Hà Nội 1978: Images of Life in “Subsidy Period” Việt Nam

A busy Hanoi street. Photo by author.

In an article for Education About Asia, Stephen Black shares and writes about photos he took during his time visiting Hanoi, Vietnam in 1978.

Abstract:

In 1978, just three years after the ending of the twenty-year war in Việt Nam, the author of this article, at the time a high school history teacher from Melbourne, visited the country as part of a university organized educational tour. It was rare in this early post-war period for Western groups to be permitted to visit Việt Nam. This article features photographs taken by the author that provide a visual resource for illuminating aspects of everyday living in what has become known as the “Subsidy Period” (1975–1986). It was a period of high socialism in Việt Nam, a doctrinaire Soviet model of government based on Marxism-Leninism. The state owned and centrally controlled the means of production (a command economy), providing subsidies to industries and agricultural cooperatives, and maintaining control over prices and incomes. The Subsidy Period is known in Việt Nam for its austere and deprived everyday living conditions involving the scarcity and strict rationing of consumer goods, particularly food supplies. In this period of economic and material hardships, citizens were required to be inventive and adaptive to survive. Only in the past two decades has the Subsidy Period been acknowledged officially in Việt Nam as a defined historical era, an “uncomfortable past” worthy of and permitted to being recounted and documented.