16 - Vietnam in the Reform Era

Summary

This chapter offers an overview of developments in postwar Vietnam until the 2010s. After the war, the communist government sought to impose a socialist system in the South in the same way they had done in the North since 1954. This utopian march to socialism was draconian and produced an economic collapse and a looming famine in the mid 1980s. With leadership change and support from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Vietnamese leaders embarked on market reform but refused political reform. For more than three decades, the communist party has overseen rapid economic growth that lifted millions out of poverty and raised national income many times. Despite impressive economic achievements, Vietnam’s political system is undergoing severe decay, with an aging leadership still pledging loyalty to communism while party and state bureaucracies are thoroughly penetrated by corrupt patronage networks that peddle offices and influences to serve officials and their cronies. The perverse outcome of a communist revolution that produced an oppressive and corrupt regime in Vietnam today has lately brought about the moment of reckoning for many Vietnamese about the true meaning of the Vietnam War.