Area Handbook Series: Vietnam: A Country Study

The current study focuses on the years between 1975 and the mid- 1980s, when a nascent and newly reunified nation struggled to develop a postwar identity. It was a period marked by a change in leadership, as Vietnams first generation of communist leaders began to retire in favor of younger technocrats by the introduction of significant economic reforms, including the preservation of private enterprise in the South and by major foreign policy developments, particularly the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation signed with the Soviet Union, the invasion and occupation of Cambodia, and the 1979 border war with China. emk