Vietnam's doi moi (renovation) era began twenty years ago, in 1986, and this volume is about Vietnam's struggles to strengthen law and pursue legal reform in that era of reform. Vietnam's efforts are part of a broader transformation of socialist societies, and this volume makes explicit comparisons to developments in China, a country closely watched in Vietnam and whose own reform efforts have sometimes paralleled (or presaged) some of Vietnam's struggles and policies (Cohen 1990).

Vietnam's current debates and activities in strengthening a role for law are, of course, closely related to its history, and understanding that history is crucial to comprehending the debates over legal reform in Vietnam. Nguyen Ngoc Huy, Ta Van Tai, John Gillespie and other scholars have illuminated the important roles that Chinese, French, Russian and (in the south), American law have played in the development of different historical stages of Vietnamese law (Huy and Tai 1987; Tai 1989; Gillespie 2006). In this introduction, we begin the exploration of the modern conflict over the role of law in Vietnam by exploring conflicting strands of legal thought in Vietnam in the 1950s, when the first in a series of debates and conflicts on law under Party rule took place.

Any attempt to unravel these strands cannot challenge the historical fact that law was severely repressed, undervalued and used as an instrument of Party policy during this era.