Fighting poverty with 'great unity'

HANOI: Dinh Xuan Lam, historian and deputy director of the Institution of History, describes Vietnam’s “great unity” as a “vital and constant factor.” 

To the Vietnamese people, this unity is a collective memory, forged through centuries of beating back all-powerful invaders. If the repeated 13th century invasions by the Yuan-Mongol forces of the Tran Dynasty were early aids to meshing disparate peoples in Vietnam, the French and American armies provided a more recent cause for their adhesion.