Saigon surrenders.

Per UC Berkeley demographer, Jacqueline Desbarats' article "Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: Executions and Population Relocation," research show an extremely strong probability that at least 65,000 Vietnamese perished as victims of political executions in the eight years after Saigon fell. Desbarats and associate Karl Jackson only counted executions eyewitnessed by refugees in the USA and France to project the rate of killings for the population remaining in Vietnam, and so discarded about two-thirds of the political death reports received, so their figures are likely very conservative. Their death count did not include victims of starvation, disease, exhaustion, suicide or "accident" (injuries sustained in clearing minefields, for example). Nor did they count Vietnamese who inexplicably "disappeared."

Official Communist Party newspaper "Saigon Gai Phong" declares that the Southerners must pay their "blood debt" to the revolution.

Within Viet Nam, postwar economic and social problems were severe, and reconstruction proceeded slowly. Efforts to collectivize agriculture and nationalize business aroused hostility in the south. Disappointing harvests and the absorption of resources by the military further retarded Viet Nam's recovery.

A massive exodus from Vietnam began with the change in government; eventually, 2 million people tried to escape. Many braved typhoon-lashed seas only to languish for years in detention camps throughout Southeast Asia. Hong Kong took in many Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s and 1980s. By the mid-1980s, Asia and the rest of the world was suffering from what was dubbed "compassion fatigue" and Hong Kong started trying to force Vietnamese to repatriate, efforts that produced regular riots in the camps.

The first Vietnamese "boat people" come ashore on the northern beaches of Australia after travelling 4,800 km in leaky fishing boats. Over the next decade, tens of thousands of Vietnamese will flee Vietnam as boat people.

South Vietnam and North Vietnam are united in a new Socialist Republic of Viet Nam.

Chinese leader Mao Zedong dies.

In China, the Deng-era's Four Modernizations program stressed a need for improvement in agriculture, industry, science and defense. Part of this was introducing the responsibility system for family farm plots, where government got some of what the family produced but the family kept rest.

Viet Nam admitted to United Nations.

Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong declared that a million people who had "collaborated with the enemy" (about 7% of the South Vietnamese population) had been returned to civilian life from reeducation camps and jail.

Border tension with the Communist government in Cambodia escalated rapidly after the fall of Saigon, and tension remained high throughout the Pol Pot regime's forced relocation and mass murders of their population.

The Vietnamese PAVN forces invade Cambodia and install a pro-Vietnamese government. They will remain for 12 years, with the last Vietnamese troops leaving Cambodia in 1990.

China launches invasion of Viet Nam; Chinese suffer approximately 50,000 casualties.

Chinese forces withdraw from Viet Nam under a United Nations-brokered agreement.

Note: With the Chinese withdrawal from Viet Nam, General Vo Nguyen Giap has defeated the Japanese, the French, the Americans, the Cambodians, and the Chinese. Now somewhat out of favor with the government, he has recently been in charge of family planning. Birth control is treated as another form of warfare.

Vietnam maintains about 140,000 Vietnamese troops in Cambodia and another 50,000 troops in Laos.

As in other communist countries, corruption hinders reforms.

Doi Moi, "New Openness", declared. Free market economy begins. Greater personal freedom.

Cold War ends with the collapse of the Soviet Union.