Vietnam today is a vibrant, youthful country that has opened its borders to foreign investment and tourism. When will political changes follow economic ones, asks David Tresilian in Hanoi While the familiar features of Ho Chi Minh, first president of communist North Vietnam, still look out from Vietnam's banknotes and the walls of public buildings, the hold of his brand of Marxism-Leninism has long been weakening over this Southeast Asian country, at least in the economic sphere. Visiting Vietnam today, one could be forgiven for thinking that this was a capitalist country, such is the amount of thriving private-sector activity particularly in Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, once the capital of South Vietnam. Following the introduction of the 'Doi Moi' ('renovation') reform programme announced by the ruling Communist Party in 1986, Vietnam has witnessed far-reaching changes to the ways in which the economy and society are organised. The agricultural collectives that were once a feature of the countryside have now been largely broken up, and foreign private investment is now welcomed, rather than shunned, as is private enterprise. All this has had knock-on effects on Vietnamese civil society and on possibilities for self- expression, including artistic and cultural expression, even as the political system remains anti- pluralist and the formation of associations outside government control circumscribed. The question hanging over Vietnam today is when, and how far, the country's political system will follow the social and economic changes that have been taking place in the country over the last two decades. Such changes have accelerated in recent years with Vietnam's developing rapprochement with the United States. Diplomatic relations were restored in 1995, and former US president G.W. Bush paid an official visit to the country in 2006. Vietnam entered the World Trade Organisation in 2001, and few visitors to the country today, with fast-food restaurants and internet cafes lining the streets even of the more conservative northern city of Hanoi, will feel isolated from the outside world, as was possible only 15 years ago when Vietnam was still suffering from US sanctions. Taxi drivers in Hanoi regularly point out the Temple of Literature to visitors, an ancient Confucian temple in the centre of the city, since this was the venue of a highly publicised visit to the city by US president Bill Clinton in 2000, the first visit by a US head of state since the collapse of the former South Vietnam. Today, the site is as much a part of the tourist route as the former French colonial-era prison, the so-called "Hanoi Hilton," where US prisoners were held during the Vietnam War. Now partly demolished, and the remainder turned into a museum, this building once held John McCain, the Republican Party candidate in this year's US presidential elections, when he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam in the 1960s. As good an indication as any of how Vietnam has changed since then is the gleaming new representative of the US hotel chain, the Hilton Hanoi Opera, which stands besides the French colonial-era Opera House, a beautifully renovated building in the Hoan Kiem district of Hanoi. Yet, for all this emphasis on reconciliation and modernisation, contemporary Vietnam, perhaps more than any other country in a region with a stark modern history of war and violence, is still a society marked by war, first against the former colonial power, France, and then during the long period of civil conflict between North and South Vietnam, during which the north of the country was supported by China and the south by the United States. This only ended in 1975 following the withdrawal of US troops from the country and the subsequent collapse of the regime in South Vietnam. War was almost continuous between 1945, when Ho Chi Minh, general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, declared his country's independence from French colonial rule, to the short but bitter conflict between Vietnam and China in 1979. Such wars gave rise to an estimated 1.5 million military casualties on the North Vietnamese side, perhaps a quarter of a million on the South, with perhaps two million civilians also killed. The effects of this remain today in the legacy of bitterness 30 years or more of war may have created between Vietnamese from southern and northern Vietnam and among members of the Vietnamese diaspora that fled the south of the country following the northern victory. The effects remain, too, in the poisonous legacy of the chemical agents used by the United States in its war against North Vietnamese fighters in the late 1960s and early 70s. In addition to 'napalm', a thickened form of gasoline, which, sticking to the skin, causes third-degree burns, millions of gallons of "Agent Orange," a defoliant containing the poison dioxin, were sprayed across South Vietnam in an attempt to deny forest cover to fighters hostile to the Saigon regime, the Viet Cong. Vietnam today is living with the after-effects of this in the shape of the health problems suffered by those exposed to Agent Orange and the birth and other defects it has caused in subsequent generations. The sheer scale of the warfare waged by the US in Vietnam still has the power to shock, even for those born too late to have first-hand memories of the Vietnam War, as it is called in the West, or the "American War," as it is called in Vietnam. The figures are staggering, with the United States dropping some seven million tons of bombs on Vietnam according to some estimates, more than were used throughout the Second World War. Violence and instability spread throughout Southeast Asia, particularly in neighbouring Cambodia and Laos. Incidents such as the 1968 My Lai Massacre, in which US forces ran amok killing between 300 and 500 unarmed southern Vietnamese villagers, and the famous photographs of Vietnamese children, their skin hanging off in strips as a result of a napalm attack, caused revulsion against the war worldwide, eventually contributing to the retirement from politics of the then Democratic Party president Lyndon Johnson. Johnson, Kennedy's vice-president, was the man most associated with the escalation of the American war in Vietnam, and his career ended in ignominious fashion when Richard Nixon, the Republican Party candidate, won the 1968 US presidential elections after a promise to extricate America from the "quagmire" it had created in Vietnam. Although today there are signs of rapprochement between the US and Vietnam, and anyone visiting Ho Chi Minh City in particular will be struck by the number of American tourists visiting sites associated with the Vietnam War, this has not so far translated into the US accepting responsibility for its use of chemical agents in Vietnam, even though the companies that produced them have admitted liability with regard to US veterans. In February 2009, the US Supreme Court turned down an appeal by Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange, refusing to hear a case against the US companies concerned. Like other societies emerging from periods of conflict and perhaps also from Communist Party rule, Vietnam has had to confront issues of how to remember the past. Such debates are familiar from Eastern Europe, where the formerly Eastern bloc countries have set about renegotiating their relationships with Russia and the United States, while at the same time finding ways either of remembering, or erasing, their recent histories. In the case of Vietnam, issues of remembrance are made more complicated by the fact that the regime continues to trace its legitimacy to victories achieved under Communist Party leadership in the French and American wars, even as the Doi Moi reforms may have called the ideological bases of Party rule into question. Hagiographical accounts of the life and thought of Ho Chi Minh are everywhere on sale in today's Vietnam, but it is not clear how his Marxist-Leninist programme relates to the current policies of the Communist Party of Vietnam or to the direction taken by the country post-Doi Moi. Visitors to Hanoi, for example, will almost certainly pay a visit to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum in Ba Dinh Square, where the former president's preserved remains are on show, much in the way that the body of Lenin used to be displayed in Moscow during Communist Party rule in the former Soviet Union. Nearby, there is the Ho Chi Minh Museum, which presents an official version of the life of this remarkable man. Growing up in northern Vietnam, the son of a provincial mandarin, Ho Chi Minh, born Nguyen Sinh Cung, left for France in 1911, eventually travelling to the United States, England, the Soviet Union and China. In France he joined the Communist Party and campaigned for the independence of what was then French Indochina, before continuing his political education in the Soviet Union. He returned to Vietnam in 1941 to lead the Viet Minh independence movement against France, declaring the independence of Vietnam from French colonial rule in September 1945. Yet, extraordinary as the details of Ho Chi Minh's life are, his version of revolutionary struggle, as austere as Mao's in neighbouring China, does not seem to be popular in today's Hanoi. Marxism-Leninism may have lost its capacity to mobilise. While the streets are full of the familiar iconography -- Ho Chi Minh in combat uniform leading the people, Ho Chi Minh addressing workers and peasants, Ho Chi Minh greeting the wives and mothers of revolutionary fighters -- they are full, too, of a perhaps even more familiar iconography that comes from outside Vietnam and from a system that Ho Chi Minh spent his life fighting. There is something disorientating about finding images of Ho Chi Minh facing those of Colonel Saunders, of chicken fame, across the same Hanoi boulevard, though perhaps this simply marks the passage from revolutionary purity to commercial bathos. This kind of layering, particularly when taken with the French colonial-style buildings that grace Hanoi's central boulevards, gives an indication of the country's recent history. Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, is more geared to international visitors, and it is here that memories of the war are perhaps most in evidence, at least for foreign consumption. Originally developed as a port, something like the British colonial comptoirs of Hong Kong and Singapore, Saigon was intended by its French colonial rulers to funnel the country's export production, particularly rice, out to foreign markets. One might say that it played a similar role in colonial Vietnam to that played by Alexandria in Egypt. Saigon was laid out on less grand a scale than Hanoi, and recent history has only confirmed its secondary status. The Vietnamese themselves draw a contrast between life in the north and the more business- oriented character of life in Saigon. Historically, because of the commercial role the city played under French rule, a large Chinese community grew up in Saigon, and this is still centred in Cholon, slightly outside the city centre. Memoirs of the colonial period, such as French novelist Marguerite Duras's L'Amant (The Lover), winner of the Prix Goncourt, mention Cholon as home to what elsewhere would be called the city's Chinatown. Graham Greene's 1955 novel The Quiet American, one of the best-known literary works to have come out of the earlier, French stage of the war, also mentions Cholon, though his novel has a different topography. Whereas Duras has her characters move across the Saigon River and into the Mekong Delta and beyond, Greene's book is set around the Continental Hotel on the corner of the rue Caritat, now Khoi Dong, which runs from the port area towards the cathedral and the former colonial governor's palace. This was rebuilt in 1966 as a residence of the president of the former South Vietnam, and, together with the newspaper pictures of the evacuation of the US embassy in Saigon, images of a tank crashing through the gates of the palace during an attack by Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces in April 1975 have become inseparably associated with the fall of Saigon. Visitors today commonly have their photographs taken in front of this tank, now placed in the palace grounds. One of the most-visited institutions in Ho Chi Minh City today is the War Remnants Museum, which gives an account of the American war from a northern Vietnamese point of view. Housed in a 1970s building, the presentation is stark and dated by contemporary standards, but it is also effective. The story the museum tells is of a puppet regime in the south that survived only thanks to massive American economic and military aid, and this is repeated in institutions throughout the city. Down by the docks, in the former French colonial-era customs house, there is the Saigon version of the northern Ho Chi Minh museum, which retells the life of Ho Chi Minh and the political events of which he was a part. The story is given extra resonance from its location, since it was from the Saigon port that Ho Chi Minh left Vietnam in search of employment and revolutionary inspiration abroad. Elsewhere in the city, the Ho Chi Minh City Museum, another former presidential palace, has a display of memories of the anti-colonial struggle, and the subsequent struggle to unify the country under northern rule. The Museum of Vietnamese Women is particularly interesting, though visitors are sparse. The French psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon probably did most to popularise the study of the roles played by women in the anti-colonial wars of the 1950s and 60s, famously examining women's roles in the context of Algeria. The Museum of Vietnamese Women does something similar for women members of the Viet Minh and Viet Cong. However, probably the most interesting experience to foreign visitors to southern Vietnam may be a visit to the Cu Chi Tunnels, some 70 km north of Saigon. Located in the flat delta region that surrounds the city on three sides, these were once used by Viet Cong fighters in their war against the southern Vietnamese regime and its American allies. One of the major problems facing the Saigon government was its imperfect control of the countryside. Controlled by Viet Minh insurgents fighting the French during the earlier, French part of the war, and then by the Viet Cong during the later American stages, southern Vietnamese and US patrols were susceptible to ambush from rural guerrilla fighters, and the Cu Chi Tunnels help to explain why. Beneath what today are tranquil orchards and plantations of rubber trees lie some 200 kilometres of tunnels forming a network like a spider's web. Viet Cong fighters lived in these tunnels during the Vietnam War, having excavated them using hand tools over a period of years. Emerging at night, or when American patrols were passing, these men could attack as if out of nowhere, before melting away again underground. Shortly after the end of the Vietnam War, the tunnels were designated a national monument, and today they form a highly choreographed visit for tourists. Destroyed American tanks, victims of improvised explosive devices, still lie at intervals on the surface, which is pockmarked, too, by bomb craters, now largely filled with vegetation and trees. Visitors are taken through a presentation of the tunnels that shows the organisation of the area prior to the 1968 "Tet Offensive", an uprising by Viet Cong forces in southern Vietnam linked to a major push by regular North Vietnamese forces. The presentation shows the difficulties faced by the south Vietnamese and their American allies in gaining control of the countryside under Viet Cong control. Visiting the tunnels themselves, and then crawling through a short, ten-metre stretch of them in the company of a uniformed military guide, also causes one to marvel at the physical endurance and agility of the Viet Cong, who would have lived in the tunnels perhaps for days at a time. Anyone of Caucasian ancestry, and probably anyone over 40, is likely to have intense difficulty crawling through even the enlarged sections of the tunnels that are open to visitors. It is extraordinary that these tunnels were once home to the Viet Cong, and one shudders to think of the fate of the American "tunnel rats" and the southern Vietnamese soldiers, chosen because of their smaller stature, sent into the tunnels to clear them of the fighters. Visiting Vietnam today, at peace and undergoing a prolonged period of economic growth, it is natural to wonder about how the process of post- war reconciliation that has gathered pace in recent years will continue. Will the ruling Communist Party give up its pre-eminent role and allow multi- party elections to take place? Will the controls still exercised over the country's press and civil society be relaxed, loosening the hold of the Communist-era nomenklatura ? There have been signs that something like this may be on the way, and certainly Vietnamese artists, to take one example, though still corporately organised, are no longer required to see themselves as the "intellectual workers" of the revolution, producing iconography of peasants and workers united under Communist Party banners. Pressure for change may come from returning Vietnamese émigrés, the Viet Khieu, who left the country after Communist victory in 1975, but are now returning, bringing their skills with them. This process of return and reconciliation is being encouraged by the Vietnamese state. Can it be too long before the rituals played out around the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum in Hanoi, the military marches that take place before Ho Chi Minh's dead body, are also consigned to history?
