The Socialist Republic of Vietnam has recovered substantially from the tragedy of the Second Indochina War and Hanoi's punishing retribution on the south following "liberation" in 1975. Hanoi's subsequent economic liberalization (doi moi) of the late 1980s took hold in the early 1990s and has helped transform Vietnam into a vibrant trading nation with a foreign trade level nearly equal to the size of the GDP (measured in exchange rate formulas). However, Vietnam's political system, still under firm Communist Party control, has not experienced a similar renovation and likely will not until a third or fourth generation of leaders comes to power. Even then, Vietnam's politics are likely to remain patriarchical, substantially collectivist, and imbued with the Sinic legacy.
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Lawrence E. Grinter (2006) studied this question.