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Vietnam South Vietnam
South of the demarcation line after partition in 1954, the
social system remained unchanged except that power reverted to a
Vietnamese elite. The South's urban-rural network of roles,
heavily dependent on the peasant economy, remained intact despite
the influx of nearly a million refugees from the North; and land
reform, initiated unenthusiastically in 1956, had little
socioeconomic impact in the face of obstruction by the landowning
class. In contrast to the North, there was no doctrinaire,
organized attempt to reorganize the society fundamentally or to
implant new cultural values and social sanctions. The regime of
Ngo Dinh Diem was more concerned with its own immediate survival
than with revolutionary social change, and if it had a vision of
sociopolitical reform at all, that vision was diffusive.
Furthermore, it lacked a political organization comparable in
zeal to the party apparatus of Hanoi in order to achieve its
goals.
In the 1960s, prolonged political instability placed social
structures in the South under increasing stress. The communist
insurgency, which prevented the government from extending its
authority to some areas of the countryside, was partially
responsible, but even more disruptive were the policies of the
government itself. Isolated in Saigon, the Diem regime alienated
large parts of the population by acting to suppress Buddhists and
other minorities, by forcing the relocation of peasants to areas
nominally controlled by the government, and by systematically
crushing political opposition. Such policies fueled a growing
dissatisfaction with the regime that led to Diem's assassination
in November 1963 and his replacement by a series of military
strongmen.
As the war in the South intensified, it created unprecedented
social disruption in both urban and rural life. Countless
civilians were forced to abandon their ancestral lands and sever
their network of family and communal ties to flee areas
controlled by the Viet Cong or exposed to government operations
against the communists. By the early 1970s, as many as 12 million
persons, or 63 percent of the entire southern population, were
estimated to have been displaced; some were relocated to
government-protected rural hamlets while others crowded into
already congested urban centers. Few villages, however remote,
were left untouched by the war. The urban-rural boundary, once
sharply defined, seemed to disappear as throngs of uprooted
refugees moved to the cities. Traditional social structures broke
down, leaving the society listless and bereft of a cohesive force
other than the common instinct for survival.
The disruption imposed by the war, however, did not alter
conventional socioeconomic class identifiers. In the urban areas,
the small upper class elite continued to be limited to highranking military officers, government officials, people in the
professions, absentee landlords, intellectuals, and Catholic and
Buddhist religious leaders. The elite retained a strong personal
interest in France and French culture; many had been educated in
France and many had sons or daughters residing there. In addition
to wealth, Western education--particularly French education--was
valued highly, and French and English were widely spoken.
The urban middle class included civil servants, lower and
middle-ranking officers in the armed forces, commercial
employees, school teachers, shop owners and managers, small
merchants, and farm and factory managers. A few were college
graduates, although the majority had only a secondary-school
education. Very few had been able to study abroad.
At the bottom of the urban society were unskilled, largely
uneducated wageworkers and petty tradespeople. While semiliterate
themselves, they nevertheless were able to send their children to
primary school. Secondary education was less common, however,
particularly for girls. These children tended not to proceed far
enough in school to acquire an elementary knowledge of French or
English, and most adults of the lower class knew only Vietnamese
unless they had worked as domestics for foreigners.
Village society, which embraced 80 percent of the population,
was composed mostly of farmers, who were ranked in three
socioeconomic groups. The elite were the wealthiest landowners.
If they farmed, the work was done by hired laborers who planted,
irrigated, and harvested under the owner's supervision. In the
off-season, landowners engaged in moneylending, rice trading, or
rice milling. Usually the well-to-do owners were active in
village affairs as members of the village councils. After the
mid-1960s, however, interest in seeking such positions waned as
village leaders increasingly were targeted by Viet Cong
insurgents.
The less prosperous, middle-level villagers owned or rented
enough land to live at a level well above subsistence, but they
tended not to acquire a surplus large enough to invest in other
ventures. They worked their own fields and hired farm hands only
when needed during planting or harvesting. A few supplemented
their income as artisans, but never as laborers. Because of their
more modest economic circumstances, members of this group tended
not to assume as many communal responsibilities as did the
wealthier villagers.
At the bottom of village life were owners of small farming
plots and tenant farmers. Forced to spend nearly all of their
time eking out a living, they could not afford to engage in
village affairs. Because they could not cultivate enough land to
support their families, most of them worked also as part-time
laborers, and their wives and children assisted with the field
work. Their children frequently went to school only long enough
to learn the rudiments of reading and writing. This group also
included workers in a wide range of other service occupations,
such as artisans, practitioners of oriental medicine, and small
tradespeople.
Data as of December 1987
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