In the spring of 1954, Vietnamese revolutionaries launched a decisive assault against French colonial troops in the mountain valley of Dien Bien Phu. The military defeat of France, crystalized in the surrender of French troops in May 1954, was the single most crucial event in the collapse of colonial power. In military terms, France had unambiguously yielded to the strategic brilliance and soldierly élan of the Vietnamese, but culturally and intellectually, the empire was not so easily dispatched. Though it was decisive, the military victory alone could not resolve the problems caused by colonial domination. Rather, it created the possibility for Vietnamese to recover from the experience of colonization. Thus, in June, only a month after the French surrender, revolutionary scholars began a new offensive — an intellectual assault — against the most basic assumptions and conclusions of the colonial presence by sending forth a cascade of histories, a rush of ethnographic works, and waves of folkloric studies. In unintended ways, however, the sheer energy of their response also underscored the great difficulty of their endeavor.

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The volume has some important strengths as well as some shortcomings. The study is recommended because it provides information about the economic activities of the Chinese in the post-1975 period and this has not been done in earlier studies in the English language. However, the book should be read in connection with other studies which address the political dimension of the situation of the ethnic Chinese in more detail in particular the exodus of the late 1970s.

In the fall of 1990 Jayne Werner organized a conference on the Vietnam War at Columbia University. In an attempt to establish a new dialogue among Vietnamese and Americans and among specialists from different fields, she invited two scholars from Vietnam, both of whom also participated in the war, and a number of U.S. specialists, including one Vietnamese-American, on Vietnam, whose disciplines ranged from history, including military and diplomatic history, sociology and political science. Her purpose, stated explicitly, was to overcome some of the disciplinary limitations of Vietnam War studies. It is also clear, even though it remains unstated, that the conference, and therefore the volume of essays presented here, should constitute a kind of riposte to hawkish and revisionist studies of the Vietnam War, represented, for example, in the work of Guenter Lewy and Harry Summers. This volume is organized into four thematic sections. The first section, concerned with revolutionary politics and strategy, begins with Mark Bradley's piece on DRV diplomacy ("An Improbable Opportunity: America and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam's 1947 Initiative"). Bradley demonstrates that the muted quality of the U.S. response to Vietnamese diplomatic overtures should not be characterized as a "lost opportunity". On the contrary, he argues, it stemmed from the fact that U.S. policymakers were principally concerned with Soviet expansionism in Europe. That U.S. officials also often expressed doubt about the ability of Vietnamese to govern themselves further diminished the possibility of a more sympathetic response. In "Waging Revolutionary War: The Evolution of Hanoi's Strategy in the South, 1959-1965," William Duiker investigates the DRV's careful calibration of diplomatic, political, and military strategies in the South. By attending to Le Duan's often cautious approach, he calls into question the usual claim that it was pressure from revolutionaries in the South that forced the North to take a more militarist stance. In "Tet: The 1968 General Offensive and General Uprising", General Tran Van Tra (commander of the People's Liberation Armed Forces) offers an extremely detailed portrait of Tet, from its planning stages, beginning with the overthrow of the Diem government in 1963, to its execution, which he divides into three distinct phases stretching from January to November of 1968. He criticizes those who harbor "naive thoughts" and claim that the Tet Offensive was a military disaster for the revolutionary armies (PAVN and PLAF) but a great political success nonetheless (p. 57). General Tran Van Tra counterargues by asserting that the political victory of Tet must be attributed to the stunning success of its military offensives. As a direct consequence of Tet, he writes, "The United States was forced to drop its conquering club and sit down for peace talks....