Introduction

Abstract

After two generations of Vietnamese successively and successfully fought French and American forces, Vietnam formally became a reunified country under the rule of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) in mid-1976.¹ In the following decade, the CPV installed state-socialist economic institutions, the base of Vietnam’s command economy. Peasant resistance and the rapid erosion of the state-socialist economic institutions were inter alia pressures that would trigger a deep economic crisis starting in the late 1970s, seriously eroding social trust and threatening the CPV’s legitimacy (CPV 1991, Vasavakul 1995, Luong 2003b, CPV 2005, Kerkvliet 2005, London 2009, Thayer 2010). In response to this crisis, the CPV introduced the policy of economic reform, known as Ɖối Mới, in 1986 at its sixth national congress to begin shifting away from the command economy.