CONFUCIAN LI (RITUAL) VS. CAPITALIST PROFIT: THE BANQUE DE L’INDOCHINE’S ROLE IN ALTERING SOCIAL HIERARCHIES IN COLONIAL ANNAM (1885-1945)

Abstract

Abstract: This paper investigates the profound ontological conflict between the Confucian ethical paradigm and colonial economic rationality through the specific operational role of the Banque de l’Indochine in re-stratifying social hierarchies in colonial Annam from 1885 to 1945. Embodying a critical archival methodology synthesized with critical discourse analysis of vernacular socio-political texts, this study exposes how French finance capital systematically dismantled the traditional social order regulated by the foundational concept of Li (Ritual). Within the Annamite Confucian cosmology, Li operated not merely as a ritualistic code but as a totalizing politico-moral ontology, preserving cosmic-social harmony by prioritizing ethical righteousness (Yi) over the egoistic accumulation of mercantile profit (Yi/Lu). The aggressive penetration of the Banque de l’Indochine, functioning as the absolute sovereign apparatus of monetary monopoly and credit hegemony, brutally dissolved this ancestral structure. By deploying predatory "liquidity algorithms" and enforcing widespread debt subjection, the Bank effectively desacralized the socio-economic prestige of the traditional literati (Sĩ phu) while simultaneously engineering the structural ascendance of a new class of collaborative landlords and comprador bourgeois elites. This existential dislocation violently mutated Annamite society from a hierarchy anchored within moral reciprocity into a deeply alienated class-stratified matrix, wherein the colonial currency was institutionalized as the supreme, unmediated signifier of power and ontological status.