A very dark view of Vietnam - The Beauty of Humanity Movement

Camilla Gibb is definitely no fan of the North Vietnamese communist government, nor of Ho Chi Minh, to judge from the first hal for so of her novel The Beauty of Humanity Movement, which is largely about the suffering of artists, rural peasants, and the impoverished urban class, first under colonial rule but then, perhaps even more bitterly and tragically, under independance. I'm not sure how much of this novel is "true" and even if it is based on historical evidence how much is accurate - but she certainly makes the Communist regime out to be as brutal and oppressive as the horrible government in Cambodia post war and Burma/Maynmar then and today. Was there nothing about the government that elevated the status and improved the lives of the Vietnamese peasants? This novel depict the regime as ruthless - sending artists and intellectuals to "re-education camps," breaking apart villages, blindly killing anyone who seemed in the remotest way like a landowner, getting friend and neighbor to turn against one another - and all the time the life of the impoverished got just worse, more desperate - as we see from the central character, Hung, who basically lives in shack (and pays protection $ for the privilege of doing so) and subsists on cooked pond leaves. The novel moves about from Colonial to war-era to modern times - and in the contemporary setting we see the great prosperity arriving - new hotels, Western visitors and tourists, and in particular a flourishing art market - but we also see that this prosperity barely touches most of the Vietnamese people - very dark view and a very dark novel.