Vietnam
Originating in what is now southern China and northern Vietnam, the
Vietnamese people pushed southward over 2 millennia to occupy the
entire eastern seacoast of the Indochinese Peninsula. Vietnam has 54
ethnic groups; ethnic Vietnamese or Kinh constitute approximately
85% of Vietnam's population. The next largest groups are ethnic Tay
and Thai, which account for 1.97% and 1.79% of Vietnam's population
and are concentrated in the country's northern uplands.
With a population of more than 900,000, Vietnam's ethnic Chinese
community is one of the most significant and wealthiest in Vietnam.
Long important in the Vietnamese economy, Vietnamese of Chinese
ancestry have been active in rice trading, milling, real estate, and
banking in the south and shop keeping, stevedoring, and mining in
the north. Restrictions on economic activity following reunification
of the north and south in 1975 and the subsequent but unrelated
general deterioration in Vietnamese-Chinese relations caused
increasing anxiety within the Chinese-Vietnamese community. As
tensions between Vietnam and China reached their peak in 1978-79,
some 450,000 ethnic Chinese left Vietnam by boat as refugees (many
officially encouraged and assisted) or were expelled across the land
border with China.
Other significant ethnic minority groups include central highland
peoples (formerly termed Montagnards) such as the Gia Rai, Bana,
Ede, Xo Dang, Gie Trieng, and the Khmer Krom (Cambodians), who are
concentrated near the Cambodian border and at the mouth of the
Mekong River.
Vietnamese is the official language of the country. It is a tonal
language with influences from Thai, Khmer, and Chinese. Since the
early 20th century, the Vietnamese have used a Romanized script
introduced by the French. Previously, Chinese characters and an
indigenous phonetic script were both used. |
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Vietnam's identity has been shaped by long-running conflicts, both
internally and with foreign forces. In 111 BC, China's Han dynasty
conquered northern Vietnam's Red River Delta and the ancestors of
today's Vietnamese. Chinese dynasties ruled Vietnam for the next
1,000 years, inculcating it with Confucian ideas and political
culture, but also leaving a tradition of resistance to foreign
occupation. In 939 AD, Vietnam achieved independence under a native
dynasty. After 1471, when Vietnam conquered the Champa Kingdom in
what is now central Vietnam, the Vietnamese moved gradually
southward, finally reaching the rich Mekong Delta, where they
encountered previously settled communities of Cham and Cambodians.
As Vietnam's Le dynasty declined, powerful northern and southern
families, the Trinh and Nguyen, fought civil wars in the 17th and
18th centuries. A peasant revolt originating in the Tay Son region
of central Vietnam defeated the Nguyen and Trinh and unified the
country at the end of the 18th century, but was itself defeated by a
surviving member of the Nguyen family, who founded the Nguyen
dynasty as Emperor Gia Long in 1802.
French Rule and the Anti-Colonial Struggle
In 1858, the French began their conquest of Vietnam starting in the
south. They annexed all of Vietnam in 1885, governing the
territories of Annan, Tonkin, and Cochin China, together with
Cambodia and Laos, as part of French Indochina. The French allowed
Vietnam's emperors to continue to reign, although not actually to
rule. In the early 20th century, Vietnamese intellectuals, many of
them French educated, organized nationalist and
communist-nationalist anti-colonial movements.
Japan's occupation of Vietnam during World War II further stirred
nationalism, as well as antipathy toward the French Vichy colonial
regime, which took its direction from the Japanese. Vietnamese
communists under Ho Chi Minh organized a coalition of anti-colonial
groups, the Viet Minh, though many anti-communists refused to join.
After Japan stripped Indochina's Vichy authorities of much of their
remaining power in March 1945, Ho Chi Minh announced the
independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on September 2,
1945.
North and South Partition
France's post-World War II unwillingness to leave Vietnam led to
failed talks and an 8-year guerrilla war between the communist-led
Viet Minh on one side and the French and their anti-communist
nationalist allies on the other. Following a humiliating defeat at
Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, France and other parties, including
Britain, China, the Soviet Union, and the United States, convened in
Geneva, Switzerland for peace talks. On July 29, 1954, an Agreement
on the Cessation of Hostilities in Vietnam was signed between France
and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The United States observed,
but did not sign, the agreement. French colonial rule in Vietnam
ended.
The 1954 Geneva agreement provided for a cease-fire between
communist and anti-communist nationalist forces, the temporary
division of Vietnam at approximately the 17th parallel, provisional
northern (communist) and southern (noncommunist) zone governments,
and the evacuation of anti-communist Vietnamese from northern to
southern Vietnam. The agreement also called for an election to be
held by July 1956 to bring the two provisional zones under a unified
government. However, the South Vietnamese Government refused to
accept this provision. On October 26, 1955, South Vietnam declared
itself the Republic of Vietnam.
After 1954, North Vietnamese communist leaders consolidated their
power and instituted a harsh agrarian reform and socialization
program. During this period, some 450,000 Vietnamese, including a
large number of Vietnamese Catholics, fled from the north to the
south, while a much smaller number relocated north. In the late
1950s, North Vietnamese leaders reactivated the network of communist
guerrillas that had remained behind in the south. These
forces--commonly known as the Viet Cong--aided covertly by the
north, started an armed campaign against officials and villagers who
refused to support the communist reunification cause.
American Assistance to the South
In December 1961, at the request of South Vietnamese President Ngo
Dinh Diem, President Kennedy sent U.S. military advisers to South
Vietnam to help the government there deal with the Viet Cong
campaign. In the wake of escalating political turmoil in the south
after a 1963 generals' coup against President Diem, the United
States increased its military support for South Vietnam. In March
1965, President Johnson sent the first U.S. combat forces to
Vietnam. The American military role peaked in 1969 with an
in-country force of 534,000. However, the Viet Cong's surprise Tet
Offensive in January 1968 deeply hurt both the Viet Cong
infrastructure and American and South Vietnamese morale. In January
1969, the United States, governments of South and North Vietnam, and
the Viet Cong met for the first plenary session of peace talks in
Paris, France. These talks, which began with much hope, moved
slowly. They finally concluded with the signing of a peace
agreement, the Paris Accords, on January 27, 1973. As a result, the
south was divided into a patchwork of zones controlled by the South
Vietnamese Government and the Viet Cong. The United States withdrew
its forces, although U.S. military advisers remained.
Reunification
In early 1975, North Vietnamese regular military forces began a
major offensive in the south, inflicting great damage to the south's
forces. The communists took Saigon on April 30, 1975, and announced
their intention of reunifying the country. The Democratic Republic
of Vietnam (north) absorbed the former Republic of Vietnam (south)
to form the Socialist Republic of Vietnam on July 2, 1976.
After reunification, the government confiscated privately owned land
and forced citizens into collectivized agricultural practices.
Hundreds of thousands of former South Vietnamese government and
military officials, as well as intellectuals previously opposed to
the communist cause, were sent to re-education camps to study
socialist doctrine, where they remained for periods ranging from
months to several years.
Expectations that reunification of the country and its socialist
transformation would be condoned by the international community were
quickly dashed as the international community expressed concern over
Vietnam's internal practices and foreign policy. Vietnam's 1978
invasion of Cambodia in particular, together with its increasingly
tight alliance with the Soviet Union, appeared to confirm suspicions
that Vietnam wanted to establish hegemony in Indochina.
Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia also heightened tensions that already
existed between Vietnam and China. Beijing, which had long backed
the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, retaliated in early 1979 by
initiating a brief, but bloody border war with Vietnam.
Vietnam's tensions with its neighbors, internal repression, and a
stagnant economy contributed to a massive exodus from Vietnam.
Fearing persecution, many Chinese in particular fled Vietnam by boat
to nearby countries. Later, hundreds of thousands of other
Vietnamese nationals fled as well, seeking temporary refuge in camps
throughout Southeast Asia.
The continuing grave condition of the economy and the alienation
from the international community became focal points of party
debate. In 1986, at the Sixth Party Congress, there was an important
easing of communist agrarian and commercial policies. |
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