In their image: The Vietnamese Communist Party, the “West” and the social evils campaign of 1996

Abstract

This article analyzes the production of English-language and Vietnamese-language state-owned newspaper reports that appeared in the early days of the “social evils campaign” in Vietnam in January and February 1996. While the English-language coverage attempts to depict the campaign as an attempt to create a drug-free, able-bodied workforce in compliance with international anti-trafficking efforts, the Vietnamese-language coverage portrays the campaign as an attempt to fight against decadent and corrupt “Western values” in order to reinvent the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) as the gatekeeper of Vietnamese tradition. These depictions serve a dual purpose. On the one hand, they can be seen as an attempt by the VCP to walk a fine line to avoid the alienation of the expatriate community while at the same time reconstituting itself as a significant institution in the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people. At another level, the social evils campaign demonstrates that neither an easy invocation of “democratization theory” nor a call to arms against Eurocentrism and an affirmation of the particularity of the “East” is sufficient to analyze under what conditions purportedly “Communist” parties might survive and grow vibrant in an age of globalization. Rather, it is important to note the role of the West not as an actual entity but as an imagined phenomenon against which a pure, Eastern tradition is constructed. In other words, the Vietnamese Communist Party uses the social evils campaign to construct the “West” as a phantasmic “straw man” in order to construct itself in the inverted image of the “West,” as “anti-West.” This portrayal is put forward despite the fact that most foreign direct investment in Vietnam comes from East Asian countries and that the businesses singled out in the newspaper articles as the locus of “social evils” were often Japanese-, Korean-, or Vietnamese-owned.