The Vietnamese will to independence was too strong to permit it; and that will to independence could never have existed without some intuition, reaching through all social classes right down to the seemingly crustacean politics of the bamboo-walled villages, that there was a special Vietnamese collective identity of some sort. The Vietnamese nation is, to put it bluntly, one of the longest enduring acts of faith in human history.
Alexander B. Woodside, Vietnamese History: Confucianism, Colonialism, and the Struggle for Independence
