This article attempts to map some of Vietnam’s national identities that were constructed in the early twentieth century (1900s-1930s). Instead of treating Vietnamese national identity either as a monolithic entity or as too fragmented to be considered a useful concept, it shows that at least three interactive and overlapping national identities emerged, each with its own political significance and state institutionalisation. To map them, this article re-traces several key nationalists in the early twentieth century. It situates each of their national imaginations within interconnected global relations, namely, Civilisational relations of hierarchy, cultural relations of equality, and radical relations of exploitation and oppression. This analytical approach to mapping national identity offers a framework that may prove valuable for cross-national comparative studies.

Critical CHD refers to life-threatening cardiac anomalies present at birth that require surgical or catheter-based intervention within the first year of life. Without punctual diagnosis and treatment, these conditions can result in significant morbidity or mortality. In high-income countries like the United States (U.S.), early detection and management of Critical CHD have been greatly improved through universal prenatal screening, pulse oximetry screening, regionalised care, and subspecialty training. In contrast, Vietnam, a low- and middle-income country, faces persistent challenges. The absence of newborn screening policies and limited prenatal detection infrastructure leads to delayed diagnoses. Paediatric cardiac expertise and surgical services are largely confined to urban centres, leaving rural areas underserved. Vietnam also lacks national CHD registries, standardised referral pathways, and consistent training programmes, impeding quality improvement and equitable access. This manuscript compares the U.S. and Vietnamese Critical CHD systems, highlighting structural, infrastructural, and workforce-related disparities. We identify barriers, key areas for intervention, and offer targeted strategic considerations to address these discrepancies. We strongly believe that efforts to implement universal newborn screening, develop regional cardiac hubs with mandatory outreach support to rural proximity, expand workforce training, invest in ICU infrastructure, and establish national data systems are of immediate need. These reforms could significantly improve survival and outcomes for children with Critical CHD in Vietnam and inform similar efforts in other low- and middle-income countries.

Investigating risk factors for mpox’s infectious period is vital for preventing this emerging disease, yet evidence remains scarce. This study aimed to identify risk factors associated with the duration of mpox infectiousness among mpox cases in Vietnam. The primary outcome was the duration of the mpox infectiousness, defined between symptom onset and the first negative test result for the mpox virus. Fine and Gray’s regression models were employed to assess the associations between the infectious period and several risk factors while accounting for competing risks of death by mpox. Most mpox cases recovered within 30 days. Patients with HIV or treated at multiple facilities for mpox had lower incidence rates of cleared infection compared to those who were HIV-negative or treated at a single facility. In regression models, patients with mpox symptoms of rash or mucosal lesions (sub-distribution hazard ratios = 0.62, 95% confidence interval = 0.46–0.83), ulcers (0.57, 0.41–0.80), or fever (0.62, 0.46–0.83) had significantly prolonged infectious periods than those without such symptoms. Our findings provided insights for managing mpox cases, especially those vulnerable to prolonged infectious periods in settings with sporadic cases reported.

The Cold War is often depicted in binary terms: communists against anti-communists, the left against the right, or the free world versus the communist world. However, during the latter part of the Cold War, particularly following the 1979 war between China and Vietnam, earlier Cold War binaries no longer applied, and new alliances were established. These alliances often brought people with the same enemies together, despite having little in common ideologically. This article examines the historical circumstances and Cold War geographies of ethnic Khmu anti-Lao PDR and anti-Vietnamese insurgents, including their alliances with right-wing governments in Thailand and the communist People’s Republic of China (PRC). As neutralists, these Khmu occupied a political space rarely discussed in relation to the Cold War. Although the PRC provided training, weapons, and supplies to the neutralist Khmu between 1979 and 1983, later their political leader, General Kong Le, had a falling out with the Chinese, and the PRC stopped supporting his largely ethnic minority soldiers. However, up until 1989, the Thai government continued to allow the Khmu to maintain bases in Thailand for launching military operations inside Laos, until the Thai government adopted the “Battlefield to Marketplace” policy. Some Khmu continued resisting inside northwestern Laos during the early 1990s, but with declining numbers of soldiers and decreased outside support, armed resistance ended in 2003. It is critical that the geographies and alliances of the later Cold War be differentiated from those of the earlier years of the Cold War. This transnational insurgency deserves attention.

Students’ interfering behaviour is a common concern among educators working in special and general education classrooms. Interfering behaviour can significantly compromise students’ educational experiences and educators’ ability to create a conducive learning environment. Evidence-based assessments and interventions for interfering behaviour in the classroom involve identifying the variables in the student’s immediate environment influencing these behaviours. There has been little to no dissemination of evidence-based assessments for classroom management in developing nations such as South Africa and Vietnam. In the current study, we used a single-case design to assess the effectiveness and acceptability of behavioural skills training (BST) in teaching educators from South Africa and Vietnam how to assess students’ interfering behaviour in the classroom. The training was divided into four phases, with the different steps involved in teaching participants how to assess interfering behaviour. All participants successfully acquired the trained skills and demonstrated a shift in their explanation of the causes of interfering behaviour.

The twenty-first century has witnessed the global resurgence of constituent power—the power to make a constitution—in both academic debate and the practice of constitutional adjudication and design. Comparative constitutional law scholarship on this power has largely focused on democratic settings. Little academic attention has been paid to the constiuent power in socialist regimes. To fill in this gap, this Article explores the design and practice of the constituent power in both former and current socialist regimes. It identifies three paradigms of the socialist constituent power. In the revolutionary paradigm, the power is used at the founding moment after a communist revolution to establish the legal foundation for a socialist state. In the Soviet, post-revolutionary paradigm, constitutent power is a power of the ordinary legislature used for the replacement of an existing by another socialist constitution. In the contemporary reformist paradigm, the socialist constituent power is still vested in an ordinary legislature but its design and practice integrate ideals and practices of democratic constituent power, including public engagement in constitutional reforms, as the consequence of the people’s struggle for their constituent power and the global diffusion of the idea of the popular constituent power. The reformist paradigm is illustrated by a case-study of Vietnam, using original resources. This study has implications for understanding the Soviet legacies and contemporary dynamics of constituent power in the socialist regimes, and for the comparative study of constituent power.

This article examines recent developments in English language education in Vietnam, contextualising them within contemporary sociopolitical and cultural discourses. It begins by tracing the historical emergence and evolution of English in Vietnam before examining its role in the education system. The article then critically discusses Project 2020, Vietnam's largest language education initiative, and its profound impact on the country's language education landscape. Finally, it presents three notable trends significantly shaped by Project 2020: the increasing prevalence of IELTS preparation, the rise of second-career language teachers, and the emergence of communities of practice for English teachers.

This article draws on fieldwork among patients pursuing healing using macrobiotic diets at a Buddhist temple clinic not far from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. It examines the (re-)emergence of macrobiotic diets as a movement for “nurturing life” (duõng sinh) in modeern Vietnam. By examining the use of macrobiotic diets among this temple's patients and followers, the article unravels popular discourses of food and health, and their intertwining relationships with conceptions of chronic diseases in contemporary Vietnamese society. The popularity of this temple as an alternative therapeutic centre for people with chronic conditions also sheds light on notions of illness, healing processes, and religious beliefs. The rise of macrobiotics as an alternative diet and lifestyle reveals people's uncertainties and mistrust amid many prevalent problems in contemporary Vietnam, such as food safety concerns. Altogether, “nurturing life” activities offer strategies for individuals to adapt to a rapidly changing social context.

The papers in this special issue have highlighted new perspectives on food charity activities, as well as notions of food and ethics in contemporary Vietnam. As Vietnam is rapidly changing, food-related activities are dynamic phenomena that reflect the social, moral, and economic changes unfolding in society. However, ethnographic research on food culture in Vietnam published in English has been scarce. This epilogue provides a few exploratory insights into interesting social phenomena in recent years that exemplify the shifting landscape of cuisine and food ethics in modern Vietnam.

On October 26, 1967, John McCain (1936-2018), the naval aviator who later became a US Senator from Arizona was shot down while flying over Hanoi, Vietnam. McCain then became a war prisoner for five and a half years until his release in March 1973. Where McCain was captured became the site of a memorial, depicting a soldier kneeling with two arms raised in surrender. Originally intended to celebrate the Vietnamese victory, the memorial later turned into a symbol of McCain's relationship with Vietnam and the US's relationship to the country. McCain himself visited, as well as recent US leaders, including President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Upon McCain's passing, both Vietnamese people and American expats brought flowers to the memorial to pay their respects. This commentary discusses how the memorial became an instrument of diplomacy, serving the present rhetoric of friendship the US has fostered with Vietnam and demonstrating both peoples' desires for an amiable future. By honouring the memorial, the Americans and the Vietnamese have engaged in what we argue is strategic remembering, reconfiguring the meaning of a war artifact and making it not only a testament to the past but also a marker of renewed reality in the present.

This study explores the preparation of food for charitable distribution by Buddhists in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) (Vietnam). Most of those involved in cooking for charity are women. This article shows that HCMC women perceive cooking for charity as an extension of household cooking. Food charity transforms the household duty of cooking into a charitable practice that benefits the wider society. Vietnamese media focuses on this feminine aspect of food charity, portraying it as an act of kindness that increases communal solidarity during adversities such as the Covid-19 pandemic, similar to women's kitchen work in sustaining their families.

In this article, I use Emile Durkheim’s theory of “social facts” to examine Buddhist charity movements in Vietnam. Durkheim defines social facts as the beliefs and customs required to belong in a community. I use Durkheim's theory to analyze how volunteer groups develop Buddhist cosmologies with distinct social facts about human subjectivity, ethics, and karma. My study traces how social facts cause different programming outcomes like decisions to serve meat-based or vegetarian meals among food charities. My findings are significant among studies of religious humanitarianism for suggesting that grassroots movements spread through heterogeneous values and cosmologies, even within a shared tradition.

At the White House Festival of the Arts in 1965, the American novelist John Hersey read excerpts from his noted non-fiction work Hiroshima (1946) as an act of protest against President Lyndon Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam War. As Hersey linked Harry Truman's bombing of Hiroshima and Johnson's bombing of Vietnam within the same spectrum of American military interventions in Asia, he earned the ire of the First Family and raised questions about freedom of speech in the White House itself. Drawing on archival documents in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and the Library of Congress, this article argues that Hersey's literary protest revealed how the premises of cultural freedom that lay at the heart of Cold War American liberalism stirred far more controversy in practice than their placid articulation in theory would have ever suggested.

This introduction to the special issue on food charity, religion, and care in Vietnam compares grassroots philanthropy in Vietnam with broader trends toward religious humanitarianism happening across Asia. The co-editors of the special issue examine why food charity has become popular in urban areas like Ho Chi Minh City by exploring how food holds spiritual, moral significance for both donors and recipients. This survey illuminates how grassroots philanthropy in Vietnam can offer a comparative study for spirituality, ethics, and food practices across Asia, as well as religious humanitarianism globally.

Spatial analysis and disease mapping have the potential to enhance understanding of tuberculosis (TB) dynamics, whose spatial dynamics may be complicated by the mix of short and long-range transmission and long latency periods. TB notifications in Nam Dinh Province for individuals aged 15 and older from 2013 to 2022 were analyzed with a variety of spatio-temporal methods. The study commenced with an analysis of spatial autocorrelation to identify clustering patterns, followed by the evaluation of several candidate Bayesian spatio-temporal models. These models varied from simple assessments of spatial heterogeneity to more complex configurations incorporating covariates and interactions. The findings highlighted a peak in the TB notification rate in 2017, with 98 cases per 100,000 population, followed by a sharp decline in 2021. Significant spatial autocorrelation at the commune level was detected over most of the 10-year period. The Bayesian model that best balanced goodness-of-fit and complexity indicated that TB trends were associated with poverty: each percentage point increase in the proportion of poor households was associated with a 1.3% increase in TB notifications, emphasizing a significant socioeconomic factor in TB transmission dynamics. The integration of local socioeconomic data with spatio-temporal analysis could further enhance our understanding of TB epidemiology.

This article explores Vietnam’s distinctive approach to data privacy regulation and its implications for the established understandings of privacy law. While global data privacy regulations are premised on individual freedom and integrity of information flows, the recent Vietnamese Decree 13/2023/NĐ-CP on Personal Data Protection (herein PDPD) prioritise state oversight and centralised control over information flows to safeguard collective interests and cyberspace security. The fresh regulatory logic puts data privacy under the regulation of government agencies and moves the privacy law arena even further away from the already distant judicial power. This prompts an exploration of the nuances underlying the ways regulators and the regulated communities understand data privacy regulation. The article draws on social constructionist accounts of regulation and discourse analysis to explore the epistemic interaction between regulators and those subject to regulation during the PDPD’s drafting period. The process is highlighted by the dynamics between actors within a complex semantic network established by the state’s policy initiatives, where tacit assumptions and normative beliefs direct the way actors in various communities favour one type of thinking about data privacy regulation over another. The findings suggest that reforms to privacy laws may not result in “more privacy” to individuals and that divergences in global privacy regulation may not be easily explained by drawing merely from cultural and institutional variances.