Communism in Vietnam
During the 1930s, the Communist Party was nearly wiped out due to French execution of its top leaders such as Trần Phú, Lê Hồng Phong, and Nguyễn Văn Cừ.
[1] The Việt Minh had an armed force and, during the war, worked with the American Office of Strategic Services to collect intelligence on the Japanese.
Because the campaign was mainly concentrated in the Red River Delta area, a lower estimate of 50,000 executions was accepted by many scholars at the time.
The NLF called for Southern Vietnamese to "overthrow the camouflaged colonial regime of the American Imperialists" and to make "efforts towards the peaceful unification".
The PLAF's best-known action was the Tet Offensive, an assault on more than 100 South Vietnamese urban centres in 1968, including an attack on the U.S. embassy in Saigon.
Members of the Party, the People's Army of Vietnam or the former NLF and their families were often the recipients of the confiscated properties, often in downtown areas of cities and towns.
Any negative comments about the Party, the State, Ho Chi Minh, or anything else that was critical of status-quo might earn the person the tag of a Phản Động (Reactionary), with consequences ranging from harassment by the police, to expulsion from one's school or workplace, or imprisonment.
Nevertheless, the government failed to suppress the black market, where food, consumer goods, and banned literature could be bought at high prices.
These conditions resulted in an exodus of around 2.5 million Vietnamese (approximately 5% of the population[8]) secretly escaping the country either by sea or overland through Cambodia.
Some were successful in fleeing the region and large numbers of them landed in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Hong Kong, only to wind up in United Nations refugee camps.
During the early 1980s, a number of overseas Vietnamese organisations were created with the aim of overthrowing the newly unified government through armed struggle once peaceful protesting was no longer a viable option.
Most notable were the organisations led by Hoàng Cơ Minh from the US, Võ Đại Tôn from Australia, and Lê Quốc Túy from France.
Lê Quốc Túy stayed in France so he could undergo kidney treatment while his allies were arrested and executed in Vietnam.
These organisations gained massive funding from US-aligned interest groups as from their eyes, transitioning modern-day Vietnam into a Liberal democracy would be a superior economic and social alternative and would improve the lifestyle of many of those living under the current socialist system (which utilises many capitalist-style marketing techniques), whereas Pro-Socialists in Vietnam may unwittingly see this act, even if it is viewed as benign by pro-democratic, as an act of reopening unhealed wounds.
Additionally, a drastic shift in governance ideology would produce a change too vast for the Vietnamese to cope with, as evident with how Russia suffered immense drops in economic and social conditions when USSR dissolved in 1991 due to Shock therapy.
In the following decades of the dissolution of the USSR, only five or six of the post-communist states are on a path to joining the wealthy capitalist West while most fell behind, some to such an extent that it will take over fifty years to catch up to where they were before the fall of the Soviet Bloc, justifying that Vietnam did not need to transition to Liberal democracy anytime soon.
Some cadres, realizing the economic suffering of the people, began to break the rules and experiment with market-oriented enterprises, thus, following models inspired by Western World values.
This was tolerated by most local authorities before becoming widespread and popular after small business regulations loosened in the 1990s – around the same the time the USSR started to dissolve.
