Economic Freedom and Thought in the United States, North Vietnam, and South Vietnam

Spring 2019

North and South Vietnam during the Vietnam War provided a perfect microcosm for American narratives. The United States were fighting for freedom, for a society based upon the ideals of free-market capitalism, free from government intrusion in both the personal and business lives of its constituents. North Vietnam on the other hand, was the enemy to freedom; the home of communists, friends of both China and Russia, and to the United States, people devoid of any sense of personal autonomy. This simple dichotomy made it easy for government officials to, based off these premises, make logical decisions; and made it easy for the public to voice opinion based on this rigid dichotomy.

Freedom however, is not so simple. In 1945, Ho Chi Minh expressed the same words Thomas Jefferson did in 1776: “All men are created equal; they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Shortly thereafter he quotes France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man, written in 1789 and inspired also by the American Declaration of Independence.[1] How did Minh make the transition from pleading for the American idea of freedom, to fighting a war against the United States for a different type of freedom only 20 years later? More importantly, what does freedom mean to both Ho and the North Vietnamese, as well as the South Vietnamese, and how does that differ from the American vision of freedom?

It seems that the definition that Ho Chi Minh, and North Vietnam as a larger body, subscribed to during his life was a philosophy of national freedom. Freedom from foreign nations. Not necessarily freedom of choice for the individual, but rather freedom of the national body of Vietnam to make decisions for themselves as a nation. Freedom, to the United States of America, roughly means freedom of the citizen to make his or her own decisions, so long as those decisions do not infringe on the rights of others. This latter sense of freedom, The United States saw as a value and ideal directly threatened by the principles of communism. It is this threat that leads to the containment policy held by the United States and various European powers throughout the mid-20th century, and played a large part in regards to our eventually engagement in war with Vietnam. It was the type of imperial hand that we pressed against the Vietnamese, along with our other European allies, that pushed the Vietnamese toward communism in the first place.

Minh was widely-regarded as primarily a nationalist, and a communist secondarily, tracing his communist roots to the Marxist-Leninist training he received while, ironically, in France during the later end of the 1910’s.[2] His main concern throughout his life was to unify his country around its own duly created government; whether that be through a communist or capitalist economic system, was more or less a means to an end. Between France, Japan, and the United States, most Vietnamese people did not remember what it was like to live a life free of colonial rule. These were not people originally of strict communist adherence, but people who wanted to use the ideology as a means to bring themselves freedom and sovereignty as a country.

National sovereignty is easier said than done. In 1955, Vietnam split in two; leaving the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the North, and the Republic of Vietnam in the South. Led by the economic and political philosophy of Ho Chi Minh, rapid production in the agricultural and industrial sectors were pursued.[3] For the next few years, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam were implementing a reconstruction-esque economic development, following previous years of war. While consolidating private ownership of property was a major goal of the North Vietnamese government, their first priority had been to fully employ their massive labor force, which proved difficult with such a small amount of farmable land.[4]

South Vietnam rejected the ideas that Minh brought to the table, a factor that would eventually lead to the split between the two countries. As opposed to its Northern counterpart, South Vietnam wanted to model themselves along the lines of countries like Taiwan and South Korea, of which were seen as successful examples of modernized capitalist societies.[5] Digging deeper, these were also countries the thrived economically after American aid and intervention, a situation in which South Vietnam was currently in. One of the first problems the South Vietnamese economy faced, was loss of access to industry and material to North Vietnam after the partition of North and South Vietnam. Production expanded rapidly on popular materials like cement, textiles, and paper, all of which historically had been produced in the North. In addition, the South Vietnamese found new industries in the coal deposits of Non Son, and the utilization of the water power in the central eastern highlands.[6]

The United States, grown from a laissez-faire and personal freedom childhood, found good company in the aspirations of South Vietnam. And while the United States and South Vietnam shared what can only be determined as an unhealthy relationship, one in which officials in both governments try to manipulate the other, they both shared a few common goals. The first of which being the fending off of the North Vietnamese Army into South Vietnam, and the second being the promotion and creation of a free-market economy in Vietnam. In creating a capitalist society, according to American logic, the United States also created a democratic society, a prosperous society, and a free society.

Once again however, the definition of freedom is not always created equal. In the mind of Ho Chi Minh, the United States was not the purveyor of freedom, but rather the preventer of freedom. It was the United States that unjustly cohabitates both South and North Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh’s eyes. In a letter to president Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1967, Minh writes that the “Vietnamese people deeply love independence, freedom, and peace,” while also noting that the North Vietnamese will not have a seat at the negotiation table while under relentless bombing campaigns by the United States.[7] If the North Vietnamese under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh deeply love independence, freedom, and peace, why is the United States fighting what will eventually become a 19-year long war against them? How did Ho Chi Minh’s definition of freedom differ with Johnson’s, Nixon’s, and Kennedy’s?

To compare and contrast the definitions of freedom held by both Minh and the United States, we will have to examine deeper their political and economic philosophies as well. Historically, the United States more or less holds a very laissez-faire economic worldview, and as stated earlier has been based off of the ideals of small government, private property rights, and individual sovereignty; that is what freedom might sound like to the average American. Now, while economic freedom is mighty well and alive in the United States, ideological imperialism, and sometimes physical imperialism has played a crucial role in American foreign policy over the course of American history. In Ho Chi Minh’s eyes, the receiving end of American imperialism, as well as French and Japanese imperialism, is the antithesis to freedom. He said in 1920 regarding his treatment in what he refers to as “Imperial Crimes,” saying that “Any natives having socialist ideas are arrested and sometimes murdered without trial. Such is the so-called justice in Indochina.”[8]­­

It is of no surprise that Ho Chi Minh found appeal in the communist and Marxist doctrine under these conditions. To Minh, the nationalist and communist, freedom seems to mean the freedom of the state from foreign power and influence. The state and its leaders may decide how to lead their country and people as they please, as long as it is in fact their state with a grip on the reins. In that case, freedom in the eyes of North Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh, so long as it is their country choosing to travel a communist path, all is fair and just. The meaning of freedom to Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese, does not translate to individual freedom for Vietnamese peasants, but independence and freedom for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam as an entire country to choose their own fate.

This definition obviously does not translate well when it comes to the South Vietnamese and American definition of freedom. The very idea of communism is antithetical to the American idea. The abolition of private property as it is transitioned to state controlled enterprises attacks right at the heart of the American dream and experiment. The idea of collective ownership is not apart of the American id, and is incompatible with individual freedom. If land and possession are owned by everyone, no individual has sole sovereignty over their property or possessions.

In the current world, Vietnam is far from a country of freedom and individual sovereignty. One does not have to search far to find corruption, only to the election of 2018, where President and Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong won the presidency with 99.79% of the vote.[9] According to the independent watchdog organization Freedom House, Vietnam receives the score 20 out of 100, when compared with countries around the globe. That is equal to the score of Russia, and only higher than China’s score by a few points. It is over four times lower than the United States’ score of 86.[10] As per the Cato Institute, on a scale from 1–10, the United States ranks in the mid-high 8 range, and Vietnam ranks around the middle-6 range.[11] The Press Freedom Index describe press-government relations as “mostly not free,”[12] and the Democracy Index has described Vietnam as an “Authoritarian regime.”[13]

While one obviously cannot see the future, it is worth trying to decode what Ho Chi Minh’s grand vision was when trying to liberate the Vietnamese people. Under the definition of freedom which succeeds solely when a country is free from foreign control, the state of affairs in North Vietnam and consolidated communist Vietnam after 1975 being labelled as “free” is completely plausible. If freedom is as simple as the type of government one has, the government can effectively do whatever it feels is in its best interest. Ho previously sat in Nguyen Phu Trong’s chair as Party General Secretary until his death and recommended in 1956 to consolidate party leadership. Ho quoted Lenin as saying “the Central Committee can fulfill its task only if it is organized in the most centralized way, if there is inner-party discipline, almost as rigorous as military discipline, and if the central organ of the Party is influential and enjoys the general esteem of all its members.”[14] It is worthwhile noting that Ho Chi Minh did add the stipulation that this should only be true during a time of war, adding that “once victorious, socialism can never tolerate the personality cult and its harmful consequences,” even admitting that to a degree North Vietnam suffered from the same personality cult.[15] However, Ho Chi Minh did not seem to do much in terms of proposing an alternative, and the North Vietnamese as a whole did not seem to do much in terms of proposing an alternative to the one-party personality cult either, as history shows the swing towards authoritarianism after Ho Chi Mihn’s 1969 death.

While it is easy to infer that North Vietnam wasn’t ever going to be a benchmark of economic freedom, the neighbor to the south of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam maintained its own fair share of issues as well. While fervent U.S.-backed fighters of communism, the government of South Vietnam failed the freedom of many of their citizens as well; perhaps most infamously, religious freedom. It is important to clarify that the North Vietnamese weren’t the only ones who swayed on freedom. The United States ranks high on the economic freedom front, but as is known all too well, has a dark and ugly record in terms of racial and ethnic freedom. In backing the South Vietnamese Diem regime, the United States did itself no service in permitting the Diem administration in its policies against Buddhists. President Ngo Dinh Diem was a Catholic leader in an eighty to ninety percent Buddhist majority country.[16] In 1963, as an act of rebellion against the Diem administration’s anti-Buddhist policies, led mostly by Diem’s brother, there was a major Buddhist protest in the city center of Saigon. During the demonstration, a Buddhist monk by the name of Thich Quang Duc lit himself on fire in protest, which made headlines worldwide.[17] While the United States eventually executed a coup d’etat against the Diem administration, the corrupt and aristocratic governments the U.S. propped up, from the North Vietnamese perspective, only looked like the United States were continuing to meddle in the affairs of foreign countries in which it had no claim to be in.

Aside from the leaders of South Vietnam, North Vietnam, and the United States, how did the people of both Vietnam’s and the United States feel about freedom, communism, and capitalism in their respective countries? Before and during the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese working-class, mostly of the agricultural sector, held a cultural value to their homes and places that they grew up and spent their lives in. It was not uncommon for villagers and farmers of both North and South Vietnam to never move from the places they were born and grew up, and if having to relocate, never to the degree that Americans historically move in and out of homes. One of the main premises of the holiday of Tet is for one to migrate back to his or her place of childhood, a premise exploited by North Vietnam to sneak soldiers into South Vietnamese cities in 1968.[18] To the North and South Vietnamese farmer or worker before the Vietnam war, I would imagine neither communism or capitalism were synonymous with freedom. Freedom for your average Vietnamese citizen might just mean the ability to work your land and practice your own cultural and religious norms.

To an extent, the same applies to the average American farmer, worker, and family. Their main focuses are localized, their problems are in the community in which they may reside, and whether or not their government is communist or capitalist, they just want to be left alone. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t consequences for people in capitalistic or communistic societies, because there always are. But when one really gets down to the grit of it, the ordinary American and Vietnamese both view freedom in similar ways, the freedom from being told what to do.

NBC news categorizes present-day Vietnam as one of the “most pro-capitalist countries on Earth.” According to a Pew Research Poll, upwards of 95% of Vietnamese citizens are supportive of capitalism.[19] That number is twenty-five percentage points higher than the United States approval of capitalism, which sits just at 70% according to the same poll. Not only is it interesting to see the passing of the United States by Vietnam on the national approval of capitalism in a country that does not have it, but it is also interesting to think about how the ideas of freedom held by the ordinary people are changing. The farmers of Vietnam, the industrial-workers, the shop-owners; all have found increasing utility in economic freedom utilized by highly active and agile economies like South Korea, Japan, the United States, and elsewhere. Had we not fought the 19-year long Vietnam War, it is interesting to think about whether or not we would be meeting Vietnam right back at this moment anyway.

To the people that make up the countries on both sides of the war, freedom meant very similar things. The ability to live your life the way you would like to within your community, and to not be messed with, nor barred or forced to do anything unwillingly. To the North Vietnamese, freedom meant that a country, acting out of its own will and of its own accordance, can decide how to run its own country without the influence of foreign powers. Freedom of individuals within the country were not stressed, and sometimes plainly disregarded, after receiving sovereignty over the nation.

It was the second part of that equation that the United States had a problem with. To the United States, freedom was more concentrated, at least in theory, at the individual level. The very idea of communism was inherently detrimental to the American definition of freedom. Abolition of private property, state ownership of enterprise, it was these ideals that North Vietnam cherished, but the United States saw as antithetical to freedom. And in reverse, the North Vietnamese saw in the United States what appeared as run-amok capitalism, where the rich imposed their power on the poor and took what they wanted. Where labor was constantly fighting an uphill battle with capital, and where laws could be broken, given one had enough cash on hand. Whether or not either depiction of the other is true, both countries operated off a different paradigm of freedom. Each country saw evil in the other, and each saw injustice in the other as well.

Ho Chi Minh is perhaps one of the more interesting characters in 20th century history, freedom to him has an ambiguous meaning. In what world does a communist revolutionary find solace in the words of Thomas Jefferson? Ho Chi Minh’s freedom was freedom from the traditional American idea of freedom; in which people could do as they pleased, given they had the means to do so. Minh saw a world in which the people were held down by oppressive forces so as to benefit the capitalists themselves. From an individual growing up in a country that has never belonged to its own people during your lifetime and your family’s lifetime, this view of the world through a lens of class struggle can be easy to imagine.

However, simply because Ho Chi Minh viewed American and European foreign policy in an understandable way, does not mean he was correct on the freedom brought by communism, nor does it mean that European powers were correct in imposing capitalist systems in countries that were not interested, in the name of freedom. Communism is responsible for more deaths than any other ideology in the 20th century. The Vietnam War was not a referendum on capitalism, as polling might suggest; the Vietnam War was a referendum on the United States mandate to interfere in other countries affairs. The United States is on the right track in terms of economic freedom, yet Ho Chi Minh was also correct about the injustice he saw in a flawed, yet prosperous system.

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[1] Robert J. McMahon, Major Problems in the History of the Vietnam War (Houghton-Mifflin, Boston, 2003) Pg. 22.

[2] Kumar Sudhir Singh. “HO CHI MINH AND VIETNAM’S STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM.” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 70 (2009): 797.

[3] Central Intelligence Agency, “A Comparison of the Economies of North and South Vietnam.” 2019. Pg. 12.

[4] Central Intelligence Agency, “A Comparison of the Economies of North and South Vietnam.” 2019. Pg. 12–13.

[5] Toner, Simon (1 September 2017). “Imagining Taiwan: The Nixon Administration, the Developmental States, and South Vietnam’s Search for Economic Viability, 1969–1975”. Diplomatic History. 41 (4): Toner 772–798

[6] Central Intelligence Agency, “A Comparison of the Economies of North and South Vietnam.” 2019. Pg. 14.

[7] Ho Chi Minh, “Letter of Hi Cho Minh to Lyndon Johnson.” 1967.

[8] Robert J. McMahon, Major Problems in the History of the Vietnam War (Houghton-Mifflin, Boston, 2003) Pg. 18–19.

[9] The Pentagon Papers. (Gravel Edition, Volume II) Pg. 729–733.

[10] Freedom House. 2016.

[11] International Freedom Index. 2016.

[12] Reporters: San Frontieres. 2016.

[13]Democracy Index. 2012.

[14] Ho Chi Mihn, “Consolidation and Development of Ideological Unity Among Marxist-Leninist Parties (Foreign Languages Publishing House, 2003.)

[15] Ho Chi Mihn, “Consolidation and Development of Ideological Unity Among Marxist-Leninist Parties (Foreign Languages Publishing House, 2003.)

[16] The Pentagon Papers. (Gravel Edition, Volume II) Pg. 729–733.

[17] Digital Scholarship Lab, “The History Engine.”

[18] U.S. State Department, Office of the Historian.

[19] Patrick Winn. “It turns out Vietnam loves capitalism more than the United States does.” (Global Post, 2015).