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Introduction
Employing a process-tracing method of analysis of new documentary evidence from the Vietnamese archives, I advance an interpretive claim on how early reformist ideas of a broad-based foreign policy including Vietnam's economic engagement with the West after the Paris Peace Accords (PPA) in 1973 came to dominate Vietnam's doi moi (renovation) foreign economic policy at the Sixth Party Congress in December 1986, hereafter referred to as the 1986 doi moi. It refers to a series of policy changes to reduce international isolation including a Foreign Investment Law in 1987; a declaration to withdraw troops from Cambodia by the end of 1989; and reconciliation with China, the United States, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) allies. I not only traced the origins of doi moi ideas to the PPA in 1973 but also made an inference regarding their causal role in shaping Vietnam's 1986 doi moi.
The existing scholarship on the 1986 doi moi has largely focused on the process of Vietnam's market-oriented economic reforms in the first half of the 1980s (Kerkvliet 2005; Vasavakul 2019), but few, with notable exceptions of Tuong Vu's (2016) Vietnam's Communist Revolution: The Power and Limits of Ideology, David Elliott's (2012) Changing Worlds: Vietnam's Transition from Cold War to Globalization, and Adam Fforde's (2009) Economics, History, and the Origins of Vietnam's Post-War Economic Success, shed light on the underlying ideas that gave birth to the 1986 doi moi. The major debate about the origins of Vietnam's doi moi policy is whether it is an endogenous process, as Adam Fforde argued, or is Vietnam learning from the Soviet Union about economic reforms, as Tuong Vu emphasised. Fforde argued that the endogenous economic reality of “dualism”—that is the pre-existing condition of ‘plan-market balance’ uniquely characteristic of the DRV model of socialist economic development in the 1960s—produced internal force for economic liberalization leading up to the doi moi policy in 1986 (Fforde 2009: 495–5). Fforde wrote: “This dualism contributed to the subsequent establishment of the intellectual hegemony of reformist ideas, culminating in the official acceptance of doi moi at the December 1986 6th Party Congress” (Fforde 2009: 494). He further argued that “the evident success of the industrial liberalization” in the 1980s created...