The Power of Everyday Politics : How Vietnamese Peasants Transformed National Policy

A political history and ethnography of local resistance to Vietnam's national policy of collectivized farms, tracing their formation in the 1950s, enlargement during wartime in the 1960s and 1970s, and eventual collapse in the 1980s. Based on more than a decade of research in the Red River Delta and Vietnam's National Archives, this book gives voice to the villagers who effected change and advances a theory of how everyday activities that do not conform to the behaviour required by authorities may carry considerable weight in shaping - and even changing - the direction of national policy.