National Renovation Campaigns in Vietnam

Abstract

A LONG WITH RECENT CAMPAIGNS to eradicate vice and revive traditional virtues, the Ngo Dinh Diem government of the Republic of Vietnam has been attempting to formulate a new culture which it evidently hopes may develop to the proportions of an ideology. Central in the new cultural scheme is a campaign to propagate Personalism which appears to be directly related to the doctrine of certain French Catholic writers, notably Emmanuel Mounier and the Revue Esprit group. While Buddhism is paid scant attention in the new system, Confucianism, almost as old in Vietnam as it is in China, has an important role. It embodies many of the traditional values which the leaders of South Vietnam are selecting from their national cultural heritage to help them restore order and government authority. Years before the I954-I955 crisis many non-Communist Vietnamese intellectuals had felt the need to formulate their own ideological position. They were concerned over the successes of Vietminh propaganda characterized by the usual glib, unequivocal codifications cemented together by Marxist ideology. When they came to realize after the Geneva pact of 1954 that independence from the French was not the panacea that many had imagined, they became more concerned than ever with the problem of developing something more immediately applicable in a dynamic, new (or rephrased) nationalistic credo or ideology of their own than they had known elsewhere. Soon after assuming the reins of government in June 1954, Ngo Dinh Diem and his brothers (who constitute a sort of informal privy council for him) decided that among the most pressing problems facing the new regime were moral lassitude and the weakening of government authority among the people. Vietnam had passed through a cataclysmic epoch of rapid change and turmoil. Her traditional values had been condemned and substitutes had been offered in such developments as the French colonization of the country, the Japanese occupation and the establishment of the Ho Chi Minh's Communist state in North Vietnam dedicated to the obliteration of Confucian influence and much of traditional morality. There had been also the long military struggle against the Vietminh and the rise of the politico-military