If a reader of English had to pick just one book about twentieth-century rural society and politics in northern Vietnam, I would recommend this one. Hy V. Luong has crafted a theoretically informed and empirically grounded analysis of agrarian conditions from the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. The study emphasises one village in the Red River delta but situates it in a broader context, thereby turning the book into a window through which to view rural continuities and changes across the alluvial landscape.
The book can be read and appreciated for each of three dimensions. One is time. The study stresses major periods in Vietnam during the past 100 years. It begins with French colonial rule and resistance to it from the late 1800s to 1930 in and around Sơn-Dương village in Phu? Tho? province, northwest of Hanoi. Organised opposition to French rule in the 1920s–30s is the second time period. The prominent anti-French organisation in Sơn-Dương and vicinity was the Vietnamese Nationalist Party, which French authorities viciously repressed. The third period is the decade-long revolution to overthrow French rule, 1945–54. The most resilient revolutionary organisations were the Vietminh and the Indochinese Communist Party, which in the Sơn-Dương area attracted numerous former Nationalist Party supporters. With the defeat of the French, the Communist Party-led government ruled northern Vietnam. In the fourth period, 1954–88, rural people, who still composed some 80 per cent of the north's population, experienced first-hand two major redistributions of land (mid-1950s and late 1980s), a radical collectivisation of agriculture (1960s–early 1980s) and a war (1965–75). During that war, the United States military bombed Sơn-Dương and more than 300 residents joined the Vietnamese army. The end of the war contributed to the demise of collectivised agriculture, the return of land to households, and the rejuvenation of family-based farming.
An earlier version of this book ended with this fourth time-period (see Revolution in the village: Tradition and transformation in North Vietnam, 1925–1988, University of Hawai'i Press, 1992). This new version adds a fifth, the retreat of a socialist economy and re-emergence and spread of a market economy (late 1980s to mid-2000s). With the nation finally at peace and people now having greater physical mobility and more economic opportunities, villagers' living conditions significantly improved. They also openly expressed discontent with local authorities' corruption and other misdeeds.
The overall argument is another significant dimension of this book. At the outset, Luong makes clear that he wants to address significant social science issues. He succeeds admirably. The empirical evidence leads him to argue that rational-choice theory only modestly helps to understand villagers' behaviour, whether during revolution and war in the past or during peace and market economy of the present. More helpful, Luong argues, is class analysis and world systems theory. Class antagonisms, the adverse consequence of colonialism, and related structural aspects of capitalism are very important for making sense of villagers' actions over the decades. Still, much evidence remains unexplained. To account for more of the evidence, Luong adds ‘native sociocultural framework’. That includes class cleavages (which class analysis also recognises), male-centred elitism, hierarchical social structures, and communal institutions. The combination of class analysis, world systems theory, and the indigenous social and cultural practices, Luong argues, best explains why people from various strata joined anti-colonial resistance and revolution; how villagers viewed, manipulated and resisted collective farming during the 1960s–70s; why they insisted on equitable redistribution of land to households in the late 1980s; what kinds of organisations have emerged – and re-emerged – as a socialist economy receded and a market economy expanded; and why the trajectory and content of rural society and politics in the Red River delta are rather different from those of the Mekong delta.
The third dimension of this book is methodology. Luong combines historiography, survey research, up-close observation and interaction with villagers, and secondary literature in several social science fields. He uses documents and other materials located in French and Vietnamese national archives and libraries. He did research in Sơn-Dương village and Phu? Tho? province six times, beginning in 1987 and most recently in 2006. He surveyed over 300 randomly chosen village families. He did extended interviews with people in several households; from some of them he has materials they saved from years gone by. This rich combination of research methods yields a wealth of evidence that informs every page of this splendid book.
