Hm.  Would you say more?   I am very interested in this development of china's very competent industrialization as stacked against the rest of the developing world's experience these past few decades.  But as I know nothing previously about the topic, and come at it without having been on any side of the various maoism/china debates of the past generation of the left, I find myself without even the most rudimentary assessmnt of china and, I guess, vietnam. <div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Not at all, Vietnam won the peace as well as the war. It built one of the world's canniest developmental states, invested heavily in infrastructure and education, and has had one of the world's fastest-growing economies for the past two decades. I'd also point out that the US defeat in Vietnam created the key geopolitical window of opportunity for China's long boom: after the US left, there was no reason to continue Mao's costly and wasteful Third Line policy of constructing military industries in Western China -- Deng Xiaoping scrapped the Third Line and launched rural reforms, and the rest is, as they say, history. </blockquote></div>