- by Vijay Prashad
- The Guardian
- Issue #2146
Fifty years ago, on 30 April 1975, the revolutionary forces of the People’s Army of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front entered Saigon, the then capital of South Vietnam. A lot has been written about the war and refugees. The Guardian is happy to present VJ Prashad writing about the country itself.
The new socialist Vietnam placed enormous emphasis on the reconstruction of life for the peasantry, who had borne the brunt of the war.
Two projects of immense importance have rarely been written about: the national food programmes to alleviate hunger through the increase of rice output and emergency food distribution, and the rural development programme to rebuild rural schools, medical clinics, and irrigation systems, as well as to send out health and literacy brigades to build a new Vietnamese person out of the rigid hierarchies of old Vietnam (con người mới xã hội chủ nghĩa – to build a new person).
Against great odds, the Vietnamese Communist Party was able to start the transformation of rural society from being utterly devastated by the war to attaining some level of normalcy. Stagnation in the agricultural cooperatives due to poor soil quality and out-of-date equipment led to serious reconsideration of the path forward.
It was out of the realisation that productive forces needed to be advanced that the Vietnamese Communist Party launched the Doi Moi (or Renovation) policy in 1986 to attract new technologies and finance.
The Doi Moi period has been misunderstood outside Vietnam. The Vietnamese state continued to control the financial and currency system through the State Bank of Vietnam (monetary policy) and the Ministry of Finance (fiscal policy and oversight of the state-owned enterprises). The state, meanwhile, tightly regulates private banks and investors, restricts and monitors foreign currency flows through tight capital controls, and allocates credit to favour strategic sectors or to state-owned enterprises.
Linked to the buoyancy of the Chinese economy and due to the importation of new technologies from foreign companies, Vietnam has seen high rates of growth (over 7% in 2024), driven by manufacturing and construction, with modest contributions from agriculture, forestry, and fisheries. As a consequence, life expectancy has improved, and so have general social indicators.
However, the economy is vulnerable to external shocks because 87% of its Gross Domestic Product is from exports. But growing demand within the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership agreement of 2020, which produced the largest trading bloc in the world, has provided Vietnam with a diversified set of customers and so has insulated it from any problem. Within Vietnam, there is a strong political demand to increase the domestic market and eradicate absolute poverty, particularly in rural areas. That has been on the table alongside the Communist Party’s campaign to end corruption amongst officials and in private businesses.
One indicator of this approach is that while Vietnam is the world’s largest rice exporter, no rice leaves the country unless domestic needs are first satisfied.
At the commemoration for the reunification of Vietnam To Lam, the Communist Party general secretary, invoked a saying from Ho Chi Minh: “Vietnam is one, the Vietnamese people are one. Rivers may dry up, mountains may erode, but that truth will never change.” In fact, the Vietnamese state and the Vietnamese people are in a struggle to make sure that rivers do not dry up and mountains do not erode, that they remain united, and that their country begins to abolish the old problems (hunger, poverty, illiteracy) that have plagued them for centuries.
The Party’s former general secretary Nguyễn Phú Trọng said in this context, “No Vietnamese should go hungry in the land their revolution liberated.” This is a commitment that the Party has made to ending these rigid inheritances from the past. That many of these problems are within sight of being eradicated gives people faith in their system.
