Introduction: “From Endurance to Opening: A New Path for the Vietnamese People”
- Introduced by Professor Stephen B. Young, Global Executive Director of the Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism; author The Tradition of Human Rights in China and Vietnam
- Written by Former Ambassador Hoang Thang Dinh, Ph.D. in Political Science and Fellow of the Caux Round Table
What comes next for Vietnam in the twenty-first century?
This is a question not only for Vietnamese scholars and citizens, but also for any policymaker, international business partner, social-media communities, and younger generations seeking a practical vision of Vietnam’s possible place in a rapidly changing world.
From Endurance to Opening: A New Path for the Vietnamese People begins by recounting an extraordinary historical achievement: despite centuries of foreign domination, warfare, division, political rupture, and displacement, the Vietnamese people have preserved their identity, communal continuity, and national sovereignty. The essay calls this capacity “Endurance”, a resilient communal continuity
Yet such endurance alone is no longer sufficient to advance Vietnam’s prospects. Qualities that once enabled survival—adaptability, resilience, social cohesion, and the ability to absorb external shocks and alternative narratives on norms and proper socialization—may become constraints when they harden into political inertia, intellectual accommodation, or acceptance of conditions that should be changed. Vietnam’s twenty first century journey must therefore lead from Endurance through a process of national Maturing leading to a cultural, social, economic and political Opening Up to all of humanity: internalizing the capacity to transform historical experience into wisdom, power into responsibility, economic growth into human dignity, and national identity into a creative contribution to humanity.
This essay was developed within the framework of the broader U.S.–Vietnam Project, an effort to deepen mutual understanding between the two countries and help realize the full potential of their Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. Such understanding is increasingly important as Vietnam and the United States navigate a changing Indo-Pacific shaped by strategic competition, technological transformation, and their shared interest in a free and open regional order. I am pleased that a number of friends and other officials in our diplomatic and national security agencies have taken an interest in this essay and previous commentaries.
For scholars, policymakers, citizens, and young people asking where Vietnam may go next—and what values should guide that journey—this essay offers not a finalized proposal, but an invitation to reflect and dialogue on what is to be done by the Vietnamese to advance their destiny in promising directions. It is in this spirit of seeking the greater good that I am pleased to commend this thoughtful and ambitious essay to all those concerned with Vietnam’s future.
Here is the essay.
FROM RESILIENT CONTINUITY TO REALIZING POSSIBILITIES
A NEW PATH FOR THE VIETNAMESE PEOPLE
INTRODUCTION
FROM AN AGE OF “ORDER” TO AN AGE OF “TRANSITION”
For much of the twentieth century, strategic thinking often began with the question: What kind of order is framing world events? People gave names to various structures of behaviors and expectations: the colonial system, the bipolar order, Pax Americana, or liberal globalization. Yet an “order” is only a still photograph capturing a particular moment, while history is a film that continues moving from one frame to another. The twenty-first century increasingly shows that humanity is preparing to enter a new order that has not yet fully taken its shape. We are living in an age in which power, technology, climate, population, data, and systems of values are changing simultaneously, while no great power is yet capable of establishing a new and enduring status quo.
For Vietnam, this movement fundamentally changes the modalities of survival. In the past, we could endure through resilience by contracting when invaded, dispersing to avoid destruction, and then gathering strength to restore our sovereignty. Today, borders remain important, but dependence on others also operates through supply chains, obtaining core technologies, data infrastructure, finance, education, and even algorithms created by others that quietly shape human perceptions and decisions. A country may preserve its territorial integrity while losing its capacity for self-determination; it may grow rapidly while mortgaging its future; it may maintain political stability while trust, creativity, and civic responsibility gradually withdraw from common life. Adaptation for the sake of survival is no longer sufficient. Vietnam must acquire the capacity to orient itself towards the future it wants amid the very process of transition.
This essay begins with an undeniable achievement: through thousands of years of war, foreign domination, division, natural disasters, and political ruptures, the Vietnamese people have maintained their historical continuity. Many communities that once possessed territories, languages, and cultures have been assimilated by others or have just disappeared; the Vietnamese, although they lost their sovereignty more than once, repeatedly re-established communal life and re-asserted ethnic autonomy. This capacity can be called resilient continuity (Truong ton) and provided for lasting Endurance for the Vietnamese as a people
Such Endurance is not a mysterious gift reserved for our people, nor is it evidence of an immutable “Vietnamese essence.” It is the result, year in and year out, of many forces operating together: the resilience of the family and the village, the tenacious survival of language and memories, the capacity to receive but then Vietnamize external influences, and the ability to disperse in times of danger and reunite when opportunities to do so arose. Such a capacity for Endurance encompassed the intelligence, sacrifices, wise choices, and tragic decisions of many generations and still today energizes Vietnamese to advance by themselves their national destiny.
Yet it is precisely here that the central paradox emerges. A capacity developed in response to a particular set of circumstances may become a form of inertia when those circumstances change and new, more fitting, capabilities are demanded by those circumstances A core capability that once ensured success may harden into a core rigidity that obstructs renewal as times and economic realities change. Resourcefulness in the moment may weaken the capacity for long-term construction; accommodation may become avoidance of principle; just enduring may cause society to accept for too long conditions that should have been changed. Unity in the face of foreign invasion has repeatedly dissolved into divisiveness once the external enemy disappeared. Endurance is therefore both a precious legacy and a possible ceiling limiting the nation’s maturation as new possibilities arise.
Moving beyond the ceiling on responsiveness imposed by enduring is the stage of of Maturation, which his the capacity of a historical community to become more fully self-aware and intentional, to correct and orient itself appropriately; to elevate power into responsibility, growth into personal dignity, memory into wisdom, and uniqueness into creative energy. If Enduring answers the question of how not to be erased from history, Maturation answers the question of how to rise above systemic conformism and acquire a comprehensive agency, not to continue being led by history in an uncertain and unreflective manner.
Enduring and Maturing must both be understood on two levels: as a crystallized outcome of actions taken and as a continuing process moving forward in time. Classical Endurance was expressed by protecting the community and recovering sovereignty. Yet Enduring in these modern times is never enough, because sovereignty today also encompasses the capacity to master knowledge, technology, natural resources, data, and make strategic decisions. Similarly, Maturation is now necessary in a period when independence and civilization have reached a high degree of development, but this contemporary Maturing must be the shared undertaking of all Vietnamese. It cannot be monopolized by either the nationalists or the communists, by those inside the country or those overseas, by the state or independent intellectuals. A people becomes truly mature only when each and all participate in defining the common interest.
Such a perspective also requires a multilinear reading of history. The history that did occur was not the only history that could have occurred. Alongside the victorious currents, there have always been possibilities that emerged but were then cut short, ideas that foresaw the future but found no institutions capable of adopting and acting on them, and communities that left a remembered legacy despite having suffered military or political defeat. In the 19th century, Nguyễn Trường Tộ very correctly perceived the “great tendency of the world” at that time and so proposed comprehensive reforms in scholarship, administration, economics, and technology, but this his new understanding was not adopted by a sufficiently powerful coalition capable of turning it into a national program. A mature nation is not afraid to look back at the possibilities that history did not champion.
If Maturation is a process of evolution, then Opening Up to bring about viable possibilities is a process looking towards a horizon. For Vietnamese to Open Up today, to unfold their collective genius does not mean their Westernizing, breaking with tradition, or pursuing everything new. It is the liberation of valuable possibilities that are ready for exploitation but have not yet been fully developed: moving from adaptation to initiating creativity, from defensiveness to construction, from submission to taking responsibility, and leaving behind a community trapped by its history to become an agent capable of making history going forward. Opening Up does not negate Endurance; it enables the sources of Endurance to find a larger current.
A new path for the Vietnamese people is therefore neither a new ideology nor a declaration that the Vietnamese possess a truth of their own. It must be a way of moving forward together: sufficiently grounded in “Vietnamese character” and so not becoming a copy of others, yet sufficiently open to the global community to consider universal values; sufficiently connected to history to have roots, yet sufficiently free to criticize that very history. Values such as love, tolerance, creativity, responsibility, humanity, and dignity acquire real meaning only when they are embodied in modern life through human rights, citizens’ rights, the rule of law, democracy, and institutions that enable society to recognize and correct its mistakes.
This new journey for the Vietnamese may be imagined through the image of a tree. Its roots, reaching deep into the soil of history, represent Enduring. Its growing trunk, forming a structure, withstanding storms, and healing itself, represents Maturing. Its canopy, receiving light, air, water, and nourishment from all directions, represents Opening Up to possibilities. Its flowers and fruits are what the Vietnamese people may offer to the world. Preserving the roots does not mean rejecting the sky; opening the canopy to light does not mean losing the roots. Yet roots that cannot absorb nourishment will rot, a trunk that cannot carry sap up to the branches and leaves will wither, and a canopy that receives no light will bear neither flowers nor fruit.
This essay reads history as leaving behind layers of sediment. Each layer contains nourishment and toxins, achievements and wounds, realities that came into being and possibilities that remained unrealized. The challenge today then is neither to worship nor to reject the past, but to make the past a set of options for the future. A mature nation does not carry history as a sentence imposed upon it. It carries history as memory subjected to reflection, and thereby learns what must be inherited, what must be transcended, and what must never be allowed to happen again.
The central thesis of this essay may be expressed as follows: the Vietnamese people have demonstrated their capacity to survive, but to succeed and flourish in this twenty-first century they must acquire the capacities for Maturing and Opening Up. Endurance is the foundation; Maturation is transformative growth; Opening Up envisions the horizon. This journey does not belong exclusively to a state, a political party, an intellectual class, or a generation. It is the shared undertaking of Vietnamese communities inside and outside the country, of people who carry different memories, and especially of the younger generation—those who not only have inherited the debts and disappointments of history but also have the right to participate in writing a covenant with the future.
PART I
HISTORICAL CYCLES: CHALLENGE, ADAPTATION, AND SOVEREIGNTY
This historical section does not seek to retell the long history of the Vietnamese people, nor does it use the past as mandating a necessary destiny. This section reads history as a series of repeated cycles of challenge, response, accumulated capacities, and enduring wounds. Vietnamese Enduring therefore appears not as an immutable miracle, but as the end result of many choices, repeated processes of adaptation, and hopeful possibilities that emerged only to be cut short.
1. From the Early Period to Chinese Rule: Preserving the Core while Adapting External Influences
The periods of Văn Lang–Âu Lạc tribal coalescence and the revolt of the Trưng Sisters against Han Chinese imperialism must be discerned at the intersection of mythology, archaeology, and historical records written in later times. Legends should not be turned into facts in the modern sense, but neither should mythology be regarded as fiction. Origin stories, memories of the Hùng Kings, Mother Âu Cơ and Father Lạc Long Quân, and the uprising of the Trưng Sisters tell us how later generations, looking back, imagined their community: as a hundred children born from a single womb, bound by symbolic kinship yet accepting dispersion to the mountains or the seashore; bearing traces of female authority and indigenous beliefs; and carrying memories of a distinct political space before incorporation into the Chinese imperial bureaucratic state.
The endurance capacity accumulated in this early layer of psycho-social reality was the consciousness that the community could possess a life of its own. But caution, however, arises from the fragmentary nature of the evidence and the temptation to use mythology to legitimize present-day conclusions. Endurance did not arise from some pre-existing and homogeneous essence shared by all historic Vietnamese. The Vietnamese experience began with numerous communities in the river deltas and uplands gradually forming connections, both conflicting and integrating with one another, and later being remembered as having shared a common origin.
From the defeat of the Trưng Sisters in 39 CE to the Vietnamese victory at the Bạch Đằng River in 938 CE, the pressure of assimilation continued over centuries. Han Chinese administrative institutions, written characters, laws, scholarship, and the imperial model penetrated deeply into Vietnamese communities. Yet this reception did not take place in a vacuum. Families, villages, popular beliefs, the spoken language, and memories of resistance created places of refuge for the community to continue as a self-system. A unique identity was not lost, but preserved, and even venerated.
The subsequent indigenous uprisings extending from Lady Triệu to Lý Bí, Mai Thúc Loan, Phùng Hưng, Khúc Thừa Dụ, and Dương Đình Nghệ showed that a desire for self-rule did not suddenly appear in 938. That moral and political energy – a social capital – was a capacity nurtured and refined over many generations. In 939 CE, Ngô Quyền did not establish independence upon a land that had remained entirely quiescent; his victory at Bạch Đằng was the point at which currents of separateness and resistance, flowing quietly or erupting openly across many centuries, finally converged generating military effectiveness.
Buddhism played a significant role in this process because it created spiritual and intellectual networks that did not completely coincide with the mores and teachings of the colonial bureaucracy. Lê Mạnh Thát’s bold approach to the history of Vietnamese Buddhism may be consulted, but an interpretation such as his that remains contested should not be turned into the sole basis of understanding. What is more certain is that religious centers, trading networks, and villages helped the indigenous society maintain its connections to its past, receive written scripts and ideas from both India and China, and gradually Vietnamize them.
What these cycles of intrusion, adaption, and resistance produced was a core ability to contract without dissolving, to learn from the stronger power without entirely losing oneself in that foreignness, and to reunite as a community when opportunity appeared. What was lost were many indigenous cultural layers that became obscured; the long-term imposition on the evolving but enduring community was a deep dependence on the writing system, canonical models, and structures of social power and governance brought by the Chinese. The capacity for adaptation created vitality, but it also planted the seeds of a lasting disposition toward the neighboring giant civilization where admiration, insecurity, and resistance existed side by side.
2. The Lý–Trần and Early Lê Dynasties: 450 Years of Classical Self-Rule and National Flowering
After regaining sovereignty for the Vietnamese people, the Lý and Trần dynasties did not merely defend their borders against Chinese imperialism. They also built viable state institutions, a legal order, irrigation systems, an army, and a cultural space capable of expressing itself. That culture flourished with an amalgam known as the Three Teachings coexisting within a relatively flexible moral and intellectual order of spiritual development; Buddhism contributed to political and ethical life; A Confucianism derived from the Analects and the Mencius gradually supplied norms and techniques of governance; and indigenous beliefs continued to provide spiritual sustenance in both villages and the royal court. The uniquely Vietnamese Trúc Lâm school of Zen was a representative synthesis: it followed Buddhism while linking spiritual practice with responsibility toward the community and the country.
This may be regarded as a major Opening Up of the Vietnamese as a people permitted by an age of self-rule: knowledge received from outside was transformed into national capacity and a distinct cultural dynamic passed on from generation to generation. The solidarity displayed in the face of the Mongol–Yuan invasions of the 14th Century showed that the royal court, the nobility, the villages, and the army could coordinate efficiently with one another when the country confronted an existential threat. Although the historical and symbolic dimensions of the Diên Hồng Conference where the ruling Dynasty decided to fight back on behalf of the entire people must be elevated in contemporary esteem, it nevertheless gave rise to the memory of a moment when state power had to seek a consensus of values and personal commitments extending far beyond royal courtyards.
Yet this era of Buddhist influence should not be romanticized. The social order remained hierarchical, power belonged to a minority, ordinary lives remained precarious, and dynastic struggles between and within families never disappeared. This classical Opening Up created a high point of civilization for the Vietnamese people, but it did not yet constitute freedom and citizenship in the modern sense. The lesson for Vietnamese today is not to replicate the Lý–Trần model, but to recognize and apply once again its ability to receive multiple intellectual sources without allowing any one of them immediately to monopolize the spiritual life of the people.
The twenty years of Ming colonial rule which followed the collapse of the Tran Dynasty were shorter than the earlier centuries of Chinese domination, but the intensity of foreign control, exploitation, and cultural destruction was particularly severe. Responding to that ordeal, the Lam Sơn uprising did not merely recover political authority; it also created a new language of legitimacy. The Proclamation of Victory over the Wu placed Benevolence and Righteousness alongside consciousness of territory, customs, history, and civilization as essential for the Vietnamese capacity to Endure. It’s author, Nguyễn Trãi transformed resistance to foreign invasion into a moral proposition: bringing peace to the people was the standard of politics, and independence meant not merely replacing a foreign ruler with an indigenous one but restoring the full dignity of a civilized community deserving a status equal to that claimed by Chinese Neo-Confucian mandarins and scholars
The new capacity for Vietnamese Enduring produced by this cycle of invasion, repression, resistance, and re-assertion of national autonomy was a clearer consciousness of what a state should be and of what constituted its legitimacy. Yet the early Lê rulers subsequently strengthened centralized monarchy, the legal order, and Mencian Confucianism. This organizational capacity that helped stabilize the state also narrowed the social and cultural options permitted by the more pluralistic space which had prevailed during the previous period. A collective capacity that liberated the country from foreign domination could become a force for concentrating power domestically once peace had been restored.
This cycle shows that oppression does not automatically generate a fulsome Maturing of a people. Only when leadership, organization, a moral language, and the capacity for institutionalization are present can wounds from the past be transformed into bringing forth and then supporting a new, more consequential, stage of national development. Even then, the fruits of liberation may carry with them the seeds of rigidity in centralizing power in the state and its preferred elite families. Defeating foreign invasion and building a mature political community are related capacities, but they are not the same.
3. Civil Wars, Southward Expansion, and the Formation of a Multivector Vietnamese Identity
The prolonged conflicts beginning int he late 1500s between the Lê and Mạc clans, the Trịnh and Nguyễn clans, and the Tây Sơn brothers fighting Prince Nguyễn Ánh exhausted the Vietnamese, while also opening new realities of regional expansion, trade, and cultural interchange. The southward expansion down from the Red River Delta and contiguous provinces cannot be told solely as the Vietnamese people’s journey of territorial enlargement. It is also a history of dispossession, adaptation, and profoundly unequal coexistence involving the Chăm, Khmer, indigenous peoples, and the Minh Hương community of Chinese fleeing the Manchu Qing Dynasty. A mature common history must contain both pride in national expansion and memories of those communities who paid a price for that expansion.
Through the stage by stage pioneering movement southward, Vietnamese identity became more multilvectored. The “Five Quảng Provinces” bore the strong imprint of interaction with Chăm culture; the far South, including the Mekong River Delta, brought encounters, conflicts, and mixtures among Vietnamese, Khmer, Chinese, Chăm, and other communities. The commercial talents of the Chinese Minh Hương settlers , the Mạc Cửu, and regional trading networks showed that the South provinces were not simply an extension of life in the Red River Delta. It was a new social space in which Vietnamese identity continued to take shape through contact with other identities. Three dialects of spoken Vietnamese emerged: one in the Red River Delta, another in the central provinces along the coast of the South China Sea, and a third north and south of the two branches of the mighty Mekong River.
In each civil war, every protagonist constructed its own legitimacy, heroes, villains, and created it own victims. The Tây Sơn rebels may be viewed as a force that, in the late 18th century, broke the old order, unified much of the country under their rule, and defeated a foreign invasion; Prince Nguyễn Ánh, who defeated the Tây Sơn to establish his own Nguyen Dynasty, may be viewed as the ruler who completed the territorial unification of the country while opening the door for an increasingly conservative dynasty to reign from the city of Hue in Central Vietnam. Neither side consisted only of light or darkness. Nguyễn Huệ of the Tây Sơn defeated the Qing forces in the north, but the Tây Sơn army also devastated Gia Định in the south; Nguyễn Ánh relied upon foreign assistance to help him defeat the Tây Sơn, but this alone cannot erase him from the history of national construction.
This was not yet an ideological division in the twentieth-century sense, but it already put in place the prehistory of a binary habit: the victor turning himself into the sole legitimate historical current, while the defeated were expelled from authorized memory. When history is told only in the language of the victorious, a people loses not merely the truth of the defeated side, but also the ability to understand itself in full. Excluded memories do not disappear; they survive within families, regions, and communities that carry forward a sense of dispossession.
What this episode of the recurring cycle produced was an expanded national territory, the development of trade, and a Vietnamese identity that became regionally diverse and so complex. What it cost was human life, social trust, and the ability to build a form of legitimacy recognized by multiple communities. Endurance through division preserved a common territorial space, but it could not by itself heal the wounds inflicted by Vietnamese upon one another. Those fractures would reappear in different forms in the twentieth century.
4. The Nguyễn Dynasty and the Colonial Period: Unification, Delayed Reform, and the Reception of Modernity
The Nguyễn dynasty organized a unified state across an extensive territory, completed its administrative system, and sought to establish sovereignty. The nineteenth century for Vietnamese cannot be understood merely through use of the label “reactionary,” because the ruling dynasty had to govern a country needing discipline due to its having emerged from a prolonged civil war, weakened by deep regional differences, and facing unprecedented external pressures.
Yet as the world entered the age of industrialization and colonialism, the Hue royal court turned strongly towards Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, using old Chinese categories of thought to interpret an entirely new balance of power with the arrival of French expansionists. What had once helped organize the state and consolidate order was no longer sufficient to identify the nature of the new challenge. Vietnam faced not merely a stronger army, but an entire new civilizational system driven by science, industry, trade, maritime power, and a type of state capable of mobilizing resources on a scale far beyond that achieved by traditional Asian dynasties.
Nguyễn Trường Tộ represented a notable “counter-history”—a possible response for Vietnam that was proposed but never realized. Through The Great Tendency of the World, the Eight Urgent Proposals, and dozens of other petitions, he did not merely recommend purchasing machinery or learning Western techniques. He sought to change education, the recruitment and use of talent, administrative organization, the economy, the legal order, and the Vietnamese understanding of the world. He understood that preserving the country required, first of all, recognizing how profoundly the world had changed.
This tragedy cannot be reduced to the story of a genius rejected by ignorant men. The court lacked the money and the capacity for implementation; the bureaucracy defended established interests; wounded national pride turned into cultural defensiveness; Nguyễn Trường Tộ’s Catholic identity and personal connections aroused suspicion. More fundamentally, Vietnam lacked a reform coalition powerful enough to establish priorities, gather talent, and transform knowledge of the future into a national program.
Perceiving the danger was not enough. There also had to be institutions capable of listening to those who perceived it. No Meiji restoration came to the rescue of the Vietnamese.
Like Vietnam, in the 1860s Japan also lacked capital, faced pressure from the West, and was constrained by an old intellectual order. Yet the Meiji leadership created a reform coalition, accepted the dismantling of many privileges, and directed scarce resources according to the priority of building “a rich country and a strong army.” This comparison is not intended to idealize Japan’s path, still less to condemn the Vietnamese as an inferior people. It simply reveals the system advantage that comes from having a few individuals who could see the future and possessing a structure of power capable of using them.
The capacity that had once permitted the stability of the Nguyễn dynasty hardened into a limitation on its prospects at precisely the moment when national survival required another kind of envisioning and organizing. This is a characteristic example of the paradox of Endurance: what once helped a community preserve order may obstruct its ability to renew itself when renewal becomes necessary; national pride that once protected identity may become a refusal to acknowledge the arrival of a new reality; loyalty to tradition may become a fear of admitting that tradition can no longer provide good answers for how best to respond to a new situation.
French colonial rule brought forth for Vietnamese a period of lost sovereignty, colonial exploitation, and racial stratification. Every discussion of the impacts and effects of that French “civilizing mission” to enlighten and uplift the Vietnamese must begin with that reality of coercion.
Yet the impress of Colonial rule was not unidirectional. Cities, the press, the Romanized Vietnamese script, new schools, laws, science, and global trade created channels of modernization that the Vietnamese actively appropriated in order to better resist the colonial regime itself. Instruments introduced to facilitate colonial rule gradually became means for the formation of a new public, a new political language, and new ways of imagining the nation.
Phan Châu Trinh placed the advancement of popular knowledge and the development of social capacity as the first priority in reasserting national self-governance before the direct use of violence. Phan Bội Châu sought national salvation through the Đông Du movement and connections with other Asian cultures. Phạm Quỳnh saw the Vietnamese language as the repository of the national soul which could use it to survive and outlast the French intrusion in another instance of the Vietnamese capacity for Endurance.. The Đông Kinh Free School, the Duy Tân movement, the printed press, and modern literatur created an unprecedented and very modern space for public discussion. Ideas concerning citizens’ rights, the nation, science, education, and the role of the individual began entering social life, opening competing possibilities for Vietnam’s future.
The “golden generation” of Western-educated Vietnamese intellectuals did not share a single political orientation. Some followed nationalism, some chose communism, and others served different governments; many placed patriotism and the aspiration for modernization above loyalty to any single doctrine. This multivectorism must be recovered for Vietnam to prosper in the twenty-first century.
Tạ Quang Bửu provides a verifiable example: he participated in the revolution against French colonial rule from August 1945 but did not join the Communist Party until July 1947. A single example cannot support a generalization about an entire generation, but it is sufficient to prevent us from equating patriotic motivation with a pre-existing ideological conversion. For many intellectuals of the period, the nation was the point of departure; doctrine was a path chosen in its service.
What the period of Western colonialism produced was a modern language, a new intellectual class, the capacity for global communication, and new ideas of citizens’ rights, nationhood, and science. What it cost the Vietnamese was sovereignty, resources, human lives, and the opportunity for autonomous development. These two dimensions do not cancel one another out. Civilization did not prevent the oppressive nature of colonialism; but oppression could not entirely forestall the growth of creative capacities among the colonized.
The deeper lesson is that external knowledge generates an internal capacity only when the Vietnamese appropriate it, debate it, and translate it into the language of needs that they themselves define. Not everything introduced from abroad represents progress; neither does every foreign influence threaten national identity. The decisive question is whether the community possesses sufficient autonomy to select, transform, and use it.
5. From 1945 to the Present: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, Two Vietnams, and Remembered Experiences Yet to Be Reconciled
The August 1945 Revolution against the return of French governance mobilized an aspiration for independence that extended far beyond the communist constituency. During the following decades of war, communism provided organization, discipline, and an appealing vision of equality. Yet along with Cold War polarization, domestic repression, land reform, ideological control, and political monopoly, Communism also produced profound wounds.
The story of this period cannot be told monochromatically as a victorious resistance against foreign invasion. Nor can it be reduced to the story of a society subjected entirely to one-party coercion. Patriotism, revolutionary faith, organizational power, the intervention of great powers, and fear were all present. History becomes difficult to understand precisely because very different motivations could bring people into the same ranks, while people sharing the same patriotism were driven onto opposing sides.
During the thirty years from 1945 to 1975, the Vietnamese were not fighting a single war. At least four wars overlapped: the struggle for independence from colonial rule; the conflict between competing national projects; the ideological war embedded in the structure of the Cold War; and a conflict fought among international powers on Vietnamese territory.
If any one of these four dimensions is absolutized, history is denied. To describe the entire conflict only as a “war of national resistance” obscures the moral and civilizational conflict among the Vietnamese themselves. To call it solely a “civil war” diminishes the powerful aspiration for independence and the scale of conflict associated with great-power interventions and subventions. To characterize it entirely as a proxy war denies the agency, responsibility, and choices of the Vietnamese forces themselves. A mature reading must be broad enough to weave these difficult truths together.
The Republic of Vietnam governing from Saigon must be studied as a legitimate chapter in Vietnam’s history of modernization. It left memorable experiences in education, the press, law, the market economy, and international engagement; at the same time, it could not divorce itself from political instability, external dependence, war in the villages, and considerable limits on democratic processes. Military defeat does not erase the value of studying that very Vietnamese experience. The Saigon government in its own way was an expression of Vietnamese Endurance. Excluding the Republic of Vietnam from learned history impoverishes the common memory and prolongs the feeling among millions of people that their symbolic homeland has been taken from them.
South Vietnam itself contained many currents and cannot be reduced to a singularity of “puppets” or “nationalists.” Some opposed communism as a very intentional political choice; some staked their hopes on building a non-communist democracy; some joined peace movements or Third Force groups, or opposed foreign intervention; others were simply trying to protect their families in wartime.
Neither was North Vietnam a completely homogeneous political entity. Differences existed within the Communist Party concerning policy, the degree of international dependence, and the conduct of the war. Outside the Party, patriotism, revolutionary loyalty, fear of power, and the instinct for survival existed in society. A person could sincerely sacrifice for independence without fully understanding the apparatus he or she served; another could use an ideal just as a means to acquire power.
The histories of the two post 1954 Vietnams therefore cannot be reduced to a simple story of patriots on one side and traitors on the other, of complete autonomy versus complete dependence, or of absolute justice versus absolute injustice. Both sides were affected by great powers; both included people who sacrificed for what they believed to be the national interest; both committed errors, engaged in coercion, and contained unrealized possibilities. Realizing this does not mean distributing responsibility equally or erasing differences. It only restores to history its inherent complexity.
After 1975, Vietnam was unified territorially but its various memories were not reconciled. The transformation of private commerce, re-education camps, the exodus of boat people, the command economy, and the system of privileging certain political family backgrounds left a deep divide between victors and defeated, and between those in Vietnam and those overseas. The victors held unilateral power to authoritatively define the past, but they had no power to make the private memories of the defeated disappear from history.
Administrative centralization did not automatically become a unification of hearts. Military victory did not automatically produce national reconciliation.
The reforms of 1986 then opened an important door. Economic reality forced ideology to retreat; individual initiative, the household economy, and international integration were gradually restored. Farmers, household businesses, enterprises, and social networks released some of the capacities that had previously been constrained. The reforms demonstrated that Vietnamese society could recover rapidly when initiative was returned to the people. They also showed that solutions previously condemned as ideologically wrong could become paths to national rescue when reality could no longer be denied.
Yet market reform was not accompanied by a corresponding reform of governing power providing for the rule of law and accountability for officialdom. Economic growth, however, created a middle class and new resources, but it also generated inequality, crony capitalism, environmental destruction, and insecurity among workers. When the market is opened but regulatory power remains off-limits to citizens, initiative and agency may be liberated in the economy while continuing to be restricted in politics and intellectual life.
The development of overseas Vietnamese communities, the internet, smartphones, artificial intelligence, and Generation Z is now extending the Vietnamese space beyond national borders and the state’s monopoly over information. Ordinary people possess unprecedented capacities to learn, speak, create, and connect, but they must also confront surveillance, disinformation, and increasingly sophisticated forms of manipulation. The state is no longer the only actor capable of producing and disseminating knowledge; yet society does not automatically become wiser merely because more information is available. All this shows Vietnamese Endurance, once again, adapting, repositioning, and overcoming.
Modern day Maturation for Vietnamese is therefore not an outcome already achieved. It is an ongoing undertaking: integrating the memories of the two Vietnams without equalizing responsibility; recognizing overseas Vietnamese as part of the national community; giving younger generations the right to participate; and building institutions through which society can detect and correct obvious errors without waiting for a crisis to destabilize elite practices
After many repetitive cycles of repression followed by Openings Up, the question is no longer merely how the Vietnamese have survived the centuries. The more important question now is how far the capacities that have enabled Vietnam to survive can carry the nation.
CONCLUDING NOTE TO PART I
Looking back across these historical cycles, there is no formula according to which “a people oppressed for long enough will automatically open itself.” Challenges may generate solidarity, but they may also generate fear; acculturation under pressure may expand a culture, but it may also produce dependence; centralized power may rescue a community in times of upheaval, but it may also suffocate creativity when it becomes the normal condition.
History does not automatically transform suffering into wisdom. A people may endure for a very long time while continuing to repeat old cycles of suffering under new names.
Endurance is therefore not a capability, which, once possessed, keeps on serving a people’s deepest needs as circumstances for them change. Every age poses a different question of survival. When the principal danger is foreign invasion, the capacity to contract, disperse, and then reunite may save the community. But when the danger lies in stagnation itself, in technological dependence, in the exhaustion of public trust, and in a structure of power incapable of correcting itself, old methods of survival may no longer be sufficient and may even become obstacles to finding happiness.
Only when memory is subjected to reflection, knowledge encounters institutions, and power accepts limits can the experience of Endurance become the starting point for Maturation. The past then ceases to be either a burden to be carried or a glory to be worshiped; it becomes a repository of experience out of which paths to the future may be thoughtfully chosen.
The history examined in this part has identified the sources, turning points, and wounds of Vietnam’s journey from Endurance to now having a chance for Maturation to bring about its good works. The next part of this essay will examine more deeply the capacity for Endurance itself: what created the exceptional resilience of the Vietnamese people, and why the resilience that once saved them may sometimes become a limitation preventing them from moving toward Opening.
PART I
HISTORICAL CYCLES: CHALLENGE, ADAPTATION, AND SOVEREIGNTY
This historical section does not seek to retell the long history of the Vietnamese people, nor does it use the past as mandating a necessary destiny. This section reads history as a series of repeated cycles of challenge, response, accumulated capacities, and enduring wounds. Vietnamese Enduring therefore appears not as an immutable miracle, but as the end result of many choices, repeated processes of adaptation, and hopeful possibilities that emerged only to be cut short.
1. From the Early Period to Chinese Rule: Preserving the Core while Adapting External Influences
The periods of Văn Lang–Âu Lạc tribal coalescence and the revolt of the Trưng Sisters against Han Chinese imperialism must be discerned at the intersection of mythology, archaeology, and historical records written in later times. Legends should not be turned into facts in the modern sense, but neither should mythology be regarded as fiction. Origin stories, memories of the Hùng Kings, Mother Âu Cơ and Father Lạc Long Quân, and the uprising of the Trưng Sisters tell us how later generations, looking back, imagined their community: as a hundred children born from a single womb, bound by symbolic kinship yet accepting dispersion to the mountains or the seashore; bearing traces of female authority and indigenous beliefs; and carrying memories of a distinct political space before incorporation into the Chinese imperial bureaucratic state.
The endurance capacity accumulated in this early layer of psycho-social reality was the consciousness that the community could possess a life of its own. But caution, however, arises from the fragmentary nature of the evidence and the temptation to use mythology to legitimize present-day conclusions. Endurance did not arise from some pre-existing and homogeneous essence shared by all historic Vietnamese. The Vietnamese experience began with numerous communities in the river deltas and uplands gradually forming connections, both conflicting and integrating with one another, and later being remembered as having shared a common origin.
From the defeat of the Trưng Sisters in 39 CE to the Vietnamese victory at the Bạch Đằng River in 938 CE, the pressure of assimilation continued over centuries. Han Chinese administrative institutions, written characters, laws, scholarship, and the imperial model penetrated deeply into Vietnamese communities. Yet this reception did not take place in a vacuum. Families, villages, popular beliefs, the spoken language, and memories of resistance created places of refuge for the community to continue as a self-system. A unique identity was not lost, but preserved, and even venerated.
The subsequent indigenous uprisings extending from Lady Triệu to Lý Bí, Mai Thúc Loan, Phùng Hưng, Khúc Thừa Dụ, and Dương Đình Nghệ showed that a desire for self-rule did not suddenly appear in 938. That moral and political energy – a social capital – was a capacity nurtured and refined over many generations. In 939 CE, Ngô Quyền did not establish independence upon a land that had remained entirely quiescent; his victory at Bạch Đằng was the point at which currents of separateness and resistance, flowing quietly or erupting openly across many centuries, finally converged generating military effectiveness.
Buddhism played a significant role in this process because it created spiritual and intellectual networks that did not completely coincide with the mores and teachings of the colonial bureaucracy. Lê Mạnh Thát’s bold approach to the history of Vietnamese Buddhism may be consulted, but an interpretation such as his that remains contested should not be turned into the sole basis of understanding. What is more certain is that religious centers, trading networks, and villages helped the indigenous society maintain its connections to its past, receive written scripts and ideas from both India and China, and gradually Vietnamize them.
What these cycles of intrusion, adaption, and resistance produced was a core ability to contract without dissolving, to learn from the stronger power without entirely losing oneself in that foreignness, and to reunite as a community when opportunity appeared. What was lost were many indigenous cultural layers that became obscured; the long-term imposition on the evolving but enduring community was a deep dependence on the writing system, canonical models, and structures of social power and governance brought by the Chinese. The capacity for adaptation created vitality, but it also planted the seeds of a lasting disposition toward the neighboring giant civilization where admiration, insecurity, and resistance existed side by side.
2. The Lý–Trần and Early Lê Dynasties: 450 Years of Classical Self-Rule and National Flowering
After regaining sovereignty for the Vietnamese people, the Lý and Trần dynasties did not merely defend their borders against Chinese imperialism. They also built viable state institutions, a legal order, irrigation systems, an army, and a cultural space capable of expressing itself. That culture flourished with an amalgam known as the Three Teachings coexisting within a relatively flexible moral and intellectual order of spiritual development; Buddhism contributed to political and ethical life; A Confucianism derived from the Analects and the Mencius gradually supplied norms and techniques of governance; and indigenous beliefs continued to provide spiritual sustenance in both villages and the royal court. The uniquely Vietnamese Trúc Lâm school of Zen was a representative synthesis: it followed Buddhism while linking spiritual practice with responsibility toward the community and the country.
This may be regarded as a major Opening Up of the Vietnamese as a people permitted by an age of self-rule: knowledge received from outside was transformed into national capacity and a distinct cultural dynamic passed on from generation to generation. The solidarity displayed in the face of the Mongol–Yuan invasions of the 14th Century showed that the royal court, the nobility, the villages, and the army could coordinate efficiently with one another when the country confronted an existential threat. Although the historical and symbolic dimensions of the Diên Hồng Conference where the ruling Dynasty decided to fight back on behalf of the entire people must be elevated in contemporary esteem, it nevertheless gave rise to the memory of a moment when state power had to seek a consensus of values and personal commitments extending far beyond royal courtyards.
Yet this era of Buddhist influence should not be romanticized. The social order remained hierarchical, power belonged to a minority, ordinary lives remained precarious, and dynastic struggles between and within families never disappeared. This classical Opening Up created a high point of civilization for the Vietnamese people, but it did not yet constitute freedom and citizenship in the modern sense. The lesson for Vietnamese today is not to replicate the Lý–Trần model, but to recognize and apply once again its ability to receive multiple intellectual sources without allowing any one of them immediately to monopolize the spiritual life of the people.
The twenty years of Ming colonial rule which followed the collapse of the Tran Dynasty were shorter than the earlier centuries of Chinese domination, but the intensity of foreign control, exploitation, and cultural destruction was particularly severe. Responding to that ordeal, the Lam Sơn uprising did not merely recover political authority; it also created a new language of legitimacy. The Proclamation of Victory over the Wu placed Benevolence and Righteousness alongside consciousness of territory, customs, history, and civilization as essential for the Vietnamese capacity to Endure. It’s author, Nguyễn Trãi transformed resistance to foreign invasion into a moral proposition: bringing peace to the people was the standard of politics, and independence meant not merely replacing a foreign ruler with an indigenous one but restoring the full dignity of a civilized community deserving a status equal to that claimed by Chinese Neo-Confucian mandarins and scholars
The new capacity for Vietnamese Enduring produced by this cycle of invasion, repression, resistance, and re-assertion of national autonomy was a clearer consciousness of what a state should be and of what constituted its legitimacy. Yet the early Lê rulers subsequently strengthened centralized monarchy, the legal order, and Mencian Confucianism. This organizational capacity that helped stabilize the state also narrowed the social and cultural options permitted by the more pluralistic space which had prevailed during the previous period. A collective capacity that liberated the country from foreign domination could become a force for concentrating power domestically once peace had been restored.
This cycle shows that oppression does not automatically generate a fulsome Maturing of a people. Only when leadership, organization, a moral language, and the capacity for institutionalization are present can wounds from the past be transformed into bringing forth and then supporting a new, more consequential, stage of national development. Even then, the fruits of liberation may carry with them the seeds of rigidity in centralizing power in the state and its preferred elite families. Defeating foreign invasion and building a mature political community are related capacities, but they are not the same.
3. Civil Wars, Southward Expansion, and the Formation of a Multivector Vietnamese Identity
The prolonged conflicts beginning int he late 1500s between the Lê and Mạc clans, the Trịnh and Nguyễn clans, and the Tây Sơn brothers fighting Prince Nguyễn Ánh exhausted the Vietnamese, while also opening new realities of regional expansion, trade, and cultural interchange. The southward expansion down from the Red River Delta and contiguous provinces cannot be told solely as the Vietnamese people’s journey of territorial enlargement. It is also a history of dispossession, adaptation, and profoundly unequal coexistence involving the Chăm, Khmer, indigenous peoples, and the Minh Hương community of Chinese fleeing the Manchu Qing Dynasty. A mature common history must contain both pride in national expansion and memories of those communities who paid a price for that expansion.
Through the stage by stage pioneering movement southward, Vietnamese identity became more multilvectored. The “Five Quảng Provinces” bore the strong imprint of interaction with Chăm culture; the far South, including the Mekong River Delta, brought encounters, conflicts, and mixtures among Vietnamese, Khmer, Chinese, Chăm, and other communities. The commercial talents of the Chinese Minh Hương settlers , the Mạc Cửu, and regional trading networks showed that the South provinces were not simply an extension of life in the Red River Delta. It was a new social space in which Vietnamese identity continued to take shape through contact with other identities. Three dialects of spoken Vietnamese emerged: one in the Red River Delta, another in the central provinces along the coast of the South China Sea, and a third north and south of the two branches of the mighty Mekong River.
In each civil war, every protagonist constructed its own legitimacy, heroes, villains, and created it own victims. The Tây Sơn rebels may be viewed as a force that, in the late 18th century, broke the old order, unified much of the country under their rule, and defeated a foreign invasion; Prince Nguyễn Ánh, who defeated the Tây Sơn to establish his own Nguyen Dynasty, may be viewed as the ruler who completed the territorial unification of the country while opening the door for an increasingly conservative dynasty to reign from the city of Hue in Central Vietnam. Neither side consisted only of light or darkness. Nguyễn Huệ of the Tây Sơn defeated the Qing forces in the north, but the Tây Sơn army also devastated Gia Định in the south; Nguyễn Ánh relied upon foreign assistance to help him defeat the Tây Sơn, but this alone cannot erase him from the history of national construction.
This was not yet an ideological division in the twentieth-century sense, but it already put in place the prehistory of a binary habit: the victor turning himself into the sole legitimate historical current, while the defeated were expelled from authorized memory. When history is told only in the language of the victorious, a people loses not merely the truth of the defeated side, but also the ability to understand itself in full. Excluded memories do not disappear; they survive within families, regions, and communities that carry forward a sense of dispossession.
What this episode of the recurring cycle produced was an expanded national territory, the development of trade, and a Vietnamese identity that became regionally diverse and so complex. What it cost was human life, social trust, and the ability to build a form of legitimacy recognized by multiple communities. Endurance through division preserved a common territorial space, but it could not by itself heal the wounds inflicted by Vietnamese upon one another. Those fractures would reappear in different forms in the twentieth century.
4. The Nguyễn Dynasty and the Colonial Period: Unification, Delayed Reform, and the Reception of Modernity
The Nguyễn dynasty organized a unified state across an extensive territory, completed its administrative system, and sought to establish sovereignty. The nineteenth century for Vietnamese cannot be understood merely through use of the label “reactionary,” because the ruling dynasty had to govern a country needing discipline due to its having emerged from a prolonged civil war, weakened by deep regional differences, and facing unprecedented external pressures.
Yet as the world entered the age of industrialization and colonialism, the Hue royal court turned strongly towards Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, using old Chinese categories of thought to interpret an entirely new balance of power with the arrival of French expansionists. What had once helped organize the state and consolidate order was no longer sufficient to identify the nature of the new challenge. Vietnam faced not merely a stronger army, but an entire new civilizational system driven by science, industry, trade, maritime power, and a type of state capable of mobilizing resources on a scale far beyond that achieved by traditional Asian dynasties.
Nguyễn Trường Tộ represented a notable “counter-history”—a possible response for Vietnam that was proposed but never realized. Through The Great Tendency of the World, the Eight Urgent Proposals, and dozens of other petitions, he did not merely recommend purchasing machinery or learning Western techniques. He sought to change education, the recruitment and use of talent, administrative organization, the economy, the legal order, and the Vietnamese understanding of the world. He understood that preserving the country required, first of all, recognizing how profoundly the world had changed.
This tragedy cannot be reduced to the story of a genius rejected by ignorant men. The court lacked the money and the capacity for implementation; the bureaucracy defended established interests; wounded national pride turned into cultural defensiveness; Nguyễn Trường Tộ’s Catholic identity and personal connections aroused suspicion. More fundamentally, Vietnam lacked a reform coalition powerful enough to establish priorities, gather talent, and transform knowledge of the future into a national program.
Perceiving the danger was not enough. There also had to be institutions capable of listening to those who perceived it. No Meiji restoration came to the rescue of the Vietnamese.
Like Vietnam, in the 1860s Japan also lacked capital, faced pressure from the West, and was constrained by an old intellectual order. Yet the Meiji leadership created a reform coalition, accepted the dismantling of many privileges, and directed scarce resources according to the priority of building “a rich country and a strong army.” This comparison is not intended to idealize Japan’s path, still less to condemn the Vietnamese as an inferior people. It simply reveals the system advantage that comes from having a few individuals who could see the future and possessing a structure of power capable of using them.
The capacity that had once permitted the stability of the Nguyễn dynasty hardened into a limitation on its prospects at precisely the moment when national survival required another kind of envisioning and organizing. This is a characteristic example of the paradox of Endurance: what once helped a community preserve order may obstruct its ability to renew itself when renewal becomes necessary; national pride that once protected identity may become a refusal to acknowledge the arrival of a new reality; loyalty to tradition may become a fear of admitting that tradition can no longer provide good answers for how best to respond to a new situation.
French colonial rule brought forth for Vietnamese a period of lost sovereignty, colonial exploitation, and racial stratification. Every discussion of the impacts and effects of that French “civilizing mission” to enlighten and uplift the Vietnamese must begin with that reality of coercion.
Yet the impress of Colonial rule was not unidirectional. Cities, the press, the Romanized Vietnamese script, new schools, laws, science, and global trade created channels of modernization that the Vietnamese actively appropriated in order to better resist the colonial regime itself. Instruments introduced to facilitate colonial rule gradually became means for the formation of a new public, a new political language, and new ways of imagining the nation.
Phan Châu Trinh placed the advancement of popular knowledge and the development of social capacity as the first priority in reasserting national self-governance before the direct use of violence. Phan Bội Châu sought national salvation through the Đông Du movement and connections with other Asian cultures. Phạm Quỳnh saw the Vietnamese language as the repository of the national soul which could use it to survive and outlast the French intrusion in another instance of the Vietnamese capacity for Endurance.. The Đông Kinh Free School, the Duy Tân movement, the printed press, and modern literatur created an unprecedented and very modern space for public discussion. Ideas concerning citizens’ rights, the nation, science, education, and the role of the individual began entering social life, opening competing possibilities for Vietnam’s future.
The “golden generation” of Western-educated Vietnamese intellectuals did not share a single political orientation. Some followed nationalism, some chose communism, and others served different governments; many placed patriotism and the aspiration for modernization above loyalty to any single doctrine. This multivectorism must be recovered for Vietnam to prosper in the twenty-first century.
Tạ Quang Bửu provides a verifiable example: he participated in the revolution against French colonial rule from August 1945 but did not join the Communist Party until July 1947. A single example cannot support a generalization about an entire generation, but it is sufficient to prevent us from equating patriotic motivation with a pre-existing ideological conversion. For many intellectuals of the period, the nation was the point of departure; doctrine was a path chosen in its service.
What the period of Western colonialism produced was a modern language, a new intellectual class, the capacity for global communication, and new ideas of citizens’ rights, nationhood, and science. What it cost the Vietnamese was sovereignty, resources, human lives, and the opportunity for autonomous development. These two dimensions do not cancel one another out. Civilization did not prevent the oppressive nature of colonialism; but oppression could not entirely forestall the growth of creative capacities among the colonized.
The deeper lesson is that external knowledge generates an internal capacity only when the Vietnamese appropriate it, debate it, and translate it into the language of needs that they themselves define. Not everything introduced from abroad represents progress; neither does every foreign influence threaten national identity. The decisive question is whether the community possesses sufficient autonomy to select, transform, and use it.
5. From 1945 to the Present: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, Two Vietnams, and Remembered Experiences Yet to Be Reconciled
The August 1945 Revolution against the return of French governance mobilized an aspiration for independence that extended far beyond the communist constituency. During the following decades of war, communism provided organization, discipline, and an appealing vision of equality. Yet along with Cold War polarization, domestic repression, land reform, ideological control, and political monopoly, Communism also produced profound wounds.
The story of this period cannot be told monochromatically as a victorious resistance against foreign invasion. Nor can it be reduced to the story of a society subjected entirely to one-party coercion. Patriotism, revolutionary faith, organizational power, the intervention of great powers, and fear were all present. History becomes difficult to understand precisely because very different motivations could bring people into the same ranks, while people sharing the same patriotism were driven onto opposing sides.
During the thirty years from 1945 to 1975, the Vietnamese were not fighting a single war. At least four wars overlapped: the struggle for independence from colonial rule; the conflict between competing national projects; the ideological war embedded in the structure of the Cold War; and a conflict fought among international powers on Vietnamese territory.
If any one of these four dimensions is absolutized, history is denied. To describe the entire conflict only as a “war of national resistance” obscures the moral and civilizational conflict among the Vietnamese themselves. To call it solely a “civil war” diminishes the powerful aspiration for independence and the scale of conflict associated with great-power interventions and subventions. To characterize it entirely as a proxy war denies the agency, responsibility, and choices of the Vietnamese forces themselves. A mature reading must be broad enough to weave these difficult truths together.
The Republic of Vietnam governing from Saigon must be studied as a legitimate chapter in Vietnam’s history of modernization. It left memorable experiences in education, the press, law, the market economy, and international engagement; at the same time, it could not divorce itself from political instability, external dependence, war in the villages, and considerable limits on democratic processes. Military defeat does not erase the value of studying that very Vietnamese experience. The Saigon government in its own way was an expression of Vietnamese Endurance. Excluding the Republic of Vietnam from learned history impoverishes the common memory and prolongs the feeling among millions of people that their symbolic homeland has been taken from them.
South Vietnam itself contained many currents and cannot be reduced to a singularity of “puppets” or “nationalists.” Some opposed communism as a very intentional political choice; some staked their hopes on building a non-communist democracy; some joined peace movements or Third Force groups, or opposed foreign intervention; others were simply trying to protect their families in wartime.
Neither was North Vietnam a completely homogeneous political entity. Differences existed within the Communist Party concerning policy, the degree of international dependence, and the conduct of the war. Outside the Party, patriotism, revolutionary loyalty, fear of power, and the instinct for survival existed in society. A person could sincerely sacrifice for independence without fully understanding the apparatus he or she served; another could use an ideal just as a means to acquire power.
The histories of the two post 1954 Vietnams therefore cannot be reduced to a simple story of patriots on one side and traitors on the other, of complete autonomy versus complete dependence, or of absolute justice versus absolute injustice. Both sides were affected by great powers; both included people who sacrificed for what they believed to be the national interest; both committed errors, engaged in coercion, and contained unrealized possibilities. Realizing this does not mean distributing responsibility equally or erasing differences. It only restores to history its inherent complexity.
After 1975, Vietnam was unified territorially but its various memories were not reconciled. The transformation of private commerce, re-education camps, the exodus of boat people, the command economy, and the system of privileging certain political family backgrounds left a deep divide between victors and defeated, and between those in Vietnam and those overseas. The victors held unilateral power to authoritatively define the past, but they had no power to make the private memories of the defeated disappear from history.
Administrative centralization did not automatically become a unification of hearts. Military victory did not automatically produce national reconciliation.
The reforms of 1986 then opened an important door. Economic reality forced ideology to retreat; individual initiative, the household economy, and international integration were gradually restored. Farmers, household businesses, enterprises, and social networks released some of the capacities that had previously been constrained. The reforms demonstrated that Vietnamese society could recover rapidly when initiative was returned to the people. They also showed that solutions previously condemned as ideologically wrong could become paths to national rescue when reality could no longer be denied.
Yet market reform was not accompanied by a corresponding reform of governing power providing for the rule of law and accountability for officialdom. Economic growth, however, created a middle class and new resources, but it also generated inequality, crony capitalism, environmental destruction, and insecurity among workers. When the market is opened but regulatory power remains off-limits to citizens, initiative and agency may be liberated in the economy while continuing to be restricted in politics and intellectual life.
The development of overseas Vietnamese communities, the internet, smartphones, artificial intelligence, and Generation Z is now extending the Vietnamese space beyond national borders and the state’s monopoly over information. Ordinary people possess unprecedented capacities to learn, speak, create, and connect, but they must also confront surveillance, disinformation, and increasingly sophisticated forms of manipulation. The state is no longer the only actor capable of producing and disseminating knowledge; yet society does not automatically become wiser merely because more information is available. All this shows Vietnamese Endurance, once again, adapting, repositioning, and overcoming.
Modern day Maturation for Vietnamese is therefore not an outcome already achieved. It is an ongoing undertaking: integrating the memories of the two Vietnams without equalizing responsibility; recognizing overseas Vietnamese as part of the national community; giving younger generations the right to participate; and building institutions through which society can detect and correct obvious errors without waiting for a crisis to destabilize elite practices
After many repetitive cycles of repression followed by Openings Up, the question is no longer merely how the Vietnamese have survived the centuries. The more important question now is how far the capacities that have enabled Vietnam to survive can carry the nation.
CONCLUDING NOTE TO PART I
Looking back across these historical cycles, there is no formula according to which “a people oppressed for long enough will automatically open itself.” Challenges may generate solidarity, but they may also generate fear; acculturation under pressure may expand a culture, but it may also produce dependence; centralized power may rescue a community in times of upheaval, but it may also suffocate creativity when it becomes the normal condition.
History does not automatically transform suffering into wisdom. A people may endure for a very long time while continuing to repeat old cycles of suffering under new names.
Endurance is therefore not a capability, which, once possessed, keeps on serving a people’s deepest needs as circumstances for them change. Every age poses a different question of survival. When the principal danger is foreign invasion, the capacity to contract, disperse, and then reunite may save the community. But when the danger lies in stagnation itself, in technological dependence, in the exhaustion of public trust, and in a structure of power incapable of correcting itself, old methods of survival may no longer be sufficient and may even become obstacles to finding happiness.
Only when memory is subjected to reflection, knowledge encounters institutions, and power accepts limits can the experience of Endurance become the starting point for Maturation. The past then ceases to be either a burden to be carried or a glory to be worshiped; it becomes a repository of experience out of which paths to the future may be thoughtfully chosen.
The history examined in this part has identified the sources, turning points, and wounds of Vietnam’s journey from Endurance to now having a chance for Maturation to bring about its good works. The next part of this essay will examine more deeply the capacity for Endurance itself: what created the exceptional resilience of the Vietnamese people, and why the resilience that once saved them may sometimes become a limitation preventing them from moving toward Opening.
