Northern Vietnam’s revolutionary leader Hồ Chí Minh famously commented
that the French colonial regime had employed a “keep the people stupid” policy (chính
sách ngu dân) in order to make the Vietnamese masses easier to rule. One important part
of this policy was restricting access to literacy in Vietnamese society to a small percentage
of the population. This paper’s purpose is to explore the conduct and consequences of
the literacy campaign that was launched by Vietnamese revolutionaries in the 1940s and
1950s. As will be shown, authorities employed a number of innovative strategies to teach
reading and writing to the masses, while at a broader level, the rapid attainment of almost
universal literacy in North Vietnam became an important symbolic marker of Vietnam’s
transcendence of what revolutionary authorities regarded as the “backwardness” that had
characterized colonial society.