, Kelley studied the Vietnamese language for four years at the University of Hawaii at Manoa while during those summers he would go to Hanoi and learn more of the language and culture.

Kiernan claimed that Kelley is also ready to criticise those "few academics" who work on pre-modern Vietnamese history "who can read the sources in classical Chinese." According to Kiernan, Kelley singles out a number of historians that can understand Classical Chinese as he claimed John K. Whitmore produced "a garbled translation" that "introduced some inaccuracies", Alexander B. Woodside for supposedly producing an erroneous date, and Lê Thành Khôi for authoring a "woefully outdated" (1981) book.

Kelley has often criticised historical scholarship in Vietnamese for their Nationalist biases, he claims that the academic scholarship in Vietnam is heavily influenced and politicised by the ideology of Vietnamese nationalism. Kelley says that publications in Vietnam in the field of premodern or precolonial history don't often produce new scholarship and only rarely produce new ideas or insights as they generally only publish very basic information about sources and dates. He claims that this happened because of what he describes as "academic politics" where scholars are discouraged from publishing works that go against the current political narratives. As an example Kelley notes that the historian Trần Ngọc Thêm during the 1980s and 1990s "praises" Kim Định, a French-trained, Vietnamese philosopher-historian who posited the idea that Chinese civilisation evolved from ancient Vietnamese agriculturalists, for loving the country of Vietnam and for loving the Vietnamese nation (yêu nước, yêu dân tộc) as well as for promoting "the spiritual values of the nation" (giá trị tinh thần đặc thù của dân tộc) during a time when the North Vietnamese were forced by the world of international communism to not hold nationalistic values in favour of socialist values. However, during these decades many Communist Parties started lessening their adherence to the ideology of socialism and embrace different values like tradition and nationalism in a phenomenon that some scholars call "Late Socialism". Kelley himself refers to the Vietnamese historian Kim Định as "the greatest historian of Vietnam (who is not known/not acknowledged.)" because he pushed for different ways of thinking in Vietnamese historiography, despite not thinking that Kim Định is a good scholar comparing him to the French anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Liam Christopher Kelley (born 28 December 1966), or Lê Minh Khải (Traditional Chinese: 黎明凱), is an American Vietnamologist and a professor of Southeast Asian history and lecturer at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam, he formerly taught at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Honolulu. His studies mainly focus on all periods in Vietnamese history, but he also teaches broadly on Southeast Asian, Asian and World History. Kelley also has a research interest in the digital humanities where he analyses and discusses the ways in which the Digital Revolution is transforming how scholars can produce and disseminate their ideas online and uses new digital media himself, such as a blog, for academic purposes.

Liam Kelley was born on 28 December 1966. He grew up in the state of Vermont. In 1989, he received his B.A. in Russian Language and Literature from Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. After this he decided to go to Taiwan to teach English "just for one year" but would spend four years on the island, while there he studied Mandarin Chinese at the same time that he was teaching English. During his years in Taiwan he had taken a number of trips to Thailand in the late 1980s and early 1990s which he fancied, his time in Taiwan and Thailand made him fascinated with both Classical Chinese and Southeast Asia so he decided to focus his studies on Vietnam because in his words "{G}iven that Vietnamese used to write in classical Chinese, and given the fact that I had never been to mainland China, and given the fact that a couple of trips to Thailand had peaked my interest in Southeast Asia, I decided to study more about it, and particularly about Vietnam." While in Taiwan someone gave him the Chinese name Li Ming Kai (黎明凱), a name inspired by the Hong Kong celebrity Leon Lai Ming (黎明), plus the name was chosen because its three characters are written in 36 strokes which makes it an auspicious name. The Vietnamese language reading of this name, Lê Minh Khải, is sometimes written as Lê Minh Khai without the dấu hỏi.

Kelley has also criticised the projection of the "Vietnamese nation" (Dân tộc Việt Nam) into the past, for example he notes that scholarship that discusses the "Vietnamese nation" during the first millennium BCE wouldn't be accepted in the Western world because of different concepts of nations and their emergence as Western scholars view nations as being modern concepts that only emerge once countries establish a universal education system that can teach the inhabitants of the country that they belong to a "nation" which didn't exist during the premodern times. Kelley also argued that all history textbooks reflect political sentiments of the time and describes them as being "a politicised form of scholarship" noting that during the 1960s American students learned the history of the Western civilisation which he claimed made Americans think that their history was a part of a unique process that created a superior Western civilisation as opposed to learning about world history and world affairs as students started to learn afterwards as he claimed that people decided that the world would be a better place if Americans knew more about it.

Kelley claims that it is impossible to understand the history of Vietnam before the 20th century without being able to read the Classical Chinese language, saying that no historian specialised in ancient Greece or Rome would be taken seriously if they weren't able to be able to read ancient Greek or Latin. According to Kelley it became acceptable to be a historian of premodern Vietnam during the second half of the 20th century without being able to understand literary Chinese. According to Kelley during the 1960s former mandarins of the Nguyễn dynasty with knowledge of the literary Chinese language began to pass away causing their linguistic and cultural knowledge to die with them as well. As the Classical Chinese language was dismissed as "feudal reactionary culture" in Vietnam and seen as "not authentically Southeast Asian" outside of the country such as in the United States, literary Chinese failed to be recognised as being important for Vietnamese history like the Latin language is for Roman and Medieval European history.

Nguyễn Hòa noted that in the past many countries created cultures and built a civilisation with their own writing systems but were later invaded and assimilated, and countries where the starting point in ancient times was still at a low level and were unable to record their history. Hòa claimed that only being dependent on the written record means that Kelley denies the legitimacy of passed on oral history in Vietnam saying that we can't treat all countries like his native United States which is a recently created nation and therefore has all of its origins thoroughly documented in a paper trial while the same cannot be said about Vietnam's ancient origins. Nguyễn Hòa states that the folklore of Vietnam surrounding its ancient origins can be compared with those of the modern-day Israel, where it is equally impossible to take the time of its establishment in 1948 without ignoring the history of thousands of years before Christ of the Jews; a people which have an equally legendary origin based on the story of Moses and that his staff was seen as a symbol of the Jewish people for countless of generations before the creation of their modern state. Meaning that Kelly's method of analysing ancient documents and criticising the folklore, which he claims are just "vivid fantasies", according Nguyễn Hòa is an irrational method as it denies the patriotic struggles of past heroes as the line between "history" and "folklore" can often become blurry which cannot be exclusively analysed using the scientific method.

Lê Việt Anh criticised Kelley for claiming that seeing sovereignty in ancient maps is "modernisation of the past" (hiện đại hóa quá khứ) and that people in the past didn't view national sovereignty in the way modern people do, related to the Hoàng Sa and Trường Sa insular territorial disputes. This was as Kelley concluded that "It seems to me that the French were the first to demonstrate the "peaceful and continuous expression of state power" over the Paracels." (Với tôi có vẻ như có một thực tế là người Pháp là những người đầu tiên chứng minh "sự thể hiện hòa bình và liên tục quyền lực nhà nước" đối với Paracels) based on the facts that the Nguyễn dynasty was the first Vietnamese state to claim the area and that the French were the first to actually establish a permanent presence there during the 1930s. Lê Việt Anh claimed that the Vietnamese people had a "national consciousness" and that the modern concept of "sovereignty" could be applied to it but that the people simply didn't have a term to express this "national consciousness" and that Vietnam has always had heroes that fought for the sovereignty of the country, such as the many national heroes that fought against the Song and Ming dynasties, but that Kelley deliberately didn't recognise this because in his view Vietnam was "Sinicised" (Hán hóa) and that the tributary relationship was an expression of dependence on the Chinese.