This is an essay about transformations made and not made, about opportunities missed and lessons learnt, and about transitions that are still underway in the Southeast Asian countries we used to call “l'Indochine”. Thirty-three years have passed since the end of the Indo-China Wars and the installation of new governments in the three former French colonies. Change for the better has come slowly. In Cambodia from 1975 to 1978, a radical communist Khmer Rouge regime inflicted grievous harm on the Khmer people. After Vietnam deposed the Khmer Rouge in 1979, Cambodia was ruled by a communist government heavily reliant on Vietnam and the Soviet Union. Its sovereignty was restored in September 1993 as part of an elaborate United Nations peace operation. Today, though nominally a multi-party democracy, Cambodia is governed rigorously by an authoritarian party of Leninist persuasion. A market system dominated by the government and crony elites yields marginal benefits to most of the population. Similarly in Laos, in late 1975, a communist government supplanted a fragile Cold War period coalition and today keeps a tight hold on the reins of power, admitting no challenge. With a population of approximately seven million, Laos remains trapped between Thai culture and political pressures from China and Vietnam. Its economy is slowly adopting a market orientation but remains one of the least developed in Asia.

Vietnam is different. It is a society already deep into a transition. Thoughtful Vietnamese would be the first to admit that their country is far from “transformed”. Semantics aside, since 1986 extraordinary changes have taken place, given Vietnam's desperate situation after World War II. More than sixty years ago, on 2 September 1945, the Viet Nam Dan Chu Cong Hoa (Democratic Republic of Vietnam, or DRV) was established, with Ho Chi Minh as president of a provisional government. In his inaugural address that day, Ho quoted the American Declaration of Independence, declaring it an “immortal statement”.Historians may not judge Vietnam's historical course over the last three generations to be as cosmically important as what occurred in China from 1945 onwards, nor would they see it as consequential in global terms as Japan's post-World War II transformation. Nonetheless, what has happened in Vietnam over recent decades, not the least America's trauma there, occupies a special place among Asia's transformations.