The straw-colored hat, the bright green paddy fields and the black buffalo grazing all around — a world pure and beautiful, hidden and charming. Make the effort, implies the slogan, and your reward will be a vision of tranquility, grace and beauty. This Vietnam promises everything your modern world has left behind: delicate women, simple living and unspoilt landscapes.
Turn away from the buffalo boy and the scene is “spoiled” by his parents’ new concrete house. Vietnamese development planners don’t share the western tourist aesthetic. Call it socialist, call it proletarian or just call it ugly; they’d rather see an electricity substation than pre-industrial rural landscape. The people want progress and prosperity. The fantasy country we seek is the one they want to leave behind.
Many times I felt I was just describing ripples on the surface, while beneath great currents were at work.
The problem for the Party leadership is how to stay in control. The Party has never been a monolithic organization; its rule depends on balancing the competing interests of a range of factions — from the army, to the bosses of state-owned enterprises and its rank and file members. In the past this gave it the flexibility to adapt and survive but now seems to prevent it from confronting the new elite who are twisting the country’s development in their own favor and laying the ground for future crisis. As well-connected businesspeople build top-heavy empires with cozy links to cheap money and influences, people at the bottom are being squeezed by increases in the cost of living. The system often looks like, in the words of Gore Vidal, “free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich.”
Vietnam has come a long way in the past 30 years but its evolution has often been through crisis. The contradictions inherent in simultaneously having communist control and eating capitalist cake have come to breaking point near the end of each decade: 1979, 1988, 1997 and 2008. Each time, the Party has found a peaceful way through but the resolution has only set the stage for the next battle.
What kind of society is “The New Vietnam” becoming? It’s still nominally communist but it certainly isn’t communist in the way North Americans and Europeans usually think of the word. It’s not drab or depressing — it’s bright, exciting, fast-moving and colorful. Its leaders came to power fighting French colonialism, American imperialism and domestic capitalism, yet under their direction the country has opened its doors to corporations from France, the US and every other country, and allowed private enterprise to flourish: the World Bank calls Vietnam a poster boy for economic liberalization.
Some might snigger at the official description of a “socialist-oriented market economy” but it’s not an empty slogan. Even today, the Communist Party retains control over most of the economy: either directly through the state-owned enterprises which monopolize key strategic sectors, through joint ventures between the state sector and foreign investors or, increasingly, through the elite networks which bind the Party to the new private sector.
More important to the Communist Party than economic dogma is self-preservation. Everything else: growth, poverty reduction, regional equality, media freedom, environmental protection — everything — is subordinate to that basic instinct. To survive, the Party knows it has to match a simple, but terrifying, figure: one million jobs a year.
Victory, however, seemed to prove the superiority of the communist model: it had beaten the capitalists and their American backers. But triumph didn’t last; Vietnamese state socialism couldn’t deliver. By 1979 heavy industry was swallowing resources without much effort on output, light industry was contracting and agriculture stagnating, as peasants in the newly communist south resisted attempts to collectivize them. The country was forced to import 200k tonnes of rice just to prevent starvation. To cap it all Vietnam invaded Cambodia, and China attacked Vietnam and cut off all economic aid. Those parts of the economy dependent on Chinese imports fell into crisis.
But if the transition was gentle, it was also slow, confused and contradictory. It’s ironic that Vietnam is frequently held up as a shining example of economic liberalization. The reality is in some ways the opposite. Vietnam’s transition was marked by rising state involvement in the economy, by strong efforts to direct the economy from the center and the Communist Party’s determination to take an independent path, regardless of the advice of the World Bank, the IMF and other advocates of laissez-faire capitalism. At every crisis and junction the Party’s priority has been its own survival. The needs to buy off dissent, spread the benefits of growth and mitigate regional disparities have always trumped calls for too-great liberalization, deregulation or the singular pursuit of economic growth. The result has, so far, been a combination of economic growth, poverty reduction and political stability unmatched by any other developing country. In the words of Ho Chi Minh, it has been “success, success, great success.”
The boom was particularly strong in the south. By the end of the decade, state firms in HCMC contributed about half of the national state budget. In effect Saigon and its surroundings had taken over the role performed by the Soviet Union two decades earlier.
However, the law meant the private sector had finally arrived in Vietnam — 20 years after the start of economic reform. With hindsight, perhaps the long build-up gave these small “mom and pop” enterprises the time to build up capital and experience before the rude shock of unrestrained market forces steamrolled them into the ground. Vietnam has done much better in this regard than many other “transition” economies.
There are bigger private firms but they’re few in number. Although 350 companies are now listed on the country’s two stock exchanges, 99% of the country’s businesses are still small or medium sized. In 2005 there were just 22 domestic privately owned firms among the top 200 companies and, as we’ll see later, “private” is a debatable term.
Low-skilled and labor-intensive industries like footwear and traditionally the first stop for any industrializing country. In Vietnam they have created hundreds of thousands of jobs and underpinned its boom. But to sustain growth the country needs to attract higher-skilled industries which pay better. Vietnam has been very luck in that it opened its economy at just the time when multinational corporations began to doubt the wisdom of relying too much on China. Many have put huge amounts of investment into factories along China’s southern and eastern coasts but are now making provision in case the situation there ever turns against them. This “China+1” strategy has brought many big firms to Vietnam.
But growth has exposed Vietnam’s weaknesses. Manufacturers regularly complain that roads are falling to pieces and ports are too congested. More seriously, when Intel started to recruit staff it discovered that out of 2,000 applicants, just 40 were qualified to work in its factory, the lowest proportion of any country where it operates.
The requirements for getting a degree from a Vietnamese state university typically include being able to sprint 100 metres and fire an AK-47.
The trader and the bank clearly enjoyed the protection of what Vietnamese call an “’umbrella” — someone with power.
The general assumption among businesspeople in Hanoi was that Van and Incombank were being protected by people with connections running deep into the Ministry of Public Security. The police simply barged the State Bank out of the way. What mattered was not the law but raw power.
ABN Amro began to see the writing on the wall. With the law so vague that it could not prove its innocence and with its staff still in various forms of detention, it gave in. At the end of November 2006 it announced it had transferred $4.5M to a police custody account. Its public comment was to say that it “didn’t wish to profit from illegal actions of others.” Things went quiet for a bit and then, 7 months later, the Government Inspectorate announced the results of its investigation into the affair. It put the entire blame on the State Bank of Vietnam and its governor Le Duc Thuy, saying that the “Discrepancies were due to a lack of proper regulations on trading foreign currencies among banks” — exactly what ABN Amro had been saying for the previous year.
For the Party, a strong state sector is the way it can maintain national independence in an era of globalization. It means that the Party can still set the big goals. It is also determined to maintain high degrees of state control over strategically important sectors such as natural resources, transport, finance, infrastructure, defense and communications.
The Party has learnt from the mistakes of the past: keeping state enterprises insulated from the outside world does the country no favor — to thrive they need new investment and modern technical and managerial skills. It’s prepared to use all the tricks in the capitalist book to keep the socialist part of the economy sailing. Corporations have been free to form joint ventures with foreign partners and sell stakes to overseas investors, even to “equitize” (the word “privatize” is still politically suspect) — just so long as the management; as a whole, does the Party’s bidding. IN return, they get access to preferential government support.
Add all this together and several of Vietnam’s biggest GC have the potential to become self-financing “black boxes”. Funding arrangements are opaque. In late 2008, for example, EVN owned 40% of EVN Finance and 28% of ABBank, which in turn owned 8% of EVN Finance. Completing the circle, both ABBank and EVN owned securities firms which held stakes in EVN Finance. The GC can underwrite, purchase, trade, manipulate and profit from the equitization of its member companies. The opportunities for unethical, criminal and nationally destabilizing behavior are plenty. GC bosses think they can make more money by dabbling in these areas than in their core business.
The Party leadership likes SOEs because they can implement its policies. The Party members who run them can be ordered to carry out Party policies. But many bosses like running SOEs because they provide plenty of opportunities for personal enrichment. Setting up a subsidiary company and appointing oneself to the board is an easy way to make money. Another is to set up a private company owned by a friend or relative and either sell its assets at cheap prices or award it lucrative contracts. With easy money around, it’s not hard to bribe patrons, officials and regulators to turn a blind eye to breaches of the law. The Party members in charge of the SOE “tail” end up wagging the Party policy “dog”. But this isn’t the whole story. What is remarkable about Vietnam is the way, at moments of crisis, the Party can discipline its errant members.
To understand how this happens, it’s worth looking at the way the Party operates. The leadership wants to run the country along the liens of something which resembles Gaullism in France. A behind-the-scene elite (the Communist Party) is supposed to set the overall direction of policy and the delegate its implementation to the state (which is controlled by the Party). The government should then draw up the laws and use whatever resources are available to it — the state bureaucracy, SOEs, the private sector, foreign investors, international donors or whatever — to see the policy executed. And, behind the scenes, the Party should monitor, corral and press the various actors to make sure that its policy is followed. That, at least, is what the Party would like to happen. The reality is usually something different. Sometimes the Party acts as a cohesive force — taking a decision and enforcing it — and at others it breaks into factions, partly over ideology but increasingly around individuals and their patronage networks. No one gets elected to the CPV’s leadership, the 15-person Politburo, without building up a network of supporters and delivering them benefits in return. Working out whether a particular decision is the result of ideology or patronage is often impossible. In most cases it’s probably a bit of both.
Take the current President, for example — Nguyen Minh Triet. President Triet rose to power through the structures of Binh Duong province, just outside HCMC. He helped to turn it into an economic powerhouse, attracting huge amounts of foreign investment, providing hundreds of thousands of jobs and contributing a significant proportion of the national budget. He did so by bending the rules, breaking fences, to please investors. He cut through planning regulations to get industrial sites built, he did deals over taxation to attract foreign companies and gave state enterprises a helping hand when they needed it. The reward for his success was promotion within the Party, first to boss of HCMC and then to head of state. But his base is still Binh Duong province and it’s now a family fiefdom. His nephew has taken over as the provincial boss and his family control many of its administrative structures. Vietnamese talk about being under someone’s “umbrella.” Triet’s “umbrella” shelters his family and network in Binh Duong just as his colleagues’ umbrellas shelter their in other places. This shelter gives provinces, SOEs and, increasingly, the individuals in charge of them leeway to bend and break rules, knowing that they are protected from the law. But there are limits to how far any national leader can push the interests of their local networks. National interests eventually have to prevail. Policy must be the result of consensus: national, factional and local interests all have to be satisfied. But reaching consensus usually requires ferocious in-fighting.
In April 2008, PM Dung publicly urged SOEs to limit their non-core business to 30% of their total capital. The fact that the government was reduced to “’urging” SOEs to follow the law revealed the problems it was having in maintaining control. The SOEs didn’t listen; behind the scenes in-fighting raged. The government was forced to try a different route. The central bank, which had been giving the GC an easy ride with low interest rates and a generous money supply, was ordered into line. Rates were raised and the flow of cheap money reduced. Protective umbrella had been put away; the leadership had been impelled to act in the national interest. It worked, the economy cooled down and the crisis abated.
Even truly private companies find it most impossible to obtain licenses, registrations, customs clearance and many other vital documents without good connections. Businesses that don’t play the game quickly get into trouble. Even privately owned banks prefer to lend to “connected” people. Most of the controllers of the commanding heights of the private sector are either Party appointees, their family or their friends. The Party elite are turning Vietnamese capitalism into a family business. The new business elite are not separate from the Party but members of it, or related to it.
The young offer loyalty, the old offer protection. Those under the umbrella of COCC can get away with almost anything, for their patrons outrank the police and the courts. The real elite is known as 5C: they can get away with absolutely anything. It’s even alleged that one 5C son murdered another one, but the whole thing was hushed up.
Vietnam is now the second biggest rice exporter in the world, after Thailand. (Not the second biggest grower: its output is dwarfed by China, India and, to a lesser extent, Indonesia.)
Not everything is rosy for the rice grower, though. The industry’s success is based on quantity rather than quality. Vietnam’s rice exports make up almost a fifth of the world total by volume but only 5 percent by value.
Constructing new roads and public buildings and finally some that were regarded as voluntary but where there was strong social pressure to contribute, such as funds for flood relief or war veterans. In total some families said they were paying up to 40% of their total household income in various kinds of tax and contribution.
Land disputes continue to be the hottest political issues in Vietnam, far more corrosive to the legitimacy of the Party than calls for multiparty democracy.
There were at least 15,000 ongoing land disputes in the country. Of these, about 70% are to do with compensation, 10% relate to disputes about ownership, the next 10% are the historic cases and 5% are about corruption.
Money and influence form a perfidious circle. The Party leadership is well aware of the problem and sees it as a clear threat to its legitimacy. Once people become unhappy with local leaders, it’s only a short step to questioning the Party’s entire right to rule. That was why in 1988 it created the Famers’ Union. It realized that it needed a “pressure group” in the villages to help individuals and households stand up to the old boys in the People’s Committee and their network of friends. But now the Farmers’ Union has been captured by the old boys, so the Party is looking for new ways to rectify the problem.
Migration to the cities is gathering pace but so far Vietnam has largely prevented the development of the kind of vast shanty towns typically found on the outskirts of most Asian cities.
In effect, the Party is trying to replace the cities’ disorderly proletarian and peasant characters and replace them with something more respectable. The vanguard of the working-class revolution is now trying to make the masses respect middle-class values. Urban beatification projects and street-cleaning campaigns are just two of the ways the Party is redefining what it means by “the people.” Campaigns like these are launched under the banner of van minh — and who can oppose civilization? But in practice civilization means prioritizing the interests of property, of foreign investors and of middle-class shoppers over the interests of the poor. It is truly the end of communism as a political principle — although it’s entirely compatible with the continuing rule of a Communist Party which needs to shore up its support from the most powerful sections of Vietnam’s new society.
But if Dean’s generation rebelled against materialism, Vietnam’s teenagers are rebelling against years of communist austerity.
But perhaps because of the higher standard of living, southerners tend to be less concerned about the appearance of status and, with less to prove, fashion is less obviously flash; there’s less cool in riding a brad new motorbike than in Hanoi. Given the experience of forcible redistribution after unification in 1975, there’s also greater wariness about displaying wealth in public.
Traditional values of respect for elders and a sense of community responsibility are still strongly inculcated by parents and schools and the vast majority of children still expect their parents to have a strong influence over how they live their lives. For these young people, youth is a period of temporary independence between the demands of childhood and the new demands of a different kind of family life which will begin with early marriage.
Even among Vietnam’s newly emerging “subcultures,” rebellion is more about questions of rhythm than rejecting parental values.
The reason was simple: it was owned by a friend of a son of the PM, Phan Van Khai. But after Khai retired in mid-2006, the days of the club were numbered.
But even this action wasn’t enough to quell the rumors about the club. The city gossip suggested that it wasn’t raided because of the drug use but simply because some influential people were cut out of the profits being made there. It’s typical of city dwellers’ distrust of the authorities that even when they take what they call “anti-crime” measures many people still assume the motives are criminal.
Illicit sex is, more or less, a staple of mainstream male life in Vietnam but so long as it’s done discreetly it’s unlikely to incur the wrath of the authorities. It’s only when the authorities’ rule is directly challenged by ostentatious rule breaking that crackdowns get serious.
Party experts and government officials are struggling to find new ideas for ways to cope with the problems of the new society they are building. The top of the hierarchy clings to the Utopian idea that socialism can solve everything. Theoreticians still argue over the legacies of social thinkers like Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim and their implications for solving the country’s problems. The lower levels try to cope using whatever resources are to hand.
The problems are tying the Party’s ideologues up in ideological knots. For decades they argued that social evils were the result of foreign and capitalist influence, starting under the French and continuing under the Americans. Trying to explain why they have surged now, under Party leadership, has pitted theorists who hold the line that socialism has the answers against practitioners who work on the assumption that it hasn’t. It seems unlikely that the old line can be held for much longer but it still has powerful supporters. They don’t understand the new world they have created — they still announce strategies calling for a 90% reduction in crime, for example — and for the time being it’s easier to fall back on traditional ideas than seek out new ones.
Outsiders have to be careful not to subject Vietnam to criticism that we wouldn’t impose on ourselves. Baron Haussman had to destroy the old Paris to make the city that the world now adores. Few Americans would think of setting up a food stall on a busy shopping street without some kind of licence, nor would they tolerate the sight of shoe-shine boys skipping school. “Something” would have to be done. It’s refreshing, in a world that has largely abandoned the dream of “solving” social problems and talks of merely “managing” them, that the Communist Party still thinks it can find clear answers.
On the surface it appears that Vietnam is managing its social problems reasonably well. But in contrast to most other countries in the region, Vietnam is still at the beginning of its transition. In the next few years its urban population is likely to double and then, ultimately, triple. Vietnam is a poor country and is already struggling to manage the pressures of economic transition. Its current structures won’t be able to cope.
But Mr Hai doesn’t see it that way. He is at pains to make clear that the whole campaign is voluntary and that there is no punishment for anyone who doesn’t take part. On the face of it, that’s true; but, as he points out, Vietnamese take family honor very seriously and the people will “feel shame if they don’t live up to their commitments.” There might be other consequences if, for example, the family ever needed help from local officials.
Every person has to be registered in a specific place at birth. If they want to move, they need the consent of the authorities both where they’re registered and where they want to go. Borrowed from China, the system was initially intended to control anti-communist resistance. Over subsequent decades, even though the central state lacked the resources to ensure it was fully implemented everywhere, it became the basis for economic planning, the provision of social services and the distribution of food and goods.
As the economy liberalized, however, it became easier for people to evade the system. The distribution of state-supplied jobs, food and housing had once been largely dependent on holding a valid ho khau, but as more goods and services became available on the open market, its power was reduced.
Anyone without a valid ho khau is permanently at the authorities’ mercy. Unregistered households have to build a life’s worth of corrupt relationships simply to keep living and working in a particular place. If they misbebehave, life can get very difficult.
In spite of this, and other, clear evidence of the failure of the ho khau system, there’s no sign of it being abandoned. In part, this is because it continues to perform its original function, allowing surveillance of the population.
And new ly lich are still being written. The essay format continues to be used for most people applying for jobs in the public sector and for anyone wanting to join the Communist Party. But the police also compile their own ly lich on those they consider subversive or worth watching — journalists, foreigners, those who have contact with journalists and foreigners, and so on.
At times like these Vietnam has no problem with finding manpower to take action. The size of Vietnam’s various security forces is estimated as at least 6.7M. Given that the country’s total working population is around 43M this suggests that one person in six works either full or part time for a security force.
Even after the decisions are taken at the top, the chances of them being implemented on the ground exactly as planned are slim. The Party-state leadership has trouble enough getting local officials to control karaoke bars or enforce building regulations, let alone maintain totalitarianism. Whenever officials have to choose between national instructions and local demands, it’s usually the local that wins. Local officials answer to local bosses, so local “relationships,” influence and bribery tend to be more effective than central policy. State salaries are so low that officials depend upon the benevolence of those they are supposed to regulate to make ends meet.
But the loudspeakers have something broadcasting lacks — local character. They’re increasingly ignored by a population with access to MP3 players and other distractions but they remain an important tool. At the very least people can’t say they haven’t been warned about the latest mobilization when questioned about it by a local Party cadre.
A year later, road deaths had fallen just 10 percent. Wearing helmets doesn’t prevent speeding, drink-driving, ignoring traffic signals or carrying insane loads.
While Vietnam doesn’t block any of the pornographic sites ONI tested, it filters a significant fraction of sites with politically or religiously sensitive material.
Up until the late 1980s there were no NGOs: the state provided all forms of social assistance, and the mass organizations (particularly the Women’s Union, Youth Union, Trade Union and Farmers’ Union) under the Party’s organization, the Vietnam Fatherland Front took charge of mobilizing society.
The chain is crucial because it means that if anyone ever steps out of line there is always, at least on paper, a personal contact from a higher level who can step in and have a quiet (or not so quiet) word and sort things out. There are officially no truly “non-governmental” organizations in Vietnam; everything is (formally at least) part of either a Party or a state structure. In reality, though, the Party is struggling to stay in control.
Formally the activities of all organizations are monitored by the system of “chops”. Every organization must have a “chop” — a stamp which guarantees any document and proves that it officially sanctioned rather than simply the act of an errant official. A signature on its own, whether from a government office or a private organization, has no weight without the proper “chop.”
They built up a formidable coalition of allies. They briefed newspapers about their discoveries and gave important people tours of the site. They were careful, however, not to directly attack the construction project or its backers. Private criticism and lobbying is tolerated but public criticism of leaders by outsiders remains politically unacceptable.
Despite their professed atheism and campaigns against “backwardism,” part of the Party leadership seem to have been strongly influenced by two pieces of what they usually call “superstition.” One was the site’s auspicious geomancy: the interpretation of landscape features around the capital which placed the old Citadel in the “belly of the dragon” — a place laden with power. The second was the belief that the removal of the seat of government from Thang Long on two previous occasions (in 1397 and 1802) had precipitated foreign invasion.
And now the Politburo had reached a final agreement, any dissent would have been regarded as disloyalty.
But then, in Oct 2006, with the law then in its 13th draft, the head of the National Assembly Office candidly admitted at his pre-session press conference that: “There remain a lot of issues to be resolved so the law will not be enacted during this session.” And that was as far as the Law on Associations ever got.
None of this is meant to suggest that the Party is struggling to keep the lid on a pressure cooker of political frustration. Although unhappiness with land seizures provokes frequent protests and economic problems provoke periodic grumbling, only a very few are prepared to challenge the right of the Party to rule the country. The vast majority of the population is happy with their — gradually improving — lot. The political system remains firmly Leninist (in the words of one analyst, Very, very Leninist) — the Party’s right to lead the people can’t be challenged.
There’s little doubt that any serious challenge to the Party’s rule would be met by determined force. Under the constitution the army has the duty to defend, not just the country, but socialism itself. The state could put millions of soldiers and police on the street at very short notice.
Except the masses don’t come any more — not even for Uncle Ho’s birthday. The party of the masses no longer trusts crowds and the crowds have got better things to do than act out the role of the masses.
In the old days the law was largely meaningless. The Ministry of Justice was actually abolished between 1960 and 1981. There was no need for it: political decisions made by local Party officials sufficed. Now, the Party leadership thinks the law will perform two functions: forcing local officials to follow central instructions, and simultaneously getting officials off the backs of entrepreneurs and investors, enabling them to create jobs.
In most countries, national commemorations are led by state officials. Not in Vietnam. The birthday celebration, like the country, is led by the Communist Party. The state and the government follow on behind.
The National Assembly is, according to Vietnam’s Constitution, the country’s supreme authority. There is no separation of powers. As well as approving laws and holding ministers to account, the National Assembly select the President and PM, manages the Supreme Court and the legal system, amends the Constitutions and adjudicates conflicts between the Constitution and legislation. In reality, however, the Assembly is not the all-powerful body the Constitution makes it out to be because, like the rest of the state, it is a tool of the Party.
Because of spectacles like this, it’s tempting to dismiss the National Assembly as a joke parliament. Of its current delegates, 91% are members of the Communist Party. The remaining 9% had to pass a stringent Party-controlled nomination process. The candidates it elects to state posts are all chosen in advance by the Party and the legislation it passes follows the Party’s agenda.
“Until we have owners, we can’t have a market economy or a real democracy,” he says, and argues that having members of the Assembly who are owners — the bosses of enterprises, for example — helps to build democracy. But he’s critical of those reformers who want to speed up the process of reform “at any price,” without regard to the consequences for social stability.
The consultation and nomination that help voters to select candidates with appropriate abilities and characters, who can be worthy representatives for the people in the body with highest state power, is a core duty for the entire party, the people and the army.
The VFF is a key instrument of Party rule — it’s the organization which keeps the National Assembly under Party control. Although any citizen, in theory, stand for election to the National Assembly; they first have to be vetted in a process managed by the VFF.
The VFF’s final national meeting also decides which central candidate runs for which seat: candidates don’t have to have any connection to the province which they nominally “represent.” The PM, Nguyen Tan Dung, for example, represents the city of Haiphong where he neither lived nor worked but still gets elected with 99% of the vote. This allocation process is carefully done; indeed it’s the centerpiece of the election management process. Centrally nominated candidates never run against each other and are usually placed in districts against much weaker local rivals. They’re expected to win and go on to take high positions in the Assembly. However, provincial election boards decide which local candidates run in which districts, giving local politicians the power to ensure their favorite candidates get easier contests.
Members of the Mass Organizations, in particular the Women’s Union, went from door to door asking people if they intended to vote. If the answer was “no,” they asked for the household’s voter registration form so they could cast the vote on the household’s behalf. The province of Vinh Long actually managed a turnout of 100%. Not a single person in the province was too ill, too lazy or too far from a polling station to vote, at least according to the official figures. The average national turnout was 99.6%.
The self-nominated candidates fared even worse. Of the 236 individuals who nominated themselves, just 30 passed the approvals process and got on to the ballot paper and only one of them was actually elected — down from two in the previous Assembly. Just one of the 493 people elected to the Assembly was not nominated by the Party.
Now that it is established, those who don’t take bribes are regarded by their colleagues and superiors as potential whistleblowers who could undermine their position. Corruption is also a way of maintaining loyalty. Low pay keeps junior officials dependent upon senior ones for allocating them money and favors. But, perhaps most crucially, corruption allows the system to bend rather than break. The whole structure of laws and regulation is so complex and rigid that if it weren’t for graft it would have either broken or provoked so much resentment that there might have been active resistance to it. By allowing individuals to negotiate their way around its obstacles, corruption actually helps the system to fend off demands for wider reform.
Campaigns like this are intended for public consumption — the event was broadcast live on national television. But the public at large are generally unimpressed, if the reaction in one street cafe was anything to go by. “Why are you watching that rubbish?” asked a passer-by. It was Friday morning and they had better things to do than watch the launch of another campaign against corruption.
But the public does take an interest when the Party gets serious. Even fairly senior local party leaders can be hung out to dry when it’s necessary pour encourager les autres.
Just as it did in the mandarinate of 17th-century Vietnam, success in the Party depends upon having a combination of three factors: talent, connections, and money. Of the three, connections are the most important. Local bosses rise to the top by creating patronage machines, buying support and buying off opposition as necessary. Ambitious cadres will cultivate the support of business leaders, judges, police and their peers. If the Party leadership wanted to maintain rigid loyalty to central instructions it would have to replace local cadres with ones from other areas — but this would require a vast increase in resources, training, and logistics, including proper salaries and other incentives for deployed cadres. It’s much cheaper to use local staff, try to keep them in line and accept corruption as part of the price of rule.
Much of what the Party is trying to do with legal reform is being subsidized by foreign aid donors. Many of them are under the illusion that they are helping to build the “rule of law” in Vietnam which will ultimately supplant the “rule of the Party.” The Party leadership is, quite strategically, encouraging them to believe the illusion.
It’s the difference between “rule of law” — which has dangerous implications — and “rule by law,” which the Party believes is compatible with its own ambitions. The Party doesn’t want a “separation of powers” but a “specialization of powers” in which the various branches of government are assigned certain functions and overseen by proxy through the National Assembly. In the meantime, the cost of international legal training, new law schools, new computer systems and hundreds of thousands of hours of consultants’ time is all being subsidized by foreign governments.
The Party would, if this strategy were successful, evolve into a “socialist freemasonry” with its won rules and rituals, hidden from public view but with great influence through its formal and informal networks of power. Many other countries have some kind of equivalent — from Ivy League fraternities in the US to Oxbridge networks in the UK, or, perhaps the closest parallel, graduates of the ENArques in France — but few have such a disciplined and formalized arrangement.
During the late 1990s the Party suffered a huge vote of no confidence from young people: during the last half of the decade just 7,000 students chose to join. In response, it redefined what it offers to young people, abandoning its claim to fulfill their every revolutionary hope and instead offering them a path to personal advancement. Young Party members are frequently recruited explicitly on those terms, being told: If you want promotion you have to join..
Only about 15% of young Vietnamese are members of the Youth Union — and the leadership tries to keep it that way. Members must come from a “good family” and be hard-working students. The Union actively winnows its membership to exclude those who don’t set a good enough example — members have to keep a book in which details of their family, school and personal behavior are recorded. The Communist Party calls it a “socialist school for youth.” Its purpose is not to mobilize large numbers of young people but to be a vanguard organization whose members will lead their peers and from whose ranks subsequent generations of political and social leaders will emerge.
In 1996, following the defeat of his proposals to end preferential treatment of SOEs at the 8th Party Congress, the then PM Kiet set about marginalizing the economic conservatives. Since their power base was in provinces dominated by SOEs, he engineered the splitting of 8 of them in time for the elections the following year. He specifically ordered that the new boundaries should be drawn so as to ensure that the bulk of the state-owned industry ended up in one half of the province while the other half was dominated by the private sector.
In this way Kiet turned the voting of the 8 provinces from being 7 to 1 against further liberalization into 9 to 7 in favor. Just to make sure that reluctant conservative local leaderships went along with the plans, Kiet bought them off by ensuring that there was plenty of patronage and cash for the new provinces to hand around. New provinces meant new leaders, new bureaucracies to staff and new facilities to construct — and all the associated kickbacks.
Vietnam may be a one-party state, but it’s not a dictatorship. The Party remains a Leninist institution: once policy is agreed it is defended by all. But the process of making policy contains all the alliance-building, plotting and back-stabbing that one would expect in a western democracy. The dynamics are complex and fluid. Loyalties and allegiances change. There are both reformers and conservatives and also cliques lining up behind key people in hope of receiving the benefits of patronage. These differences have crystalized into competition between factions. Some observers see this as the basis for a potential split within the Party at some point in the future but these factions don’t necessarily have coherent positions across all issues. Economic reformers have clamped down just as hard on political dissents as the conservatives. Some economic conservatives are social liberals, and vice versa. For the time being, Party loyalty is stronger than any centrifugal forces within it. However, the result of factional rivalry is frequently political deadlock, with different groups able to use interlocking vetoes — their holds on different parts of the Party or state apparatus — to thwart the intentions of the other.
Only a very few are prepared to call for an end to the Party’s monopoly on power and usually only when they are safely out of power. The reformist PM Kit and the conservative former Party General Secretary Le Kha Phieu both openly discussed the issue, but their interventions probably owed as much to their sense of frustration because of their inability to get their own way while in office as to their interest in political pluralism.
Each year at Tet, a slogan appears on billboards, banners and even planted in flowerbeds, “Mung Dang, Mung Xuan” — “Greet the Party, Greet Spring” — as if the Party’s presence is as much a part of life as the seasons. The phrase itself is the echo of an idea dating back to feudal times, later promoted by Ho Chi Minh, that the ruler lives in harmony with nature.
It’s common for foreigners to assume that the reformers’ victory is inevitable; that the great march of History will take Vietnam into the promised land of free markets and, later, to political pluralism. In Vietnam that appears to be no more than the mirror-image of Karl Marx’s belief in the inevitable victory of the proletariat. There is nothing inevitable about what is happening in Vietnam; the outcome will be the result of day-to-day choices made by the Party and the people.
Their demands were officially ignored by the Party leadership at the time, but over the last decade the Party has actually addressed most of them. The National Assembly has been given greater powers, the press has greater independence, it’s now easier for individuals to complain about injustices, campaigns are mounted against corruption, there’s more artistic freedom and souther politicians are not longer marginalized. The Party leadership would never admit it, but the dissident movement did, to some extent, set the reform agenda.
What is there left for dissidents to complain about? Ultimately it boils down to a single cause in the Constitution: Article 4, which states that the Communist Party of Vietnam, “is the force leading the state and society.”
On its final page the Manifesto outlined the non-violent methods of its “freedom fighters”. It argued that “Once having a clear and correct knowledge, the people will act appropriately and effectively.” And that was about it. There was little about how the people should be educated or what should happen afterwards. It was long on idealism but short on specifics.
However, things began to change — as Chairman Mao had predicted decades before when he had warned his own Party that “When you open the windows, the flies also come in.”
But the wider question diplomats had was whether the dissidents were helping or harming what they hoped would be Vietnam’s gradual path towards stable democracy. Among that part of the diplomatic community which was at all concerned about human rights — most of the richer countries — there was greater concern for stability.
In early 2007, once President Bush had gone home and Vietnam’s WTO membership had been safely approved, the authorities ignored all diplomatic protests and conducted what Human Rights Watch later described as “one of the worst crackdowns on peaceful dissidents in 20 years.” The dissidents overreached themselves. Perhaps they had begun to believe their own propaganda; begun to believe they really were creating a greater political space for dissent. More dangerously, they left the safe confines of cyberspace and began to try to take their message out to the people.
However, there seems little sign of them winning support from the wider public. By plotting with foreigners and accepting financial support from overseas Vietnamese they have damaged their credibility at home.
It’s rarely a discussion, more often a critique. The man from the Ministry reads out a list of items in Vietnam’s newspapers, magazines, radio programmes, television bulletins and websites which the Ministry thought were “negative.” It’s the first warning, a simple ticking-off. Repeated failures bring tougher penalties — editors-in-chief can be ordered to replace their editors and publication can be fined, suspended or even banned altogether.
In early 2007, when there were outbreaks of cholera in some parts of the country, the Ministry warned the Tuesday meeting that coverage of the disease might hurt the tourism industry.
There are no legal, independent media in Vietnam. Every single publication belongs to part of the state or the Party.
This wasn’t how it was meant to be. Right from the beginning of Doi Moi, Party leaders wanted the media to act as an agent of reform. The Politburo knew that hundreds of thousands of people had grievances about corruption and mismanagement by local officials that it didn’t have the capacity to address them all. So, in effect, it delegated some of the power of inspection and exposure to the media.
Newspapers and magazines had to actively sell their product — and therefore offer something readers actually wanted to buy. Just as in every country with a freer press, editors discovered that the best thing for selling papers was crime. And who better to publish crime stories than a newspaper owned by the police themselves?
The once near-monopolistic Nhan Dan, on the other hand, is kept afloat by the obligation placed upon every Party and government office to buy a copy. If it were left to survive on its street sales it would have gone bust long ago — it’s almost impossible to find in newspaper kiosks. The people don’t want to buy “The People.”
Under Article 6 of Vietnam’s Press Law, the media have two mutually contradictory obligations: “To provide honest information about the domestic and international situations”; and, “To carry out propaganda, disseminate information about and contribute to the building and protection of directions, orientations and policies of the Party and the law of the State.”
VNN-TV lasted less than three years. Officially it closed because it wasn’t making money. But the reason it wasn’t making enough money was because it couldn’t reach a big enough audience without a broadcasting license, and, in contrast to its equally piratical rivals, the reason it couldn’t get the license was because ultimately its patrons didn’t have enough influence with the right people.
Broadcasts are recorded and then transmitted with a 30-minute delay to give the censor sufficient time to stop the signal if there are “provocative” news items such as any mention of Vietnam — in case it might be offensive — or of political change in China or Cuba. The only time the delay was removed was during the Asia-Pacific summit in November 2006, presumably because the authorities didn’t want all the influential foreigners in town to realize what usually happens and because they could be reasonably confident that almost all the coverage would be positive.
The fact that most of them manage to keep their working visas might suggest that the government doesn’t care about the law. Except that it does. Like many laws in Vietnam, it hovers over the heads of those it affects, ignored and unused, until the authorities have a reason to use it.
Foreign news organization with Vietnamese-language output are not allowed to have permanent correspondents based in Vietnam.
It’s illegal for Vietnamese organizations to host their sites on straight .com domains — though many large organizations routinely do so. As in so many areas of life in Vietnam, regulations weren’t a problem until some other line was crossed — and then they became very problematic indeed.
There’s plenty of evidence of low standards. Many editors are more concerned about selling papers than checking their facts. Interviews are regularly “adapted” to fit the needs of the story and, from time to time, entirely invented.
But discussion is kept within safe limits. Criticizing the implementation of policy is acceptable; criticizing the Party directly is not.
You can’t fight the top officials because they are the Party. Scapegoats will be found. They want the knife to be sharp but not too sharp.
It seems strange to call Vietnam’s landscape “untouched” when it was, for a decade, deliberately targeted by a US policy of what some have called “ecocide”: deforestation, the draining of wetlands, the use of carpet-bombing and even the seeding of rain clouds to stimulate mass flooding. Vast areas of natural habitat were destroyed. One reason why Vietnam is currently one of the few countries whose forests are growing is because so much was destroyed during the 1960s.
It’s not hard to see why. Wildlife traders are thought to make over $20M profit each year — 30 times the total budget of the Forest Protection Department’s monitoring and enforcement arm. A forest ranger makes a pathetic $50 a month. Even dedicated officers face an impossible battle because no part of the state bureaucracy is free of corruption.
The plan is to close all natural forests to logging by 2010. Like the bear bile plan, it looks good on paper but it has affected only the small guys in the trade. The big operators continue to take wood from natural forests in defiance of the law. But it’s getting harder to find good supplies of timber in Vietnam, so the trade has gone over the border into Laos and Cambodia. The mountainous regions along the borders are strategically sensitive areas controlled by the military. Either the military are incompetent, or they are deeply involved in forest destruction.
The prevailing attitude to land, trees and animals in Vietnam is that they are resources to be exploited as profitable as possible. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising in a country which has only recently escaped dire poverty. The national priority is to secure livelihoods for a large and growing population. But there’s an added factor in Vietnam: the dogmatic Marxist-derived belief that the environment is just another resource to be used up in the service of humanity.
Nonetheless, the Vietnamese fishing industry is still planned on the basis of arbitrary targets set by people far away from the realities of failing catches and dynamite fishing.
It’s been a long time coming: farmers have been complaining about pollution for years. Now, however, it’s the urban middle classes getting upset and the politicians have started listening.
Every US army division to serve in Vietnam had committed war crimes.
What is Vietnam getting to make all this forgetting worthwhile? In short, its basic needs: development and security. Without normalization with the US the country would still be languishing under an economic embargo, starved of World Bank and most other multilateral aid, outside the WTO and missing out on billions of dollars’ worth of foreign investment. It might also have become a vassal of China. Vietnam has traded the memories of its recent past for the promise of a prosperous and secure future.
But the Vietnamese, while still trying to keep China’s vital support for its war effort, refused to give in to these changing demands; they didn’t want to be China’s buffer state.
Instead, Hanoi courted greater support from the Soviet Union and tried to distance itself from China. But almost as soon as the war was won in 1975, the Vietnamese leadership became over-confident. With the USSR bankrolling it, Vietnam could pay less and less attention to the demands of Beijing.
The then Foreign Minister, Nguyen Co Thach, and his allies argued that the main threat facing the country was economic backwardness and that overcoming it would require co-operation with the sources of international finance and technology — the West.
In September 1989, two months after the crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing and amid the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the Party hierarchy was gripped by the fear that Vietnam would be the next. General Secretary Nguyen Van Linh told the Central Committee that its priority was to defend socialism and that those who believed in the good intent of the US were “naive.”
Fore once, all Vietnamese appeared united. If there’s one thing the global Vietnamese community can agree on, it’s a dislike of China.
Compare Vietnam’s position with that of Burma. Both are one-party states intent on remaining in power and both have regional strategic significance. But while Burma is subject to high-profile pressure from Europe and the US, Vietnam is receiving billions of dollars in foreign aid and investment. No US administration is likely to jeopardize the multibillion-dollar interests of Intel, Nike, Ford, GE and all the other US corporations who’ve invested in Vietnam, by pushing for change and instability. International capitalism is doing very well out of Communist Party rule in Vietnam and stability is a lot more important than the release of a very few troublesome dissidents.
The Vietnamese look at the contemporary experience of countries with close security ties to the US (Colombia, Egypt, Pakistan and the Philippines are good examples) and see loss of sovereignty, a distortion of national interests to favor Washington’s and frequently the pursuit of short-term tactical gains which exacerbate systemic threats to the country’s survival.
There are still a few who talk the language of anti-imperialism, and a very few who might still believe it, but this language is now a cloak for other arguments. The real divisions are over tactics rather than grand strategy, and cliques rather than ideology.
Given Vietnam’s low profile on the agenda of great powers and the country’s constraints in terms of strength and position, Vietnam by itself cannot establish a firm balance with China or the USA. Therefore, partnerships with Russia, India, Japan, EU and ASEAN… are all required as a counterweight to China and the US, thus striking a balance in the relations with these two powers.
Vietnam’s attempts to find some kind of position between these various gravitational pulls epitomizes the new multi-polar global order. It wants to give the big powers a stake in Vietnam’s future but not too great an influence over it. Perhaps it would be helpful to see Vietnam, an in particular its elite, as motivated by competing xenophobias based on rival memories of the past: between China the eternal oppressor and China the 20th-century liberator, between American the 20th-century destroyer and America the 21st century investor. One part of the country is familiar with the old world, with the Soviet Union and China and the old ways of doing things. They suffered during the “American War” and found meaning in the calls for international socialism. Abandoning those dreams now is, for them, a betrayal of everything they and their dead comrades fought for during those glorious, miserable years. The other group is familiar with the West and enjoys the benefits of capitalism. They see China not as a guardian, but as a threat, and they believe international integration will bring both riches and greater security.
The last bastion of opposition appears to be the security apparatus. But who knows what will happen? It might seem, in its efforts to please everyone, in its breathtaking rush forward, that Vietnam is forgetting its past, suppressing the traumas of previous centuries. But in a country with an ancestors’ altar in almost every home, the past is never totally suppressed.
Her shocked reaction to the “backwardness” of the capital (a “backwardness” — it’s worth saying — which most foreigners find charming) was provoked by the sudden collapse, in her eyes, of the image created by years of official propaganda.
To be fair, Hanoi has made great efforts to accommodate the country’s minorities. From its beginning in the 1930s the Party recognized their existence and their rights — something which other countries in Southeast Asia — Thailand and Laos, for example — long failed to do. But since the establishment of the state the dominant attitude has been patronizing. The authorities regularly describe minority peoples as “backward” and introduce policies to “civilize” them by “developing” their agriculture and banning their customs — with effects which that become familiar from other examples of similar civilizing missions around the world: community breakdown, resentment and occasional outbreaks of anti-state violence.
Life is easier in the south. The fertile soils of the deltas have created abundance and its different civilizations have created vigorous trading networks and prosperity. Harsh living conditions in the center of the country are a major reason why people are so poor and one reason often given for the political success of so many who come from the region.
The Red River’s unpredictable flow has created a ribbon of blighted territory along its banks occupied by the poor and marginal. The city faces inwards, clustering around the lakes in its centre, a giant version of the walled villages in its hinterland. Symbolically it seems to be keeping outside influences to a minimum. In Saigon, the river is the city’s focus: the trade and new ideas it brings are welcomed into the heart of the city.
Cochinchina, comprising Saigon and the Mekong Delta, was annexed as a French colony while the rest of the country remained nominally under the rule of the Nguyen monarchy — albeit “protected” by France. While the distinction might not have been obvious to the average peasant, Cochinchina was under French law; which meant there was, for example, greater freedom of the press. The colonial economy — plantations, commodity markets and globalization — penetrated society more quickly and more deeply than in the north or centre.
Capitalism is a relatively recent introduction in the north but it has been southern Vietnam’s default position for almost all of the past 150 years.
The surplus (after deductions for kickbacks and patronage) was reinvested in better infrastructure and services, which encouraged other investors to locate there, creating a virtuous circle of growth. Southern leaders, who had been largely excluded from the pinnacles of power since unification, knew they were unlikely to make it to the top of national politics. Instead, they concentrated on keeping their own constituents happy, untroubled by the need to break national rules to keep the income flowing.
There are currently 11 provinces which generate a surplus. 4 are in the north, including Hanoi itself, 2 are in the centre but 5 are in the south and, together, these five generate half the provincial income of the entire country. Increasingly they set the agenda for the country as a whole.
Old symbols are being reinterpreted, old traditions reinvented and ideas which were once thought backward and superstitious are being given new respect. So the Temple of Literature in Hanoi, once portrayed as an example of reactionary Confucian elitism, has been refurbished and given a new role to mark the eternal importance of education in Vietnamese civilization.
They give time and money to the pagodas, often to the chagrin of their families. They have become the butt of television jokes and occasional critical remarks by state officials, but these middle-class women found meaning and, above all, status through their ostentatious displays of piety.
However, there is one area into which the Church desperately wants to move, but can’t: education. Legally, anyone in Vietnam can set up a school. Religious groups have applied but no permits have yet been granted. For the time being the state seems determined to preserve its monopoly of the means of mass indoctrination, but perhaps, in time, this too will change.
It hardly needs to be said that such a revision would throw into question the nationalist legitimacy of the current state. There’s no place in the “Official History” for any resistance to northern forces — whether in the first century, the tenth or the twentieth. If the story that the Vietnamese have been a single nation for 2,300 years is questioned, then Hanoi’s right to rule the whole country, or any part of it, could be questioned too. This helps explain why no new history of the country has been published in Vietnam for many years.
The ingredients of national success are already in place. Some are easy to measure: a young population, widespread basic education and plenty of foreign investment. Others are less tangible, in particular the optimism, energy and acquisitiveness of the people. But these ingredients could easily be wasted or allowed to spoilt. The country is storing up troubles — the entrenchment of the new elite, the hollowing out of the state, the over-exploitation of the environment, ethnic inequality and the others. All of these problems are solvable, but the longer they remained unaddressed, the worse they will become. The question is whether the Party leadership has the will to tackle them in time.