Title: Vietnam After the War | Asia Pacific Curriculum
Headings: Vietnam After the War
Vietnam After the War
Overview
Prologue: The End of the “American War”
Introduction: The Challenges of Reconciliation
Background: The Road to War and Partition
Consolidating Political Control
Building a Socialist Economy
Resistance and Escape
Putting Post-War Vietnam in Context
Doi Moi and the “New” New Vietnam
Vietnamese Youth: Writing the Next Chapter
Acknowledgement

Content: The Second Indochina War—also known as the American War—had begun; it would not end until the United States withdrew and South Vietnam fell to the communist-run Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1975. Consolidating Political Control
The North and its allies’ defeat of the Republic of Vietnam cleared the way for the long-awaited reunification of the country. Soon after that, the North Vietnamese government took several steps to consolidate its political control over the south. This included eliminating potential rivals, “re-educating” those who were suspected of disloyalty, and preventing other ideologies and beliefs from competing with socialism. Removing rivals: The North quickly made clear that previous agreements for sharing power with allied groups in the south were no longer valid. According to the 1973 Paris Peace Accords (another set of negotiations that aimed to bring an end to the conflict), South Vietnam “was supposed to continue to exist as a separate and sovereign state” until the northerners and the southerners could agree on how to “unite the two Vietnams via elections or negotiations.” 7 Several NLF leaders believed that they could carve out and maintain some sort of neutral, non-communist southern state. At first, they had reason to be optimistic: