Vietnam since the fall of Saigon

by William J. Duiker

When North Vietnamese troops occupied Saigon at the end of April 1975, their leaders in Hanoi faced the future with pride and confidence. Almost fifteen years later, the euphoria has given way to sober realism. Since the end of the war, the Communist regime has faced an almost uninterrupted series of difficulties including sluggish economic growth at home and a costly occupation of neighboring Cambodia. For the Vietnamese, the basic documents came from Lenin and Mao Tse-tung. The first task of the new rulers in South Vietnam was to fill the vacuum left by the virtual disintegration of the previous regime. Beyond the immediate problem of restoring law and order in the South, the primary problem for the new regime would be to set the economic sector back on its feet. The new regime also moved expeditiously to eliminate or at least reduce the "poisonous weeds" of Western bourgeois culture and plant the seeds of a new and beautiful socialist culture. The regime was taking the first tentati