Communism in Vietnam
This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
Part of a series on |
Communism |
---|
Communism portal Socialism portal |
History
Later the party changed its name to the Indochinese Communist Party as the Comintern, under Joseph Stalin, did not favour nationalistic sentiments. Nguyễn Ái Quốc was a leftist revolutionary who had been living in France since 1911. Participating in the founding of the French Communist Party, in 1924 he traveled to the Soviet Union to join the Comintern and, in the late 1920s, acted as a Comintern agent to help build Communist movements in Southeast Asia.
During the 1930s, the Vietnamese Communist Party was nearly wiped out due to French execution of its top leaders such as Phú, Lê Hồng Phong, and Nguyễn Văn Cừ.
In 1941 Nguyễn Ái Quốc, now known as
North Vietnam
Between 1953 and 1956, the North Vietnamese government instituted various agrarian reforms, including "rent reduction" and "land reform", which resulted in the execution of thousands of accused landlords. During the land reform, testimony from North Vietnamese witnesses suggested a ratio of one execution for every 160 village residents, which extrapolated to a nationwide total of almost 100,000 executions. Because the campaign was mainly concentrated in the Red River Delta area, a lower estimate of 50,000 executions was accepted by many scholars at the time.[2][3][4][5] However, declassified documents from the Vietnamese and Hungarian archives indicate the number of executions was much lower than reported at the time, although likely greater than 13,500.[6]
Vietnam War
North Vietnam established the
The Viet Cong are estimated to have killed about 36,725 South Vietnamese soldiers between 1957 and 1972. Statistics for 1968–72 suggest that "about 80 percent of the victims were ordinary civilians and only about 20 percent of them were government officials, policemen, members of the self-defence forces or pacification cadres."[7] In the former capital city of Huế, Viet Cong troops captured the Imperial Citadel and much of the city, which led to the Battle of Huế. During the interim between the capture of the Citadel and the end of the "Battle of Huế", the occupying forces Massacre at Huế.
Post Vietnam War
In 1975, Vietnam was officially reunified and renamed the
In foreign relations, the SRVN became increasingly aligned with the Soviet Union by joining the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (
The SRVN government implemented a Stalinist dictatorship of the proletariat in the South as they did in the North. All religions had to be organised into state-controlled churches. Any negative comments about the Party, the government, Ho Chi Minh, or anything else that was critical of Communism might earn the person the tag of Phản Động (Reactionary), with consequences ranging from harassment by the police, to expulsion from one's school or workplace, or imprisonment. Nevertheless, the Communist authority failed to suppress the black market, where food, consumer goods, and banned literature could be bought at high prices. The security apparatus also failed to stop a clandestine nationwide network of people from trying to escape the country. In many cases, the security officers of whole districts were bribed and they even got involved in organising the escape schemes.
These conditions resulted in an exodus of around 2.5 million Vietnamese (approximately 5% of the population
While most refugees were resettled in other countries within five years, others languished in refugee camps for over a decade. In the 1990s, refugees who could not find asylum were deported back to Vietnam. Communities of Vietnamese refugees arrived in the US, Canada, Australia, France, West Germany, and the UK.
Vietnam's third Constitution, based on that of the
In 1980,
During the early 1980s, a number of overseas Vietnamese organisations were created with the aim of overthrowing the Vietnamese Communist government through armed struggle once peaceful protesting was no longer a viable option. Most groups attempted to infiltrate Vietnam but they were eventually executed by Vietnamese security and armed forces. Most notable were the organisations led by Hoàng Cơ Minh from the US, Võ Đại Tôn from Australia, and Lê Quốc Túy from France. Hoàng Cơ Minh was killed during an ambush in Laos. Võ Đại Tôn was captured and imprisoned until his release in December 1991. Lê Quốc Túy stayed in France so he could undergo kidney treatment while his allies were arrested and executed in Vietnam. These organisations gained massive funding from US-aligned interest groups as from their eyes, transitioning modern-day Vietnam into a democratic system would be a superior economic and social alternative and would improve the lifestyle of many of those living under the current socialist system (which utilises many capitalist-style marketing techniques anyway), whereas Pro-Socialists in Vietnam may unwittingly see this act, even if it is viewed as benign by pro-democratic, as an act of reopening unhealed wounds. Additionally, a drastic shift in governance ideology would produce a change too vast for the Vietnamese to cope with, as evident with how Russia suffered immense drops in economic and social conditions when USSR dissolved in 1991. In the following decades of the dissolution of the USSR, only five or six of the post-communist states are on a path to joining the wealthy capitalist West while most fell behind, some to such an extent that it will take over fifty years to catch up to where they were before the fall of the Soviet Bloc, justifying that Vietnam did not need to transition to democracy anytime soon.[9][10]
However, throughout the 1980s, the voices of the Overseas Vietnamese and those struggling under the socialist system were not left unheard, as Vietnam made the transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy.
Government of Vietnam
Politics portal |
The Socialist Republic of Vietnam is a
The
See also
References
- ^ S2CID 161998265.
- ISBN 978-0817964313.
- JSTOR 3024603.
- ISBN 978-0-674-07608-2.
- ^ Dommen, Arthur J. (2001), The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans, Indiana University Press, p. 340, gives a lower estimate of 32,000 executions.
- ISBN 9781139489010.
Clearly Vietnamese socialism followed a moderate path relative to China. ... Yet the Vietnamese 'land reform' campaign ... testified that Vietnamese communists could be as radical and murderous as their comrades elsewhere.
- ISBN 9780199874231.
- ^ "Vietnam - Population 1975".
- )
- S2CID 153398717.
- ISSN 1467-8411.