Why Should We Care About Non-Communist Discourse of Vietnamese Nationhood?

While issues on Vietnamese nationalism have been widely discussed in academia, the English scholarship on Vietnam’s politics and political history since the 1950s has remained ambivalent toward what constitutes the authenticity of modern Vietnamese nationalism.

The old historiography of the Vietnam War has mistakenly represented Marxist-Leninism as the authentic discourse of Vietnamese nationhood. Prominent Vietnam War historian William Duiker criticized the republican nationalism of Phan Boi Chau as theoretically immature and inherently gullible [1]. As a leading scholar of the new generation of Vietnam War historians, Tuong Vu notes that there was the tendency to allow “the Cần Vương, Đông Du and Việt Minh (the front organization for the Indochinese during the war years) to be lumped together.”[2]