Part II - The Postwar Era

13 Vietnam after “Liberation”

Ngo Vinh Long ^†

From the so-called “liberation of the South” (giải phóng miền Nam) in late April 1975 until 1989, Vietnam and its people encountered severe difficulties in practically every aspect – politically, ideologically, militarily, socially, psychologically, and economically. Arguably, the latter were the most serious and had the most debilitating impact on Vietnam’s people. In retrospect, several, often interrelated, factors contributed to this sorry state of affairs. It is impossible, on the one hand, to comprehensively describe, with any real justice, all of those factors and, on the other, ascribe the impact of each in a chapter of this nature. Accordingly, this chapter will briefly address the various reasons for the challenges experienced by Vietnam and its people in the period immediately following the end of the war before delving into and expounding upon the most critical among them.¹

The moment the war ended, the victorious authorities in Hanoi adopted a winner-takes-all attitude. A widespread slogan at the time, which was on the tip of the tongue of most officials from the North, was “ai thắng ai” (who is victorious over whom). Top party officials and policymakers justified this notion in ideological and theoretical terms as one of proving that “large-scale socialist production” (sản xuất lớn xã hội chủ nghĩa) through bureaucratic centralization would win in the battle against capitalism and its free-market system. They thus often ignored advice and analyses even from the Southern revolutionary leaders, dismissing some of the latter supposedly for insubordination while marginalizing many others. Lesser officials and bureaucrats from the North also tried to grab the lion’s share of victory in most areas.² They perhaps acted even more crudely than the carpetbaggers after the American civil war. All the while they were aided and abetted by hordes of Southern opportunists known as the “April 30 revolutionaries” (cách mạng 30 tháng 4).

Premature Reunification and “Socialist Transformation”

The communist-led military takeover of Saigon brought about policy responses by the United States in the subsequent weeks and months that tended to bolster the positions of regime hardliners in Hanoi. One of these responses was the recommendation on May 14, 1975, by US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to the US secretary of commerce, that the strictest trade sanctions should be imposed on Cambodia and communist-controlled South Vietnam, just as they had been on North Vietnam.³ Another response was the veto on July 30, 1975, by US Ambassador to the United Nations (UN) Daniel Patrick Moynihan, of the applications for membership by the two Vietnams as two separate states. The uncompromising stance of the United States had the effect of strengthening the hand of hardliners in Hanoi who favored early reunification with the South. Only two months after the US veto of the two independent Vietnamese applications to the UN, the Party Central Committee declared at its 24th Plenum in September 1975 that Vietnam had entered a “new revolutionary phase.” The tasks at hand were as follows:

To complete the reunification of the country and take it rapidly, vigorously, and steadily to socialism. To speed up socialist construction and perfect socialist relations of production in the North, and to carry out at the same time socialist transformation and construction in the South … in every field: political, economic, technical, cultural and ideological.

The Resolution of the 24th Plenary Session of the Party Central Committee stressed that in order to carry out socialist transformation and construction in the South, the “comprador class” and the “vestiges of the colonial and feudal land systems” had to be eradicated. To this end, the resolution emphasized that the most important task was to establish and strengthen the party system and the “people’s administrative system.”⁴

Lê Vӑn Lợi, a seasoned Northern diplomat, later explained the reasons the leadership in Hanoi thought it was necessary to speed up the unification of the country and to expeditiously carry out socialist transformation and construction in the South:

After the liberation, in the South the revolutionary government administration was not yet strengthened, the administrative system of the pro-American regime at the provincial levels and the grass-root levels in reality were not yet dismantled, and tens of thousands of bureaucratic and military officials of this puppet regime were not yet under control administratively. This is a condition that could not be prolonged. There was a need for the unification of the country in terms of governmental administration.⁵

Since both the government in Hanoi and the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Southern Vietnam (PRG) in Saigon had often stated that they envisioned the reunification of Vietnam to proceed step by step over a period of twelve to fourteen years, and had shown confidence by submitting, in mid-July 1975, their applications for membership to the UN as two separate states, the view expressed above reflected a fundamental reassessment by the Hanoi leadership. It is difficult to gauge how much of this was based on newfound fears and how much was a justification for imposing Hanoi’s political and bureaucratic control. What was certain was that the conditions on the ground in the southern part of Vietnam, especially at the grass-root and provincial levels, could not have changed that drastically in a couple of months, since these were areas where the PRG had the strongest support throughout the war years.

In any case, in order to carry out socialist transformation and construction in the South, two programs were initiated: the first was “Transformation of Industry and Commerce” (cải tạo công thương nghiệp) and the other “Transformation of Agriculture” (cải tạo nông nghiệp). Party leaders perceived that the commercialization of the South’s rural economy, particularly production by the middle peasants, was tightly connected to the comprador capitalists (tư sản mại bản) in the urban areas. The term “tư sản mại bản” (literally, capitalists who sell the country) is borrowed from the Chinese term used during the Qing Dynasty (1636–1911) that referred to merchants and bourgeois manufacturers who traded with foreigners. Since this term has a negative connotation, its use in Vietnam during this period was probably meant to differentiate these people from the “national capitalists” (tư sản quốc gia) or “domestic capitalists” (tư sản quốc nội) for easier targeting and scapegoating.

Whatever the intention, the middle peasants produced large food surpluses in the South. If the government allowed them to maintain close ties with the capitalists in the urban areas, it would be difficult for the government to procure enough staples and other agricultural products to supply the urban population and the huge numbers of people in its administration and its military. According to a US Senate investigation, by 1972 South Vietnam had more than 10 million internally displaced “refugees” out of a total population of 18.5 million, mostly living in and around urban areas and refugee camps.⁶ Therefore, transformation of the rural economy had to be tightly coordinated with the transformation of the private commercial and industrial sectors.

Before describing how the first program was implemented, it is necessary to mention the fact that many “comprador” bourgeois in Southern towns and cities were businesspeople who had given valuable support to the struggles for independence and freedom. This support included donating money to the revolutionary cause, providing lodging and residences to cadres and fighters, participating in antiwar movements, denouncing US intervention, and opposing the policies and conduct of the Saigon regime. After the war ended, however, most of those people who were still engaged in commercial and industrial activities became targets of the transformation program. This policy change was explained, both ideologically and theoretically, by the fact that the revolution had by now moved from the “popular democratic stage” (giai đoạn dân tộc dân chủ nhân dân) to the “socialism stage” (giai đoạn xã hội chủ nghĩa). This meant that the revolution had moved from the period of struggle for national independence, when the main contradiction was between the entire Vietnamese nation and foreign interventionists, to the period of domestic struggle between different classes in order to solve the question of “who wins over whom” between capitalism and socialism within Vietnam.

Armed with the above ideological justification, the Politburo ordered the Party Standing Committee to formulate a plan for attacking the comprador class, which was given the code name “X1.” This operation was carried out in two stages. The first stage started in the middle of the night of September 9, 1975, when ninety-two persons called “leading compradors” (tư sản mại bản đầu sỏ) were arrested. Forty-seven others were summoned for questioning, three escaped, and one committed suicide. Despite the scope of the operation, the amounts of money and valuables seized were meager according to the official inventory recorded at the time. For example, there was a total of: 900 million đồng of the former regime’s currency (1,000 đồng was equal to $1 in 1974, but by late 1975 the currency had become practically worthless); $134,578 (of which $55,370 were in bank accounts); 1,200 French francs; 135 Thai Baht; 7,691 taels (about 850 lbs) of gold; 4,000 pieces of diamond jewelry; 97 pieces of jade jewelry; and 701 watches of all types. In terms of other assets, the operation confiscated: 60,435 tons of fertilizer; 8,000 tons of chemicals; 3,031,000 meters of fabric; 229 tons of aluminum; 1,295 automobile tires; 27,460 bags of cement; 136 air conditioners; 96,604 bottles of brandy and wine; 2,000 pairs of eyeglasses, etc.⁷

One wonders why the regime had gone through all the trouble and created such social, political, and psychological turmoil in order to reap such meager results. Either the inventories were faked by the cadres involved in carrying out the campaign or the “leading compradors” were really never that wealthy. In any case, perhaps because the high officials felt that they had not obtained what they thought they could, the second stage of the operation was carried out from December 4 to December 6, 1975. This time around the cadres managed to seize 288 establishments in total – of which 64 were in the industrial sector, 10 were agricultural, 82 were commercial, and the rest in other fields. The total value of all these assets was estimated at slightly above 31 million đồng, which was equivalent to about $10 million US by the official exchange rate at the time.⁸ These numbers suggest that either there was asset-stripping or the properties seized were intentionally undervalued – or both.

As it conducted the two operations against the comprador class, the government carried out a program to send urban dwellers who were considered “nonproductive” – many of whom were merchants – to the so-called “New Economic Zones” (NEZs, vùng kinh tế mới) in rural areas that had been abandoned during the war years. Many displaced war refugees were also sent back to their former native villages. One of the main aims of this campaign was to relieve the urban areas of social, economic, and political pressures. According to the official records kept by the Committee of Party Historical Research in Hồ Chí Minh City, as Saigon was renamed shortly after the country’s formal reunification, “during the first 15 days of October 1975 more than 27,000 inhabitants of the city had returned to their native villages or gone to the New Economic Zones.” During the month of October 1975, “100,000 inhabitants of the city went to the rural areas to construct New Economic Zones.” By official account, “in less than 5 months after liberation about 240,000 inhabitants of the city had enthusiastically returned to their former native villages and gone to the New Economic Zones.”⁹ It is quite a stretch to maintain that these people had “enthusiastically” done so. As this author witnessed during his six-month research trip to Vietnam over 1979 and 1980, thousands of people who had been sent to the NEZs flooded back to Hồ Chí Minh City and were living on the sidewalks because they had run out of food supplies and/or because unexploded mines and ammunition were still in the ground, injuring and killing many people there. Nevertheless, according to official estimates, by the end of 1975 nearly 6 million refugees in the South had returned to their native villages. This resulted in critical demands for land and severe land disputes in the countryside.¹⁰

The “transformation of agriculture” was carried out differently in the southern half of the country from how it was in the northern half. Since most of the rural areas in the North had already been collectivized, the government’s plan was to consolidate village cooperatives so that “large-scale socialist production” could be managed and coordinated, presumably more efficiently, at the district level. In southern Vietnam, peasant households were first encouraged to become members of the “production collectives” (tập đoàn sản xuất), purportedly in order to get them used to working together before moving them to the higher cooperative levels. These members pooled their means of production (such as land, buffaloes and cows, farm implements, and other capital inputs) and worked together in “unity production teams” (đội đoàn kết sản xuất), each composed of forty to fifty people who cultivated an average surface of 30 to 40 hectares. The administrative committee of each team included the head administrator, who was responsible for overall management, and two assistant administrators, who oversaw the particular tasks involved in planting and harvesting, rearing livestock, and performing other production activities. The responsibilities of the administrators and team members were to make sure that the production plans of the households would be feasible and would together become the common production plan of the whole team that, in turn, would meet the goals set by the central government. These goals included meeting government procurement quotas at price levels set by the government, making sure that materials purchased from the government and services provided by it would be paid on time, and a host of other matters.

Figure 13.1 Young people sit in a coffee shop in Hồ Chí Minh City (April 20, 1980).

Source: Dirck Halstead / Contributor / Hulton Archive / Getty Images.

The “production collective” system in the south neither increased agricultural production nor food procurement for the government. Although in 1976–7 staple production (in terms of rice and rice equivalents) increased from 17 percent to 20 percent over the prewar years, this was mainly because of the redistribution of about 1 million hectares of land to the landless and the reclamation of about 1 million hectares of fallow land. Government food procurement (which included taxes and government purchases) actually decreased from 950,000 metric tons in 1976 to 790,000 metric tons the following year. Food production and procurement also suffered due to the escalating conflict with Cambodia and increasing tensions with China.

Impact of Conflicts with Cambodia and China

Beginning in January 1977, Khmer Rouge forces attacked across the Cambodian border into civilian settlements in six out of seven of Vietnam’s border provinces. Such attacks occurred again in April. The Vietnamese government decided not to retaliate at this point and instead sent a conciliatory letter to Phnom Penh proposing negotiations to resolve the border problem. The Khmer Rouge rejected this offer and continued with the attacks. In September and December, the Vietnamese counterattacked strongly, pulling back each time with an offer for negotiation. But each time Phnom Penh spurned the offer for talks and continued to attack Vietnamese territory, almost until the end of 1978. A reason for this intransigence on the part of the Khmer Rouge had to do with China’s aid and support. Between 1977 and 1978, China gave Pol Pot’s Cambodia several billion dollars in economic aid and supplied it with enough weapons to equip about 200,000 troops. An estimated 10,000 Chinese troops and technical personnel were also deployed to Cambodia to improve its military capability. During these two years of attacks, Khmer Rouge forces brutally murdered about 30,000 Vietnamese civilians, impelling tens of thousands to flee the border provinces. Many people in the NEZs abandoned their farmland and flooded back into Hồ Chí Minh City and other urban areas. Several hundred thousand Cambodian refugees also fled to Vietnam during those years.

In the face of these complicated developments, on April 14, 1978, the Hanoi Politburo issued Directive 43-CT/TW, which called for the vigorous “transformation of agriculture” in southern Vietnam. Collectivization had proceeded cautiously there, especially in the Mekong River Delta, until the beginning of 1978. But now the Party leadership was willing to take a gamble that, by getting the peasants into a collective framework, the government would be able to procure food more effectively in the effort to feed the burgeoning urban population and the armed forces. In response to the conflicts with Cambodia and China, some 300,000–400,000 men and women had by now been added to the various armed services, while hundreds of thousands of refugees had flooded into the cities. In 1980, the total number of people in the armed forces and in the urban areas was estimated at 11.5 million out of a total population of around 50 million. Another primary goal, similar to what had happened in 1975, was to relieve pressure in the urban areas by sending more of their inhabitants into the rural areas, where they could be isolated and controlled.

Connected to the goals mentioned above, the party leadership was now bent on an “all-out transformation policy” (chủ trương cải tạo triệt để) of the commercial and industrial sectors. In order to be able to do this, beginning in early 1978 leaders and cadres who had been involved in the transformation campaigns in 1975 were replaced. Nguyễn Vӑn Linh, the chair of the Transformation Committee for the South in 1975, was transferred to another position. On March 23, 1978, a secret campaign was carried out whereby all privately owned enterprises were simultaneously searched. All merchandise, raw materials, and means of production were confiscated. Large, privately owned industrial enterprises were transformed into “joint enterprises” (công ty hợp doanh), while smaller ones were organized into “production collectives.” Privately owned commercial enterprises were totally dismantled; meanwhile, small retail businesses were transformed into “service collectives” (tổ dịch vụ). Many merchants were sent to the NEZs to put fallow land under cultivation or to join production collectives. Only street vendors and manual laborers, such as bicycle repairers and barbers, were allowed to remain in the urban areas. A number of owners of large and medium-sized enterprises were arrested; many others fled abroad.

Hồ Chí Minh City was the focal point of the campaign, and an official report disclosed that 28,787 private commercial households were affected. Among them, 3,493 households were “deported” to rural areas. More than 2,500 households whose business enterprises had been dismantled, but whose members were later found to have been southern party cadres or strong supporters of the revolution, were allowed to remain in place and to work as government employees in various newly established enterprises slapped together from the privately owned ones that had been dismantled. In addition to the household members who were sent to the rural areas, 30,000 people fled abroad by various means.

Nguyễn Vӑn Trân, director of the Central Economic Institute when the campaign began, said later in an interview that the deportation of people to the NEZs was related to the belief by a number of top party leaders that, historically, the ethnic Chinese population of Chợ Lờn, a twin city of Saigon/Hồ Chí Minh City, had undermined the economic and political position of Vietnam for a very long time. Combining the transformation campaign with the deportation of a number of households from this area would prevent the return of some of these problems in the future. He added further that reliance on reports by unethical “April 30 revolutionaries” because of shortages of cadres on the ground caused distortions to the formation and implementation of the policies, thereby creating “extremely bad consequences.”¹¹

One of the “extremely bad consequences” had to do with the fact that, since many of the commercial capitalists were ethnic Chinese, this gave China the opportunity to accuse Vietnam of racial discrimination and thereby to terminate all aid and all trade by mid-1978. Trade with China had accounted for 70 percent of Vietnam’s foreign trade. Much of China’s aid consisted of consumer items, such as hot-water flasks, bicycles, electric fans, canned milk, and fabrics. Without these items, the government had little to offer the peasants for their produce in order to encourage them to increase production. China also increased the military pressure on Vietnam by shelling across Vietnam’s northern border on a regular basis. More significant still was the opportunity that the hardliners in Vietnam gave China to win over the hardliners within the US foreign policy establishment who wanted to use Vietnam for a proxy war against the Soviet Union. Since this would bring about huge problems for Vietnam and the whole Southeast Asia region for the next decade or so, a brief summary of the circumstances leading to this is necessary here.

While Vietnam was confronted by domestic difficulties and mounting problems in its relations with Cambodia and China, in the United States the Democratic Party had won the White House. After assuming the presidency, Jimmy Carter sought to improve relations with Vietnam for a number of reasons, including creating peace and stability in the Southeast Asia region. After a period of “feeling out,” the United States and Vietnam began a series of negotiations in May, June, and December 1977. During the first round of talks (May 3–4, 1977), the American side showed flexibility and suggested that the two sides should immediately establish diplomatic relations without preconditions. Other existing problems could be negotiated later on. The American delegation stated that the United States would not veto Vietnam’s application to be a UN member, but because of US laws Washington could not meet the promise stated in the 1973 Paris Agreement of giving Vietnam $3.2 billion “to heal the wounds of war.” However, the American side promised that after normalization of relations the United States would lift the trade embargo and consider humanitarian aid.

The counterproposal from the Vietnamese side was that the United States must accept a whole package, which included three items: (a) full diplomatic relations, (b) Vietnamese assistance in recovering American servicemen listed as missing in action (MIA), and (c) US reparations to Vietnam in the amount of $3.2 billion, as previously pledged by the administration of US President Richard Nixon. The biggest sticking point was the latter issue. During the second round of negotiations (June 2–3, 1977), the US delegation repeated its offer made in May. The head of the Vietnamese delegation, Phan Hiền, flew back to Hanoi and pressed for flexibility on the issue of aid/reparations, but the top party leaders would not budge. On July 19, 1977, the United States withdrew its veto on Vietnam’s UN membership as an indication of its good will before the third round of talks (December 19–20, 1977). At this third round of negotiations the American delegation suggested that if the two sides could not reach an agreement on establishing full diplomatic relations, then they could create Interest Sections in each other’s capital. In the latter case, the trade embargo could not be lifted right away. But Vietnam still insisted on the whole package that it had presented at the first round of talks.

On May 20, 1978, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security advisor, went to China to discuss the normalization of relations between the two countries. The previous day, Deng Xiaoping, the “paramount leader” of China, was reported in the press as saying that China was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) of the East, whereas Vietnam was the Cuba of East Asia. Given this development, it is not certain whether the top leaders in Vietnam still had any hope of normalizing relations with the United States. But for the next few months Vietnam offered, both publicly and through the offices of such countries as France, Sweden, and the Soviet Union, to drop the precondition for economic aid and promised to help the United States wholeheartedly in solving the MIA issues. On July 31, 1978, Vietnamese Premier Phạm Vӑn Đồng told an American delegation in Hanoi led by Senator Edward Kennedy not only that Vietnam had dropped the precondition for US economic aid in order to normalize relations with the United States, but that Vietnam also truly wanted to be a good friend of the United States.¹² Upon his return, Senator Kennedy called upon the US government to establish diplomatic relations with Vietnam, to lift the trade embargo against Vietnam, and to give Vietnam aid “according to the humanitarian traditions of our country.”¹³ This was followed by meetings between US Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke and the Vietnamese foreign minister at the UN headquarters in New York on September 22 and 27, 1978, to discuss the normalization of relations between the two countries. The two agreed on normalization without any preconditions.

According to Brzezinski, on September 28, 1978, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance sent President Carter a report on the details of the agreement to normalize relations with Vietnam and recommended that normalization should proceed immediately after the congressional elections in early November. Brzezinski, a staunch Cold Warrior, strongly opposed this recommendation. According to Brzezinski, as of October 11, 1978, he had been successful in getting President Carter to drop the decision to normalize relations with Vietnam.¹⁴ Instead, at the end of October 1978, “Vietnam was presented with a set of preconditions it could not possibly meet in the current situation.” Recognition, the United States now maintained, could not occur until three issues had been resolved to its total satisfaction: “the near-war between Vietnam and Cambodia; the close ties between Vietnam and the Soviet Union; and the continued flood of refugees from Vietnam.”¹⁵

Fearing that the tough stance by the United States would encourage both Cambodia and China to stage a pincer attack on Vietnam, in early November 1978 Vietnam signed the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union. On December 15, the United States announced normalization of relations with China. On December 25, Vietnam invaded Cambodia in order to preempt a pincer attack, claiming publicly that it went into Cambodia to save the Cambodian people from the genocidal Pol Pot regime. In late January 1979, Deng Xiaoping arrived in the United States for a visit and announced that China would “teach Vietnam a lesson.” He asked President Carter for “moral support” for the forthcoming Chinese punitive war against Vietnam. In his memoirs, Brzezinski disclosed his concern that President Carter would be persuaded by Cyrus Vance’s advice and would ask Deng Xiaoping not to use force against Vietnam. Therefore, Brzezinski stated that he did everything in his power to ensure that President Carter would support China.¹⁶

Early in the morning of February 17, 1979, several divisions of crack Chinese troops simultaneously attacked Vietnam along the entire length of the northern border and went on to occupy Vietnam’s six northern provinces. Six divisions invaded Cao Bằng province, and three divisions were used against each of Lạng Sơn and Lào Cai provinces. It was widely reported that during their occupation Chinese troops reduced the six northernmost Vietnamese provinces to rubble and committed many atrocities. What is less known is the fact that after withdrawing from the said provinces, Chinese troops still continued to attack Vietnam across the northern border until 1989, causing much loss in lives and property. For example, the Battles of Vị Xuyên in Hà Giang province in April and May 1984 cost the lives of nearly 2,000 Vietnamese troops. From 1979 to 1989, China consistently refused to accept Vietnam’s proposals to hold talks to discuss the border issues, putting forth preconditions that included Vietnam’s total withdrawal from Cambodia and denunciation of the Soviet Union. Some of China’s top leaders even said publicly that they wanted to stretch Vietnam out and bleed it white as part of their proxy war against the Soviet Union. As a result, Vietnam had to maintain about 1.6 million soldiers for the defense of the northern and western borders.

The maintenance of such a large military force required increased supplies of food and materials. However, the “socialist transformation” campaigns in the rural and urban areas had already disrupted production capabilities and supply chains, creating severe shortages in food and in almost all other commodities. In the rural areas of the south, many peasants who refused to enter the collectives and the cooperatives left 1.8 million hectares of their land uncultivated out of a total of 7 million hectares in the entire country. Food procurement by the government, in terms of tax and purchases, decreased to 613,000 metric tons in 1979, as opposed to 1.1 million metric tons in 1976, 989,000 metric tons in 1977, and 716,000 metric tons in 1978.¹⁷ Meanwhile, many former merchants and skilled workers from the urban areas who had been sent to the countryside to work in the newly established collectives did not have the means of production and the necessary skills to put the land under cultivation. Added to these problems was the fear that a prolonged war with China and with the remnants of Pol Pot’s army in Cambodia would bring about much more hardship and suffering. A combination of these and other factors led an increasing number of people in all regions of Vietnam to flee to other countries in search of safety and opportunities. The exodus from Vietnam during this period has been estimated at around 600,000 people. While many of these refugees encountered severe hardship and unspeakable tragedies, the exodus also created much criticism of Vietnam by other countries in the region, thereby contributing to its further isolation from the international community.

From Stop-Gap Measures to “Renovation”

Instead of reexamining the basic reasons behind the problems produced by the transformation campaigns, Hanoi embarked on a series of stop-gap measures to try to remedy them. For example, on November 18, 1980, the prime minister’s office issued the decree code-named 306-TTg ordering employees in all government offices and state-owned enterprises to go, by rotation, to rural areas about 25 to 30 miles (40 to 50 kilometers) in distance from the cities to put under cultivation land that the collectives and cooperatives had left fallow. Since government offices and enterprises had by now ballooned with employees who did not have much work to do, as a result of the transformation programs, it was not difficult to send them every month to the rural areas to till the land and raise livestock. The problem was that the costs involved in getting these government employees to these rural areas exceeded many times over the values of the things they could produce.

Stop-gap measures of this nature lasted for several years, in spite of courageous attempts by intellectuals and officials at various levels to voice their opinions on what they thought were the underlying problems. Many cadres were dismissed from their positions, while many independent intellectuals were driven to leave the country, since they realized not only that their interventions would not be listened to, but that their personal welfare would also be compromised. At the same time, however, the dire conditions in the country brought about a groundswell of resistance to the failed government policies and programs in every region and in most sectors of the economy. This grass-roots movement, which involved the participation of local inhabitants and officials both in rural and urban areas, lasted from 1979 to 1986, and had many ups and downs. This became known as a period of “fence-breaking” (phá rào) to indicate the efforts at tearing down the barriers that had been set up by the government at all levels to obstruct local and national development. Most of the time, however, these efforts involved subtle, indirect maneuvers to avoid direct confrontation with the authorities. In fact, the movement for renting out cooperative lands to household bidders for a certain agreed-upon percentage of the crops was initially called “sneak contracts” (khoán chui). Eventually, its name changed to “household contracts” (khoán hộ) and “two-way contracts” (khoán hai chiều). The overall effect was to force the central government to begin incrementally the process of reforms that culminated in the policy called Đổi mới (Renovation) in 1986.¹⁸ But the real fruits of this change in outlook and policies only came after the withdrawal of all Vietnamese troops from Cambodia in the early 1990s.

Conclusion

After the so-called “liberation of the South,” Vietnamese leaders plunged Vietnam into more than a decade of difficulties on all fronts because of overconfidence, ideological steadfastness, and miscalculations. Domestic resistance and international pressures of various natures eventually brought about grudging changes that finally culminated in the reform process that opened up a new horizon for Vietnam and its people.

14 The Third World and the Communist Triumph in Vietnam

Paul Thomas Chamberlin

On the surface, 1975 appeared as a triumphal year in the decades-long history of postcolonial revolution. The year began in high spirits as progressive revolutionaries around the world continued to celebrate the fall of the Portuguese Empire in southern Africa and the rise of Angola and Mozambique as independent states. Rhodesia and the apartheid regime in South Africa now appeared as the key battlegrounds in the war against colonialism in Africa. Perhaps equally encouraging was the news that Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), had delivered a hugely successful address on the floor of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in late November 1974. Arafat and his comrades had worked hard to identify their struggle with a broad alliance of revolutionary forces across the world that included Cuba, China, Algeria, and North Vietnam. Palestinian fighters cast themselves as Arab Che Guevaras – part of a rising generation of liberation warriors waging a struggle against oppression that reached from the rice paddies of Southeast Asia, to the rocky hillsides of South Lebanon, south to the plains of southern Africa, and across the Atlantic in the rainforests of Central America. News of the PLO’s success was only the beginning. Revolutionary armies in South Vietnam and Cambodia continued to make gains through the early months of 1975 that, by April, brought them to the gates of Saigon and Phnom Penh. The decades-long battle for liberation in Southeast Asia seemed as if it was drawing to a triumphal close. The implication of these events could not have been less than heartening for progressive revolutionaries across the wider world.

Despite appearances, this Third World secular-revolutionary triumph would be short-lived. Although many contemporaries saw the victory of the Vietnamese Revolution as a transformative moment in the Cold War, subsequent events around the world suggested that a very different set of changes were underway. Even as peoples around the world celebrated the victories of 1974 and 1975, the unraveling of the progressive revolutionary project in the developing world was well underway. Changes taking place in the wider international system would transform the revolutionary playing field during the 1970s and 1980s. This chapter locates the communist victory in Vietnam in a regional and global context – that of what Odd Arne Westad has aptly termed the Global Cold War. It first situates the Vietnamese Revolution as part of a broader wave of communist revolutions in East Asia before turning to examine the impact of the Sino-Soviet split in Hanoi and around the wider postcolonial world. From there, the chapter identifies the mid-1970s as a key moment in the unraveling of the Third World secular-revolutionary project. It then concludes by looking at the 1980s and the rise of competing forms of postcolonial revolution.¹

Conventional interpretations of the 1970s tended to treat the post-Vietnam period as the nadir of US power and influence in world affairs – a view shared by many contemporaries and given voice by Ronald Reagan’s “Let’s Make America Great Again” presidential campaign in 1980. Recent histories of the 1970s by US historians have challenged this understanding, suggesting instead that the decade witnessed a series of cultural, political, and economic revolutions that paved the way for a resurgence in the 1980s and 1990s.² A similar shift has taken place in the field of international history as scholars reexamine these transformations in the global sphere. The slow pace of declassification in Western countries, combined with the significant obstacles to archival access in many Third World states, has played a large role in this dearth of studies. Nevertheless, several general works³ together with more specific studies⁴ have begun to throw new light on this period. With the passage of time, and the end of the Cold War, the 1970s appear not as a triumph for the forces of Third World communism but rather as a tipping point in the story of their unraveling.

Viewed in the longer term, Hanoi’s victories in 1973 and 1975 appear as the final triumphs in a string of East Asian communist conquests stretching back to the late 1940s. The resumption of the Chinese civil war between Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Jiang Jieshi’s Guomindang government in 1946 marked the beginning of a communist strategic offensive that would span the next three decades. The Chinese civil war, the French Indochina War, the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Massacre of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), and the Cambodian civil war each occurred as part of this offensive that would serve to transform the region. To observers in Western capitalist countries, it appeared as if the East was indeed turning Red. Although officials in the Eisenhower administration would first articulate the domino theory, fears of communist contagion and the spreading influence of both Moscow and Beijing dated back to the 1940s.

Furthermore, there was no reason to expect that such upheavals would be limited to East Asia. The entire postcolonial world – and developing countries in Latin America – appeared vulnerable to communist influence. In particular, Mao Zedong’s doctrine of People’s War seemed tailor-made for what was to become the Third World. While Karl Marx had seen an industrial proletariat as the engine of communist revolution and V. I. Lenin had looked to a hardened vanguard of revolutionaries, Mao identified the people – and in China’s case the peasantry – as the source of revolutionary energy. In Mao’s formulation, agrarian societies could leapfrog the stage of industrial-capitalist development and move directly into a communist revolution. Likewise, the People’s War promised to serve as a blueprint for guerrilla armies hoping to defeat better-armed conventional forces backed by wealthy states. Mao and the CCP’s success served as a tremendous source of inspiration for revolutionaries around the world. Third World fighters – using a highly modified version of Mao’s playbook – won a string of victories in the Korean War, the French Indochina War, and the Algerian War that appeared to validate these Maoist ideas. Indeed, by the late 1960s, it appeared as if Third World guerrilla forces might be unstoppable.

The Unraveling World Revolution

However, these triumphs masked a deeper set of problems. While prevailing opinion in the West tended to see international communism as a monolithic force in the Cold War, deep fissures existed between the two most influential communist powers, the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union. Tensions between Chinese and Soviet communists stretched back to the Chinese civil war. Mao would never forget Stalin’s reluctant and partial support during the darkest days of the Chinese Revolution. And Stalin’s death in 1953 only served to make matters worse. With Stalin gone, Mao had good reason to see himself as the reigning patriarch of the international communist movement. But Soviet leaders had no inclination to surrender their claims to leadership of the world revolution to the CCP. Nikita Khrushchev’s rise to power and his 1956 “Secret Speech” further strained relations between Moscow and Beijing. Mao and his comrades viewed Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and his repudiation of his predecessor’s cult of personality as an attack on key tenets of the CCP’s authority. The Soviet military intervention in Hungary that same year also worried Beijing – how long would it be before Moscow chose to send its forces against China in order to keep the CCP in line? Conversely, Khrushchev’s willingness to engage in “peaceful coexistence” with the Western powers seemed to signal that the Kremlin intended to abandon the cause of world revolution – a cause that still appeared urgent to Beijing. The Soviet Union’s refusal to back China in its 1962 war with India marked yet another slap in Mao’s face. Under the weight of these indignities, Mao and his comrades were only too happy to needle the Kremlin following its diplomatic defeat in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Beijing was quick to denounce Moscow’s failure to live up to its commitments in the postcolonial world, as well as the Kremlin’s Marxist “revisionism.” It was in response to Beijing’s attacks – more than in an attempt to challenge US power – that Khrushchev had announced Moscow’s support for “wars of national liberation” in the Third World in early 1961. By the early 1960s, the Sino-Soviet split was tearing the Third World’s global revolution apart.⁵

Indochina would emerge as a key battleground in the nascent struggle between Moscow and Beijing. Whereas both communist powers had cooperated to restrain the more militant factions of Hanoi’s leadership during the 1954 Geneva Conference, the Sino-Soviet split created new opportunities for North Vietnamese leaders such as Lê Duẩn to pursue the military reunification of North and South Vietnam. With both Moscow and Beijing looking to burnish their Third World revolutionary credentials, Vietnam became a proving ground for both powers. Beijing would support Hanoi as its East Asian protégé while Moscow used North Vietnam to prove its continued commitment to wars of national liberation. In this way, Lê Duẩn and his comrades were able to gain military, political, and economic support from both communist powers. In the short run, then, the Sino-Soviet split opened doors for revolutionaries in such places as Hanoi. However, in the longer term, the increasing acrimony between China and the Soviet Union boded ill for the cause of postcolonial revolution.⁶

A clear example of the fallout from the Sino-Soviet split came with the 1965 annihilation of the PKI – the largest nongoverning communist party in the world. Like North Vietnam, Indonesia had become a battlefield in the contest between Moscow and Beijing. However, unlike North Vietnam, Indonesia had a third contender for influence – the United States. While China and the Soviet Union struggled over the PKI and Indonesia’s left-leaning, charismatic President Sukarno, Washington built influence in the Indonesian Army. Many of the details of what happened in the summer and fall of 1965 have been erased, destroyed, or hidden, but scholars have offered a likely reconstruction of what followed. Spurred on by the Sino-Soviet competition – and possibly by US CIA machinations – the PKI appears to have staged a preemptive attack on September 30, 1965 on top leaders in the Indonesian Army, which the PKI suspected of planning a coup against Sukarno. While six high-ranking commanders were murdered in the attack, key officers – most notably Major General Suharto – survived. The army responded by launching a nationwide crackdown against the PKI that quickly escalated to a quasi-genocidal massacre. In the coming months, army forces, Islamic youth movements, and ordinary Indonesians slaughtered hundreds of thousands of PKI members and associates. US officials recognized that purge as a victory for American interests in Southeast Asia’s most populous nation. Time magazine summed up the mood in July 1966 when it described the annihilation of Indonesia’s communists as the “West’s best news for years in Asia.”⁷

In retrospect, the massacre of the PKI was as representative – and as strategically significant – as Hanoi’s victory over the Saigon regime. The Sino-Soviet split had divided Indonesia’s communists and created a situation in the autumn of 1965 in which they either overplayed their hand or fell into a trap set by US-backed military officers. Through the second half of 1965 and 1966, Suharto consolidated control over the Indonesian government and established a pro-US military regime in Jakarta. For all intents and purposes, Indonesia was now firmly in the Western camp – Washington’s darkest fears of falling dominoes would not come to pass. Even if Vietnam and the rest of Indochina fell to the communists, the region’s largest and most strategically important nation was in the hands of a strong, reliably pro-Western military regime. As US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara later explained, the destruction of the PKI “significantly altered the regional balance of power [in Asia] and substantially reduced America’s real stake in Vietnam.” But the geostrategic implications of Suharto’s rise were mostly drowned out by the fury of America’s escalating war in Indochina.⁸

Even as the Vietnam War intensified, the global communist movement was coming undone. The same forces that allowed Hanoi to play Moscow and Beijing off one another also set the stage for the slaughter of the PKI. But the drama of America’s war in Vietnam overshadowed these dynamics. So, too, did the successful efforts of Hanoi and the National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (NLF, or Viet Cong) to reach out to the broader revolutionary world. Much like the Algerians before them, the Vietnamese recognized that the international landscape of the middle Cold War offered fertile ground for their diplomacy.⁹ The global process of decolonization had transformed the international arena in the years since 1945. The UN General Assembly would grow a membership of several dozen states to nearly 200 during these decades. As a result, the Western powers would find themselves increasingly outnumbered in key international forums by new, postcolonial nations in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Many of these new states held deep sympathies with fellow peoples struggling for national liberation. Furthermore, the emergence of the nonaligned movement in the 1950s created new international networks linking postcolonial states, national liberation fighters, and progressive forces. By the early 1960s, aspiring revolutionaries such as those in Vietnam found an array of eager supporters in the so-called Third World.

Vietnamese communist leaders embraced this notion of “guerrilla diplomacy” by reaching out to groups around the radical world. In the United States and Western Europe, millions of leftwing students, civil rights activists, and progressives came to celebrate the cause of the Vietnamese liberation fighters and denounce the “imperialism” of the United States and South Vietnam. Revolutionary states in the postcolonial world also made shows of support – even though their aid was vastly outweighed by that coming from Beijing and Moscow.¹⁰

The Vietnamese communists – along with the Algerian and Cuban Revolutions – became a central driver in the formation and proliferation of what has been called the myth of the heroic guerrilla that arose during the 1960s.¹¹ For a time, Third World liberation fighters seemed nearly invincible. From Mao and Ahmed Ben Bella to Hồ Chí Minh and Che Guevara, these national liberation fighters came to appear as the leaders of an unstoppable force in international affairs. Had Sukarno and the PKI’s demise received more attention, observers of international affairs might have drawn a different conclusion. But the high drama of the Vietnam War proved too mesmerizing. While Hanoi’s victories troubled Washington, they electrified revolutionary groups in the postcolonial world.

Among those transfixed by the war in Vietnam were Palestinian revolutionaries. Leila Khaled – who gained international fame as a strikingly attractive female aircraft hijacker – would write that the Palestinians “must learn the secrets of the Vietnamese.” The largest Palestinian guerrilla group, Fatah, published translations of Võ Nguyên Giáp’s writings in its series “Revolutionary Studies and Experiences” alongside studies of the Chinese, Algerian, and Cuban Revolutions. In March 1970, Hanoi would host a delegation of Palestinian liberation fighters, including Yasser Arafat. The Palestinians toured government and military facilities and met with such leaders as Giáp. “The Vietnamese and Palestinian peoples have much in common,” he told the Arab visitors, “just like two people suffering from the same disease.” Throughout their struggle, Palestinian fighters would seek to identify themselves with the Vietnamese. The Jordanian capital of Amman would be an “Arab Hanoi.” Fatah’s moral victory in the 1968 battle of al-Karamah would earn comparisons with the concurrent Tet Offensive in South Vietnam. The fact that both South Vietnam and Israel were key recipients of US aid reinforced these associations, as did revelations that Israeli military officials had visited Saigon to observe US counterinsurgency operations in Southeast Asia. By the late 1960s, many – though certainly not all – leftwing political activists in Western Europe and North America would place Arafat alongside Che Guevara and Hồ Chí Minh as icons of a globalized struggle against colonialism in all its forms.¹²

No single episode of the war had greater global resonance than the 1968 Tet Offensive. Although the offensive itself proved to be a military failure, the political impact reverberated around the world. In the United States, Tết proved to be a tipping point in convincing a majority of Americans that the war was not being won. As the public began to turn against the conflict, the antiwar movement gained momentum. On campuses and the streets of cities across America, students and political activists rose up against the established order. Moreover, these movements were not confined to the United States. Large protests broke out in multiple countries in what historians have identified as a global moment. These uprisings owed much to the communist triumphs in Vietnam and the Tet Offensive in particular. Anti-war sentiment proved to be a key rallying point for various groups of activists protesting. African Americans fighting for civil rights, disgruntled students protesting conditions in major American and European universities, environmentalists, women fighting for equal rights, and others found common cause in their opposition to the American war in Vietnam.¹³

Once again, however, appearances proved deceiving. Even as the Tet Offensive and the global uprisings of 1968 appeared as sweeping victories for the international forces of revolution, the Sino-Soviet split continued to widen. In the summer of 1969, clashes along the Soviet–Chinese border escalated to a low-level border war between the two communist powers. Although the death toll only reached into triple digits, the potential for a wider conflict remained. Indeed, in September 1969 Soviet diplomats communicating with US officials quietly floated the prospect of staging a preemptive strike against Chinese nuclear facilities – a move that would very likely have sparked a wider conflict between Moscow and Beijing. Although the Kremlin chose not to launch such an attack, it was clear to all that Sino-Soviet relations were not what they had once been. To many Chinese leaders, the Soviet Union – and not the United States – appeared as the greatest foreign threat. Thus, even as the communist triumphs in Vietnam seized the world’s attention, the seeds took root for a massive geostrategic realignment between Beijing, Moscow, and Washington.

The Tipping Point

These two threads – the revolutionary and geostrategic – would converge in East Pakistan in 1971 in a war that created the state of Bangladesh. Having suffered a brutal crackdown at the hands of Pakistani military forces in the wake of the Awami League’s electoral victory, East Pakistani separatists launched an armed insurgency to achieve full independence for Bangladesh. Western journalists touring the battlefields noted the striking similarity between the wars in Bangladesh and Vietnam. Meanwhile, Bangladesh liberation fighters – Mukti Bahini – identified their common cause with Vietnamese revolutionaries. Both were fighting foreign occupations backed by the United States; both would use guerrilla tactics to achieve victory. But the liberation of Bangladesh would also contain a more ominous dimension for the forces of progressive revolution. In the latter stages of the conflict, as India and Pakistan went to war against one another, the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) moved into alignment. Both Washington and Beijing feared Moscow’s ambitions in South Asia, and both supported Pakistan as a counterweight to India. Moreover, US President Richard Nixon was using Pakistan as a backchannel in his bid to “open” China. During the darkest days of the India–Pakistan conflict, Nixon would reach out to Beijing to request the mobilization of Chinese military forces along the border with India. Though Beijing balked at Nixon’s suggestion, the larger implications were clear: the Sino-Soviet split had transformed the relationship between the world’s three greatest powers.¹⁴

The following February – 1972 – Nixon shocked the world by visiting China. Nixon’s trip capped a long series of negotiations that brought about a rapprochement between Washington and Beijing. This realignment transformed the triangular relationship between the United States, the Soviet Union, and China, and helped to ensure that the Sino-Soviet split was irreparable. Henceforth, Washington and Beijing would partner on various projects designed to thwart Soviet foreign policies and diminish the Kremlin’s standing in the world. In the wake of this opening to China, Washington’s stakes in the Vietnam War dropped even lower. Accordingly, Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, redoubled their efforts to bring the war in Vietnam to a close, now with the intermittent support of China. Leaders in Beijing also recognized that their best interests lay in aiding an American withdrawal from China. Although the Nixon administration staged a furious and ultimately futile series of campaigns to secure the survival of Saigon, the decision to pull out of South Vietnam had effectively been made. And while the Saigon regime struggled to hold on – bolstered by substantial infusions of US aid – Hanoi prepared for a final offensive to secure complete control of Vietnam. In March 1975, North Vietnamese forces launched their last campaign against South Vietnamese troops. Communist units stormed south, reaching the gates of Saigon in early April. Washington evacuated its remaining personnel while tens of thousands of Vietnamese fled on boats.¹⁵

From the perspective of the Global Cold War, then, the North Vietnamese victories in 1973 and 1975 proved decidedly pyrrhic. Hanoi had reunified Vietnam under communist rule, the Saigon regime had been destroyed, and Washington’s South Vietnamese modernization project had been defeated. But while the drama in Vietnam held center stage, the Sino-Soviet split, the massacre of the PKI, and Nixon’s opening to China transformed the structure of power in the wider postcolonial world. Over this same period, the Nixon administration also established a new approach to fighting the Cold War in the Third World under the auspices of the Nixon Doctrine. The roots of this approach stretch back at least to the 1950s and the publication of Henry Kissinger’s first major foreign policy article, “Military Policy and Defense of the ‘Grey Areas’” in 1955. In the article, Kissinger argued that Cold War nuclear strategy and Dwight Eisenhower’s policy of mutually assured destruction effectively guaranteed that a superpower clash over core areas such as Central Europe or Japan would set off a full-scale nuclear war. However, nuclear retaliation was less effective for so-called “grey areas” – peripheral regions of secondary geostrategic importance. He wondered, was the United States prepared to risk a Soviet counterstrike against New York or Chicago in order to defend US interests in Indochina, Burma, or Afghanistan? Kissinger argued that the United States must maintain the ability to intervene in such areas if it hoped to defend its position in the Third World.¹⁶ In less than a decade, American troops would be engaged in just such a venture in South Vietnam. But as Kissinger and other US officials discovered, the American public remained unconvinced of the need to sacrifice tens of thousands of American lives to maintain such commitments. The Nixon Doctrine would ultimately emerge as an attempt to defend American interests in peripheral areas without sacrificing large numbers of American lives. Perhaps indigenous forces – armed, trained, and funded by the United States – could serve as local police powers in the Third World.

Although Nixon’s failed “Vietnamization” scheme is the best-known example of the Nixon Doctrine, the idea was applicable to much of the Third World. A key inspiration for these ideas arrived in the months leading up to the Tet Offensive at the far western corner of southern Asia. In June 1967, the State of Israel launched a spectacular preemptive strike against the Egyptian and Syrian Air Forces. In less than a week, the Israeli military soundly defeated its Arab neighbors and occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Sinai peninsula. Because Israel was a pro-Western nation and Egypt and Syria were aligned with the Soviet Union, the 1967 Arab–Israeli War also appeared as a stand-in for a hypothetical clash between North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Warsaw Pact military forces. To many Americans, Israel appeared to have succeeded while US troops in Vietnam continued to struggle. If Washington could find more allies like Israel, the United States might gain the upper hand in the Cold War battle for the Third World. The 1968 Tet Offensive and the slow, painful failure of US policy in South Vietnam ultimately reinforced this lesson: rather than rolling back the Kremlin’s influence, it might be enough to raise the cost of any future communist gains by pouring resources into pro-Western allies in the Third World. Americans could afford to pay the bills as long as no US soldiers were coming home in body bags.¹⁷

By the early 1970s, Nixon Doctrine aid had begun pouring into Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Brazil. America’s heavily armed Third World allies might not be able to reverse the tide of leftwing revolutions in the postcolonial world, but they could make any communist gains tremendously bloody – and they could do so without sacrificing significant numbers of American lives. As was the case in 1967, Israel again provided a key model for fighting Third World revolutionaries. In the years following 1968, the PLO had tried to emulate the Algerian and Vietnamese models by coordinating armed operations on the ground with a global diplomatic campaign in the international arena. PLO leaders reached out to revolutionary groups and leftwing regimes around the world, securing the political support of the majority of the world’s community by 1974. As Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish mused, “In the conscience of the people of the world, the torch has been passed from Vietnam to us.” At the end of that year, the UN General Assembly voted to recognize the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and granted the organization permanent observer status – a significant victory for a liberation movement that controlled no official territory. But in contrast to Algerian and Vietnamese revolutionaries before them, Palestinian leaders were unable to translate these diplomatic victories into progress on the ground. With the firm backing of the United States, a massive influx of arms, and the cover provided by a US veto in the UN Security Council, Israeli leaders scorned UN resolutions and dug in their heels in opposition to the PLO. The following year, 1975, the PLO found itself embraced at the UN but locked out of Palestine and embroiled in a vicious civil war in Lebanon.¹⁸

On the other side of the continent, in Southeast Asia, the forces of postcolonial revolution still appeared energized. The spring of 1975 brought two triumphs that electrified the millions of people around the world who had cheered the Vietnamese Revolution: on April 17, Khmer Rouge forces seized Phnom Penh; thirteen days later, Saigon fell to the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and the NLF. April 1975 thus brought not one but two victories for the Third World forces of revolution. But those celebrating these triumphs had reason to pause. After capturing the capital of Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge forced tens of thousands of Cambodians out of Phnom Penh, compelling those that survived grueling marches along the roads to settle in the countryside. Next door, Hanoi prepared to send thousands of Vietnamese citizens who had worked with the Saigon regime to reeducation camps.¹⁹

Furthermore, despite their shared communist ideology, deep animosities existed between Phnom Penh and Hanoi. During much of the American war in Vietnam, Vietnamese forces had used Cambodian territory as a rear base – the notorious Hồ Chí Minh Trail ran through Cambodia’s remote eastern regions. This reality brought Vietnamese and Cambodian fighters into close proximity. Khmer Rouge forces benefited immensely from the Vietnamese presence inside Cambodia, gaining shelter, a limited supply of weapons, and training at the hands of more experienced Vietnamese guerrillas. But these experiences also bred resentment. Vietnamese commanders often treated the Khmer Rouge as subordinates in their own country, and the Vietnamese always placed priority on their own revolution over that of the Cambodians. Moreover, the Vietnamese presence inside Cambodia invited ferocious US reprisals. American B-52s carpet-bombed the Cambodian rainforests while commandos staged limited raids into the country in search of the elusive Vietnamese communist headquarters. Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia in the spring and summer of 1970 unleashed widespread devastation across the eastern reaches of the country.²⁰

These festering resentments would rise to the surface after the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975, creating a Cambodian–Vietnamese split to match the Sino-Soviet one. Cambodian leaders began by marginalizing – and eventually executing – their comrades who had spent large amounts of time in Hanoi. At the same time, the party put forward a highly chauvinistic and xenophobic program that aimed to expel all foreign influence from Cambodia and seal the country off from future outside meddling. While these policies expelled Westerners, they also targeted Vietnamese – officials and civilians alike. As the Khmer Rouge transformed Cambodia into a massive forced labor camp, they laid plans to exact revenge on their Vietnamese neighbors. Beginning in 1977, Khmer Rouge forces staged a series of border raids into Vietnam. Hanoi initially responded to these attacks on a tit-for-tat basis, but as the violence escalated to several full-scale massacres, Vietnamese leaders determined that more drastic action had to be taken. In 1978, Hanoi assembled a government-in-exile composed of Cambodians who had fled the Khmer Rouge and began preparing for a full-scale invasion of Democratic Kampuchea.²¹

On December 25, 1978, Vietnamese forces launched their attack. Some 150,000 soldiers supported by heavy armor crashed across the border and quickly forced Khmer Rouge units to retreat. In a matter of days, Vietnamese troops had reached Phnom Penh, and the Khmer Rouge leadership had abandoned the capital. Inside the city and across the countryside, Vietnamese soldiers found grisly evidence of the Khmer Rouge’s short and brutal time in power. After emptying the cities, the Khmer Rouge had forced hundreds of thousands of Cambodians into grueling agricultural labor. In an effort to stage a total revolution that would effectively turn the clock back to year zero, the regime tried to completely overturn the foundations of Cambodian society. After resettling the population, the Khmer Rouge separated children from parents, instituted an extensive regime of surveillance, and tried to transform the nation into an agricultural powerhouse. While the Khmer Rouge massacred thousands, its disastrous agricultural programs unleashed man-made famines across Cambodia that increased the death toll exponentially. In all, nearly 25 percent of Cambodia’s pre-1975 population perished under the Khmer Rouge reign. So shocking were these reports that much of the international left initially dismissed them as CIA propaganda. In the long run, however, the revelations of what life had been like inside Democratic Kampuchea did little to encourage foreign emulators.²²

Just as unsettling, for some observers, was the realization that two communist states – the products of successful revolutions that had triumphed less than two weeks apart – were now engaged in a fratricidal war. The worst was yet to come. In February 1979, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army launched an invasion of Vietnam. Beijing was now at war with Hanoi. The Sino-Vietnamese War would conclude in less than a month and leave somewhere around 60,000 people dead. Although short and strategically inconclusive, the symbolism of the conflict – and the larger Third Indochina War – reverberated throughout the communist and postcolonial worlds. The spectacle of three of the Third World’s most successful revolutionary states at war with one another devastated the illusion of global communist solidarity. Political scientist Benedict Anderson captured the gravity of the moment when he identified the Vietnamese–Cambodian and Sino-Vietnamese Wars as markers of “a fundamental transformation in the history of Marxism and Marxist movements” in the introduction to his seminal study of nationalism, Imagined Communities.²³ The Third Indochina War, the Sino-Soviet split, and the growing list of indictments regarding the human rights records of communist regimes crippled the appeal of leftwing politics for revolutionaries around the Third World. That same year, 1979, however, aspiring postcolonial revolutionaries would receive a new, dynamic, noncommunist model of liberation war.

The New Face of Revolution

The world’s next great revolution would appear in Iran. The Iranian Revolution began, like many other postcolonial upheavals, as a broadbased protest movement against an oppressive regime. Shah Reza Pahlavi had ruled Iran with an iron fist since a 1953 joint CIA–MI6 coup had reinstalled him in power. The Shah had remained a reliably conservative Cold War ally to the United States who secured massive amounts of Nixon Doctrine aid, which he hoped to use to build his nation into a major regional power. By the late 1970s, Iran’s forces fielded some of the most sophisticated military equipment in the US arsenal. Meanwhile, the regime’s secret police force, the SAVAK, enjoyed a fearsome reputation bolstered by its deep penetration of Iranian society, its working relationship with the CIA and the Israeli Mossad, and rumors of horrific torture techniques employed by its interrogators.²⁴ But none of this would prove sufficient to save the Shah’s regime. Disgruntled elements from across Iranian society – liberals, reformers, merchants, socialists, communists, students, and clergy – joined a wave of protests against the regime beginning in 1977. In the coming months, the protests grew to include tens of thousands of demonstrators. By late 1978, even US officials were coming to question whether the Shah could survive. In January 1979, the Shah – who had learned he was dying of cancer – chose to flee with his family rather than launch a military crackdown that would have guaranteed a massive bloodbath.²⁵

Initially, Iran’s broad revolutionary coalition remained mostly intact – but this was about to change. In February 1979, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from his exile in France to massive crowds of cheering supporters. Khomeini and his allies quickly set about building up the clergy’s power in the new revolutionary regime and marginalizing rival factions. In short order, radical clergy were able to push aside more moderate leaders in the provisional government and assume positions of power. The hostage crisis at the US Embassy in Iran proved to be the last straw for the moderate holdouts in the regime – the path was now clear for Khomeini to assume total control. In this way, Iran’s revolution became the first large theocratic revolution of the twentieth century. This shift shocked contemporary observers around the world who had come to assume that modern revolutions were generally led by leftwing forces. Indeed, since the eighteenth century, the forces of revolution had tended to identify as liberal, socialist, or Marxist. Iran’s revolution reversed this historical momentum, signaled a structural shift in global politics, and dealt yet another blow against the secular, leftwing forces of Third World revolution.²⁶

Khomeini and his supporters borrowed elements from Third World revolutionary movements and saw themselves as liberation warriors in a similar mold to the Vietnamese. But in place of Marxism, Iran’s revolutionary leaders touted their Shi’a faith. The Iranian Revolution thus combined elements of political Islam with Third World revolutionary warfare. Indeed, the Iranian experience revealed the depleted state of the leftwing, secular politics in the postcolonial world. For a new generation of Iranians, Marxism did not appear as the most promising path to revolutionary change. This stemmed in part from the strong Shi’a faith held by many Iranians and, perhaps more importantly, from the fact that Iran’s clergy remained the best, organized institution in the country under the Shah’s reign that nevertheless managed to remain outside the regime’s control. But the collapse of worldwide communist solidarity with the Sino-Soviet split and the Third Indochina War dealt a devastating blow to the movement.

At the same time, the Iranian Revolution sent shockwaves across Central Asia and the Middle East. Iran’s eastern neighbor, Afghanistan, was also facing a challenge from Islamic revolutionaries. The previous year, communist forces had seized power in Kabul and created a Marxist regime. The new Afghan regime promptly bungled efforts to stage reforms and undercut much of what little popular support it had initially enjoyed. Infighting between rival Marxist factions and the murder of one of the key revolutionary leaders only made matters worse. These struggles placed Soviet leaders in a difficult position. Although many in the Kremlin doubted their Afghan comrades were up to the task of running the country, Moscow could not simply ignore the requests for assistance from a Marxist regime on its own borders. The unfolding revolution in Iran – which was destabilizing the region, leading the United States to expand its presence in the Persian Gulf, and leading some US officials to consider expanding relations with Kabul – added to this urgency. Ironically, the Iranian Revolution had also sown insecurities in Washington, where US officials feared that the Soviet Union might seek to expand its influence in the aftermath of the Shah’s departure. With tensions rising, Moscow decided to act: on the night of December 24, 1979, while Soviet troops moved across the border, KGB commandos staged an assault on the presidential palace in Kabul, killing Afghanistan’s president and installing Babrak Karmal in power.²⁷

The stage was now set for the last major battle of the Cold War. In a key sense, the tables had turned in the Soviet–Afghan War from earlier cases of Cold War insurgencies. Instead of a Western-backed government battling communist guerrillas, the Kremlin now supported a Marxist regime fighting against Western-backed rebels. In this same vein, the rebels – the Mujahideen, “the ones who struggle” – borrowed some of the techniques pioneered from leftwing fighters such as the Chinese, Algerians, Vietnamese, and Palestinians, but they had little use for Marxist doctrine. Rather, political Islam emerged as the prevailing ideological tendencies among the Mujahideen. Although many Mujahideen fighters and commanders were deeply religious and fought in defense of their faith, instrumentalist motivations figured heavily in this transformation. By the early 1980s, Islamist Mujahideen organizations enjoyed an overwhelming strategic advantage over their more moderate rivals.²⁸

In 1979, US President Jimmy Carter had committed to providing a modest amount of financial aid to Mujahideen guerrillas fighting the Marxist regime in Kabul. Carter’s support marked the beginning of what was to become the largest CIA covert operation of the Cold War, whereby the United States established a massive pipeline of aid to the Afghan rebels. Saudi Arabia provided matching funds that, together with CIA support, was funneled through Pakistani intelligence services (ISI) who provided on-the-ground contacts with the Mujahideen. Because CIA officers rarely entered Afghanistan, Washington effectively outsourced decisions as to which rebels received aid to the ISI. Pakistani officials – who hoped to use the Mujahideen as a bulwark against Indian influence in South Asia – chose to direct the majority of funds to Islamic fighters. In short order, the religious extremists became the best-funded and best-armed factions of the Afghan resistance.²⁹

Afghanistan would come to represent the centerpiece of the so-called Reagan Doctrine – an update of the Nixon Doctrine aimed at rolling back communism in the Third World not just by aiding conservative regimes, but also by providing aid to rightwing insurgencies. In the eyes of many US officials, the war in Afghanistan would become payback for Soviet aid to Hanoi during the Vietnam War. The aim of US policy in Afghanistan would be to create a “Soviet Vietnam” – a bloody, indecisive conflict engineered to kill thousands of Soviet soldiers and drain the Soviet economy. Whereas earlier periods had seen Moscow and Beijing functioning as key sources of foreign aid for revolutionary movements, Washington assumed this position in the final decade of the Cold War. Furthermore, Beijing also reemerged as a patron of the Mujahideen, forming a link in the foreign supply chain to the rebels, and effectively partnering with the United States in waging a proxy war against the Soviet Union.³⁰

If the long 1960s belonged to the Vietnamese Revolution, the 1980s belonged to the Mujahideen. The Vietnam analogies made by US officials would hold true for the Soviet–Afghan War with one glaring exception. Whereas Washington emerged from Vietnam in a stronger position vis-à-vis the Cold War, the war in Afghanistan would leave Moscow crippled. By the time the last Soviet troops left Afghanistan, the Soviet Union was spiraling toward collapse. Furthermore, if the fall of Saigon marked one of the last great victories for a Third World communist movement, the fall of Kabul in 1992 to Mujahideen forces was only the beginning of a larger story of the rise of Islamic revolutionary forces through much of the postcolonial world. Afghanistan descended into a vicious civil war between rival Mujahideen factions that, in 1996, gave an opening to a little-known Islamist movement calling itself the Taliban that would, five years later, burst onto the world stage as part of the September 11, 2001 attacks. The most notorious revolutionary of the twenty-first century would likewise emerge from the crucible of the Soviet–Afghan War. Osama Bin Laden launched his career as an Islamic militant as a minor figure in the anti-Soviet resistance. Through the 1990s, Bin Laden had built a potent, transnational force of committed Islamic fighters that would mount a global campaign of violence in the coming years.

Indeed, as the tides of the Cold War receded, the forces of Islamic revolution were on the march. Along the shores of the Mediterranean, PLO fighters – who had cast themselves as Arab incarnations of Vietnamese and Cuban liberation fighters and, in doing so, became darlings of the international left in the 1970s – faced a major internal challenge for leadership of the Palestinian liberation movement from Hamas, an extremist offshoot of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood. Meanwhile, in Algeria – a state created by a Third World revolution that had inspired and been inspired by the Vietnamese example – an even bloodier fate awaited. When the religious party, the Islamic Salvation Front, appeared to be on the verge of a victory in the 1992 parliamentary elections, the Algerian military suspended the election, sparking a vicious civil war that killed perhaps over 100,000 people.³¹

Figure 14.1 Afghan Mujahideen who fought against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1980s).

Source: Pascal Manoukian / Contributor / Sygma / Getty Images.

Conclusion

If the communist triumphs of 1975 in Vietnam and across the rest of Indochina marked the zenith of the Third World’s communist revolution, they also signaled that movement’s shockingly rapid decline. The string of communist victories in East Asia stretching back to 1949 effectively came to an end with the fall of Saigon and the fall of Phnom Penh. By that time, the Sino-Soviet split had torn the global communist movement apart, Suharto had consolidated a pro-Western military regime in Jakarta, and Beijing had chosen to align with Washington in the Cold War struggle. The coming years held mainly defeat and disappointment for the forces of secular Third World revolution on the battlefields of the Third Indochina War, the streets of revolutionary Tehran, and in the mountain passes of Afghanistan. As the Cold War came to an end, the Soviet Union perched on the brink of collapse, the CCP focused on competing in a globalizing capitalist economy, US leaders pushed neoliberal policies while boasting about the inevitability of a liberal-capitalist world order, and aspiring postcolonial revolutionaries joined the ranks of ethno-sectarian movements such as Al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Islamic State (ISIS). Meanwhile, the communist government in Hanoi kept a nervous eye on Beijing’s rising power and expanding regional ambitions while pursuing a cautious rapprochement with Washington. To many Vietnamese leaders, the United States, a former enemy, came to appear as a potential ally in counterbalancing the expanding influence of China, Hanoi’s former ally. In the event that it continues, this strategic reversal may one day be remembered as the greatest irony and a testament to the ultimate tragedy and futility of America’s war in Vietnam.

15 The Third Indochina War

Ang Cheng Guan

What is commonly known as the “Third Indochina War” consists of two related wars: the Vietnam–Kampuchea War from 1978 to 1990 and the brief Sino-Vietnamese War in February 1979. Although the latter military confrontation was brief, China and Vietnam were technically at war until the resolution of the Cambodian conflict in 1990. Unlike the “First” and “Second” Indochina Wars which lasted just as long, “the post-1975 period in general and the Third Indochina War in particular continue to be relegated to footnotes and epilogues.”¹ Although Edwin Martini made this observation in 2009, the state of the field has not changed much today.

Marshaling old and new Vietnamese, Cambodian, Chinese, Soviet, American, and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) sources, this chapter takes an international-history perspective, focusing on the simultaneous decision-making of all sides directly or indirectly involved in the conflict, which, in the words of Odd Arne Westad, “created shockwaves within the international system of states.”² It adopts a chronological approach, following the life cycle of the conflict by first locating the origins of both wars from the interconnected perspectives of the three main protagonists – Vietnam, Cambodia, and China. Following that, the chapter will describe the conduct of both wars and their eventual resolution. This is where the Soviet Union, the United States (and its European allies), and ASEAN come into the picture. Although these actors were not directly involved in the fighting, they played a significant role in both prolonging the war and bringing about its end.

When it comes to the English-language historiography of the Third Indochina War we know a lot more about the Khmer Rouge – their origin and roots, ideology, policies and practices, and relations with Vietnam – from the scholarship of Ben Kiernan, Steven Heder, and David Chandler; about the root problems in Sino-Vietnamese relations culminating in the February 1979 war from noted Vietnam historian William Duiker, Chang Pao-min, King C. Chen, Eugene K. Lawson, Robert S. Ross, Anne Gilks, and Steven J. Hood. These studies, mostly by political scientists (David Chandler and William Duiker being the exceptions), were mainly published in the 1980s and were based primarily on contemporary information or open sources. Three of the best accounts of the conflict are: Grant Evans and Kelvin Rowley’s Red Brotherhood at War: Indochina since the Fall of Saigon; Nayan Chanda’s Brother Enemy: The War after the War; and Stephen J. Morris’ Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia: Political Culture and the Causes of War. Then there was a long lull before the publication of The Third Indochina War: Conflict between China, Vietnam and Cambodia, 1972–79 edited by Odd Arne Westad and Sophie Quinn-Judge,³ which essentially focuses on developments in the 1970s leading to the conflict but does not really come to grips with the two key questions: Why did Vietnam launch its invasion of Cambodia (then known as Kampuchea) on December 25, 1978? And why did China attack Vietnam on February 17, 1979 and withdraw a month later? Bringing this overview of the state of the field to a close are three recent books published in 2014, 2015, and 2020 respectively: Brothers in Arms: Chinese Aid to the Khmer Rouge 1975–1979 by Andrew Mertha; Deng Xiaoping’s Long War: The Military Conflict between China and Vietnam 1979–1991 by Xiaoming Zhang (which is useful to read alongside Edward C. O’Dowd’s Chinese Military Strategy in the Third Indochina War: The Last Maoist War); and, the most recent, Kosal Path’s Vietnam’s Strategic Thinking during the Third Indochina War, which has a chapter on Vietnam’s decision to invade Cambodia in which he argues that the geopolitics (the alliance between Democratic Kampuchea and China backed by the United States) was a more significant reason for the war than the border conflict and the historical animosity between Cambodia and Vietnam.⁴

Vietnam–Cambodia Relations, 1962–75

Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge on April 17, 1975, about two weeks ahead of the Vietnamese communists who captured Saigon on April 30. The timing was deliberate on the part of the Khmer Rouge, to make the point that they can achieve victory without Vietnamese assistance and in fact even quicker. Relations between the Vietnamese communists and the Khmer Rouge gradually but consistently deteriorated after Pol Pot took over the leadership of the Khmer Rouge in July 1962. The Khmer Rouge had for many years been constrained by both Hanoi and Beijing, which favored the strategy of supporting Norodom Sihanouk because he turned a blind eye to Vietnamese communist activities along the border. The March 1970 coup against Sihanouk by the pro-American Lon Nol changed everything. Thereafter, the Khmer Rouge demonstrated greater autonomy and assertiveness vis-à-vis Hanoi. The movement was not, however, completely unified in its stance. There were differences between the Saloth Sar (aka Pol Pot) group, who wanted a revolutionary overhaul of Cambodian society, and detractors, who aspired to restore Sihanouk to power. The latter group was more in line with Vietnamese and Chinese thinking. Hanoi had great difficulty managing its relations with the Khmer Rouge thereafter. In fact, as Vietnamese communist forces were withdrawing from Cambodia in the days before the signing of the Paris Agreement on Vietnam in late January 1973, the Khmer Rouge attacked them. On January 26, 1973, when Vietnamese paramount leader Lê Duẩn met the senior Khmer Rouge official known as “Brother Number Three,” Ieng Sary, in Hanoi to inform him that North Vietnam would sign the Paris Agreement the next day, he tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Cambodian Communist Party to coordinate its strategy with North Vietnam. Pol Pot was adamant that the fighting must continue and that there would be no truce with the Lon Nol regime and/or the United States. Pol Pot was afraid that the United States and Sihanouk might cut a deal behind his back. To Pol Pot, the Vietnamese communists’ deal with Washington was simply a sellout. Because North Vietnam’s top priority was the war, the Hanoi leadership tried to play down its problems with the Khmer communists.⁵

The reality, as Sihanouk confided to the French ambassador to China after returning from a brief visit to the communist-controlled area of Cambodia in late March–early April 1973, was that anti-Vietnamese feelings within the Cambodian Communist Party were rapidly growing. Sporadic fighting between both sides occurred soon after Sihanouk’s visit. As long as the “revolution” had not been won, both sides were cognizant of the fact that they still needed each other. The withdrawal of the Vietnamese communists from Cambodia after the signing of the Paris Peace Accord inadvertently provided the opportunity for Pol Pot and those who supported him, who had always wanted to get out of Vietnam’s shadow, to liberate the country ahead of the Vietnamese. A revised history of the Cambodian Communist Party published in 1974 hardly mentioned Vietnam. Phnom Penh fell on April 17, 1975. We still do not know what the Vietnamese leadership thought of the liberation of Cambodia, which occurred while they were deeply engrossed in their own war in southern Vietnam.⁶

In the months after April 1975, both countries had their hands full putting their own houses in order. Attention at the beginning was essentially focused, understandably so, on internal developments and putting in the structures to realize their respective vision(s) of a socialist or communist society. As for relations between Vietnam and Cambodia, it remained unchanged from what it was pre-April 1975 – poor, but nowhere near the brink of a total breakdown.

This is perhaps a good point to pause and briefly consider the idea of the “Indochina Federation.” There were apparently two schools of opinion within the Vietnamese communist movement on the issue of its relations with Cambodia and Laos. One was for a unified Indochinese communist party, with Vietnam assuming the role of a big brother. The other advocated a loose form of unity between the three Indochinese countries whereby assistance could be given to each other as and when the need arose. This was the arrangement that the Chinese favored, whereas Lê Duẩn and his closest associates were for a unified communist movement led by Vietnam. In the minds of Lê Duẩn and those close to him, it was the Chinese who had forced them to accede to the French demand that the problems of Cambodia and Laos be separated from those of Vietnam at the 1954 Geneva Conference on Indochina.⁷ Although most Vietnam specialists have concluded that the idea of an Indochina Federation was abandoned in the late 1930s, there is no doubt that Vietnam continued to retain a neocolonialist attitude toward both Cambodia and Laos. The Khmer Rouge perspective of Vietnam as having always wanted to annex and swallow Cambodia, as well as exterminate the Cambodian race, was the most extreme. As the Black Book (issued by the Khmer Rouge in September 1978) pointed out, one of the means by which the Vietnamese hoped to achieve their goal was through the strategy of an “IndoChina Federation.”⁸

Vietnam–China Relations, 1971–5

The twists and turns in Vietnam–China relations share some parallels with the relationship between Vietnam and Cambodia. That relationship, which had never been really warm, turned complicated in July 1971 (coincidentally around the time when relations between the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese communists were turning bad) with the announcement of US President Richard Nixon’s forthcoming visit (to take place in May 1972) to Beijing. The Vietnamese were informed on July 13, by Zhou Enlai, who had traveled to Hanoi to personally convey the news, two days before the rest of the world would learn of it. Sino-Vietnamese relations gradually declined from this point. Although Chinese influence remained strong in North Vietnam for the duration of the Vietnam War, it had diminished considerably by 1973 as a result of Sino-US rapprochement.⁹

The high profile given to senior Khmer Rouge official Khieu Samphan’s April 1974 visit to Beijing, where he met Mao Zedong, contrasted with the low-key publicity of Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) Prime Minister Phạm Vӑn Đồng’s visit in the same month, adding fuel to the already strained Sino-Vietnamese relations. Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP) Politburo member and DRVN Deputy Prime Minister Lê Thanh Nghị’s two visits to Beijing in August and October 1974, respectively, extracted little economic and military assistance from China. Significantly, by August 1974, because of health reasons, Zhou Enlai was no longer able to oversee Sino-Vietnamese relations.¹⁰ Zhou underwent surgery for cancer in June 1974 and was last seen at an official function in January 1975. After that, he effectively retired for medical treatment and died in January 1976.

Figure 15.1 Chairman Mao Zedong greets Khmer Rouge Foreign Minister Ieng Sary while Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot looks on (1970s).

Source: – / Staff / AFP / Getty Images.

Pol Pot’s visit to Beijing in June 1975 was, however, well received by the Chinese, and Mao lavished much praise on Pol Pot and the success of the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot, for his part, projected himself as an ideological disciple of Mao. As Qiang Zhai noted, “realising the determination and strength of the Khmer Rouge, Chinese leaders had apparently taken the position that if they wanted to maintain their influence over the Vietnamese and the Russians in Cambodia, they must back Pol Pot.”¹¹ Lê Duẩn’s first visit to Beijing in September 1975, not long after the unification of Vietnam, was also in sharp contrast to that of Pol Pot’s visit in June. Most significantly, the Vietnamese leadership’s refusal to accept Mao’s “Three Worlds” theory, which required Hanoi to oppose the Soviet Union, affected Sino-Vietnamese relations. The Khmer Rouge, on the other hand, never managed to develop a close relationship with Moscow.

The “battle lines” were thus more or less drawn by the end of 1975. Sino-Vietnamese and Vietnam–Kampuchean relations became interweaved. At the 4th Congress of the VWP in December 1976, the VWP merged with the Southern-based People’s Revolutionary Party of Southern Vietnam to create the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV). At the same meeting, all the ostensibly pro-China groups, as well as those who had reservations about a unified Indochinese communist movement under Vietnam’s leadership, were purged. Sino-Vietnamese relations went quickly downhill from then and did not recover until the 1990s. The harsh treatment of ethnic Chinese by Hanoi and border issues between Vietnam and China that emerged in 1977 were thus mere symptoms or consequences of a much deeper malaise.

Vietnam–Kampuchea Relations, 1975–7

Newly independent countries are especially sensitive about their territorial integrity. Both Vietnam and Cambodia had land and maritime border problems or disagreements that resulted in sporadic skirmishes soon after April 1975. Between that time and December 1977, the Vietnamese did make a number of attempts to settle the border dispute. In June 1975, Phan Hiền met with Kampuchean officials, and both sides agreed to the establishment of provincial liaison committees to resolve their problems at the local level and, if that failed, to raise the issues to higher authorities. In the same month, Pol Pot led a delegation to Hanoi to discuss the Vietnamese seizure of the Cambodian island of Poulo Wai, which was subsequently returned to the Kampucheans in August. Lê Duẩn had traveled to Phnom Penh in August for further discussions on the border disputes. It was reported in the Vietnamese media that both sides reached a “complete identity of views,” but it was short-lived. The reason their border disagreements (which were by no means irreconcilable) could not be resolved and instead grew out of hand was the ongoing power tussle within Kampuchea in 1976–7 that finally saw Pol Pot (the arch-anti-Vietnamese) and his faction or clique emerge as the dominant power in the country in September 1977. It is difficult to go into the specifics of the divisions within the Khmer Rouge. As Bern Schaefer, who has explored the East German archives, noted, the Vietnamese incessantly complained to their East German counterparts that it was hard to determine the real background of the Khmer defectors or cadres because “their files have been destroyed.”¹² Memoirs by Khieu Samphan (president of Democratic Kampuchea 1976–9)¹³ and Heng Samrin (head of state of the Vietnamese-backed People’s Republic of Kampuchea 1979–81 and General Secretary of the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party 1981–91) reveal to some extent the schism in the Khmer Rouge regime and the extermination by Pol Pot of those seen as aligned with the Vietnamese.¹⁴

Because the border issues remained unresolved, except for the brief lull between mid-1975 and 1976, the fighting continued, and this grew from skirmishes to increasingly large-scale clashes, particularly from late September 1977. According to Bùi Tín, the fighting became progressively more severe especially after a massacre at Châu Đốc on the night of April 30, 1977, which was also the second anniversary of the fall of Saigon.¹⁵ In September 1977, the intensified border conflict coincided with Pol Pot’s highly publicized and triumphant visit to China, where he was warmly welcomed by Hua Guofeng, Mao’s successor. His visit was preceded by a lengthy speech revealing the existence of the Communist Party of Kampuchea and extolling its singular role in the revolutionary struggle. Hanoi tried to get the Chinese to mediate without success. The warm welcome of Pol Pot and the Chinese failure to mediate – it is not clear whether it was a case of unwillingness or inability – created the impression, in the eyes of the Vietnamese, that Beijing supported Khmer Rouge actions. According to Soviet sources, the presence of Chinese military personnel training and arming the Khmer Rouge, and building roads and military bases, including an air force base in Kampong Chhnang that made it possible for military planes to reach Hồ Chí Minh City in half an hour, forced the Vietnamese “to think about the real threat to [their] security rather than about an Indochinese federation.”¹⁶ In addition, on July 18, 1977, a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation was signed between Vietnam and Laos. Vietnam thus consolidated its “special relationship” with Laos with little opposition. In the view of Hanoi, if it were not for Beijing’s conspicuous support for the Khmer Rouge, Phnom Penh would have followed the path of Vientiane. China was thus seen as the obstacle preventing the Vietnamese from realizing their aspiration of an Indochinese Federation – a repeat of what happened in 1954.

On September 30, 1977, there was a Politburo meeting in Hồ Chí Minh City chaired by Lê Duẩn to evaluate the situation. The Politburo came up with two options: (a) facilitate a victory of the “healthy,” namely pro-Vietnam forces inside Cambodia; or (b) pressure Pol Pot to negotiate in a worsening situation. The first (opening) move to achieve either option was to modify Vietnam’s border-war strategy from defensive to offensive. The Vietnamese made one further, and futile, attempt to get the Chinese to intercede with the Khmer Rouge when Lê Duẩn met with the Chinese leadership in Beijing in November. The November meeting also showed the strains in Sino-Vietnamese relations.¹⁷ On December 25, 1977, to the surprise of the Khmer Rouge, Vietnamese forces invaded eastern Cambodia and briefly occupied the territory, in retaliation for the Khmer Rouge attack on Tây Ninh province in September, before withdrawing.¹⁸ It was clearly an exercise of intimidation and a warning to the Khmer Rouge. Not to be cowed, Phnom Penh also surprised the Vietnamese by breaking off diplomatic relations on December 31, 1977. The tensions and dispute between the two fraternal communist countries, which had been kept away from the limelight, finally became public.

Why did the Vietnamese not go all the way in December 1977, stopping 24 miles (39 kilometers) from Phnom Penh, and then withdrawing and waiting another twelve months before invading the country? One reason was that in 1977–8 there were some members of the party who held the view that “the contradictions between the US and China would prevent the formation of an anti-Soviet and anti-Vietnamese alliance,” and as such the anti-Maoists led by Deng Xiaoping in China would eventually choose the Soviet Union, and Vietnam by extension, over the United States.¹⁹ These people would need to be convinced or neutralized. Thus, we first need to consider the state of Vietnam’s relations with the Soviet Union and the United States until the end of 1977 before focusing on the critical year 1978.

Vietnam–Soviet–US–China Relations, 1975–7

While the Vietnamese communists also had their disagreements with the Soviets – they continued to refrain from siding with the Soviet Union in the Sino-Soviet ideological dispute, and they continued to procrastinate over joining the Moscow-led Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) – the 1973 annual report by the Soviet Embassy in Hanoi on the relationship between the two countries was, overall, positive.²⁰ Sino-Vietnamese animosity clearly played into the hands of the Soviet Union, which seized the opportunity to increase its influence in Vietnam.

As for the United States, Hanoi was keen to normalize relations with Washington after the 1973 Paris Peace Accord, but circumstances were not propitious. While the American military might have withdrawn from Vietnam, the war had not really ended. Shortly after the fall of Saigon in April 1975, Prime Minister Phạm Vӑn Đồng extended a formal invitation to the United States to normalize relations on one precondition: Washington must fulfill its commitment to provide reconstruction aid to Vietnam as stated in Article 21 of the 1973 Paris Peace Accord. The Ford administration, however, was only prepared to discuss normalization of relations without any precondition. Aid would be considered only once the American side was satisfied that the Vietnamese were seriously addressing the missing in action (MIA) issue, a high-priority concern for Washington. Thus, for the first one and a half years after the fall of Saigon (May 1975–December 1976), the two sides were locked into inflexible stances. There was one further reason the Ford administration was not forthcoming with the Vietnamese, which was that “Vietnamese–American normalization would have hampered US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s geopolitical strategy.” Kissinger’s foremost concern was, and always had been, the balance of US–Soviet relations and the strategic importance of the China factor in the equation. As Steven Hurst put it, “easing Chinese fears of Soviet–Vietnamese collusion would have reduced the incentive to normalize with the United States on terms acceptable to Washington.”²¹

The arrival of a new president in the White House appeared to provide both sides with a fresh opportunity to revisit the issue of normalization of relations. The State Department’s perspective on and approach to relations with Hanoi differed from Kissinger’s. As mentioned above, the new US secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, and his assistant for Far Eastern and Pacific affairs, Richard Holbrooke, placed ASEAN at the core of American policy in Southeast Asia. In the case of Vietnam, they saw it as a country “trying to find a balance between overdependence on either the Chinese or the Soviet Union,” thus offering “an opportunity for a new initiative.” It was in America’s interest, Vance believed, to wean Vietnam of its dependence on China and the Soviet Union.²² The Carter administration, however, shared the same position as that of its predecessor – that reconstruction aid, which the Vietnamese wanted, could only be discussed after the MIA accounting had been satisfactorily concluded. This did not appear to be a difficult task, since the House Select Committee on Missing Persons in Southeast Asia, which delivered its final report in late 1976, concluded that there were no American POWs alive in Indochina. The American side was hopeful of a quick agreement. But negotiations in 1977 to bring about normalization still failed, because Hanoi insisted that the United States was legally bound to provide aid. And as a rebuke to Washington’s refusal to fulfill what the Vietnamese considered to be its legal obligation, Hanoi stubbornly refused to bring the MIA accounting to a close. Subsequent dropping of such words and terms as “precondition,” “legal,” “delinking of aid,” “MIA,” and “normalization” became verbal gymnastics. The bottom line was the Vietnamese continued to expect American aid, which they badly needed, as a precondition for normalization. After the failure of the March and May 1977 meetings, there were no more substantial discussions. In October, Deputy Foreign Minister Nguyễn Cơ Thạch met Holbrooke during the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, and both agreed to meet for further talks to find a compromise solution. Subsequently, Phan Hiền and Holbrooke met in Paris from December 7 to December 10, 1977, but could not resolve their differences.

Meanwhile, the Hanoi leadership was pleased to see the fall of the Gang of Four in Beijing in October 1976. Although, unlike Hồ Chí Minh, Lê Duẩn had never been close to the Chinese leadership, he expected that Sino-Vietnamese relations would improve under Deng Xiaoping.²³ However, Deng, unlike Zhou Enlai, did not have any particular attachment to the Vietnamese. As Qiang Zhai put it, “this absence of emotional ties to the Vietnamese and a visceral bitterness about what he perceived as Hanoi’s ungratefulness and arrogance help explain why he had no qualms about launching a war in 1979 ‘to teach Vietnam a lesson.’”²⁴ By the end of 1977, the only country that Vietnam could count on, if push came to shove, was the Soviet Union.

Vietnam–Kampuchea, 1978

In Kampuchea, attempts to organize Pol Pot’s overthrow by a mutiny of the Eastern Zone military forces (aligned with Vietnam) ended in a complete disaster for the anti–Pol Pot rebels in June 1978. That led to the Vietnamese decision to invade Kampuchea. The worsening of Sino-Vietnamese relations corresponded with the rupture in Vietnam–Kampuchea relations. Chinese public statements in 1978 clearly showed that Beijing’s sympathies lay with the Khmer Rouge regime. China suspended all aid to Vietnam at the end of May 1978 and recalled all its specialists in the country on July 3. Vietnam joined COMECON on June 29. Finally, at the 4th Plenum of the CPV Central Committee in July 1978, a resolution was passed identifying China as Vietnam’s primary enemy.

By the summer of 1978, the “battle lines” had widened, with Vietnam and the Soviet Union on the one side, and Kampuchea and China on the other. Chinese Foreign Minister Huang Hua, in a May 1978 conversation with President Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, succinctly described the Chinese perspective of developments in Indochina. This was a “problem of regional hegemony”; Vietnam’s goal was to dominate Kampuchea and Laos and establish the Indochinese Federation, and “behind there lies the Soviet Union.” Rightly or wrongly, the Chinese saw Moscow as supporting, if not directing, Vietnamese regional aspirations. Vietnam had already achieved its dominance over Laos but was encountering difficulties in Cambodia. Vietnamese–Kampuchean tensions were “more than merely some sporadic skirmishes along the borders.” They constituted a major conflict that “may last for a long time,” that is, as long as Vietnam persisted in realizing its goal.²⁵

A Beijing official presumably told Nayan Chanda that during one of the regular Chinese Politburo meetings in July 1978, the leadership decided in “absolute secrecy” to “teach Vietnam a lesson” for its “ungrateful and arrogant behaviour.” Apparently, this issue had already been raised at the May 1978 Politburo meeting. There were some who disagreed, but Deng Xiaoping was able to make a persuasive case by arguing that: (a) limited military action would demonstrate to Moscow that China “was ready to stand up to its bullying”; and (b) Moscow would not want to get militarily involved. The Chinese idea was to frame the military action as part of a “global antihegemonic strategy serving broader interests,” rather than just a bilateral conflict between Vietnam and China. For this, Beijing first needed to improve its relations with the United States, noncommunist Asia, and the West. As for when to punish the Vietnamese, the decision would be made at the appropriate time.²⁶ In August 1978, the Chinese advised Pol Pot to prepare to wage a protracted war. Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyễn Cơ Thạch claimed that Vietnam signed the treaty with the Soviet Union only after China began to concentrate its military forces on the Vietnamese border and made serious preparations for an invasion.²⁷

We will recall that the Vietnam–US negotiations to normalize relations that had been held up until the end of 1977 were unsuccessful. In May 1978, Vietnam tried to resuscitate the normalization discussions by hinting that it would drop its long-held precondition of reconstruction aid.²⁸ But the Vietnamese vacillated on this until late September 1978, before Nguyễn Cơ Thạch finally confirmed it. By this time, the “window of opportunity” was already fast closing. In April 1978, President Carter had given permission to National Security Advisor Brzezinski to visit Beijing, which he did in May. It was, in Carter’s view, a “very successful” trip.²⁹ Like Kissinger, Brzezinski aimed to balance US–Soviet relations and the strategic importance of China in this equation. Normalization of relations with Vietnam was secondary on his agenda. Brzezinski’s view differed from the State Department’s. Thanks to the support of President Carter, he prevailed. Besides Brzezinski, the tensions between Vietnam and Kampuchea, Vietnam’s joining of COMECON, and China’s opposition all worked against Vietnam. John Holdridge recalled that in September 1978, about the time that he was assigned to be national intelligence officer for China, he became aware of “the tremendous influence that Vietnam and Cambodia exercised on US–China relations.”³⁰ After the Vietnamese dropped their precondition, Washington agreed to normalize relations – but in 1979, and not before Sino-US normalization had taken place in December 1978. Carter made the decision on October 11 to focus on China. Thus, by mid-October 1978, Hanoi knew that Washington’s priority was China and that Vietnam–US normalization would not happen any time soon. This, plus the failure of both Foreign Minister Nguyễn Duy Trinh (late 1977 and early 1978) and Prime Minister Phạm Vӑn Đồng (in September–October 1978) to improve relations with ASEAN countries, compounded Vietnam’s sense of insecurity and reaffirmed the view that the Soviet Union was the only country it could rely on. Soon after, on November 3, Vietnam signed the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union. According to Stephen J. Morris, there is no evidence that Moscow instigated or urged the invasion of Kampuchea.³¹ But this does not mean that Moscow was not aware of Hanoi’s intention. Nor did they attempt to discourage the Vietnamese.

By late November 1978, when the rainy season had ended, most observers expected a large-scale attack of Kampuchea by the Vietnamese. Defense analysts in Singapore were of the view that Hanoi had two options: an all-out invasion leading to the capture of Phnom Penh and the occupation of Kampuchea, or “a more prudent military option,” which was to close in on the Khmer Rouge troops deployed along the border and destroy or disperse them without occupying the whole country. The destruction of this army would enable pro-Vietnamese Kampuchean armed forces to occupy Kampuchean territory with relative ease while Pol Pot’s troops were engaged with the Vietnamese Army. The first option was likely to provoke a major Chinese military response. No one could predict for certain whether the recently signed defense treaty between the Soviet Union and Vietnam would deter the Chinese. An all-out invasion would also likely damage Hanoi’s standing in the Third World. ASEAN states would surely view it as “naked aggression,” and Japan and the West would be “greatly disturbed” and be less inclined to give aid to Vietnam.³² In the end, Vietnam chose the first option, believing that “in two weeks, the world will have forgotten the Kampuchean problem.”³³ In retrospect, and as the Vietnamese themselves subsequently admitted, that was a strategic mistake.³⁴

Preparation for the invasion of Kampuchea began in earnest in early December. On December 7, 1978, the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) was given the go-ahead to activate what was called the “General Staff’s Combat Readiness Plan for Cambodia.” The order of battle comprised 18 divisions, 600 armored vehicles, 137 aircraft, and as many as 250,000 men. The invasion was scheduled to begin on January 4, 1979, when the rice harvest was ready and the terrain dry. However, the Khmer Rouge caught wind of the impending invasion and launched a preemptive strike across the southwestern border of Vietnam on December 23, prompting Hanoi to bring forward its plan to December 25, although the PAVN was not yet completely ready. The Khmer Rouge preemptive action gave Vietnam a convenient pretext to retaliate.

Although the Vietnamese military conducted an “efficient and effective campaign” overall, the Khmer Rouge “put up a tenacious fight while withdrawing,” inflicting heavy losses on advancing PAVN armored units.³⁵ The Vietnamese took Phnom Penh on January 7 “virtually without a shot,” ending the violent, genocidal reign of the Khmer Rouge.³⁶ However, Hanoi’s plan to “free” Sihanouk (who had been kept under house arrest by Pol Pot) so that he could head – and legitimize – a “Cambodian liberation front” backed by the Vietnamese was foiled by Pol Pot, who released the prince on January 5. Sihanouk left for Beijing the next day. On January 10, 1979, the pro-Vietnamese People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) was established in Phnom Penh, with Heng Samrin as the head of state.

The Sino-Vietnamese War and the Regional Response

The Chinese launched an attack on Vietnam on February 17, 1979.³⁷ The Chinese attack did not surprise ASEAN countries. Singapore leader Lee Kuan Yew recalled in his memoir that when Deng Xiaoping visited his country in November 1978, a possible Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea was very much on the Chinese leader’s mind, and in Lee’s as well. He probed Deng on the Chinese response if indeed the Vietnamese crossed the Mekong River. From the conversation with Deng, he concluded that China would not sit idly by.³⁸

While ASEAN countries felt that Vietnam could not be let off the hook without repercussions, none could officially support the Chinese action for the same reason that they could not support Vietnam’s invasion of Kampuchea.³⁹ Having strongly opposed the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, ASEAN countries had a problem “coming to terms” with the Chinese invasion. ASEAN “could not reasonably endorse” the Chinese action. Fortunately, Chinese troops withdrew a month after the attack, “and so ASEAN was let off the hook.”⁴⁰ Singapore was of the view that “by combining diplomatic moves with military pressure against Vietnam, China had brought about the isolation of Vietnam and her economic impoverishment.”⁴¹ Lee Kuan Yew, who found the Vietnamese so tough even in defeat, was thankful that the Chinese had punished the Vietnamese.⁴² But in the wake of the attack, Mushahid Ali, deputy director (international) covering China at the ministry of foreign affairs, recalled that Singapore was concerned about how far and long China would pursue its “punishment” of Vietnam, and the regional repercussions of all that. Thailand was less troubled by the Chinese action.⁴³ Whatever the reservations some quarters of the Thai leadership might have had about China, they needed the support of Beijing (and Washington) against the Vietnamese. On the other hand, the attack “enhanced the suspicions” that Malaysia and Indonesia already had of Beijing. They were also concerned about the growing Sino-Thai relationship.⁴⁴ Malaysian Minister of Home Affairs Ghazali Shafie noted in a November 1979 speech on “Security and Southeast Asia” that Beijing was trying “to get the Soviets committed further and further into the bottomless pit in which the United States found herself once in Vietnam.” The Chinese needed to make the Soviets “bend and bleed” for aiding the Vietnamese until they could not withstand the strain any more, and then they “would lose Indochina altogether.” When that happened, “China would be free to pursue her own ‘hegemonism’ in Asia.”⁴⁵ Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Seri Mahathir Mohammed noted that “perhaps China’s invasion did have a salutary effect on Vietnam but it also demonstrated unequivocally the willingness of China to act regardless of the usual norms of world opinion.”⁴⁶ On March 5, China announced the beginning of its troop withdrawal from Vietnam after having achieved its objective. All Chinese troops were withdrawn by March 16. Although the Soviet Union did not come to the aid of the Vietnamese during the war, the Soviet military presence in Vietnam accelerated thereafter.⁴⁷

Termination of War

Notwithstanding their distrust of China, the ASEAN states collaborated with the Chinese to oust the Vietnamese from Cambodia. The task of terminating the war began almost immediately after the invasion. The initiative was taken by ASEAN. On January 12, 1979, a special ASEAN foreign ministers’ closed-door meeting was convened in Bangkok, capital of Thailand, the country most anxious to discuss the invasion owing to the implications of the Vietnamese invasion, given the Thais’ geographical proximity and role during the Vietnam War. This meeting marked the beginning of the decade-long process to bring the war to an end. ASEAN, however, did not envisage a military solution to the conflict.

Because the two main protagonists were supported by China and the Soviet Union, respectively, there could be no solution as long as China and the Soviet Union were involved in protecting their respective interests. Of the two, the Soviet Union carried a heavier burden, having essentially to bankroll the Vietnamese. Thus, it would be up to the Soviets to decide the cost factor. Without Soviet assistance, Vietnamese determination would reach its limits.⁴⁸ Beijing concurrently aimed to isolate Vietnam and impose heavy costs on the Vietnamese for the invasion. Indeed, for years afterwards, Vietnam, still recovering from the Vietnam War, was forced to support considerable forces on its northern border to forestall a possible second Chinese attack.⁴⁹

The chessboard was further complicated by the involvement of the United States. ASEAN members believed that the United States was the only country that could provide aid to the noncommunist side matching that of the Soviet Union to Vietnam or of China to the Khmer Rouge.⁵⁰ However, there were few expectations of the American role at the initial stage. The United States had not overcome the “Vietnam syndrome.” Besides, American officials were doubtful of the capabilities of the noncommunist forces, as well as being skeptical of ASEAN’s ability to stay the course. In December 1981, the Reagan administration for the first time agreed to provide the noncommunist Khmers with “administrative and financial propaganda and other nonlethal assistance.” The amount was, however, insignificant compared to US aid to other parts of the world.⁵¹ Washington also did not want to dispense aid directly.

The processes of glasnost and perestroika initiated by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and the eventual withdrawal of Soviet forces from Eastern Europe that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, as well as the ending of the Sino-Soviet dispute, transformed the global geopolitical situation against which the Cambodian problem had been played out. The Soviet defeat and withdrawal from Afghanistan presaged the Vietnamese withdrawal from Cambodia in 1989.⁵²

The stalemate over Cambodia lasted until around 1986–7, when there was a flurry of political and diplomatic activities aimed at finding a political solution. Whereas in the past the Vietnamese had always insisted that the situation in Kampuchea was “irreversible,” Hanoi now expressed a willingness to reach a solution by political means. After years of no communication between the Coalition government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK)⁵³ and the Vietnamese-installed PRK, Sihanouk and Hun Sen met for the first time at the end of 1987. They accepted two-stage talks – first amongst the various Khmer factions and then amongst Vietnam and other interested countries. In effect, the Sihanouk–Hun Sen talks were proxy talks with Vietnam. The Soviet Union had in the past refused to discuss the Kampuchean problem on the grounds that it was not involved. Now, Moscow, under Gorbachev, demonstrated a willingness to play a helpful role in the seeking of a political solution. Moscow’s change of mind coincided with new developments within Vietnam. There was, within the Vietnamese leadership echelon, “a reappraisal of [Vietnam’s] endemic poverty and its performance vis-à-vis the relative prosperity and dynamism elsewhere in Southeast Asia.”⁵⁴ Indeed, the reassessment began as early as 1984, which accounted for Hanoi’s first announcement that it was prepared to withdraw forces as early as 1985 (which, of course, no one wanted to believe).

Conclusion

The Soviet Union completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 1989, and the first Sino-Soviet summit since 1959 was held in May that same year. Even the United States, which had been rather uninterested in the Cambodian problem, was willing to discuss the issue with the Soviet Union at summit level. China, which as late as 1988 still refused to talk directly with the Vietnamese, held back any possible progress to resolve the problem. The first Sino-Vietnamese meeting (at the vice-ministerial level) in nine years took place in January 1989. It was not until September 1990 that both sides reached agreement with regards to Cambodia, mostly on Chinese terms. Both countries finally normalized relations in November 1991. By this time, Lê Duẩn (July 1986) and Lê Đức Thọ (October 1990) – the key architects of the Vietnamese invasion – had passed away, and a new generation of leaders had replaced them. Vӑn Tiến Dũng, who led the 1978 invasion and who was “the least inclined to cooperate with China,”⁵⁵ had retired. All these changes made it possible to convene the second International Conference on Cambodia in Paris in October 1991, which finally ended the conflict.

With hindsight, it is possible to view the Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea (now Cambodia) as the start of the slow end of the Cold War in Southeast Asia. Nayan Chanda rightly pointed out that although the Vietnamese were victorious in 1978–9, it was to be a “hollow” victory, “literally and metaphorically.” In the words of one Vietnamese official, “in the end, this is our version of Afghanistan.”⁵⁶ Conversely, China, which had supported the Khmer Rouge, was the “ultimate winner,” as it managed to turn “defeat into victory.”⁵⁷ Cambodia is the strongest ally of China in Southeast Asia today. Vietnam, for its part, is still making up for lost time.

16 Vietnam in the Reform Era

Tuong Vu and Thuy Nguyen

The history of post-1975 Vietnam remains largely unwritten.¹ Popular narratives in the media and scholarship of market reforms since the 1980s present different views about its direction (transition to capitalism or something else), its process (who, why, and how), and its relationship to the war (especially the role of the United States). A popular view in the American press praises the economic hustle in Vietnamese cities today and plays it up as evidence that the country has “gone capitalist.” To journalists and even some historians of the Vietnam War, the appearance of capitalism in today’s Vietnam serves to highlight the irony and unnecessity of the US efforts to fight communism during the Cold War.²

On the opposite end is the view held by Gabriel Kolko, an ardent antiwar activist and Marxist historian who enjoyed a close relationship with top Vietnamese officials until he became critical of their reform. Kolko blames the war and the United States for problems encountered in postwar Vietnam but decries Vietnamese communist leaders for embarking on market reform – an act of betrayal of the revolution and their people’s sacrifices, in his opinion.³ As he writes in hindsight:

[During the war] I always expected the Vietnamese Communists to do far better in power than the Russians or Chinese, and in certain important regards they have done so. By 1975 I also anticipated some [serious] postwar problems … because the concentration of so much power in the party Politburo’s hands removed any check on both its abuse and … its ignorance. But I scarcely suspected it would employ its victory to create a “market economy,” which is merely a euphemism for capitalism.⁴

In contrast, the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) sometimes admits its own erroneous policies in the postwar period but credits itself for leading the reform. For example, CPV General Secretary Nguyễn Phú Trọng wrote in 2004 that:

In the context of domestic difficulties and complicated international situations, the Party has persisted with our revolutionary goals, held firmly our independent and creative spirit, and led our people in the reform effort that has brought many results, including a growing economy, a stable society and political system, expanding international relations, and improving the people’s living standards.⁵

The official narrative has been seriously challenged by the late Đặng Phong, the head of Economic Historical Research at the Vietnamese Institute of Economy, who meticulously documented the economic thoughts and policies of the period, and showed how reform was not a top-down but bottom-up process.⁶ As the postwar central planning and “subsidy system” [chế độ bao cấp] created severe shortages and a looming famine, local officials deliberately violated central policies to save their people from starvation, gradually persuading dogmatic central leaders to adopt the market economy in the early 1990s. Along the same line, political scientist Benedict Kerkvliet points out how peasants’ everyday resistance and initiatives forced national leaders to dismantle collective farming in rural Vietnam.⁷

While pursuing a similar argument, journalist Huy Duc’s sweeping account of the entire post-1975 period focuses on the power struggle among individual leaders and their factions over the direction of reform.⁸ Political scientist Tuong Vu shows how the loyalty to Marxism-Leninism of Vietnamese leaders as a group caused them to fear reform, thus shaping the reactionary character of the reform process.⁹ In contrast, another political scientist, Martin Gainsborough, argues that patronage networks rather than policies shaped the politics of reform.¹⁰ To these authors who know Vietnamese and work with Vietnamese sources, reform was a desperate attempt to save the regime from the postwar crisis caused by mistaken, dogmatic policies. Reform was desirable for the Vietnamese people, and necessary, given the profound crisis of socialism, but was extremely contentious because of the elites’ competition over visions, power, and privileges.¹¹ In addition, the result of reform today is not really a capitalist system but something far more sinister, whose appearance may be deceptive to the casual observer.

Against the backdrop of rival narratives, this chapter offers an overview of developments in Vietnam from the 1980s through the 2010s as the country evolved from its socialist system of the war and revolutionary period. After the war, the communist government in Hanoi sought to establish the socialist system in the South in the same way it had done in the North after 1954. This postwar march to socialism was draconian and caused much unnecessary disruption, destruction, and hardship. Even with generous help from the Soviet bloc, Vietnam was in a dire situation in the early 1980s, as already poor economic production and living standards continued to worsen.

With leadership change and support from Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in the late 1980s, Vietnamese reformers embarked on market reform but refused political reform. This formula of limited reform allowed the regime to survive the collapse of the Soviet bloc. For more than three decades, the CPV has overseen rapid economic growth that lifted millions out of poverty and raised national income many times. By the 2000s, Vietnam’s advantages – including its strategic location in a dynamic region, its tropical climate and natural resources such as oil and forests, its relatively large and young population, and its large diaspora – helped attract billions in foreign investment, aid, and remittance every year, fueling economic growth and wealth accumulation.

Despite impressive economic achievements, Vietnam’s political system has undergone severe decay. An aging leadership still pledges loyalty to communism. Behind the facade of a market economy, state-owned enterprises still dominate the strategic sectors, while private enterprises are discriminated against. State managers have formed a critical power bloc and have successfully resisted structural reforms that would take away their privileges. The state bureaucracy is thoroughly penetrated by corrupt patronage networks that peddle offices and influences to serve officials and their cronies.

As officials have accumulated wealth legally and illegally, social inequality and political unrest have been rising rapidly. Recent years have witnessed the rise of a civil society and an urban middle class that are increasingly vocal in demanding greater political representation and government accountability. The perverse outcome of a communist revolution that produced an oppressive and corrupt regime in Vietnam today has lately brought about a moment of reckoning for many prominent Vietnamese intellectuals about the true meaning of the Vietnam War.

Historical Background

To understand the timing, goals, and processes of Vietnam’s market reform it is essential to understand its top leaders’ backgrounds and experiences, which were uniformly narrow to begin with and further ossified over decades of war. Most top leaders of the CPV of the 1970s began their careers as activists within the network of the Third Communist International established in 1919 and directed from Moscow.¹² By the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the communist movement began in Vietnam, that network had spread over the entire Eurasian continent, from Western Europe to Southeast Asia. The first Vietnamese communists, such as Hồ Chí Minh, Lê Duẩn, Trường Chinh, Hoàng Quốc Việt, and Phạm Vӑn Đồng, were young when they joined the movement, whether in Paris or in French Indochina. Nguyễn Vӑn Linh, who was on the younger side of the first generation and who would become a central figure in economic reform in postwar Vietnam, was only 15 when he joined the movement while incarcerated at the infamous Poulo Condor colonial prison.

These men and (a few) women typically came from modest family backgrounds with an elementary school education or less in the modern school system created by the French (exceptions are Hồ Chí Minh, who never attended modern schools, and Trần Phú, Phạm Vӑn Đồng, Võ Nguyên Giáp, and Trường Chinh, who all received formal education at the secondary level).¹³ Some received training in Moscow, such as Hồ Chí Minh, who was assigned to work in East Asia as a Comintern agent. Others like Lê Duẩn joined when they came into contact with those who had been trained abroad. Significantly, besides Hồ Chí Minh and a few others who had lived in France, China, and the Soviet Union, as well as having traveled to other Western countries, most never had any experience outside of Vietnam.

By the 1970s, the dozen or so members of the Politburo of the CPV, the top executive body, were all those revolutionaries of the first generation. They had spent decades primarily waging war and making revolution. The lower level of leaders was slightly better, but only a few of those 100 Central Committee members, the organ of the CPV, in postwar Vietnam had had any significant experience outside Vietnam. Several younger members of this group possessed training and worked in technical fields, and had accumulated significant experience during 1954–75 in running the economy of North Vietnam based on the Stalinist model.¹⁴ But the vast majority built their careers in war, diplomacy, mass organizing, or propaganda.

Vietnam’s communist leaders viewed the wars with the French and, later, the Republic of Vietnam and the United States as part of their socialist revolution. Since the 1930s these leaders had dreamed of taking power and building a communist society in their country while contributing to world revolution. Few Vietnamese communists had actually read Karl Marx and other socialist thinkers. Most learned the basics about socialism from introductory-level books such as Nikolai Bukharin’s The ABC of Communism.¹⁵ Their model of an ideal society was the Soviet Union under Stalin that they read about or (for a few) observed first-hand. In this model, social classes deemed “exploitative” would be eliminated. The state would necessarily own all productive assets, control trade, and redistribute wealth across society to ensure development with social equality. The entire economy would operate under central planning to mobilize all resources for industrialization. In the countryside, all agricultural production would be collectivized to achieve large-scale socialist production.

Vietnamese communist leaders sincerely believed that the effective mobilization of all resources, together with workers’ and farmers’ enthusiasm about socialism under the power of a strong state and the wise and caring leadership of the vanguard party, would inevitably produce the miracle of a socialist paradise in a reasonable time, regardless of their country’s initial level of development.¹⁶ Vietnamese leaders, like their dedicated communist comrades elsewhere at the time, passionately believed that the success of the Russian Revolution and the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union under Stalin were evidence of “the Age of Revolution” which would bring about the ultimate triumph of communism on the global scale.

After taking control of North Vietnam in 1954, communist leaders embarked on realizing their dream. Collectivization of agriculture and the nationalization of trade and industry were mostly completed by 1960, paving the way for the first Five-Year Plan of 1961–5.¹⁷ Even in the first year of the plan, however, agricultural production fell. With a rising population and stagnant production in subsequent years, living standards deteriorated even before the war in the South began in earnest and also before the United States started bombing North Vietnam in 1964.¹⁸ Throughout the war, not collective farms but the 5 percent of farmland reserved for private cultivation, together with food aid from China and the Soviet bloc, helped keep Northerners from starving. War contributed to the economic hardships the North Vietnamese experienced and was blamed for the failure of collective farms. Near the end of the war, the government sought to enlarge those farms, in the hope of making them more productive.¹⁹

Sorghum Socialism, 1975–86

After the war, North Vietnam took over a largely intact Southern economy that was much more developed and productive than the Northern one. While heavily dependent on foreign aid and trade, the Southern economy was dynamic, with fully commercialized agriculture and burgeoning industries oriented toward producing for consumption and connected to other rapidly growing economies in the region. A predominantly commercial culture and a significant entrepreneurial class dominated by ethnic Chinese made the Southern economy similar to those of other Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, yet distinguished it sharply from the Northern economy, which was Stalinist by design.

Touring the South after the war, top North Vietnamese leaders grudgingly admired the Southern capitalist economy for its productive capacity, especially its modern industries. There was some discussion in the leadership about whether Hanoi should leave the Southern economy as-is for some time to exploit existing advantages, or to immediately transform it into a socialist economy. Eventually, the CPV opted for the latter at the 24th Plenum of the Central Committee in August 1975, likely expecting that the Southern economy would perform even better under the Stalinist model.²⁰ A number of factors explained this decision: the belief that the two economies were complementary in resource bases that could benefit each other from immediate unification; the conceit that victory against the Americans in war meant anything was possible; an overall dismissive attitude toward anything related to their much-hated Southern enemy and the capitalist system in general; and the ambition to realize the socialist dream as fast as possible.²¹

The socialist transformation of the Southern economy was draconian. Thousands of residents in Southern cities were taken and then dumped in former war zones, dubbed “New Economic Zones” (NEZs, vùng kinh tế mới), with little government support, ostensibly to start a new life as farmers. Between 1975 and 1976, in an operation code-named “X1,” the government confiscated thousands of enterprises, private houses, and other valuable personal property owned by 670 families of “comprador capitalists” in 19 Southern cities.²² Many of these families were ethnic Chinese. Several were sent to the above NEZs, while others were forcibly placed into “reeducation camps,” together with tens of thousands of South Vietnam’s former officials, intellectuals, religious leaders, and writers. In the second campaign (code-named “X2”) during 1977–8, the target was small and medium-sized industrial and trading enterprises that belonged to about 40,000 families of private owners.²³

These campaigns to nationalize industry and trade were accompanied by the introduction of new currencies in 1975 in the South and in 1978 in the whole country.²⁴ At each time of changing currency a household was sharply limited in the amount of money in the old currency it could exchange for the new one, practically being robbed of most of its wealth once the old currency went out of use the next day. From mid-1977, the government began to pressure farmers to give up their land, draught animals, and tools to join cooperatives. The goal was to organize all farmers in low-level cooperatives by the end of 1979. The campaigns for socialist transformation and the revenge on former supporters and officials of the Republic of Vietnam were the primary causes of a massive exodus of Southerners and ethnic Chinese from Vietnam in the late 1970s, the largest wave of refugees in modern history up to then. “Boat people,” the term coined to refer to these refugees who risked their lives on rickety boats in the journey to escape from Vietnam, was an original contribution of Vietnamese socialism to the English lexicon.

The imposition of the socialist economic system on the South was carried out in conjunction with the Second Five-Year Plan (1976–80) unveiled at the 4th Party Congress in December 1976. The Congress set the goal of achieving large-scale socialist industrial production in about twenty years. Toward that goal, ambitious targets were set, such as food production to reach 21 million tons by 1980 and industrial output to increase by 16–18 percent a year.²⁵ Yet this plan ignored the war-ravaged and foreign aid–dependent conditions of the country, and the already apparent failure of the socialist model in North Vietnam. Not knowing how economics works, Party leaders thought that Southern farmers could be coerced into cooperatives and paid little for their work while agricultural production would increase.

Postwar Vietnam’s forced march to socialism failed completely and resulted in extreme miseries for its people. Agricultural and industrial outputs increased only marginally, by 2 and 0.6 percent a year respectively, despite more than $4 billion in foreign aid and loans during this period, mostly from the Soviet bloc.²⁶ About 10,000 out of more than 13,000 collective farms set up in 1979 collapsed in 1980 owing to farmers’ resistance. Stagnant production and rising population led per capita national income to fall by about 10 percent during the Second Five-Year Plan. The whole country was on the verge of famine by 1979, with an already tightly rationed food supply for urban residents drastically reduced. In the absence of rice, the main staple was emergency food aid, from Soviet wheat to sorghum grains that were used in many countries as animal feed. Vietnamese who survived this period coined the term “sorghum socialism” (chủ nghĩa xã hội ӑn bo bo) to mock their government for its radicalism that ended in disastrous failures.

Even before Vietnam went to war with Cambodia and China, the situation was already grim. In 1979, the Party decided to relent, allowing local governments more autonomy, authorizing the use of material incentives to stimulate production, and tolerating small private businesses.²⁷ In 1981, the central government allowed collective farms to enter into contracts with individuals and groups of farmers that set production quotas for fulfillment above which farmers were free to sell in the market. At the 5th Party Congress in 1982, the leaders approved those 1979 and 1981 decisions and the Third Five-Year Plan, for 1981–5. In the new plan, the Party pledged to improve living standards by adjusting the balance between agriculture and light industry on the one hand, and heavy industry on the other, while still aiming to complete collectivization of the Mekong River Delta by 1985.

The new policies stimulated production for the first two years, but farmers quickly found out that the quotas imposed by cooperatives were too high for them to make a surplus. It was estimated that farmers got only 16–17 percent of the contract output after fulfilling all obligations to the government (for comparison, they had the right to at least 20 percent of the crops while working as tenants in the colonial period).²⁸ During the Second Five-Year Plan, there was some industrial growth thanks to Soviet aid and loans of nearly $5 billion in the form of 150 infrastructural and industrial projects. Soviet influence in Vietnam reached a peak during this period, with Russian being taught throughout Vietnam, thousands of Vietnamese students and officials studying in the Soviet Union, and hundreds of Soviet experts living in Vietnam.²⁹

The second Five-Year Plan helped Vietnam to recover from the crisis caused by the First Five-Year Plan, and its national income per capita in 1985 returned to the level of 1976. Yet food production was still insufficient to feed a growing population. Already extremely low living standards were deteriorating rapidly in 1985 owing to hyperinflation, as the government had simply been printing money to sustain its perennial budget deficit.³⁰ At the same time, the thriving black market was threatening government control over the economy, and its corrupt cadres were causing mounting popular resentment. To solve the problem, the Party decided to liberalize some prices and issue a new currency, but these clumsy attempts pushed inflation to over 700 percent, threatening an imminent economic collapse. Fortunately for the Party, paramount leader Lê Duẩn died in office in July 1986, opening the way for reformist leaders who had been inspired by Gorbachev’s perestroika (economic restructuring) in the Soviet Union. It was very unlikely that the reformist leaders in the CPV would have been able to push through their agenda without Gorbachev’s protection and Lê Duẩn’s passing.³¹

Market Reform without Political Reform, 1986–97

That was the context of the market reform that the 6th Congress of the CPV embraced in late 1986. At the Congress, three other top leaders (Trường Chinh, Phạm Vӑn Đồng, and Lê Đức Thọ) retired, and Nguyễn Vӑn Linh became the new Party chief. The Congress sharply criticized policy since 1975 as driven by wild dreams rather than reality.³² It called for the whole Party to face the truth and speak the truth. The resolution issued by the Congress supported a general toleration of the private sector and accepted the legitimate role of market factors in the operation of the economy. Economic reform was to be accompanied by foreign policy changes: Vietnam was to withdraw its troops from Cambodia, and to seek peace and normal relations with China, the United States, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Over the next three years, the CPV authorized limited measures to liberalize the economy, including raising real interest rates, dismantling controls over domestic trade, increasing prices paid to farmers, cutting subsidies while giving greater autonomy to state-owned enterprises, and removing many restrictions on foreign trade.³³ A new Land Law enacted in late 1987 is an example of the tentative character of these initial reform measures. The law allowed collective farms to distribute their land to farming households for long-term use, but also imposed a ceiling on what each household could receive. The state retained ownership of all land, and no land sales or transfers would be permitted. The distribution of land to households marked the end of collective agriculture while guarding against the potential rise of new landlords. A foreign investment law enacted in late 1987 followed a similar pattern, with foreign investors welcomed but required to team up with a local state-owned enterprise. The Party wanted to attract foreign funds to develop Vietnam’s economy, but it would not permit the reemergence of a domestic capitalist class that could challenge its power.

Although limited in extent, early market reform policies offered immediate relief to the economy, especially regarding hyperinflation, which was brought down to about 40 percent in 1989.³⁴ The overall situation remained dire, as the Soviet Union was reducing its aid to Vietnam, while famine was reported in some provinces in the central region. At the same time, the new policies generated many new problems. Thousands of farmers protested in the Mekong Delta, in some cases clashing with the police, demanding their land back from collective farms.³⁵ Inspired by Gorbachev’s glasnost (openness and political democratization) and similar democratizing trends in Eastern European communist countries at the time, a movement emerged among Vietnamese intellectuals, writers, and retired officials demanding democratization.³⁶ As the movement was gaining momentum, a sympathetic Nguyễn Vӑn Linh responded by calling on writers “to save [themselves] before Heaven can save [them],” signaling strong institutional resistance to political liberalization within the leadership.³⁷

Here it is important to bear in mind the various views about market reform among top Party leaders. Three main groups within the leadership held different views about reform, with moderates and conservatives holding a delicate balance and liberals forming a small third faction. Conservatives, who were still numerous, opposed market reform and wanted the Party to continue the march to socialism. In contrast, moderates under Trường Chinh and Nguyễn Vӑn Linh supported reform in certain areas but viewed it as a tactical step back to raise production and improve living conditions before proceeding with socialism. They did not view reform as a rejection of socialism. Like Gorbachev who inspired them, reform was to have more, not less, socialism. Finally, liberals were inspired not only by Gorbachev’s perestroika, but also his glasnost. They called for political reform and democratization. Liberals were composed mostly of intellectuals, writers, technocrats, Southern veterans, and some retired leaders. They received support from Trần Xuân Bách, the only incumbent Politburo member who advocated political as well as economic reform.³⁸

In early 1989, the Polish Roundtable Agreement between the communist government and the Solidarity movement that allowed free legislative elections was concluded. This event raised alarms among Vietnamese leaders about the dangers of political reform. In a Central Committee Plenum, CPV Chief Nguyễn Vӑn Linh rejected calls from liberals for democratization as misguided and dangerous.³⁹ He declared that the nature of imperialism had not changed, and the Party needed to maintain vigilance against the plot of imperialist powers to subvert socialist countries. Subsequent events further hardened the CPV’s stance toward political reform. That summer, student protests at Tiananmen Square in Beijing nearly brought down the Chinese government; tanks had to be brought in to crush the protest. By the end of the year, nearly all communist regimes in Eastern Europe had fallen like dominoes.

At this critical juncture, moderates and conservatives closed ranks and cracked down on supporters of political reform.⁴⁰ The latter lost their official positions, and some were placed under house arrest. Market reform that had brought some early results was allowed to continue. Publicly, the Party still talked about “renovation” (đổi mới), but internally the full motto was “renovation without changing political colors” (đổi mới nhưng không đổi màu sắc chính trị).⁴¹ Gorbachev was now considered a traitor, and the CPV was quick to voice public support for the coup against him that eventually failed. Vietnam rushed to normalize relations with China in 1990, even though Beijing refused to form an alliance with Hanoi to save world socialism, as the Vietnamese proposed.⁴² Despite the loss of their main patron, the Soviet Union, Vietnamese leaders could now feel more secure, as it had giant socialist China by its side.

The years from 1990 to 1996 were the best of the reform period in terms of growth rate – about 8 percent per annum on average. Never again would those rates be achieved. As one of the poorest countries in the world in 1990, Vietnam benefited from a very low starting point. Human and material resources were extremely undervalued and underemployed under the socialist system that had mostly abolished real prices and economic incentives. Now that market mechanisms returned, the value of resources soared, and efficiency gains were large. Vietnam also benefited from being a part of a dynamic region: South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia were having the highest growth rates in the world at the time, and were all eager to explore new opportunities in Vietnam. As a result, registered foreign investment increased from $400 million to $6.6 billion between 1990 and 1995.⁴³ The value of Vietnam’s exports, which were mostly crude oil and other commodities, tripled in the same period. As relations with the United States improved and eventually normalized in 1995, Vietnam received pledges of official aid from international institutions annually to nearly $6 billion, and about the same amount of remittance from abroad by overseas Vietnamese.⁴⁴ Given the country’s nominal GDP of about $20 billion in 1995, the amounts of aid and remittance were substantial, giving a boom to economic activities in urban areas.

As the economic situation improved, the government “equitized” (privatized) about 6,000 small enterprises but retained an equal number, all of which were large enterprises in strategic sectors.⁴⁵ About 800,000 state workers were laid off in the process but were quickly absorbed by the booming private sector. A new land law was promulgated in 1993 that permitted the sale, lease, and transfer of land use rights (not land itself) and raised the time limit of those rights up to fifty years.⁴⁶ The law also empowered local governments with the authority to repossess land to be used for “public purposes” with compensation. (This clause would turn out to be a big loophole for local officials to grab land, pay farmers as little as possible, lease land to private developers at high prices, and pocket the profits.)

With the dissolution of collective farms and the reduction of export duty on rice from 10 to 1 percent in 1990, Vietnamese farmers produced enough not only for domestic needs, but also for export.⁴⁷ Rice exports made up about 11 percent of total exports throughout the 1990s, and Vietnam became the world’s second-largest rice exporter in 1996 – a miracle, given that the country had suffered from famine throughout the 1980s.⁴⁸ With more employment opportunities and new freedom to employ personal and family resources to gain the highest returns in the marketplace, the national poverty rate fell sharply from nearly 60 percent to less than 40 percent between 1992 and 1998.

The economy remained fragile. Although increased tax revenues and foreign aid helped reduce the budget deficit significantly, the trade deficit increased sharply and amounted to nearly half the value of exports. Vietnam’s boom of the 1990s was driven primarily by a one-time boost in productivity and by remittance and foreign investment, mostly from neighboring Asian countries. The boom ended in 1997, when the Asian Financial Crisis led to the collapse of the South Korean, Malaysian, Indonesian, and Thai economies. The Vietnamese economy was not yet fully integrated into the global economy, and so the impact of the regional crisis on Vietnam was mild, with weakened demand for its exports and suspension of many foreign investment projects.⁴⁹

In politics, the 1990s witnessed a continuing transition after the CPV had recovered from the shock of the Soviet bloc’s collapse in 1991. Changes were implemented to regularize politics, with the retirement age, term limits, qualifications, and regional representation formally or informally established for the Politburo and Central Committee.⁵⁰ This process allowed leadership changes to occur slowly but smoothly at the top. Nevertheless, the Party found it difficult to catch up with the times. Its leaders were in their 70s; more than a quarter of its membership was in retirement.⁵¹ Its members were predominantly male and from the North, with veterans being a significant component of its then 3 million members. Few younger members still believed in Marxism-Leninism. The Party continued to operate with much secrecy, like a revolutionary clique, and policymaking remained a top-down process that permitted few inputs from below or tolerated dissent and criticism from outsiders.

In a midterm Party Congress in 1994, the leaders began to promote the formula of “market economy with socialist orientations,” which appeared to be a copycat of China’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” This formula basically meant that the leadership remained loyal to its revolutionary past and committed to the protection of communist rule, but was open to experimenting with market mechanisms to facilitate economic growth. The Congress also defined the threats to Vietnam as being four-fold, namely economic backwardness, corruption, deviation from socialism, and subversive “hostile forces” (i.e., the United States).⁵² This mindset has changed little since. Economic reform is acceptable but only to the extent that it does not threaten communist rule. This means that reform has proceeded slowly and often followed the pattern of two steps forward, one step back. Political reform is out of the question, and no independent political organizations are permitted.

As Vietnam became internationalized, its society changed in ways beyond the Party’s ability to control.⁵³ Toward the end of the 1990s, intellectuals and students with access to the Internet and contacts with the outside world, whether through travel, study, or work, began to question one-party rule and the relevance of Marxism-Leninism. At foreign-invested enterprises, workers frequently participated in wildcat strikes to demand higher wages and better working conditions. Disputes over land between farmers and local governments ballooned, leading to many violent protests. As religious establishments gained more freedom to operate, resentment long accumulated toward the government began to surface among the groups that had been most suppressed: Northern Catholics, Southern Buddhists, Hòa Hảo, Cao Đài, and Protestant ethnic minorities in the Central Highlands.⁵⁴

By the late 1990s the situation in the countryside had become tense. Despite being the world’s second-largest rice exporters, Vietnamese farmers did not get rich, because government rice-export monopolies allowed them only low profit margins in good years when the world market had high demand for Vietnamese rice, while refusing to buy their rice in bad years when world demand was low.⁵⁵ Government investment in agriculture had been consistently low, and village governments imposed numerous levies on farmers to pay for local budgets and to line their pockets. Farmers’ anger eventually exploded in Thái Bình province in 1997, when villagers in several districts revolted en masse, seized local governments, and held officials captive until the military descended to suppress them.⁵⁶ Following this incident, the government issued a decree ordering local governments to publicize their budgets and involve farmers in making important decisions concerning duties and land development. Six years later, this so-called “grassroots democracy” decree reportedly had been implemented in only about one-third of all villages.⁵⁷

Global Integration and the Rise of Red Crony Capitalism, 1998–2011

As previously noted, Vietnam was not severely affected by the Asian Financial Crisis of the late 1990s because its economy was still largely insulated. Still, the regional crisis might have given the Communist Party’s loyalists the ammunition to slow down market reforms. Since the mid-1990s, following the successful normalization of Vietnam’s relations with the United States and with ASEAN, reformers in the Party such as Võ Vӑn Kiệt, Phan Vӑn Khải, and Vũ Khoan had aimed for more substantial reforms in the development of private enterprises and the full integration of Vietnam into the global and regional economy. Their most significant achievements were a 1997 Central Committee resolution to allow the development of agricultural estates for cash crops and the 1999 Company Law in support of private-sector development. The estates policy was to circumvent the limits on land holding imposed by the Land Law, and was followed by amendments in 1998 and 2001 to further stipulate land-use transfer rights and the procedures of land acquisition, including compensations and complaints. The Company Law provided legal protection for private entrepreneurs and investors’ property, and limited the arbitrary powers of state regulators.

The reformers’ efforts at international integration met greater resistance. In 1999 they secured the party’s approval for a Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA) with the United States that would greatly expand Vietnam’s exports to America. In response to a provocative question about the future of socialism by US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright during her visit to Hanoi, and to China’s disapproval of the deal, hardcore loyal Marxist-Leninists such as Đỗ Mười, Lê Khả Phiêu, Nguyễn Đức Bình, and Nguyễn Phú Trọng, who were suspicious of Washington’s subversive motives, ordered the planned signing ceremony to be canceled at the last minute.⁵⁸ After China acceded to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2000, loyalist opposition to integration within the CPV leadership relented. Vietnam concluded the BTA in 2001 and became a member of the WTO in 2007.

Despite such resistance, a more liberal environment allowed Vietnam to overcome the economic slump caused by the Asian Financial Crisis and achieved growth throughout the next decade. Annual growth rates were lower than those in the mid-1990s, however. Growth was still driven primarily by foreign investment and billions of dollars in annual remittance from overseas Vietnamese. Registered foreign direct investment (FDI) rose seven times from less than $3 billion in 2000 to about $22 billion in 2014. The total value of exports increased ten times, from about $15 billion in 2000 to $150 billion in 2014.⁵⁹ Not only did the value of exports increase, but the exported commodities also shifted to more labor-intensive manufactured goods. In the early 2000s, Vietnam’s top four exports were crude oil, textiles and garments, shoes, and seafood, in that order; a decade later, the value of exports in textiles and garments became three times larger than that of crude oil, and the four top exports were, in descending order, textiles and garments, shoes, electronics, and seafood. Despite rapid growth, labor productivity across the economy did not increase and remained low compared with Vietnam’s Southeast Asian neighbors.

Under the Company Law, Vietnam’s private sector grew rapidly, from about 15,000 registered companies in 2000 to about 75,000 by the mid-2010s. In terms of total national industrial output, private enterprises’ share increased from less than 24 percent in the late 1990s to about 36 percent a decade later (compared with 47 percent for the foreign-invested enterprises, and 17 percent for state-owned enterprises). The private sector continued to face many constraints: the CPV has always proclaimed its intention to preserve the leading position in the economy for the state-owned sector, and this policy was manifested in preferences given to state-owned enterprises in access to land, credits, and state contracts.⁶⁰ Private entrepreneurs also face higher hurdles in opening businesses, greater scrutiny of their operation, and arbitrary treatment and even extortion by local officials – all resulting in a higher-cost and volatile business environment.

While the party and the government discriminate against Vietnam’s private businesses out of fear of a domestic capitalist class that may one day challenge their power, foreign investors in Vietnam have, ironically, been given red-carpet treatment.⁶¹ Provincial governments usually relax regulations to compete for FDI, since the rate of economic growth in their province is key if officials are to be promoted to higher offices. FDI also brings local governments lucrative construction contracts of which, it is estimated, up to a quarter of their total value lines the pockets of officials. Given such conditions, it is unsurprising that foreign-invested enterprises formed the largest sector in Vietnam’s economy by the early 2000s, accounting for 43 percent of total national industrial output (compared with 17 percent a decade earlier).⁶²

As private and foreign-owned sectors expanded, the state-owned sector’s share of total national industrial output fell from 29 percent in the early 2000s to 17 percent by the early 2010s.⁶³ State-owned enterprises still controlled all strategic sectors, from energy to steel, and from textiles to foodstuff. Despite being assigned the leading role in the economy and granted many privileges, the state-owned sector continued to decline in efficiency.⁶⁴ The government’s policy of “equitization,” with the dual purposes of improving efficiency and complying with WTO terms for a “market economy,” made little headway, as managers, executives, and supervising ministry officials dragged their feet.⁶⁵

After Nguyễn Tấn Dũng replaced Phan Vӑn Khải as prime minister in 2006, he moved quickly to take personal control of major state conglomerates and use them as venues for his patronage network. In public, Dũng promoted these conglomerates as “steel fists” in the mold of Korean chaebols to spearhead Vietnam’s economic development. His government even underwrote bonds in the international market to raise funds for the conglomerates. Whether due to collusion or lax oversight (likely both), the conglomerates expanded into banking and real estate rather than focus on production. By the first years of Dũng’s second term in office, some of the conglomerates had gone bankrupt, losing billions of dollars in state investment owing to corruption at the highest levels. For example, Vinashin, the state-owned ship-building conglomerate, went bankrupt in 2010 after having lost $4.5 billion (equivalent to about 4.5 percent of Vietnam’s GDP at the time).⁶⁶

Corruption was also rampant in connection with foreign aid. One of the largest cases involved a Project Management Unit (PMU) of the ministry of transportation, which managed infrastructure projects worth $2 billion financed by Official Development Aid.⁶⁷ Officials were found to have embezzled millions of dollars in gambling and lavish spending on personal items. The scandal led to the resignation of the minister of transportation, the arrest of his deputy, and the convictions of several executives. Ironically, two reporters who revealed the case were also convicted of “abusing democratic freedoms” and spreading “false information.” The government obviously did not encourage anyone to expose more corruption.

As Vietnam became more open, clear signs of a civil society appeared.⁶⁸ On the eve of Vietnam’s accession to the WTO, dozens of political dissidents who lived in different parts of Vietnam, including several Catholic priests and Buddhist monks, set up the group named “8406” (on the date of their founding, April 8, 2006) to demand democratization. The government briefly tolerated this group but arrested its members when they began to have social impacts and connections to people outside of Vietnam. In 2007, a group of public intellectuals, including many who had advised the former prime minister, founded an independent think tank, the Institute of Development Studies. This group, which organized public events to critically discuss government policies, was forced to disband after the government issued a decree banning research institutes from publicizing their reports.

Figure 16.1 Motorcyclists ride under red flags and banners marking the 65th anniversary of the communist regime in downtown Hanoi (August 31, 2010).

Source: Hoang Dinh Nam / Contributor / AFP / Getty Images.

With pressure from party members who wanted to open their own companies, and following China’s policy of admitting business executives into the Communist Party, the CPV began to permit party members to run private businesses in 2006. As the ruling class, the 5 million party members were now free to leverage political connections and privileges to enrich themselves. Despite the sharp rise in corruption and graft reaching to the top, the party took one further step in 2011 to admit entrepreneurs.⁶⁹ These moves heralded the rise of red crony capitalism, a capitalist system dominated by people with family connections to the ruling Communist Party.⁷⁰

Institutional Decay and the Crisis of Legitimacy

After three decades of economic liberalization, Vietnam has escaped extreme poverty. Despite some media hype about Vietnam soon becoming the next “Asian tiger,” that moment has not arrived. Growth since 2007 has been slower than in the previous period. While the gap between Vietnam and its neighbors has shrunk considerably, Vietnam’s national income per capita in 2018 ranked fourth from the bottom in Southeast Asia, exactly where it had been in 1986 when market reform began. Vietnam’s growth has relied chiefly on foreign investment, the sale of natural resources, and the use of cheap and unskilled labor. It is doubtful that the gap can be much further narrowed, given the country’s legion of serious problems: its rapidly aging infrastructure, persistent budget deficits, rising foreign debt, unhealthy banks, inefficient state-owned sector, and cancerous corruption.

With 5 million members, the CPV consists of about 5 percent of the population. Party membership is a key requirement for promotion to leadership positions in all government bureaucracies, including universities, public schools and hospitals, publishing companies, and media organizations (no private media are allowed). The party has invested massive resources into controlling public opinion and culture. Two key bodies in charge of strengthening and disseminating the party’s ideology and political messages are the Central Theoretical Council (Hội đồng Lý luận Trung ương) and Propaganda Department (Ban Tuyên giáo Trung ương). The Central Theoretical Council is tasked with advising the party’s leadership on ideological issues. The Propaganda Department oversees the content of newspapers, radio and television, education, cultural and scientific publications, and information regarding external matters and international cooperation. This department has branches down to provincial and district levels to make sure party propaganda reaches Vietnamese wherever they live and work. The party has created a new cyberforce code-named “AK47,” which consists of tens of thousands of online undercover agents and hackers to monitor social media, spread misinformation, hack into the private accounts of dissidents, and inundate Facebook with requests for closing down certain pages for “violation of community norms” (with which Facebook now routinely complies).⁷¹

Despite the fact that the regime does not tolerate an independent civil society, Vietnamese continue to form a variety of clubs, groups, and associations. Confronting nearly a thousand state-owned newspapers that serve as the mouthpieces of various government and party organs, a few independent online newspapers have emerged since the early 2000s to offer alternative channels of information. Joined by social media a few years later, independent media have strived to become a counterbalance to the state-controlled media.⁷² Although these media are forced to operate behind a firewall, they have had a significant impact by fact-checking official media, publishing historical documents revealing the dark past of the CPV, and presenting alternative perspectives on numerous social and political topics. Together with independent clubs, these media face constant harassment by the police but help nurture a growing civil society in Vietnam.

It is not a coincidence that the emergence of an incipient civil society in Vietnam is taking place amidst rising unrest. Whereas the regime blames external “hostile forces” for this problem, its own socialist system, namely public ownership of land, one-party dictatorship, and repression of civil rights, is the true cause. The 2013 Land Law currently in force is a major socialist institution, as well as a major source of abuses and resentment. Since the state has the sole authority to manage land, officials have grabbed land ostensibly for “public needs” but in fact for renting to developers at high prices. The farmers whose lands are taken have no voice in most land deals and are often forced to accept any price offered by the government or the developer.

The number of disputes and protests involving land have soared in recent years. Those communities that were forced to leave their lands often face great challenges in resettlement in new areas that are often more remote, with worse infrastructural conditions and few employment opportunities. Entire villages and many individuals have fought back with weapons against police attempts to evict them from their lands. Over the past decades people whose lands and homes were seized throughout the country have formed a new class of “victims of injustice” (dân oan) comprising hundreds of thousands. The visibility of this class has raised collective awareness among many Vietnamese about the injustice of the system, which has fueled other collective actions, such as anti-China demonstrations, environmental protests, or workers’ strikes. Unrest has spread across the country and become increasingly common, with some recent protests involving as many as 10,000 people.⁷³

To protect the regime from collapsing in the face of such unrest, the enormous public security forces have frequently relied on brute force. It is estimated that the public security apparatus now employs one out of every eight working Vietnamese.⁷⁴ Uniformed and undercover police, the armed forces, Communist Youth members, and local officials have been mobilized to prevent activists and other citizens from participating in protests. Peaceful protests almost always meet with a violent crackdown, involving beatings, mass arrests, and long prison sentences for activists. The other key socialist institutions, namely one-party dictatorship and the repression of civil rights, have allowed officials to pursue misguided policies and engage in corruption with devastating impacts on the environment and the livelihood of millions. A case in point is the bauxite mining project in central Vietnam, which the government approved in 2007 despite heavy criticisms from environmentalists, scientists, and the general public about the project’s economic viability and potential environmental damage. These criticisms were proven true, as it was reported in 2018 that the project experienced a cost overrun of almost twice its estimated costs, while Vinacomin, also a state-owned corporation and in charge of the project, lost around $200 million in the first three years. No serious environmental incidents have happened, yet even government officials admit that the risks remain significant.

The most serious environmental disaster thus far occurred in 2016, when the Taiwanese-invested Formosa Hà Tĩnh Steel Company illegally discharged toxic industrial waste into the ocean and caused massive fish deaths along the four coastal provinces of central Vietnam.⁷⁵ It was later discovered that the provincial government in collusion with some central officials had rushed to approve the investment with only a perfunctory assessment of its environmental impact. Neither did they care whether the company later complied with environmental regulations. In response to sustained public outcries and massive protests by people in the affected provinces, the government negotiated with Formosa to offer compensation to fishing households who lost their source of livelihood, but it has refused to prosecute company executives and responsible officials.

As an attempt to stem the rapid decay of the regime, CPV General Secretary Nguyễn Phú Trọng launched a campaign against corruption in 2016. In his campaign, Trọng appeared to have learned from the earlier campaign to “catch tigers and flies” implemented by Xi Jinping in China to consolidate his power. While Trọng has so far been unable to prosecute former Prime Minister Nguyễn Tấn Dũng and his family for corruption, he has succeeded in sending to prison Dũng’s associates, including a Politburo member, several deputy ministers of defense and public security, and many executives of state-owned banks and conglomerates. At least sixty officials were arrested and convicted between 2016 and 2018.⁷⁶ Although the campaign targets corruption at all levels in many sectors, those known to be close associates of Trọng who appeared to have been extremely corrupt have avoided persecution. The campaign is therefore as much about factional struggle as about fighting corruption. The strategy is strictly top-down, with almost no reliance on public inputs of any form. As Trọng once stated, he wanted to “catch mice without breaking the pots.”⁷⁷ The seemingly tough campaign has not translated into regulations and institutions, since the CPV does not want to restrict its power. There have been no efforts to strengthen institutional or legal procedures to control corruption in the long run.

It is true that a vibrant private sector has emerged after Vietnam instituted market reforms in the late 1980s. The economy, once controlled by the government, is now largely fueled by foreign investment and private entrepreneurial initiatives. At the same time, it is easy to neglect the fact that the government continues to hold on to strategic industrial sectors. The Vietnamese Communist Party maintains a lucrative patronage network that latches onto entrenched socialist institutions, including state ownership of land, and tight government control over society. Party leaders offer foreign investors cheap and long-term access to Vietnam’s human and natural resources in exchange for a portion of profits that they channel back to their hungry and perennially loss-making state-owned sector. The institutional structure of the socialist system thus remains in place but is mostly hidden from casual observers. If Vietnam can be called a capitalist country, it is definitely of the red crony kind.

Conclusion

In the reform era, Vietnam has witnessed enormous changes in politics, the economy, and society. Overall, general living standards have improved greatly, and the country has become more open and dynamic. The economy has generated a greater amount of goods and services. However, the distribution of wealth and well-being has been heavily skewed to the ruling class, comprising officials and their families and cronies. In the name of economic development, the regime has neglected environmental protection while tolerating unbridled corruption. There has been little improvement in political freedom, human rights, and education. In the last two decades, the “socialist-oriented market economy” model has served the ruling party well, while ordinary people bear the costs. The policy of opening the economy without reforming the political system now entrenches a red crony capitalism that prevents the Vietnamese economy from taking full advantage of favorable conditions. The totalitarian power of the state is now being converted into money in a market economy, generating institutional decay at every level of government.

In retrospect, the outcome of the Vietnam War brought communist rule over all of Indochina. Within fifteen years, the communist revolution in all three countries had faltered, as communist regimes in Eastern Europe were falling. Vietnam avoided such a fate and has made impressive achievements in its market reform since then. Yet Vietnam’s transformation over the last three decades does not signal the triumph of capitalism; nor is it a consequence of peace, as some may think. Vietnam remains a frontier where imported capitalist institutions continue to be tested against the harsh local realities of a renegade communist state bent on preserving its power and privileges at any costs.

Understanding this complex process helps one understand why the meaning of the Vietnam War has shifted over time. Ever since the war’s end in 1975, Hanoi’s leaders have sought to capitalize on their military victory to legitimize their rule. Every year the event is celebrated with great fanfare, as “the day when South Vietnam was liberated and the country reunified.” The victory on that day, the Vietnamese are told again and again, validated the eternal mandate of the Communist Party to rule the country. Yet public opinion inside Vietnam about the meaning of the war has quietly shifted in the last two decades, as Vietnamese have gained the freedom to travel abroad, as scholars have gained access to previously classified documents, and as the Internet has broken the government’s monopoly on access to information. Much to the government’s chagrin, Vietnamese now view the war between North and South Vietnam as a proxy war and civil war, rather than one for national liberation and unification, and an extremely tragic, devastating, and deadly one at that.

The greater freedom and comfort that the Vietnamese enjoy today came not from the end of the war, but from the end of the communist revolution in the late 1980s. The market reforms that the party has launched since then have been popular but have, ironically, invited greater scrutiny into its past fanaticism. Numerous eyewitness accounts of the land reform, reeducation camps, and famine-riven life in collective farms are now readily available online for those who want to learn more about that past. This gave birth to the popular joke that “the longest and bloodiest path to capitalism is through socialism.” Except for a few honest leaders, the party has morphed into a family-run racket. Children of officials, or the “red princes and princesses,” are now routinely appointed to key positions early on to succeed their parents when they retire. This perverse outcome naturally causes the war that brought the country under the party’s control to be seen in a new light. As the popular poet and onetime-People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) soldier Nguyễn Duy wrote bitterly, “whichever side won in war, it is the people who lost.”⁷⁸

Nguyễn Duy spoke for numerous other North Vietnamese intellectuals, from military leaders such as the late PAVN General Trần Độ and Colonel Phạm Quế Dương, to scientists and scholars such as Nguyễn Thanh Giang and Nguyễn Huệ Chi, to prominent writers such as Nguyên Ngọc and Nguyễn Quang Lập, to young lawyers and doctors such as Nguyễn Vӑn Đài and Phạm Hồng Sơn. Journalist Huy Đức, who grew up in North Vietnam during the war and used to serve as a captain in the military, admitted that in hindsight it was the South that liberated the North, not vice versa.⁷⁹ The North Vietnamese lived in abject poverty caused mostly by their leaders’ fanatical policies, yet many were led to believe that their socialist system was superior and that their Southern compatriots’ lives were much worse under imperialism. What they saw with their own eyes in the South after 1975 liberated their minds from the web of lies told by their leaders. Almost fifty years after the end of the war, prominent Vietnamese from diverse backgrounds now feel that it was a costly mistake. The moment of reckoning is late but has finally arrived.

17 Postwar US–Vietnam Relations

George C. Herring ^†

The end of the Vietnam War in April 1975 brought no peace between the United States and North Vietnam. Humiliated by a small nation, the world’s greatest power was not in a conciliatory frame of mind. In marked contrast to its generous treatment of vanquished Germany and Japan after World War II, it dealt with victorious North Vietnam as a defeated foe. US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger designed the punitive American policy. Exhausted from his arduous and immensely frustrating years of negotiating with Hanoi – and Saigon – and mortified by the outcome of the war, he harbored a strong animus against all Vietnamese. Privately, he damned the Hanoi leadership as “the most bloody-minded bastards I have ever dealt with.” He reasoned that worsening relations with China and dependence on the Soviet Union in time would force them to accede to American demands. If the United States “played it cool,” he opined, the “logic of events” would force North Vietnam to come around.¹

The War after the War, 1975–87

Without consulting Congress, Kissinger orchestrated after Hanoi’s victory in the Vietnam War a series of steps that perpetuated the conflict by other means. The day Saigon fell, the United States froze $70 million in South Vietnamese assets held by American banks. US agencies imposed an array of economic sanctions that retained the wartime embargo on North Vietnam, slapped export controls on newly “liberated” South Vietnam and Cambodia that prevented them from receiving humanitarian aid, denied Hanoi any US foreign aid and access to international capital, and even forbade shipment of agricultural equipment and medical supplies by charitable organizations. Americans could not legally travel to Vietnam. As yet another way of isolating Hanoi, the United States in the fall of 1975 vetoed its membership in the United Nations (UN), an action widely viewed as spiteful.²

North Vietnam emerged from the war understandably hubristic. Its leaders had long proclaimed their nation the vanguard of world revolution. But they were also practical enough to recognize their vast reconstruction needs. They feared dependency on their communist allies, China and the Soviet Union, and recognized that the United States had the resources to meet their desperate needs. They fell back on a vaguely worded article in the 1973 Paris Agreement on Vietnam calling for the United States to heal the wounds of war by providing economic assistance, “reconstruction aid” by official account. Hanoi deluded itself that it had strong political support in America. Its haughty manner and talk of US “obligations” to provide what amounted to reparations as a precondition to discussions of normalization further inflamed top US officials. Most galling were its claims that the United States must provide aid in order not to “lose face.”³

The positions staked out by both sides in the summer of 1975 set the parameters for the generally fruitless diplomacy of the next decade. Kissinger candidly admitted that “I gag at the thought of economic aid to Vietnam.”⁴ The Gerald Ford administration flatly rejected Vietnamese demands, claiming that Hanoi’s repeated violations of the 1973 agreement absolved the United States of any responsibility to abide by its terms. Contradicting itself, Washington used another article of that agreement to pin on North Vietnam responsibility for Americans missing in action (MIA). Percentage-wise, the United States had far fewer MIAs in the Vietnam War than in World War II or Korea. Many of the missing were air-crew members who went down in remote areas with rugged terrain, making the location and identification of remains all but impossible. For the loser of a conflict to hold the winner responsible for its MIAs was quite unprecedented in the history of warfare. But President Richard M. Nixon had used the MIA issue to rally Americans behind continuation of the war, and in time that had taken on a life of its own. Reversing the US position on aid, Hanoi held that America’s refusal to uphold its “obligations” relieved it of responsibility for MIAs. Each side accused the other of “bribery” and “blackmail.”⁵

Sporadic efforts to break the deadlock ran afoul US electoral politics. In late 1975, the Vietnamese returned nine Americans captured at the end of the war. The United States responded by allowing a nongovernmental organization (NGO) to send humanitarian aid to Vietnam. Again, there was talk of normalization, and Hanoi promised to release the remains of some Americans killed in action (KIA). But its absorption of South Vietnam and creation of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRVN) in the summer of 1976, along with its shift closer to the Soviet Union, cooled US interest. Seeking election in his own right and facing a tough rightwing challenge from California governor Ronald Reagan, Ford, in campaign speeches, denounced Hanoi’s leaders as a “bunch of international pirates,” denied any intention of establishing diplomatic relations, and demanded a “full accounting” of MIAs as a precondition to talks. Perhaps to head off another UN veto, the Vietnamese softened their position in October by requiring only that Ford stop calling them “pirates.” The thaw quickly refroze when the United States, shortly after the election, again wielded the veto in the Security Council, a move Democrat Jimmy Carter, Ford’s opponent and the winner of the election, fully backed.⁶

A neophyte in politics and diplomacy, Carter brought to the presidency high hopes for peacemaking. He dreamed of ending the Cold War. He hoped to heal the wounds of America’s recent, traumatic conflict by making peace with Vietnam, a step that could also stabilize Southeast Asia and keep Vietnam out of the Chinese and Soviet orbits. He dropped the Kissinger–Ford demand for a full accounting of MIAs, asking only for a “satisfactory report.” He opened cracks in the embargo by allowing some private humanitarian and development aid for Vietnam and by easing the travel ban. He dispatched to Vietnam a special mission to discuss normalization and related issues, a move that – briefly – raised hopes for further progress by establishing an office in Hanoi to deal with MIA matters.⁷

While the United States turned conciliatory, Hanoi moved in the opposite direction. At the 4th Party Congress in late 1976, First Secretary Lê Duẩn’s regime shifted hard left by imposing a Stalinist economic model on the newly unified country. In foreign policy, the Vietnamese set out to improve relations with their feuding allies, the Soviet Union and China, and to assume a “leadership” role in Indochina. Still hubristic, they insisted that the United States could heal itself only by providing them what amounted to reparations. Mistakenly persuaded that the United States needed Vietnam more than they needed US aid and that American public opinion was behind them, they took a harder line on normalization issues.⁸

Throughout 1977 and into 1978, the two sides engaged in an “awkward dialogue of mutual misunderstanding and increasing diplomatic tension.”⁹ The United States remained confident that Vietnam would soften its stance on aid, while Hanoi wrongly believed that Washington would have to provide assistance. During extended off-and-on talks in Paris, the United States agreed to drop its opposition to Vietnam’s admission to the UN if Hanoi would push ahead with an accounting of MIAs. To the shock of US diplomats, the Vietnamese publicly reintroduced the aid issue by releasing a 1973 Nixon letter promising $3.25 billion and embarrassing the Carter administration at home. Congress responded by banning aid to Vietnam. US diplomats pushed Vietnam on MIAs and sought to disconnect that issue from normalization. Vietnam continued to demand aid as a precondition to negotiations. By December, the talks in Paris had deadlocked. The revelation of Vietnamese spying in the United States provoked outrage that further narrowed the room for compromise. The “scars of war still exist on both sides,” US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance lamented.¹⁰

In 1978, the lagging discussions on normalization became entangled in the frantic geopolitical maneuvering that rekindled the Cold War and sparked fighting in Indochina. The roles were now reversed, with an increasingly embattled Vietnam as the eager suitor and the United States as the standoffish object of its attention. In Indochina, the murderous Cambodian regime of Pol Pot, wary of Vietnam’s claims to a “special relationship,” conducted border raids, provoking Vietnamese counterattacks. Vietnam blamed China for Cambodian provocations and edged closer to the Soviet Union. On the verge of war with Cambodia and possibly China, and despite its close ties with the Soviet Union, Vietnam now eagerly sought ties with the United States, again proposing to move immediately toward normalization and address other issues later. The Vietnamese were “panting to lock up the deal,” one US official observed.¹¹

Washington spurned Hanoi’s advances. Soviet adventurism in the Horn of Africa had provoked anger and rising suspicion in the United States. As the staunchly anti-Soviet National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski gained predominance among Carter’s advisors, the administration took a harder line against the USSR and sought to “play the China card” against Moscow by moving closer to Beijing. Vietnam’s ties with Moscow and enmity with China made it less attractive to the United States. China made plain its opposition to US ties with Vietnam. Following Brzezinski’s lead, the administration decided to hold off on normalization with Vietnam until the rapprochement with China had been finalized. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and Carter’s angry and forceful response brought Soviet–American tensions back to the heyday of the Cold War.¹²

A series of dramatic events in 1978–9 would put normalization on the shelf for a decade. As fighting raged across Indochina in 1979, diplomatic stances hardened. Vietnam signed a treaty with the Soviet Union in November 1978 just before it invaded Cambodia and settled in for a long-term occupation. Seeing the sinister hand of Moscow behind Vietnamese actions, China provided aid to Cambodia, speeded up negotiations with the United States, and in February invaded Vietnam’s northern provinces. This largely symbolic maneuver proved costly and was quickly liquidated after Beijing claimed to have “taught Vietnam a lesson.” Meanwhile, Vietnam’s harassment of its Hòa population – the ethnic Chinese – set off another mass exodus of refugees into China and Southeast Asia, sparking protests throughout the region and fueling anti-Vietnamese sentiment in the United States. With China the higher priority, Washington now insisted that Vietnam’s close ties with Moscow, occupation of Cambodia, and maltreatment of the Hòa stood as barriers to normalization. The diplomatic ties that seemed possible, if not likely, when Carter took office were not even on the horizon when he left.¹³

US attitudes hardened significantly in the 1980s. Republican President Ronald Reagan campaigned on a Cold War platform. Upon taking office, he hyped up anti-Soviet rhetoric, ordered a massive defense buildup, and took a hard line in negotiations on nuclear weapons. After a time of national amnesia, the Vietnam War roared back into American life with a vengeance. A “revisionist” school of thought challenged the “dove” orthodoxy. Reagan pronounced Vietnam a “noble cause.” Former military and civilian leaders insisted that the United States could have won the war had it used its vast power decisively, an argument designed to cure the so-called Vietnam syndrome that allegedly limited America’s use of military power abroad. The continued arrival of “boat people” from Vietnam and its invasion of Cambodia put a moral stigma on Hanoi.¹⁴

Sparked by reported sightings of live Americans behind the so-called Bamboo Curtain, the POW/MIA issue emerged front and center in Reagan’s first term. Sensationalist films such as Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) fed the myth of Americans held captive by Indochinese communists and desperate to be rescued by US superheroes. A potent POW/MIA lobby kept up a drumfire of criticism of Hanoi – and Washington. Americans wore wristbands in memory of the forgotten. A stark, black-and-white POW/MIA flag soon flew above the White House, the US Capitol, and other public buildings (and still flies in many places today). Reagan brought to the cause his unique brand of sentimental patriotism. He viewed resolution of the MIA issue as a way to erase the nation’s “crippling memory” of Vietnam. Responding to the surge of popular interest, he assigned it the “highest national priority” and reasserted demands for a full accounting. He even approved covert operations into Laos by soldiers of fortune of dubious reputation searching for Americans held captive.¹⁵

Normalization, 1988–2007

Yet another stunning global geopolitical upheaval and major changes in the United States, and especially in Vietnam, finally set these former enemies on a mutually wary course toward normalization. In the United States, the harder the MIA lobby pushed, the more it alienated leaders of both political parties. Reagan administration officials grew increasingly angry with its agitation, and skeptical of its numbers, and tired of its insistence that the war could not end until “all POWs came home.” More important, Reagan’s quite remarkable shift from belligerency against the Soviet Union to détente opened up new possibilities with Vietnam. After years of stasis, the administration in 1987 sent General John Vessey to Vietnam as a special emissary to discuss MIAs and other issues.¹⁶

For Vietnam, the transformation was far more dramatic – and drastic. By the early 1980s, hubris was in short supply in Hanoi. The invasion of Cambodia had bogged down in a costly, quagmire-like occupation, “Vietnam’s Vietnam,” some Americans smugly called it. Enmity with the United States and China left Hanoi isolated and dependent on Moscow. The grand economic experiment launched with such zeal by the communist regime a decade earlier had flopped miserably, leaving Vietnam one of the world’s poorest nations. Economic growth lagged at around 2 percent, annual per capita income averaged $100, and inflation soared. “Waging a war is easy,” the veteran revolutionary Phạm Vӑn Đồng conceded, “but running a country is difficult.”¹⁷

External pressures played a critical role in the transformation. While Vietnam languished economically, its Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) neighbors showcased glittering economic success. Under reformer Deng Xiaoping, China in the mid-1980s introduced quasi-capitalist reforms to salvage a sagging economy – and perpetuate Communist Party rule. Premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika (restructuring) of the Soviet system provided a further stimulus and alternative. As part of the revolution in world affairs he did so much to bring about, Gorbachev also pressed Hanoi to reconcile with China and the United States. A more compelling incentive came with a drastic Soviet aid cut that threatened a body blow to Vietnam’s already teetering economy. The fall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe at the end of the decade and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union sent shock waves across the world, reaffirming to the Hanoi government that it must do better by its own people or risk the fate of its communist allies.¹⁸

Economic woes, more than anything else, forced radical changes in Vietnam. Party leaders increasingly recognized that they must find ways to bolster economic growth and improve living standards. Food shortages and even famine in the 1980s underscored the danger. Acting on the slogan “reform or die,” a regime led, ironically, by Southerners forced out the combative – and dogmatic – Lê Duẩn (who died in 1986) after twenty-five years in power, traded communist ideology for a more pragmatic economic and diplomatic approach, and launched a program of Đổi mới (Renovation). The changes took place incrementally rather than all at once. Not surprisingly, they provoked opposition within the government. While enacting reforms, the party clung tightly to political power and stifled dissent.¹⁹

At home, the reformers took radical steps to stimulate economic growth and prosperity. Relying on Southerners experienced with the workings of a capitalist economy, they scrapped collectivization, especially in agriculture, and downplayed central planning. They limited government price-fixing in favor of supply-and-demand principles and market incentives, and encouraged private ownership, while putting state-run enterprises on a profit basis and freeing them to operate on their own. These changes put a premium on opening Vietnam to foreign investment and finding new trading partners. The reforms began slowly, but in the wake of the dramatic events of 1989 the regime boldly – and keenly aware of the risks – stepped up the process by embarking “on an uncharted path without a clear idea of the ultimate destination.”²⁰

Economic change compelled a fundamental reorientation of Vietnam’s foreign policy. The reformers prioritized economic growth over military security and enacted huge cuts in a swollen military budget. Party Resolution 13 of 1988, a “seminal moment,” according to scholar David Elliott, spoke of a “changing world” and called for “new thinking,” words often used by Gorbachev. The reformers swapped ideology for a foreign policy based on national interest and abandoned classic Marxist doctrine of a world divided into two camps for interdependence and “multidirectionalism.” After years of colonial control and dependence on outside powers, an isolated Vietnam aimed for a self-reliance based on the “three nos”: no military alliances; no foreign bases on Vietnam’s soil; and no military actions against other nations. Its leaders attempted to promote their nation’s security and prosperity and maximize its autonomy by shortening its list of enemies, expanding the number of its friends, and affiliating with international organizations – what they called “pro-active international integration.” This fundamental reorientation of policies, along with the sharp drop in Soviet aid and decline in trade with Eastern Europe, made it essential for Vietnam to withdraw from Cambodia, reconcile with China, normalize relations with the United States to get rid of the crippling embargo, develop ties with Western Europe and Japan, and gain access to ASEAN. As a first step in this process, the SRVN responded to the Vessey mission by turning over to the Americans 130 sets of remains, a crucial turning point in postwar US–Vietnam relations. An issue that had been an impediment now helped jumpstart the process of normalization.²¹

Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, went along, but set a steep price. During its first years in office, the Bush administration was preoccupied with the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and war in the Middle East. In this strikingly different international context, enmity toward Vietnam seemed increasingly outdated, even irrelevant. Leaders of both the main US political parties agreed it was time to move on. In what has been called America’s “unipolar moment,” that brief time when the nation stood as the lone superpower, hubristic US officials were not in a mood for conciliation. In 1991, the administration charted a harsh “Road Map” of demands for normalization: When Vietnam withdrew from Cambodia, granted access to its archives dealing with MIA matters, and agreed to the establishment of an MIA office in Hanoi, the United States would end its trade embargo. As MIA issues were resolved, the two nations could proceed toward normalizing their diplomatic relations. “One day Vietnam may overcome the consequences of having won its war against America,” the London Economist opined. “The Americans are putting off this day as long as possible.”²²

The Vietnamese naturally resented the tone of the road map and the severity of its demands. “America is a beautiful lady,” one diplomat moaned, “but very hard to please.” But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Vietnamese lost their patron, and their economic reforms made ties with the United States almost mandatory. They consented to US demands, even (remarkably) to archival access, a step Bush hailed as a “real breakthrough” in “writing the last chapter of the history of the war.” The United States in turn provided $1.3 million to help Vietnamese disabled by the war, lifted its ban on travel to Vietnam, permitted American businesses to negotiate contracts with the SRVN, and allowed Vietnamese Americans to wire money to relatives in Vietnam. The two nations seemed on the verge of full normalization when Bush’s campaign for reelection stymied further progress.²³

Completion of the process was left to Bush’s successor, Democrat and former Arkansas governor Bill Clinton. By the time Clinton took office, American businesses were clamoring for an end to the embargo and access to Vietnamese markets. After a thorough investigation, a Select Senate Committee headed by Vietnam veterans John McCain (Republican and a former POW) and John Kerry (Democrat and former Vietnam Veterans Against the War protestor) produced no evidence that Americans were being held captive in Indochina. Opinion polls indicated firm support for normalization, if not outright enthusiasm. Clinton still moved cautiously. His protest against the war as a college student and his avoidance of the draft had been contentious issues during the 1992 campaign. Like his predecessors, he hesitated to provoke a still potent MIA lobby. His relations with his own military were especially bad, giving him added reason for caution. In July 1993, the administration stopped blocking international loans to Vietnam and began stationing diplomats in Hanoi to help American families seeking information about missing service personnel. Finally, in February 1994, Clinton lifted the embargo, and the two countries set about establishing liaison offices in their capitals.²⁴

The immediate results in terms of trade were limited. Boeing, United Airlines, and American Express rushed into Vietnam, and Pepsi and Coke launched “cola wars” to win over Vietnamese palates. Some thirty US companies opened offices the day after the embargo was lifted, starting a new battle for Vietnamese wallets. Nike quickly became Vietnam’s largest foreign employer. But a cumbersome Vietnamese bureaucracy, along with rampant corruption and stifling red tape, posed major obstacles to investment and development. By 1999, the United States ranked only eighth among foreign investors. High tariffs on Vietnamese goods sold in the United States and Vietnam’s lack of most-favored-nation status restricted what it could sell, thus limiting its ability to buy US goods. In any event, Vietnam did not have much to sell, and a low per capita income sharply restricted what it could buy. US exports averaged only $300 million from 1996 to 1999.²⁵

Full normalization came in 1995. In a major symbolic act, the Vietnamese returned to the United States the now crumbling and rotted-out embassy in Hồ Chí Minh City, once an imposing, fortress-like symbol of America’s presence in Vietnam, subsequently a lingering image of its frenzied departure and humiliating defeat. In January 1995, the two nations agreed to open liaison offices in Washington and Hanoi. Finally, in July, Clinton announced his intention to establish full diplomatic relations on the grounds that opening Vietnam to US trade and ideas would help promote freedom there, as in Eastern Europe. Vietnamese leaders resented America’s patronizing tone and worried about the corrupting influence of American materialism, but they had little choice except to go along. In an act richly symbolic of the spirit of reconciliation, the United States subsequently sent to Hanoi as its first ambassador Douglas “Pete” Peterson, a former POW who had previously visited the city as an involuntary guest at the notorious “Hanoi Hilton.” An inspired choice, Peterson went out of his way to promote friendship and reconciliation with his former captors. In a technical sense, at least, the war had finally ended.²⁶

A visit to Vietnam by President Clinton in November 2000, the first trip there by an American chief executive since Richard Nixon visited troops in 1969, pushed the process of normalization still further. Clinton stayed four days, longer than customary for such visits, and the SRVN, in an act without precedent, permitted his speech to be broadcast over national television. He did not apologize for the war, as some Americans and Vietnamese had urged, recognizing the obvious domestic political pitfalls of such an act. But he showed sensitivity to Vietnamese feelings. The theme of his visit was “Vietnam is a country, not a war,” an obvious fact that Americans in their self-absorption had difficulty grasping. “The history we leave behind is painful and hard,” he affirmed. “We must not forget it, but we must not be controlled by it.” He visited a site where Americans and Vietnamese together painstakingly sifted through dirt in search of fragments of bone that might help identify Americans. He also expressed concern for the thousands of Vietnamese still missing and provided thousands of pages of documents to help the search. In Hanoi and Hồ Chí Minh City, he drew huge crowds. His visit represented a sort of closure for one era and the beginning of another.²⁷

The visit also exposed lingering sores in the United States and Vietnam. “Why didn’t he go before?” some US veterans snarled, making clear the continuing divide between those Americans who went to Vietnam and those who did not. The Vietnamese insisted that the United States should assume greater responsibility for the deaths and injuries caused by unexploded land mines and Agent Orange. When Clinton gently chided the Vietnamese government about its human rights record and pressed it to permit greater freedoms and open itself fully to globalization, Vietnam’s communist leaders charged that an imperialist United States was once again seeking to impose its will on a sovereign nation.²⁸

By the turn of the century, Đổi mới had brought dramatic changes to Vietnam. The country’s annual growth rate averaged between 6 and 8 percent, and it managed to lift itself from the ranks of the world’s poorest countries into middle-income status. Poverty and hunger were no longer acute. Vietnam in fact produced enough food to export some products. An explosion of jobs in factories significantly altered Vietnamese society. Living standards improved, and by 2009 per capita GDP reached $1,200. In foreign policy, the changes were little short of revolutionary. Normalization with the United States was but a single element of Vietnam’s “multidirectional” foreign policy. In 1985, it had diplomatic relations with only twenty-three nations. Ten years later, the number had jumped to 163. It also reconciled with China and established ties with Japan and numerous European nations. It joined ASEAN and Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), a twenty-one–nation forum founded in 1989 to promote free trade in the region. It also became a nonpermanent member of the UN Security Council.²⁹

During the first years of the new century, Vietnam–US economic ties expanded dramatically. The United States became a major investor in Vietnam, and that nation became one of the largest recipients of American foreign assistance, much of it going to AIDS/HIV prevention and treatment, deactivating unexploded mines and shells, and education. The two nations concluded a bilateral trade agreement. In 2007, with full US support, Vietnam joined the World Trade Organization (WTO), and Congress agreed to full and normal trade relations. The United States soon became Vietnam’s largest market, in 2009 taking in about 20 percent of that nation’s exports. Two years later, trade totaled $1.76 billion, a tenfold increase since 2001, with the balance heavily in favor of Vietnam. Trade representatives met frequently to discuss areas of contention, such as American charges that Vietnam was not protecting intellectual property rights and was dumping clothing and other products on the US market at lower prices than domestic and foreign competitors.³⁰

One of the most vexing items in US–Vietnam trade has been the lowly catfish market competition that provoked the so-called “catfish wars” between southern American catfish farmers and Vietnamese exporters. Following ratification of the trade treaty, catfish exports to the United States soared, and Vietnam captured some 20 percent of the US market. Catfish farmers from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas naturally blamed Vietnamese competition for their sharp drop in sales. They mounted a public relations campaign against catfish “with a foreign accent” that sought first to taint Vietnamese fish as an inferior and even dangerous product raised in the heavily polluted Mekong River that might even contain Agent Orange (which Americans, of course, had sprayed in Vietnam). When the smear campaign failed to slow Vietnamese imports, the Americans claimed that Vietnamese catfish were not in fact catfish and gained legislation forcing them to be labeled basa or tra, no more like a catfish than “calling a cat a cow,” a sympathetic US legislator claimed. When that also failed, southern catfish farmers secured the imposition of tariffs on imports. Vietnamese exporters showed the same persistence and staying power in waging the catfish wars as their brethren did in the earlier war. Critics noted the contradiction between Americans’ efforts to impose free-trade principles on other countries while violating those principles to stamp out competition.³¹

“Legacy” issues from the war continued to divide the two nations. Vietnam’s quite extraordinary assistance in helping locate the remains of American MIAs (usually in return for substantial economic assistance) provoked its own people to complain that hundreds of thousands of their sons were also missing “and you are looking for Americans.” Through technology and searches in its records, the United States began helping to find Vietnamese MIAs.³² For years, the Vietnamese pressed the United States to accept responsibility for and assist in cleaning up the deadly mess left from the estimated 20 million gallons of herbicides sprayed across roughly 10 percent of the South Vietnamese countryside and in treating the millions of Vietnamese victims of American dioxins. For liability reasons, the United States refused to accept legal responsibility. Since 2007, it has provided substantial funds for dioxin removal and health care for victims. In 2012, fifty years after the start of the Ranch Hand spraying operations, it agreed to remove dioxin from the site of its former air base in Đà Nẵng, an arduous $43 million project that would take six years – “the first steps to bury the legacies of our past,” the US ambassador called it.³³ Some Vietnamese agreed; others complained of too little, too late. A follow-up project at the former US air base at Biên Hòa began some years later.

Human rights issues have also loomed large in US–Vietnamese relations. Vietnam has changed significantly since the implementation of Đổi mới. Individuals can engage in private enterprise. Vietnamese enjoy a limited freedom of worship, and church membership has increased. To promote tourism, the government even approved the construction of a decidedly bourgeois string of golf courses running north to south called the Hồ Chí Minh Golf Trail.³⁴ Đổi mới also opened the door at least slightly for individuals and a growing number of quasi-political organizations to agitate for such things as greater freedoms and better working conditions, and even to challenge government policies. And the Internet has provided protestors a potentially powerful weapon of dissent.³⁵ To the consternation of some Americans, Vietnam remains very much a one-party authoritarian state. The party’s strategy has been to permit some freedoms but to crack down hard on any dissent that threatens its control. It has specifically targeted minority groups in the Central Highlands and the northwest mountain regions. Press freedoms have been restricted and bloggers shut down, and even sometimes incarcerated. The roughly 2 million Vietnamese in the United States, some of them quite prosperous and many of them critical of the Hanoi regime, have lobbied Washington to push the Vietnam government to allow additional political and religious freedoms. Some Americans have sought to use trade to leverage change in Vietnam. Congress and human rights groups regularly introduce legislation to punish the SRVN for political repression.

“Not Too Hot, Not Too Cold”: From Normalization to Partnership

Changes in the international system and in the positions of the two nations, along with the emerging threat of China, pushed the former enemies toward measured and still qualified cooperation on security and military issues. America’s unipolar moment turned out to be stunningly brief. Terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001 provoked a US “global war on terror” that in turn produced ill-advised, drawn-out, and ultimately disastrous and debilitating military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Great Recession of 2008 further undermined America’s global position – and its claims to offer a political and economic model for other countries. The United States remained the world’s greatest power economically and militarily, but a nation that had seemed invincible in the 1990s appeared anything but in the new century.

The major catalyst for US–Vietnam defense cooperation was the looming presence of Asia’s new economic giant and rising military power: China. While the United States was bogged down in Iraq and crippled by recession, China surged economically and began to rebuild its military, especially its navy. It still lagged far behind the United States in overall military power, but it increasingly asserted itself in the Asia–Pacific region, especially in the South China Sea. That vital waterway carries an estimated $5 trillion in trade each year, one-third of global commerce. It contains a bounty of fish and vast deposits of oil and natural gas. China’s neo-imperial claim to “indisputable sovereignty” over the entire region, what it calls its “patrimony,” threatened the interests that Vietnam and other small regional nations such as the Philippines and Malaysia consider vital. To back up its claims, China occupied some disputed islands and constructed upon reefs numerous artificial islands with runways capable of handling large military aircraft. It harassed and even seized fishing boats from Vietnam and other regional nations.³⁶

Vietnam’s policies have mirrored its historical love–hate relationship with its former colonial master and larger northern neighbor. Its economic reforms are patterned loosely on those of China. China is its largest trading partner. But the two countries have clashed over numerous issues. Vietnam has protested Beijing’s plans to build enormous hydroelectric dams on the Upper Mekong River, a waterway vital to its economy and ecology. It fears rising Chinese influence in Laos, traditionally part of its area of influence. The SRVN’s awarding of a contract permitting Chinese companies to mine bauxite in the Central Highlands provoked fierce opposition from Vietnamese environmentalists, academics, intellectuals, and veterans’ groups, including even the legendary General Võ Nguyên Giáp of Điện Biên Phủ fame. Chinese harassment of Vietnamese fishing vessels in the South China Sea in 2007 and the government’s refusal to respond set off widespread and angry protests in Vietnam’s major cities and among bloggers. Hanoi has been careful not to provoke Beijing, but it has also come to see strategic value in a larger US presence in Southeast Asia and closer ties with its former enemy.³⁷

To meet the China threat and other foreign policy challenges, Vietnam in the early years of the new century expanded and refined the multidirectional policy adopted in the 1980s. In an increasingly multipolar world, it sought to build its economy and safeguard its security by engaging with as many nations as possible. Eschewing alliances in accord with the “three-nos” policy, it sought a “hedging” strategy that would protect it from depending on any one nation or getting caught up in conflict between great powers. The device chosen to achieve its goals was the strategic partnership, a concept apparently adapted from the business world that gained wide popularity among small and middle-sized nations, especially in the Asia–Pacific region. These bilateral agreements were goal-driven rather than threat-driven. They spelled out sometimes in great detail areas of cooperation and goals to be pursued in trade, security, and defense, and even cultural and educational activities. They sought to promote the nation’s interests without the binding commitments of a formal alliance. The partnerships came in ascending levels of “density” that sometimes seemed murky: comprehensive; strategic-comprehensive; and comprehensive-strategic. Vietnam’s first partnership was a comprehensive-strategic agreement with Russia in 2001 weighted heavily toward defense and arms purchases. By 2017, it had various levels of partnerships with twenty-six nations. Its comprehensive-strategic-cooperative partnership with China spelled out in great detail numerous areas of “cooperation” to balance known areas of “struggle” between the two nations.³⁸

The United States also had extensive trade with China, and China held much of its soaring national debt. As a Pacific power, it too was uneasy about China’s assertive claims and its bullying of smaller nations. Some US military strategists warned of the dangers of China’s growing military power, especially its navy. Entangled in costly and futile wars in the Middle East since the turn of the century, America’s presence in the Pacific had diminished. In a major 2010 policy shift, President Barack Obama announced a US “pivot” back to an area traditionally important to the United States and likely to be central to world commerce in the twenty-first century. Later that year, in a tough speech at an ASEAN meeting in Hanoi, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton surprised her listeners, especially the Chinese, by asserting that freedom of the seas was a vital national interest for the United States. While offering to mediate China’s disputes with regional nations, she further warned that the Obama administration would not tolerate the threat or use of force by any claimant. The United States subsequently challenged China’s extravagant claims with air and sea patrols, sparking the kind of incidents that could easily escalate.³⁹

Against this backdrop of rising regional and great-power tension, the United States and Vietnam moved cautiously toward growing, but still limited, cooperation on defense and security issues. Hanoi continued to emphasize the “multidirectional” approach in its foreign relations. Wary of the reliability of American commitments, and even of a US–China rapprochement, as in the 1970s, it did not seek a close relationship. With memories of colonial domination still etched in its mind, it clung firmly to its “three nos” policy. It carefully avoided any step that would antagonize its neighbor. But it sought by edging closer to the United States to gain some leverage against Beijing and even possibly some influence with Washington. Relations with both China and the United States should follow a “Goldilocks Formula,” one Vietnamese diplomat observed: “not too hot, not too cold.”⁴⁰

For the United States, also, discretion has been the watchword. It too has avoided actions that might antagonize China. It publicly justified its move toward Vietnam with reasons other than China. It may also have hoped that closer relations with Vietnam would give it some influence over Hanoi’s internal politics, especially in regard to human rights.

From 2011, the two nations inched closer together. As part of its “pivot” back to Asia, the United States upgraded its defense ties with numerous Asia–Pacific nations, Vietnam included. US Navy ships began regular visits to Vietnamese ports. The two fleets participated in joint nonmilitary exercises; their officers exchanged visits to Hanoi and Honolulu. In 2011, Vietnam and the United States signed a “landmark” Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on bilateral defense cooperation, pledging to work together in such areas as maritime security, search and rescue, humanitarian assistance, and disaster relief, thereby establishing a foundation for their military cooperation to the present.⁴¹

Discussions of a strategic partnership exposed the persisting complexity of the evolving US–Vietnam relationship. In diplomatic parlance, those two words affirm that the signatories have formed ties that each considers important for the attainment of its vital interests. A strategic partnership usually includes a plan of action for the achievement of shared goals and may even discuss the means to attain them. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proposed such an agreement as early as 2010. But negotiations got bogged down, in part, apparently, because of Vietnam’s concern regarding American pressures on human rights issues and its fear of alienating China. In July 2013, during the visit of Vietnam’s President Trương Tấn Sang to Washington, the two nations announced agreement on a Comprehensive Partnership (CP). Apparently, they considered a less formal agreement better than none at all. The CP mainly restated areas of cooperation already agreed upon, such as working together to combat terrorism, international crime, and piracy.⁴²

Relations warmed significantly in Obama’s second term. Visits of top officials to each country became a regular occurrence. In a 2012 event rich with symbolism, US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta traveled to Cam Ranh Bay, a magnificent deepwater port once the site of one of America’s largest overseas naval bases. The first visit to the United States of a General Secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party, Nguyễn Phú Trọng, in July 2015, was viewed by Vietnamese as an especially important event. Hanoi had lobbied hard for it, and some top officials chose to interpret it as tacit US acquiescence in their one-party rule. Vietnam allowed the entry of additional American Peace Corps volunteers, most of whom taught English. The number of US students in Vietnam rose significantly.⁴³

Chinese aggressiveness in the South China Sea in the summer of 2014 aroused furious opposition in Vietnam. Beijing deployed an enormous oil rig in waters claimed by Vietnam and sent 100 ships to protect its operations. When Vietnam dispatched coast guard vessels to the area in a show of force, Chinese ships rammed some of them and used water cannons against their crews. This incident fueled anti-Chinese rage in Vietnam, provoking noisy but peaceful demonstrations in major cities and violent protests among workers who destroyed some Chinese-owned factories and demanded lessening their nation’s dependence on China. To secure international backing, the government invited foreign journalists to visit the scene of conflict. Claiming to have achieved its goals, China in time vacated the area, but the incident left grave concern in Vietnam.⁴⁴

This crisis brought Hanoi and Washington still closer. In October, initially on a case-by-case basis, the United States modified the arms embargo first imposed on North Vietnam in 1964 and reapplied to the SRVN twenty years later as a ban on the sale of weapons to countries (mostly communist) deemed threats to world peace. Initial purchases were limited to maritime security and included such items as defensive weapons for Vietnam’s coast guard.

A capstone event came in May 2016 with Obama’s visit to Vietnam. The president drew large crowds at most of his stops. He won robust applause for his affirmation that “big nations should not bully smaller ones.” As part of his visit, the United States lifted all restrictions on arms purchases, a step Vietnamese leaders hailed as “clear proof that both countries have completely normalized relations.” In explaining his decision, the president pointedly avoided references to China, instead insisting that the United States was shedding “relics of the Cold War,” as with its opening to Cuba. Removal of the arms embargo was more important symbolically than substantively, since Vietnam lacked money for major purchases and preferred Russian weapons that were often cheaper and that they were more accustomed to. The United States reportedly hoped to get from Vietnam assent for its troops and ships to rotate through major ports, especially Cam Ranh Bay. The two nations signed an updated statement on cooperation. During his visit, Obama also announced the establishment of Fulbright University in Hồ Chí Minh City, a private, nonprofit educational institution founded by Harvard University, the only school in Vietnam where the curriculum was not set by the government. Obama’s visit also exposed lingering tensions on human rights. Dissidents were not allowed to attend the president’s speeches, and he himself publicly expressed “concern” about such issues.⁴⁵

Figure 17.1 US President Barack Obama speaks at the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative town hall event in Hồ Chí Minh City (May 25, 2016).

Source: Jim Watson / Staff / AFP / Getty Images.

A Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) sponsored by the Obama administration seemed likely to bring the two nations even closer economically. The TPP was a cornerstone of the US pivot to Asia. It included eleven Asia–Pacific nations representing 40 percent of the global economy, and it comprised the world’s largest free-trade zone. Vietnam saw the TPP as easing its dependence on trade with China. Membership would also give its clothing, shoe, and textile producers free access to US markets. The United States viewed the TPP as a means to challenge Chinese dominance in the region. It could also be used to prod Vietnam on human rights, and in fact Vietnamese admission was conditioned on pledges to prevent child and forced labor, permit unionization of workers, and set minimum wages. US–Vietnam trade reached an all-time high of $42 billion in 2016. Vietnam retained a sizable trade surplus of $32 billion.⁴⁶

The surprising election in 2016 of the political newcomer, Republican Donald J. Trump, posed uncertainties and challenges for the budding US–Vietnam relationship. The new president campaigned on a platform more assertively nationalist and unilateralist than any since the 1930s, pledging to shut off immigration into the United States and negotiate trade agreements more favorable to US workers while questioning the value of alliances and threatening, at a minimum, to force allies to pay more for their own defense. Upon taking office, Trump plunged ahead with his America First program, attacking multilateral trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Obama’s TPP, raising questions about US treaty ties with South Korea and even the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and in time launching trade wars with Canada, Mexico, and China. He railed against Vietnam’s sizable trade surplus with the United States and made clear the United States would not join the TPP, threatening to deprive Vietnam of its favored position in the US market. The administration’s position on China veered wildly during Trump’s first years in office, leaving uncertainty in Hanoi.⁴⁷

Trump’s rabidly nationalist shift undercut the US–Vietnam relationship less than seemed likely. His approach to foreign policy left little room for promoting human rights and encouraging democracy. On the contrary, he cozied up to authoritarian leaders like the Philippines’ Roberto Duterte, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and especially Russia’s Vladimir Putin. His administration cut off aid to Cambodia for alleged human rights abuses but said nothing about Hanoi’s arrest of protesting bloggers and religious leaders. This eased, if it did not eliminate altogether, a major area of friction in US–Vietnam relations. Despite Trump’s refusal to join the TPP and his complaints about America’s $32 billion trade deficit with Vietnam and intellectual property issues, Vietnam’s trade with the United States actually increased to $27.44 billion in the first six months of 2018. And the TPP nations are determined to proceed without the United States. China’s allegedly unfair trade practices with Vietnam and its continued assertiveness in the South China Sea added powerful incentives for good relations with the United States. President Xi Jinping vowed to stand “tall and firm in the East” and insisted that China would not “lose one inch” of territory in the region. Meanwhile, the Chinese pushed ahead with new artificial islands on reefs and shoals scattered throughout the Spratly Islands and elsewhere in the region. Trump ordered the navy to assert US claims vigorously, and American warships sailed on “freedom of navigation” patrols, raising the possibility of major clashes. In October 2018, no doubt partly with the off-year elections in mind, Vice President Mike Pence firmly asserted that “We will not stand down.”⁴⁸

In this context, US–Vietnam relations remained close. Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyễn Xuân Phúc was the first Southeast Asian leader to meet with Trump. The president in turn visited Vietnam in November 2017 as part of the APEC forum meeting in Đà Nẵng. Trump’s America First rhetoric rattled his hosts, but their concern about China made good relations with the United States mandatory. The United States provided a coast guard cutter and six patrol boats to help defend that part of the South China Sea that Vietnam claimed as its own. In the summer of 2018, for the first time, Vietnam actively participated in RIMPAC (rim of the Pacific) military exercises in Hawai’i and California with twenty-five other nations. A major symbolic event in March was the appearance in Đà Nẵng of the massive aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinsson. The length of three football fields and with a crew of 6,000 sailors, the giant nuclear warship represented the “epitome of modern naval power.” Its visit to Vietnam seemed to affirm in the most tangible way America’s continued presence in the region.⁴⁹

Conclusion

At the end of 2018, trade issues remained contentious. In the first eight months of the year, Vietnam had a surplus of more than $25.74 billion, a concern to the Trump administration and possible obstacle to a new bilateral treaty. The president encouraged Vietnam to make up the deficit with purchases of US weapons, but that seemed unlikely in light of Russian dominance of that market. The catfish wars continued to simmer, American producers protesting what they saw as Vietnamese dumping, Vietnamese complaining about US regulations limiting importations of their fish. Vietnam continues to seek US and WTO recognition of its status as a “market economy.” Americans insist that this will not happen while state-owned businesses remain privileged. Trump would go no further than delegate the matter to a working group.⁵⁰

In the realm of strategy and geopolitics, Vietnamese and US interests have increasingly converged, in scholar Carlyle A. Thayer’s apt words, but they are not congruent. The two nations share an interest in Vietnam’s stability and security. In the face of the Chinese threat, Vietnam values its partnerships with the United States and many other nations, and appreciates America’s naval presence in the region. But the “three nos” policy limits how close such ties can become. Vietnam carefully avoids steps that might antagonize Beijing. Only in the event of a dire and immediate threat would it welcome US military forces on its soil or ships in its harbors. Vietnam fears getting caught in a struggle between the two superpowers. For its part, the United States sees Vietnam as a possibly useful partner in limiting Chinese expansion in the Indo-Pacific region. But it is not likely to assist Vietnam in the event of a direct Chinese threat. The two nations have come a long way from the recriminations of the immediate postwar period and the studied wariness of normalization. For the moment, at least, they are content to keep their relations “not too hot, not too cold.”⁵¹

18 Refugees and US–Vietnam Relations

Amanda C. Demmer

Between 1975 and 1995, over 1 million Vietnamese resettled in the United States. These included 130,000 who evacuated alongside US personnel in 1975, 500,000 who emigrated directly from Vietnam to the United States through the Orderly Departure Program (ODP), and another 425,000 who fled Vietnam by sea and landed in nations of first asylum in Southeast Asia before ultimately arriving in the United States.¹ During the same twenty years, Washington and Hanoi lacked formal economic and diplomatic relations, which were not resumed until 1994 and 1995, respectively. Despite the absence of formal ties, however, US and Vietnamese officials remained in close contact and often collaborated on migration programs. Refugee politics formed a primary pillar of the US approach to US–Vietnam relations in the two decades after 1975.

The United States’ bilateral ties with a unified Vietnam governed from Hanoi, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRVN) – what we might call postwar relations – has interested scholars far less than the war’s origins and military phase. While a handful of important works explore efforts to normalize relations during the Ford and Carter administrations,² there are very few treatments that examine 1975 to the mid-1990s in totality, and even these overlook the vital importance of refugee politics to US–Vietnam relations.³ The diaspora and the international responses it provoked have also been examined by scholars, but, until recently, have not been integrated with studies of US–Vietnam bilateral ties.⁴ Critical refugee study, which centers the refugee experience and in so doing reveals much about the state, power, and the consequences of US war and militarism, has also taught us a great deal about the Vietnamese diaspora.⁵ This chapter combines these preexisting studies with new research to demonstrate the necessity of integrating migration programs into the study of US relations with Vietnam after 1975.⁶

Migration Programs, 1975–96

Over 3 million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians left their homelands between 1975 and 1995. The scope and scale of these migrations entangled refugee issues with regional politics and international relations for decades. The diaspora prompted a series of responses, including unilateral actions, bilateral negotiations, and multilateral accords.

The 130,000 South Vietnamese who evacuated alongside US personnel in April 1975 are commonly referred to as refugees. Legally, however, these individuals and additional Vietnamese who arrived in the late 1970s were parolees. Because the United States did not have a mechanism for regular, annual resettlement of refugees until 1980, the Vietnamese who arrived in the late 1970s did so under the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act. The law, which governed immigrant admissions, contained a loophole that US presidents used to facilitate the resettlement of large groups of refugees during the second half of the twentieth century: the parole power.⁷ This provision empowered the US attorney general to admit (or “parole”) an alien into the country for “emergent reasons” if the admission served “the public interest.”⁸ Previous US administrations had used the parole power to admit Hungarians, Cubans, and others, and it was under parole authority that Vietnamese resettled in the United States in the second half of the 1970s. These resettlements, then, were unilateral decisions that stemmed from the White House. Very quickly, however, the scope and scale of the diaspora entangled US refugee policy with the nation’s foreign relations more broadly.

Conditions on the ground in Vietnam after 1975 were especially dire, and for a variety of reasons large numbers began to flee by boat.⁹ Over 300,000 so-called “boat people” successfully reached the shores of first-asylum nations between 1975 and 1979. Vietnamese arrived in nations belonging to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), including Malaysia (over 124,000), Indonesia (over 51,000), Thailand (nearly 26,000), and the Philippines (over 12,000). An additional 80,000 arrived in Hong Kong.¹⁰ This data, compiled by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), includes only those who successfully reached foreign soil, omitting the estimated hundreds of thousands who died at sea. Unprepared to handle such a large influx, nations of first asylum, especially Malaysia, which hosted the majority of boat people, implemented intentionally provocative policies to attempt to provoke the international community into action.¹¹ Malaysia began to push arriving Vietnamese back to sea, and other nations refused to allow ships who had rescued stranded migrants to dock in their ports.

In addition to the oceanic migrants who fled Vietnam by boat, nearly 235,000 more took the overland journey across Vietnam’s northern border into China.¹² Like a significant portion of the boat people, a majority of these were ethnic Chinese prompted to flee by anti-Chinese policies that Hanoi implemented in the wake of deteriorating Sino-Soviet relations. Hanoi’s policies added to the souring Sino-Vietnamese relations, which by 1979 resulted in open warfare between the two communist countries.

Contemporaries referred to the exodus of such large numbers of Vietnamese and the arrival of nearly 400,000 “land people” (including Cambodians and Laotians) in Thailand as the Indochinese refugee crisis. These massive migrations prompted a Conference on Indochinese Refugees hosted by the UNHCR in Geneva in July 1979. Sixty-five nations attended the conference, including the United States, the SRVN, and the Southeast Asian nations providing first asylum.

The conference took place amid rapidly changing regional and international conditions. Relations between Washington and Beijing thawed considerably, culminating in the resumption of diplomatic relations for the first time since 1949 in January 1979. The world also began to reckon with the genocide in Cambodia. Between 1975 and mid-1978, the Khmer Rouge killed over 2 million of the country’s 7 million people.¹³ Amid this intrastate violence, interstate bloodshed between communist countries also escalated, including clashes between Vietnam and China and Vietnam and Cambodia.¹⁴ These conflicts, known collectively as the Third Indochina War, prompted additional migrant flight and helped spur a multilateral response to the diaspora.¹⁵

In Geneva, the international community forged a fragile but enduring consensus on the resettlement of oceanic migrants. The ASEAN nations agreed to cease pushback policies, thereby restoring the principle of first asylum. In return for providing temporary refuge, first-asylum nations were assured that most migrants would be resettled elsewhere. The international community pledged 260,000 resettlement slots and $160 million to underwrite the effort, with the United States leading in both resettlement and financial contributions.

As the international community grappled with the violence occurring in Southeast Asia, the Holocaust became a primary reference point. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and leading state officials (including both US and ASEAN leaders) publicly framed recent events as akin to the Holocaust. US Vice President Walter Mondale, for instance, bookended his remarks in Geneva with Holocaust references and concluded by imploring his audience: “history will not forgive us if we fail, history will not forget us if we succeed.”¹⁶ Repeated references to the Holocaust made questions about refugee status moot, at least for a time. Those assembled agreed that the “boat people” would receive blanket refugee status, although resettlement nations screened migrants individually to determine their eligibility for resettlement abroad.

Ultimately, just under 800,000 boat people arrived in first-asylum nations between 1975 and 1995. The United States resettled over half, approximately 425,000. Over 100,000 resettled in both Australia and in Canada, while 27,000 went to France, 19,000 to the United Kingdom, and 17,000 to Germany.¹⁷ This sustained, multilateral effort to resettle Indochinese refugees became one of the UNHCR’s largest and longest-lasting programs.¹⁸

The Indochinese diaspora, in addition to other factors, also prompted a change in the definition of refugee in US law. The Refugee Act of 1980 drastically altered the admission of refugees into the United States. The law provided for a regular annual admission of 50,000 refugees and codified a role for the White House and Capitol Hill in the process. The president distributed the annual allotment and could increase the total number, but only after consultations with Congress. Throughout the 1980s, Indochinese refugees received over 50 percent of the resettlement slots.

The Refugee Act also aligned the definition of refugee in the United States with the UN definition. The 1951 Refugee Convention as amended by the 1967 Protocol defined a refugee in international law as any individual “outside the country of his nationality” and unable to return due to “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”¹⁹ The law therefore embraced a human rights–based definition of refugee, though US legislators provided a loophole for individuals who did not meet the enumerated criteria to be admitted as “refugees” if they were deemed “of special humanitarian concern.” As a result of these changes, the Refugee Act of 1980 drastically altered the landscape of refugee politics in the United States.

Although lasting into the mid-1990s, the assumptions and agreements underpinning international resettlement for Indochinese refugees changed substantively in 1989 with the Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA). In the years immediately preceding the CPA, the number of migrants reaching first-asylum nations surged sharply, and pushback policies – or threats to implement them – were reported throughout the region. After another conference hosted by the UNHCR, the international community (including, once again, the United States, the SRVN, first-asylum nations in Southeast Asia, and major resettlement nations abroad) agreed to the CPA.²⁰

The CPA altered the preexisting consensus on Indochinese migrants in important ways. Southeast Asian actors once again spearheaded what became international initiatives. This time, policies implemented by officials in Hong Kong pioneered a new approach to Vietnamese migrants that became ensconced in regional policy.²¹ Under the CPA, blanket refugee status was replaced with individual screening. First-asylum nations, with guidance from the UNHCR, screened all migrants who arrived after March 14, 1989 to determine their legal status. This shift reflected growing compassion fatigue and the conviction that Vietnamese boat people were no longer genuine refugees pushed by persecution but economic migrants pulled by opportunities abroad. For those who were “screened out” under the new procedures, the CPA prescribed voluntary repatriation, or return to Vietnam, a policy that required Hanoi’s cooperation. In requiring individual screenings to determine refugee status and favoring repatriation over (or, at least, alongside) resettlement, the CPA reflected and accelerated changes occurring in international refugee norms more broadly.

The CPA came to a contested close in the mid-1990s. The number of Vietnamese who claimed refugee status and ultimately received it, and therefore settled abroad, came to just under 30 percent of the total.²² The fact that so few received refugee status made the program highly controversial, as did the endorsement of repatriation to Vietnam. The 1996 Resettlement Opportunities for Vietnamese Refugees (ROVR), a bilateral program negotiated between Washington and Hanoi, gave screened-out migrants who were repatriated to Vietnam a final chance to apply for resettlement in the United States. Nearly 10,000 ultimately emigrated to the United States through the program.

Between 1979 and 1996, there was one other major emigration route for Vietnamese that existed alongside oceanic flight and resettlement abroad: the ODP. The UNHCR signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the SRVN underwriting the multilateral program in May 1979, on the eve of the 1979 conference. The ODP facilitated the departure of individuals directly from Vietnam to resettlement countries abroad, an arrangement which obviated the dangers of clandestine flight and protracted stays in refugee camps.

Although clearly reacting to the presence of large numbers of refugees in Southeast Asia, the program provided for the emigration of individuals directly from their country of origin. Those traveling through the ODP, in other words, were still inside their “country of nationality” and therefore technically did not meet the definition of refugee codified in international law. Side-stepping this legal requirement to implement “in-country” processing for refugees was a harbinger of things to come in the post–Cold War World.²³ One qualified for the ODP – which was framed as a humanitarian program to facilitate family reunification – on an individual basis, and departures required approval by the SRVN and participant nations abroad. Ultimately, over 60,000 went to Canada, nearly 47,000 to Australia, 20,000 to France, 12,000 to Germany, 5,000 to the UK, 4,000 to Norway, and approximately 3,000 to each of Belgium, Sweden, and Denmark.²⁴ The vast majority – over 523,000 – resettled in the United States.²⁵

That the preponderant number of emigrants who traveled through the ODP resettled in the United States reflected Washington’s deep ties to the South Vietnamese people and the international community’s belief that Washington harbored a special responsibility to provide resettlement opportunities to its former allies. Under the auspices of the multilateral ODP, moreover, Washington and Hanoi negotiated and implemented special bilateral programs for groups of special interest to the United States: Amerasians and former reeducation camp prisoners. Nearly 90,000 Amerasians and 167,000 reeducation camp detainees and their family members emigrated through the respective subprograms. Implementing these programs required negotiations with Hanoi and changes to US law.

The existence of children fathered by US servicemen and Asian women long preceded the Vietnam War. The 1982 Amerasian Immigration Act (AIA) provided “special treatment” for individuals who were “born in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Kampuchea, or Thailand after 1950” and who were “fathered by a United States citizen” by allowing them to bypass the restrictions codified in the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act and to emigrate to the United States.²⁶ Although the law pertained to others, the question of national responsibility or lack thereof to Vietnamese Amerasians formed the crux of the legislative and public debates about the measure. That Vietnamese Amerasians largely inspired the AIA is ironic because very few traveled through the program. The lack of formal US–Vietnam relations made the paperwork necessary for emigration prohibitively difficult, and the bill did not permit Vietnamese mothers to travel with their children, which undercut the initiative’s purported humanitarian and family reunification aims.²⁷

Bilateral negotiations between the United States and Vietnam in 1987 addressed the AIA’s many shortcomings. In September a Resettlement Accord between Vietnamese and US officials reached multiple compromises. First, the officials agreed to treat Amerasians as a bilateral issue: although emigrants would travel through the multilateral ODP, Washington and Hanoi would negotiate the terms of the subprogram separately. Second, to complete the necessary paperwork and interviews, US officials could henceforth be stationed in Hồ Chí Minh City, as were officials from nations who had formal diplomatic relations with the SRVN. Third, Amerasians emigrating through the ODP subprogram would not have refugee status, a concession to Hanoi’s long-standing position that Amerasians were not refugees, though they would be eligible for refugee benefits upon entering the United States. Finally, both sides agreed that close family members would be eligible to resettle with Amerasians, a point intended to ameliorate one of the AIA’s most criticized shortcomings. Capitol Hill codified the necessary legal changes to implement these agreements in the December 1987 Amerasian Homecoming Act (AHA).²⁸

Former reeducation camp detainees and their close family members also emigrated via a bilaterally negotiated subprogram of the ODP. The Humanitarian Operation of 1989, colloquially known as “the HO,” provided for the emigration of individuals closely associated with the United States who had spent at least three years in a reeducation camp. “Close relatives,” including spouses and unmarried children, were also permitted to resettle with former detainees. This definition of close relatives, like the HO itself, was an exception made to US law in recognition of the exceptionality of enduring ties between the United States and Vietnamese peoples. US law limited the age of unmarried children eligible for emigration with their parents to 21 years old, a requirement suspended in the case of the HO. When officials attempted to close this loophole in the mid-1990s, Vietnamese Americans and their allies in Congress lobbied to have the original terms of the program restored, an objective that was achieved with the 1996 McCain Amendment.

Between 1975 and 1995, one of the largest migrations of the twentieth century unfolded as 3 million fled from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. In a series of unilateral, multilateral, and bilateral measures, over 1 million Vietnamese resettled in the United States. Understanding why Washington implemented new programs not only in the late 1970s but for two decades thereafter requires a closer look at the various architects behind US policies.

Crafting US Policies: The Importance of Nonexecutive Actors

The US government announced new resettlement programs for Vietnamese migrants in 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1982, 1984, 1987, 1989, and 1996. These programs occurred because of the United States’ self-appointed role as leader of the West in the late Cold War struggle, pressure from regional and international actors, the deep and ongoing ties between the United States and Vietnamese peoples, and the power of humanitarian and human rights rhetoric and advocacy. Nonexecutive actors – US officials outside of the White House and their nonstate allies – provided much of the information, advocacy, and momentum for US responses.²⁹

In 1975, as South Vietnam collapsed, the White House led the US policy response. President Gerald Ford argued that the United States had a “profound moral obligation” to its South Vietnamese allies.³⁰ Putting this impulse into practice ran into an array of obstacles, including logistical challenges, legal limitations, and intense pockets of domestic opposition. Ultimately, however, the administration prevailed, and 130,000 South Vietnamese evacuated alongside US personnel, including many who left prior to the helicopter phase of the evacuation (Operation Frequent Wind).

Nonstate advocacy proved crucial to creating and sustaining the momentum for migration programs after 1975. In the late 1970s, the Citizens Commission on Indochinese Refugees (CCIR) played a profound role in shaping the US response to what contemporaries called the Indochinese refugee crisis. The CCIR was a subcommittee formed within the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a humanitarian NGO that became internationally known in the mid-twentieth century for its refugee advocacy efforts. The CCIR’s membership included leading religious figures, well-known civil rights activists, former diplomats, cultural icons, and individuals with deep governmental connections. The CCIR members were able to use their diverse backgrounds, political clout, and widespread connections to help shift the domestic political climate and, especially, prompt policymakers into action.³¹

The CCIR employed many of the methods popularized by human rights organizations in the era. CCIR members conducted fact-finding missions abroad, held press conferences, publicized policy proposals, met with government officials, and prompted letter-writing campaigns to demonstrate public support. These efforts led to tangible results. When Mondale spoke at the 1979 Geneva Conference on Indochinese Refugees, the vice president announced the implementation of proposals that the CCIR had been making for over a year. As time went on, members of the Vietnamese diaspora created some of the most vocal NGOs dedicated to advocating on behalf of boat people. Organizations like Project Ngoc, Boat People SOS, and Refugee Concern pressured state actors and the UNHCR to respect boat peoples’ human rights and became especially active in the wake of the CPA’s embrace of repatriation.³²

While a variety of NGOs focused on the fates of those who fled the SRVN, other nonstate activists lobbied on behalf of groups who remained in Vietnam, including Amerasians and reeducation camp detainees. The Pearl Buck Foundation and church leaders like Father Alfred Carroll, who headed a Korean Amerasian Program at Gonzaga University, were early leaders of nonstate efforts to create emigration programs for Vietnamese Amerasians, especially the AIA. In the mid-1980s, additional nonstate actors helped fuel debates. As Hanoi permitted members of the international media to enter Hồ Chí Minh City, photographs of Amerasians began appearing in major news outlets. Physical characteristics like height, hair color and texture, eye color, and other attributes served as powerful forms of visual evidence that helped propel nonstate advocacy on Amerasians’ behalf. Students at Hunting High School in Long Island, New York, for example, were inspired by a photograph they saw on the cover of Newsday and created a grassroots movement to bring Amerasian Lê Vӑn Minh to the United States. The students collected over 27,000 signatures from twenty-seven states and three different countries, and, after partnering with their local congressman and fellow Hunting High alumnus, Robert Mzarek (D-New York), Minh arrived in the United States in 1987.³³ Mzarek and Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) traveled to Hanoi to escort Minh to the United States, a gesture that provided a symbolic start to the AHA.

Reeducation camp detainees lacked much of the publicity that accompanied boat people and Amerasians. Because oceanic migrants fled Vietnam under such dire conditions and attracted the attention of the UNHCR and nations throughout Southeast Asia, it became increasingly costly for US officials to ignore the life-and-death stakes on the high seas and in refugee camps. If Amerasians lacked the regional and international attention commanded by boat people, they nevertheless possessed a very particular form of visibility that proved difficult for many Americans to ignore once photographs of Amerasians began appearing in the early 1980s. Reeducation camp detainees were not visible in either of these senses.

Throughout much of the late 1970s, reeducation camp detainees remained overshadowed by more visible causes and were underreported owing to a lack of outside access to the camps. By the end of the decade, the surge of oceanic migrants, many of whom were former detainees, led to greater awareness of the incredibly harsh conditions within the camps. Amnesty International published reports on human rights conditions in the SRVN in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and adopted several of the religious and civilian leaders imprisoned as prisoners of conscience. Because Amnesty International required individuals to not have advocated or used violence to qualify for prisoner-of-conscience status, however, most of the detainees, who had served in the South Vietnamese military, fell outside of Amnesty’s mandate.

Other human rights organizations and NGOs founded by members of the Vietnamese diaspora filled this void. Two of the most prominent were the Aurora Foundation and the Families of Vietnamese Political Prisoners Association (FVPPA). The Aurora Foundation began in 1981 under the leadership of Ginetta Sagan. After surviving imprisonment and torture in her native Italy during World War II, Sagan emigrated to the United States and, in the late 1960s, founded the West Coast branch of Amnesty International at her kitchen table. Sagan disagreed with the Amnesty policy that put most reeducation camp detainees outside of the organization’s purview, and created the Aurora Foundation to inform the public about political prisoners outside of Amnesty’s auspices in Vietnam and, eventually, elsewhere. Based on interviews with hundreds of former detainees in the United States, Europe, and Asia, Sagan published major reports of her findings in 1983 and 1989. Both reports were received widely in policymaking circles and helped motivate the US position on the issue. While Sagan advocated on behalf of reeducation camp prisoners using a human rights framework, the FVPPA highlighted the imperatives of family reunification.

The organization that became the FVPPA began as informal meetings in the living room of Khúc Minh Thơ in Falls Church, Virginia. The women present, including Thơ, had recently resettled in the United States and were separated from loved ones who remained in Vietnam, including family members incarcerated in reeducation camps. Initially meeting as a means of emotional support and in an effort to share information, the FVPPA eventually became one of the most powerful Vietnamese American organizations in the United States. The Association used what one newspaper dubbed the “Vietnamese grapevine” to assemble information on individual detainees, which was incredibly valuable, because the Vietnamese government refused to release that information. Thơ and her associates worked tirelessly to develop and maintain incredibly close relationships with US officials like John McCain and Robert Funseth, the deputy assistant secretary of state who acted as the lead US negotiator with Hanoi on reeducation camp detainees.³⁴

The FVPPA proved to be a vital link in transnational advocacy and national policymaking networks. The organization kept US officials up to date on individual detainees and provided a consistent source of advocacy and accountability on an issue that registered little among the broader American public. The FVPPA also provided a vital service to Vietnamese families by publishing bilingual newsletters that contained information about official US policy, including letters of support from officials and up-to-date information about migration forms and procedures. The sustained advocacy of the FVPPA and the Aurora Foundation helped form a great deal of the momentum for the HO of 1989. Funseth gave Thơ the pen he used to sign the agreement, a gesture which symbolized the FVPPA’s profound role in the policymaking process.

Members of Congress played a crucial role in crafting US policy toward Vietnam after 1975. One significant way they did so was by supporting migration programs. Early on, the members of Congress most actively involved in crafting US migration policies were those with broader ties to refugee issues, the Holocaust, and/or World War II. One example is Claiborne Pell (D-Rhode Island). Pell’s father had served as the US representative on the UN War Crimes Commission in the wake of World War II. Thereafter, the younger Pell served as vice president of the International Rescue Committee in the 1950s and played a large role in advocating on behalf of Hungarian refugees. Pell was active in legislative efforts, as was Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy (D-Massachusetts). Beginning in the mid-1960s, Kennedy chaired the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee for Refugees and Escapees, a position he used to draw attention to those displaced by the American war in Vietnam by holding hearings and introducing resolutions and legislation to provide humanitarian assistance. Kennedy maintained his interest and activism in these issues after 1975 and was a key architect behind the Refugee Act of 1980. In addition to supporting parole for Indochinese in the late 1970s, Kennedy also advocated specifically on behalf both of reeducation camp detainees and Amerasians.

In the late 1970s, as events unfolding in Indochina drew repeated comparisons to the treatment of Jews during World War II, legislators with personal ties to the Holocaust spearheaded a number of initiatives on behalf of Indochinese refugees. Rudy Boschwitz’s (R-Minnesota) family fled Nazi Germany when he was young, and the senator from Minnesota was the only refugee serving in Congress in the late 1970s. Boschwitz supported resettlement opportunities for Vietnamese refugees throughout his tenure in Congress. So did Stephen Solarz (D-New York). Solarz’s stepmother was a refugee from Nazi Germany, and the congressman made explicit connections between this history and the events unfolding in Indochina. Boschwitz, Solarz, and Pell all served on the President’s Commission on the Holocaust in 1978, alongside multiple CCIR members. The combined efforts of these nonexecutive actors had profound consequences for US policy during the late 1970s.

Figure 18.1 A man raises incense to his forehead as he pays his respects at the Vietnam War Memorial near Little Saigon in Westminster, California (April 28, 2005).

Source: David McNew / Staff / Getty Images North America / Getty Images.

Members of Congress who were also veterans, especially Vietnam War veterans, eventually joined this initial group of legislators in spearheading the creation of migration programs and in setting the scope and pace of US–Vietnam normalization more broadly. Larger transformations in public perception of the Vietnam War and the US military more broadly acted as a catalyst for this development.³⁵ Members of Congress used the political capital their veteran status conferred to sponsor legislation that underwrote migration initiatives, hold hearings, pass resolutions, send delegations to Vietnam, correspond with Vietnamese officials, and meet regularly with NGOs. In so doing, veterans serving in Congress stood at the forefront of US policymaking vis-à-vis Vietnam in the late 1980s and beyond.

The advocacy of John McCain serves as a useful microcosm for congressional advocacy on this issue. McCain is among the best-known of US veterans of the Vietnam War. A naval aviator who was shot down while completing a bombing run as part of Operation Rolling Thunder in 1967, he endured six years as a POW, an experience that included protracted stays in solitary confinement and torture. McCain entered Congress in 1982 and became a senator in 1987. The future Republican presidential nominee was very active vis-à-vis Vietnam during his tenure in Congress. In addition to escorting Lê Vӑn Minh to the United States in 1987 and sponsoring the McCain Amendment to reinstate the original terms of the HO in 1996, McCain had a close relationship with Khúc Minh Thơ and the FVPPA more broadly. The senator from Arizona introduced resolutions, traveled as part of congressional delegations to Vietnam, served on the POW/MIA Select Committee, made public statements, and took a host of other actions that influenced the scope and pace of US–Vietnam relations in the late 1980s and early 1990s. When Bill Clinton announced the resumption of formal diplomatic relations with Vietnam in 1995, he stood flanked on both sides by members of Congress who served in the Vietnam War, including McCain. The legislators’ presence was more than symbolic or political cover: legislators and their nongovernmental allies played a profound role in crafting migration programs for Vietnamese after 1975. Migration programs were not merely simultaneous with US–Vietnam normalization: they constituted an integral part of the larger process.

Refugees and the American Approach to US–Vietnam Normalization

Normalization between Washington and Hanoi was a highly contentious, protracted process that unfolded over the two decades after 1975. The only way to understand the contradictory policies Washington implemented during these years is to acknowledge that US officials continued to treat the government in Hanoi and its Vietnamese allies as distinct entities and implemented policies to address them both. The United States approach to normalization unfolded over three parts.

Part I occurred in the four years after the fall of Saigon, and was characterized by fluidity and contention. The situation in Indochina transformed dramatically as communist governments came to power in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and as the Third Indochina War erupted. Over the same years, the diaspora began, with nearly 1 million boat and land people crossing international borders between 1975 and 1979. In addition to these regional transformations, major geopolitical realignments also prompted US officials to approach events unfolding in Southeast Asia differently, as Washington reacted to the demise of détente with Moscow by recognizing the government in Beijing in 1979 and escalating the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union.

In the years immediately following the fall of Saigon, US officials extended the economic embargo that had previously pertained to only North Vietnam to the entire country and refused to have formal diplomatic relations with the SRVN. Leaders in Hanoi were initially open to pursuing ties with the United States and other Western countries as they sought to implement a massive program of national reconstruction, including socialist transformation in the South, all while balancing relations with the two communist superpowers.³⁶ Washington made no concrete offers, however, as questions of culpability and intense mistrust between the White House and Capitol Hill made crafting the American approach to Vietnam in 1975 and 1976 especially fraught.

Jimmy Carter entered the White House with the intent to proceed quickly with normalization. Immediately after his inauguration, the United States made various goodwill gestures toward Hanoi which culminated in official normalization talks in May. During private talks in Paris, US diplomats offered multiple times to establish formal relations without preconditions and even suggested leaving the closed deliberations to publicly announce to the press their intention to normalize relations. Vietnamese officials refused these offers, however, because reconstruction aid from the defeated US government remained symbolically and economically important to Hanoi.³⁷ President Richard Nixon had promised billions of dollars in a classified letter, and when SRVN officials made the letter public in the spring of 1977, Congress passed a series of resolutions preventing the United States from giving Vietnam any aid whatsoever. The Paris talks therefore ended in stalemate. In the subsequent years, however, the negotiating position of each side changed drastically.

Conditions in Vietnam quickly became dire, thanks to a combination of economic and national security threats. Throughout 1977, Vietnamese endured widespread shortages of food and consumer goods, a prolonged drought, and a ballooning trade deficit as leaders in Hanoi attempted to facilitate national reconstruction in the absence of nonrefundable aid. Amid these economic challenges, Vietnamese leaders also sought to balance relations with Beijing and Moscow, a goal that became increasingly difficult as border clashes along the Vietnamese–Cambodian border careened toward war. By mid-1978 an already difficult situation became intolerable. Economic conditions worsened considerably and were exacerbated further when intense flooding hit that fall. Throughout the spring and summer, Hanoi sent clear signals that its negotiating position vis-à-vis the United States had changed, and during a meeting in September formally offered to resume relations without preconditions, thereby meeting the terms Washington had set forth the previous year. These overtures, however, were met with silence from US officials. Moscow was far more responsive. In June, after determining reconciliation with Beijing was impossible, Vietnamese leaders joined the Soviet-led Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) and, in November, announced a strategic alliance with Moscow.³⁸

US officials increasingly viewed these events through a Cold War lens. After a period of détente, US–Soviet relations deteriorated in the spring of 1978. Amid intense bureaucratic infighting, the Carter administration decided that simultaneous normalization with Vietnam and China was impossible, and that the United States would temporarily table negotiations with Vietnam and pursue official ties with China, which were formally announced in January 1979. Motivated by economic woes, escalating border clashes, deteriorating Sino-Vietnamese relations, and the looming threat of the US-supported Sino-Cambodian alliance, Hanoi launched an invasion of Cambodia on Christmas Day 1978.³⁹ Vietnamese troops reached Phnom Penh on January 7, ousting the genocidal Khmer Rouge in the process.

While the United States and Vietnam occupied oppositional stances on most geopolitical questions, refugee issues were one area where they collaborated. This was a harbinger of things to come. Both nations attended the 1979 Conference on Indochinese Refugees, where US and SRVN officials had private bilateral meetings and discussed facilitating family reunification, among other issues.

By the turn of 1980, then, the status of US and Vietnamese positions on normalization had shifted dramatically from a few years prior. In 1977, US officials insisted that the resumption of formal economic and diplomatic relations should commence immediately without preconditions. This did not happen, because Hanoi insisted that the United States was obligated to provide reconstruction aid. In the following years, Vietnamese officials dropped this requirement and pushed for an immediate resumption of economic and diplomatic relations without preconditions. US officials rejected this offer, stating that negotiations on the status of formal relations could only commence after Hanoi satisfied two requirements: withdrawing their troops from Cambodia and providing a “full accounting” of missing American servicemen. Although a long-standing part of US–Vietnam dialogue, the issue of US servicemen listed as POWs or missing in action (MIA) was at the forefront of US rhetoric and policy after 1975.⁴⁰

US officials described migration programs and POW/MIA accounting collectively as “humanitarian” issues and argued they should be addressed prior to “political” questions. While humanitarianism has a long history in US foreign relations, in the case of US relations vis-à-vis Vietnam after 1975, American policymakers defined humanitarian in a very specific way that privileged causes that facilitated family reunification for members of the US and former South Vietnamese militaries over other concerns. While the issues that US officials labeled as humanitarian were inherently political, Washington infused even more significance by designating the resolution of humanitarian issues (to American satisfaction) as preconditions for the resumption of bilateral ties.

Part II of US–Vietnam normalization occurred in the 1980s. On the surface, bilateral relations between Washington and Hanoi appeared increasingly adversarial, especially for the first half of the decade, and formal normalization talks remained suspended until the early 1990s. Hanoi’s close alliance with Moscow and the continued presence of Vietnamese troops in Cambodia set the two on a collision course in geopolitics. Within US domestic politics, the popularity of films like Rambo: First Blood Part II further elevated impossible expectations for POW/MIA accounting, and contributed to a larger dehumanization and erasure of Vietnamese peoples from popular narratives of the Vietnam War.

Despite these realities, however, US and Vietnamese officials met regularly to discuss what US policymakers called “humanitarian issues”: migration programs and POW/MIA accounting. Frequent consultations and, eventually, collaboration and cooperation on these programs furthered the normalization process, despite US assertions to the contrary. By the end of Reagan’s first term, the administration elevated the release and emigration of reeducation camp detainees, the resettlement of Amerasians, and the return or repatriation of POW/MIAs to be primary pillars of US policy vis-à-vis Vietnam. Groups like the Aurora Foundation, the National League of POW/MIA Families, and others added moral momentum and provided information to members of Congress, who increasingly worked collaboratively with NGOs to ensure the humanitarian causes received official backing.

Establishing emigration programs of Amerasians and reeducation camp detainees, and insisting on a full accounting of missing American servicemen, also aligned with the administration’s worldview. Many argued the diaspora – that so many chose to risk their lives on the high seas – and the suffering of so many who remained in Vietnam substantiated Reagan’s claim that the Vietnam War had been a “noble cause,” a worthwhile fight against an evil adversary. Additionally, each of the concerns US officials earmarked as “humanitarian” involved, at least in theory, reunification for families separated by the Vietnam War. This imperative aligned with the long history of family reunification in US immigration law and with the Reagan administration’s “family values” rhetoric. Efforts to secure the emigration of reeducation camp detainees and Amerasians and the repatriation of POW/MIAs all had another feature in common, however: they required SRVN cooperation.

As American officials elevated Amerasians, reeducation camp detainees, and POW/MIAs on the US agenda vis-à-vis Vietnam in 1983 and 1984, Hanoi’s strategic thinking shifted considerably. After years of military confrontation with Cambodia and China, reformist leaders like Foreign Minister Nguyễn Cơ Thạch advocated for a reorientation of Vietnamese foreign policy from an emphasis on military confrontation to an embrace of economic reform. In December 1986, this shift became enshrined in official policy at the 6th Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), which announced Đổi mới (Renovation) as the official basis of Vietnamese foreign and economic policy. While this transformation was neither immediate nor universally supported among Vietnamese elites, the changes occurring in Moscow, with Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika policies, bolstered and accelerated the transformations occurring within Vietnam. Changes in the Soviet Union also created space for increasing compromise between Washington and Moscow. Gorbachev and Reagan met in a series of highly publicized summits, culminating with the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in December 1987. As it became increasingly clear that globalization and economic interdependence were becoming the order of the day, Hanoi announced in May 1988 that it would withdraw half of its troops from Cambodia by the end of the year and remove all troops by 1990, a decision intended to end Vietnam’s international isolation.⁴¹

Amid these changes, US–Vietnam collaboration on humanitarian issues accelerated in the second half of the 1980s. Washington and Hanoi negotiated an agreement in 1987 facilitating the emigration of Amerasians, and, among other provisions involving a high degree of compromise, the accord permitted US officials to be stationed in Hồ Chí Minh City to conduct exit interviews, as did nations with whom Vietnam had full diplomatic relations. In 1988 US and Vietnamese officials had the first bilateral meeting earmarked solely for the discussion of reeducation camp detainees. Despite the hostile and combative rhetoric that often accompanied US public comments about these cohorts, then, the work of negotiating and implementing policies to address them expanded the scope of US–Vietnam dialogue and helped create personal and bureaucratic ties between the two governments.

Phase III of the US approach to normalization developed over the decade after 1989. The reverberations of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union upended many of the assumptions and relationships that had sustained the Cold War. This was especially true for leaders in Hanoi, as the dissolution of their international patron prompted profound changes to Vietnamese foreign policy. After years of tense negotiations, in the fall of 1991 a diplomatic settlement brought the Cambodian conflict to an end, and Hanoi normalized relations with China. In the following years, the SRVN joined ASEAN and established closer economic and diplomatic ties with Europe. This diversification of Vietnamese foreign policy included a willingness and even eagerness to resolve issues with the United States that would permit the flow of direly needed investment funds from international bodies like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which would not lend to Vietnam without US acquiescence.⁴²

In this moment of increasing flexibility, the United States and Vietnam expanded their collaboration on both bilateral and multilateral migration accords. As the Vietnamese diaspora surged in the late 1980s, with nearly 100,000 reaching the shores of first asylum in the first half of 1989, the nations of first asylum pushed the UNHCR to create a new response to the ongoing exodus, which led to the creation of the CPA.

Among the CPA’s many innovations was its support of repatriation or return to Vietnam. While repatriation had uneven support in Washington and Hanoi, especially early on, both governments eventually supported the measure. To ease concerns that eligible individuals had been wrongfully denied refugee status and a chance to resettle abroad, the United States and Vietnam negotiated the ROVR in 1996, which gave screened-out individuals who were repatriated to Vietnam one final chance to apply for resettlement in the United States. To address the more immediate concern of the growing number of migrants in camps throughout Southeast Asia, US officials drew increased attention to reeducation camp detainees. Despite assurances otherwise, Hanoi largely prohibited this cohort from emigrating through the ODP, which meant that as tens of thousands of additional individuals were released in the second half of the 1980s, they had no means to emigrate from Vietnam other than by clandestine flight.

The emigration of former reeducation camp detainees was a key point of negotiation during this period. Because so many of the detainees were former members of the South Vietnamese military with close ties to the United States, Washington and Hanoi negotiated on a bilateral basis. The SRVN’s request to meet with the FVPPA at the UN in March 1989 clearly demonstrated a key shift in the Vietnamese willingness to negotiate. Commitments undertaken during negotiations for the CPA only added more momentum. In July, plenipotentiaries signed the HO, which permitted those who had been detained for three years and who were “closely associated” with the United States to emigrate under the program. Detainees were permitted to travel with “close family members.”

Conclusion

As the global, regional, and domestic contexts shifted after 1989, Washington and Hanoi made a series of visible symbolic and tangible steps toward normalization. In April 1991, US officials presented Vietnam with a written Roadmap to normal relations. The Roadmap contained four phases, with US and Vietnamese obligations for each phase that culminated in the resumption of full economic and diplomatic ties. The Roadmap was not a change in policy: it emphasized a resolution to the Cambodian conflict, POW/MIA accounting, and collaboration on migration issues, including the ODP and reeducation camp prisoners. The document did, however, signal a shift in tone. Although US officials still moved cautiously and had deep reservoirs of opposition among the US public to contend with, the question was increasingly becoming when, not if, the former foes would formally reconcile. In September 1990, US Secretary of State Baker and SRVN Foreign Minister Nguyễn Cơ Thạch met in New York City, marking the highest-level talks between the two nations since the early 1970s. The next year, as the conflict in Cambodia came to a close and Hanoi normalized relations with China, the SRVN permitted US officials to open an office in Hanoi to help facilitate POW/MIA accounting.

The most highly publicized steps toward normalization occurred in the mid-1990s. In February 1994, the United States lifted the embargo, and the two nations announced the resumption of formal diplomatic relations in July 1995. Although major milestones in the normalization process, full normalization was still elusive: it took until 2001 for Washington to award Hanoi most-favored-nation status, and regularizing military ties was a slower process still.

Normalization between Washington and Hanoi was a protracted process that unfolded over decades after 1975. Migration issues were at the center of the US approach to normalization, and negotiating and implementing migration programs furthered the normalization process, despite US assertions otherwise. State-level normalization occurred alongside, and was accelerated by, transnational efforts of individual Americans and Vietnamese. A nuanced understanding of the normalization process, including the centrality of refugee issues, is essential to understanding the complexities and many consequences of the Vietnam War.

19 The US POW Experience, American Veterans, and the War

Michael J. Allen

The American prisoner of war (POW) experience dominates American understandings of the Vietnam War. That was true during the war, when American POWs “became the objects of a virtual cult,” as reporter Jonathan Schell wrote at the time. It became even more true after the war, when American POWs and their missing-in-action (MIA) counterparts overshadowed far larger populations touched by the war, including other American veterans. As the war’s more immediate horrors faded from view, the suffering of American POWs, real and imagined, still featured in presidential rhetoric, congressional hearings, and US diplomacy; in movies, television, books, and the popular press; and on POW/MIA flags in the public square. From John McCain to John Rambo, POWs were made surrogates for all Americans who served in Vietnam: “All our sons in Vietnam are POWs,” declared the antiwar group Another Mother for Peace in 1971. They became stand-ins for all Americans in relation to that conflict: “We’re Still Prisoners of War,” Newsweek wrote in 1985. Half a century on from the war, their prominence has faded but not disappeared. In November 2019, US President Donald Trump signed the National POW/MIA Flag Act, enacted by Congress with unanimous consent, which mandated that the black-and-white banner, emblazoned with the words “You Are Not Forgotten,” must be flown whenever the American flag flies at the White House, the US Capitol, and other federal buildings and national monuments, including every US post office.¹

All this was unusual. In the annals of American warfare POWs were more often scorned than lionized. Indeed, Trump’s 2016 run for the White House recalled this tradition: “Does being captured make you a hero?” Trump asked of McCain at the time. “He’s not a war hero, because he was captured,” sneered Trump. “I like people that weren’t captured.”² Such talk was common before the Vietnam War, but shocking after it as POWs emerged as the lost war’s principal paragons. Eight American prisoners of the Vietnam War received the Congressional Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for military valor, representing 3 percent of Vietnam veterans to receive that distinction. Two dozen were promoted to the rank of admiral or general. Three were elected to Congress, two to the Senate, and two were named US ambassadors. Admiral James Stockdale, among the highest-ranking and longest-held American POWs, was Ross Perot’s running mate in his 1992 presidential bid. And McCain was the Republican nominee for president in 2008 and nearly claimed that prize in 2000.³

Such prominence is more remarkable still given the small number of Americans captured in Indochina – under 800 total, with 591 imprisoned until war’s end. Their numbers were negligible compared with the numbers captured in earlier American wars – over 130,000 Americans were interned in World War II and some 7,000 in Korea. So too was their population dwarfed by the 58,000 Americans killed in Indochina and the 303,000 Americans wounded there, not to mention the 200,000 or more Vietnamese POWs held by the US-backed Republic of Vietnam (RVN), a group that attracted little notice at the time or since.⁴

Finally, the cult of American POWs is odd given that these men were strikingly unrepresentative of the 3.4 million Americans who served in the Vietnam War, and their experience bore little resemblance to that of other Vietnam veterans. Consisting mostly of downed aviators, the prisoners were older, whiter, better educated, and better paid than most American troops; most were officers, not enlisted men; most were married, many with children; and most spent the better part of a decade in strict confinement and material hardship while other American service personnel cycled in and out of Vietnam on twelve-month tours defined by constant motion and material abundance. Their differences with millions more draft-eligible Americans who never served in Vietnam were greater still. Donald Trump, who used a bone-spurs diagnosis to avoid being captured by the war, was closer to the norm than was John McCain, who was born in 1936, a decade prior to the baby boom that supplied such a surplus of men to fight – or, more often, not to fight – in Vietnam.⁵

But if Trump represented the predominant American experience in the Vietnam era, McCain and his fellow POWs offered a more flattering portrait, which is why the POW experience, however unusual, loomed large in American memory while more typical but less attractive dimensions of that experience faded from view. War remembrance works to “direct human memory from the horrors to the meaningfulness and glory of war,” historian George Mosse once wrote.⁶ In that sense it was precisely the anomalous character of the POW experience that made it central to American memory. In a war that was disorienting, disheartening, and divisive for Americans, the POW experience was simple, legible, uplifting, and potentially unifying, especially for the nation’s white majority, which identified most closely with the war, its warriors, and the nation’s war-making traditions. Who and what the POWs represented was clear in part because the POWs were a small, homogenous elite, with little of the diversity or dissent that defined so much else in the war. They were patriotic white men who stood for the heroism and sacrifice of white men and their families in the fight against nonwhite revolutionaries. In that sense they stood for the nation as its ruling white majority preferred to imagine it. Unlike the rest of the war, which called into question the nation’s hegemonic beliefs and practices, the POW experience reified nationalist values, validated counterrevolutionary ideology, and reaffirmed a crusading US foreign policy.⁷

Who was responsible for POW captivity was also clear: Asian communists and Americans who sympathized with such racialized revolutionary foes, especially those in the antiwar movement, the student left, the Black Freedom Struggle, women’s liberation, and other reform movements. The prospect of POW suffering reversed culpability for the war, indicting Asians who suffered under American bombs while exonerating those who bombed them, even as sympathy for POWs served to absolve American architects of the war and impugn their critics, all while inciting more war. If US policy and those who made it caused their capture, their long and brutal captivity drew attention away from that fact and linked their Vietnamese captors to slavery and barbarism while associating Americans with freedom and nobility. And POW survival promised the resurgence of American power after US defeat, along with the return of racial and gender hierarchies and patriotic values that the POWs personified. Such clash-of-civilizations tropes made captivity narratives among the most popular expressions of early American nationalism amid clashes with indigenous peoples. During and after the Vietnam War such settler-colonial storylines, preserved in Cold War cinema such as John Wayne’s 1956 film The Searchers, resurged as a way to make sense of US defeat in Asia without abandoning the national and racial chauvinism that inspired Americans to invade Vietnam in the first place.⁸

“We now have some heroes in this war!” US President Richard Nixon exulted as the POWs returned in 1973, a tacit admission that none of the other Americans who served in Vietnam fit the heroic profile – at least, not in his view. “They must be used effectively,” he told his staff; they “could have a great impact on the destiny of this country.” Making effective use of war heroes, or martyrs, to shape the nation’s destiny is precisely what Mosse meant when he wrote about turning public consciousness from the horrors to the glories of war. As Nixon grasped, POWs were important because they gave Americans something the lost war otherwise denied: “the sense of men redeemed, the satisfaction of something retrieved from the tragedy,” as Time magazine put it.⁹

But if Americans were drawn to POWs in hopes of redemption, some embraced them as avenging angels who would set right what went wrong in Vietnam. Here, too, their exclusivity mattered, since POWs represented not just the nation’s white majority but the loss of power and position that the nation’s defeat visited upon white Americans, especially white working-class men, who made up the bulk of the US military in Vietnam. Black Americans were overrepresented in combat infantry units and died in disproportionate numbers in the war’s early years, when ground fighting was most intense. Still, 87 percent of Vietnam veterans were white, as were 85.5 percent of Americans killed in Vietnam, at a time when 87 percent of Americans were white. And most of the white men sent to Vietnam were poor and working-class.¹⁰ What white men lost in the war, white POWs would restore. Like Christ on the cross or the Gettysburg dead, POW martyrs redeemed white male sins so that white men could resume their place of leadership in their families, their communities, their workplaces, the nation, and the world.¹¹

Yet because much of what changed during the war was welcomed by many Americans or, even if unwelcome, proved irreversible, POWs and their MIA counterparts became talismans in a “politics of loss” that blamed wartime defeat for white dispossession and used POW/MIA advocacy to resist both. True, these men were imprecise symbols for Vietnam veterans. But their undeniable suffering resonated with those still fighting various lost causes after the war, particularly in white working-class and veteran subcultures where POW/MIA activism and iconography were most pronounced, even as their redemption held out hope for final victory.¹²

Cold War Icons

None of this was anticipated in March 1961 when Army Major Lawrence Bailey bailed out of a flaming C-47 troop transport over northeastern Laos, becoming the first American POW in what came to be called the Vietnam War. Part of the new Kennedy administration’s beefed-up but undeclared “secret war” against communists operating in and passing through Laos on the Hồ Chí Minh Trail between North and South Vietnam, Bailey was the first of six Americans captured there that year. Five of those six survived until their release in August 1962, which came soon after the United States signed the International Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos, ending US combat operations there for a time. But if their war was over, their experience set the pattern for hundreds of Americans captured over the next twelve years as the United States expanded its anticommunist fight from Laos to Vietnam. Four of those first six American POWs were onboard US aircraft shot down over communist territory in an air war of dubious legality. Three of the six were officers, two were enlisted men, and one was an NBC correspondent. Five of the six were born before World War II, averaging 31 years of age at the time of capture. All were white, all were men, and all suffered injury, illness, deprivation, and brutal treatment. Army Captain Walter Moon, wounded in the fighting that led to his capture and injured further in an escape attempt, was shot dead for intransigence.¹³

These patterns would define the American POW experience in Vietnam. Army Captain Floyd Thompson, aged 31, was shot down on a reconnaissance flight in March 1964, becoming the first American POW who would be held until the Paris Agreement on Vietnam was signed in January 1973. Like most Americans captured in Vietnam – and like most Laos captives before him – Thompson was an officer lost over enemy territory, not an infantryman captured in ground fighting. With few fixed battle lines or protracted battles, ground combat in Vietnam produced relatively few casualties that could not be recovered. This meant that 84 percent of American POWs were downed aviators, and that most were captured and held in North Vietnam, where the United States conducted extensive bombing over the first four years of the war and again in its final year, but where US ground forces never operated, making search-and-rescue efforts impossible. Even in South Vietnam, where fewer Americans were captured, nearly half of American POWs were shootdowns like Thompson.¹⁴ Given that military aircraft were operated by officers, 88 percent of American POWs were officers, like Thompson. And given that most officers at the time were white, so were 95 percent of American POWs. As officers, these men were also older and better educated than most Americans in Vietnam, with navy pilots averaging 30 years of age when captured. And since most were captured early in the war, before the 1968 bombing halt over North Vietnam, but were held until 1973, after the Paris Peace Accords, they exited the war far older than other veterans, having served for far longer. Like McCain, captured in 1967 when he was 31 years old, most came of age in the 1950s, not the 1960s. And given their more advanced age, two-thirds were married, many with children. “Never before in the history of mankind had such an unusual group of prisoners been gathered,” wrote one. And all that made them distinctive was most pronounced among those shot down first, who came to define the POW experience because of, not despite, their extraordinary character.¹⁵

In an ill-considered, ill-defined, ineffectual war fought mostly by poor and working-class “grunts” fresh out of high school, POWs were sympathetic figures. Their age, education, and family status, along with their glamorous service, elevated rank and pay, and unmistakable whiteness, distinguished them from US ground forces in Vietnam, making them more comparable to middle-class, middle-aged Americans, and thus more admirable in their eyes. They possessed all the hallmarks of Cold War America’s idealized self-image, which they sustained, even burnished, in a time of challenge. Before being shot down, for instance, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Robinson “Robbie” Risner, a 40-year-old World War II veteran and Korean War ace, and father to eight children, was featured on the April 23, 1965 cover of Time magazine “as the classic example of the kind of dedicated military professional who was leading the American effort in Vietnam.” “The US effort in Viet Nam must be measured in terms of quality, not quantity,” it continued. “The American serviceman in Viet Nam is probably the most proficient the nation has ever produced.”¹⁶

The desire for all this to be true only intensified among Time’s middle-class readers during Risner’s seven years in captivity, as less gratifying images of Americans in Vietnam came to the fore. Indeed, Risner and men like him became even more attractive once relegated to Hanoi’s prisons, becoming victims rather than perpetrators of the war. More than troops in the field, white middle-class aviators who were removed from battle but still trapped in the war made perfect stand-ins for white middle-class Americans in a long and bitter fight they were unable to win yet unable or unwilling to end. As hero–victims, POWs reflected American ambivalence about the war, allowing those Richard Nixon named the “Silent Majority” to grieve the war’s costs without giving up on it or openly protesting it.

From Precious Sons to Criminal Air Pirates

Their distinctive profile mattered not only in America: it had a direct bearing on the POW experience inside Vietnamese prisons. As Nhân Dân, Hanoi’s Communist Party newspaper, explained, “to lose one of these ‘precious sons’” created “anxiety over losing someone whose worth cannot be calculated, such as military secrets which he possesses and the loss of morale by his friends.” If Americans saw POWs as “precious sons,” North Vietnamese considered them “criminal air pirates” waging an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign state and its civilian population. Communist efforts to make this case, outlined in a seventy-seven-page dossier titled US War Crimes in North Vietnam that North Vietnam published in February 1966, moved Hanoi’s jailers to seek admissions of guilt from downed American pilots. To secure confessions, authorities used both sticks and carrots, promising preferential treatment and early release to cooperative captives while treating the obdurate to solitary confinement, reduced rations, sleep deprivation, ankle stocks, stress positions, rope torture, and beatings, all with an eye toward proving American criminality before the world.

Because the Hanoi prisoners were military officers with deep commitments to the US military, the Vietnam War, and the broader Cold War struggle, not to mention an engrained sense of their own national and racial superiority, they refused voluntary cooperation, leading to widespread abuse of American POWs between 1965 and 1968 as US bombing intensified and the numbers of American prisoners grew. Together with the serious injuries most pilots suffered during shootdown, physical and mental abuse made these years a time “when hell was in session,” as Navy Commander Jeremiah Denton titled his prison memoir. After US President Lyndon Johnson authorized heavy bombing near Hanoi in June 1966, North Vietnamese authorities marched Denton, Risner, and other Americans through the streets, where angry crowds hurled insults at them – and sometimes rocks and fists – screaming “Death to you who have massacred our dear ones.” Meanwhile Southern communists announced the execution of first one then two more American POWs in June and September 1965 in retaliation for the public execution of communist POWs by the US-backed Saigon government, prompting the International Committee for the Red Cross to urge “all authorities” to abide by Geneva Convention protections for prisoners of war.¹⁷

Such abuse has defined American understandings of the POW experience ever since. The suffering that American prisoners endured was seen at the time and since as a sort of martyrdom, even a saintly act. But while the torture of prisoners was real and cannot be excused, it is often exaggerated in popular accounts and must be contextualized. First, it should be emphasized that all prisoners of the Vietnam War suffered abuse, deprivation, and disease, and that the Saigon government inflicted worse treatment on vastly larger populations of political prisoners than anything Americans endured, and it did so with the support of the US government.¹⁸ More broadly, the people of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia faced more lasting and lethal violence in the form of US combat operations, which cost some 3 million Asian lives. Indeed, 20 percent of American POWs held in South Vietnam died in captivity, compared with 5 percent in the North, thanks not to greater abuse by their captors but to the greater dangers resulting from living among Southern communists under relentless pursuit by US forces.¹⁹ To communist officials, the violence that Americans unleashed on North Vietnam, a sovereign state, without a formal declaration of war vacated American claims to Geneva Convention protections. “You are not considered a prisoner of war but fall under the policy of a criminal of war,” one Vietnamese interrogator told an American. If most Americans and their government dismissed such reasoning, some legal experts did not, noting that North Vietnam signed the Geneva Convention with an express “Nuremberg reservation” that it would not apply to those guilty of crimes against humanity. Even American POWs found it difficult to answer “What would have happened if we were bombing the United States and one of our pilots was shot down over Pittsburgh?” as one was asked. This question gained credence in the United States and around the world as American bombing grew in scale, scope, and ferocity, and any analysis of the POW experience must acknowledge that the asymmetric violence of US bombing, together with the fact that most POWs were pilots who volunteered to carry out mechanized warfare against a largely defenseless population, helps to account for prisoner abuse.²⁰ Finally, it should be noted that abuse of American prisoners was not constant throughout the war but diminished over time. Amid international backlash to the forced march through Hanoi, Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) President Hồ Chí Minh affirmed that his government’s policy “with regard to the enemies captured in war is a humanitarian policy.” After 1966, mistreatment lessened, though it did not fully end until 1969.²¹

Hanoi moderated its strongarm tactics because those tactics backfired, bringing condemnation even from sympathetic corners, such as the Red Cross. Though it is true that the US air war against North Vietnam was of questionable legality and dubious ethics, abuses of American POWs violated Geneva Convention protections – as did Saigon’s brutality toward its political prisoners – and all such violence was abhorrent. Fundamentally, it was impossible for Hanoi to seize the moral high ground by abusing American prisoners. American pilots knew this and did all they could to publicize their mistreatment as a counteroffensive against communist claims. In May 1966, for instance, Denton famously blinked the word “TORTURE” in Morse code as he was being interviewed by a Japanese television reporter in a session his captors had arranged with the expectation that he would criticize US bombing, something he refused to do once on camera. Such performances did more harm than good to the communist cause.

Faced with such resistance, communists moved to using early release rather than abuse to win propaganda points. This approach worked best in the South, where a more diverse POW population with more enlisted infantrymen was more willing to follow their captors’ lead and condemn US war-making. In November 1965, the National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (NLF, or Viet Cong) released two army enlisted men, one white and one Black, to coincide with the March on Washington for Peace in Vietnam after each made antiwar statements. Over sixty Americans were released in this way over the course of the war, mostly from the South but including twelve from Hanoi, usually after the parolees denounced the war. Acts of mercy demonstrated the peaceful intent of communist leaders more effectively than violence against American captives. Given that most early releases involved enlisted men captured in South Vietnam, often released into the custody of peace activists, they also placed the Vietnamese Revolution in solidarity with peace and freedom movements elsewhere, including “the just struggle of the US Negroes … for basic national rights,” as the NLF proclaimed upon releasing two Black soldiers in 1967, while relieving beleaguered Southern fighters of responsibility for keeping prisoners fed, concealed, and alive.²²

Figure 19.1 American airmen, captured by North Vietnamese forces, are paraded through the streets of Hanoi (July 6, 1966).

Source:

– / Contributor / AFP / Getty Images.

The Fight for Moral Authority

The release of American POWs signaled to the world that these men could return home if only the US government ended the war, a message that Vietnamese authorities and American peace activists reinforced by cooperating on prisoner paroles. Because POWs were high-profile to begin with – and made more so by communist propaganda – and because they were the only Americans in Vietnam unable to be called home by the US government, they proved valuable bargaining chips in communist diplomacy, and became more so as the war dragged on. Each year the war continued meant more Americans in Vietnamese prisons while adding another year to the captivity of those already there, lending urgency to calls to end the war in the United States. As Americans gave up on other rationales for waging war, the well-being of American POWs became “the only remaining war aim of any respectability.” Nixon tried to turn this to his advantage, telling Americans that “as long as the North Vietnamese have any Americans there will be Americans in South Vietnam, and enough Americans to give them an incentive to release the prisoners.” But administration officials knew that by making the POWs the primary rationale for the war’s continuation they made it likely that “Hanoi may use prisoners explicitly to try to squeeze a timetable out of us,” as one predicted. In 1971, North Vietnam’s lead negotiator Lê Đức Thọ did just that, telling the New York Times that “all American prisoners may promptly return to their homes” with the “withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam.”²³

Implicit in such offers was the obverse: most POWs would not return until US withdrawal. By releasing low-ranking cooperative POWs while detaining more numerous high-ranking obdurate ones, communists appealed to war-weary Americans while pressing US policymakers to end the war. “We will not settle the war just for prisoners,” snapped National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger in his secret talks with Hanoi. But administration officials could not say that publicly when the POWs were more important to American voters than the survival of the Saigon government. So, Nixon obfuscated by conflating American MIAs – men the Pentagon had little reason to believe were alive – with the much smaller number of confirmed POWs, then making unprecedented and impossible demands that Hanoi must “account for” all of them before the war would end. Such sleight of hand originated the irresolvable “POW/MIA issue” that persists to this day, authorizing further assaults on Vietnam that continued long after the war’s official end.²⁴ But it satisfied few Americans at the time, and fewer with each passing year. “The obvious solution to the POW problem is to end the war,” countered one antiwar group. In the last two years of the war this position was echoed by POW/MIA Families for Immediate Release and by antiwar politicians like Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern.²⁵

The goal of Vietnamese POW propaganda and diplomacy was to win friends and demoralize foes in Vietnam, the United States, and the world. Over the course of the war communists learned that they could better pursue this goal through suasion than coercion. But neither course was easy, because most American POWs, especially the officer–aviators in Hanoi, were determined to thwart Vietnamese designs, and they were not passive pawns despite their captive status. POW agency can be hard to spot within the context of Hanoi’s prisons, particularly when it involved provoking and publicizing the very abuse Vietnamese jailers were eager to dish out. Yet American resistance to Vietnamese authority did as much to shape the POW experience as Vietnamese intent, as evidenced by the fact that Americans who cooperated with their captors were treated humanely. Most POWs, however, chose a different path when Hanoi asked captives “to decide whether they were going to repent their crimes and join with the Vietnamese people in seeking a just end to Washington’s illegal and immoral war, or to continue on their belligerent ways.” Faced with this choice, “we forced them to be brutal to us,” Denton, the navy’s second-highest ranking officer in Hanoi, later said. “And this policy was successful,” he continued, “in that the consequent exposure to their brutality ultimately caused United States public and official pressure to bear so heavily on our captors.” In pursuing this course, POWs saw themselves not as helpless victims of Vietnamese power but as indomitable combatants in what they called “the battle for Hanoi,” a fight for moral authority before the world where “the only weapons we had were our bodies and our pain.” “Everybody says we had nothing to do,” remarked one returned POW. “But we did have something to do,” namely “to resist the North Vietnamese attempts to exploit us.” In this fight “the V’s got nothing,” said another. “They tortured people but they got nothing. I kept faith in what I believed in – my God, my country, and my family.” “I want you all to remember we walked out of Hanoi as winners.”²⁶

Such a dynamic may have emerged in any Cold War prison, given that conflict’s ideological dimensions. Prisoner indoctrination and abuse also featured in Saigon’s prisons, in communist and noncommunist prisons during the Korean War, and in “reeducation camps” throughout the world. But the ubiquity of such practices in carceral settings returns us to the question of why the POW experience in Vietnam captured the American imagination. The answer derives in part from the determination of American POWs in Hanoi to distinguish themselves from their Korean War predecessors, who were deemed insufficiently resistant to communist “brainwashing.” To guard against a repeat performance of prisoner collaboration, the Pentagon issued a report in 1955 titled “POW: The Fight Continues after the Battle” that included a strict new code of conduct that ordered POWs to “make no oral or written statements disloyal to my country,” to “accept neither parole or special favors from the enemy,” and to “resist by all means available … to the utmost of my ability.” These dictates were drilled into US pilots at air force and navy survival schools, which were also beefed up after Korea, leaving aviators primed to resist communist indoctrination.²⁷ With limited means to demonstrate their resistance to audiences outside Vietnamese prisons, especially with their captors determined to publicize their guilt and contrition before the world, POWs made their resistance as dramatic as possible, engaging in theatrical displays such as that Denton staged when he blinked out “TORTURE” on television. Watching as POWs “came back on our feet, rather than our knees,” as one put it, Nixon likened it to “a great play or a great movie – you had a helluva bunch of stars on this one – it’s an all-star cast.”²⁸

Nixon’s remarks remind us that the communists weren’t the only actors in Hanoi. American POWs acted too. In some sense, their performance in Hanoi’s prisons was but one act in the broader theatrical production of the Cold War, a war in which signs, signals, appearances, and perceptions mattered more than material realities on any given battlefield. As officers who began their careers during the Red Scare, American POWs had spent years learning their lines via loyalty oaths, security clearances, and codes of conduct. As they prepared for leading roles, they envisioned their parts in the lofty terms Kennedy laid out in his inaugural address, which framed the Cold War less in terms of armed conflict than as a social–political contest for hearts and minds. “Let every nation know …” Kennedy proclaimed, before launching into a long recital of the material and moral goods the United States claimed to represent on the world stage.²⁹ Their senior officers, Navy Commanders James Stockdale and Jeremiah Denton, mastered theories of flexible response and the credibility of power while earning master’s degrees in international relations during Kennedy’s presidency – Stockdale at Stanford, Denton at George Washington – just prior to shipping off to Vietnam, where the growing US mission was presented as an effort to show American resolve to a watching world. Given such training, it is hardly surprising that Stockdale concluded soon after his August 1965 capture that “the American POW did not suddenly find himself on the war’s sidelines. Rather, he found himself on one of the major battlefronts – the propaganda battlefront.” Like his captors, Stockdale knew the importance of public opinion to the Cold War’s contest of arms. As commanders on the propaganda front, Stockdale, Denton, and Risner, the senior air force man and Time cover star, fought to win. They developed means of communication, including but not limited to a tap code for nonverbal transmission, established a chain of command, and ordered their men “to take torture, forcing the Vietnamese to impose significant pain” before acceding to their demands. They knew that they could not resist all cooperation. But their orders required that Americans “should resist until they broke us and, when we recovered, make them break us again,” as Denton explained, to demonstrate to their captors, themselves, and the world that their cooperation was coerced and insincere, and that communists were aggressors and liars. To that end they insisted that no American should participate in Hanoi’s “fink release program,” which required and rewarded displays of deference to Vietnamese authority, and they threatened to bring court-martial charges against those who did upon their return home.³⁰

Not all prisoners lived by these rules. Twelve Hanoi men were granted early release. And late-arriving “new guys” shot down after the bombing of North Vietnam resumed in 1972 saw the old guard as rigid, even fanatical, as did some Southern POWs moved North for safekeeping in the war’s last years. Still, that just twelve Northern POWs took early release – including Hanoi’s lone enlisted man, who was given permission by his officers in order to smuggle intelligence out of the camps – suggests the determined resistance of most others. Disciplined, competitive, resourceful, and proud, with abiding commitments to US nationalist culture, which for many included a devout Christianity and strong sense of global mission, the Hanoi prisoners were well-suited for waging ideological war. Many, including Stockdale and Denton, attended military service academies before making a career in the armed forces, leaving them jealous of their reputations within peer groups that extended across the US armed forces. And some, like John Sydney McCain III, came from families with long records of military service, and thus felt obliged to live up to the reputations and expectations of their fathers and grandfathers. McCain’s father, John Sydney McCain, Jr., and grandfather, John Sydney McCain, Sr., were both admirals, and his father became commander-in-chief, Pacific soon after son’s capture. When McCain, whom the communists called “the Crown Prince,” confessed to being “a black criminal” and “an air pirate” after four days of torture, he felt “faithless” and “ashamed,” certain that his statement would “embarrass my father.” “Nothing could save me,” he later wrote, except “acts of defiance,” which “felt so good” that “they more than compensated for their repercussions,” helping him to “keep at bay the unsettling feelings of guilt and self-doubt.”³¹

Accounts like McCain’s help to explain what motivated Americans “to take torture,” as opposed to what motivated Vietnamese to give it. Since no prisoner could refuse all cooperation with their captors and survive, they needed some way to prove that their compliance was coerced rather than freely given. Signs of abuse that were visible on the body – stigmata – provided proof of psychological mortification and expiation, something American POWs so desperately needed that many – Stockdale, Denton, Risner, and McCain among them – resorted to self-harm, even attempted suicide, to prove that they had adhered to their own unbending code.

“Strength in unity,” as Stockdale conceived it, was critical to both POW suffering and their survival. Sociologists have long recognized “small-group cohesion” as key to military discipline and mission effectiveness, and “unity over self” was a watchword among American POWs, giving them a sense of being accountable to one another in opposition to a foreign foe. Given their shared race, gender, class, age, occupation, and political and religious convictions, such allegiances came easily. Their bond with one another was, in some sense, an extension, or distillation, of their connection with the nation and its leading men and institutions. The POWs, like their captors, saw themselves as the nation’s “precious sons,” and it was that shared understanding that motivated them to resist efforts to convert them and instead cling to what McCain called the “faith of my fathers.” Uniform men in uniform, the prisoners’ reinforcing identities made it difficult to condemn their nation or its outsized presence in the world without dishonoring, even destroying, themselves. “The communists spent upwards of four, five, six, seven, eight, nine years trying to turn us against our country, against our way of life, against America,” said one upon his return; “the natural reaction on the part of ninety-nine percent of us was to build our patriotism even stronger.” This was their “natural” reaction, because the Hanoi men so neatly embodied the nation that went to war in Vietnam, preserving its patriotic values and patriarchal, racial, and religious order through nine long years of pain and anguish, no matter what happened outside their prison cells.³²

Conclusion

The POWs’ refusal to bow to Vietnamese demands or to concede the legitimacy of critical perspectives on the war and the nation that authorized it – their refusal even to admit the basic but profound fact of US defeat – made them central to American memory of the war. Their undeniable suffering at the hands of their captors, combined with their “we-win-even-when-we-lose” obstinacy, multiplied by their instinct for self-promotion – during their last years in captivity the POWs went so far as to form toastmaster clubs where they practiced patriotic speeches and fielded mock questions from reporters – worked to legitimize the American cause in Vietnam, resurrect a sense of national pride, and restore public trust in the use of force.

These ends were achieved in part through politics, including Denton’s election to the Senate in 1980 and McCain’s election to the House in 1982, then the Senate in 1986. Both conservative Republicans took themes from the POW experience to promote military rearmament and national reunion under white male leadership. Even more, the ends were accomplished through culture and memory, which worked to turn the Vietnam War from an angry wound to a noble cause. In POW memoirs and films, the war’s moral and strategic failures were inverted even as they were displaced. Unlike the wider war, where Americans possessed a preponderance of power but found that their excessive use of force backfired, breeding resistance and sympathy for those who resisted, in Hanoi’s prisons Americans cast themselves as innocent victims of communist aggression, a more familiar and appealing war story. American POWs flipped the script on their critics. Indeed, one surreal feature of their strategy was how it resembled but reversed the thinking and tactics of the New Left. Like Mario Savio’s calls to Berkeley students to “put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus – and you’ve to make it stop,” POW resolve “to lie on the railroad tracks hoping that the sheer bulk of our bodies would slow down the train” used civil disobedience to disrupt illegitimate authority with the assurance that “the whole world was watching.” But whereas the peace and freedom movements of the 1960s used civil disobedience to dramatize the unjust nature of Cold War America, POWs used their experience to reinscribe American power with moral force.³³

This project sparked ample resistance, particularly in the beginning when anger over the war and its injustices was most acute. “In what ways are these relatively few P.O.W.’s greater heroes than the 50,000 dead boys who came home in body bags?” asked one New York Times columnist. One veteran wrote to Time to voice his “resentment about the solicitous attention the returning P.O.W.’s are receiving” compared with the lack of interest that greeted “draftees who faced the war 24 hours a day on the ground.” Charles Evers, the brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, cabled Nixon to ask, “What happened to the foot soldiers, the marines and especially the black and Mexican-American GIs?” Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel raised similar concerns, noting that he was “disturbed by the absence of black faces in the happy scenes of welcome portrayed on the television sets.” And Ngô Vĩnh Long, director of the Vietnam Resource Center, complained that the effusive welcome given to returned POWs “served to cover up and justify the inhumane policies of the United States against the Indochinese people.” “They are trying to pose as heroic victims when they were responsible for killing countless Vietnamese,” insisted Jane Fonda, the antiwar activist and actor who called returned POWs “professional killers.” It was “disturbing,” added Yale psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, that the POWs sought to recreate an image “of simple, old-fashioned American military virtue as though nothing had happened in Vietnam.”

But what disturbed some reassured most. And, besides, POW suffering and the fate of their still-missing counterparts, the MIAs, offered ample cause for those who wished to pursue the war’s unfinished business to do so. “When you abandon 1,300 men there is no peace with honor,” said one MIA activist a few months after the POW homecoming ended. “For us the war goes on.”³⁴ Like the hero–victim dualism of the POWs, which allowed Americans, particularly white Americans, to celebrate themselves while condemning the Vietnamese and their American sympathizers, so too the Janus-faced POW/MIA issue allowed Americans simultaneously to embrace the social and political recuperation the prisoners promised while still grieving what was lost in the war and could not be recovered. These impulses existed in tension, but that tension gave the issue its dynamism and longevity. The celebration of POWs worked to repair the loss that MIAs symbolized, while the continued absence of MIAs signaled that no celebration was sufficient, making still more celebration necessary. And new wars more likely.