Reading on Cambodia
I just finished Philip Short’s book Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare. I bought the book because I wanted to learn something about Cambodian history and culture before we visited and this appeared to be the best balance of my goals and reviewer opinions on Amazon. For my purposes it ended up being too wordy and filled with minutiae about specific interactions between party members, but there were some interesting points of general interest:
Page 25 discusses historical cultural relations with the Vietnamese which eventually precipitated a purge by the Khmer Rouges:
Vietnam was the Cambodian bogeyman…They seemed to be everything the Khmers were not; a disciplined, vigorous, virile people, whose relentless, centuries-long southward migration had swallowed up Kampuchea Krom, or Lower Cambodia, in the area of what would become South Vietnam, and now threatened a creeping takeover of Cambodia itself, aided and abetted by the French authorities, who encouraged large-scale Vietnamese immigration to staff the lower echelons of the colonial civil service and furnish the skilled manual labor which the Cambodians were judged incapable of providing. The result was more than mere racial antipathy. It was a massive national inferiority complex, which took refuge in dreams of ancient grandeur. At a personal level, Khmers and Vietnamese might befriend each other…But the cultural fracture between the two peoples – between Confucianism and Theravada Buddhism, between the Chinese world and the Indian – was one of mutual incomprehension and distrust, which periodically exploded into racial massacres and pogroms.
Page 43 hints at French colonial policy:
Under the protectorate, the French had so neglected higher education in Cambodia that in the late 1940s, fewer than a hundred students a year left secondary school with the requisite qualifications [for a university scholarship]…This was especially true in the technical fields where even the humblest posts were filled by Vietnamese because of the lack of trained Cambodians…Although the numbers were rising, fewer than 250 Cambodians had been trained abroad since the beginning of the century [almost 50 years], including those sent by their families without government support.
Page 295 discusses backward bending labor supply curves:
Even Khieu Samphan estimated that on average Khmer peasants worked only six months of the year, and sometimes much less. Theravada Buddhism has never placed much value on the acquisition and consumption of wealth. Sihanouk has recounted the experience of an American aid expert in the 1950s who convinced a group of villagers to use chemical fertilizer, promising that it would enable them to double rice production. ‘Sure enough, at harvest time, the yield was doubled. Everyone was delighted…[but] when the official came back the following year he was horrified to find that each peasant had cultivated only half his land. “Why” said the peasants, “cultivate the entire area when you can get just as much by cultivating half?” Fifty years later, a Khmer businessman, seeking a regular supply of palm sugar for sweetmeat manufacture encountered exactly the same problem. Once the peasant farmers he employed had earned enough for the year they stopped work, and neither blandishments nor the promise of more money could make them start again. “From their point of view it was logical”, he acknowledged. “Once they had paid their family’s expenses – seed for the next planting; fertilizer; clothes; offerings to the monks; school fees for the children – what would they spend it on? There was nothing more they wanted.”…To Pol it was a roadblock obstructing his ambition to make Cambodia prosperous and strong…the Khmers Rouges had deliberately adopted policies of extremism to move “the inert peasant mass.
To be fair I read a similar characterization of the Vietnamese in The Last Valley except in that case it was used to explain how the Vietnamese could muster hundreds of thousands of rebel fighters since their primary jobs (growing rice) only took about 3 months per year, leaving them lots of free time. There seems to be a "Vietnam is to Cambodia/Lao as China is to Vietnam" theme in the history I'm reading.
The last part of the book (see page 420) is interesting; Vietnam eventually invaded Cambodia and the US subsequently elected to support the Khmer Rouges (in the midst of their governance killing something like 20% of everyone in Cambodia) because it was a way to punish the Soviets via the Vietnamese – very much the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” school of foreign affairs.