Asian Survey, a monthly journal, usually focuses in current or recent events, but at least the articles are written by scholars, and sometimes there are articles dealing with events far enough in the past to allow a real historical perspective. In January or February of each year, it usually published an article summarizing the events of the previous year in North Vietnam. If you browse the Internet through an institution that has subscribed to JSTOR, you can access the journal through the JSTOR Asian Survey browse page or go to individual articles directly. The listing below is a very incomplete sample of the relevant articles:
Jean Bertolino, Vietnam sanglant: au sud et au nord du 17e parallele, 1967-1968. Paris: Stock, 1968. 226 pp. Bertolino, a journalist, was in Vietnam for all or almost all of 1967. He expresses affection for the American GIs serving in Vietnam, but his tone is hostile to the U.S. war effort. Approximately half the book is about the South, and half about the North.
Elizabeth J. Boardman, Phoenix Trip: Notes on a Quaker Mission to Haiphong. Burnsville, NC: Celo Press, 1985. xv, 174 pp. A Quaker mission that delivered medical supplies to North Vietnam in 1967.
Georges Boudarel, Cent Fleurs Ecloses dans la Nuit du Vietnam: Communisme et Dissidence, 1954-1956. Paris: Jacques Bertoin, 1991. 302 pp. A very important account, by a witness.
Georges Boudarel and Nguyen Van Ky, Hanoi 1936-1996. Paris: Autrement, 1997. 203 pp.
James Cameron, Here is Your Enemy. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1966. 144 pp. By a British journalist who was allowed into North Vietnam in December 1965.
Gerard Chaliand, The Peasants of North Vietnam. Penguin, 1969. 244 pp. (French original Paris: Maspero, 1968). By a Frenchman who visited North Vietnam for several months late in 1967.
China Quarterly no. 9 (January-March 1962) was a special issue devoted to North Vietnam. The articles can give you a good idea of how North Vietnam was seen in the West in 1962, though in hindsight some of them do not seem to have been very accurate. If you browse the Internet through an institution that has subscribed to JSTOR, you can access this issue through the JSTOR China Quarterly browse page or go to individual articles through the links below:
Noam Chomsky, "A Special Supplement: In North Vietnam." New York Review of Books, 15:3 (August 13, 1970). Account of a visit Chomsky made to North Vietnam April 10-17, 1970.
Albert Clavier, De l'Indochine coloniale au Vietnam libre: Je ne regrette rien. Paris: Indes Savantes, 2008. 205 pp. Clavier went over from the French forces to the Viet Minh during the First Indochina War, and remained in North Vietnam until 1964.
Barbara Crossette, "What the Poets Thought: Antiwar Sentiment in North Vietnam." World Policy Journal XX:1 (Spring 2003). The poet Hoang Cam and others who disapproved the war, but were prevented from forming an antiwar movement.
Olga Dror, Making Two Vietnams: War and Youth Identities, 1965–1975. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019 (forthcoming).
Charles Fourniau, Le Vietnam face à la guerre. Paris: Editions Sociales, 1966. 288 pp. 2d ed. 1967. 318 pp. Strongly pro-Communist; the author was in North Vietnam from 1963 to 1965 as a correspondent for the French Communist Party newspaper l'Humanité.
Charles Fourniau, Le Vietnam que j'ai vu (1960-2000). Paris: les Indes Savantes, 248 pp. Almost half the book (pp. 12-115) is devoted to Fourniau's stay in North Vietnam from October 1963 to July 1965, as a correspondent for l'Humanité. pp. 116-142 cover visits to North Vietnam between 1968 and 1972; pp. 143-243 deal with postwar Vietnam.
John Gerassi, North Vietnam: A Documentary. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. 200 pp. Gerassi, a journalist and an opponent of US policy in Vietnam, arrived in Hanoi December 30, 1966.
George Ginsburgs, "Local Government and Administration in North Vietnam, 1945-1954", China Quarterly, no. 10 (Apr-Jun 1962), pp. 174-204. If you browse the Internet through an institution that has subscribed to JSTOR, you can access the text directly or go through the JSTOR China Quarterly browse page.
George Ginsburgs, "Local Government and Administration in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam since 1954", China Quarterly, no. 12 (Oct-Dec 1962), pp. 211-230, and no. 14 (Apr-Jun 1963), pp. 195-211. If you browse the Internet through an institution that has subscribed to JSTOR, you can access part 1 and part 2 directly or go through the JSTOR China Quarterly browse page.
Martin Grossheim, "The Lao Dong Party, Culture and the Campaign against 'Modern Revisionism': The Democratic Republic of Vietnam Before the Second Indochina War," Journal of Vietnamese Studies 8:1 (Winter 2013), pp. 80-129. The text is on JSTOR. The campaign of 1963-64.
Bertrand de Hartingh, Entre le peuple et la nation: la République Démocratique du Viêt Nam de 1953 à 1957. Paris: École française d'Extrême-Orient, 2003. 585 pp.
Bertrand de Hartingh, "L'adoption de la réforme agraire par la République démocratique du Vietnam: pragmatisme ou idéologie?" Autrepart (3), 1997, pp. 5-24.
Hoang Van Chi, From Colonialism to Communism: A Case History of North Vietnam. New York: Praeger, 1964. xv, 252 pp. A very unreliable study, by a refugee from North Vietnam, of the transformations brought about in North Vietnam by the Communists in the 1950s. Some of the mistranslations of Communist documents in this book have become famous.
Alec Holcombe, "The Complete Collection of Party Documents: Listening to the Party's Official Internal Voice," Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 5:2 (Summer 2010), pp. 225-242. An analysis of documents relating to the land reform and related campaigns, especially the early stages (from 1953 to about the middle of 1955), found in Van kien dang toan tap.
Alec Holcombe, Mass Mobilization in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 1945–1960. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2020.
P.J. Honey, a British scholar, very anti-Communist, wrote a series of quarterly reports on North Vietnam that were published as special issues of China News Analysis, a newsletter based in Hong Kong that was, as the title indicates, usually devoted to China. A considerable number of these have been placed online in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project at Texas Tech University, including:
"Responsibility for the War in South Vietnam," North Vietnam Quarterly Report No. 14 (pp. 6-7 of China News Analysis No. 544), December 11, 1964.
"Vietnam at War," North Vietnam Quarterly Report No. 26 (China News Analysis No. 678), September 22, 1967. 7 pp. Note p. 5 and p. 7n7, which between them suggest that Harrison Salisbury, reporting from Vietnam a few months earlier, had reported that support for government policies was universal in North Vietnam. I very much doubt that Salisbury had reported any such thing.
"The Offensive: Hanoi's Change in Strategy," North Vietnam Quarterly Report No. 28 (China News Analysis No. 701), March 22, 1968. 7 pp.
"Peace in Vietnam?" North Vietnam Quarterly Report No. 29 (China News Analysis No. 713), June 21, 1968. 7 pp.
"Peace Hangs in the Balance," North Vietnam Quarterly Report No. 47 (China News Analysis No. 903), December 8, 1972. 7 pp.
"North Vietnam's Objectives," North Vietnam Quarterly Report No. 48 (China News Analysis No. 913), March 16, 1973. 7 pp.
"Vietnamese Communist Experience Since the Cease-Fire," North Vietnam Quarterly Report No. 54 (China News Analysis No. 973), September 13, 1974. 7 pp.
Hy V. Luong, with Nguyen Dac Bang, Revolution in the Village: Tradition and Transformation in North Vietnam, 1925-1988. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992. xxiii, 272 pp. History of the village of Son-Duong, in what used to be Phu Tho province (merged into Vinh Phu province in 1968) northwest of Hanoi. The full text is available online to paid subscribers of Questia.
Hy V. Luong, Tradition, Revolution, and Market Economy in a North Vietnamese Village, 1925-2006. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2010. xiii, 333 pp. A revised and expanded edition.
Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet, The Power of Everyday Politics: How Vietnamese Peasants Transformed National Policy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. xii, 305 pp.
Benedict J. Kerkvliet and David Marr, eds., Beyond Hanoi: Local Government in Vietnam. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2004. xii, 359 pp.
John Kleinen, Facing the Future, Reviving the Past: A Study of Social Change in a Northern Vietnamese Village. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1999. xv, 239 pp. History of a village in the Red River Delta, about 25 km southwest of Hanoi, in what used to be Ha Dong province. Kleinen did field work in the village between 1992 and 1996.
Danielle Labbé, Land politics and livelihoods on the margins of Hanoi, 1920-2010. Vancouver, BC, Canada: UBC Press, 2014. Includes interesting material on the land reform.
Lê Châu, Le Viet Nam socialiste: une economie de transition. Paris: Maspero, 1966. 410 pp.
Christian Lentz, "Cultivating Subjects: Opium and Rule in Post-Colonial Vietnam," Modern Asian Studies, 51:4 (July 2017).
William S. Logan, Hanoi: Biography of a City. Seattle: University of Washington Press/Sydney, Australia: University of New South Wales Press, 2000. xvi, 304 pp. Runs from pre-colonial times up to the 1990s. Numerous illustrations.
Mary McCarthy, Hanoi. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1969. 159 pp. Most of this is an account of Ms. McCarthy's visit to North Vietnam in March 1968. The full text was reprinted in Mary McCarthy, The Seventeenth Degree (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), pp. 167-322.
Carol Cohen McEldowney, Hanoi Journal, 1967. Edited by Suzanne Kelley McCormack and Elizabeth R. Mock. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007. xiv, 151 pp. McEldowney was a member of an SDS group led by Tom Hayden, which visited Hanoi in late 1967.
Shawn McHale, "Vietnamese Marxism, Dissent, and the Politics of Postcolonial Memory: Tran Duc Thao, 1946-1993," Journal of Asian Studies 61:1 (February 2007), pp. 7-31. Tran Duc Thao (born 1917) was a French-educated intellectual who returned to Vietnam in 1951 and became (in 1956?) dean of the Faculty of History of the University of Hanoi. He published two articles in Nhan Van and was caught up in the repression of intellectuals soon after.
Shaun Kingsley Malarney, Culture, Ritual and Revolution in Vietnam. RoutledgeCurzon, 2002 (distributed in the United States by University of Hawaii Press). 253 pp.
Michael Peter Mau, "The Political Evolution of the Village-Commune in North Vietnam, 1802-1970." Ph.D. dissertation, Political Science(?), University of Pennsylvania, 1977. 424 pp. 77-19893. The xa in Tonkin.
M. Giovanna Merli, "Socioeconomic Background and War Mortality During Vietnam's Wars," Demography vol. 37, no. 1, February 2000, pp. 1-15. Based on a survey in the Red River Delta in 1995.
Edwin E. Moise, Land Reform in China and North Vietnam: Consolidating the Revolution at the Village Level. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983. xiv, 305 pp. The land reform of 1953-56 in North Vietnam, which was supposed to distribute the land of rich landlords to the poor peasants as private property, was botched in an astonishingly stupid and brutal fashion. The mess was cleaned up better than one might have expected, but the scars of the disaster still lingered.
Nguyen Manh Tuong, Un excommunié: Hanoi 1954–1991; procès d'un intellectuel. Paris: Que Me, 1992. Nguyen Manh Tuong, a French-educated intellectual and lawyer, was a fairly prominent figure in Hanoi until he criticized Communist Party excesses in 1956.
Nguyen Manh Tuong, Ke bi khai tru: Ha Noi, 1954–1991: vu an mot tri thuc: tu truyen. Falls Church, VA: Tieng que huong, 2011. Vietnamese translation, by Nguyen Quoc Vi, of Tuong's book.
Nguyen Manh Tuong, Ke bi mat phep thong cong: Ha Noi 1954–1991: Ban an cho mot tri thuc. Vietnamese translation, by Nguyen Quoc Vi, of Tuong's book. I don't know whether this version of the Vietnamese text is identical to the one listed immediately above.
Nguyen Thuy Phuong, "A French School in North Vietnam: The Lycée Albert-Sarraut from 1954 to 1965," Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 10:3 (2015), pp. 1-47.
Nguyen Van Tran, Viet cho me va Quoc Hoi. Van Nghe, 1995. Memoir by a party member who had been trained in Moscow.
Philippe Papin, Histoire de Hanoi. Paris: Fayard, 2001. 404 pp.
François de Quirielle, À Hanoi sous les bombes americaines. Paris: Tallandier, 1992. 239 pp. De Quirielle was the French representative in Hanoi from January 1966 to July 1969.
Sophie Quinn-Judge, "The Ideological Debate in the DRV and the Significance of the Anti-Party Affair, 1967-68," Cold War History 5:4 (2005), pp. 479-500.
Marc Riboud, The Face of North Vietnam. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970. Photos by Marc Riboud; text by Philippe Devillers.
Madeleine Riffaud, Au Nord Viet-Nam (Écrit sous les bombes). Paris: Julliard, 1967. 300 pp. Riffaud arrived in North Vietnam in late July 1967, and spent about two months. Very critical of the U.S. bombing.
Harrison E. Salisbury, Behind the Lines: Hanoi, December 23, 1966 - January 7, 1967. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. x, 243 pp. pb New York: Bantam, 1967. 214 pp. By a reporter from The New York Times who got into North Vietnam at the end of 1966, and inspired considerable controversy by his reporting. Chapters IX-XI and the first page of Chapter XII, Chapters XX-XXI have been placed on-line in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project at Texas Tech University.
Heinz Schütte, Hundred Flowers in Vietnam, 1955-1957. Berlin: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2003. Südostasien Working Papers No. 22. 34 pp.
Balazs Szalontai, "Poltical and Economic Crisis in North Vietnam, 1955-56," Cold War History, 5:4 (November 2005), pp. 395-426.
N[igel]. J. Thrift and D[ean]. K. Forbes, "Cities, Socialism and War: Hanoi, Saigon and the Vietnamese Experience of Urbanisation," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 3:3 (1985), pp. 279-308.
Nigel Thrift and Dean Forbes, The Price of War: Urbanization in Vietnam, 1954-1985. Routledge, 2012. 188 pp.
To Hoai, Ba nguoi khac (Three others). Danang: NXB Da Nang, 2006. 250 pp. Novel about the land reform of 1953-56, based on the author's own experiences as a land reform cadre.
Gerard Tongas, J'ai vécu dans l'enfer communiste au Nord Viêt-Nam et j'ai choisi la liberté. Paris: Nouvelles Editions Debresse, 1960. 463 pp.
Tran Dinh, Den cu: so phan Viet nam duoi che do cong san. Nguoi Viet, 2014. 600 pp. I have not seen this book, but it is said to contain a high figure, over 170,000, for the deaths in the land reform of 1953-56.
Tran Hoa Phuong, "Vietnamese Higher Education at the Intersection of French and Soviet Influences." Ph.D. dissertation, Higher Education, SUNY at Buffalo, 1999. 256 pp.
Tran Nhu Trang, "The Transformation of the Peasantry in North Viet Nam." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1972. 553 pp. 73-13210.
Tran Thi Lien, "The Catholic Question in North Vietnam: From Polish Sources, 1954-56," Cold War History, 5:4 (November 2005), pp. 427-449.
Benoit de Treglode, Heroes and Revolution in Vietnam, 1948-1964. Singapore: NUS Press (distributed in the United States by University of Hawaii Press), 2012. xv, 244 pp. French original Héros et révolution au Viêt Nam, 1948-1964. Paris: l'Harmattan, 2001. 445 pp.
Quang Truong, "Agricultural collectivization and rural development in Vietnam: A North/South study (1955-1985)." Doctoral dissertation, Vrije Universiteit te Amsterdam, 1987. xvi, 303 pp.
Tuong Vu, trans., "Politburo's Directive Issued on May 4, 1953, on Some Special Issues regarding Mass Mobilization," Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 5:2 (Summer 2010), pp. 243-47. Translation of a document found in Van kien dang toan tap, vol. 14, pp. 201-206. The most important passage was at the very beginning. It said that during the mass mobilization, there should be about one execution for every 1,000 population.
William S. Turley, "Urbanization in War: Hanoi, 1946-1973." Pacific Affairs 48:3 (Autumn 1975), pp. 370-397. If you browse the Internet through an institution that has subscribed to JSTOR, you can access the text directly or go through the JSTOR Pacific Affairs browse page.
Jon M. Van Dyke, North Vietnam's Strategy for Survival. Palo Alto, CA: Pacific Books, 1972. 336 pp.
Andrew Vickerman, The Fate of the Peasantry: Premature Transition to Socialism in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1986. xvi, 373 pp.
Alex-Thai D. Vo, "Nguyen Thi Nam and the Land Reform in North Vietnam, 1953," Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Winter 2015), pp. 1-62.
Vo Nhan Tri, Croissance économique de la République démocratique du Vietnam (1945-1965). Hanoi: Editions en Langues Etrangeres, 1967. 627 pp.
Vu Thu Hien, Dem giua ban ngay. Westminster, CA: Van Nghe, 1997. 768, vii pp. The fate of those branded "revisionists."
Tuong Vu, Paths to Development in Asia: South Korea, Vietnam, China, and Indonesia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xvii, 294 pp.
Florence Yvon-Tran, "The Chronicle of a Failure: Collectivization in Northern Vietnam, 1958–1988." In Gisele Bousquet and Pierre Brocheux, eds., Viêt-Nam Exposé: French Scholarship on Twentieth-Century Vietnamese Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), pp. 331-55.
Peter Zinoman, "Nhan Van - Giai Pham and Vietnamese 'Reform Communism' in the 1950s: A Revisionist Interpretation." Journal of Cold War Studies, 13:1 (Winter 2011), pp. 60-100.
Next section: The Communist Viewpoint
Photos (taken during two visits to Vietnam, in 1986 and 1989)
Copyright © 1996, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2021, 2023, Edwin E. Moise. This document may be reproduced only by permission. Revised September 10, 2023.