ABSTRACT
The Vietnamese have always been closer to the Soviet style of "socialist legality" than the Maoist "reign of virtue" approach, but this tendency is more pronounced than ever. In addition to the proliferation of institutional structures, there has been since 1977 a blizzard of detailed regulations published in the Party press on almost every conceivable aspect of administration. In the case of Vietnam, the role of the Party was largely determined by the clandestine conditions in which the revolutionaries operated. In many ways the Vietnamese have been more inclined toward the Soviet model, at least in such areas as industrial management, bureaucratic procedures, and legal structures. Vietnam's development strategy is indeed an attempted "imposition of rationality on the affairs of men" through complex organization and scientific management. Many of Vietnam's revolutionary leaders came from a scholar-official background which furnished a storehouse of traditional concepts of governance.
