The Vietnamese people have always harboured an extraordinarily strong patriotic drive. But the government formed by Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969) after the Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) on the 2nd September 1945, the group that was to represent majority Vietnamese opinion until and after 1975, was spearheaded by the Vietminh (League for Vietnam's Independence) - a movement that did not define itself as Nationalist, but rather as an expressly Communist group. When the people of Vietnam looked for leadership, this was the obvious group to choose - the only movement prepared and willing to step in (other, more nationalist resistance groups had prematurely flourished and failed, as shall be discussed). In the Vietnam that found itself suddenly free at the close of the Second World War, no other lobby was ready, no group presented itself nationally as the Communists were and did. The Liberation Army that seized control of town after town was the military arm of the Viet Minh, formed in 1944 under Vo Nguyen Giap (b. 1912), an element of a movement that published its manifesto in February 1930, that had begun preparation and ideological training in the late 1920's in Guangzhou under Ho Chi Minh. Given the long preparation carried out by the Vietminh, the progression to the declaration of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam as a Communist nation with Ho at its head was a natural one. Whilst that development seems logical given the conditions of the day, the manner in which those conditions were reached (or manipulated) has been the subject of intense debate. Was that natural progression one in which the ideologists of Communist revolution 'captured' the Nationalist movement, exploited a nationalistic fervour to produce the desired revolt, using the front of the Viet Minh to blend their esoteric dogmas with the more easily understood nationalist cause of resistance? This is a perception held by many modern historians - that, in effect, Communists are the parasites of the modernization process. This attitude was and is encouraged by examination of advice given to Asian revolutionaries by their Soviet counterparts; Grigori Zinoviev (1833-1936) - later to die by Stalin's order - argued in 1922 that Communists should co-operate with the rising nationalists in Asia, gain the leadership of their movement, and then cast aside the genuine national leaders. For by itself, the tiny Indochina Communist Party could never have hoped to attract the support of politically engaged Vietnamese, let alone the hearts and minds of the nation at large. This is the essence of the currently accepted analysis of the revolutionary Vietnamese setting - that the Communist lobby exploited a majority furious with the abuses of French rule, sliding Communism into a dominant role in Vietnamese life. The majority of people had not fought for a communist government, but to be rid of the colonial occupying power. Such a perception, as shall be discussed, is representative of the Western reading of the whole Southeast Asian region of the day. The Vietnamese people were accustomed to the use of violence to protect their independence; perennial opposition to expansionist China meant that few peoples in Asia had been compelled to fight longer and harder to retain their identity as a separate and independent state than the Vietnamese. Whilst the ability and commitment of the Vietcong in resistance to outside power has been recognised, the strong sense of Vietnamese identity in and of itself has never really been acknowledged beyond the most simplistic of terms by external observers, perhaps because of the difficulty of comprehending how such an emotion can form when looking at the odd shape of the nation on a map. Such a lack of awareness allows supposed Vietnam specialists to assert that the dominant Vietnamese self-assessment is the extent to which the country is not Chinese (and, to a lesser extent, not French) rather than entering into a more significant analysis of how a national identity formed: how, whilst certainly influenced by feelings of encirclement and domination, Vietnam also developed a separate, distinct sense of self. This, whilst a sense that has only relatively recently manifested itself in territorial demands, is a longstanding emotion and sense, in and of itself. Given an understanding of that sense or merely an awareness of its existence, the willingness of the Vietnamese to combat the most powerful nation on Earth, though certainly impressive, needs little explanation; this work has attempted to explore a more difficult question - why they chose the dogma that served them. The idea that the majority of the Vietnamese people had not fought for a communist government, but to be rid of the colonial occupying power is in truth the presentation of a false dichotomy. The fact that a group within a broad movement participates for different reasons from another group does not necessarily imply exploitation or pretense. Neither does the fact that one has a strong political ideology such as socialism forbid the possession of any other political inclination, such as patriotism. The concept of a socialist exploitation of Vietnamese nationalism will be opposed here: a discussion of the disputed importance of nationalism to the Vietnamese Communist movement in resistance, and of Communism to the nationalist movement, will form the subject of this essay. The unity of Vietnam under Communist government in 1975 seems a fitting end to the period to be considered. Much of interest - the politics behind partition, or the Communist-led conduct of war with America, for example - can be considered only briefly; fortunately, these are issues considered in great depth elsewhere. The central issue to this work shall be the development of the Communist movement in French Indochina, and the thesis herein shall be that nationalism and Marxist-Leninism occupied a symbiotic relationship in the motivation of the Communist movement and its chief practitioners in the nation once again known as Vietnam.

By 1970, Singapore’s urban landscape was dominated by high-rise blocks of planned public housing built by the People’s Action Party government, signifying the establishment of a high modernist nation-state. A decade earlier, the margins of the City had been dominated by kampongs, home to semi-autonomous communities of low-income Chinese families which freely built, and rebuilt, unauthorised wooden houses. This change was not merely one of housing but belied a more fundamental realignment of state-society relations in the 1960s. Relocated in Housing and Development Board flats, urban kampong families were progressively integrated into the social fabric of the emergent nation-state. This study examines the pivotal role of an event, the great Kampong Bukit Ho Swee fire of 1961, in bringing about this transformation. The redevelopment of the fire site in the aftermath of the calamity brought to completion the British colonial regime’s ‘emergency’ programmes of resettling urban kampong dwellers in planned accommodation, in particular, of building emergency public housing on the sites of major fires in the 1950s. The PAP’s far greater political resolve, and the timing of and state of emergency occasioned by the scale of the 1961 disaster, enabled the government to rehouse the Bukit Ho Swee fire victims in emergency housing in record time. This in turn provided the HDB with a strategic platform for clearing other kampongs and for transforming their residents into model citizens of the nation-state. The 1961 fire’s symbolic usefulness extended into the 1980s and beyond, in sanctioning the PAP’s new housing redevelopment schemes. The official account of the inferno has also become politically useful for the government of today for disciplining a new generation of Singaporeans against taking the nation’s progress for granted. Against these exalted claims of the fire’s role in the Singapore Story, this study also examines the degree of actual change and continuity in the social and economic lives of the people of Bukit Ho Swee after the inferno. In some crucial ways, the residents continued to occupy a marginal place in society while pondering, too, over the unresolved question of the cause of the fire. These continuities of everyday life reflect the ambivalence with which the citizenry regarded the high modernist state in contemporary Singapore.

Brands have become valuable assets that play a central role in differentiating the products and services to catch the attention of the customers. This research examines the significance of branding strategies for companies’ growth and survival. For this paper, models and theories from previous researches are used to give an in-depth understanding of the different brand strategies and SMEs. The data was collected through qualitative interviews with 10 companies of which five were conducted in Kampala, Uganda and the other five were in Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam. Although SMEs play a significant role in economic development, they are facing challenges of building brands due to the scarce resources. Financing was shown among the key prohibitions to brand establishment. The research identifies the need for SMEs to adapt branding strategies. Research findings pointed out the benefits of brand recognition in both countries. The respondents indicated that brand communication was an effective tool in creating brand recognition in SMEs. Also price, quality, innovation, and a clear vision among others are enabling factors for building strong brands.

This paper discusses the changes of economic activities of ethnic Chinese in Ho Chi Minh City under different political regimes with different institutions. The thesis applied qualitative research methods with in-depth interviews, collected and analysed data from documents. The research result shows that under different social and political institutions, which are changed from French colonial period to the two different political systems during Vietnam War with the Communism in the North and the Capitalism in the South, and the socialist system carried out in the whole country after 1975, to the Doi Moi period after 1986, the Vietnamese Chinese conduct different economic activities in terms of business and trust in social relations. Before 1975, the Vietnamese Chinese traded heavily with the same ethnic group. The in-group business practices were changed after the institutional change after 1975, which pushed them to work more closely with other ethnic groups. The concept toward ¡§trust¡¨ (Xinyong) in Vietnamese Chinese community is gradually changed in accordance with the changes of social and political institutions.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2002. / Typescript. Leaf v does not exist therefore pre-paging is misnumbered. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 256-262). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2002. / Typescript. Leaf v does not exist therefore pre-paging is misnumbered. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 256-262). Also available on the Internet.

published_or_final_version / Architecture / Master / Master of Architecture

published_or_final_version / Architecture / Master / Master of Architecture

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