Integration of the Country

Abstract

The two parts of Vietnam, the North and the South, have had very different experiences in recent history. While the northern part of the country was undergoing socialist transformation for over two decades, the southern region operated under a dependent form of capitalism. Because of this great difference in experience, it was initially expected that there would be a long period of adjustment in the south before the country could be reunited and both regions could move toward socialism. After the war, however, thinking changed rapidly and in 1976 the Vietnamese embarked on a course of reuniting their country. In the next period, when southerners stubbornly resisted methods of transition which had been used in the North, southern individualism was pointed to as the cause of the problem . The southern experience of intense class struggle and the mass character of their revolution was overlooked in the northern assessment of the southerners as backward in terms of socialist consciousness.