"Vietnam was a single country again. Ho had organised the communist order on political and economic principles which drew on the Soviet and Chinese experiences. Agriculture was collectivised. A network of labour camps was spread across the country and hostile ‘class’ elements were rounded up and forced to abandon their capitalistic sympathies. A strict one-party dictatorship was imposed. A blend of patriotism and Marxism-Leninism was propagated. The party and the army were reinforced as the combined bastion of the regime. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam had been born in a colonial war and had known nothing but war since obtaining its independence. It was an even more militarised society than the People’s Republic of China. Yet its industry made hardly any armaments. It had little industry at all and the Americans bombed its few factories into rubble. Financial support and military supplies from the USSR and China had been crucial for survival. The northerners communised the south after the American withdrawal. Expropriations and arrests accompanied the expansion of the party and army presence across the newly occupied provinces. Within a year or two the southern economy had been pressed into a northern mould. Yet the wartime devastation was everywhere. Vietnam was a land of orphans, invalids, ruined houses, disrupted rice paddies and poisoned forests. Hanoi expressed the wish for a rapprochement, but the departed Americans cut the Vietnamese off from the world economy. Peace was meant to turn the country into a desert. Although the USSR continued to proffer aid, it was never on a scale adequate for substantial reconstruction."