Socialist Republic of Vietnam

Abstract

Despite its image as a small country (it is the sixteenth largest country in the world), the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) is the world’s third most populous communist state. Vietnam’s geography has been a major factor in its historical development, particularly with regard to its northern neighbour, China. A thousand years of Chinese occupation between 111 BC and 939 AD left a lasting imprint on Vietnamese culture and institutions. It also left a strong desire for national independence, which subsequently manifested itself in bitter struggles against the Mongols in the thirteenth century, the Ming dynasty in the fifteenth century, and France and the United States in the twentieth century. Although Vietnam has long been viewed in the West as the ‘smaller dragon’ —a miniature replica of China — modern scholarship has uncovered important cultural and linguistic differences between the two countries, and these in many ways show Vietnam to be more closely linked to its South-east Asian neighbours than to China.