Why Vietnam Gave Up On Communism

Here’s a short video on why the ruling Vietnamese Communist Party gave up on Communism. Short answer: It didn’t work.

  • “Why did communists in Vietnam end up adopting the economic system of the country they spent 20 years fighting a war against?
  • “After the fall of South Vietnam’s capital of Saigon in April 1975, they finally got their wish. The result was a disaster.”
  • “After taking over the country, the communists collectivized the farms. Farmers didn’t get paid based on how much they grew, but rather how many days they showed up, and because there was no connection between effort and reward, the collective farming campaign ended in total failure. Famine swept the country whenever harvests were poor.” Just like what happened in the Soviet Union and Communist China when they tried collectivizing agriculture.
  • “Throughout the 1980s, Vietnamese families were given ration cards that determined how much food they were allowed to eat. People lined up for hours, sometimes overnight, at government food distribution centers.”
  • “In less than a generation, the entire country’s economy had collapsed. Nearly 80% of the population lived in poverty, while annual inflation exceeded 100%. By the end of the 1980s, Vietnam was one of the poorest countries on Earth.”
  • “Now, contrast that with the Vietnam of today. It’s one of the fastest growing economies in Asia with less than 2% of the population still living in extreme poverty. What’s more, a famine hasn’t happened in over 40 years, and Vietnam is now a net exporter of rice.”
  • “Turns out the ruling party didn’t fix Vietnam by successfully implementing Marxism Leninism. Vietnam was saved because the Communist Party actually abandoned Marxism.”
  • “With the country facing total collapse, the VCP did something that is incredibly rare in politics. They admitted they were wrong.”
  • “At the Sixth Party Conference in 1986, the VCP itself declared, ‘The reasons for the current situation are to be sought above all in mistakes and errors of leadership and direction by the Party and the State.”
  • “In a desperate bid to pull the country out of an economic depression, a series of radical reforms was proposed and adopted. The Vietnamese called it ‘Renewal,’ but in many ways it was revolutionary.”
  • “Businesses that had previously operated on the black market were allowed to open up and hire workers. The state’s monopoly on foreign trade was dissolved. Internal customs checkpoints were dismantled. Almost all subsidies and price controls were lifted. Land and businesses that had been nationalized in the 1970s were returned to their former owners, or their relatives, and foreign investment was welcomed into the country for the first time since the war.”
  • “And when you look at the history of Vietnam’s GDP per capita, you can see the exact moment that Renewal took place.”

  • “The result has been an economic miracle. GDP grew at nearly 8% a year through the 1990s. Inflation fell from 100% to less than 10% and poverty rates plummeted for more than 30 years straight.”
  • “Now, this doesn’t mean that Vietnam is a paradise. The country is still a long way off from being as wealthy as other East Asian nations like South Korea or Japan. Corruption is still a major problem and it’s still an authoritarian single party state.”
  • “But ironically, the story of Vietnam’s economic collapse and the miracle that happened next is perhaps best summarized by what the Vietnamese Communist Party admitted at their own Party congress in 1986 when a delegate stood up and told the room what nobody in the Party had ever said out loud before. ‘The people have lost faith in the Party.'”
  • “And the only thing that can save it was abandoning everything the Party stood for.”

    • Capitalism works. Communism doesn’t.

    It’s really that simple.

    By Lawrence Person

    Lawrence Person is a political commentator and science fiction writer living in Austin, Texas. His political work has appeared in National Review, Reason, The Freeman, Liberty and The World & I. His SF has appeared in Asimov's, Analog, F&SF, Postscripts, Jim Baen's Universe, Fear, and several anthologies. He owns such a large library (mostly science fiction first editions) he had to buy a two-story house to put it in, and then adopted a golden retriever to drag him out of his house on a regular basis.

    7 comments

    1. It makes more sense when you look farther back and realize that the war in Vietnam started as a war of independence against the French. Ho Chie Minh first approached the United States for assistance and I’m not sure why we did not make France abandon their colonies while we were making England and the rest of Europe do so after WW2. The North Vietnamese were “Communist” because that was who was supporting them, they didn’t give a rip about International Socialism, they were Nationalists.

    2. The opposite of communism isn’t capitalism. The opposite of communism is math.

    3. Being in charge unopposed is the only non-negotiable platform plank of The Party.

    4. So now they are a fascist state (I mean that with the true definition of the word, not the Democrat’s fascism-is-anything-I-don’t-like definition).

    5. US feeling before, during and after WW2 was strongly anti-imperial, though we never get credit for it. We encouraged the Brits and the Dutch to grant independence to their colonies, and in general they did. But our policymakers feared that similar pressure applied to France might turn over the whole country to the Communists, especially given the peculiar circumstances of Algeria.

    6. While Ho Chi Minh repeatedly approached the U.S. for diplomatic support in his efforts to gain Vietnamese independence from French colonial rule from 1919 through 1945, there is nothing I can find to indicate he suddenly had a revelation and only embraced Marxist ideology after his final 1945 appeal was met with dismissal.
      Without that evidence, it is just as valid to view his appeals as similar to Castro’s false flag efforts to woo U.S. support against the Bautista regime in Cuba, which led to various “plucky freedom fighters” pieces in U.S. media until he decloaked as a full on Marxist dictatorship guy. It seems more likely Uncle Ho was a commie all along, but U.S. support sure would have been handy against the French, so he asked.

    7. The war in Vietnam is more than 2,000 years old. Uncle Ho met members of the OSS Deer Team as nothing more than a courtesy. He was totally controlled by the Vietnam Communist Party, which was formed in 1920 by the Comintern. Ho Chi Minh (not his real name but I digress) wasn’t tricked into being a Stalinist; he was a Stalinist. And today’s VCP is headed 80-plus years later by a true Stalinist, name of To Lam.
      I know you people hate to look things up, but you should try it.
      73

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