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“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 19^th 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

1. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised ed. London: Verso, 2006.
2. Braudel, Fernand. Écrits sur l’histoire. Paris: Flammarion, 1969.
3. 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.
4. Goscha, Christopher. Vietnam: A New History. New York: Basic Books, 2016.
5. 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.
6. Marr, David G. Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
7. Papin, Philippe. Histoire de Hanoi. Paris: Fayard, 2001.
8. Taylor, Keith Weller. A History of the Vietnamese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
9. Toynbee, Arnold J. A Study of History. London: Oxford University Press, 1934–1961.
10. Trần Ngọc Vương. Thực thể Việt nhìn từ các tọa độ chữ. 2 vols. Hanoi: Vietnam National University Press, 2025.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. Kiernan, Ben. Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
14. Bradley, Mark Philip. Vietnam at War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

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 19^th 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 14^th 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 18^th 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 14^th 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 18^th 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.