Why has VN been a poor country for so long?

 (This is part of my final paper for the course on “America’s Foreign and Public Policy”

Praising the greatness of America as a country that helped to rebuild Germany and Japan after destroying them in the WWII in his best-seller What’s so Great about America, published in 2003, Dinesh D’Souza added an afterthought, putting it in parentheses: “North Vietnam’s misfortune was to win the war against the U.S. If it had lost, it wouldn’t be the impoverished country it is today, because America would have rebuilt and modernized it.”[1] Putting aside his fawning attitude towards America, his lack of respect for third world countries’ ability to rebuild their economy, and his willingness to trade in national independence for economic prosperity, I still have to take issue with him on one more thing. Did he mean the poverty in Vietnam is a result of the incompetence of the Vietnamese leadership to run the country? Or did he mean it is the consequence of the vindictive punishment levied on Vietnam and her people by America long after the war ended? Given the fact that the book from which his remark is taken is an expression of his admiration and adoration for America, he must have meant the incompetence of the Vietnamese leadership, not the unworthy, undignified, dishonorable, ignominious vindictiveness on the part of America. If so, he could not have been further from the truth.

While it is true that the successful takeover of the South came a bit unexpectedly for the leaders of the North and presented them with challenges far more complicated in nature than their war experiences and combative skills could solve, the many errors they made in policies were not the only factor that mired the entire country in poverty for so long. According to their plan, the major offensive launched in the spring of 1975 was only to achieve a major victory and set the state for the final takeover of the South in 1976.[2] In other words, the North Vietnamese did not expect the war to come to an end until one year later. The unexpected victory presented the victorious North with a host of problems much more difficult and complicated than they could successfully deal with. As a result, they made a great number of mistakes. These mistakes on the part of the Vietnamese leaders alone, however, cannot fully account for the grinding poverty afflicting the millions of Vietnamese from 1975 until today. To be fair, the poverty endured by the Vietnamese for more than a decade from 1975 to early 1990s must be attributed to four factors: the devastation of the country’s economy after thirty years of conflict, the poor management on the part of the Communist government, the costly war with Cambodia, in which the U.S also played a part by providing aid to the Khmer Rouge, and the economic embargo imposed on Vietnam by the U.S government, blocking its access to international financial institutions like the IMF and the WB.

In a comment to journalist Stanley Karnow, the late Pham Van Dong, prime minister of the Democratic Republic of North Vietnam from 1954 to 1976 and prime minister of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam from 1976 to 1987, conceded that, “Waging a war is simple, but running it is very difficult.”[3] Given the extreme reluctance of the overweening Vietnamese leaders to acknowledge mistake and mismanagement, his comment betrayed the enormous difficulty facing the North Vietnamese after they successfully took over the South. Flush from their victory over the U.S, indisputably the richest and most powerful country on earth, the Vietnamese leaders were overly optimistic about the prospect of rebuilding the country and overly confident about its ability to do so. Their overconfidence blinded them to enormous challenges facing their effort to improve living standards, hampered by the legacy of war.

After the end of the war, “in southern Vietnam 9,000 out of 15,000 hamlets were destroyed. Almost 1.5 million civilians were killed between 1965 and 1973 alone. There were an estimated 362,000 war cripples and 600,000 orphans. Agriculture was affected badly, with 10 million hectares hit and 1.5 million buffaloes and oxen killed. By 1975, 10 million people in southern Vietnam had been driven from their villages by bombs and raids.”[4] The figures in 2003 by the Hanoi-based Resource Centre NGO showed that about 10% of the population – 7 million people – were disabled, representing an incalculable economic burden on a poor and devastated country. Many hundreds of thousands were estimated to be suffering from the effects of the Agent Orange US chemical warfare, and 84,000 people had been killed by unexploded ordinance left by the US since the end of the war – with an estimated 150,000 tonnes of ordinance remaining buried in fields and forests.[5]

Intoxicated by their success in war, the North Vietnamese fell victim to certain delusions, underestimating the challenges they faced in post-war era and embarking on an overly ambitious course of action, leading their nation into many difficulties, both at home and abroad.[6] Among its early mistakes after the end of the war was the decision to dismantle the capitalist system, nationalize all industry and commerce above the family level, and collectivize rice farming in the countryside. These proved to be a disaster. Millions of people in the South lost their faith in the new government and decided to leave the country, on foot and by boat, by the thousands. In addition, in 1978, faced with the repeated military attacks by the Pol Pot’s regime along the common border with Cambodia, the Vietnamese leaders decided to protect itself against the Pol Pot’s threat by ordering troops into Cambodia and install a new government in Phnom Penh, more friendly towards Vietnam. Unfortunately, the war against the Khmer Rouge turned out to be unpopular and costly, leaving the Vietnamese government “bogged down in its own ‘Vietnam’ in Cambodia.”[7]

The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia was undoubtedly welcomed by many Cambodians who had lived in horror of the Pol Pot’s ferocity, unparalleled since the days of Adolf Hitler.

[I]n his first days in power Pol Pot had attempted to eliminate all elements in the country considered unsympathetic to the goals of the new order….. thousands were put to work in slave-labor camps in the countryside. Thousands more were tortured and killed, and their remains dumped in mass graves around the country. Pol Pot’s new order was the sign of a revolution gone mad. To the relief of many Cambodians, the new pro-Hanoi government installed in Phnom Penh adopted moderate policies to win the trust of the people.[8]

But sadly, the decision to invade Cambodia and remove Pol Pot from power was not welcomed by any governments, both in the region and around the world. Suspicion of the Vietnamese intentions in the capitals of many Southeast Asian nations, dissatisfaction with Vietnam being “Moscow’s puppet” in China, and the American resentment at being defeated by communist Vietnam, all these elements combined to put together a coalition of anti-Hanoi Cambodian groups to wage a guerilla struggle against the new government in Phnom Penh. Most disturbingly, “the dominant military force in that coalition was the Khmer Rouge whose brutal behavior while in power had aroused demands that Pol Pot and other key leaders be tried in an international criminal court on charges of genocide.”[9]

Since the end of the war the U.S foreign policy towards Vietnam had “been guided mainly by hostility and lingering resentment.”[10] With the invasion of Cambodia, “Vietnam was seen as a ‘rogue elephant’ about to go stampeding across Southeast Asia, encompassing not only Cambodia but also Thailand and the Malaysian peninsula.”[11] Joining other Southeast Asian countries to condemn Vietnam for its invasion of Cambodia, the U.S provided aid to the non-communist Cambodian guerillas and maintained an economic embargo under the Trading With the Enemy Act of 1917, that not only barred Vietnam from receiving American aid, investments, exports or credit, but also blocked aid to Vietnam from international lending agencies like the IMF and WB. Thus legally and technically the war still went on.[12]

In classifying Vietnam a “Category Z” country, Washington imposed sanctions more isolating than even those against Cuba. The World Bank was warned off and humanitarian aid was stopped or obstructed; the new British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, persuaded the EU to halt shipments of milk to Vietnamese children. The American objective was to continue the war by other means.[13]

Under the Reagan administration, Washington’s stated policy was not to allow the Khmer Rouge to return to power, and not to have any role in a future Cambodian government. Behind the scenes, however, the Reagan administration increased Washington’s commitment to the noncommunist, supplying up to $5 million a year in nonlethal aid to the guerrillas.[14] In the late 1980s, Vietnam’s decision to withdraw its troops from Cambodia ahead of schedule in a desperate effort to break out of isolation and to secure Western assistance was not immediately met with any reciprocal goodwill gesture – either full normalization with the United States or at least a relaxation of the economic embargo. When George Bush Senior came to office, the U.S continued to treat Vietnam as an enemy. Commenting on this, an American professor of history wrote, “U.S. policy may be motivated in part by a desire to punish Vietnam. The Bush administration may also hope, by continuing to squeeze Hanoi, to topple one of the last communist dominoes, winning by economic means the military victory the
United States was denied, thereby erasing the stigma of defeat.”[15]

The embargo remained in place for 30 years until 1994 – five years after Vietnam withdrew all its troops from Cambodia and three years after the Paris Peace Agreement ended the Cambodian civil war,[16] thus freeing the U.S from a policy that linked the lifting of the embargo with a final peace settlement in Cambodia. By the time the embargo was lifted, more than enough misery had been inflicted on the Vietnamese; besides, with the doi moi, or economic reform program, already set in motion since 1986, there were now other ways for the U.S to continue its policy of subverting socialism in Vietnam, asserting its global power and pursuing hegemonic dominance.

The next time you hear someone making a derisive comment about the incompetence and incapability of Vietnam’s Communist Party in running their economy, think about the context in which this poverty was created in the first place and the manner in which it has been perpetuated and make a more informed judgement of your own.

[1] Dinesh D’Souza. What’s so Great about America. New York: Penguin Books USA, 2003, p. 168.
[2] William J. Duiker, Sacred war: Nationalism and Revolution in a Divided Vietnam, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995), pp. 243-244.
[3] Quoted in Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking Press, 1983), p. 9.
[4] The Green Left Weekly, “Vietnam: Progress and Problems,” http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/1991/11/11p19.htm.
[5] The Green Left Weekly, “Vietnam: The Pauper among the ‘Tigers’?” http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2001/441/%20441p18.htm.
[6] William J. Duiker, 259.
[7] George C. Herring, “America and Vietnam: The Unending War,” Foreign Affairs, Winter 91/92, Vol. 70, Issue 5.
[8] Ibid., 263.
[9] Ibid., p. 265.
[10] Keith Richburg, “Back To Vietnam,” Foreign Affairs, Fall 91, Vol. 70, Issue 4.
[11] Ibid.
[12] George C. Herring.
[13] John Pilger. “The price of Vietnam being allowed to come out of isolation was the destruction of its health services.” New Statesman, Nov 27, 2000, Vol. 129, Iss. 4514.
[14] Keith Richburg.
[15] George C. Herring.
[16] BBC. “Timeline: Vietnam, A Chronology of Key Events.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/country_profiles/1243686.stm;