Through a case study of workers’ protests to demand owed wages and social insurance benefits after foreign management had suddenly fled the country, this article discusses the moral and legal dynamics of labor dispute resolution in Vietnam. It examines the local government’s use of extralegal measures, which combine a tactical deployment of the law and moral responsibility, in brokering a resolution. The article argues that these measures, while aimed at addressing the legal challenges of supporting affected workers in the event of these so-called “cicada practices,” are limited in satisfying workers’ demands for justice as workers struggle to claim their legal rights and overcome their precariousness.

During the eighteenth century, the Vietnamese government relied on local chieftains to govern its northern uplands, including the Sino-Vietnamese border region. In Lạng Sơn Province—an intermediary point for diplomatic documents traveling from the Lê-Trịnh government to the Qing—the government constructed a documentary system that gave local chieftains considerable political responsibility. Under this system, local chieftains were responsible for administering tax collection and some forms of military service, researching the titles and positions of Qing officials, purchasing Qing calendars, and forwarding official documents. Thus, these local chieftains played important roles in eighteenth-century Sino-Vietnamese relations and politics.

During the colonial period, particularly in the 1920s, Vietnamese intellectuals frequently debated Rabindranath Tagore’s Greater Indian, pan-Asian vision in their political exchanges. Drawing on scholarship on the rise of an Indian Ocean public sphere, this article analyzes periodicals covering Tagore in colonial Vietnam in order to explore alternative and less researched trajectories of contemporary Vietnamese nationalism. Specifically, it examines media coverage of Tagore’s works, ideas, personality, and appearance, and, in particular, his visit to Sài Gòn in 1929, to answer the question of how those depictions reflected and shaped different anticolonial imaginaries and ideological debates at the time. Radical and moderate forms of Vietnamese nationalism reflected both appreciation and criticism of Tagore’s views of Indian nationhood. The engagement of both moderate and radical Vietnamese intellectuals with Tagore’s work was thus an important early moment in the turn of Vietnamese intellectuals away from colonial models of nationalism toward those articulated by other colonized populations.

From modest beginnings in the 1950s and 1960s, Vietnamese studies experienced a slow but consistent rise in Germany. In the GDR, the rise was connected first with close relations between the two communist states. Second, the area studies’ concept favored Vietnamese studies as a subject of Southeast Asian studies, rather than as a side subject of sinology as it had been before. In both parts of Germany, the interest in Vietnam has grown, especially after its reunification in 1975. Since 1990, at least one place is continuing to teach the subject in the framework of the Southeast Asian Languages and Cultures Program. In this way, one of the two professorships could be preserved.

While conducting research on debt in the lives of sex workers in Hồ Chí Minh City, I stumbled upon an ad a moneylender had glued to a wall. It revealed that financialization was thriving in Vietnam, and more specifically that credit was rapidly expanding and colonizing the urban landscape. Photography became a tool to visually capture this radical financial transformation. This article argues that photography can be an effective inductive research method for moving from the particular to the general and seeing the big picture. I contend that looking at the world through the camera viewfinder with an open mind can help us to uncover hidden patterns and generate a rich and meaningful overall picture of a research problem. This process facilitates the formation of research perspectives and generalizations based on observations. I support this argument by describing the reflexive journey that drove me from photographing debt records in enclosed spaces to wandering in Hồ Chí Minh City’s streets to document a thriving credit boom. This journey radically transformed my research agenda on credit and debt.

This paper examines the development of Vietnamese studies in post–World War II Japan. During the Vietnam War, Vietnamese studies in Japan was developed by a young generation of academics who were shocked by war coverage. Some of these scholars viewed Vietnamese society and its nationalist spirit as their “ideal social model,” and dedicated themselves to research topics centered on Vietnam’s rural society, revolution, and nationalism. However, when fieldwork became possible in the 1990s after the Đổi Mới reforms, research subjects became diversified among scholars who came after the Vietnam War generation as they encountered the country’s diverse realities.

Vietnamese studies first emerged in Thailand during the Cold War period and developed into a vibrant field after the establishment of Thai-Vietnamese diplomatic relations and the end of the Cambodian conflict. Vietnam’s accession to ASEAN in 1995 and preparation for the ASEAN Economic Community prior to 2015 also provided favorable conditions for the expansion of Vietnamese studies in Thai research and scholarship. However, the study of Vietnam in Thailand is often seen as a part of Southeast Asian studies and ASEAN studies. Research on Vietnam is typically carried out comparatively within a regional context, especially in comparison with Thailand, rather than for its own sake.

This paper surveys the emergence and transformation of Vietnamese studies in Russia and the former Soviet Union from the late nineteenth century until the present. It demonstrates how writings by Russian explorers and geographers developed into a professional academic field during the Soviet era, one that was strongly shaped by ideological affinities and international connections within the communist world. Although Vietnamese studies in Russia has retained some intellectual and institutional legacies from the Soviet era, it also reflects transformations in academic life in Russia since the 1990s as well as the changing relationship between the two countries.

Vietnamese studies in China is a contentious field that is dominated by three frameworks: the central-regional relationship, the tributary relationship, and the diffusion thesis. It emerged in the late nineteenth century in response to French scholars’ questioning of the extent and duration of Chinese influence on Vietnam. It then became highly politicized between the 1970s and 1980s due to the issues of both the ethnic origins of the bronze drum and the nature of Sino-Vietnamese relations. In the twenty-first century, even though China began to address the issue of Sinocentrism, its claim to the South China Sea has been a source of great tension among the scholars in the two communist countries.