Hanoi's Capitalist Revolution - City Journal
fter the Vietnam War ended in 1975, Hanoi, capital of a now-unified, Communist Vietnam, was a bombed-out disasterscape. People queued up in long lines past government stores with bare shelves to exchange ration coupons for meager handfuls of rice. Since then, however, Hanoi has transformed itself more dramatically than almost any other city in the world. Today, the city is an explosive capitalist volcano, and Vietnam is rapidly on its way to becoming a formidable economic and military power. Many revolutions are begun by conservatives, Christopher Hitchens once said, paraphrasing John Maynard Keynes, because these are people who tried to make the existing system work and they know why it does not. Thats exactly what happened in Vietnam, though the revolutionaries werent conservatives. The French invaded and made it the capital of colonial French Indochina in 1887. The Empire of Japan seized the city in 1940 and annexed Vietnam to its fascistic Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam an independent state after World War II, and his Viet Minh forces controlled a few scraps of territory, but the French returned in force in 1946 and didnt leave until Hos Communist army forced them out in 1954. Hanoi... Hos centrally planned Marxist-Leninist system ravaged the economy, and war with the United States and the American-backed government of South Vietnam—which included aerial bombardment of Hanoi itself—made the devastation complete. Source: www.city-journal.org
