58. Transcending the Seventeenth Parallel: Exploring Common Features, Patterns and Interactions in North and South Vietnamese State-Civil Society Relations, 1955-1975. Sponsored by the Vietnam Studies Group

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

In scholarship on the Vietnam War, historians have conventionally portrayed North and South Vietnam as worlds apart, bitter competitors divided by irreconcilable social and political values. Such depictions overlook, however, the ways that both states emerged as rival responses inspired by a shared anti-colonial tradition. Moreover, despite their ostensible differences, the two polities had a host of common features. In particular, as our panel demonstrates, political dynamics on both sides of the seventeenth parallel were characterized by conflict between authoritarian states and civil society groups, including journalists, students, religious communities, and intellectuals. And far from discrete, isolated entities, we show how the two states and their constituents were acutely aware of each other, crafting programs and policies in response to events and developments on the other side.

Drawing on newly-available Vietnamese-language sources, including memoirs, print media and archival material, this panel explores the intricate, interwoven connections between North and South Vietnam. We devote particular attention to confrontations between respective authoritarian states and civil society groups. By demonstrating that the North-South conflict was both more complex and more connected than previously appreciated, we challenge prevailing “orthodox” and “revisionist” interpretations of the war, which have sought to valorize the Hanoi and Saigon regimes, respectively. The result is a panel which highlights the significance of wartime Vietnam’s cross-border connections and common features, complicating less dispassionate prevailing assertions about the nature of the war’s rival belligerents, and providing a more nuanced understanding of the conflict’s complex political dynamics.

Area of Study

• Southeast

Session Organizer

• Sean Arthur Fear, Dartmouth College

Chair

• Peter Zinoman, University of California, Berkeley

Individual Presentations

• Responses and Consequences: The Impacts of the 1954 Geneva Accords on North Vietnam’s Land Reform, 1954-1956 - Alex-Thai D. Vo, Cornell University

• An Inside Look at North Vietnams "Committee for Revising the Constitution," 1957-1959 - Alec G. Holcombe, Ohio University

• An Quang’s Fateful Bargain: South Vietnamese Political Buddhism between Rival Authoritarian Regimes, 1967-1975 - Sean Arthur Fear, Dartmouth College

• Press Freedom or Death: The Struggle for Transparency and Freedom of the Press in South Vietnam, 1972-1975 - Van Nguyen-Marshall, Trent University

Discussant

• Peter Zinoman, University of California, Berkeley