Vietnam’s Communist Revolution: The Power and Limits of Ideology.
By Tuong Vu.
New York: Cambridge University Press,
2017. Softcover: 337pp.
Source: Contemporary Southeast Asia , Vol. 40, No. 2, ISEAS @ 50 Special Issue: Young Scholars in Southeast Asian Studies (August 2018), pp. 336-338
Published by: ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute
Review by Christopher Goscha, Université du Québec à Montréal
The published review can be found here.
Vietnamese Communists believed. From Ho Chi Minh to Truong Chinh by way of Le Duan and Le Duc Tho, the founding fathers of the Vietnamese Communist Party today may have been pragmatic nationalists dedicated to the liberation of their country, but they were also dedicated Marxist-Leninists and defenders of the Communist faith. Even when their Soviet and Chinese brothers-in-arms had visibly turned on each other by the early 1960s, Vietnamese Communists soldiered on, convinced of the righteousness of the internationalist cause and determined to carry the torch of world revolution alone if the others were not up to the challenge. In nine chronologically arranged chapters starting with Ho’s discovery of Communism in Europe in the 1920s to Vietnam’s efforts to navigate a post-Communist world today, Tuong Vu convincingly demonstrates the remarkable extent to which ideology drove the Communist party’s view of the world, of Vietnam, and of itself. To make his case over this long period of time, Tuong Vu taps into the Communist Party’s recently published documents covering most of the period under study, the Van Kien Dangseries. He also mines the Communist press and a wide-range of memoirs penned by Vietnamese Communists. H-Diplo readers would, I think, do well to read this book as closely as they have the works of scholars who have stressed the importance of ideology for understanding Chinese Communist foreign relations, such as Chen Jian, Qiang Zhai, Lorenz Lüthi, Sergei Radchenko, and Arne Westad among many others.1
Like Chen Jian’s landmark article destroying the myth of the ‘lost chance’ in Sino-American relations in 1949-502, Tuong Vu does something similar by debunking the myth that American presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Lyndon Johnson repeatedly ‘missed’ opportunities to find peace with Ho Chi Minh at Versailles after the First World War, in Hanoi after the Second, in 1950 by refusing to recognize Ho as an ‘Asian Tito,’ and so on with a flurry of peace overtures proffered by just about every country in the world. Had the Americans just recognized the nationalism driving Vietnamese Communists and allowed them to follow a neutral path in the Cold War, so the standard explanation goes, the two sides could have reached some sort of an arrangement and thereby avoided war. Tuong Vu responds that Vietnamese Communists were more than nationalists. They were, like so many others in twentieth-century world history, committed revolutionaries and, in their case, firm believers in the superiority of Communism. With this book, Tuong Vu shows that there was no real chance for accommodation with the United States. Tuong Vu’s book, however, is about much more than debunking the American myth of ‘missed opportunities.’ On the contrary, he provides the most in-depth and sustained analysis of the role of ideology in the making of the Vietnamese Communist revolution from the early 1920s to the present. Like their Chinese counterparts, obtaining full independence from imperial control was a top priority; but it was also part of a wider march towards the creation of a single-party Communist state (based on land reform, collectivization, and Stalinist industrialization) and the promotion of a wider internationalist revolution. War, Tuong Vu argues, was not simply imposed on the Vietnamese Communists. The latter chose war in order to realize the revolution they had begun against the French with Chinese help but temporarily put on hold at the Geneva Conference of 1954 dividing Vietnam into a Communist north and a non-Communist south. Tuong Vu carefully analyzes how the party’s commitment to ideology led it to resume war under the leadership of a committed Marxist-Leninist, Le Duan, with, according to Vu, a green light from Ho Chi Minh. In Vu’s words, “patriotism was made to serve socialism, not vice versa” (147).
Chapters five and six are perhaps two of the most thought-provoking parts of Tuong Vu’s book. Running from 1957 to 1975, the chapters first demonstrates how Le Duan climbed to the top of the party and, faced with the burgeoning Sino-Soviet dispute, shifted the party to a ‘realistic internationalism’ instead of blindly following Sino-Soviet suggestions as in the past. Tuong Vu then carefully analyzes how Le Duan’s participation in the Moscow Conference in 1960 and in inner Party discussions in Hanoi thereafter led to a more independent-minded Communist party under Le Duan’s leadership. Despite this independence in the Sino-Soviet dispute, the party under Le Duan’s stewardship remained as committed as ever to promoting Communism inside Vietnam and at the international level. This meant accepting that the Communist bloc was divided and that the Soviets under Nikita Khrushchev had perhaps lost their way, but the party got around this by pledging allegiance to the ‘socialist camp’ rather than the Soviet hub. There was thus no break with the Soviet Union. There was no attempt to follow a neutralist, ‘Titoist’ line either. While Le Duan pushed out the pro-Soviet revisionists in his own party (apparently they were gravitating around General Vo Nguyen Giap), he also refused to recognize the Chinese as the head of the Communist camp. Again, it was fidelity to the ‘socialist camp’ that counted most and loyalty to it allowed the Vietnamese to maintain joint Sino-Soviet support despite the rift between the Communist giants.
But Le Duan went further. While he embraced Vietnam’s long history of resisting foreign aggression as the war against the Americans intensified, he also saw the war as placing the Vietnamese party on the cutting edge of the revolutionary struggle against American imperialism, what Vu refers to as “vanguard internationalism” (18). This audacious view of the Vietnamese revolution, according to Vu, led Le Duan to approve the massive attacks of the Tet Offensive in 1968 and again during the Easter Offensive of 1972, both of which cost the People’s Army of Vietnam, not to mention the civilian populations caught in the crossfire, huge casualties. Le Duan launched these attacks in the interests of the Vietnamese revolution but also did so in the belief that this put the Vietnamese on the revolutionary map like no other party at the time.
One wishes here that Tuong Vu could have said just a bit more for the general reader as well as the specialist about why Le Duan’s rise to power is so significant in the historiography of the Vietnam War and of Vietnamese Communism. Why and how did Le Duan replace Ho Chi Minh and Truong Chinh and come to oppose General Vo Nguyen Giap? Tuong Vu says that Ho Chi Minh apparently sided with Le Duan’s aggressive line on the war, approved in 1963, but then avoids engaging with Pierre Asselin and Lien-Hang Nguyen’s argument that Le Duan was the hawk and Ho was the dove who lost out to Le Duan.3 What exactly were the factional divides within the party? Sophie Quinn-Judge, Lien-Hang Nguyen, Judy Stowe, Georges Boudarel, and Martin Grossheim among others have written on the importance of the Anti-Revisionist affair.4 What are the competing views on this very important event in the history of Vietnamese Communism and the Vietnam War? And if Giap was in such deep trouble in the late 1960s, is it not significant that he led the Easter Offensive of 1972 and played a central role in the Great Spring Offensive that brought down the Republic of Vietnam in 1975—in collaboration with the Secretary General of the Party, Le Duan? Does this mean that it was a question of differences over changing military strategy rather than ideological debates that divided the party?
Whatever one’s take on Vietnamese Communism, Ho Chi Minh, Le Duan, or the wars over Vietnam, Tuong Vu’s book confirms wonderfully that a full reappraisal of such events is now underway. This is a welcome and good thing, as similar books on Chinese and Soviet foreign relations reviewed on H-Diplo and elsewhere have shown. Tuong Vu’s book should spark honest debate and fruitful exchanges that move us away from the out-dated polemics opposing ‘Orthodox’ and ‘Revisionist’ scholars and counterfactual arguments about ‘missed opportunities’ that do not really get us anywhere.
1 Chen Jian, Mao’s China & the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Qiang Zhai, China & the Vietnam Wars, 1950-1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Lorenz Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Sergei Radchenko, Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962-1967 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); and Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2005)
2 Chen Jian, “The Myth of America’s ‘Lost Chance’ in China: A Chinese Perspective in Light of New Evidence,” Diplomatic History 21:1 (1997): 77-86.
3 Pierre Asselin, Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013) and ‘Derrière Ho Chi Minh, Le Duan l’apparatchik’, L’Histoire–Les Collections de l’Histoire : Le Vietnam depuis 2000 ans 62 (2014): 66-70; and Lien-Hang Nguyen, Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
4 Sophie Quinn-Judge, ‘The Ideological Debate in the DRV and the Significance of the Anti-Party Affair, 1967-1968, Cold War History 5:4 (2005): 479-500; Georges Boudarel, Cent fleurs écloses dans la nuit du Vietnam. Communisme et dissidence 1954-1956 (Paris: Jacques Bertoin, 1991); Nguyen, Hanoi’s War; Judy Stowe, ‘Révisionnisme au Vietnam’, Communisme 65-66 (2001): 233-249; Martin Grossheim, ‘Revisionism’ in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’, Cold War History 5:4 (2005): 451-477.
