Vietnam: The Nation After the War

For a span of nearly two decades, the nation of Vietnam was a battlefield. Fought between communist-aligned North Vietnam, backed up by the Soviet Union and China, and South Vietnam, backed up by the United States and the nations of Western Europe, the Vietnam War would rank among the most devastating turning points of the entire Cold War. By the time it concluded, between 900,000 and three million Vietnamese people would lay dead, joined by hundreds of thousands from Cambodia, Laos, the United States, and South Korea, while those who survived would be profoundly scarred by their experience no matter where they hailed from. For the world’s largest communist nations, it was a hard-fought victory; for the United States, it was humiliation; and for what once had been South Vietnam, it was the end.

This is the story of Vietnam after the war. It’s a saga of brutal repression and difficult reconstruction, abandonment by old allies, and reconciliation with old enemies. It’s a difficult history, profoundly difficult, and one that leaves no part of Vietnam’s dark past untouched—but it’s also the story of Vietnam today, a place that has come back against impossible odds, and become a nation unlike any other on Earth.

How the War Ended

It’s impossible to understand post-war Vietnam without first understanding the end of the Vietnam War. Although the cascade of events that ultimately saw Vietnam reunified wouldn’t end until the mid-1970s, it started all the way back in 1968, when the forces of North Vietnam launched a military offensive southward known as the Tet Offensive.

Around that time, Vietnam was already in the heat of full-scale war, split in its territory between the communist and Soviet-backed North, and the capitalist and US-backed South. The North Vietnamese had a powerful military, one that Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev had gone out of his way to build up. At North Vietnam’s disposal were modern T-54 tanks, Mikoyan MiG fighter aircraft, missiles, and more, although Soviet boots on the ground were relatively rare, with only a bit over a dozen Soviet troops officially counted dead by the end of the conflict.

Instead of foreign troops, the North Vietnamese military worked inside the Viet Cong, otherwise known as the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam. The Viet Cong were a massive force, and while they took orders from North Vietnam, particularly the country’s leader Ho Chi Minh, they weren’t part of the North Vietnamese military proper. Instead, they were primarily a guerrilla army, working to mobilize and recruit Vietnamese peasants in and around South Vietnam via a system of trails, ferrying themselves, their supplies, and even heavy weapons into the territory through the neighboring nations of Laos and Cambodia.

On the American side, US troops and the South Vietnamese did their level best to stamp out the Viet Cong wherever they could be found, but in effect, they were largely putting out fires instead of accomplishing major military objectives.

But if the Vietnam War prior to 1968 was a deadly-serious game of Whack-a-Mole, then the Tet Offensive by the Viet Cong insurgency was enough to turn that game on its head. It was a surprise attack, at a massive scale, in which the Viet Cong and their North Vietnamese allies launched combined offenses against nearly every city across South Vietnam. It was a ruinous campaign, one that saw purges of pro-US or pro-South-Vietnam citizens in several cities, featuring both mass executions and mass recruitment of South Vietnamese into the Viet Cong’s ranks. The Tet Offensive wouldn’t last forever; in fact, it proved to be unsustainable when it came to asserting territorial control, and a combination of crafty counterattacks and scorched-Earth warfare from the Americans was enough to push the Viet Cong out of most of South Vietnam within a year.

But while the Tet Offensive went down as a military failure in the grand scheme of the war, it was a major propaganda and ideological victory for the communist North. With such a massive shock attack coming almost entirely without warning, the United States was forced to reckon with the fact that its excursion to Vietnam wouldn’t be so open-and-shut as Korea, or even just as strategically straightforward as the Second World War. This was a conflict that saw America fighting a multi-headed hydra, in a process that’s become familiar in today’s world, but was still relatively new back in the late 1960s.

Making matters worse, Americans could hardly recognize many of their own troops anymore, or at least, that’s what they felt at the time. Over the course of beating back the Viet Cong, Americans had perpetrated the My Lai massacre against civilians in a small village where insurgents were suspected to have hidden, and through the use of Agent Orange, counter-guerrilla operations against civilians, the use of free-fire zones and the use of torture and assassination against suspected Viet Cong, and more, US troops had alienated themselves from the American public. Now, not only was the US fighting what seemed more and more like an unwinnable war, but it seemed, in the eyes of its own people, as if America itself was becoming unrecognizable in the process.

The incoming administration of American President Richard Nixon would work to shift America toward a policy of disengagement from the conflict, entering into negotiations around it with the Soviet Union and normalizing relations with China, a country that the US had previously held at arm’s length. Around that time, Soviet relations with China were becoming far more complicated than they’d once been, and by driving a wedge between them, Nixon could do more to stymie the global rise of communism than he could achieve sending American boys to die in Vietnam. On the front lines, America moved toward a policy of so-called “Vietnamization,” a process by which combat duties were gradually shifted to South Vietnamese troops, while America’s aerial and naval assets, still firmly under Uncle Sam’s direct authority, were called in to support as needed.

But while the decision to Vietnamize the war alleviated pressure on America, it would prove to be a death knell to South Vietnam. Even at the height of American intervention, the Viet Cong’s success in South Vietnam indicated a population that had far fewer qualms about the communists than the South Vietnamese would have liked. Now, the relatively weak government found that it couldn’t count on the support of its own people, and it was militarily ill-prepared to transition into a leading role in operations against the North.

America’s newfound desire for a quick peace wasn’t much help; although South Vietnam was strongarmed into accepting a peace treaty it didn’t want in 1973, North Vietnam would violate the treaty and start the war back up again. South Vietnam was largely unable to claw back the territories that had been captured by the North, and when Richard Nixon was forced to resign in 1974, the American president who replaced him, Gerald R. Ford, was unable to get the US legislature to agree to keeping up its prior levels of military support.

Also in 1974, South Vietnam lost the Paracel Islands to the Chinese Navy, and in 1975, North Vietnam began its endgame.

In a gargantuan surprise attack against a South Vietnamese province, many of the South’s military assets were lost or ravaged in battle, and with South Vietnam lacking the manpower and resources to fight across a large stretch of territory at a time, the South was forced to withdraw, and withdraw, and withdraw into fewer and fewer reinforceable positions. Even worse, South Vietnam was ill-equipped to manage a strategic withdrawal of that kind, and retreating forces, along with civilians trying to escape the North Vietnamese advance, were slaughtered. When South Vietnam put up one last, brave attempt at defense, and managed to hold resolute against the North, their adversary simply went around their position, and the South couldn’t offer up enough reinforcements to stop them.

The South Vietnamese president at the time resigned, his replacement surrendered rather than try and fight tooth-and-nail for the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon, and with the knowledge that the North was coming to enact vengeance on those it considered traitors, hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese made a mass exodus from the nation. Most fled on boats and barges, although others left by air, mostly either finding their way to Thailand, or being picked up by American ships off the coast. The Fall of Saigon became a crowning achievement for the North Vietnamese and their communist allies abroad, and became arguably the greatest black eye that America would weather over the course of the entire Cold War.

It was also, quite unsurprisingly, the end of South Vietnam. As the former nation’s military, political, and intellectual classes fled en masse, its leadership was tossed aside and replaced with a puppet government, while North Vietnamese soldiers patrolled the streets, and North Vietnamese secret police got to work stamping out dissent. In all, anywhere from just a hair under a million people, on the low end, up to 3.1 million people, on the high end, were estimated to have been killed during the war.

Its pre-war population had been roughly 32 million, meaning that if the highest counts are to be believed, then nearly one in ten Vietnamese had been killed over the course of the war, with unbelievable numbers wounded, and a very large proportion of the population ultimately displaced. The nation that was left, in the aftermath, was hardly a nation at all—but it would have to stagger forward, simply because there was no other choice but to try.

Reconciliation, Repression, Reorganization

North and South Vietnam were officially reunified in 1976, into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. As should probably have been expected, the unified nation bore telltale signs of which side had won its recent civil war, and which side had lost. The capital, Hanoi, was a northern city; its flag, previously flown over North Vietnam, was now flown over the entire country; and North Vietnam’s one-time sponsor, the Soviet Union, was now Vietnam’s primary ally abroad.

South Vietnam’s former ally, the United States, had been denounced and condemned by South Vietnamese leaders for abandoning their cause prior to the Fall of Saigon, and America was seething at the geopolitical shellacking it had taken while trying to help a nation that it saw as unwilling to help itself. Between a decades-long trade embargo from Washington, a strict policy of isolation imposed by other Western nations, and the desperate need for Soviet support in the reconstruction effort, Vietnam was well-and-truly isolated.

As for what that meant inside Vietnam, the results were something of a mixed bag. On the one hand, South Vietnamese and American fears of massacres on the order of millions, by North Vietnamese soldiers against the people of the south, turned out to be unfounded. Whether because so many people had already fled, or because such a massive bloodletting was never part of the plan at all, Vietnam’s treatment of its own people was—if perhaps not good—certainly better than expected.

The Viet Cong was disbanded, thus getting rid of an organization that was responsible for somewhere around one third of all civilian deaths during the war, although it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that none of the organization’s former members ever faced prosecution for their acts in wartime. The high-ranking members of the former South Vietnamese government were spared execution or re-education, and were instead allowed to live quietly inside Vietnam; just as one example, the South Vietnamese president who’d agreed to surrender Saigon to the North would live at his villa in isolation for eight years, growing orchids and raising birds, before he was allowed to leave for Paris and then the United States later in life. In exchange for their relative freedom, the former leaders of South Vietnam would stay largely silent in Vietnamese politics over the long term.

For a time, former South Vietnamese leaders thought they might even be able to form some sort of non-communist governing body inside the country, owing to early promises that North Vietnam was in, “no rush to communize the south.”

Over the following few years, that would prove to be a lie. After reunification was complete, the Vietnamese government would oversee the reshaping of the nation into a model of proper Soviet alignment. Agriculture was collectivized, with villages organized into working groups and individual landholders losing what they previously had.

Farmers were asked to join state-owned cooperatives, and when they refused to volunteer, they were assimilated via far more coercive means. In cities and towns, Vietnamese working-age adults were pushed toward heavy industry, and the nation began to develop the bedrock of a manufacturing economy that has gotten far more formidable in the years since. Business owners—or, now, former business owners—got the tougher end of the deal, stripped of their holdings and assets and made just another worker for the Party.

In fact, they often got some of the worst assignments, sent to land that was euphemistically called New Economic Zones. In reality, they were dangerous, heavy jungle, difficult to penetrate and miserable to endure, that workers were expected to clear out bit-by-bit before building upon them.

Yet even the plight of former business owners was nothing when compared to what former military officers, former government employees, and civilian sympathizers believed to be loyal to South Vietnam, were forced to endure. Instead of the mass executions that had been expected across Vietnam, these people were put into another feature of communist Vietnam that had been adopted from the Soviets: re-education camps, better known in the land of borscht and vodka as gulags. In the months immediately following the war, some quarter-million people would be marched out of Saigon, and brought to forced labor camps.

Actually, we should be precise; many of them actually went willingly, owing to the fact that re-education was advertised as a months-long process, a sort of baptism-by-fire that would absolve a person of their pre-reunification sins once completed. Others were members of Vietnam’s ethnic Chinese minority, the Hoa, who controlled generational wealth from Vietnam’s colonial period and were a lucrative target, as well as a convenient bogeyman, for the Communist Party. In total, many estimates place the number of “re-educated” persons closer to a million, and in reality, the ordeal that detainees expected to last a season or two, typically stretched for years.

Upon arrival, South Vietnamese former officers and government officials surrendered their identification, their formal documentation, their uniforms, their weapons if they had any, and even personal photographs that showed them to be part of the old regime in the south. Purged of their old identities, and thus, in a spiritual sense, purged of the part of themselves that had once shown loyalty to another government, inmates began a long campaign of political indoctrination. This process was documented extensively, first by the Italian-born American human rights activist Ginetta Moroni, who published a landmark study in 1983 after interviewing hundreds of former detainees. First, a person would be indoctrinated via lectures by cadres of communist educators, with subject matter typically pertaining to the injustices and abuses of America, South Vietnam, and the Western global order, while extolling the virtues and the generosity of the new pan-Vietnamese state. Then, after months of lectures, detainees were expected to foster group discussions that would ultimately see them self-confess past crimes. As independent outlet The Vietnamese described it in a 2023 article: “For example, mail clerks were told they were guilty of contributing to ‘the puppet’s war machine.’ Inmates were forced to write very detailed autobiographies about their lives, including details about their father’s and grandfather’s generations as well as their material assets. Inmates were encouraged to criticize each other’s confessions, and the more confessions they wrote, the better.” Those confessions would then be used to justify detainees’ internment in the first place, while helping to identify other so-called collaborators who were typically rounded up and brought into similar camps.

But the ordeal people experienced in these camps didn’t stop with re-education. Like its parallel in the Soviet Union, Vietnam’s gulags thrived on their imposition of mandatory physical labor, wearing down detainees’ bodies and refusing to provide them with adequate food or medical care. Forced to work in long shifts and meet quotas on penalty of solitary confinement, many detainees’ bodies would break while trying to do what the regime asked of them, while the rest were brought to the brink of starvation and complete collapse, in overcrowded, windowless barracks reminiscent of those found in Nazi concentration camps.

While former soldiers, accustomed to years of war in Vietnam’s brutal conditions, may have been equipped to survive, others almost certainly weren’t. Those were the poets, the journalists, the religious leaders, and the activists who were rounded up and sent to the camps on suspicion of dissent, the doctors forced into camps as punishment for having treated wounded South Vietnamese soldiers, and the people who were named by others who had already been taken to the camps before them.

In principle, the camps took on an almost mystic quality among supporters of the Vietnamese government, a sort of state-sponsored baptism that saw those who entered, be physically and spiritually transformed into a ‘proper’ citizen. In terms of its pragmatic value, the camp system was meant to isolate and destroy people who might otherwise have become a threat to the new regime, stamping them out before any security risk could emerge, and punishing what it derided as war criminals—largely meaning anybody who’d fought against the North. In practice, though, they were little more than torture camps, where people were exposed not only to their near-fatal conditions on a daily basis, but punishments such as being tied into forced contortions, shackled in solitary confinement in dark cells or forced into tiny cargo containers with other prisoners, beaten to death, or, at times, executed outright.

Tuberculosis was common, malaria ran rampant, dysentery was all but unavoidable, and often, sickness was punished as a symptom of a broader, unforgivable laziness. Those who were released, often got out because of simple bribery, while others were able to get out after reaching basically arbitrary thresholds in what was supposed to be a merit system. For up to a year following their release, ex-detainees were forced to live without rations, visas, access to the school system for their children, or even legal recognition as people.

Those who chose to stay in Vietnam after that, instead of fleeing, were forever changed by what they had experienced.

All the while, other forms of social control began to seep through Vietnamese society. Religious institutions and schools were placed under government authority, the media that had remained after reunification was tightly regulated, and organizations that were considered to be a threat to communism were shut down outright. Book burnings were common, and educators who had lived and worked in South Vietnam were frequently replaced with Northerners.

The attendance of religious services was something the government began keeping close tabs on, especially attendance of Christian services, which were derided as a lingering sign of colonial rule. Disparagement of the Party, of Ho Chi Minh, or of communism itself, would very quickly get a person slapped with the label of Reactionary, for which punishments could range greatly depending on both the specific offense and the enforcer. For years, a person’s lot in life, and their families’ lots in life, were dictated by their relation to the war, with South Vietnamese who’d fought or worked on behalf of the North during wartime being rewarded handsomely with work or education, and those who’d been faithful to the South, including up to an estimated one-third of the population, disadvantaged in their opportunities, work assignments, and daily interactions in their communities.

Cities like Saigon were slowly depopulated, and their former residents de-urbanized, encouraged to return to their hometowns or forcibly relocated to the highlands with instructions to grow crops, but no guidance or means to do so.

And while the re-education camp detainees in Vietnam had it worst of all, and many parts of the Vietnamese population had it especially bad, the entire country would be racked with death and destruction in the immediate post-war years. The national restructuring campaign had been conducted with the intent that each of Vietnam’s provinces would be self-sufficient, something that the government chose to enforce almost immediately by criminalizing the transfer of food and other supplies from one province to another. But rather than successfully forcing each province to create its own resources from thin air, this almost immediately led to severe shortages across the country, at exactly the wrong time for what came next.

At the same time, Vietnam instituted quota systems that automatically claimed food that families had grown, but didn’t need for their own subsistence, basically removing any incentives to work and produce any more food than that. As food began to run out in many regions, the nation was hit by a long drought that devastated production, followed immediately by storms and cyclones that made for an exceptional wet season, with flooding that wiped out rice crops in the critical Mekong Delta and sent the entire nation spiraling toward famine.

By the end of the 1970s, the socialist experiment in Vietnam was spiraling toward imminent catastrophe. In 1980, Colombian writer and Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez traveled to the nation’s capital of Hanoi and spoke of what he saw there, and the results, predictably, were tragic. “Civilian airports were full of the shells of bombed war-planes and helicopters, and all manner of scrapped death machinery abandoned in the final stampede.

From the deserted highways, one could see the ashes of towns wiped off the map by napalm and the no man’s land that once had been jungle, now sterilized by chemical defoliants. The irrigation canals that gave the country the look of a huge chessboard from the air were barely being put to use again.” Garcia Marquez told of a countryside littered with mines and unexploded bombs that had claimed thousands of lives since the end of the war, and devastation to much of the farmland that might have gotten Vietnam out of its near-famine conditions.

Remarking on the climate catastrophes that had followed afterward: “God completed the holocaust the Yankees had left unfinished. The consequences were a country leveled and 53 million human beings reduced to misery.”

All the while, life continued in Saigon. Garcia Marquez was well-accustomed to the way things were in the north, where even government officials rode around on bicycles, most people didn’t have or seem to want cars, and cities and towns went quiet after about six in the evening, after which time families would settle in for their nightly four hours of government television programming. Meanwhile, Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, was a bustling metropolis, dominated by black markets and automobiles, with a young population that still seemed to imagine itself in European fashion.

It was a place that seemed as if it had failed completely to reconcile the ruin of war, the hardship and hard realities of unified Vietnam, and the lost and broken dreams that had been dashed to bits in the aftermath of reunification. He wrote, “The cost of this delirium was stupefying: 360,000 people mutilated, a million widows, 500,000 prostitutes, 500,000 drug addicts, a million tuberculosis and more than a million soldiers of the old regime, impossible to rehabilitate into a new society. Ten percent of the population of Ho Chi Minh City was suffering from serious venereal diseases when the war ended, and there were 4 million illiterates throughout the South.”

Yet, Garcia Marquez wrote, swarms of homeless children bearing strange tattoos on their skin intermingled with people soon to become refugees in faraway lands, as a class of people who had once anticipated that they’d make modern, Western-style lives in Vietnam were left clutching at straws with little ability to reconcile what had happened.

Under Soviet Protection

But although reunified Vietnam began to crumble nearly as soon as it super-glued itself back into the battered husk of a single nation, it was still under the protection of a very powerful global player, the Soviet Union. Like every other country during the Cold War, the choice between allying with the Soviets and allying with the Americans was a mutually exclusive one, with both options bringing their own fair share of risks, rewards, and inevitable turmoil and meddling from the other side. Frankly, even though this was a time in history where both the Soviet and American spheres extolled the value of certain countries and disdained others, the broader truth is that this was a very difficult time to be anything but a global superpower—and for Vietnam, the reality was no different.

Like other countries in similar positions, Vietnam was forced to realize fairly early on that no matter how hard it tried to carry the flag of Soviet-style communism, it would always be a client of the Soviet Union, and never a colleague. Even during the Vietnam War, a clear proxy conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, North Vietnam had never received quite the amount of support from its backer that South Vietnam had, and while Mikoyan and Ilyushin aircraft certainly counted for something, they never made up for a conflict where North Vietnam had to make up for its technological disadvantage by sacrificing the lives of its people. In Vietnam’s later conflicts, which we’ll speak about shortly, the Soviets hardly lifted a finger to fight in their client state’s defense, instead sending only supplies and logistical support.

But the reasons for this stem from the true value that Vietnam conferred upon the Soviets. Sure, the fact that a communist faction had forced the Americans out of a divided nation was great; in fact, it was a tremendous victory for the Soviets to take with them for the rest of the Cold War. But by the late 1970s, America wasn’t really active in this part of the world, and the new threat the Soviet Union was dealing with was China.

Although the two nations had once been close, China by this time was far from the lackey it had once been, and between its physical proximity to the Soviet Union and its immense manpower, it was a nation that put the Soviets in a difficult position. The Russian bear couldn’t be overtaken by the Chinese dragon, that simply wouldn’t do, but China had swollen to a size and power that it no longer made sense for the Soviets to assert dominance directly. Vietnam, between its shared land border with China and its ability to cause trouble across the South China Sea, was an ideal candidate to make problems for Beijing.

In essence, it was the perfect partner to participate in a proxy war—and after what communist Vietnam had done against the Americans, there could be little doubt that the smaller nation could draw China into a similarly ruinous quagmire.

As it turned out, Vietnam became a target of foreign attacks before it ever became an offensive actor, but the first local war to ravage Vietnam actually wasn’t fought directly against China. Instead, China had its own proxy in the region, Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge communist movement, under the leadership of Pol Pot, had lost its taste for cooperation with Vietnamese communists around 1974-75. Initially trained by the Vietnamese and regarded as close allies, the Khmer Rouge now feared that Vietnam might try to expand beyond its own borders, and in 1977, they launched a massive surprise attack on Vietnam in an attempt to pre-empt potential acts of aggression.

This took Vietnam by surprise, and after repelling the initial offensive, Vietnam launched a counteroffensive toward the end of the year, ultimately wrapping it up by January of 1978. China would initially attempt to mediate the conflict, but over time, it had become clear to Vietnam that China had closer relations with Cambodia than it was willing to develop with the Vietnamese. At the end of 1978, a massive force of 150,000 Vietnamese troops overran Cambodia, expelling Pol Pot from his position of power, and putting an end to a ruinous few years in which up to a quarter of all Cambodians had been wiped out in Pol Pot’s genocide there.

Vietnam would ultimately occupy Cambodia for about ten years, although the Khmer Rouge continued to govern from exile, and a range of resistance organizations fought against the Vietnamese in the countryside. Now, it was Vietnam bogged down in a long foreign war, trying to stomp out a counterinsurgency that not only China, but even Great Britain was playing an active role in. Retrospectively, Vietnam’s anti-insurgent actions in Cambodia have drawn close comparisons to what American soldiers experienced in Vietnam just a few years earlier, in sentiments echoed by Vietnamese survivors even today.

Said one former soldier, recounting his experiences to the BBC after writing a book that would ultimately be banned in Vietnam: “When your companions die in battle, it is a very great loss… During the war, the battle does not stop. We have no time to reflect. We must be strong to continue.

Later, more than 30 years later, memories come back—over and over again… The injury in the body is not so heavy but our injury was mental. Many soldiers, one or two years later, when they came back, they went mad.” It was an experience straight out of American memoirs of their war in Vietnam, along with a wide range of other, similar conflicts that popped up on all sides of the Cold War.

The Cambodian intervention would prove unpopular in Vietnam, and give the country the same black eye it had given to the Americans just prior—a shared experience that would eventually give Vietnam reason to seek reconciliation with the United States, in the decades afterward. As American veterans long suspected would be the case among the Vietnamese population they subjugated, Vietnam and its role in the war is still despised across much of Cambodia, even today.

But the real devastation came in early 1979, when, with their proxy force defeated, China decided to take its problems into its own hands. The resulting conflict would last just short of four weeks, mainly contained to the borderlands between southern China and northern Vietnam, but the results would be devastating. China regarded Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia as an unforgivable act of expansionist, or even hegemonic aggression, one that brought it from a posture of previously not really caring about Cambodia one way or the other, to now regarding it as a place that simply had to be defended in order to get Vietnam to back down. As Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping explained China’s plans to American President Jimmy Carter at the end of January, 1979: “This child is getting naughty, it is time he got spanked.”

Three weeks after those words were uttered, China would begin its retaliatory action. With its one and a half million troops along the northern Soviet border readied to defend a potential counterattack from Vietnam’s main backer, a force of 200,000 troops, according to China, or 600,000, according to Vietnam, marched in a southward advance. They brought with them an inferior military force, with less training and less experience than the battle-hardened and well-equipped Vietnamese, but nonetheless, they were able to achieve major combat action.

The Soviets never intervened militarily, and while the hundreds of tanks and artillery they sent to Vietnam were of some help, they simply didn’t see a point in engaging in battle directly. China had promised the Soviets, as well as the Americans, that they were looking to engage in only a limited war, and with China holding off on using its navy and air force, this proved to be true. From a territorial perspective, China would claim only a few cities and towns before withdrawing, but the human devastation in the meantime was stunning.

Casualty counts have never truly been established, with each side working to inflate the other’s losses while minimizing their own, but generally, China is estimated to have lost somewhere in the realm of six to twenty-five thousand troops. Vietnam has never acknowledged how many casualties it sustained, but Chinese estimates suggested numbers as high as 57,000 soldiers and 70,000 militia members, although those numbers are generally not regarded to be reliable. Western estimates run around 25,000 to 35,000 killed on the Vietnamese side.

Again, these casualties on both sides were inflicted in a brief border war, lasting fewer than four weeks, with repercussions that would echo across the region for decades afterward.

After the wars, Vietnam would prop up a puppet regime inside Cambodia for years, effectively granting Vietnam decision-making power in the country and making it the only other nation in East Asia, other than China, that was able to engage in any level of regional hegemony at this time. But as a result, Vietnam’s time in Cambodia quickly became yet another proxy war—this one fought with China—as China attempted to play on divisions inside Vietnam, run an insurgency in Cambodia, and make the most of Vietnamese crackdowns against their Chinese minority in the north. Vietnam responded with increased hostility toward other nations nearby, including against Thailand and Singapore, driving those nations toward China in the long term.

As Vietnam lost prestige and credibility, and began to be perceived more and more as a purely malevolent actor, its role in Asia became more and more limited, until for all intents and purposes, it was reduced to a Soviet vassal state. Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once opined that it was actually the failure of the Soviet Union’s Vietnam experiment that led the superpower to engage in what would become a fruitless campaign in Afghanistan.

For the following decade, Vietnam would become increasingly economically dependent on the Soviet Union, receiving immense amounts of economic aid by the late 1980s. In fact, it was rivaled only by Cuba and Mongolia, who, together with Vietnam, accounted for over ninety percent of Soviet economic aid around the world. But at the same time, the 1980s would see the Soviets become disillusioned with Vietnam for reasons beyond just the country’s inability to be a counterweight against China.

More troubling was the degree to which the Soviets felt that the aid they sent was being misused. The Soviets had hoped for a far greater level of economic progress in Vietnam than had been achieved by that time, and corruption and naïve mismanagement were all too common. Strangely enough, very little of the wealth the Soviets had funneled to Vietnam seemed to translate into fixes for unemployment or malnutrition, and the nation’s agricultural potential remained significantly less developed than it perhaps should have been.

Over the years, these problems got worse, not better, to the point that by 1988, crop shortages in several northern provinces were at near-crisis levels. But all across the decade, the Soviets found greater utility in working with Vietnam despite its imperfections than they found in the idea of abandoning their last true ally in East Asia—and Vietnam, after isolating itself from the global West and the Far East alike, had nowhere else to turn.

The other side of Vietnam’s place on the global stage at this time was its intense isolation from any nation that considered itself even marginally aligned with the United States. The post-war years had not been kind to Vietnam-US relations, understandably so; after a decade out for each other’s throats, the governments of the two countries had little reason to work together. Early after the war ended, Vietnam tried to normalize its relations with the US again, and obtain $3.3 billion in reconstruction aid that Richard Nixon had promised Vietnam in secret, while the nation worked hard to entice American oil companies to enter into arrangements with Vietnam to search for oil offshore.

But in such an intense environment as post-war America, the idea of reparations payments to Vietnam were a non-starter, and the country’s affiliations with the Soviet Union made it an adversary for the long term. The US, Europe, and other allied nations imposed a comprehensive trade embargo, one that only got broader in scale the more Vietnam insisted that it be provided economic assistance for a post-war recovery. The US was far more concerned with accepting Vietnamese refugees who’d been on their side of the war, than aiding a people many Americans still considered to be the enemy, and when Vietnam found itself at war with an adversary, in China, that the US was working hard to build relations with, they’d seen enough.

All through the 1980s, Vietnam was barred from normalization efforts with the United States, with even America’s basic openness to the concept now predicated on Vietnam ending its occupation in Cambodia. The whereabouts of American soldiers missing-in-action was another massive sore spot, with well over 1,000 soldiers still unaccounted for in the early 2000s. Attempts by Vietnam to solicit US partnership by cooperating with American demands proved to be fruitless, leading to such frustration inside Vietnam that eventually the country reverted to its immediate post-war posture, a set of policies that mostly involved sticking up two middle fingers to the Americans and insisting that the issue of missing soldiers could only be addressed once Vietnam began to receive American aid payments. It wasn’t until 1987 that even the slightest breakthroughs could be reached, and it would be nearly another decade after that before the two sides finally began to discuss what it would take to move forward.

Backlash and Boat People

Through the 1970s and the 1980s, Vietnam wasn’t just an isolated nation, and it wasn’t just a nation that found itself at war far too often; it was also a nation in which massive swathes of the population still struggled to live under the same flag, let alone in the same towns and villages. Remember, even though the North had won, and had isolated, persecuted, and even brainwashed many of the people who had taken up arms against it, the entirety of South Vietnam—not just its soldiers—had watched with trepidation as the Vietnam War came to a close. In the aftermath, even those who hadn’t fought directly were often reticent to play the games of the communists, and resistance across the nation was commonplace.

For people who still lived in South Vietnam’s countryside, and had no intention to leave, they were often directed to become part of rural collectives. There, they didn’t have much power, but they had some, and to the extent that they could be a thorn in the side of the regime without getting themselves sent off to a Vietnamese gulag, they did so. Vietnam’s struggles with food production were, in part, economic; after all, why work so hard to produce food when everything you and your family didn’t imminently need to eat would simply be taken from you without compensation?

But the refusal to produce more food than necessary was also an act of resistance. Producing for the collective was a secondary priority, and if a person could produce enough for themselves and their families, squirreling away a little surplus so they didn’t have to rely on the collective, then they could withhold the value of their labor from the collective at will. So too would they delay deliveries of crops and livestock, and as time went on, the tactics became less a tool of individual families, and more of entire collectives who were slowly growing disillusioned with the regime.

The tactics would spread northward after a time, and become indispensable even in North Vietnam among farmers who were less than amenable to what their regime had become.

Then, there were the people of Vietnam who had no intention of staying: the Boat People. Many of the boat people were part of the ethnic-Chinese Hoa population, who, as we mentioned previously, were a wealthy minority group in South Vietnam before the end of the war. Many of them had lived comfortably in a district of Saigon called Cholon, translated to “big market,” a place known for its brothels, opium dens, and extravagant wealth relative to the rest of Vietnam.

Immediately after the fall of Saigon, many people there had fled while they had a chance, but others opted to make what would eventually turn out to be a major miscalculation. Taking advantage of the chaos after the war, imported goods and precious metals and gems were stockpiled in Cholon, parlayed into control of a black market that ran illicit distribution of food across the rest of Vietnam. In the short term, this made Vietnam’s post-war struggles a profitable affair, but by 1978, the whole thing was dismantled.

Between the Hoa’s status as a minority group, and their ties to capitalist systems in a nation now completely ruled by communists, they were the perfect scapegoat for the government, and after private business was nationalized and Vietnam found itself in conflict with China, the Hoa saw the writing on the wall. With China now Vietnam’s main antagonist, and the Hoa practically guaranteed to be Chinese spies in the eyes of many other Vietnamese, it was time to get out.

We’ve already mentioned the writings of Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who visited Vietnam in 1980. By the time he arrived, incredible numbers of people were leaving Saigon each month, including well over 50,000 each month in May and June of 1979. Word of successful escapes to Thailand, Indonesia, and Hong Kong began to pour back into Vietnam, inspiring more and more people to take the chance to flee—either unaware of the fact that those who’d perished on the voyage weren’t alive to warn them against it, or trying to block out that reality as best they could, in an attempt to coax themselves into making the leap anyway.

Technically speaking, there was a legal path to refugee departure via the UN, but because that process demanded resident visas for people looking to travel to a new place, it was functionally useless. Instead, amidst desperation and growing poverty, South Vietnam became a mad dash toward the exit. Wrote Garcia Marquez during his travels: “The most expensive medicine in Vietnam last August were pills for seasickness.

The drugstores where it usually cost a little over a dollar for twelve pills were out of them, and they had begun to show up on the black market at five dollars apiece. Still, they weren’t the most expensive necessity or the most difficult to obtain in order to flee Vietnam aboard an illegal boat. In Ho Chi Minh City—formerly Saigon—anybody who wanted to leave could do so whenever he wanted to if he had enough money to pay the price and was ready to assume the enormous risk.”

Garcia Marquez shared stories with the world of seeing Vietnamese people struggle to scrounge up pure gold in order to finance their escape: three and a half ounces per head for anyone age six to sixteen, and six ounces a head for adults, plus another five ounces to pay off local officials along the journey. Much of that gold was left over from the financial endeavors of the immediate post-war years, now given up as a sort of forced atonement for those same endeavors now that the Hoa and other South Vietnamese were forced to leave. Those who could afford the trip piled onto rickety boats equipped with little other than the clothes on their backs.

The boats they boarded were fishing vessels, packed with several hundred people despite being designed for a hundred or less, and manned by people who often had little idea what they were doing in the best of times, let alone how to respond in a crisis. A large proportion of those onboard were under the age of twelve, some traveling with their parents, and some sent by their parents in order to find a life that those same parents knew they’d never see.

And during the voyages these ships attempted to carry out, there was no shortage of crises to fear. Weather off the Vietnamese coast was unreliable at best, and outright fatal at worst, with frequent storms, high waves, and waters well-populated with creatures that would be more than happy to claim a human snack. Onboard, standing water could lead to the spread of disease, or cause the boat to drag even lower in the water, raising the risk that it would capsize when poor conditions came along.

When ships began to sink, they were often ignored by other vessels, who overlooked a fundamental maritime expectation that ships help ships in need no matter the circumstances. The Vietnamese Navy prowled the waters, not always effectively, but more than enough to give refugees reason to fear. And worst of all were the pirates, often from Cambodia or Thailand, and sometimes from China, all looking to rob refugees of their belongings, abduct and attack women, and—if the refugees were particularly unlucky—sink their boats.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, in the year 1981, refugee boats were attacked an average of three times each, with 228 women abducted and 881 people dead or missing in that year alone. It would take almost a decade for the pirate scourge to be brought under control, and in all, the UNHCR estimates that up to six hundred thousand people might have died fleeing Vietnam by sea. Some figures suggest that just ten percent of boat people died on the water; other figures are as high as a staggering seventy percent.

When people arrived to new nations, the reception they got was as variable as it was potentially dangerous. Malaysia had vowed that it would use devastating naval force to destroy refugee ships that approached its coastal waters, setting upon them with machine guns rather than allow them to reach land. Those who did get caught often weren’t gunned down in practice, but were towed to massive refugee camps, particularly Bidong Island.

The island was less than a square mile in land area, but ultimately became home to over forty thousand refugees at its peak, with no on-island source of food or water, and no sanitation infrastructure. Indonesia was somewhat less interested in bloodshed, but relied on its own refugee camps too, with the Galang camp hosting some 250,000 refugees in the years it was open. In Thailand, the plight of the boat people turned into a worldwide news story, with the Thai government declaring within a year or two that it was overwhelmed with the sheer number of fugitives coming in—many of whom were actually from Laos, but all of whom were counted in Thailand as Vietnamese.

The Philippines received many others, and Hong Kong took in a large portion as well.

The degree to which the boat people became an international symbol of Vietnamese tyranny and repression seemed to surprise the Vietnamese government as it was happening. The country, to their credit, hadn’t told any of those people to leave, and by its own understanding of its internal politics, it hadn’t even put any of them at unjustifiable risk despite its suspicions that they lacked loyalty to Vietnam. Whether or not that’s actually true, in a country ravaged by re-education camps and forced relocations, is another matter, but to Vietnam’s leaders, it was a major shock. International solidarity around the Vietnamese government was replaced by international solidarity against the Vietnamese government, and with the exodus of some of Vietnam’s best-educated professionals and wealthiest citizens, left much of the economic power and the technical prowess that would have been critical in attempts to rebuild.

Once the boat people really began departing in force, Vietnam found itself deep in a morass that it had hoped to avoid. The occupation of Cambodia would prove to be a painful and slow exercise in attrition, the national economy would continue to sputter toward an agonizing death, and the international community no longer had any interest in taking pity on a country it saw as having forced out immense numbers of its own people. Vietnam was alone, in a grinding cycle of deterioration that it lacked the power, and seemingly even the political and Party will to stop.

Trade and Perestroika

For a nation so deeply intertwined with the Soviet Union, it should be no surprise that the ebb and flow of Soviet culture had ripple effects within its southeastern ally. When the Soviets got bogged down in Afghanistan, Vietnam was bogged down in Cambodia; when the Soviet economic engine began to falter, Vietnam’s was barely functioning—but when the Soviet Union got a reformer, the people of Vietnam had little choice but to perk up their heads and observe the change happening beyond their borders.

The reformer was Mikhail Gorbachev, a man who was less than kind in his assessment of Vietnam. According to him, the country, along with other so-called “socialist camp” nations, was a weight dragging on the ankles of the Soviet Union, taking far more than it provided to the Soviets in return. As Gorbachev saw it, the Soviets’ continued attempts to keep Vietnam afloat were stupid; the Soviet grudge against China was stupid; and the Soviet Union’s seeming disdain for the Pacific Rim, of which it was very much a part, was stupid too. Gorbachev’s new Soviet Union would live by two rules: glasnost, or openness, in hopes that freedom of speech and press could be introduced and broadened, and perestroika, the progressive restructuring of the Soviet economy and political system away from extreme centralization and toward greater efficiency, no matter where that efficiency came from.

In Vietnam, the concept of openness, glasnost, was taken with a bit more hesitation than it was in the Soviet Union. While the idea of cracking down on corruption via public arrests, and laying out the realities of economic mismanagement for the Vietnamese population, weren’t out of the question, the Vietnamese Communist Party had considerably more trouble with other parts of the policy that seemed to come so naturally to Gorbachev. The media was still tightly constricted in what it could say or do, criticism of the high ideals of communism was still a grave offense, and the West was still the great enemy.

But nonetheless, perestroika—restructuring—seemed to come a little bit easier. In Vietnam, the concept was referred to as doi moi, a term that in Vietnamese relates to concepts of rebirth and rejuvenation more generally. The economy began to open somewhat, with capitalist principles slowly trickling in and resulting in a hesitant acceptance of some elements of private enterprise. Vietnam found its way to cultivating a business class, which, conveniently enough, seemed to share a lot of members in common with the communist elite. The changes were couched in moderating statements and caveats by Party officials, including this one from a prominent economic thinker in Vietnam: “We are using capitalists to improve our economy. Marxism is against exploitation—not against being rich. Sometimes we misunderstand Marxism…that there will be no rich people and everyone will be equal, can only happen in the advanced phase of capitalism. In the meantime, we have to put up with people being rich because they are talented and have a good mind.”

And as Vietnam began to carefully start engaging with other capitalist concepts like that, starting up private enterprises and letting them conduct international business, the government’s attempts to reconcile Marx and Lenin with their new economic way didn’t start to wane as time went on. Instead, the Vietnamese government chose to double down, in a way that Soviet Russia never did, weaving the two concepts together in an attempt to prove that they weren’t necessarily opposed. Under Vietnam’s vision for its economic future, the nation would endeavor to become a so-called “socialist-oriented market economy”—that is to say, an economy that was, in practice, ultimately capitalist, but kept fidelity to Marxist-Leninist ideals in principle.

In Vietnam’s economy, private, collectivist, and state-owned enterprises are meant to work together, with state and collectivist endeavors forming the fundamental structure that keeps the economy afloat, and private enterprise basically working on the fringes. As it turned out, that model worked very, very well; the government was able to take unilateral action when it needed to, in order to keep the economy afloat and growing, and the private sector was let off its leash in order to do what it did best—namely, to make money. Under that model, the Vietnamese Communist Party could continue to exist, it could continue to issue five-year economic plans, and it could continue to aspire toward a later-stage economy more in line with truly socialist ideals—but it could also function exceedingly well in today’s world, as compared to other developing nations.

The results were striking for Vietnam. During the 1990s, export volume increased year-over-year by twenty to thirty percent, even sustaining through the economic crisis that rocked Asia during the later half of the decade. Manufacturing played a dominant role, although Vietnam was also able to become a major food exporter in due time.

By the end of the 20th century, over thirty thousand private businesses were thriving in Vietnam, poverty rates had been halved since their pre-reform numbers, and nearly half of the national GDP was made up of exports. The country implemented a policy around birth rates, but a two-child policy rather than the one-child policy of neighboring China, and it remained strict about asserting government control over some areas, while picking and choosing the areas where the private sector could best serve the country by operating as it saw fit.

With Vietnamese economic reform at home came the first early signs that the nation’s relations with the USA might start to defrost. In 1987, Vietnam managed to secure an agreement with the United States that while America wouldn’t send economic aid or pay for war damages directly, they’d encourage charitable organizations to work to assist Vietnam in addressing its national plight. In exchange, the Americans got increased cooperation with the issue of missing soldiers.

Over the following few years, Vietnam and the US began to get a bit cozier around the negotiating table, certainly not to a point of true collaboration yet, but at least to the extent that they were able to work together productively. As the pain and devastation of the Vietnam War began to fade into memory in the American consciousness, and the big, scary Soviet Union started to look like it was losing its teeth and claws, the prospect of negotiating with Vietnam—or even working toward true mutual aims—became far less of a taboo in Washington, and much more of a real possibility.

The tipping point came in the early 1990s, during the Clinton years in America, when two US Senators—a Republican named John McCain and a Democrat named John Kerry—started to prod Clinton about reopening relations. Both men were veterans of the Vietnam War, and served on the Congressional commission to address prisoners of war and missing US troops. McCain had had close brushes with death multiple times, even being tortured and left permanently disabled by the North Vietnamese as a prisoner of war for several years, and had been awarded high honors like the Silver Star Medal, three Bronze Stars, and the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Kerry, too, had been wounded in combat three times by the Viet Cong, and was awarded a Silver Star and a Bronze Star with valor. We take the time to emphasize their service, because not only were these two high-ranking American officials with supreme credibility on matters relating to the Vietnam War, but they were men who had experienced more pain at the hands of their Vietnamese adversaries than any person should have had to. Over the 1980s, they’d frequently visited Vietnam and worked with Vietnamese officials, and during the Clinton presidency, both men met together with the president many times to persuade him to lift the embargo.

Not only did they make a persuasive case in strategic and economic terms, but their support, couched in their credibility on the subject, was enough to create a broad consensus in America that it was time to move on from the hurt and the pain of Vietnam. After all, if these two could do it, then Americans who’d never served had little right to remain stuck in the mud.

With the rusty gears of diplomacy finally lubricated, America and Vietnam began churning their way toward reconciliation. The American embargo on Vietnam was lifted in February of 1994, with formal normalization commencing in 1995, and both countries hosting embassies on each other’s soil by the end of the year. Trade between the two nations resumed in 1997, and immediately, American importers seized on the manufacturing prowess that Vietnam could bring to bear.

In the year 2000, the two nations signed a bilateral trade agreement, giving Vietnam even greater incentive to become the sort of manufacturing-heavy export economy that America could so clearly benefit from working with. Investment poured in, not just from the States but from other nations that had previously been disinterested in working with Vietnam. It wasn’t all smooth sailing; the endemic corruption there was a blinking red light in the international community’s eyes, and some doubted whether the nation’s incredible economic boom would prove sustainable at all.

But history has showed that Vietnam’s rise was no accident, and that its unique take on reconciliation not just with the West, but within its own economic and geopolitical model, were the critical pieces that got it to where it is today.

Life in Modern Vietnam

Modern-day Vietnam certainly isn’t perfect, but it bears little resemblance to the poor, desperate, and hungry nation that it once was. The national transition toward manufacturing meant that former city-dwellers could return to where they’d once lived, while overstressed and undernourished land could begin to recover. The Vietnamese government, once stretched every which way to manage every element of a crisis that was spiraling out of control, could now be far more precise about how it managed and even prevented problems in certain regions.

The introduction of real, market incentives for productivity meant that farmers now had good reason to produce more than they needed to survive, and Vietnam’s agricultural sector surged back to life, in a way that meant that even when droughts or floods did sweep the landscape, they were far less catastrophic than they used to be. More wealth pouring into the country led to the ability to support more robust health and education infrastructure; communities were able to use their own money to build back from devastation and address local issues without the need for government oversight; and many of the people who had left Vietnam long ago could return home or see their families for the first time in more than a decade.

And through it all, Vietnam’s Communist Party didn’t topple like it did across the remnants of the Soviet Union. Instead, the nation was able to keep faithful to the broad concept of Marxism, and that communist ethos still runs through Vietnam today, in a way that proved impossible in Eastern Europe and most parts of the Soviet Union. Vietnam is one of the few nations left on Earth that still boasts hammer-and-sickle imagery, it’s run by way of a National Congress held once every five years, and the policies and decisions made by the National Congress are carried out by a Central Committee, a Secretariat, and a Politburo.

The whole nation is overseen by the General Secretary of the Communist Party, an office currently held by a leader partway through his third term. The country’s Central Theoretical Council works to ensure that the governing Party doesn’t stray too far from Marx, and in a practical sense, it’s played a leading role in the complicated, and often acrobatic affair of justifying Vietnam’s actions within its guiding theory. According to the Party, Vietnam’s socialist-oriented market economy doesn’t have to be capitalist simply because it’s a market economy; in fact, according to Vietnam, it’s not necessarily socialist either.

It’s the market economy Vietnam is working with, Vietnam tries to run that market economy in a way that draws on socialist principles, and that’s that.

As for what that economy actually looks like—well, it’s booming, and it doesn’t appear that the boom is going to stop anytime soon. The country is a major agricultural exporter, leveraging effective land-distribution programs and pouring money into the rural communities that make the national agricultural landscape work. In addition to the country’s booming manufacturing industry, it’s become a major player in information technology, investing heavily into training and educational programs that have raised countless people from the circumstances they and their families faced in decades past.

Vietnam has recently become a player in both high-tech industry and oil production, both of which have set off a cascading effect in which subsequent investment becomes even easier for foreign financiers to justify. The country has become a booming tourist destination, among the fastest-growing in the world, and it’s increasingly become a player in scientific research.

All the while, the nation’s success in reopening its ties to the global West have led to adoption of many trappings of the modern world. While Vietnam remains a bicyclist’s nation despite its brutal hills, cars and buses have become far more common than they used to be, with individual vehicle ownership a recent but much-appreciated trend in the country. Electrical and telecommunications infrastructure has been constructed across most of the country within just a couple of decades, while clean and reliable drinking water is becoming far more accessible, owing in part to the spread of community-scale and home-by-home water filtration systems. Those improvements have gone a long way in dealing with polluted and unsanitary water across the country, although in that regard, the country still has plenty of room to improve.

Vietnam Today, Vietnam Tomorrow

Vietnam, in its modern era, shows reflections of both its communist history, and its newfound openness to the rest of the world. The country elects a president, it has a prime minister, and both of those more Western-style offices manage to share power and responsibilities with the General Secretary. Vietnam features a relatively robust judiciary, but it serves a strictly single-party political system, where although nominally different political parties like the Vietnamese Fatherland Front and the Workers’ Party do exist, they all require the signoff of the Communist Party and are expected to stay loyal to the same fundamental ideology.

Internationally, it’s a member of all the global and East Asian organizations one might expect, and while it’s not exactly neutral like Switzerland in its posture, the nation maintains a strict policy of open multilateralism—meaning, basically, they’ll work with most nations out there and would rather be building things up than blowing them up. With the shifting geopolitics of East Asia, Vietnam has found itself drawn closer and closer to its old enemy, the United States, linking itself into an informal but slowly strengthening network between America, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand—not an official Asia-Pacific NATO, by any stretch, but the comparison’s not too far off. Generally speaking, Vietnam is interested in seeing China’s expansionist policies reined in, and the United States is glad to have another ally on board to support in that effort.

The Vietnamese military is fairly large, and the country’s many, largely peaceful militias lend it substantially greater strength, although the People’s Navy and the People’s Air Force would be ill-equipped to face down China on their own.

But while Vietnam appears quite well-integrated into a generally Western geopolitical order, the situation at home there still leaves much to be desired. Although Vietnam’s one-party system seems outwardly to produce less-bad results than other one-party systems around the world, it’s still a place where free and fair elections simply don’t exist, and where the communist party has shown time and time again that it’s glad to violate its own rules on things like term limits when it chooses to. Nobody except for vetted political candidates can even consider runs for office, and people who attempt to form opposition parties—which are, by nature, illegal—are liable to be imprisoned for their trouble.

As such, political participation among the general populace is somewhere between irrelevant and farcical, and party officials have very little incentive to set government policy in line with the wishes of the people, who broadly have very few mechanisms to make those wishes known. The party is known to be rife with corruption, and while party leaders have taken a hard line against corruption in recent years, even leading to the ouster of a very recent president, the situation still leaves much to be desired.

Freedom of the press in Vietnam is functionally unheard-of, with journalists functionally barred from conducting investigations that risk showing the communist party in a negative light, and commentary that critiques government policy or conduct will typically incur criminal penalties. Wide-reaching anti-speech laws empower the Vietnamese government to tightly restrict social media and blog activity among its citizens, and independent print and broadcast media essentially don’t exist. International news that’s deemed a threat to national security is generally not able to make it through to the people, and Vietnamese journalists and bloggers face not only arrest by the authorities, but assaults at home, and disappearances when they’re living abroad.

Religious engagement is technically permitted, but religious organizations are expected to be supervised by the communist party, and unregistered and unrecognized groups are not only criminalized, but harassed openly with property damage and outright violence against leaders and followers. When people organize in the streets, brutal police crackdowns typically follow close behind, and while a handful of non-government organizations do manage to get good work done in the country, most are banned or risk a very quick ouster if they’re caught engaging in conduct other than what the Vietnamese government might expect of them. Lawyers are typically unwilling to engage with criminal and civil cases that might put them at odds with the government, and in general, the profession is badly overworked and fails to attract many new members each year.

The Vietnamese state is known to abuse political prisoners and other detainees, and while the number of people who are executed by the state is kept secret, Vietnam’s penal system is well-understood to be a place where many people go in, and fewer come out.

Unfortunately, Vietnam’s problems today go far beyond just its political system. Even many decades after the end of the Vietnam War, the aftereffects still haunt the nation, largely courtesy of American tactics of warfighting that left a longer-lasting impact on the landscape. The legacy of Agent Orange still ripples through Vietnam, in the form of birth defects even in babies born today, and long-term health issues among the population in southern and central Vietnam.

The US is in the process of helping with a cleanup expected to take decades, while Vietnam spends the US-dollar equivalent of half a billion each year to aid in the physical recovery and financial support of victims. Even now, reforestation is not an easy process, with some areas proving particularly difficult to bring back to life, even as the Mekong Delta has been largely overrun with mangroves as it had been before the war. And unexploded bombs, hidden land mines, and other lingering signs of war still dot the landscape, despite international efforts from across Europe, Asia, and North America to disarm bombs and de-mine the nation.

And beyond the repercussions of war, Vietnam faces long-term problems when it comes to human trafficking, domestic violence in families, vigilante violence among small communities in the countryside, and widespread harassment against racial and ethnic minorities.

Yet with all that said, Vietnam still has plenty of success stories to its name, success stories that, in aggregate, show that this is a country where things are far better than they used to be. Vietnam’s poverty rate is now less than that of most other nations in the region, and today, fewer people there live in extreme poverty than ever. The country’s standard of living has gone way up, especially in Hanoi, in the north, and Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon, in the south.

The communist party has taken pains to reduce economic inequality where possible, and invest capital and resources in poor or far-flung parts of the country. Education and healthcare in the nation are quite robust overall, unemployment is very low, and GDP per capita has improved substantially every year for the past couple of decades. Life expectancy has climbed dramatically over the decades, with women in Vietnam now expected to live well past eighty, and infant mortality has plummeted, especially in rural areas where public health services are now available.

The country’s urban areas are thoroughly modernized, infrastructure and resources are generally quite satisfactory, and the economy has proven to be generally recession-proof, at least for now.

Today, Vietnam is quite a young nation, with the majority of people under age forty. At the time of writing, Vietnam is right on the verge of cresting past a total population of 100 million. Split between some fifty-four recognized ethnic groups, but mostly the majority Viet, the nation’s many peoples have proven able to share their country peacefully, for the vast majority of the time.

The country is still predominantly rural, with only about one in three people dwelling in the cities at the time of the last census, but the trends are headed firmly toward urbanization. Between its pleasant conditions and its economic opportunity, Ho Chi Minh City is the place expected to grow fastest, while out in the countryside, more and more people are beginning to coalesce into larger communities than the villages that were the norm across this land for centuries. In cultural celebrations, in literature, and in music, many elements of Vietnam’s storied past can still be felt today, although much of it is preserved alternately to build up the communist party’s claim to authority, and to draw tourists seeking what they imagine to be the “real” Vietnamese experience.

When it comes to Vietnam’s future, it’s important to recognize that unlike many other parts of the world that deal with repression, that still experience the aftershocks of war, and that struggle to extend the benefits of modernity to the whole of their people—Vietnam is not a place that its people are inclined to leave. When asked by Pew Research Center in 2014, 88% of polled Vietnamese people said that they hoped their own personal futures would lead them to remain in Vietnam, as opposed to 75% in China, 65% in the Philippines, and less than 50% in other countries polled, like Jordan and Egypt. In the same poll, 94% of Vietnamese expected that they’d be better off in the future than they were at that time, as opposed to just fourteen percent in Japan, and thirteen percent in France.

Many people who once fled Vietnam, or in some cases their children, are now coming back, bringing the benefits of foreign enterprise and education as they return. While the history of the Vietnam War can certainly be felt across the nation, it’s nowhere near the dominant cultural memory that many foreigners, and particularly Americans, expect it would be; after all, most of Vietnam’s population today wasn’t even born when the war concluded, and even a person born on the day of Vietnam’s reunification would have precious little memory of the violence that came after.

As time goes on, it appears altogether likely that Vietnam’s place in the global order will only get more important. The country aims to become a high-income nation by 2045, something it’s well on its way to doing, and it’s been unusually proactive compared to other countries when it comes to drawing down emissions and stopping deforestation. Its population is aging, but appears, for now, to be relatively stable; its trade revenues aren’t what they once were, but for now, they’re still fairly robust.

Look at Japan or South Korea at previous moments in their history, and their positions were quite similar—but where those nations now face population decline and must deal with social challenges among an increasingly elderly nation, those are examples that Vietnam can follow and learn from proactively, if it chooses to do so. This is a nation that certainly has a long way left to go, with lingering issues to work through and systems in place that serve nobody except those in power—but rising from a legacy of brutal war, global isolation, and cultural despair, Vietnam has made an astonishing recovery thus far. As time goes on, there’s every reason to believe that the country’s national resurgence can only continue.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the Tet Offensive?

The Tet Offensive was a surprise attack launched by the Viet Cong and their North Vietnamese allies against nearly every city across South Vietnam in 1968. It was a massive and ruinous campaign that saw purges of pro-US or pro-South-Vietnam citizens in several cities, featuring both mass executions and mass recruitment of South Vietnamese into the Viet Cong’s ranks.

What was the impact of the Tet Offensive on the United States?

The Tet Offensive was a major propaganda and ideological victory for the communist North. It forced the United States to reckon with the fact that its excursion to Vietnam wouldn’t be so open-and-shut as Korea, or even just as strategically straightforward as the Second World War. This was a conflict that saw America fighting a multi-headed hydra, in a process that’s become familiar in today’s world, but was still relatively new back in the late 1960s.

What was the Vietnamization policy?

The Vietnamization policy was a process by which combat duties were gradually shifted to South Vietnamese troops, while America’s aerial and naval assets, still firmly under Uncle Sam’s direct authority, were called in to support as needed. This policy was implemented by the Nixon administration to alleviate pressure on America.

What was the Fall of Saigon?

The Fall of Saigon was the event in 1975 when North Vietnamese forces captured Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam. This marked the end of the Vietnam War and the reunification of Vietnam under communist rule. The event is often seen as a significant geopolitical defeat for the United States.

What happened to the leaders of South Vietnam after the Fall of Saigon?

The high-ranking members of the former South Vietnamese government were spared execution or re-education and were instead allowed to live quietly inside Vietnam. They were allowed to live in isolation and were expected to stay largely silent in Vietnamese politics over the long term.

What were re-education camps in Vietnam?

Re-education camps in Vietnam were forced labor camps where former military officers, government employees, and civilian sympathizers believed to be loyal to South Vietnam were sent. These camps were used for political indoctrination and forced labor, often leading to severe physical and mental suffering for the detainees.

What was the impact of the Vietnam War on Vietnam’s economy?

The Vietnam War left Vietnam’s economy in ruins. The nation faced severe shortages, famine, and economic isolation. The post-war years saw a struggle to rebuild, with the government implementing collectivization and heavy industry, but these efforts often led to further hardship and inefficiency.

What was the role of the Soviet Union in post-war Vietnam?

The Soviet Union was Vietnam’s primary ally after the war, providing significant economic aid and military support. However, the relationship was complex, with the Soviets often frustrated by Vietnam’s economic mismanagement and corruption. The Soviets saw Vietnam as a client state rather than a colleague.

What were the Boat People?

The Boat People were Vietnamese refugees who fled the country by sea after the end of the Vietnam War. Many were from the ethnic-Chinese Hoa population and faced persecution and economic hardship. Their journeys were often dangerous, with many dying at sea due to storms, pirates, and overcrowded boats.

How did Vietnam’s economic reforms in the 1980s and 1990s impact the country?

Vietnam’s economic reforms, known as doi moi, allowed for the introduction of capitalist principles and private enterprise. This led to significant economic growth, with export volume increasing year-over-year and the establishment of over thirty thousand private businesses by the end of the 20th century. These reforms also paved the way for improved relations with the United States.

Sources

• Original Places video: Vietnam: The Nation After the War
• https://www.vietnamwar50th.com/history_and_legacy/timeline/
• https://www.britannica.com/list/vietnam-war-timeline
• https://www.pbs.org/battlefieldvietnam/timeline/
• https://www.ncpedia.org/anchor/vietnam-war-timeline
• https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-16568035
• https://www.chipublib.org/the-vietnam-war-extended-timelin/
• https://www.britannica.com/event/Fall-of-Saigon
• https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/0400saigon/
• https://www.defense.gov/News/Feature-Stories/story/Article/3291950/highlighting-history-how-tet-began-the-end-of-vietnam/
• https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/apr/21/40-years-on-from-fall-of-saigon-witnessing-end-of-vietnam-war
• https://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R2208.html
• https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-fall-of-saigon-southeast-asian-perspectives/
• https://time.com/3840657/saigon-fall-lessons/
• https://www.thoughtco.com/the-viet-cong-the-vietnam-war-195432
• https://vietnamesemuseum.org/our-roots/re-education-camps/
• https://www.thevietnamese.org/2023/04/a-purposefully-forgotten-chapter-reeducation-camps-in-vietnam/
• https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/lastdays/firstdaysstoryproject/slideshow/boat-peoples-journey/
• https://www.britannica.com/topic/boat-people-refugees
• https://www.vietnameseboatpeople.org/
• https://www.theguardian.com/global/2016/mar/20/vietnamese-boat-people-survivors-families
• https://refugeehistory.org/blog/2020/8/24/boat-people-a-tale-of-two-seas
• https://borgenproject.org/vietnamese-boat-people/
• https://www.hoover.org/research/1979-sino-vietnamese-war-and-its-consequences
• https://thediplomat.com/2023/02/how-the-sino-vietnamese-war-was-purposefully-forgotten/
• https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1057&context=mscas
• https://thediplomat.com/2017/02/the-bitter-legacy-of-the-1979-china-vietnam-war/
• https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7249/j.ctt1287m9t.17?seq=1
• https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/topics/sino-vietnamese-war-1979
• https://www.britannica.com/place/Cambodia/Vietnamese-intervention
• https://www.ushmm.org/genocide-prevention/countries/cambodia/war-closes-in
• https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-29106034
• https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/195959/the-southeast-asia-war-vietnam-laos-and-cambodia/
• https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/notes/2009/N2737.pdf
• https://www.jstor.org/stable/2644912
• https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/ACFB2E.pdf
• https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/the-soviet-vietnamese-intelligence-relationship-during-the-vietnam-war
• https://www.jstor.org/stable/2644070
• https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/vietnam/overview
• https://www.imf.org/en/Countries/VNM/vietnam-raising-millions-out-of-poverty
• https://freedomhouse.org/country/vietnam/freedom-world/2024
• https://asiapacificcurriculum.ca/learning-module/vietnam-after-war
• https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/JIPA/Display/Article/3344154/from-bitter-enemies-to-strategic-partners-the-remarkable-transformation-of-usvi/
• https://www.usip.org/publications/2024/04/current-situation-vietnam
• https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/VNM/vietnam/population
• https://www.kinu.or.kr/pyxis-api/1/digital-files/3a35f2fd-694c-4dd8-aa8d-0063051a6650
• https://www.thevietnamese.org/2022/04/reunification-without-reconciliation-a-glimpse-into-the-social-conflicts-and-integration-process-in-postwar-vietnam/
• https://www.britannica.com/place/Vietnam/The-two-Vietnams-1954-65
• https://asialink.unimelb.edu.au/insights/u.s.-vietnam-post-war-reconciliation-a-work-in-process
• https://www.nytimes.com/1971/05/21/archives/vietnam-steps-toward-reunification.html
• https://americandiplomacy.web.unc.edu/2023/11/reconciling-with-a-former-enemy-post-war-diplomacy-between-the-us-and-vietnam/
• https://www.jstor.org/stable/2644912
• https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/the-soviet-vietnamese-intelligence-relationship-during-the-vietnam-war
• https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z8kw3k7/revision/8
• https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-vietnam-wars-100426/
• https://www.hrw.org/reports/pdfs/v/vietnam/vietnam913.pdf
• https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1145&context=facpubs
• https://www.vietnameseboatpeople.org/gallery1
• https://refugeehistory.org/blog/2020/8/24/boat-people-a-tale-of-two-seas
• https://thediplomat.com/2023/02/how-the-sino-vietnamese-war-was-purposefully-forgotten/
• https://thediplomat.com/2017/02/the-bitter-legacy-of-the-1979-china-vietnam-war/
• https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/can-vietnam-cambodia-build-lasting-peace
• https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/vietnam/overview#:~:text=Vietnam%20has%20grown%20bolder%20in,a%20greener%2C%20more%20inclusive%20way
• https://thediplomat.com/2022/09/why-vietnams-economic-future-is-bright-and-growing-brighter/
• Hero image source by Saga1111 / openverse, by-sa.