1 definition by Brooks Duncan
Literally, the "barbarians of the South," the "Viet" ("Yue") ("barbarians") of "Nam" ("south"), the Chinese name that the Han Chinese gave to the rice growing people from the Red River ("Song Hong" -- literally, the "Pink River"), and that they now use to describe themselves in the Chinese language rather than the word for their ethnicity, Kinh. Connotes a group of border people south of China who have copied Chinese religions (Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism), customs, technology, and lust for empire along with that from others (such as the Western alphabet and French and Russian colonial government systems) and whose sense of self comes mainly from their "dirt-water" geography ("dat-nuoc", usually mistranslated in English as "country"). Their survival strategy is to multiply quickly and use technologies that they copy or pirate from others and to spread over neighboring lands. They now rule over some 30 former displaced empires and cultures on their land including the artistic and innovative Khmer and Cham and are the 12th largest population group in the world but have invented little or nothing distinctive on their own. They prosper overseas due to an ability to copy and adapt and to live with low consumption.
Ho Chi Minh, a Vietnamese leader taking a Chinese name who wore Chinese clothes, plagiarized the U.S. Declaration of Independence, and built a political system for a newly independent country that copied the French and Russian colonial military rule.
by Brooks Duncan December 19, 2007