If education is meant to indoctrinate, are teachers the indoctrinators? Conventional wisdom suggests that public school teachers in communist regimes should prioritize party-state inculcation over imparting skills. Using an original survey and conjoint experiment with 2,930 teachers in two minority-concentrated provinces in northern Vietnam, I find evidence showing the opposite: teachers consider indoctrination less valuable than teaching basic skills. This preference holds across a wide range of demographic and geographic characteristics. At the same time, teachers still display behavioral compliance with the state. In areas with limited state presence, they function as multipurpose brokers: informing citizens of state initiatives, mobilizing participation, monitoring behavior, and reporting noncompliance. I find that teachers working in more remote schools engage more intensively in day-to-day state-building tasks than their counterparts elsewhere. Moreover, their participation is not associated with Communist Party membership, ethnicity, hometown origin, or school location. Teachers display dispassionate, unquestioning compliance, even if they value state-building work less than typical teaching duties. This article extends the literature on education and state-building, by clarifying the mechanisms through which teachers substitute for state presence in strategic, hard-to-govern peripheries.

How does market-induced internal migration affect state building? I argue that market-led internal migration can help the state expand its physical presence in minority-concentrated peripheral areas, but it can also hurt the state's ability to induce compliance from minority populations. This is especially true where migrants and natives compete over ownership of limited, valuable land. I leverage an exogenous positive shock in global coffee prices in the mid-1990s that drove an influx of ethnic majority migrants into minority-concentrated areas in Vietnam. My preliminary evidence suggests the Vietnamese state was able to expand its bureaucratic and infrastructural capacity (especially those related to education) in affected areas, though the adverse effects on minority compliance in the long run are inconclusive. State building can occur at times without being induced by warfare or internal conflict, and even without the direct supervision of the state.

For central rulers seeking to consolidate legitimacy among the mass, education can be a useful tool. The dissemination and teaching of state-sanctioned textbooks in schools across the country can help to spread ideas about the state and the legitimacy of its rulers. In Vietnam, this construction of the nation-state comes hand in hand with the Communist Party’s quest to legitimize its enduring grasp onto power. This paper dissects the content of Vietnamese national identity as portrayed in general education textbooks. Through a text analysis of over 400 state-sanctioned social science and humanities textbooks for grades 1-12 spanning the country’s post-colonial period (1957-2018), I explore how the components of Vietnamese national identity have shifted over time to serve state building and regime legitimation purpose.