Negotiation over religious space in Vietnam

From the 1950s, North Vietnam underwent anti-superstition campaigns in the name of the new socialist modernisation project. After the end of the Vietnam War this process included the South. In Vietnam, like in China and Soviet Russia, religion was considered a harmful superstition. In its ideological struggle the state aimed to build a ‘new culture’ that would substitute religion. A glimpse into the Government Gazette – Công Baó – displays the failure of this secularising agenda, its transformation over the years, as well as dissonance between the state’s goals and their realisation in everyday life.

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