Vietnamese Communism In Comparative Perspective

This book focuses on how the Vietnam Communist party adapted to its environment in order to achieve and exercise power and to what degree these adaptations made the Vietnamese revolution distinctive.

This book presents a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives on the problematic of reform in Vietnam. It explores the Vietnam's reforms in relation to those taking place in other countries of the socialist world, comparing doi moi with restructuring in other socialist states.

This book presents a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives on the problematic of reform in Vietnam. It explores the Vietnam's reforms in relation to those taking place in other countries of the socialist world, comparing doi moi with restructuring in other socialist states.

In this ambitious and path-breaking book, Shawn McHale challenges long held views that define modern Vietnamese history in terms of anticolonial nationalism and revolution. McHale argues instead for a historiography that does not overstress either the role of politics in general or Communism in particular. Using a wide range of sources from Vietnam, France, and the United States, many of them previously unexploited, he shows how the use of printed matter soared between 1920 and 1945 and in the process transformed Vietnamese public life and shaped the modern Vietnamese consciousness. Print and Power begins with an overview of Vietnam's lively public spheres, bringing debates from Europe and the rest of Asia to Vietnamese studies with nuance and sophistication. It examines the impact of the French colonial state on Vietnamese society as well as Vietnamese and East Asian understandings of public discourse and public space. Popular taste, rather than revolutionary or national ideology, determined to a large extent what was published, with limited intervention by the French authorities. A vibrant but hierarchical public realm of debate existed in Vietnam under authoritarian colonial rule. The work goes on to contest the impact of Confucianism on premodern and modern Vietnam and, based on materials never before used, provides a radically new perspective on the rise of Vietnamese communism from 1929 to 1945. Novel interpretations of the Nghe Tinh soviets (1930-1931), the first major communist uprising in Vietnam, and Vietnamese communist successes in World War II built an audience for their views and made an extremely alien ideology comprehensible to growing numbers of Vietnamese. In what is by far the most thorough examination in English of modern Vietnamese Buddhism and its transformations, McHale argues that, contrary to received wisdom, Buddhism was not in decline during the 1920-1945 period; in fact, more Buddhist texts were produced in Vietnam at that time than at any other in its history. This finding suggests that the heritage of the Vietnamese past played a crucial role in the late colonial period. Print and Power makes a significant contribution to Vietnamese and Asian studies and will be of compelling interest to those in the fields of comparative religion and European colonialism.

This anthology concentrates on domestic questions, economic policies, and socialist development and ideology. The essays' subjects include such varied topics as education, economics, the military, leadership, and economic assistance and humanitarian aid.

According to the final declaration of the 1954 Geneva Conference regarding Vietnam, general elections were to be held in July 1956 that would lead to the reunification of North and South Vietnam. The Geneva Agreement, however, was doomed from the start, as the South Vietnamese leaders did not suscribe to it and the leaders of the Communist North saw its value as primarily a propaganda tool. By 1956 it was obvious to all that reunification in accordance with the agreement was impossible, and the North Vietnamese looked to China for advice and assistance. Based on Vietnamese, Chinese, American and British sources--many only recently made available--this work examines Sino-Vietnamese relations in the early stages of the second Indochina conflict. The progression of the Vietnamese Communists' goals from primarily political to essentially military is traced. The book shows that the Hanoi government was remarkably in control of its own decision-making.