Vietnam

• 1. Introduction

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  Vietnam is as little as 50 kilometres across at its narrowest point, in the central Quảng Bình province, yet it widens to around 600 kilometres in the north. This is a country shaped like a stretched ribbon along the eastern edge of Mainland Southeast Asia. It holds over 102 million people across roughly 331,000 square kilometres. That makes it the world's 16th-most populous country. The capital is Hanoi. The largest city is Ho Chi Minh City. China borders it to the north. Laos and Cambodia sit to the west. The South China Sea stretches along its entire eastern coast. How does a place that spent a thousand years under Chinese rule, then decades under France, then prolonged warfare in the 20th century, become a fast-growing market economy run by self-described ardently capitalist communists? Why does a name that scholars debate the meaning of still spark territorial tension over a sea? And how does a single cave in this country hold a forest deep enough to swallow a 40-story skyscraper? The answers begin with an axe-shaped logograph carved before this country had a name.

• 2. What The Name Means

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  The term Yue, written in oracle bone and bronze inscriptions of the late Shang dynasty around 1200 BC, was first drawn using the logograph for an axe, a homophone. At that time it referred to a people or chieftain to the northwest of the Shang. From the 3rd century BC, the word stretched to cover the non-Chinese populations of southern China and northern Vietnam, groups collectively called the Baiyue, or Bách Việt. That collective term first appeared in the book Lüshi Chunqiu, compiled around 239 BC. The form Việt Nam is first recorded in the 16th-century oracular poem Sấm Trạng Trình. The name was also carved on 12 steles in the 16th and 17th centuries, including one at Bao Lam Pagoda in Hải Phòng dating to 1558. In 1802, Nguyễn Phúc Ánh established the Nguyễn dynasty and ruled as Emperor Gia Long. He asked the Jiaqing Emperor of the Qing dynasty to confer on him the title King of Nam Việt, or Nanyue. The Jiaqing Emperor refused, because that name was tied to Zhao Tuo's old Nanyue, which included Guangxi and Guangdong in southern China. He decided to call the area Việt Nam instead. The country was usually called Annam until 1945, when the imperial government in Huế adopted Việt Nam.

• 3. A Thousand Years Under China

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  In 939, the Vietnamese lord Ngô Quyền achieved full independence after defeating the forces of the Chinese Southern Han state at the Bạch Đằng River. The victory ended roughly a millennium of Chinese domination that had begun when the Han dynasty incorporated Âu Lạc into Nanyue in 111 BC, following the Han-Nanyue War. Through Han rule, Confucianism entered the region and shaped Vietnamese societal norms and governance. Early independence movements, like those of the Trưng Sisters and Lady Triệu, were only briefly successful. A longer reprieve came as Vạn Xuân under the Anterior Lý dynasty between AD 544 and 602. By the 960s, the dynastic Đại Việt kingdom was established, and society enjoyed a golden era under the Lý and Trần dynasties. During Trần rule, Đại Việt repelled three Mongol invasions, and the Mahāyāna branch of Buddhism became the state religion. The Vietnamese polity reached its zenith in the Lê dynasty of the 15th century, especially during the reign of emperor Lê Thánh Tông, from 1460 to 1497. Between the 11th and 18th centuries, the polity pushed southward in a gradual process called Nam tiến, or Southward expansion, eventually conquering the kingdom of Champa and part of the Khmer Kingdom. Civil strife later split the country. From 1600 to 1777, Vietnam was divided between the northern Trịnh lords and the southern Nguyễn lords, with the Nguyễn expanding into the Mekong Delta along the way.

• 4. The French Century

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  In 1843, the French Navy intervened to free Catholic missionaries who had been detained by Vietnamese authorities alarmed by rising Christianisation. That intervention opened a longer assault on sovereignty. In a series of conquests from 1859 to 1885, France eroded Vietnam's independence piece by piece. At the siege of Tourane in 1858, France was aided by Spain, with Spanish and Filipino troops from the Philippines. Between 1862 and 1867, the southern third of the country became the French colony of Cochinchina. By 1884, the entire country was under French rule, with the central and northern parts separated into the protectorates of Annam and Tonkin. The three entities were formally integrated into French Indochina in 1887. The French built a plantation economy to export tobacco, indigo, tea, and coffee, while largely ignoring demands for civil rights and self-governance. Resistance flared in poorly executed plots like the Hanoi Poison Plot of 1908 and the Thái Nguyên uprising of 1917. A nationalist movement rose under leaders including Phan Bội Châu, Phan Châu Trinh, and Ho Chi Minh. The 1930 Yên Bái mutiny by the Vietnamese Nationalist Party was quashed, splitting the movement as many leaders converted to communism. When the war in the Pacific brought a Japanese invasion of French Indochina in 1940, Japan exploited the country's resources, culminating in a full takeover in March 1945. The result was the Vietnamese famine of 1944 to 1945, which killed up to two million people.

• 5. War And Division

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  On the 2nd of September 1945, a provisional government established by the Việt Minh declared national independence, after the movement seized Hanoi and Huế that August and dissolved the Empire of Vietnam. France did not accept this. After negotiations broke down, the full-scale First Indochina War erupted in December 1946. The defeat of French Union forces at the 1954 Battle of Điện Biên Phủ let Ho Chi Minh negotiate from strength at the Geneva Conference. The Geneva Accords of the 21st of July 1954 placed Vietnam under a temporary division roughly along the 17th parallel north, with elections scheduled for July 1956. During 300 days of permitted free movement, almost a million northerners moved south, including at least 500,000 Catholics, aided by the United States military through Operation Passage to Freedom. In July 1955, South Vietnam's prime minister Ngô Đình Diệm announced his side would not take part in the elections. In October 1955 he toppled Bảo Đại in a fraudulent referendum and proclaimed himself president of the Republic of Vietnam. The Vietnam War followed, between the communist North, supported by the Soviet Union and China, and the anti-communist South, supported by the United States. US forces entered ground combat by 1965 and peaked at more than 500,000 troops. The 1968 Tết Offensive failed militarily but turned American public opinion against the war. After the Paris Peace Accords of the 27th of January 1973, all American combat troops were withdrawn by the 29th of March 1973. North Vietnam launched a full-scale offensive that ended with the fall of Saigon on the 30th of April 1975.

• 6. Renovation

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  At the Sixth National Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam in December 1986, reformist politicians replaced the old guard, led by 71-year-old Nguyễn Văn Linh as the party's new general secretary. The reunified state had been crippled. The war killed somewhere between 966,000 and 3.8 million people, and afterward up to 300,000 South Vietnamese were sent to reeducation camps. An ineffective planned economy, a Western trade embargo, and wars with Cambodia and China deepened the wound. In 1978 the Vietnamese military invaded Cambodia and removed the Khmer Rouge from power after occupying Phnom Penh, a move that worsened relations with China and led to a brief Chinese incursion into northern Vietnam in 1979. The reformers answered with Đổi Mới, meaning Renovation, a careful transition from a planned economy to a socialist-oriented market economy. The government encouraged private ownership of farms and factories, economic deregulation, and foreign investment, while keeping control over strategic industries. Vietnam then achieved roughly 8% annual GDP growth between 1990 and 1997. The United States ended its economic embargo in early 1994. On the 11th of January 2007, Vietnam became the 150th member of the World Trade Organization. The reforms also widened income and gender disparities, the cost shadowing the growth.

• 7. Capitalist Communists

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  The Economist has characterised Vietnam's leadership as ardently capitalist communists, a phrase that captures a state officially committed to socialism while its economic policies grow steadily more capitalist. Under the constitution, the Communist Party of Vietnam asserts its role across all sectors of politics, and only organisations affiliated with or endorsed by the party may contest elections. The National Assembly is the unicameral supreme state organ, composed of 500 members, and it is superior to both the executive and judicial organs. In 2023, a three-person collective leadership governed: President Võ Văn Thưởng, Prime Minister Phạm Minh Chính, and the most powerful figure, General Secretary Nguyễn Phú Trọng. The arrangement then shifted quickly. Võ Văn Thưởng resigned in March 2024 over corruption charges, and on the 22nd of May 2024, the National Assembly voted Tô Lâm, formerly Minister of Public Security, as president. After Nguyễn Phú Trọng died on the 19th of July 2024, Tô Lâm was elected general secretary on the 3rd of August 2024. On the 21st of October 2024, army general Lương Cường was appointed president. The country still maintains the death penalty for numerous offences, and rights groups have flagged its record. In 2009, lawyer Lê Công Định was arrested and charged with the capital crime of subversion, and Amnesty International described him and his associates as prisoners of conscience.

• 8. The Land Itself

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  Hang Sơn Đoòng, first surveyed in 2009 by an expedition from the British Cave Research Association, is among the largest caves in the world. It runs over 8.8 kilometres in length, with caverns large enough to hold a 40-story skyscraper. It has an enormous sinkhole more than 183 metres deep, beneath which grows a tropical rainforest with trees nearly 30 metres tall, home to monkeys not normally found underground, and a subterranean river flows within it. The wider country is mostly hilly and densely forested, with level land covering no more than 20%. Mountains account for 40% of the land area, and tropical forests cover around 42%. Fansipan, on the border between Lào Cai and Lai Châu provinces, is the highest mountain on the Indochinese Peninsula at 3,143 metres. Within the Indomalayan realm, Vietnam is one of twenty-five countries with uniquely high biodiversity, home to roughly 16% of the world's species, with 15,986 species of flora identified. Six new mammal species, including the saola, giant muntjac, and Tonkin snub-nosed monkey, have been discovered here. A small population of Javan rhinoceros was found in Cát Tiên National Park in the late 1980s, but the last individual in Vietnam was reportedly shot in 2010. A different legacy lingers in the soil. The chemical herbicide Agent Orange still causes birth defects and health problems, and nearly 4.8 million Vietnamese people have been exposed to its effects. In 2018, the Japanese engineering group Shimizu Corporation, working with the Vietnamese military, built a plant to treat soil polluted by it.