Post-Cold War Vietnam: stay low, learn, adapt and try to have fun – but what about the party?^†

Abstract

The paper compares political ideas and acts in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev and in Communist Vietnam. It argues that the Gorbachev group, committed to progressive change, concluded that power granted to them by their position in the Soviet system needed to be eliminated, creating a ‘boot strap’ problem. To secure progressive change they had first to destroy their own power base. By contrast, the ruling Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) attempted, in the two decades after the emergence of a market economy in 1989–1991, to rule an increasingly open society through Soviet political institutions. By the late ‘noughties’ Vietnam faced a crisis of domestic sovereignty, with politics largely a matter of spoils, with policy largely irrelevant and unimplementable, and usually blocked by powerful interests. The paper argues that Hinsley's notion of the sovereignty issue makes this situation far easier to analyse. It argues that the Gorbachev group's analysis would have led to them predicting that the VCP's attempt to use Soviet institutions to rule over a globalising and increasingly open society with a market economy would lead to a crisis of political authority, and that they would have been correct. This leads to the counter-intuitive position that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a success − in that it managed to solve a serious political problem, i.e. how to create the preconditions for a political system suited to a market economy in a relatively open society – and the VCP a failure.

Key words:

• Vietnam
• Asia
• Cold War
• political reform
• regime change
• Communism
• domestic sovereignty
• Soviet politics

Notes

1. Hinsley's position is discussed below. ‘Sovereignty’ here is treated as an assumption held within society that ‘there was a final and absolute authority’ (Hinsley 1986, p. 1). The paper deliberately does not say much about possible relationships between domestic and external sovereignty, though possibilities here are fascinating. Whilst the latter is in the modern world surely largely something granted by other states (manifest, for example, in a seat at the UN), domestic sovereignty, if we follow Hinsley, arises from local political assumptions about relations between rulers and ruled. Links between the two are thus well worth thinking about, not least as one can often find people failing to distinguish between the two. In Vietnamese, the term used is chu quyen, derived from Chinese, and implying that there is a ‘power’ (quyen) that has an agency, and only one agency (chu) attached to it (the noun-adjective order thus follows Chinese rather than Vietnamese rules). This is perhaps a better, at least more easily glossed, term than ‘sovereignty’.

2. That is, the first decade of the new century and new millennium.

3. Woodside's classic work comparing Chinese and Vietnamese versions of mandarinal governance shows how the Vietnamese Emperor was also both ‘Monarch’ (Vuong), and in popular contemporary usage, ‘King’ (Vua) (Woodside 1971). Thus the phrase ‘land without a King’ renders into modern Vietnamese easily, as dat khong co Vua.

4. The present author was told this expression derives from Lord Acton, but has never been able to find a reference.

5. In most accounts in English this Vietnamese term is retained, and then glossed in various ways. Given the position taken in this paper it is better to retain the Vietnamese term, which is a compound formed from doi – to change – and moi – new. Neither of these words alone has any great political significance.

6. For SOEs, see Fforde (2007); for a more general history, see de Vylder and Fforde (1996); for a Vietnamese view see Le Duc Thuy (1993). Thuy was a personal assistant to one of the VCP Party General-Secretaries in the 1990s, Do Muoi, and then had a career in the Vietnamese central bank. See also Dang Phong (2008), which this paper argues attempts the political task of encouraging belief that ‘there is a King’. For a distant but intriguing comparison see the discussion in Carpenter (1997), who argues that when Henry VI of England and others refused to act as a monarch should, his courtiers pretended that he did, which worked for a while.

7. It is the ‘so-called’ north because Vietnamese practice refers to north, centre and south and what is commonly called the north in the West is in Vietnamese called the north and north-centre.

8. These meant that relevant committees of the Party/State had quotas for representation in them of the constituent elements of the Party/State.

9. Consider the fate of CPSU General Secretary Andropov, ex KGB, who sought radical conservative change in the USSR during the early 1980s, and failed.

10. Here and what follows draws upon Ed. Ellman and Kontorovich (1998), largely made up of histories written by senior (but not peak level) CPSU officials. One strong opinion there is that the Gorbachev group grew impatient with the inertia offered by the system and failed to realise that gradual change could allow the economy to reform itself and so preserve the regime – the Vietnamese pathway (Fforde 2009b). The analysis here argues that this misunderstands the political ambitions of the Gorbachev group, whose goals went well beyond the economic.

11. Further research, perhaps drawing upon the growing range of autobiographies, is needed to provide a decent secondary literature on patterns of authority at this time; for example, as Premier Do Muoi was able to push through policy based upon advice from his senior technocrats that led to establishment of a state Treasury system in Vietnam in the 1990s some years before China. This policy had run into opposition from local governments keen to retain control over state funds, but this was overcome. Personal observation.

12. The author first heard this expression in a consultancy study of the implementation of the Law on Cadres and Public Servants carried out in the late ‘noughties’. Consider Rama (2010):

… rapid economic and social change are not incompatible with a resilience of political power and culture. He {Gainsborough} convincingly argues that scholarly language about ‘reforms’ misses the point, because what is at play is a continuous reworking of existing power structures. (Martin Rama, endorsement to Gainsborough 2010)

13. The present author, whilst continuing academic research and publication throughout this period, was involved in a number of consultancies in Vietnam which permitted a series of ‘participatory observations’ of the realities of policy development and implementation.

14. The earliest reference the present author knows to this phrase is Dam van Nhue and Nguyen Si Thiep (1981).

15. By the late 1990s, we may note the following. An interview with the Deputy Manager of the Bank for Investment and Development in Thoi Bao Kinh Te Viet nam 15/7/98:3 provided a clear outline of the way in which neither the bank nor its customers bore business risk. ‘In reality, in all localities, no Bank Manager would dare reject a project that has been approved by the Party Committee, and the People's Committee’. For central projects, ‘For credits to General Companies that lie within the plan the Bank has to lend …’ If debtors could not pay, then the solution was to extend the payment period.

16. See the analysis and policy actions presented at the national conference of State Bank managers in January 1998 (Tuoi Tre 17/2/98:11).

17. The information available to Vietnamese was by now of good quality. For example, The Hai (Thuong Mai 27/5/98:8) reported the steep falls in commodity export prices (crude oil – 21%; rubber – 42.5%, etc.) and, in the first quarter, the steep falls in exports – to ASEAN, 48%; to China, 20% and to South Korea, 60%. The Vietnamese business community was well informed as to what was happening; numbers of government missions went abroad to investigate key branches (e.g. garments, where product was diverted to the EU to compensate for loss of demand in non-quota countries). They advised businesses to accept re-badging of Vietnamese products as well as to pay enough to insure against trade risk (Vu Trong Hai Nhan Dan 27/4/98:5).

18. See references to donor positions in Fforde (2012).

19. Thus Woodside (1971, 2007) on historical ideas; apart from Vietnamese direct experiences, and those of the Soviet Union, Vietnamese thinkers are also, of course, aware of interactions with French and American ideas before 1975, as well as Eastern Europe before 1989–1991 and a wide range of contacts since the country opened up. Here it is worth stressing that the ideas of transition of 1980s were, unusually, largely home-grown (Fforde 2009b). See also Marr's classic writings on the late nineteenth century and the colonial period.