where some spent months and others years, a
Vietnamese Gulag.
The communists now applied their Marxist, cen-
trally directed economic policies in the south and
imposed a one-party state. They set out to abolish
capitalism and collectivise land, with disastrous
results. The people suffered once again from the
corruption of officials and the incompetence of
the administration. During the 1980s more
market-oriented economic policies were intro-
duced, permitting entrepreneurs, especially in the
south, to run small factories and services for
profit. Within the top echelon of the party there
was a constant struggle between the reformers,
the pragmatists who wanted to follow China’s
example, and the party ideologues, who believed
that these experiments weakened Marxism–
Leninism. The conflict was principally about the
correct economic policies in order to raise
Vietnam’s low standards of living, which in bad
years led to widespread malnutrition. But there
was no thought of turning the one-party state
into a multi-party democracy. Economic liberali-
sation won the upper hand in the second half of
the 1980s, but bad state management of the
economy led to hyperinflation checked periodi-
cally by austerity measures. Attempts to attract
foreign investment had little success. With the
outbreak of revolution in Eastern Europe and
Soviet perestroika, Vietnam’s political control
tightened once more in 1989 and 1990. Vietnam
remains one of the poorest countries in the world,
barely able to feed its rapidly expanding popula-
tion, which reached 66 million in 1989.
One major reason for Vietnam’s poverty
besides communist mismanagement is the great
amount still spent on defence: its army is over 1
million strong. Since 1975, Vietnam has lived in
regional isolation. Only the Soviet Union pro-
vided aid, which rapidly decreased after 1985
(Russia gave no aid in the early 1990s). The US
maintained a trade embargo. The failure to
account for US servicemen missing during the
war is one stumbling-block to improved relations
with the US, though some American aid has been
given. Relations with its northern neighbour
reached their nadir when Vietnam invaded and
occupied most of Kampuchea in December 1978
and expelled the Chinese-backed Pol Pot regime.
The Vietnamese-installed government was os-
tracised by the international community and
Vietnam was condemned. The Chinese mounted
an armed attack across the Vietnamese border in
February 1979, but withdrew three weeks later
in March having, as Beijing put it, ‘taught’ the
Vietnamese a ‘lesson’. Thereafter in the 1980s the
Chinese maintained a threatening posture on
Vietnam’s northern border with occasional armed
clashes, but relations have become much less tense
since Vietnam withdrew from Kampuchea in- The constant stream of refugees from south
Vietnam by sea (the ‘boat people’) and overland
to Thailand, Malaya and Hong Kong also aggra-
vated Vietnam’s neighbours. The US accepted
hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and, more
recently, numbers of ‘Amerasians’, the mixed chil-
dren of US servicemen and Vietnamese.
Vietnam remained isolated until the early
1990s, and no large-scale international aid or
capital investment had reached it. A people who
had suffered so much deserved a better fate, and
there were increasing signs that the US felt it had
a moral responsibility to help. By the mid-1990s
Vietnam’s isolation from the West was ended: in
1994 the US lifted its trade embargo and a year
later normalised relations. Vietnam continued to
be ruled by an elderly Marxist Politburo, veterans
of the war, like the party general secretary Do
Muoi, aged eighty in 1996. The door was never-
theless opened slightly to Western ‘capitalist’
investment. With 80 per cent of the people living
in the countryside, the limited impact made itself
felt principally in the cities. The cultural attrac-
tion of the West, however, proved strong for the
younger generation born since the war. Tension
is inevitable. Given the regulation and bureau-
cracy of the regime and their opposition to the
imports of Western culture, the new millennium
was reached before Vietnam had the opportunity
to emerge from its backward economic state.
Western influence could not be kept out. Vietnam
became a popular tourist destination early in the
twenty-first century. What is extraordinary is the
friendliness the Western visitors now encounter.
The absence of hatred bodes better for the future.