What would Vietnam have been like if Ho Chi Minh had somehow managed to lead a unified Vietnam?
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WI: Ho Chi Minh Leads Unified Vietnam
- Thread starter Delta Force
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theflyingmgoose
Well-known member
IIRC correctly Ho Chi Minh was originally pro-American. Maybe if the Nationalists win the Chinese Civil War/a bigger divide between France and America over decolonization results in this.
Ricardolindo
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Not really. Ho Chi Minh had long been a communist. That doesn't mean that in 1945-1946, he wasn't willing to compromise with France and the United States but at the time, so was Stalin. All of Ho Chi Minh's policies were consistent with Soviet policy at the time.
This is one of the counterfactual hypotheses to which one can actually reply: not so very different from OTL. Although French pig-headedness followed by US obstinacy delayed reunification for 30 years, Vietnam finally got there in the end. Now one of the side-effects of the war is that it empowered hard-liners (in his last years of life Ho was little more than a figurehead for the regime) who implemented brutal policies in the years following the fall of the South; but within a decade even they figured out that orthodox Marxist-Leninism was a dead end and shifted to Chinese-style economic liberalization. The real question is whether a Vietnam that doesn't suffer the devastation of war and is governed pragmatically from the start could rise to "Asian Dragon" status or remain a middle-income country similar to, say, Thailand or Malaysia.
raharris1973
Well-known member
But is non-Command economics, using the market more than state directives, even intellectually 'trendy' enough for the Vietnamese party or Ho Chi Minh to try out in the 40s, 50s, or early 60s?
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I mean, they have Yugoslavia and Hungary as examples, no?
I Saw A Red Sky
He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but 🤓
As cautionary tales.
The glib answer is that it was trendy enough for Lenin in the 1920s. The longer answer is that Ho Chi Minh wasn't a particularly doctrinaire Communist, his ultimate goal being an independent and unified Vietnam. In OTL, he backtracked and publicly admitted failure after his botched attempt at land collectivization in the 1950s, quite unlike Mao with the Great Leap Forward a few years later. If he has good reason to believe that market-oriented policies will deliver better outcomes, I don't think he will hesitate more than, in OTL, the Vietnamese leadership did in the 1980s.
raharris1973
Well-known member
Yes, but those two weren't very news making in the third world.
And nobody went as far as his NEPitude in the Communist world, except in the opening, transitional stages, again, until Deng's reforms from 1979 onward. Not even Yugoslavia or Hungary.
I would agree with all this. He was not the martinet and micromanager that many other Communist dictators were. He was more collegial, and later on gracefully accepted being retired to a more 'Emperor of Japan' like symbolic status. I just think the consensus of the Party, while moderating away from leftist excesses with always be watchful about quashing excessive bourgeois concentrations and keep directing imperatives for degrees of forced heavy industrialization for ideological, nationalistic and national security reasons. The Party in the middle/late 1980s going the full doi moi, and loosening the leash on capitalist actors and foreign investors so much still owed something to the Chinese showing it was 'safe' and could be survived with Party rule intact.
Even in China, Deng and Zhou and Liu eventually got a pull back from Great Leap Forward crazy and the communes to pragmatism. But that was a pullback to more grounded, planned economics, a la Khrushchev (sometimes), Malenkov, and Brezhnev, it wasn't breaking up the collectives for private leases a la NEP during the Deng 1.0 interlude of the early 1960s. Breaking up the collectives and effectively redistributing the land a la NEP had to wait until 1979-1980 until Deng 2.0.
One thing people miss about a China style economic opening is that unlike the NEP comparison, it's not a self contained internal policy, it's an attempt at capturing international capital. If there's no Nixon, Deng would have been a boring internal market in planning reformist, not a full return to capitalism under party control. Lot of talk about what the party would be willing to do and not enough about which western nation would bankroll it.
Is there any appetite to invest in a red nation, especially one that probably didn't break with the USSR in the dramatic way China did?
Is there any appetite to invest in a red nation, especially one that probably didn't break with the USSR in the dramatic way China did?
I mean China's break with the USSR wasn't dramatic, but an earlier united Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh would probably be working both sides of the Sino-Soviet Split like Korea did. Mind you an earlier reunification of Vietnam could be essential for easing Sino-Soviet tensions while Mao is still kicking especially since the DRV's politics were very much effected by it, but that is a question of when does reunification happen, and more importantly how.
raharris1973
Well-known member
When you say ‘wasn’t dramatic’ do you mean ‘wasn’t sudden’ or ‘abrupt’ or ‘out of the blue’?
It reached ‘dramatic’ heights certainly. If you don’t think so, you’re a pretty tough audience!
When you say ‘wasn’t dramatic’ do you mean ‘wasn’t sudden’ or ‘abrupt’ or ‘out of the blue’?
It reached ‘dramatic’ heights certainly. If you don’t think so, you’re a pretty tough audience!
The United States didn't realize that a Sino-Soviet Split had actually occurred until the 1969 Sino-Soviet Border Conflict. It realized that something was up when the Soviet Union sent feelers to the United States to the effect of how it would respond if the Soviet Union were to hypothetically launch a nuclear first strike against the PRC.
When you say ‘wasn’t dramatic’ do you mean ‘wasn’t sudden’ or ‘abrupt’ or ‘out of the blue’?
It reached ‘dramatic’ heights certainly. If you don’t think so, you’re a pretty tough audience!
I mean that it wasn't this sudden shocking thing. The U.S was thinking of ways to split the second world as early as 1947, before anything as belligerent as the Berlin blockade had happened, and some had even thought that the CCP and later PRC could be made to 'switch sides' or that the U.S had a 'lost chance' with China. Knowledge of the split was at least openly known by 64. The fact that some of the rhetoric around Ho Chi Minh basically sounds similar to the 'lost chance' idea makes me very skeptical that he
Mind you, all knowing about the Sino-Soviet split ever did was cause the U.S. to double down on the idea they had to stay in Vietnam, so the more aggressive Maoist rhetoric wouldn't win out. So the Domino Theory just evolved in the face of new information and didn't go away.
That's not true, Again The U.S knew by 64 at least and was making considerations some after the Cuban Missle Crisis, if the U.S knew earlier than 63 or even 62 I don't exactly know, but there were discussions about this on Radio Free Europe by 64
Back to the topic, I don't think Ho Chi Minh leading a unified Vietnam would matter that much, at least to the U.S. it's someone's fault we 'lost' Vietnam. There was still the issue of Sino-Soviet politics to deal with even if no Vietnam War or a faster resolution somehow makes politics easier the issue of who to back isn't going to be resolved then and there. Ho, was backed by China from the jump, while the Soviets had their reservations.
How it gets reunified is important, The NLF/Viet Cong whatever you want to call them were not necessarily in lock step with the DRV, while a violent reunification basically saw any concerns kicked to the curb, peaceful reunification might give those groups some cards to go work with. But if there is still something like an informal North First faction under Ho Chi Minh, and an informal South First faction under Le Duan, the NLF/Viet Cong could easily have friends in Le's faction within the party.
Basically, I think there are too many moving parts and possible biases to go make a clear statement other than a theoretically Ho Chi Minh led wouldn't be anything more than Romania, a state largely in a position to play the Sino-Soviet Split without too much coercion.
Jackson Lennock
Well-known member
Yugoslavia managed to successfully do its own thing. Hungary was already in the Warsaw Pact. Vietnam has all of China in between themselves and the Soviets, and the Chinese demonstrated OTL that marching south into Vietnam isn't exactly easy.
Ho Chi Minh pursuing a Titoist Communist/Socialist-but-politically-neutral position doesn't seem implausible to me.
Also, if Ho Chi Minh is leading a unified independent Vietnam from the get-go (ergo, no partition of Vietnam), couldn't that still mean Cochinchina isn't part of Vietnam? Unlike Tonkin and Annam (which were protectorates that formally had the Nguyen dynasty as sovereigns) Cochinchina was French. France proclaiming Cochinchina as an "autonomous Republic" was a cause (among others) of the First Indochina War.
raharris1973
Well-known member
Points against a separatist Cochinchina, presumably propped up by the French, and serving as a refuge for various anti-Viet Minh factions:
a) It was Admiral Thierry D'Argenlieu's post-war insistence on maintaining a separate Cochinchina from Vietnam was the formal, political reason the Viet Minh cited to having to restart armed resistance and having irreconcilable political differences with France in 1946 & 1947. [Even though France allowed their puppet administrators to 'reunite' the two as early as 48 or 49]
b) It is simply an affront to most Vietnamese national sensibilities
Point in favor of getting Viet Minh to live with it for a good long while:
1. At least this area does not house the home towns/villages/provinces of two southern-born of southern-firster major Party members, Le Duan and Pham Van Dong, they were from Annamese provinces, so they may have less sentimental and visceral attachment to recovering the extreme far south.