Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2019. vi, 198 pp. US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-5017-4513-3.
For too long, the Republic of Vietnam has been underrepresented in contemporary studies of the Vietnam War. South Vietnamese voices, having suffered through the aftermath of 1975, have also been silenced by the official narrative of the Vietnamese communist regime. In addition, their perspectives are often minimized by scholarship based out of the US that all too often focuses on the US role in Vietnam while downplaying if not outright dismissing their Vietnamese allies.
Tuong Vu and Sean Fear’s edited volume, The Republic of Vietnam, 1950-1975: Vietnamese Perspectives on Nation Building, addresses this neglect. The volume brings together 15 voices representing South Vietnam’s bureaucracy as well as its civil society. Most contributors come from a non-military background, and several are women. Nguyen Duc Cuong, Vu Quoc Thuc, Pham Kim Ngoc, and Cao Van Than—three former ministers and a national bank governor—open up about their personal roles in shaping South Vietnam’s economic policies. President Nguyen Van Thieu’s private secretary Hoang Duc Nha, National Police Academy Commandant Tran Minh Cong, and Lieutenant Colonel Bui Quyen of the Republic of Vietnam Army, reflect on South Vietnam’s diplomacy with the United States, the creation of its national police, and the development of its military branches. Next, two educators, Nguyen Huu Phuoc and Vo Kim Son, discuss the philosophy and practice of educational reforms, while three journalists reflect on the ups and downs of press freedom in South Vietnam. Pham Tran focuses on the South Vietnamese government’s various tools of media control, in particular the 1969 and 1972 press laws; Vu Thanh Thuy contrasts wartime reporting by South Vietnamese reporters with that by foreign news outlets; and Trung Duong describes the struggles of running an opposition newspaper during President Nguyen Van Thieu’s government. Finally, the volume features reflections by two well-known South Vietnamese artists, novelist Nha Ca and actress Kieu Chinh, on the rich cultural and artistic scene of South Vietnam.
The contributions offer a diverse and candid representation of South Vietnamese state-building efforts. The editors assisted in contextualizing the volume by commissioning two additional chapters from scholars of South Vietnamese history, but otherwise let the contributors speak for themselves. Without an attempt to force feed the audience with an overarching argument, the themes of the volume emerge organically.
The first theme, one that does not surprise readers familiar with South Vietnamese memoirs and autobiographies, is the authors’ devotion to the republican cause in Vietnam. The authors’ position is that both the policy makers and the government critics had a common goal to protect not only the Republic, but also the liberal values that it stood for. So unwavering is the contributors’ position that some choose to acknowledge yet still ultimately defend darker patches of the Republic’s history. For instance, several contributors take note of the South Vietnamese government’s severe press censorship. Pham Tran (chapter 10) highlights the limits to free speech in the 1956 Constitution; Vu Thanh Thuy (chapter 11) notes the government’s practice of screening newspapers’ draft copies and forcing “voluntary deletions,” and Trung Duong (chapter 12) describes their brainchild Song Than’s resistance against and capitulation to government coercion. At the end of the day, however, the same contributors justify the government’s censorship as a necessary evil given the threat of communist infiltration. In the extreme, one contributor (Vu Thanh Thuy) laments that the South Vietnamese government did not censor even more, arguing that allowing journalists to practice free speech “caused much harm by opening the door to the enemy” (132).
The second theme of the book is South Vietnamese agency. Whereas official Vietnamese narrative and critics of the United States’ involvement consider South Vietnam a mere puppet army, the picture painted by the contributors puts South Vietnamese actors at the centre stage as they deal with existential threats from not only communist North Vietnam but also their own American allies. More than just survival, the volume’s South Vietnamese contributors sought to shape an independent Vietnam free from foreign influence, be it of French, American, or Chinese origin. Such was the driving force behind Cao Van Than’s (chapter 4) fight to remove borrowed Sino-Vietnamese words from the name of the 1970 Land to the Tiller campaign. Similarly, Pham Kim Ngoc (chapter 3) recounts the South Vietnamese people’s resistance when their United States advisors, hoping for a rapid withdrawal from Vietnam, pushed the government toward a “reform blitz.” Instead of caving in, the Republic’s economists responded to the country’s precarious position with policy experiments of their own. Many of these, such as the crawling peg exchange system or the VAT tax, were almost untested outside the country’s borders, and would remain novel policies even in today’s world.
Overall, the volume paints an authentic if rosy picture of South Vietnamese efforts to forge an enduring state and society for themselves. It also sheds light on the way loyalists of republican South Vietnam perceived the outside world, most notably the United States and communist North Vietnam. The volume should provide excellent teaching materials for undergraduate- and graduate-level courses on Vietnamese history. In addition, historians researching the decision-making processes of both sides of the Vietnam War might also find it useful as a primary source.
Duy Duc Trinh
University of California, San Diego