Indochina War Research Articles

The Legacy of the Vietnam War: Making a Living amid Unexploded Ordnance in Xieng Khouang Province, Northern Laos

ABSTRACTLaos was drawn into the Second Indochina War, making the country the most heavily bombed country on earth. Although the war ended more than four decades ago, unexploded ordnance (UXO) continues to kill and injure civilians. In many provinces UXO constitutes the major hindrance to socioeconomic development and obstacle to local people earning a decent living. The aim of this article is to examine the ways in which local people have developed livelihood strategies to survive in dangerous environments through the lens of sustainable livelihood perspectives. This article argues that livelihood improvements in Xieng Khouang Province should be characterised as a bottom-up phenomenon. UXO is still a major concern for the government and local people with respect to achieving development objectives. As the financial resources for UXO clearance are limited, education is a powerful tool for creating awareness of UXO risks among local people. The research suggests that more resources should be mobilised to deal with UXO problems.

The Long-Run and Gender-Equalizing Impacts of School Access: Evidence from the First Indochina War

Very few studies currently exist on the long-term impacts of schooling policies in developing countries. This paper examines the impacts -- half a century later -- of a mass education program conducted by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the occupied areas during the First Indochina War. Difference-in-difference estimation results suggest that school-age children who were exposed to the program obtained significantly higher levels of education than their peers who were residing in French-occupied areas. The impacts are statistically significant for school-age girls and not for school-age boys. The analysis finds beneficial spillover and inter-generational impacts of education: affected girls enjoyed higher household living standards, had more educated spouses, and raised more educated children. The paper discusses various robustness checks and extensions that support these findings.

A Secular State for a Religious Nation: The Republic of Vietnam and Religious Nationalism, 1946–1963

Most studies of the Republic of Vietnam's nation-building programs have focused on its security and land reforms. Yet spirituality was a fundamental element of Ngô Đình Diệm's Personalist Revolution. This article analyzes how the Republic of Vietnam attempted to channel the religious nationalism emerging from the First Indochina War. The spiritual dimension of the Republic's Personalist Revolution did not involve state interference in all religious activities. Instead, it promoted religious freedom and diversity, provided that the spiritual values they propagated opposed communism's atheism. In practice, this framework did not succeed in creating a religious alliance against communism. In fact, it strengthened a religious consciousness that would increasingly challenge the state, its assumption that religions opposed communism, and the very principle of religious diversity.

The Vietnam War, the Church, the Christian Democratic Party and the Italian Left Catholics

Over the years of the Cold War, the conflict in Vietnam assumed the significance of a clash between two civilizations, the West and communism. Italian Catholics thus found themselves not only invoking the end of the conflict, but also expressing their evaluations on the choices made in international politics by the two superpowers. The positions assumed by the ecclesiastic Institution, the Christian Democrats and the Catholic world in Italy towards the war in Indochina were not identical: in fact, if—with a few exceptions—the ecclesiastic hierarchy was distinguished by its extreme caution, in the Catholic party different positions became manifest. It was mainly in Catholic associations, and in general amongst believers closer to the experience of the Vatican Council, that a radical sense of aversion to U.S. foreign policy developed.

A Narrative Cartography of the French Indo-China War: A Journalistic Perspective

While cartography continues to be a major form of geographic study, an important line of cartographic research has moved away from the “scientific” framework of cartographic inquiry, and instead studies the narratives and social construction of maps. This article seeks to understand the visual representation of the French Indo-China War using journalistic maps from the New York Times. In doing so, it hopes to reconstruct how the policies and events of this conflict were visually represented to the American public. It draws upon critical cartographic frameworks to deconstruct the visual narrative and interpret the assumptions that were inherent within the maps. The overall visual impact of the conflict suggests an attempt to simplify the conflict into a Western narrative of national emergence without a deeper discussion of identity, ethnicity, and sovereignty at a subnational level.

Assimilating Weather Data into a Digital Event Gazetteer of Airborne Parachute Operations during the French Indochina War

Abstract Modern datasets cataloging historical events, known as digital event gazetteers, feature spatiotemporal data regarding events that enable analysis through parameters including location and other descriptive information of those events. Weather and climate data represent two dimensions of spatiotemporal information, which can enhance understanding of historical events. A recently published digital event gazetteer of airborne parachute operations [opérations aéroportées (OAPs)] during and prior to the French Indochina War, spanning from 1945 to 1954, represents an opportunity to associate discrete historical events with weather information. This study outlines a methodology for assimilating weather data into the construct of a digital event gazetteer and then demonstrates example analyses of how the weather and climate conditions in Indochina may relate to OAPs during the war. A synoptic classification, utilizing the self-organizing maps procedure, is performed using daily mean sea level pressure data from 1945 to 2010, from a twentieth-century reanalysis dataset, to characterize weather patterns over the Indochina Peninsula. Since observations are sparse during the years of the conflict, the resulting weather patterns are associated with modern precipitation observations in the area, as a representation of wet and dry patterns during the war. The appropriate daily weather pattern is then assigned to each OAP in order to investigate its relationship with the weather and climate patterns of Indochina, including the influence of monsoon seasons, and how the resulting precipitation patterns affected combat operations across the theater. Additionally, specific OAPs of various missions are analyzed to investigate how weather patterns may have affected operation planning during the French Indochina War.

Review: Historical Dictionary of the Indochina War (1945–1954): An International and Interdisciplinary Approach by Christopher Goscha

Review: <i>Historical Dictionary of the Indochina War (1945–1954): An International and Interdisciplinary Approach</i> by Christopher Goscha

Cultivating Subjects: Opium and rule in post-colonial Vietnam

AbstractSwidden cultivators in the Southeast Asian highlands may work far from lowland centres, but certain crops attract powerful interests. During the First Indochina War (1946–54), French and Vietnamese political actors climbed the hills in pursuit of the Black River region's opium production and trade. Even after combat formally ended, opium contests continued into an independent Vietnam, intersecting with larger struggles over ethnic difference, state resource claims, and market organization. Using upland cultivators to examine post-colonial statemaking, this article tells a new story about opium's tangled relationship with socialist rule in Vietnam. Drawing on French and Vietnamese archival records, it traces the operation of successive opium regimes through war and into restive peace. Based on evidence of opium tax and purchase operations conducted by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) from 1951 to 1960, it argues that regulating the commodity sensitized cultivators to their long, fraught relations with state power. Far from passive, cultivating subjects animated revolutionary ideals, engaged smuggling networks, negotiated resource rights, and mounted an oppositional social movement. Peaking in 1957, the movement and subsequent crackdown illustrate tensions embedded in post-colonial relations of exchange and rule.

“To Show the People in Paris How We Live Here”: Working-Class Representation, Paul Carpita, and Film History

“To Show the People in Paris How We Live Here”: Working-Class Representation, Paul Carpita, and Film History Sabine Haenni (bio) French and Anglo-American film historians usually stress the “idea of continuity” that dominated French cinema after World War II.1 Susan Hayward claims that “the look of France’s cinema did not change considerably” after the war, and Alan Williams suggests that the foundation of institutions such as the CNC (Centre National de la Cinématographie) helped nurture “the strong artistic continuity between the new French school of the Occupation and the postwar Tradition of Quality.”2 During the war, when the German company Continental made films in Paris, production in the South had become more important, at least before the occupation of the Southern zone in 1942. Many film professionals found themselves in Nice, the country’s second largest production site, and other cities such as Toulon and Marseille saw the foundation of new production companies.3 After the war, however, most film histories shift their focus back to Paris. Film production seems once again centered in the capital. In terms of representation onscreen, however, historians have noted one major change compared to the pre-war period. The 1930s, Susan Hayward tells us, saw “the emergence onto the screen of the working class in a big way. The proletariat—most especially the Parisian working class . . . became the new iconography denoting ‘Frenchness.’” Such a new iconography entailed a shift not just to the representation but also to the valorization of the working class. And yet, “after the Occupation and into the 1950s, the working class all but disappeared both as an icon and as a preoccupation (either positive or negative).” Instead, the 1950s are characterized by an “aura of uninventiveness” during which genre films such as the film policier and comedies dominate.4 In a more detailed account of the [End Page 79] fate of the cinematic working class, Michel Cadé acknowledges the paucity as well as the diversity of working-class themed films that in his view do not constitute a clearly defined “genre,” but equally emphasizes their relative flourishing in the 1930s, after 1968, during the 1980s, and from 1992–2002. Cadé also notices a brief moment of flourishing working-class representation during post-war liberation, which came with a brief left-wing political victory.5 I want to start with this brief post-war moment marked by “revolutionary illusion” and “great Hope for social change.”6 According to historian Emile Temime, this was particularly true for the country’s southern port city of Marseille, which had been deeply affected by the war, when it was the major port in Europe from where people fleeing fascism tried to escape, and which had resulted in the total destruction of one of its central neighborhoods.7 After the war, Marseille was a stronghold of the Communist Party and briefly had a communist mayor, before strikes in 1947 paralyzed the city’s port—strikes that would flare up again in 1950 and 1951.8 One of the more fascinating filmmakers to come out of this milieu was Paul Carpita, a son of a dock worker and fish-monger, who had become a schoolteacher, who had been active in the Resistance, and who had joined the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1943.9 In 1947, Carpita created Ciné-Pax, a small filmmaking collective—which he was happy to call a “counter-school of cinema”—committed to filming “counter-actualities” that were then screened unofficially in Marseille’s Saint-Lazare Cinema. Some footage shot for Ciné-Pax, particularly that of a strike of the dock workers in 1950, was incorporated into the fictional feature-length film, Le Rendez-vous des quais/Meeting on the Docks (FR, 1955), about the daily life of dock workers in Marseille during the Indochina War (1946–54), which would be finished only in 1955.10 In this essay, I understand Carpita as coming out of this postwar moment, and I will unpack how especially his feature film creates spaces where intersectional working-class identities—differently marked by anti-colonial struggles, gender, and race—come together in an alliance based on friendship. Carpita creates images of a...

Neutralizing Indochina: The 1954 Geneva Conference and China's Efforts to Isolate the United States

Based on declassified documents from the People's Republic of China (PRC), Vietnam, and the former Soviet Union, this essay examines China's policy toward the 1954 Geneva Conference on Indochina in relation to the United States. The article shows that Chinese leaders wanted to neutralize Indochina in order to forestall U.S. military intervention in the conflict, which, if it occurred, would directly threaten the PRC's southern flank. In pursuit of this objective, Chinese officials sought to exploit differences between the United States and its two main allies, Britain and France, and thereby induce U.S. policymakers to agree to end the first Indochina War between France and Vietnam. Because Chinese leaders worried that the United States might respond by trying to foment splits within the Communist camp, they worked to build a united front with the Soviet Union and North Vietnam, both of which shared Beijing's anxiety about U.S. intervention, and to convince the Viet Minh guerrilla leaders to make necessary concessions for a negotiated settlement at Geneva.

A Mediterranean gap in the national canon? Paul Carpita’s anti-colonial cinema between militant amateurism and New Wave

A new Marseille cinema, focusing on the city’s everyday culture, emerged in the 1980s with directors such as René Allio and Robert Guédiguian. Even though some of their films received considerable recognition, an important part of the history of this cinematic representation has remained largely unaccounted for: the work of Paul Carpita (1922–2009). His films of the 1950s and 60s are strongly linked to the cultural history of the labour and peace movement. A former member of the Resistance, he created just after World War II Le Rendez-vous des quais/Meeting on the Docks (1953–55), a full-length film shot in the popular quarters of Marseille, thematising the dockers’ protest against the Indochina War. The film was censored before its release and only restored in the 1980s. This article situates the film within the regional and national French cinema of the post-war era, and analyses its hybrid aesthetics, comprising cinematic realism, militant cinema and amateur film. By referring to Carpita’s more intimate and reflexive short films, the article argues that his marginal status within French film history can be traced to the political and amateurish character of his films, but also to the fact that his artistic activity was located in Marseille, at the periphery of the national film scene and academia.

The Uprooted: Race, Children and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890–1980 by Christina Elizabeth Firpo

Reviewed by: The Uprooted: Race, Children and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890–1980 by Christina Elizabeth Firpo Marie-Paule Ha The Uprooted: Race, Children and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890–1980 By Christina Elizabeth Firpo. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2016. Christina Firpo's book is a reconstruction of the history of the removal of Eurasian children in French Indochina from the late nineteenth century to the postcolonial era. The mixed-blood children at the center of this near century long saga, known in the colonial parlance as "métis non reconnus," were the illegitimate offspring of Frenchmen and their Native concubines. Born out of wedlock, many of the métis had been abandoned by their European fathers, who, for various reasons, did not legally recognize them as their progeny. As a result, these children were denied French citizenship and its many legal, social and economic privileges. Raised by their mothers in the Indigenous milieu, they were given the lower status of Native subjects. While the plight of these unrecognized métis in Indochina has been the subject of a number of previous studies, Firpo's book is the first one to provide a detailed and systematic investigation of their removal from the native milieu by the métis protection system and their institutionalization in French-run organizations in Indochina and the métropole. In her reconstruction of this saga, the author tracks the many shifts in the policies and attitudes of the French towards these fatherless mixed-blood children from the inception of the métis protection system to its dissolution. Starting with the discussion of the creation of the first métis protection societies by French civilians in the 1880s in Chapter One, the book moves on chronologically to show, in the ensuing chapters, how political events, social and economic changes both inside and outside Indochina such as World War I, the Great Depression, the Japanese occupation, the French Indochina War and the advent of decolonization shaped the evolution of the métis protection system as well as the French perceptions and treatments of the métis. The main contention of the book is that the French intervention to "save" the fatherless mixed-blood children from poverty was prompted not solely by benevolence, but also by "colonial self-interest" (5). Members of the métis protection societies and colonial administrators were convinced that letting métis grow up under the care of their Native mothers would not only be deleterious to the children's wellbeing, but more importantly, their abandonment by their fathers could also foster in them resentment and rebellious sentiments against the colonial state. Besides defusing these potential dangers, the métis' removal scheme also served the goal of grooming these half-French fatherless children to become loyal collaborators of the colonial state by providing them with a French education and nurturing in them an identification with French culture. For there was a widely held belief among colonial administrators that these bilingual and bicultural "Frenchmen" were best suited to perpetuate French presence in Indochina as they could act as a counterweight to the emerging power of the Indigenous elite (Chapter Four). One of the book's strengths is its use of a wide range of primary materials in both French and Vietnamese that include government documentation and the personal narratives of the métis and their mothers. The juxtaposition of these sources brings forth poignantly the huge gap between the official rhetoric of "saving" the children and the emotional cost the coercive separation from their mothers caused to the latter. The letters of the Native women also belie the protection societies' adamant belief that they were unfit mothers only interested in exploiting their children for financial gains. Among the many shifts in the colonial administration's handling of the métis question discussed in the book, one significant change is the redefinition of French identity. Instead of limiting Frenchness to the White phenotype as used to be the practice in the colony, the Fédération des OEuvres de l'Enfance Française d'Indochine (FOEFI), a civilian charitable organization supported by the French government to take care of the abandoned mixed-blood children after...

Eisenhower and Cambodia: diplomacy, covert action, and the origins of the Second Indochina War

Eisenhower and Cambodia: diplomacy, covert action, and the origins of the Second Indochina War

The Sovereign States of Vietnam, 1945–1955

This paper revisits the “bricolage” State of Vietnam and the fractured system of sovereignty that characterized its halting practice of sovereignty at the ground level during the First Indochina War. In addition, it examines how the French Union’s concept of shared external sovereignty became discredited by the end of the war.

Partisan to Sovereign

The decade following the end of World War II saw the rise of the Bình Xuyên as a formidable military and political force. How did the Bình Xuyên emerge as local sovereigns? Eschewing the predominant “criminal” framework that has dominated our understanding of the group’s ascent, this article shows that competition to court the Bình Xuyên between the southern DRV and the French-sponsored Vietnamese governments as well as power struggles within those same state entities strengthened the Bình Xuyên’s local power. This pattern of interstate and intrastate competition in the early years of the First Indochina War laid the foundation for the group’s contentious relationship with its nominal Franco-Vietnamese patrons after its ralliement in 1948.

Makers of Modern Asia, edited by Ramachandra Guha

Makers of Modern Asia, edited by Ramachandra Guha. Cambridge, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014. 385 pp. $29.95 US (cloth). In his volume Makers of Modern Asia, Ramachandra Guha has brought together an impressive assembly of scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals tasked with authoring a series of biographical essays about Asia's major leading political figures of the twentieth century. The list of figures, while in many ways predictable, is notable for its inclusivity. In it, the reader finds three Indian (Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Indira Gandhi) and four Chinese (Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping) leaders, as well as one each from Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh), Indonesia (Sukarno), Singapore (Lee Kuan Yew), and Pakistan (Zulfikar Ali Bhutto). The list reads like a roster of the veritable heavyweights of Asian statesmen (and a token woman) of the recent past. In keeping with the volume's theme of makers, nearly all the selected individuals were key movers in the nationalist movements that gained independence (de jure and de facto) throughout Asia during the middle decades of the century. Makers of Modern Asia begins with a short introductory essay authored by Guha himself, where he lays out the structure and logic of the book. The book's aim is to bring to the fore the now somewhat obscured history of agitation and consolidation that created unified, stable (or more or less stable) nation-states out of fragmented territories and fractious social groups (4). The work, then, is most decidedly that of political biography. As such, it returns to a version of history rather long passe within the profession, namely that of big-man history. Yet the authors use this form to reflect on wider social and political issues that their subjects both shaped and were beholden to. Taken individually, the eleven essays offer contributions of somewhat uneven character. Some, such as James R. Rush's chapter on Sukarno and Odd Arne Westad's on Deng Xiaoping, provide a chronological biography of their subject from birth to death. Others, such as Sophie Quinn-Judge's contribution on Ho-Chi Mirth, more tightly focus on particular episodes of the individual's life, in this case the years between the end of WWII and the outbreak of the Second Indo-China War. Consequently, the essays fail to set a collective tone for the volume, as each reflects the individual voice of its author. Some take a relatively light tack vis-a-vis the details of the historical narrative, while others provide what is at times an overwhelming wealth of information. …

History Reformatted: Vietnam's Great Famine (1944-45) in Archival Form

We primarily see the archive as storehouse of memory and fact, as the place from whence history issues forth. However, the archive is much more than this; it is . . . a place of trauma and pain. It is a place of sorrow and loss for many, where unpacified ghosts with unfinished business await, yielding stories and letters different from expectation, a site where loss is localized and realized. (Murphy 2011, 481)Many Vietnamese present ritual offerings to wandering spirits during T?t Trung Nguyen, a popular festival that occurs on the 15th day of the seventh lunar month. Participants recite prayers and then light seven sticks of incense to appease these spirits, who cannot become benevolent ancestors due to the unjust and often violent nature of their deaths. People pour small portions of boiled sweet potato, cassava, roasted corn, hard rice pancakes, and porridge-foods commonly eaten during periods of scarcity-into cones made of leaves from banyan trees. They then place the offerings outside in bushes, small shrines, and other hidden spaces for these ontological refugees (Kwon 2008, 16), who are neither fully dead nor alive, to dine upon. The festival's primary purpose, several Vietnamese explained to me, is to absolve the hungry ghosts of any harm they may have caused the living, such as misfortune or serious illness, over the past year. Several of them told me that the offerings also function as insurance against future problems because the offerings are meant to keep the hungry ghosts satiated for the next 12 months. The explanations are not mutually exclusive, and since the early 1990s growing numbers of people have used the festival to commemorate the victims of the Great Famine of 1944- 45 (N?n ðoi ?t D?u).Official Vietnamese estimates, first put forward in a famous speech by H? Chi Minh and then reiterated with little empirical support until recently, place the number of people who died within the space of six months at approximately two million (Nguyen Kh?c Ð?m 1988; Van T?o and Nguyen Kh?c Ð?m 1988; Ð?ng C?ng s?n Vi?t Nam 2008, 921; Gunn 2014, 259n1). Given the vast number of hungry ghosts this famine reportedly produced, the gradual inclusion of its victims, as part of this festival, is not surprising.1) The Great Famine affected 32 provinces across colonial Tonkin and Annam, reducing the population of what is now northern and central Vietnam by an estimated 15 percent (Duong Trung Quoc 2005). Yet, despite the size and scale of loss, no national monument exists to collectively memorialize the deaths. Instead, commemorative practices remain decidedly local in nature and revolve around the mass that can still be found across the countryside, usually in close proximity to villages where death rates were particularly high. Ghost graves (c?n ma) and hunger tombs (m? ðoi), as they are colloquially known, typically consist of a small mound of earth or a pile of carefully arranged bricks. These sites become visible to nonresidents only when famine survivors and their descendants visit them during the festival to appease the hungry ghosts.A three-meter-high concrete memorial, once part of a charity cemetery (nghia trang h?p thi?n) in Hanoi, is an exception to these informal practices. The remains of thousands of people who fled the countryside to seek refuge in the city but perished shortly after their arrival are interred beneath it. Residents of Hanoi raised funds to construct the memorial, which was completed in April 1951. Photographs, displayed in a small room adjacent to the memorial, indicate that people visited the site year-round for the next several years. But the memorial fell into disrepair by the time the Second Indochina War (1954-75) began. In September 2001, the People's Committee of Hanoi announced that it would rectify this situation by providing funds to renovate the longneglected memorial. The announcement, which appeared as a small sidebar in local newspapers, stated that the renovations would be completed by 2005, in time to mark the 60th anniversary of the Great Famine. …

Propaganda and the Public: The Shaping of Opinion in the Southern Vietnamese Countryside during the Second Indochina War

In the Mekong Delta province of Mỹ Tho, village populations paid attention to print and electronic media controlled by the Government of Vietnam in Saigon and by the National Liberation Front during the early 1960s. They also relied for news on rumours and on information circulating on the grapevine. At first, NLF militants benefited from their dialogue with an ascendant rural public. But after 1965 mounting violence complicated Front efforts to stay in touch with its mass base, and the grapevine assumed an even greater importance for people in the countryside. On the eve of the Tet Offensive of 1968, the choices made by rural dwellers helped to determine the course of the Second Indochina War.

From Yao to now: Daoism and the imperialization of the China/Southeast Asia borderlands

This article investigates the adoption of Daoist ritual among the Yao peoples in South China and mainland Southeast Asia. The Song Dynasty imperial court patronized new Daoist ritual traditions that harnessed martial deities such as the Thunder Gods. Although these traditions were mostly southern in origin, it is not until the Qing dynasty that we find evidence for their circulation among the Yao. After discussing historical representations of Yao religion from the Song to the Qing dynasty and the specific historical contexts that gave rise to each representation, I conclude by examining how beliefs and practices derived from these same Daoist ritual traditions were active among the Iu Mien in Laos during the Second Indochina War. What is needed is an analysis that links a specific ethnographic or historiographic representation with a broader understanding of local, regional, and even transnational ritual practices in the borderlands of China and Southeast Asia.

K. W. Taylor, ed. Voices from the Second Republic of South Vietnam (1967–1975)

Voices from the Second Republic of South Vietnam (1967-1975)K. W. Taylor, ed.Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University, 2015, 180p.Four decades removed from the fall of Saigon, now is perhaps the right time to revisit the Vietnam conflict, for no longer pressing is the impulse to assign blame, discredit others, or find excuses (p. 159). So begins Lan Lu's contribution to the collection Voices from the Second Republic of South Vietnam (1967-1975). Edited by Keith Taylor, it consists of chapters by 10 different contributors, each of whom played a role in the administrative, political, and military milieu of the Republic of Vietnam based in Saigon from 1955 to 1975.The collection can be situated in two different contexts. One is the growing interest in the Republic of Vietnam and the efforts of scholars to develop more nuanced accounts of the Second Indochina War that situate the struggle in local as well as global contexts and highlight the agency and ideologies of participants on all sides. Key works in this emerging body of scholarship include Ed Miller's (2013) and Philip Catton's (2002) works on Ngo Dinh Diem and Nu-Anh Tran's work on nationalism in the First Vietnamese Republic (2006). An equally important context is the scholarly trajectory of Keith Taylor, Professor in Cornell's Department of Asian Studies and a renowned historian of Vietnam. In a very personal account published in 2004, Taylor described how over the course of his career he came to contest the three axioms in the dominant interpretation of the U.S.-Vietnam War, namely that the government in Saigon was illegitimate, that the U.S. had no grounds to be involved in Vietnamese affairs, and that the fall of the Republic of Vietnam was inevitable (Taylor 2004).1) Together with his History of the Vietnamese (Taylor 2013), the present volume can be seen as part of the exposition of Taylor's theses that the Vietnamese are characterized by a fundamental North-South division, that their history is driven not by nationalism or resistance to foreign aggression, but rather an inescapable connection to the Chinese political world, and that the struggle of Vietnamese and their allies to create and sustain a non-Communist Vietnamese government after 1945 was a just one (ibid., 620-626).It is an uneven collection, with entries ranging from Bui Diem's 5-page A Vietnamese Perspective on US Involvement, to Tran Quang Minh's 49-page A Decade of Public Service. text could have benefitted from closer editing that would have tightened up some chapters and avoided such things as flights in beach craft [sic. Beechcraft] airplanes (p. 27). In some places, contributors attempt to gloss 2,000 years of history in a few pages; in others, they veer into questionable attempts to refute commonly-held beliefs about the nature of the regime, as in Nguyen Ngoc Bich's description of the so-called Tiger Cages used for solitary confinement in the prison at Con Son island (p. 34).Nevertheless, the accounts provide important insights into life under the Second Republic, reminding us it was a functioning regime attempting to create institutions, build capacity, and carry on the day-to-day operations of governments everywhere. Over the course of the 1960s and early 70s, the Republic came to be shaped by a new generation of highly trained and motivated young officials and activists. As Tran Quang Minh explains, The Vietnam War was not all about killing and maiming, battles lost and won, and American and Vietnamese frustrations. . . . It was for us very much about building a nation and changing lives, about social revolution, rural reconstruction, agricultural development, economic improvement, and building a happy future for our children (p. 87).Moreover, this new generation achieved results that are often ignored. Programs like the Land To Tiller Program (LTTTP), the Accelerated Miracle Rice Production Program (AMRPP), and the National Food Administration (NFA), detailed in Tran Quang Minh's chapter A Decade of Public Service, created millions of new smallholders in the Vietnamese countryside and reintroduced market mechanisms, contributing to an increase in food production so that after years of wartime shortages by 1974 the country was once again largely self-sufficient. …