“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?
ARTICLE TWO: PART II
RESILIENT CONTINUITY: ITS CAPACITIES AND LIMITS
Part I read Vietnamese history through recurring cycles of challenge, adaptation, and recovering sovereignty. Part II looks inside those cycles to examine the capacities that made each of their phases possible: what enabled the Vietnamese people repeatedly to contract without dissolving, to receive outside influences without wholly losing themselves, to disperse when in danger and then re-group when circumstances permitted?
Yet the most difficult questions lie in understanding the causes of those restorations.
Why would the very capacities that once enabled a people to survive later become limitations on its continued Maturation? Why have the Vietnamese often proved remarkably quick at overcoming immediate difficulties, yet less consistently successful at building durable institutions after a crisis has passed? Why has the capacity to absorb what is new repeatedly produced visible achievements in outlook and manners while deeper structures of power, social habits, and accumulated institutional capacities changed much more slowly?
If these limitations associated with modern Vietnamese resilient continuity are attributed only to war, colonialism, or the ideological choices of the twentieth century, the explanation of why Vietnam is what it today remains incomplete. Those events were immensely consequential, but they unfolded on the surface of an underlying historical foundation, one in which patterns of survival, forms of communal organization, relations with power, and ways of absorbing external influence had been taking shape for centuries.
Resilient Continuity must therefore be seen from two points of view: one recognizing the extraordinary vitalism of the Vietnamese down through history, the other recognizing the limitations that may have been preserved within that very vitality. A capacity that once enabled a community to survive a particular danger does not thereby become, automatically, a capacity for successful development when new historical conditions present themselves.
6. The Paradox of Vietnamese Survival
Vietnamese Resilient Continuity was formed in response to many different challenges, not through a succession of identical intrusions or oppressions.
Centuries of Chinese rule exerted powerful assimilative pressure on Vietnamese, yet these pressures simultaneously made the family, the village, the language, and religious practices stalwart repositories of communal continuity. The years of an independent Đại Việt nation consolidated statehood, literary culture, and consciousness of sovereignty. The later Ming occupation, national restoration under the Lê, the southward expansion of Vietnamese rule, and successive civil wars, enlarged the national territory while also leaving violence, division, and dissimilar memories among different communities living under Vietnamese rule.
French colonialism destroyed Vietnamese sovereign authority, yet it also introduced cultural expressions that Vietnamese would later appropriate for their own purposes: the romanized national script, journalism, modern science and education, together with new vocabularies in which to think about nationhood and citizenship. The following era of anti-colonial revolution, war, partition into two governing regimes, reunification, and Đổi Mới economic reformation produced major achievements in independence, territorial unity, and economic development, while also leaving behind tangible and intangible wounds between Vietnamese, ruptures in social continuity, and memories that still remain incompletely reconciled.
There is no law of history by which a community necessarily matures in understanding and capability in optimal proportion to the pressures it has endured.
Challenge can stimulate creativity, but it can also circumscribe a society, distorting moral norms, and transmitting trauma from one generation to the next. A community does not necessarily mature in competence after catastrophe. It may merely learn how to live with catastrophe, carrying forward reflexes formed under conditions of danger into circumstances in which they are no longer necessary.
The gains made in each phase of every historical cycle must therefore be considered alongside the harms inflicted.
The Vietnamese people endured not because their every historical choice was correct, but because even after making wrong choices, defeats, and suffereing great harms, the community retained a capacity to reconstitute its integrity. That is the fundamental achievement of the Vietnamese over the centuries.
A paradox is that successful reconstitution may also preserve the very reflexes that allow crises to recur in different forms. One such reflex is the tendency to make too radical a break with the past, not learning the right lessons, whenever political power changes hands from one ruling elite to another
New dynasties traditionally strengthened their legitimacy by disparaging their predecessors. Victorious forces did not merely take control of the state; they sought to establish a new official history most favorable to them. The legacy of those who came before was consequently divided between what should be inherited and what must be rejected.
The mechanism of selective appropriation has appeared in different forms, from monarchical society to modern, Westernized, regimes.
The new can criticize the old while still standing upon part of what the old achieved.
In Vietnam, the recurring impulse to clear the board and begin again from ground zero has often meant that renewal of community came with a form of selective amnesia. The Nguyễn dynasty diminished the Tây Sơn; later Hanoi’s revolutionary historiography placed much of the legacy of the Republic of Vietnam outside the officially recognized national narrative.
When the victor obliges the country to reconstruct its history starting with its achievements, society may still recover from setbacks, but its capacity for accumulation of constructive points of view and risk tolerance is damaged.
To survive is to retain the possibility of beginning again. To recover with gracious maturity avoids having to begin again from zero.
The paradox contained within survivability can also be seen in the relationship between war and peace.
Under foreign invasion, concentrated authority, severe discipline, and the subordination of private interests become sources of collective strength. Yet the methods that can rescue a community in wartime do not naturally disappear when peace comes. An apparatus built for command may continue to govern through command though the war is over; secrecy that once protected a clandestine movement may become a means of shielding power in times of peace; dissent that was regarded as dangerous during war may continue to be viewed with suspicion through a national security lens in peacetime.
A community can defeat its enemies and still fail to overcome the necessary habits created during the struggle.
Resilient Continuity is therefore not an unqualified virtue, much less a fixed essence of Vietnamese identity. It is a collection of historically formed capacities which may save a people under one set of conditions but constrain it under another.
To move towards a grand Opening Up of possibility today, Vietnam need not discard the inheritance left by surviving. It must distinguish within that inheritance what constitutes vitality worth preserving, what was a reflex that now must be transformed, and what is an injury that should not be transmitted into the next historical cycle.
7. Adaptation as a Civilizational Pattern
Arnold Toynbee interpreted the history of civilizations through the dialectic of “challenge and response.” A community does not grow simply because it overcomes difficulties; it grows when its response opens the way toward a higher level of civilization development.
Vietnamese experience suggests a recurrent pattern: bend without breaking, receive without accepting everything offered or imposed, withdraw into smaller units when the center is threatened, and reunite when opportunity returns.
This might be described as a rhythm of Consolidation and Dispersion — Tích and Tản.
Assets – human capital, social capital, economic, political – accumulate as conditions permit, scatter when the center weakens so that they are not destroyed and later re-converge hosted within a new structure of command and control. The rhythm of dispersal and then consolidation can be seen in villages, migration, guerrilla warfare, family networks, and, today, even among overseas Vietnamese communities.
When the state weakened, village society preserved part of communal life in the margins of official governance. When the centralized economy reached an impasse, families and informal networks sustained livelihoods. When the country was relatively closed and stagnant, Vietnamese abroad continued to construct networks of knowledge, finance, and international connection.
Thus, the center might fail while dispersed currents of life continued to flow.
This is a remarkable elasticity. Yet such adaptation to events always has two sides.
It enables people to live through an inhospitable environment; at the same time, it may reduce the pressure to transform that environment. People learn how to circumvent an unreasonable regulation rather than organize themselves to demand a better one; to rely upon personal connections rather than fair procedures; to transfer responsibility to the family rather than build institutions capable of protecting a wider common interest.
In dispersal, each individual may very well be acting entirely rationally to protect himself or herself. Yet the aggregate of millions of rational individual decisions can produce a society characterized by low trust and high costs of cooperation.
The familiar saying “Ở bầu thì tròn, ở ống thì dài” — roughly, to take the shape of the vessel in which one finds oneself — captures this adaptive capacity well. Under difficult conditions, it is survival intelligence. Once elevated into a permanent philosophy applied after the danger has evaporated, however, it can justify living without stable principles: speaking the language expected by each different power grouping, accommodating whoever has the whip hand, and above all preserving personal safety and advantage.
A bi-focal, inside/outside, existence easily develops from this pattern.
In official settings, people speak the permitted language; privately, they may think differently. A civil servant enforces a regulation he knows to be unreasonable; an intellectual writes what does not entirely correspond to what she believes; citizens comply outwardly while quietly devising ways to neutralize an order.
A society can adapt for a very long time to a political order in which the social space for expressing genuine belief cannot expand.
The ability to coexist with what is unreasonable can prevent immediate hardship, but it can also enable the unreasonable to survive much longer.
The same limitation appears in the modern Vietnamese reception of new ideas and practices.
Vietnamese society often learns quickly, applies techniques flexibly, and catches up rapidly in practical skills. Yet absorbing an accomplishment of modernity is not the same as absorbing the conditions that made that accomplishment possible.
A university can be built according to international models while its tolerance of academic freedom remains constrained. Modern techniques of administration can be imported without giving rise to corresponding structures of accountability. A market economy can expand without the simultaneous construction of a sufficiently strong rule of law and genuinely fair competition.
The new penetrates deeply enough to alter the surface, but not deeply enough to transform the society’s foundations and thus maximize the benefits so made available for years to come.
The problem, then, is not that the Vietnamese do not know how to learn.
Rather, for them learning has too often been driven only by the necessity of immediate response instead of by a long-term strategy of beneficial accumulation: learning in order to pass an examination, meet a target, fulfill a campaign, or catch up with the outside world — but not always learning in order to cultivate independent thought or generate new knowledge.
Đổi Mới in 1986 offers a national-scale example:
As the centrally planned economy entered profound crisis, individual initiative, household production, and market activity were permitted far greater room. Results appeared quickly, demonstrating the considerable vitality already present in society.
Yet reform focused primarily on the economy, while the structures of power, the rule of law, and the freedom to organize social entities evolved more slowly. The market was accepted as an instrument for generating growth, while many of the political and legal conditions that allow a market economy to become fair, innovative, and sustainable, developed far less fully.
That was adaptation. It was not transformation.
A rigid people cannot survive in a changing world. But real, effective, productive, systemic Opening Up requires adaptation to be elevated to another level: from finding a path to manage one’s way in an irrational environment to changing that environment together; from learning in order to catch up to learning in order to create; from flexibility toward circumstances to fidelity to principle combined with flexibility in method.
Resilient Continuity helps people find a way to live inside a narrow tube. Maturation – systemic Opening Up – requires them together to widen the tube.
8. Non-Absolutism: From the Strength of Synthesis to the Danger of Ambiguity
Vietnamese society has rarely carried any single system of thought to the final logical implications instructing us how best to live our lives.
The Three Teachings — Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism — could coexist among Vietnamese. A person could worship ancestors, visit Buddhist temples, respect Confucian norms, maintain local religious practices, and absorb certain Western values without feeling compelled to choose only one of them as providing the absolute truth about heaven and earth and our fates in this life. Things that might appear contradictory in theory could coexist quite comfortably in personal practice.
This tendency toward non-absolutism has encouraged cultural absorption and everyday tolerance.
Vietnamese society has often been able to accept the new without immediately abandoning the old, to modify this or that behavior before reconstructing an integrated holistic system of belief. This has generated considerable capacity for synthesis.
It also helps explain why imported ideologies, once in Vietnam, have been modified by the society that received them.
Confucianism never eliminated village religion; Buddhism coexisted with ancestor worship; Vietnamese Catholicism absorbed many expressions of local culture. Communism, while preserving Marxist-Leninist language within the official system, also combined in practice with nationalism, family structures, village psychology, and traditions of authority that had long predated its arrival from the West.
Even those speaking in the name of an absolute doctrine do not necessarily live by all its prescriptions.
A Party cadre might speak the vocabulary of class struggle while giving priority to the interests of his family. The state may maintain a socialist political identity while increasingly relying on markets, private enterprise, and integration into the global economy.
Doctrine can survive in language while practice quietly adjusts to the requirements of survival.
This produces a notable inconsistency.
An ideology does not necessarily disappear when belief in its theoretical propositions weakens. When people become accustomed to saying one thing but thinking another, while acting according to a third normative assumption, a political order may continue to function long after its original intellectual foundations have lost much of their persuasive force.
Ideology, once institutionalized, survives not through intermediation of belief alone. It survives through organization, interests, language, habits, and the self-interest of power structures.
What efficacy remains after an ideology loses its moral appeal may therefore prove more socially durable than the abstractions of that belief system. Habits of obedience, the distribution of privileges, the relationship between authority and official truth, or the expectation that decisions must descend from above, can persist even after the language that once justified them has lost much of its currency.
Non-absolutism, however, must not be confused with the absence of principle.
When it degenerates into “anything can be accepted,” it blurs the distinctions between tolerance and accommodation, flexibility and opportunism. One may respect beliefs different from one’s own, but tolerance cannot be invoked to excuse corruption, the denial of rights, violence, or systematic falsehood.
Nor does the idea of a “Middle Way” mean positioning oneself halfway between truth and falsehood or distributing responsibility equally simply to avoid having to judge. The Middle Way demands resistance to extremism in thought and action; it does not require the abandonment of moral discrimination.
Tolerance respects persons and differences within a zone of proportional morality and practical reason. It cannot become a tolerance without limits which therefore accepts even conduct that destroys human dignity.
A new path for the Vietnamese people today must preserve their resilient capacity for synthesis, because a plural society cannot mature under monopolies of truth.
But a right-minded synthesis needs banks within which to flow: human dignity, truth, responsibility, the rule of law, and the right to dissent.
Without such boundaries, the current of synthesis can only lose momentum and become stagnant water wherein principle gradually dissolves into convenience.
The strength of the Vietnamese lies partly in the fact that they are not easily swallowed whole by a doctrine. Their limitation is that they do not always follow to the full the values they claim to have chosen.
The journey from Resilient Continuity to fully Opening Up must preserve capacities while overcoming limitations.
9. The Accumulated Sediments of Collective Consciousness
History does not stop in its tracks when an event ends.
It settles into language, symbols, habits, fears, and forms of tacit knowledge that people use without necessarily remembering their origins. These accumulations of experience may be called the sediments of a people’s collective consciousness.
Every generation receives such sediments from family, school, community, and state, and then transmits them — sometimes almost unchanged, sometimes partially transformed — to the next.
Sediments are not an immutable essence.
They are history that has entered into human consciousness and conscience.
The memory of Chinese domination nourishes Vietnamese vigilance toward China, while centuries of interaction also left a deep dependence upon written forms, classical references, and patterns of political organization originating in Chinese civilization.
The Vietnamese repeatedly resisted rule from the north, yet their state was also organized to incorporate many forms learned from that same neighboring civilization. This is not uniquely Vietnamese; civilizations often learn a great deal from their most powerful rivals.
In Vietnam’s case, however, the prolonged asymmetry produced a particular tension.
China was both a major source of civilizational learning and a recurrent threat to political autonomy. Vietnamese elites learned writing, classics, and techniques of statecraft from China while repeatedly asserting that Vietnam was not Chinese.
Vietnamese-Chinese relations have therefore long carried paired opposites: proximity and distance, reception and vigilance, admiration and resistance.
That tension has never entirely disappeared.
One of the deeper consequences of this long-standing tension may be that Vietnamese consciousness has often been highly sensitive to national independence without always connecting national independence equally strongly to the autonomy of individual citizens. A country may defend its political frontier while continuing to reproduce its own forms of hierarchy and obedience shaped by a much longer history.
The memory of war has left another double sediment.
On one side, it nurtures patriotism, endurance, sacrifice, and the capacity to mobilize society in the face of danger. On the other, it can reinforce the habit of dividing the world into “us” and “the enemy,” treating disagreement with “us” as a domestic threat and identifying unity of will as the only possible basis of national strength.
Military vocabulary consequently survives in peacetime life: “campaign,” “front,” “battle line,” “shock force,” “victory.”
When every problem is imagined as a battle, society tends to follow commands rather than seek dialogue, favors mobilization rather than participation, values victory rather than interim solutions that can be tested, corrected, and improved over time.
A person who disagrees with the method chosen to meet a particular need can then be treated as though he or she rejects the common good.
Another layer of sediment was produced during periods when political power reached deeply into social life but met with subtle non-compliance.
When public language diverges from private belief, outward compliance is easily accompanied by withdrawal from common responsibility. People learn what may be said, where it may be said, and to whom. But acquiescence does not necessarily mean agreement. Applause does not necessarily mean approval.
Over time, this bi-modal existence undermined more than truth. It weakens trust between people. When no one is certain what others actually think, social cooperation becomes more difficult. Family and close relationships become safe spaces, while public life is treated as the domain of procedure, ritual language, and unnecessary risk.
For today’s Vietnamese, April 30, 1975 is one clear expression of a bi-furcated political memory.
Within the narrative of the victorious side, it is the day of liberation and reunification. In the experience of many former South Vietnamese and members of overseas communities, it is associated with collapse, reeducation, dispossession, escape by sea, and exile.
A historical event can carry profoundly different meanings depending on who is shaping the narrative, and no such meaning automatically disappears because one side possesses state power.
Maturation requires the creation of a space in which different memories can be expressed, tested against evidence, and allowed to coexist. Non-absolutism can contribute constructively here. Historical events must be investigated through evidence; memories of suffering also call for the capacity to listen.
Reconciliation cannot be achieved by demanding that people renounce and abandon their own narratives.
To excavate historical sediments is neither to persecute one’s ancestors nor to apply contemporary standards simplistically to every decision made in the past. It is to bring forward unconscious reflexes so that a community can recognize what perceptions and feelings continue silently to influence the quality of its collective li.
Once recognized, the past can become an object of choice. When denied, it continues to govern the present from the shadows.
A people does not mature by forgetting what happened.
Rather, a people matures when formalized perceptions of the past no longer possesses absolute authority over what must happen next.
10. When the Advantages permitting Survival Become Limits on Development
A survival capability becomes a developmental limitation when a method that once worked in emergency conditions is transformed into the normal method of government.
Centralized authority can enable rapid mobilization during war but weaken initiative in peace. Secrecy may protect a persecuted organization but diminish transparency once that organization becomes the state. Discipline may prevent a movement from disintegrating but turn into the punishment of dissent if independent thinking is no longer tolerated.
A core capacity then hardens into a core rigidity.
Solidarity against foreign aggression is one of the clearest strengths in Vietnamese history. Yet once an external danger has passed, solidarity does not automatically become the capacity to live constructively with internal differences.
The Vietnamese may rally remarkably quickly in the presence of a common enemy, yet divisions can persist for generations when the immediate need becomes the distribution of power, interests, and responsibilities among themselves.
The Lê-Mạc conflict, the Trịnh-Nguyễn division, the Tây Sơn – Nguyễn Ánh rivalry, followed later by the ideological struggles of the twentieth century, all point toward a recurring problem among Vietnamese: the capacity to identify “us and the enemy” is extremely useful in war but becomes an obstacle when the supposed “other side” is also part of the national community.
The capacity for enduring is similarly double-edged.
It helps human beings survive poverty, war, and natural disasters, but it can also lead society to tolerate for too long conditions that might actually be changed for the betterment of the common good. A community accustomed to celebrating sacrifice can forget to ask why ordinary people must always be the ones who sacrifice, and whether better government might have prevented at least part of the suffering.
Endurance is a virtue when human beings face what cannot be changed.
It becomes a political problem when endurance is used for submission to the irresponsibilities of those who govern.
Vietnamese ingenuity and improvisation have also produced remarkable achievements. Under scarcity, people devised solutions with few resources; enterprises adapt quickly to changing circumstances; families invest intensely in the future of their children.
Yet when improvisation substitutes for beneficial institutions, a society comes to depend upon exceptions rather than rules.
Success may then belong to those who know how to find a way around the infirmities of the system, rather than flow to those who are most capable or who follow fair procedures.
Cleverness can defeat standards. Connections can replace law.
The 19th century case of Nguyễn Trường Tộ again reveals the distance between seeing the possibility of Opening Up and possessing the institutional capacity to bring about new approaches.
Vietnam has not lacked people capable of recognizing historical challenges. What it has often lacked are institutions able to listen to their voices, test their proposals, and accept recommended changes to established interests.
At such turning points, individuals sometimes emerge whom we might call hinge figures: they discern something of the logic of the coming age while still living and acting within institutions belonging to an age that is passing. Their tragedy does not necessarily lie in being always right, or even in failing. It lies in the distance between the capacity of certain individuals to recognize the need for change and the capacity of the system they serve to correct itself.
The same gap continues into modern history.
Many reform programs may set advanced objectives while recruitment systems, resource allocation, and mechanisms of accountability resist such changes. New ideas must pass through old networks of power; reform policies can themselves be reshaped to accommodate the structures that they were originally intended to change.
A policy failure therefore does not always demonstrate that the direction of reform was entirely mistaken. At times, an idea moving in the right direction passes through a mechanism incapable of implementing, testing, and correcting it, and the weaknesses of the implementing mechanism undermine the well-intentioned reform efforts.
Vietnam can therefore change very rapidly while transforming very slowly.
In the 1980s Đổi Mới generated rapid growth partly because it restored a measure of economic initiative to society. Yet when reform approaches directly affect the ordained structure of political power, the pace of change becomes much slower.
Whenever an older structure reaches its inherent limits, it may open up just far enough to absorb new resources and recover vitality. But if the forces that produced the original disappointments remain unchanged, a syncopated rhythm of Closing and Opening — Khép and Mở – risks repeating itself to perpetuate excessive institutional lassitude and economic stagnation.
A society must always be prepared to ask whether what is accumulating within its parameters is sufficient to make the next opening up a productive transformation rather than just another interim adjustment.
Maturity arrives for a people only when their capacity to endure hardship becomes the capacity to prevent other avoidable hardships; when sacrifice is complemented by participation; when solidarity no longer requires uniformity of thought; and when flexibility operates within principles that cannot simply be bent whenever circumstances change or to favor the few at the expense of the many
What saved a people yesterday does not automatically carry that people into tomorrow.
11. Broken Accumulation and the Malady of Half-Learning
One recurring weakness occurring in Vietnamese history has been that the capacity to accumulate has not always generated the capacity to recover.
Transitions of power have repeatedly been accompanied by rewritten histories, replacement of elites, and excessive repudiation of the defeated side. The new does not merely correct the old; it often tries to demonstrate that little of value existed before itself.
Under the various family monarchies, a new dynasty could diminish the virtues of its predecessor in order to establish for itself legitimate receipt of a new Mandate from Heaven. Modern ideologies could take repudiation of past governments further by dividing history into progressive and reactionary eras, revolutionary and counterrevolutionary movements, inclusion in or exclusion from authoritative public memory.
The consequence of these re-conceptualizations is not merely injustice toward the past.
It impoverishes the present.
When a political order ends, administrative knowledge, law, education, and culture associated with that order can easily be discarded together with its political apparatus. Skilled people may be removed because of political background; archives and memories may be neglected; achievements of the defeated side may no longer be viewed as part of the common national inheritance.
The victor must then rebuild capacities that might instead have been inherited, corrected, and re-focused.
The treatment after 1975 of parts of the legacy of the Republic of Vietnam is one case worth reconsidering. Many professionals lost their positions or left the country, while experiences accumulated in education, law, administration, economics, and international engagement could not easily be assessed on its merits because it was associated with the delegitimized defeated government.
In 1975, Vietnam achieved territorial reunification while also losing part of its human capital and part of its accumulated memory — assets that a different process of reconciliation might have preserved.
Đổi Mới later restored or legitimized many elements that had previously been constrained or rejected: household production, markets, private business, relations with the West, and a greater role for expertise.
Yet this recovery was not always accompanied by a public mechanism for examining why the earlier choices had failed.
A society cannot fully learn necessary truths about reality if it cannot name its mistakes accurately.
And naming a mistake is only the beginning. The capacity for self-correction requires a fuller cycle: truth must be able to reach decision-makers; those who identify errors must have space to speak; responsibility must be traced beyond a convenient individual toward policies and mechanisms; and what has been learned must be translated into changes that make recurrence less likely.
A system may be highly capable of mobilization and still be weak at learning if success is routinely attributed to the system while failure is assigned mainly to individuals. Correction then becomes a matter of replacing people rather than repairing the conditions that produced the error.
Without the capacity to acknowledge error, there can be no genuine capacity to learn.
Incompetence in accumulation is closely connected with another recurring short-coming: half-learning.
Vietnam has repeatedly adopted the achievements of another civilization without fully absorbing the conditions that generated those achievements.
Confucian institutions were adopted to create an educated bureaucracy without a comparably developed tradition of independent disputation. Western technology was learned while freedom of thought remained more cautiously received. The Soviet model of organization was embraced without providing sufficient insulation from the dangers of concentrated power. A market economy was developed without a simultaneous maturation of the rule of law, transparent property rights, and genuinely equal competition.
Learning has often been more transactional and instrumental: take what is immediately useful while avoiding those elements which could not be smoothly synchronized with the deeper needs of the power structure.
Science is celebrated as an engine of development while academic freedom remains constrained. Digital transformation is accelerated while privacy and control over personal data lag behind. Artificial intelligence is embraced as an instrument of administrative efficiency even as it may also increase the technical capacity for surveillance.
The new is therefore invited inside while simultaneously being separated from some of its realities which are the very things which give it transformative force.
The old saying about taking the shape of one’s vessel now applies not only to individual behavior. It may become a national approach to imported models: adopt what satisfies an immediate need, modify what conflicts with existing arrangements, and then declare that the new global standard has been embraced.
The result can be modern institutions operated through premodern relationships, new institutional names carrying forward old political logics.
This is not the consequence of a lack of intelligence.
On the contrary, it may be the product of an adaptive intelligence that has become too accomplished in just being transactional in the moment. Such instrumental cleverness can easily lead to half-learning and no more.
When society becomes accustomed to finding rapid solutions for particular situations, it becomes harder to construct systems requiring time, discipline, transparency, and consistency. Dramatic leaps are more attractive than quiet accumulation; campaigns more visible than institutions; measurable achievements easier to celebrate than foundations whose importance may not become visible for a generation.
To move toward Opening Up, Vietnam must learn how to inherit without worshipping, to break with the past without forgetting it, and to learn truths without merely imitating superficials.
What matters is not how many additional models the country imports, but whether it can understand them to their foundations, test them under Vietnamese conditions, acknowledge mistakes openly, and continue accumulating knowledge across generations.
A mature people need not be ashamed to learn from others.
The danger begins only when a society learns a great deal but the knowledge it acquires does not enhance its own creative capacity.
12. Communism in Vietnamese History: From a Capacity for Liberation to the Restraints on Reconciliation
Communism cannot be understood simply as something foreign imposed upon Vietnam.
Nor can it be equated with the entirety of Vietnamese patriotism, the desire for independence, or the sacrifices of those who followed it.
In the twentieth century, the communist movement provided disciplined organization, a language of liberation, methods of mass mobilization, and an international network for the struggle against colonial rule. It promised not only national independence but also a more equal social order.
In a poor, colonized, and deeply stratified country, that promise possessed genuine attraction.
The historical strength of Vietnamese communism lay partly in its ability to connect the national question to the social question. It did not merely promise to expel foreign rulers; it also promised to transform the lives of peasants, workers, and social groups possessing little voice within the previous order.
Organizational discipline, clandestine capacity, and support from an international communist movement helped it outperform competing nationalist organizations that were often more fragmented.
Yet the patriotic motivations of millions of Vietnamese cannot be reduced to belief in Marxism-Leninism.
The example of Tạ Quang Bửu, mentioned in Part I, is instructive: he joined the revolution in 1945 and became a Party member only later. A single individual cannot represent an entire generation, but his path reminds us that for many intellectuals and ordinary Vietnamese, the nation came before the doctrine; the doctrine was a path chosen in the service of the nation.
The Communist Party of Indochina’s announcement of its dissolution in November 1945, followed by clandestine organizational activity before its public reappearance as the Workers’ Party of Vietnam in 1951, should likewise be understood in the context of efforts to construct a broader national front while responding to domestic and international concerns.
The episode does not permit the simplistic conclusion that Vietnamese society as a whole rejected communism.
A more defensible proposition is that the movement’s broadest appeal did not arise from Marxist theory in the abstract. It came from the capacity to connect that theory with independence, national unity, social justice, and liberation from colonial subordination.
That combination created a capacity for liberation.
The paradox emerged when a doctrine that had functioned as an instrument of liberation became the exclusive foundation of political legitimacy for an independent nation with a remarkable past made possible by a resilient continuity.
Class struggle placed people into political categories heavily conditioned by social origin. Land reform did more than redistribute property; it also inflicted deep wounds upon community relations. The political classification of family background blurred the distinction between individual responsibility and inherited identity.
More consequentially, when a political organization identifies itself simultaneously with the nation and with the allegedly necessary direction of history, rival domestic political competition can easily be interpreted as betrayal rather than as a normal possibility within national life.
A doctrine that speaks in the name of human liberation can thereby produce a structure in which human beings no longer possess a full right to choose the path of their own liberation.
During war, discipline and concentration of authority provided significant organizational advantages. In peace, if not transformed, they can become foundations for monopoly.
A propaganda apparatus once used to mobilize society during war can continue to define which memories are legitimate. Security institutions created to confront infiltration from outside can easily be turned toward supervision of dissent within. The category of “enemy” migrates from the battlefield into political life, where criticism of policy may still be viewed through the lens of loyal solidarity.
After 1975, territorial reunification did not produce uniformity of memories.
Economic reorganization, reeducation camps, the exodus of the boat people, and the legacy of the Republic of Vietnam were for many years represented in official discourse primarily through the perspective of the victorious side. An opportunity for postwar reconciliation was therefore only partially used, while the normative logic of winner and loser held sway long after the fighting had ended.
Yet the limitations of the communist model do not disappear merely because belief in communist theory declines. This is where the analysis must go deeper.
A modern political system does not survive only through the writings of Marx or Lenin, textbooks, ideological instruction, or public slogans. It also survives through an apparatus of power, networks of interests, procedures for selecting personnel, relationships between property and political position, languages of legitimacy, and fears of instability. It survives, too, through social habits accumulated over long periods: withdrawal from politics, the search for patronage, self-censorship, and the tendency to regard existing structures of authority as almost immutable facts of life.
An ideology may weaken in the minds of citizens while continuing for a long time to inhabit institutions.
The distinction is essential. The end of belief in a doctrine is not the same thing as the disappearance of mechanisms created under that doctrine. Institutions, interests, habits of power, and social psychology do not dissolve at the same moment as ideological conviction. The central challenge of any future transition is therefore not simply to leave an old order behind, but to avoid carrying its deepest reflexes intact into what comes next.
For that reason, any future transition — whatever name it may eventually bear — cannot consist merely of changing symbols, replacing terminology, or announcing the repudiation of an ideology.
If political power remains beyond effective restraint; if a new victor erases a new loser; if dissent continues to be interpreted as betrayal; if society continues to place its hopes in a leader presumed capable of resolving problems that properly belong to institutions, then a new political order may do no more than reproduce the mechanisms of the order it has replaced.
The lesson extends far beyond communism. Political names can change much faster than the habits of power those systems leave behind, and the removal of an old orthodoxy does not in itself create a culture of responsibility.
Justice requires truth, individual responsibility, and reform of the institutions that permitted abuse. Reconciliation requires equal dignity, the right to dissent, and the rejection of collective vengeance. These two imperatives do not cancel one another. They need each other.
Without justice, reconciliation may become compulsory forgetting. Without reconciliation, justice risks becoming only the punitive instrument of whoever claims the power to rule.
Only when the history of the nation is understood as larger than the separate histories of every political party can memories once used to divide Vietnamese begin to become part of a common moral and spiritual inheritance befitting an intelligent and ambitious people.
Communism can then be restored to its proper historical proportion: an exceptionally important chapter of modern Vietnamese history, capable of mobilizing great energies and associated with achievements that cannot reasonably be denied, while also carrying profound limitations and tragedies — but neither the beginning, nor the end, nor the ultimate meaning of Vietnamese history.
The Vietnamese people existed long before every modern political doctrine contributed to global discourse, and they will remain a people after many such doctrines have changed, faded, or passed away.
The decisive question, therefore, is not when a particular political label will disappear. It is whether a society has accumulated by the time a historical order reaches the limits of its own capacity – enough independent persons, enough knowledge, enough respect for law, enough institutional responsibility, enough reconciled memory, enough space for truth, enough experience of cooperation — so that what follows need not become just another variation on what had gone before.
A new cycle for the Vietnamese, should one emerge, does not become better merely because an older cycle has ended. It will become a genuine Opening Up only when the conditions for Maturing have already begun to form: autonomous persons, the rule of law, accountable power, memories capable of reconciliation, and a society that possesses the institutional courage to detect and correct its own mistakes.
CONCLUSION TO PART II
Resilient Continuity is one of the great achievements of Vietnamese history, but it does not provide the Vietnamese with an exemption from the limitations of the present. That inheritance remains life-giving only if the Vietnamese learn to distinguish nourishment from poison, endurance from stagnation, tolerance from ambiguity, solidarity from submission, and flexibility from the absence of principle.
Almost every capacity that enabled the Vietnamese people to survive over the centuries possesses this double character. Village society preserved community, yet it could also nourish localism. The family generated resilience, yet it could weaken obligations toward the public realm. Adaptation helped people cross periods of danger, yet it could prolong an irrational environment. Non-absolutism made cultural synthesis possible, yet it could blur distinctions between right and wrong. Concentrated authority made extraordinary mobilization possible during crisis, yet when normalized it could weaken precisely the capacity for self-correction upon which long-term development depends.
Historical ruptures repeatedly allowed Vietnam to recover without fully retaining the achievements of preceding cycles. Half-learning brought modern forms to the surface without necessarily transforming the foundations below. Communism gathered immense energies associated with patriotism, equality, and the struggle for independence; once made the exclusive source of political legitimacy, however, it also revitalized older normative sediments of obedience, fear of difference, and the exclusion of the defeated side from common memory.
None of these limitations is destiny. They were produced in history, and because they were historically produced, they can also be recognized, modified, and overcome.
The rhythm of history is therefore not a promise that renewal must inevitably follow deterioration. History owes salvation to no people. What history allows us to recognize is something more modest and more demanding: no historical condition is naturally permanent, yet an opportunity for change becomes meaningful only when a society has developed the capacities required to use it.
Here the two historical rhythms followed throughout this essay meet. Consolidation and Dispersion — Tích and Tản – help explain how Vietnamese communities could disperse without disappearing and then converge again when circumstances permitted. Closing and Opening —Khép and Mở – pose the more difficult question: after each convergence, does society reach a higher level of development, or merely reconstitute a familiar structure under a new name?
Replacing one center of power with another is not yet an Opening Up. Replacing one political language with another while preserving obedience, monopolized memory, and the longing for a savior does not introduce a new advance in civilization
That is why the decisive issue is not simply recognizing when an order is approaching its limits. It is what has already been prepared before that point of transition arrives: are there available people capable of independent judgment; knowledge capable of surviving political changes; a culture of responsibility; the rule of law; memories capable of speaking to one another; institutions able to discover errors and correct them rather than merely conceal them. A society should not wait for an old order to end before asking what must be built next. The foundations for what will follow are laid, quietly and often imperfectly, while the existing order is still standing.
Transformation of the Vietnamese begins when endurance is no longer used as a reason to endure indefinitely; when victory no longer confers ownership of historical truth; when popular ingenuity is no longer treated as a substitute for institutional responsibility; and when a society ceases to believe that a new era can be brought into existence merely by giving it a new name.
A new age begins only when the people and institutions capable of inhabiting that age have themselves begun to mature.
From this point onward, the central question is no longer simply why the Vietnamese people survived. It becomes more demanding: what must a people that has demonstrated such extraordinary Resilient Continuity transform within itself in order to become capable of self-knowledge, self-correction, responsibility, and the deliberate construction of its own future?
That is the passage from Resilient Continuity to Maturation — and the subject of Part III.
SELECTED REFERENCES
- Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised ed. London: Verso, 2006.
- Braudel, Fernand. Écrits sur l’histoire. Paris: Flammarion, 1969.
- Brocheux, Pierre, and Daniel Hémery. Indochine: la colonisation ambiguë, 1858–1954. Paris: La Découverte, 2001. English edition: Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858–1954. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
- Goscha, Christopher. Vietnam: A New History. New York: Basic Books, 2016.
- Guillemot, François. Viêt-Nam, fractures d’une nation: Une histoire contemporaine de 1858 à nos jours. Paris: La Découverte, 2018; updated as Histoire du Viêt Nam contemporain: De 1858 à nos jours. Paris: La Découverte, 2025.
- Marr, David G. Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
- Papin, Philippe. Histoire de Hanoi. Paris: Fayard, 2001.
- Taylor, Keith Weller. A History of the Vietnamese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
- Toynbee, Arnold J. A Study of History. London: Oxford University Press, 1934–1961.
- Trần Ngọc Vương. Thực thể Việt nhìn từ các tọa độ chữ. 2 vols. Hanoi: Vietnam National University Press, 2025.
- Trần Quốc Vượng. Văn hóa Việt Nam: Tìm tòi và suy ngẫm. Hanoi: Văn hóa Dân tộc / Tạp chí Văn hóa Nghệ thuật, various editions.
- Woodside, Alexander Barton. Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study of Vietnamese and Chinese Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.
- Kiernan, Ben. Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
- Bradley, Mark Philip. Vietnam at War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.