Richly informed by in-depth field and archival research, this book offers a synthetic and accessible analysis of contemporary Vietnam. After decades of war and a socialist transformation, the country has moved toward a market economy. Echoing that shift, Vietnamese society itself has undergone significant changes, marked by increasing socioeconomic disparities among regions and within localities, greater unrest both in urban and rural areas, and a revitalization of religious and folk rituals. Moving beyond the standard emphasis on the Vietnam War and Vietnamese politics and economy, this volume provides a historically grounded examination of the dynamics of contemporary society and state-society relations. Within that framework, the contributors explore the dynamics of economic reforms, socioeconomic inequality, environmental changes, gender and ethnic relations, migration, media, and ritual. Their work will be of interest to all those studying Southeast Asia, socialist and post-socialist societies, agrarian transformation, international development, as well as the Vietnam War.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.

The year 1945 was the most significant in the modern history of Vietnam. One thousand years of dynastic politics and monarchist ideology came to an end. Eight decades of French rule lay shattered and five years of Japanese occupation ceased. Drawing on extensive archival research, interviews and an examination of published memoirs and documents, David G. Marr has written a detailed and descriptive analysis of this crucial moment in Vietnamese history, and shows how Vietnam became a vortex of intense international and domestic competition for power.

Phu Rieng was one of many French rubber plantations in colonial Vietnam; Tran Tu Binh was one of 17,606 laborers brought to work there in 1927, and his memoir is a straightforward, emotionally searing account of how one Vietnamese youth became involved in revolutionary politics. The connection between this early experience and later activities of the author becomes clear as we learn that Tran Tu Binh survived imprisonment on Con Son island to help engineer the general uprising in Hanoi in 1945.
"The Red Earth" is the first of dozens of such works by veterans of the 1924-45 struggle in Vietnam to be published in English translation. It is important reading for all those interested in the many-faceted history of modern Vietnam and of communism in the non-Western world.

Despite the historical importance of the Vietnam War, we know very little about what the Vietnamese people thought and felt prior to the conflict. Americans have tended to treat Vietnam as an extension of their own hopes and fears, successes and failures, rather than addressing the Vietnamese record. In this volume, David Marr offers the first serious intellectual history of Vietnam, focusing on the period just prior to full-scale revolutionary upheaval and protracted military conflict. He argues that changes in political and social consciousness between 1920 and 1945 were a necessary precondition to the mass mobilization and people's war strategies employed subsequently against the French and the Americans. Thus he rejects the prevailing notion that Vietnamese success was primarily due to communist techniques of organization.
However, "Vietnamese Tradition on Trial" goes beyond simply accounting for anyone's victory or defeat to an informed description of intellectual currents in general. Replying for his information on a previously ignored corpus of books, pamphlets, periodicals, and leaflets, the author isolates eight issues of central concern to twentieth-century Vietnamese. The new intelligentsia--indubitably the product of a peculiar French colonial milieu, yet never divorced from the Vietnamese past and always looking to a brilliant Vietnamese future--spearheaded every debate beginning ini 1925.
After 1945, Vietnamese intellectuals either placed themselves under ruthless battlefield discipline or withdrew to private meditation. David Marr suggests that the new problems facing Vietnamese today make both of these approaches anachronistic. Whether the Vietnam Communist Partywill allow citizens to subject received wisdom to critical debate, to formulate new explanations of reality, to test those explanations in practice, is the essential question lingering at the end of this study.