How come Vietnamese communism was comparatively mild?

[puddleglum]

@Dr_Paprika

Vietnam was a country which was essentially ruled by the Chinese for nine hundred years until the French colonized it. Ho Chi Minh trained in Paris as a chef and after becoming a military leader did much to help the Allies in WW2. He expected to win independence for his efforts. After the war, the Allies considered Vietnam low priority and reflexively favoured France and its continued colonialism of Indochina. The Vietnamese were more interested in independence than ideology, and when they embraced communism as a method for achieving this, the Cold War was underway and the Americans did not understand that Vietnamese, Chinese and Russian communism differed; they just feared a domino effect. America gradually became more involved after the French fell in 1954.

Ho Chi Minh did very little to help the Allies in WW2. He came back to Vietnam in early 1941 and help set up the opposition to the Vichy French and Japanese but the only real contribution to the war effort was passing information to Chinese intelligence. In 1942 he was arrested by the Chinese and held for two years. He returned to Vietnam in September 1944 but the only contribution to the war effort was intelligence and the occasional rescue of a downed airman. He declared a revolution against the ruling Japanese in August 1944 but the war was pretty much over at that point.

The Vietnamese did not embrace communism as a method to achieve independence, Ho Chi Minh was one of the founders of the French Communist Party and had studied in the USSR prior to coming back to Vietnam.