Hanoi's leaders have often boasted to sympathetic foreign visitors that the Vietnamese people were willing to "suffer with dedication." Last week truckloads of war-wounded and dead returning from the Chinese border and from Cambodia testified that the suffering was far from over. One unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable, question is how dedicated the 51 million citizens of the Vietnamese Socialist Republic remain to a leadership that has been unable to create a stable or prosperous country even after four years of relative peace.
Malnutrition and even hunger prevail throughout Viet Nam. Agricultural output declined 15% in 1978, while prospects for this year are...
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