In November 1974, a technical advisory team from the Kaohsiung Export-Processing Zone (EPZ) in Taiwan arrived in Saigon to help the government of South Vietnam (GVN) establish a 65-hectare EPZ on the former site of U.S. Camp Davies in Tan Thuan Dong, next to Saigon port. For the previous several years, the two countries had discussed the feasibility of such a project and the Saigon government had sent delegations to study EPZs in Taiwan. For the Taiwanese, the attraction of bringing their export-led development model to South Vietnam was based on Taipei and Saigon "having the same national objectives and facing the same threat." The Kaohsiung EPZ "had contributed tremendously in solving the unemployment problem as well as promoting export[s], the two major problems which RVN [Republic of Vietnam] has encountered for many years." 1 For the South Vietnamese, export-processing zones appeared a promising means of encouraging investment, utilizing manpower, and boosting exports to deal with the country's massive balance of trade deficit. EPZs could help South Vietnam end its dependence on foreign aid and "progress towards economic independence." 2 This would strengthen Saigon in its battle against Hanoi and perhaps 1 "Consultant Services of the EPZ Mission from the Republic of China for the Establishment of Saigon Export

The Sanitary Hamlet Program, a rural health project intended to serve counterinsurgency goals in wartime Vietnam, focused on ending open-air defecation and instructing Vietnamese in the correct use of latrines. This program belongs within a larger arc of American nation-building cum toilet-building at home and abroad in the twentieth century; American toilet-building shared common features and served common functions from the age of formal empire through the postcolonial era. Looking beyond the rhetoric of modernization to on-the-ground practices reveals how American approaches to international development after 1945 continued to be shaped by racialized perceptions of foreign peoples. But the project was not simply the product of an American neo-colonial impulse. It was also an expression of South Vietnamese leaders’ postcolonial worldview—one that similarly targeted unsanitary peasants for hygienic reform.

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