Strengths and Vulnerabilities of Surviving Asian Communist Regimes: A New Approach

China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia are five among the six surviving communist regimes in the world after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. In this talk, I propose a historically grounded, regionally framed, and holistically constructed framework to examine the strengths and vulnerabilities of these surviving communist regimes in Asia. Existing approaches on these regimes devote significant attention to China, North Korea and Vietnam but not Laos and Cambodia; they are focused on either vulnerabilities or strengths but not both; and they study them separately and often without historical depth. My approach hopes to present a more complex picture of these regimes as they continue to evolve after the death of world communism.

Bio: Tuong Vu is professor of Political Science and director of the US-Vietnam Research Center at the University of Oregon. He has held visiting appointments at Seoul National University, Princeton University and National University of Singapore. Vu is the author or co-editor of eight books, including Vietnam’s Communist Revolution: The Power and Limits of Ideology (Cambridge, 2017) and Paths to Development in Asia: South Korea, Vietnam, China, and Indonesia (Cambridge, 2010). He has also authored numerous articles on the politics of nationalism, revolution, and state-building in East and Southeast Asia. His more recent scholarship explores Vietnamese republicanism, the Republic of Vietnam, and the Vietnamese diaspora.