CHAPTER 13

THE TRAGEDY AND THE RISE OF MODERN VIETNAM

ANYTHING SEEMED POSSIBLE to the communist leadership in mid-1975. The Vietnam Ho Chi Minh had declared independent and unified in Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi thirty years earlier was finally a reality. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam had prevailed against all odds, first against the French in one of the most violent wars of decolonization of the twentieth century and then against the Americans in arguably the most brutal conflagration of the Cold War. The victors had reason to celebrate when they gathered in downtown Saigon on 15 May as the PAVN marched by. But all did not cheer, for 1975 also marked the end of a bloody thirty-year civil war among the Vietnamese. There were winners and there were losers. And as in post-Civil War America, France, Russia, or China, the divisions did not disappear overnight.

The question now was, having won, what type of Vietnam would Ho Chi Minh’s disciples create? How would the leadership heal the wounds of war that had taken the lives of as many as 3.6 million souls since 1945? Would they unite the country immediately or wait for five to ten years before proceeding, as Le Duc Tho had promised? Would Hanoi transform the Republic of Vietnam’s market-oriented economy along communist lines or allow two systems to co-exist for a decent interval? Visitors to Vietnam today might marvel at the rapid economic development of this latest ‘Asian tiger’, but the road leading toward modern Vietnam after 1975 was not a straight line. In fact, for over a decade, it remained a very tragic one.

ONE VIETNAM?

Uniting the South with the North¹

While the victors in 1975 were understandably determined to unify the country into one nation-state, they had few historical precedents to guide them. Except for a few weeks in mid-1945, it had been 113 years since a unitary Vietnam running from north to south had existed. A myriad of states, contesting sovereignties, and identities had proliferated. Southern, central, and northern Vietnam had developed in very different ways under the French. Some nationalists, including the communists, had even thought of going pan-Indochinese. The two Vietnams led by Bao Dai and Ho Chi Minh during the Indochina conflict had never controlled all of Vietnam, functioning instead as competing, fragmented war states. The Geneva Conference agreements of 1954 only solidified the existence of two very different postcolonial states, economies, and societies. Nationalists in both areas certainly believed in a unified Vietnamese nation and located each in a faraway heroic past; but in reality such a state had only existed under the Nguyen dynasty during the first half of the nineteenth century. Le Duan’s conquest of the south in 1975 and Gia Long’s victory over the north in 1802 stand out as the two points in time at which leaders achieved the territorial state we now call ‘modern Vietnam’.

Like their Nguyen predecessors, the Vietnamese communists relied on their conquering army to hold this new Vietnam together. In 1975, the People’s Army of Vietnam disarmed the enemy, occupied the major cities, roads, and bridges, and administered the south. A military management committee ruled through a hastily convened coalition government known as the ‘Republic of South Vietnam’. This was not the ‘Republic of Vietnam’ the PAVN had just toppled, but rather a manifestation of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam created by the Vietnamese Workers’ Party in the late 1960s. That said, military authorities maintained many of the lower- and mid-level civil servants of the ancien régime until enough communist officials could arrive to take over. And in contrast to earlier periods in Vietnamese history, that did not take long. As former republican personnel quit, were fired, or had to leave in order to undergo re-education, the new authorities introduced thousands of northern cadres to staff upper- and mid-level positions in southern provincial, district, and urban offices. They operated the new police and security services and took over the administration of schools, universities, hospitals, industries, and businesses which they had seized. Secondly, the wartime destruction of the VWP’s National Liberation Front in the south only reinforced this ‘northernization’ of the southern civil service. Thirdly, given the intensity of the long Vietnamese civil war and the communists’ distrust of the ‘corrupted’ and ‘debauched’ south it had finally conquered, the victors wanted their people in command. They wanted direct rule.²

Having demobilized the Republic of Vietnam’s army, the new authorities sent tens of thousands of enemy officers to re-education camps, at the same time as confiscating massive amounts of American-supplied war materiel. Over a million-strong by 1975, the People’s Army of Vietnam stood unchallenged in postcolonial Indochina and was the fifth largest standing army in the world. It certainly dwarfed its wartime ally, the southern-grown People’s Liberation Armed Forces. The war had decimated the latter’s ranks, leading Hanoi to increase dramatically the PAVN’s presence in the south. In all, between 1965 and 1975, the north had sent 980,000 People’s Army of Vietnam troops and personnel to the south. And with the guns now silent, the communists were in no mood to allow this southern army to assert its independence from the very communist party that had created it or risk the chance that it could support a rival southern regional polity. This reality finally dawned on the NLF’s non-communist Minister of Justice, Truong Nhu Tang, as he stood proudly next to the PAVN’s General Van Tien Dung during the 15 May 1975 victory celebrations in Saigon. These men and their people had suffered together in the jungles and under the bombs. Together they had driven out the Americans and toppled their common Vietnamese enemies. It was supposed to be a day of great joy. For Tang it was, until the People’s Army of Vietnam troops had passed by to be followed by People’s Liberation Armed Force soldiers now marching under the national flag of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. When he asked Dung what was going on, meaning why were there not two flags for two different armies, the general curtly replied: ‘The army has already been unified’. ‘Since when?’ Tang shot back. Dung did not answer as he quietly returned his gaze to the parade. The communists had neutralized two armies in the spring of 1975, not one.³

They did away with two governments as well, not only the enemy Republic of Vietnam one created by Ngo Dinh Diem, but also the coalition government the communists had themselves created in the form of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam. Now the PRG had become one of three main components of the counter-republic in the south along with the National Liberation Front, and the Alliance of National, Democratic, and Peace Forces. As stipulated in the Paris Accords of January 1973 (see chapter 11), this coalition government was supposed to continue to exist as a separate and sovereign state until an agreement could be reached with the DRV to unite the two Vietnams via elections or negotiations into one sovereign, unitary state. Although this republic was a communist creation, many Third Force non-communists like Truong Nhu Tang sincerely believed that they could use this entity to promote a less than wholly communist ‘South Vietnam’, allied with, but which would be independent of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s institutional control for at least a decade. Since the founding of the national front in 1960, Vietnamese communists had repeatedly promised this to their partners and assured them that they were in no rush to communize the south.

In many ways, Third Force nationalists like Truong Nhu Tang had made the same dangerous gamble as their non-communist predecessors who had tried to use French military power to thwart the Vietnamese communists during the initial Indochina War. The difference of course was that this second ‘Third Force’ had wanted to drive out the Americans and their Vietnamese allies by entering into an alliance with the Vietnamese Workers’ Party since 1960. But the political risk was the same: would the militarily stronger partner honor its promises to the junior one once the guns fell silent? By joining the communists, Tang and his non-communist allies ran the risk that the politburo in Hanoi in control of the NLF/PRG would one day discard them just as the French had disposed of Nguyen Van Thinh when he had threatened their Cochinchinese republic in 1946 and the Americans had supported the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem when he imperiled their hold on the south.

While the politburo never doubted the loyalty of the communists they had put in charge of the Republic of South Vietnam, Nguyen Thi Binh and Huynh Tan Phat, and rewarded them accordingly after 1975, Ho Chi Minh’s disciples were not about to let non-communist, democratic-minded southern nationalists turn the coalition government and the 1973 accords on them in order to plot some sort of ‘Third Way’ out for South Vietnam or to slip political pluralism into the north. There would be no elections, no coalition, and no autonomous ‘South Vietnam’, inside or outside of the state of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. For the communists, the 1973 accords were null and void. Power was finally theirs. And those who challenged it, even former allies, would suffer the consequences. This, too, is why the leadership in Hanoi preferred direct control. The communists did not trust their non-communist allies.

The victors also realized that the south was so different from the north economically and ideologically that it was a threat that had to be subdued immediately. Young PAVN soldiers and communist cadres expecting to save their southern brethren from capitalist exploitation and underdevelopment discovered instead an urban population which was not particularly keen on being liberated ideologically. They also encountered a consumerist society in the cities which they had never dreamed possible. In 1981, a very privileged northern party member sent to Saigon to run a medical laboratory described the impact of the south on her mindset in subversive terms: ‘It was a dream city for someone coming from the mists of Hanoi, so austere and poor. The contrast was brutal. I saw a plethora of products about which I knew nothing. An electric rice cooker! Who could have imagined an electric rice cooker in Hanoi, under the bombs? We were still in the age of coal and wood. There was such abundance and choice [. . .]’⁴

Meanwhile, as Saigon teenagers shed their bell-bottomed jeans and clipped their long hair to conform to the austere northern ‘look’, northern cadres and the rank and file in the People’s Army of Vietnam in Saigon were trying them on and ‘sucking up every loose camera, television, stereo, and motorcycle’ they could find. ‘They came to purify us’, one Saigon citizen remarked with irony, ‘but we are corrupting them’. Indeed, the party feared this and struggled to control the psychological fallout from this meeting of two very different Vietnams. And adding to their sense of urgency was the rapid deterioration of relations with Cambodian and Chinese communists which I will discuss below.⁵

By early 1976, the Vietnamese politburo had concluded that if it did not unify and transform the south then, in five to ten years, it might be too late. In April 1976, having disbanded the military management committee which had ruled there, the party organized elections to create a new National Assembly, the first step to creating a new state. Representatives from all over the country then gathered in Hanoi between 24 June and 3 July 1976 to discuss the future nature and workings of such a unitary state. What would be its economic tack, its political constitution, and roadmap for unification? Would the south continue to exist autonomously? In the end, little if any real debate occurred before the party’s delegate to the convention announced that the country would now be unified as part of a new state to be known as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, or SRV.

A number of liberal-minded delegates who had opposed American intervention, Ngo Dinh Diem, and his military successors could not believe their ears. They had expected a debate, discussions, at the least a bit of time. The ‘socialization’ of the south was supposed to be gradual. That’s what the Central Office of South Vietnam leadership had always promised. One of the rare assemblymen to have transitioned from the republic’s parliament to the communist one, Nguyen Cong Hoan earnestly told the communist party’s representative in the National Assembly that ‘most southerners were not used to the idea of socialism’ and ‘didn’t trust it’. But the communist representative, Hoan later recalled, told him that now: ‘There’s only one road to building the nation, and that’s our road’. Even southern attempts to negotiate a new national flag rather than simply adopting the DRV’s yellow star on a red banner went nowhere. On 2 July 1976, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam officially came to life. At the end of the year, during their fourth party congress, the communists renamed their party the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) and set the entire country on a communist tack under the leadership of a single-party state. For the first time since 1862, one Vietnamese state existed, not a Confucian, Christian, republican, Personalist, or Buddhist-minded one, but a communist dictatorship.⁶

Communist State-making in the South

Official Vietnamese historians in the SRV like to compare their struggle and social revolution in the twentieth century to that of the Tay Son brothers two hundred years earlier. Like the communists, the Tay Son brothers had fought for the poor, driven out foreign invaders, and unified the country against all odds. However, when it comes to state-building, there are equally compelling reasons to compare the communists’ methods of the late twentieth century to those used by their neo-Confucian-minded predecessor in the 1820s and 1830s, the Nguyen Emperor Minh Mang. Both groups came to power after some thirty years of civil and interstate wars. Postwar loyalties were divided. Both were determined to create highly centralized, unitary states by tailoring foreign ideologies and techniques to local needs. Both confronted a heterogeneous southern society and economy very different from their northern-centered ones in Hue and Hanoi.

Worried by the fragile nature of their unitary states, the communists and their Confucian predecessor were also remarkably determined to impose unflinching loyalty right down to the lowest levels of state and society. Just as Minh Mang had imposed the dual, interlocking Confucian policies of ‘Cultivation’ and ‘Sino-Vietnamization’ to establish loyalty to his court in Hue and homogenize the civil service and his subjects, so too did the communists turn to Sino-Soviet communist techniques such as rectification, emulation campaigns, hero worship, and self-edifying propaganda to take control of the bureaucracy and society from top to bottom, homogenize both ideologically, and subordinate them to the political center, now in Hanoi. Instead of administering a Confucian-based examination system, the Vietnamese Communist Party trained its bureaucrats in Marxist-Leninist thought via carefully controlled coursework given out by a network of academies. Whereas Minh Mang promoted state-sponsored ancestor worship to people at every level of society, often grafting this type of worship on to local cults, and their deities, the communists did much the same thing by establishing an elaborate cult of Ho Chi Minh in an effort to tie people to the party’s ideology. Like the Nguyen emperor, the VCP closed competing churches and schools which belonged to the Catholics, the Buddhists, and the religious sects, or placed them under its own careful control. They also required Catholics and Buddhists to place portraits of Ho Chi Minh on their altars. These were not simple decorations.

But such parallels can only go so far before they lose their analytical value. Neither state, even the communist one, was as ‘totalitarian’ in its social control as so many would like to think. As always, the gulf between theory and practice was real. Moreover, what the communists proposed ideologically in the late twentieth century would have been unimaginable for the Tay Son brothers or even a remarkably modern emperor at the turn of the nineteenth century like Minh Mang. Vietnamese society had also changed dramatically under a century of French colonialism and thirty years of war, while the social revolution the communists proposed in the late twentieth century was radically different from that of the Tay Son brothers in the 1790s. As the constitution of 1980 now proudly announced it, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was a Marxist-Leninist state led by the dictatorship of the proletariat, the peasants and the workers.⁷

Upon taking the south, Vietnamese communists extended the Sino-Soviet state-building project they had first begun in the north in 1950 to the south. They pushed party cells down to village level, interlocking with and controlling the state in parallel administrative hierarchies. Again, given the destruction southern communist organizations had suffered during the war, northerners tended to dominate the party’s civil service. A wide range of VCP-controlled mass associations emerged to organize and mobilize youth groups, peasants, workers, women and children. Tens of thousands of southern young people joined the party’s new associations, with the most promising going on to attend the prestigious Nguyen Ai Quoc Academy in Hanoi while others joined provincial chapters of the party. Membership in the Vietnamese Communist Party was the surest way to social ascension in these years, though all sorts of compromises and negotiations occurred in peoples’ daily lives.⁸

While Vietnamese communists never tried to murder the ‘bad classes’ as their Cambodian counterparts were on their genocidal way to doing from 1975 onward, the VCP applied discriminatory social measures in order to take control of the cities, the means of production, and capital resources. In Saigon/Cholon, the party’s initial assault on the ‘capitalist’ and ‘comprador’ classes translated into an attack on the ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese citizens of Chinese origin living there (who had played a vital role in developing the southern economy since at least the seventeenth century). Of the urban capitalists targeted by the VCP in late 1975, 70 percent were of ethnic Chinese descent. Socialist Republic of Vietnam authorities closed or seized an estimated 50,000 Chinese businesses in the south. Most were medium- and small-sized businesses employing tens of thousands of workers, including many ethnic Viet. Others were among the most important banks and industries in the country. Communist authorities nationalized, for example, the vibrant business empire of Ly Long Than (whose very close ties to Nguyen Van Thieu did not help him avoid this measure). His family had run such important industries as Vienatexco and Vinafilco (textiles), Vicasa steel, and the Nam Do and Trung Nam banks. In all, Chinese in the south lost an estimated two billion dollars in the late 1970s due to the nationalization of their property, businesses, and industries.⁹

While this may have made good ideological sense, putting the party in charge of powerful banks, it also meant that some 650 state-owned enterprises closed, and 130,000 workers (thousands of them highly trained, experienced, and globally connected Chinese and Vietnamese businessmen and women) withdrew, disappeared into re-education camps, or fled the country. In all, 200,000 Chinese (not all of them from the commercial class) fled to southern China, while over 600,000 repatriated to non-communist countries in Asia and elsewhere. Paradoxically, in the very period that communist China’s Deng Xiaoping would begin inviting overseas Chinese to invest their capital and know-how into developing the mainland’s market economy, Vietnamese communists were driving the Chinese out in order to destroy southern capitalism and the ancien régime’s economic hold. The Vietnamese managed this social-racial ‘reordering’ through changes in law and the use of repression.¹⁰

However, this assault on the Chinese in Vietnam occurred as diplomatic relations between the communist Chinese and Vietnamese nation-states melted down. The Chinese communist authorities were furious, for example, when they learned that their counterparts in Vietnam had reversed a 1955 agreement protecting Chinese nationals from having to adopt Vietnamese nationality, which they interpreted as an attack on Chinese national sovereignty. Vietnamese communists, however, saw citizenship as a powerful instrument for controlling and nationalizing the Chinese under their control in the north since 1945 and this even larger Chinese population they had just inherited in the south, whose political loyalty and economic power posed problems. As diplomatic relations with Beijing worsened, officials (although not necessarily ordinary people) began to see the ‘Chinese’, including those living in the north, as a potentially dangerous fifth column. Despite the fact that many Chinese had joined the Vietnamese in order to fight the French and Americans, Hanoi now required all Chinese living in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to become ‘Vietnamese nationals’ or leave. ‘At the end of 1977 the arrests began’, recalled Trinh Duc, as did state-sponsored anti-Chinese discrimination:

The first sign was when my direct bosses in the Hoa Van [Overseas Chinese Mobilizing] Committee were ordered to leave the country. (They are living in China now). They had been working closely for years with the Chinese Communist Party, overseeing the supplies and aid that were coming from China [for Vietnamese communists]. Then Chinese cadres were arrested as ‘Chinese spies’. No one had ever heard that charge before. My uncle was arrested at that time. He had been working for the revolution since before I came to Vietnam, at least forty years [ago]. He had been awarded the First Rank Revolution Medal [by the Vietnamese communists themselves].¹¹

As Asian communists slid toward war once again (the Third Indochina War), class-based discrimination rapidly morphed into crude, official racism as scores of Cambodian, Chinese, and Vietnamese newspaper editorials, posters, cartoons, and a legion of ‘white’ and ‘black’ ‘truth’ books poured off the state presses, in which each government accused the other of provoking the other into war. An anti-Chinese clause even found its way into the SRV’s 1980 constitution. Like the Khmers Rouges who were concurrently transforming the Vietnamese in Cambodia (the pejorative word they used for them was ‘yuon’), the authorities in Hanoi also began constructing a historical enemy (which they felt they needed) from the ‘Chinese’.

In the countryside, the class assault on ‘cruel landowners’ was less severe than it had been in the north in the 1950s, because southern landowners had already lost most of their property. Why? Firstly, the communists had begun redistributing land during the First Indochina War and the National Liberation Front had kept it up as part of the war on the Republic of Vietnam. Secondly, the republican government of Nguyen Van Thieu had in fact implemented successful land redistribution in the Land to the Tiller program. Lastly, by 1975, most of the remaining landowners had already left the country or were on their way to re-education camps as the party confiscated their land equipment (and redistributed it). The Buddhist and Catholic churches were arguably the biggest losers when the Socialist Republic of Vietnam nationalized landholdings (Diem had already nationalized vast Cao Dai and Hoa Hao territories). In any case, by 1978 the party agreed that most of the land below the seventeenth parallel had now been redistributed.¹²

The communist state redefined society in other ways than through class. Much like Ngo Dinh Diem’s discriminatory policies toward those in the south who had collaborated with the communists before 1954, it was now the SRV’s turn to discriminate against those who had collaborated with the now defeated puppet regimes (‘nguy’) which reached back to the 1940s. From 1975 onward (even before that time in NLF/PLAF zones), the Socialist Republic of Vietnam police and security services began establishing lists of suspect people, issuing identity cards, and requiring people to fill out personal biographies (‘ly lich’). Like their Chinese counterparts, Vietnamese communists used these dossiers to classify and categorize their subjects in terms of their positions in the ancien régime and the National Liberation Force/People’s Liberation Armed Force. The ly lich requirement insisted citizens state their current occupation, family relations, ethnicity, and religious faith. Although people quickly learned how to protect themselves when filling out these forms, the party-state used these categorizing powers to promote ‘good’ elements and discriminate against ‘bad’ ones, as they saw them.¹³

Those who came from families loyal to the party or who had sacrificed labor and loved ones to the armed forces during the thirty-year war now found it easier to access jobs in the bureaucracy, the army, and higher education institutions. The party practiced such discrimination also knowing that millions of people expected something in return for the massive sacrifices they had made during the war. Children of parents and grandparents who had ‘collaborated’ with the French, the Americans, and their Vietnamese allies found their careers and study abroad opportunities diminished, even if they scored higher on qualifying examinations. The SRV estimated that in 1975, 6.5 million people (of a total southern population of around twenty million) were ‘compromised’ either directly or by their families’ collaboration. Of course class counted too, as the party assigned a privileged place for the workers and the peasants at the top of the social hierarchy which was constitutionally enshrined.¹⁴

To assist in this transformation of the south, communist authorities took control of schools and universities there. At the top levels, they removed most teachers and professors and replaced them with ideologically reliable and loyal ones. In all, the communists in charge dispatched some two thousand professors to the south. In May 1975, in an extraordinary attempt to destroy the past, communist authorities seized 100,000 books and burned many publicly, whereas in the new textbooks, official historians presented Ho Chi Minh and his victorious Vietnam as the manifestation of a timeless patriotic culture of heroic resistance to foreign aggression against the French, the Americans and, increasingly, the Chinese. The party-state also introduced and propagated Marxism-Leninism throughout southern Vietnam, making it required reading in schools, military academies, and civil service training programs. Each student, Pham Van Dong insisted in 1984, had to come from the right social milieu, ‘filled with hatred for capitalism and imperialism and his heart and mind should be bound to socialism and proletarian internationalism’.¹⁵

With a few, short-lived exceptions, the SRV closed republican newspapers, television stations, and radio shows in order to install communist-run ones. The victors also changed street names yet again, destroyed enemy monuments and symbols, and erected new ones in their places. In September 1977, Ho Chi Minh City officially became the new name for Saigon. Meanwhile, in the north, authorities followed the Soviets’ lead by erecting a massive granite mausoleum in which they placed the embalmed body of President Ho Chi Minh. (It had been in storage there since his death in 1969.) They did so against the written wishes of their venerated leader. Tourists can still view the president’s body in this sacred state shrine as Vietnamese schoolchildren and citizens file by. This architectural testament to communist power and its pedagogical cult stands in vivid contrast to the modest living quarters of ‘Uncle’ Ho, preserved just down the road.¹⁶

Like their French and Vietnamese adversaries, the communists jailed many of their enemies upon taking power. However, Vietnamese communists were not content to simply lock them up; they also wanted to reform them (‘cai tao’), to purge them of their erroneous thinking, and, theoretically, reinsert them in the new socialist society. In all, more than a million Vietnamese associated with the former southern republic and its antecedents experienced re-education. For the majority of the lower-level bureaucrats and soldiers, this was not much more than an in-house (re)training course. A communist cadre carefully explained to his listeners their errors; provided them with the fundamentals of the new communist society, peppering his lecture with liberal citations from the internationalist Marxist canon and Ho Chi Minh. He then repeated the importance of following the correct path before letting everyone go. Such courses could last a few days, a couple of months, even a year or two. However, for higher-ranking cadres in the former government, army, intelligence, and security services, re-education could last much longer and it often occurred in camps. This form of cai tao not only entailed countless sessions of brainwashing, rectification, new hero emulation, and propaganda, but it also meant performing forced labor in harsh, disease-ridden parts of the country. Hundreds of Vietnamese still remained in these camps in the late 1980s. An unknown number never returned. Such officially sanctioned retribution did little to heal Vietnam’s deep divisions. One of Vietnam’s best modern poets, Thanh Tam Tuyen, spent seven years in a communist camp before emigrating to the United States. In his poem ‘Resurrection’, he described how ‘a shout is a prayer for the waiting centuries, / I want to live like I want to die, / Among the intersecting breaths of a flaming chest’.¹⁷

While Vietnamese communists avoided the ferocity of their Cambodian counterparts, who emptied Phnom Penh of almost all of its inhabitants within weeks of taking power in April 1975, the authorities also feared the massive urbanization the war had generated in the south. Forty-three percent of the population lived in urban areas in 1975. Saigon counted four million people in its population in 1975, making it one of the most urbanized places on earth (alongside Phnom Penh!). One million unemployed roamed the urban centers of southern Vietnam in 1975. Many were the ‘bad elements’, who had lost their jobs with the Republic of Vietnam’s fall. Added to this number were 300,000 prostitutes and some 800,000 orphans the enemy armies had left behind. Feeding, housing, employing, indeed controlling all of these people posed immediate and daunting challenges for which the new authorities were badly prepared. As a result, the communist regime encouraged millions of wartime refugees to return to their native villages and many did so of their own volition.¹⁸

But like Ngo Dinh Diem before them, the communists also engineered new economic zones in order to relocate hundreds of thousands of unemployed people and bad elements to the highlands, sometimes forcibly so. The government provided them with a plot of land, seeds, and wished them well. Many left; others, exhausted, returned to the cities. Confronted with chronic demographic pressures in the north, the party-state also sent tens of thousands of northern peasants to these same settlement areas in the south. However, as we know, the highlands were not ‘empty’ lands just waiting for the Vietnamese to colonize them. Hundreds of thousands of non-Viet people had inhabited these lands for centuries. Now ethnic Viet poured in. In 1977, the new economic zones were home to 120,000 Vietnamese migrants. In 1978, that number rose to almost half a million and by 1985 it reached a million. Some estimates push the total as high as two million by 1988. This internal colonization certainly helped lower the high rates of wartime urbanization from 43 percent in 1975 to 25 percent in 1979, but it also ensured that the indigenous people of the highlands for the first time truly became ‘ethnic minorities’ in this new Vietnam.¹⁹

With its second five-year plan (1976–80), the government imposed Stalinist-minded central planning and collectivization on the south. Even though it was distancing itself from just such a policy in the north, the Vietnamese Communist Party applied the model in the south in order to transform the southern capitalist economy into a communist one, neutralize any economic threats, in short, to establish a centrally planned economy and assert control. This is why the confiscation of Chinese capital and centuries-old commercial networks was so important. The state simultaneously organized peasants into cooperatives, terminated private property, trade, and banking, and set prices instead of letting the market do it. Inside the party, ideologues were determined to collectivize and control agriculture so as to create the surplus needed to feed the cities and finance rapid industrialization according to the Stalinist model.²⁰

If the leadership in Hanoi asserted its control, it did so at the price of a massive contraction of the economy. By collectivizing agriculture and setting uncompetitive prices, it erased incentives for production in the countryside. Rather than producing more, Vietnamese peasants—like their Chinese and Soviet counterparts before them—simply cultivated enough land upon which to live rather than have to turn over any surplus to the state at fixed prices (i.e. a loss). The fact that individuals no longer possessed their land, equipment, tools, or animals only further discouraged them. In 1980, farmers cultivated 100,000 hectares of land less than they had in 1978. Food production for 1980 fell short of its target by seven million tons. Gross domestic product only reached 0.4 percent instead of the predicted double-digit estimate. Living standards tanked, famine broke out in several provinces in 1978 and would continue in those and others, including some in the north, well into the 1980s. Tens of thousands of peasants asked to withdraw from the cooperatives. Many resisted collectivization outright.²¹

Vietnam’s international isolation hardly helped. Relations with the Khmers Rouges were already going sour by late 1975 and there were tensions with the Chinese, one of communist Vietnam’s biggest trading partners and aid donors since 1950. In May 1975, Washington imposed a trade embargo and soon prohibited Americans from even sending humanitarian aid to the country. As Vietnam moved closer to the Soviet Union and the Chinese improved their relations with the Americans, non-communist Asian states, most notably Japan and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), distanced themselves from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. By rebuffing ASEAN’s 1973 invitation to join the group as an observer, the Vietnamese communists left the field open to China to improve relations with the rest of Southeast Asia. By 1980, as the two communist states went to war, life for millions in Vietnam became unbearable.²²

Fleeing Communist Vietnam²³

Things became so bad that hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese began to risk their lives to get out. Rich and poor, young and old, men and women, peasants and urbanites left the country. Most—but not all—were southerners associated with the anciens régimes. In the weeks leading up to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975, nearly 150,000 Vietnamese linked to the crumbling Republic of Vietnam evacuated to the US. Around 10,000 who didn’t make it out found their way by boat or overland to Hong Kong and mainland Southeast Asian states by late 1975 and later relocated, mainly to the United States. By 1978, in all of Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese of Chinese descent were already on their way out.²⁴

The flight from Indochina was a perilous one. For a price, an everincreasing one, people paid bribes to local police and border patrol agents to let them go, but not before selling their possessions in order to pay the smugglers, even elaborate smuggling syndicates, to get them out. Most went by boat to southern China, Hong Kong, and above all to the shores of the Southeast Asian states stretching from the Philippines to Singapore by way of Indonesia and Malaysia. In November 1978, the 1,500-ton freighter Hai Hong reached its final destination in Malaysia to unload a human cargo of 2,500 Vietnamese ‘boat people’, as they were now so unfortunately labeled. Tens of thousands more floated across the South China Sea on woefully unsafe vessels. When littoral states began to turn refugees back, often to their deaths, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees intervened. Faced with obstacles at every turn, its representatives negotiated the rules, legal categories, and Western support needed to organize the orderly departure of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. From 1979, a series of UN-run camps and processing centers appeared in Southeast Asia. In all, the United States, Australia, France, and Canada resettled 623,800 Indochinese refugees between July 1979 and July 1982. In 1980, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam agreed to establish an Orderly Departure Program or ODP with the UNHCR, which was to be based in Bangkok, and to allow those Vietnamese wishing to leave the country for family reunion and other humanitarian reasons to do so. Most went to the United States, the state of California in particular. In all, between 1975 and 1995, when the ODP program ended, 796,310 boat people and 42,918 so-called ‘land people’ (those who exited via overland routes) had left their native country: in all, 839,228 Vietnamese. This internal hemorrhaging of modern Vietnam was proof that national reconciliation had been a failure. This was true, too, for communist Laos and especially so in Cambodia, where the Khmers Rouges were responsible for the deaths of at least 1.5 million Cambodians by late 1978. In all, 1,436,556 Laotians, Cambodians, Vietnamese, and minority peoples departed communist Indochina. Two hundred thousand Vietnamese individuals are estimated to have died trying.²⁵

MISALLIANCES: THE INDOCHINESE MELTDOWN OF EURASIAN COMMUNISM

This human tragedy occurred against the backdrop of yet another, the renewal of war in Indochina. No sooner had the United States withdrawn from Saigon in 1975 than Vietnamese communists found themselves sliding into another conflagration, not with the French ‘colonialists’ or the American ‘imperialists’, but with their former communist brethren in Cambodia and China. No one could have imagined in the early 1950s that the communist internationalism binding them all together across Eurasia would disintegrate into yet another bitter conflict over Indochina. And yet it did. So how did this happen? To answer this question, we need to return briefly to the colonial and Cold War periods in order to trace how the breakdown in two communist relationships, one between the Vietnamese and the Cambodians, the other between the Soviets and Chinese, intersected and eventually destroyed the Eurasian communist bloc at its Indochinese fault-line. How this happened is essential to understanding the continued tragedy of modern Vietnam until 1991.

Vietnamese Communists’ Nation-building in Laos and Cambodia

In the beginning, the internationalist communist movement led by the Soviet Union supported the creation of the Indochinese Communist Party with the Vietnamese at its helm. The Comintern required local revolutionaries in these countries to turn the colonial state upon the colonizers. Ho Chi Minh fully supported this, and so did his Chinese counterparts whom he knew well. Indeed, Asian communism was a remarkably fraternal, Sino-Vietnamese enterprise during the interwar period. Not only did Chinese and Vietnamese communists create the ICP in Hong Kong in 1930, but they also helped the Comintern establish communist parties for Thailand and Malaya. This transnational collaboration resumed after the Second World War, when Stalin turned over the leadership of the communist movement in Asia to Mao Zedong. The latter sent his army to help Kim Il-sung in Korea and rushed military aid and advisors to Ho in Vietnam. Despite post 1979 claims to the contrary, there is no hard evidence from the time showing that the Sino-Soviet leadership objected in the early 1950s to the Vietnamese-led Indochinese bloc fighting the French ‘colonialists’ and the American ‘imperialists’ on the Southeast Asian frontlines of the Cold War.²⁶

Vietnamese communists were also fighting in a colonial context and had to adjust their revolutionary plans for Indochina to counter those of the French. This is why, following the French abandonment of the Indochinese Federation in 1948 and recognition of the three Associated States of Indochina a year later, the communists dissolved the Indochinese Communist Party in favor of separate national parties. Instead of creating an Indochinese federation of their own, Vietnamese communists then established sister Laotian and Cambodian parties, states, and armies. In 1950, Ho personally presided over the creation of the Lao and Cambodian ‘resistance governments’ and national fronts. In 1951, Vietnamese communists helped to form the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party and began work on a Lao one that became official in 1955. Although the Vietnamese let go of the Indochinese Communist Party in favor of the Vietnamese Workers Party the three sister republics remained linked by association of an Indochinese type under indirect Vietnamese control. Like the French and the Americans, Vietnamese communists were also deeply involved in state-making outside their own national borders.

To get their associated states off the ground, Ho’s entourage trained, equipped, and dispatched thousands of advisors and bureaucrats to serve in Laos and Cambodia. The VWP created highly secret and all-powerful ‘party affairs committees’ to build sister parties, nation-states, and people’s armies for each country. Run by trusted Vietnamese cadres, the Lao and Cambodian party affairs committees administered tens of thousands of Viet, Lao, Khmer, and ethnic minority civil servants in charge of these parallel state-building projects. The Vietnamese presided over the creation and administration of police services, customs offices, schools, and courts. They installed the Pathet Lao and Khmer Issarak national parties, established ‘People’s Administrative and Resistance Committees’, and sent trustworthy Lao, Khmer, and highland peoples to study in military and party academies in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Vietnamese communists divided Laos and Cambodia territorially into administrative and military zones, connecting each by trails and wireless radio to controlling offices across the border in the DRV. Vietnamese advisors also brought Sino-Vietnamese mobilization techniques, such as armed propaganda, rectification campaigns and patriotic emulation to the other communist countries within Indochina, but not, to my knowledge, Maoist land reform. ‘In short’, one Vietnamese advisor involved in these transfers explained, ‘armed propaganda is about more than just organizing meetings, gatherings, or putting on theatrical events. Armed propaganda must make propaganda and put in place and direct [party and state] organizations’. This is how the Vietnamese, like the Chinese in northern Vietnam, transferred Sino-Soviet models into western Indochina during wartime—and this enabled them to build war states at the same time.²⁷

The Vietnamese recruited allies with whom they could collaborate. In Laos, Ho Chi Minh, Vo Nguyen Giap, and others actively recruited Prince Souphanouvong whose royal blood would attract popular support for the Pathet Lao. They also turned to the son of a Lao mother and an ethnic Viet civil servant in Laos. His name was Kaysone Phoumivihane. In Cambodia, the Vietnamese won over the cooperation of a Buddhist monk named Son Ngoc Minh, who was also the offspring of a Khmer–Vietnamese mixed marriage in the Mekong delta. Bilingual, these individuals could easily read the important Sino-Soviet texts in Vietnamese (and French) translation. Kaysone Poumvihane, Son Ngoc Minh, and countless others saw in collaboration with the Vietnamese and their superior military power the chance to push through their own revolutionary and nationalist projects against their local competitors.

And like the Americans in South Vietnam or the Chinese in the north, thousands of Vietnamese advisors arrived in Laos and Cambodia with modernization theory on their minds. It was of the Marxist-Leninist–Maoist kind but it too stressed the importance of bringing modernity, civilization, and liberation to their less developed neighbors. Vietnamese cadres in Laos taught indigenous peoples the basics of personal hygiene, how to purify water, cook meat, and procure salt. They introduced modern agricultural tools, helped develop local handicraft industries, and showed how to create a revolutionary type of administration. In order to transmit all of this to the ‘people’, the Vietnamese initiated mass literacy campaigns in Khmer, Lao, and especially highland languages. One French intelligence officer captured it nicely in the early 1950s: ‘And the people’s revolutionary war has this which is truly paradoxical: it is undertaken by the Vietnamese against the French in the name of the independence of the Cambodian people. The people’s revolutionary war is the work of one foreign army fighting against another, the latter contesting the former’s right to bring happiness to the country in question’. But there was more to it than just ideology and an imperial sense of mission civilisatrice. If the Vietnamese were happy to export communism to Laos and Cambodia, their revolutionary state-building there was also designed to protect the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s vulnerable western flank from French and American attack. This geopolitical reality was, of course, an essential element in Vietnam’s actions, as the Americans well understood.²⁸

Vietnam’s Indochinese Misalliance: The Khmers Rouges and National Sovereignty

The Geneva Conference of 1954 revealed publicly for the first time Vietnamese communist efforts to project two sovereign sister states. The French, backed by the Americans and the British, firmly refused to recognize the reality of these two regimes and, with Soviet and Chinese acquiescence, successfully excluded them from the negotiating table in favor of their own associated states. However, the French and the Americans were not alone in their opposition to the DRV’s Indochinese project. In the months leading up to the Geneva Conference, India’s Pandit Nehru had repeated to China’s chief negotiator, Zhou Enlai, that communist efforts to create revolutionary states under the auspices of the Pathet Lao and Khmer Issarak were hardly neutral acts. If China wanted to improve its diplomatic relations with India and other non-communist states keen on achieving peaceful co-existence in postcolonial Asia (and thereby to allow China to block simultaneous American attempts to contain it via SEATO), then the communist bloc could not support these un-neutral ‘resistance governments’ in Laos and Cambodia. French Indochina, Nehru lectured Zhou, could no longer serve as a postcolonial model for nation-building of a communist kind. When communist support of these governments immediately became an obstacle to negotiating a ceasefire, Zhou distanced himself from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s position and finally convinced Ho Chi Minh to abandon his party’s attempts—although these had been long supported by the Chinese and the Soviets—to communize the rest of Indochina. A neutral Laos and Cambodia would suffice.²⁹

The ceasefire agreements concluded in Geneva in July 1954 had the most damaging effects for Vietnamese–Khmer communist collaboration in Cambodia. Not only did it require Vietnamese communists to withdraw their party, state, and military personnel from southern Vietnam, but it also obligated them to do the same in Cambodia. Son Ngoc Minh and Khmer bureaucrats trained by the Vietnamese relocated to Hanoi. In Laos, however, the ceasefire agreements allowed the Pathet Lao to regroup in the provinces of Samneua and Phongsaly bordering on the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. While the Vietnamese withdrew their army from Laos, they also immediately dispatched hundreds of advisors across the border to help the Pathet Lao to continue building a resistance government, army, and, in 1955, a communist party. The Vietnamese also brought hundreds of Lao students, civil servants, cadres, and officers to study in the DRV. Over the next twenty years, the Vietnamese Workers Party would help the Pathet Lao to create a new bureaucratic elite and military class. Many of those graduates today hold the top positions in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic that came to power along with their Vietnamese allies in 1975. This Indochinese nation-building is part of modern Vietnamese—and Laotian and Cambodian—history.³⁰

Things turned out very differently in Cambodia. Firstly, by requiring the DRV/VWP to withdraw from all of Cambodia in 1954, the Geneva agreements allowed a different group of Cambodian communists led by a man named Saloth Sar, better known as Pol Pot, to build a separate communist party free of Vietnamese control. Secondly, by shrewdly leaning toward the Democratic Republic of Vietnam during the Vietnam War (for example, by allowing the Ho Chi Minh Trail to run through eastern Cambodia), Cambodia’s Norodom Sihanouk effectively ensured that Vietnamese communists would not overthrow him or support his communist opponents, for whom he coined the popular phrase ‘les Khmers Rouges’ (‘the Red Khmers’, i.e., communist Khmers). Thirdly, although Pol Pot and his entourage maintained links with the (militarily stronger) Vietnamese communists, the Cambodians had no intention of letting the Vietnamese recreate their own pre-1954 party-state administration and armed forces within eastern Cambodia. Rather than seeing the Vietnamese communists as allies, as did the Pathet Lao, the Khmers Rouges saw them and their Indochinese state-making as potential threats.

This became clear in 1970, when a military coup ousted Sihanouk from power and combined American and South Vietnamese troops invaded eastern Cambodia in a bid to destroy enemy bases and the Ho Chi Minh Trail’s supply lines once and for all. While this certainly complicated the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s war effort, it also aggravated communist relations with the Khmers Rouges by forcing the Vietnamese deeper into Cambodian territory, including the Khmers Rouges zones. Rather than welcoming the new alliance with the DRV and Sihanouk, pushed on them by the Chinese and the Vietnamese, the Khmers Rouges truly feared that the Vietnamese would take over the Cambodian revolution where they had left it in 1954 by resuming their state-building à la laotienne and while having the Cambodian king tour the countryside on their behalf. Although the Democratic Republic of Vietnam never saw itself as bullying or ever entertained the thought of ‘colonizing’ Cambodia as the Khmers Rouges would later have it, they assumed that Pol Pot’s entourage shared their dream of defeating the Americans and creating independent, associated communist regimes in all of Indochina in alliance with the wider communist bloc.

Here the Vietnamese erred massively. What they embraced as a ‘policy of association’, the Khmers Rouges saw as a new protectorate in the making. As the People’s Army of Vietnam penetrated further into Cambodia under enemy bombs and artillery, the Khmers Rouges did their best to assert their national sovereignty not only against Washington and its Cambodians allies, but also against Hanoi and its Cambodian allies. The Khmers Rouges insisted that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam adhere strictly to their nationalist laws which governed their territories. The Khmers Rouges issued travel passes, imposed taxes, and tried (with great difficulty) to control PAVN military movements and interactions with local populations. They even asserted their control at the border over supplies coming from China via the Ho Chi Minh Trail. They wanted total sovereignty. That these Cambodian communists owed their territorial control to Vietnamese troops no more distracted them in their efforts to assert national sovereignty than massive American aid to Ngo Dinh Diem allowed Washington to stop Diem from building up south Vietnam on his own terms.³¹

Unsurprisingly, armed incidents occurred on the ground between these purported allies. Moreover, the return of many pre-1954 Vietnamesetrained Cambodians hardly reassured the Khmers Rouges core, fearful of a DRV-sanctioned coup d’etat. While it would be wrong to conclude that the two communist parties were already on their way to war, they operated in something very similar to what Edward Miller has described for the American relationship with Ngo Dinh Diem—a ‘misalliance’. And at the core of the breakdown of both alliances were the questions of state-building and national sovereignty. Like the Americans before them, the Vietnamese never truly grasped this reality or its implications for them.³²

If the Pathet Lao leadership relied on Vietnamese military might to come to power in 1975, and dutifully fell into line with the Paris Accords of 1973 and Hanoi’s position, the Khmers Rouges were determined to get ‘there’, to full independence, first or at least alone, whatever the contradictions involved in practice. Unlike the Lao, the Khmers Rouges rejected Le Duc Tho’s request that they sign the Paris Accords. Two years later, Pol Pot’s party proudly took power in Phnom Penh on 17 April, over a week before Saigon fell to the People’s Army of Vietnam. But when the victorious Vietnamese leadership came to congratulate the leaders of Pol Pot’s new Democratic Kampuchea in mid-1975, disingenuously speaking of ‘Indochinese solidarity’ of all things, Cambodian communists interpreted this as yet another Vietnamese attempt to re-establish their domination at the expense of full Cambodian sovereignty. Despite his reassuring smile and words of thanks to the Vietnamese delegations, Pol Pot saw the Vietnamese communists as a threat to his ability to build a communist Cambodia free of the Indochinese model and its architects.

The Meltdown of Eurasian Internationalism along the Indochinese Faultline

What no one saw coming in the heady days of mid-1975 was how the Sino-Soviet split running along the Eurasian axis of the communist bloc would interact explosively with this Vietnamese–Cambodian misalliance. Like its predecessors, the Third Indochina War cannot be understood without situating it in its global context. Indeed, the chain reaction setting off this Asian conflagration started in Eastern Europe during the 1960s. More than anything else, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 shattered Eurasian communism for good by bringing its two most powerful states to the brink of war. Relations had long been tense between the two, but Moscow’s blatant violation of another state’s national sovereignty, a communist one at that, convinced Chinese communists that the Soviet Union, not the United States, had become China’s principal national security threat. The Soviet declaration a month later on the ‘Sovereignty and the International Obligations of Socialist Countries’ did nothing to assuage Chinese fears. In fact, the announcement of the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’ made them worse. Things got so bad that in March 1969 Chinese and Soviet troops clashed briefly but violently along a shared border crossing in Central Asia. Meanwhile, Mao halted his Cultural Revolution, shifted Chinese foreign policy from proletarian internationalism to realpolitik, and authorized the opening of negotiations with the Americans in an extraordinary volte-face designed to contain the Soviet Union.³³

This historic shift in Sino-American relations and their reorientation toward Sino-American containment of the Soviets and their allies directly influenced Sino-Vietnamese and Vietnamese–Cambodian relations. The Chinese had first criticized the Vietnamese communists for negotiating with the Americans after the Tet Offensive in early 1968. But shaken by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia a few months later, they then started pushing the Democratic Republic of Vietnam the other way, urging its leaders to talk to the Americans in Paris where secret talks had begun. To be sure, Beijing continued to support Hanoi in its bid to get the Americans to leave; but the Chinese now went ahead with their own simultaneous efforts to improve relations with the DRV’s very enemy. Nixon’s historic trip to China in early 1972 could not have come at a worse time in Vietnam’s war against the Americans and Nixon exploited this leverage for all it was worth. Moscow also urged Hanoi to negotiate so that the Soviets could improve relations with the Americans, but they also provided the modern war material General Vo Nguyen Giap needed to launch the Easter Offensive in April 1972, determined not to let Vietnam lean China’s way.

This complex competition among the Chinese, Soviets, and Americans was much more dangerous for the Vietnamese communists than it had ever been before 1969. Unsurprisingly, Chinese leaders proved the hardest to please. In their paranoiac fear of Soviet ‘chauvinism’, encirclement, and violations of national sovereignty at every turn, they increasingly interpreted any sign—real or imagined—of favoritism on the DRV’s part toward Moscow as a national security threat. Meanwhile, the Soviets pushed back against Sino-American attempts to contain them in Eurasia by intensifying their relationship with the Vietnamese communists and consolidating their position in Asia via their naval presence in the eastern port at Vladivostok. In 1971, as Kissinger visited Beijing, the Soviet embassy in Hanoi reported that thanks to Vietnam’s strengthening position and victory ‘we will possess comparatively more possibilities for establishing our policy in this region. It is not excluded that Indochina may become for us the key to the whole of Southeast Asia. In addition, in that region there is nobody, so far, we could lean on, except the DRV’. It is not certain that the DRV’s communist leadership grasped the dangers of what such a Soviet strategic embrace at this volatile conjuncture might entail. This proved to be another error in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s foreign policy.³⁴

But to be fair, it is not sure that anyone at the time grasped three interconnected things when Indochina became communist in 1975: 1) the extent to which the Chinese feared that any move on Hanoi’s behalf toward the Soviet Union represented a dire threat to its national security by encirclement; 2) the degree to which the even more paranoid Khmers Rouges leaders, now in control of all of Cambodia, were increasingly convinced that the Vietnamese communists were already a national security threat that had to be opposed at all costs; and 3) how points 1) and 2) could combine dangerously to bring down the entire communist Church.³⁵

That is exactly what happened when the Khmers Rouges lit a match at the bottom of this Eurasian communist edifice by attacking southern Vietnam in September 1977. Caught off-guard, Vietnamese communists acted frantically, demanding immediate explanations from their diplomats, intelligence officers, and former advisors as to the causes. Aware of the dangers of letting a hostile Sino-Cambodian alliance turn on him, Le Duan decided to keep the lid on anti-Khmers Rouges propaganda and then travelled to Beijing in October 1977 to plead with his Chinese partners to rein in Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea. But the Chinese maintained their support of the murderous Khmers Rouges, convinced that they needed this country on their side in order to keep the Vietnamese from taking over all of former French Indochina and then handing it to the Soviets. Hanoi, in turn, was now convinced that Beijing was using the Khmers Rouges to encircle the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and reinforced its collaboration with the Lao communists now in power in Vientiane by signing a security treaty at the same time. This only reinforced Beijing’s worst fears of a Soviet conspiracy in Indochina. Where brotherly internationalism had once underpinned Eurasian communist collaboration, paranoia, racism, and raw hate now took over as Vietnamese officials expelled the Chinese in their country, the Khmers Rouges ordered the massacre of the Vietnamese in theirs, and the Chinese and Soviet armies faced off across Eurasia, accusing each other of betraying the Marxist-Leninist canon.

Inter-communist war became a real possibility in Indochina sometime in 1977, and with it the equally real possibility that it could set off a wider Eurasian war among communists. Late in that year, Vietnamese communists sent the PAVN deep into Cambodia in a clear warning to Pol Pot to stop the attacks and as a signal to the new leaders taking over in China that Hanoi would overthrow the Khmers Rouges if they persisted in their attacks. It was a question of national security, the Vietnamese insisted. Pol Pot’s entourage saw historic Vietnamese imperialism in this and severed relations with his communist neighbor. The Chinese ended their military and economic cooperation with their longtime Vietnamese allies. By early 1978, trust was in terribly short supply in all the communist capitals running from Moscow to Phnom Penh by way of Beijing and Hanoi. If there was ever a time for a communist leader to step forward in the Eurasian communist family and defuse brotherly tensions, this was it.

The Americans were certainly not going to help. Worried by Soviet advances in Africa and central Asia (the Soviet Union was increasing its support of a new regime in Afghanistan and trouble was brewing in Iran), the Carter administration played the ‘China card’, needing to stay on side with China rather than taking this chance to normalize relations with the DRV, whose leaders now desperately wanted to forget the past as the possibility of another war on a different flank loomed. Isolated, Hanoi signed a mutual defense treaty with Moscow in November 1978 before moving against the Khmers Rouges. But in so doing they confirmed Beijing’s fear that all of Indochina would fall to the Soviets. As the Vietnamese prepared to invade Cambodia and install a new government, Deng Xiaoping decided to play the ‘American card’ by travelling to Washington in a visit as historic as Nixon’s to China in 1972 had been. He carried with him the promise to teach Vietnam a lesson if it invaded Cambodia. The Carter administration gave its blessing, leaning China’s way and against Hanoi and Moscow.³⁶

On 25 December 1978, the People’s Army of Vietnam entered Cambodia and easily overthrew the Khmers Rouges, drove them to the Thai border, and installed a new revolutionary government faithful to Hanoi and Moscow. All of the actors were now on their way to transforming their worst fears—many of them pure fantasies at the start—into deadly and destabilizing realities. While the Socialist Republic of Vietnam did not intervene to save the Cambodian people from genocide, the People’s Army of Vietnam did manage to end the Khmers Rouges’ destruction of their own people, re-established Vietnam’s security in the south, and saw the Vietnamese resume their Indochinese state-building in Cambodia with their Lao model in hand. The Chinese attacked the Vietnamese in the north on 17 February 1979, when five divisions of their army marched across the SRV’s border, sending thousands of innocent civilians running for their lives. While satellite imagery provided by the Americans reassured the Chinese that the Soviets would not attack from the north, thereby excluding a two-front Eurasian war, the Chinese Red Army suffered heavy losses in its attempt to teach a lesson to one of the best trained, equipped, and experienced armies in the world. The Chinese army was humiliated.

It was on the diplomatic and economic fronts where Deng Xiaoping dealt the Vietnamese a devastating blow. Despite their unflinching support of the Khmers Rouges, the Chinese successfully isolated the Vietnamese in all of Asia for over a decade, thanks in no small part to their unprecedented collaboration with the United States. Deng Xiaoping, supported by the Americans and the Japanese, also rallied the Association of South East Asian Nations states to his cause and successfully led the charge to keep the Khmers Rouges alive on the Thai-Cambodian border and in the United Nations’ General Assembly.³⁷

While it may not have been apparent at the time, the Eurasian segment of the Cold War had vanished by 1979—a full decade before the Berlin Wall crumbled in Europe. That it did so in Indochina is no accident, for this is precisely where the Sino-Soviet and Vietnamese-Cambodian fault-lines running through the Eurasian communist bloc intersected. The first faultlines had appeared in 1969 and 1970, respectively. The result was the first war among communists in world history. Unlike the situation in 1950, the showdown was no longer between the Americans and the Chinese. It was now between the Chinese and Soviets. Nor did it have anything to do with ideology, one of the essential defining components of a ‘cold war’. Little wonder the Americans let the South East Asia Treaty Organization quietly die in 1977. For Deng Xiaoping, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Moscow’s support of the Vietnamese in Indochina, and its rapidly increasing naval presence in the South Sea via the deep-water port of Cam Ranh Bay only confirmed his fears of encirclement. The Third Indochina War—viewed as a continuation of the earlier ones reaching back to the start of the Second World War in Asia in 1937—thus confirms the geopolitical importance of Vietnam/Indochina in twentieth-century world history and geopolitics, not just for the Japanese, French, and Americans, but also for the two communist giants who faced off against each other in central Asia—China and the USSR.³⁸

The world leader who finally stepped forward to end the Indochina wars and repair relations across the Eurasian bloc was the Soviet statesman, Mikhail Gorbachev. He understood that the only way to set the Soviet Union on the road to domestic prosperity and thus enable him to implement vital reforms internally was to rethink Moscow’s foreign policy entirely, from east to west and north to south. Most importantly, he refused to continue bankrolling either an eastern European empire that had little legitimacy or far-flung expeditions in the Afro-Asian world that cost too much and only made it harder for the Soviets to reach a détente with both the Americans and the Chinese. The People’s Army of Vietnam might have become the fifth largest army in the world (the third if you count all its personnel), but it did so only because Moscow provided it and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam with massive assistance, totaling 3.3 billion in US dollars by 1985—twice the 1978 level. Soviet support of the Vietnamese, their Lao allies, and Vietnamese nation-building in Cambodia was very expensive and only served to alienate Moscow commercially and diplomatically from what was one of the most dynamic regions of the world by the 1980s—non-communist Asia.³⁹

Gorbachev thus wanted to normalize relations with Deng Xiaoping’s China as much as he did with Ronald Reagan’s United States in order to reform his country via the policies of economic restructuring (‘perestroika’). To this end, he negotiated an end to the Cold War with Reagan and accepted Deng Xiaoping’s three main demands for normalizing Sino-Soviet relations—the reduction of Soviet troops on the Sino-Soviet border; the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan; and the end of the Soviet-backed Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. In 1988–9, Sino-Soviet relations improved rapidly as the Soviet army withdrew from Afghanistan and the Vietnamese pulled out of Cambodia. The impact on the Soviets’ relationship with Vietnam was immediate as Soviet aid to the SRV fell by 63 percent in 1990. And as communist regimes in Eastern Europe imploded from 1989 onward, taking the Soviet Union with them two years later, the SRV found itself almost totally isolated in the world (and its ties to Cuba, North Korea, Mongolia, and then South Yemen in no way changed this reality). Following the Soviet lead, Hanoi agreed to negotiate a political settlement to end the war in Cambodia and to swallow its pride and improve relations with China. Otherwise, Vietnamese communists had no choice short of isolating themselves from the entire world like North Korea’s Kim Il-sung. In October 1991, with the Cold War now terminated in Europe and Asia, all the major players in the Third Indochina War supported a United Nations-backed peace conference in Paris that ended almost fifty years of war. A UN peacekeeping mission brokered and enforced a ceasefire and then presided over elections held in 1993 that created a coalition government of the Royal Cambodian Government. In 1998, Pol Pot died and the Khmers Rouges disbanded. A half-century of war finally ended. But now the Vietnamese had to focus on the well-being of their own people or risk losing it all as the fall of the Berlin Wall in Europe and the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing had just demonstrated. The prospects for building communism in Vietnam had never looked bleaker.⁴⁰

THE FAILURE OF COMMUNISM?

A Capitalist Revolution

Communism provided Chinese and Vietnamese leaders with an extraordinary instrument for creating single party-states capable of controlling and mobilizing massive numbers of people and resources for making war. But once the guns finally fell silent, the Vietnamese, like the Chinese, discovered that communism—whether Marxist, Leninist, Stalinist or Maoist in design—offered no miracle for attaining rapid economic, industrial, and technological modernization. ‘Waging a war is simple’, Pham Van Dong conceded to Western reporters in 1983, ‘running a country is difficult’. Indeed, by 1983, hardcore communists like Pham Van Dong had to admit that their failing socio-economic policies, and not just war and international isolation, were also responsible for their troubles. By that year, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were fleeing the country by boat. Hunger, indeed famine in several places, stalked the countryside. Vietnam remained one of the poorest nations on the planet, with a humiliating annual per capita income stuck at below one hundred American dollars. The legitimacy of the party had never been lower at the moment that its international isolation was highest.⁴¹

Like Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail Gorbachev, Vietnamese communists realized that they had to improve the well-being of their people if they wished to remain in power. Raw peasant hunger had brought the Viet Minh to power in August 1945. The same thing could bring them down fifty years later. It was in this context that Vietnamese communists decided to embark upon a comprehensive reform of their economic policy. Although initial attempts had begun as early as 1979, it was only in 1986 that the Vietnamese Communist Party united behind the veteran communist Nguyen Van Linh to push through a series of reforms known in Vietnamese as doi moi (‘renovation’). Just like their Sino-Soviet counterparts, the Vietnamese abandoned Stalinist central planning in favor of allowing a market-oriented economy based on supply and demand to operate. This was particularly the case in the agricultural sector, where new laws rolled back collectivization in favor of private initiative, ownership, and market-based incentives. Vietnamese communists may have cursed Deng Xiaoping in public for starting the Third Indochina War, but in private they recognized that his liberal economic policies were a model for reviving agricultural production and holding on to power. The 1986 reforms encouraged the development of the non-state sector too. Entrepreneurship was no longer a dirty word or subject to state-sponsored discrimination. Indeed, while reforming the economy along liberal lines, the politburo rehabilitated many southerners whose experience, contacts, and networks could help turn it around. The discredited Stalinist industrialization model rapidly ceded the way to exportled development using Vietnam’s comparative advantage in agriculture and cheap labor.

Over the next decade, the SRV went further in its economic renovation. In 1988, the party approved new laws allowing foreign direct investment and accorded greater decision-making powers to state-owned enterprises while decreasing state subsidies to them. In the countryside, the party presided over the full de-collectivization of agriculture. Peasants recovered their own equipment and land. In 1989, the party stopped fixing agricultural prices altogether, allowing them to fluctuate in response to supply and demand. The government simultaneously devalued its national currency, the dong, in order to stimulate exports in particular, all the while tightening fiscal and monetary policy in an effort to control demand, and with it, runaway inflation. The party reformed its communist-minded banking and legal systems, turning them—and the state in charge of them—into something very different. Banks now had to generate capital by increasing savings rates, providing capital investment while at the same time paying competitive interest rates.⁴²

Although the implementation of these policies was not without difficulties (especially that of inflation), over the next decade economic development took off in Vietnam. Thanks to market incentives, food production bounced back rapidly, eradicating famine and transforming Vietnam into the third-largest exporter of rice in the world. Between 1990 and 1997, the annual growth rate of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) averaged around 8 percent as Vietnam clawed its way back from being one of the poorest countries in the world to enter the ranks of the developing nations. Overall economic growth has remained strong over the last fifteen years despite the Asian crash of 1997 and the global crisis of 2008–9. Between 2000 and 2005 the annual growth rate of GDP hovered at around 7 percent before declining to about 5 percent in 2012. Poverty and hunger have declined remarkably in Vietnam—only 11 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, whereas over 50 percent were in that category prior to the reforms which started in 1986.

Export-led development has created a wide variety of jobs in labor-intensive industries such as garment-making, shoe-making, and computer assemblage. Rice, coffee, and tea exports have also grown rapidly, helping to keep the unemployment rate at 4.3 percent in 2012. The agricultural sector’s contribution to GDP has declined from 25 percent in 2000 to 22 percent in 2012, whereas industry’s share has increased from 36 percent to 41 percent. Tourism and the service industry accounts for the rest. While GDP growth slowed in 2012, the capitalist-minded market reforms begun officially in 1986 have profoundly transformed Vietnamese society and set it on a very different track to the one the founders of the communist party could have ever imagined. The irony of course is that this capitalist-oriented economic model was precisely the one the Republic of Vietnam had trail-blazed first, as in Taiwan and South Korea. Vietnamese communists, like their Chinese counterparts, had effectively abandoned the communist roadmap to modernization in favor of a market-driven one. This was revolutionary.⁴³

A Diplomatic Revolution?

The radical transformation of the economy required an equally revolutionary change in diplomacy. Since 1950, Vietnamese communists had aligned themselves with Moscow and Beijing, their two biggest supporters during twenty-five years of war against the French and Americans. By entering the Eurasian communist world, however, Vietnamese communists had effectively severed Vietnam from its closest Southeast Asian connections, with the exception of the party’s Indochinese sister-states in Laos and Cambodia. Hanoi had even spurned a 1973 invitation to join the Association of South East Asian Nations as an observer, assuming that it was an Asian cover for the American-run SEATO military alliance. Instead, in 1978, Hanoi had joined the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), the Soviet-led economic organization from which China had already withdrawn. East Germany’s Stasi (secret police) played a vital role in turning communist Vietnam into a modern police state under the close watch of Tran Quoc Hoan, Vietnam’s legendary security chief.This meant that as of 1979 the communist leadership in Hanoi had, intentionally and unintentionally, reoriented Vietnam’s diplomacy from its historic Asian focus to one almost exclusively focused on the eastern European bloc led by the Soviet Union.⁴⁴

Vietnamese communists owe much to Mikael Gorbachev for forcing them to re-orientate their diplomacy from Eastern Europe back to Asia. Most importantly, Gorbachev’s decision to improve Sino-Soviet relations required the Vietnamese to mend their own rift with the Chinese. In July 1986, the Soviet leader announced in Vladivostok that his troops would withdraw from Afghanistan and Mongolia. He simultaneously pressed upon the Vietnamese the importance of getting out of Cambodia and normalizing relations ‘with the People’s Republic of China for the sake of peace in Asia and the world’. The Vietnamese, as we saw above, complied, as Soviet assistance declined sharply and only highlighted their international vulnerability and internal economic crisis. In 1991, the disappearance of the entire European communist bloc, accounting for over 50 percent of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam’s foreign trade in 1988, left Vietnamese communists with no choice but to reset their diplomacy entirely.⁴⁵

The Vietnamese had already approved policy changes to this effect, most notably resolution 13 in 1988 on the ‘change of the world and our new thinking’. This document officially authorized the party to begin normalizing relations with former enemy states in order to end Vietnam’s diplomatic and commercial isolation and support the party’s efforts to reform the domestic economy as rapidly as possible. This, too, led to Hanoi’s support of the peace conference in Paris that finally ended the Third Indochina War in 1991. It allowed General Vo Nguyen Giap to lead a delegation to Beijing to attend the Asian Games in 1990, during which time he met with Chinese officials to patch up strained Sino-Vietnamese relations. In November 1991, only weeks after the Paris Conference on Cambodia ended successfully, the Chinese and Vietnamese officially normalized their diplomatic relations.⁴⁶

Having cleared this hurdle, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam could then rapidly improve its ties with the rest of Asia and the world. The leadership in Hanoi accepted ASEAN’s invitation to join it as an observer and became a full member in 1995. In that same year, Hanoi and Washington also reached an historic agreement establishing diplomatic relations between the two former enemies. Vietnam followed up its opening to the noncommunist world by expanding its cooperation with liberal capitalist organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the World Trade Organization, which it joined in 2007. The internationalist communist world in which Ho Chi Minh and his party had circulated for so long was no more.

Non-communist Asia in particular ensured the success of modern Vietnam’s renovation at the turn of the twenty-first century. As of 1989, the Soviet Union had accounted for 34 percent of the SRV’s exports and 63 percent of its imports. With the disappearance of the communist world by 1991, those same numbers had dropped to 10 percent and 13 percent respectively. Filling the gap were Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and, increasingly, China, not the French or the Americans. Asian countries provided 82 percent of communist Vietnam’s imports in 1992 and absorbed 60 percent of its exports a year later. The advanced economic development and vitality of Asian capitalism and trade in the late twentieth century helped Vietnam modernize in ways colonialism and communism had always blocked.⁴⁷

But, as in China, this internal and external revolution in communist Vietnam raises important questions. For one, the SRV’s embrace of capitalist-oriented development means that the communist vision of the world announced by Truong Chinh in 1950, casting Vietnam as the Indochinese frontline communist soldier fighting the capitalist imperialists in Southeast Asia, was a failure. Three-and-a-half decades later the leader of the Vietnamese Communist Party, Truong Chinh (whose name means the ‘Long March’) made the astonishing statement that the party had to adopt the doi moi reforms because the party had erred ‘in our desire to achieve transformation at an early date by quickly abolishing non socialist economic components’. This came from the very man who had pushed through radical Maoist reforms in 1950s and had embraced orthodox communism all his life. At the head of the party again, he now embraced capitalist-minded reforms like his counterparts in China. The survival of his Vietnam depended on it.⁴⁸

Secondly, while the communist leadership has celebrated the Socialist Republic of Vietnam’s historic entry into the ASEAN and its normalization of relations with the United States in 1995 as diplomatic victories, viewed over a longer span of time the opposite is arguably the case. By joining forces with the Americans and the ASEAN countries, the Vietnamese communist core had in many ways admitted its failure to build a modern Vietnam and to promote an alternative communist-oriented Southeast Asia, as was first pioneered by Ho Chi Minh (himself one of the creators of the Thai and Malayan communist parties back in 1930). If the Vietnamese communists scored an historic victory in 1975 over the Americans and unified the country for the first time in over a century, in 1995 the United States and the ASEAN also won when lifelong communists embraced the global capitalist system against which they had fought for most of their lives. Leaders in Hanoi, Washington, and the Association of South East Asian Nations’ capital cities may all share a fear of Chinese expansion into the South China Sea today, but the reason why they can collaborate today is because the SRV abandoned communism during the Third Indochina War and withdrew from Cambodia. And—just as important—the Eurasian communist bloc, of which the Vietnamese communists were once proud and willing members, simply no longer exists.