Polity

Vietnam

Modern Sovereign Republics

Vietnam, officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, is a unitary communist state at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, with Hanoi as its capital and Ho Chi Minh City as its largest urban center. The Viet Minh declared independence from Japan in 1945 at the end of the Second World War, but after French forces were defeated the country was partitioned at the seventeenth parallel in 1954; North Vietnam achieved military victory over the South in 1975, and the country reunified under communist rule in 1976. Vietnam is governed by the Communist Party of Vietnam, with a National Assembly as its legislature, and though it maintains a formally planned economy it has undergone substantial market-oriented reform since 1986. With over 102 million people, it is the sixteenth most populous country in the world, and it is classified today as a developing, upper middle income nation that has become deeply integrated into global markets.

Facts

Government Type

Unitary communist state 1

Start Year

1976 1

Government type (class)

Republic 1

Classification

Status (Extant or Former)

Extant 1

FAQs

Why was Vietnam divided into a northern and a southern state in the 1950s?

It was a result of the First Indochina War and the Geneva Conference of 1954 that ended it.

The division followed the First Indochina War. The Geneva Conference of 1954 marked the end of that war, and as a result the territory of the State of Vietnam was divided along the 17th parallel, with separate regimes in the North and the South. The United States was not a signatory to the Geneva Accords and did not recognize the government of North Vietnam. It kept its embassy in Saigon and dealt only with the government of South Vietnam, which in 1955 reorganized itself as the Republic of Vietnam. In 1975 South Vietnam surrendered to North Vietnamese forces; the United States closed its Saigon embassy and evacuated its staff on April 29 of that year, just before the surrender.

Connections

In Era

The Contemporary Period

Source Wikipedia: Vietnam

In the Other Atlases

Government Type

Republic

Also in Society and Culture Atlas: the government type of this subject.