Actively cautious

Abstract

This article uses the case of a northern Vietnamese village to explore how rural households in Asia have negotiated both the opportunities and challenges of marketization and capitalist industrial modernity. I focus on the Vietnamese state’s push to marketize village livelihoods by means of mass establishment of industrial parks comprising largely Foreign Direct Investment factories in the countryside. The state expects young villagers to abandon low-value agricultural livelihoods and treat factory work as their only livelihood strategy and the lifetime warranty of their well-being. Yet while young villagers have been responsive to new opportunities of industrial employment, they have all treated factory work in ways very different from what the state expects: merely as one of their household’s diverse portfolio of livelihood options. I argue that villagers have handled the encounter with industrial modernity in ways rarely documented in the literature on marketization in rural Asia: as ‘actively cautious’ decision-makers, who actively pursue industrial employment to improve their family’s living standards, and carefully maintain a portfolio of livelihood strategies to protect the family’s well-being from the many insecurities of the industrial workplace.

• Industrialization
• livelihood
• rural
• uncertainty
• Vietnam

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Susan Bayly for her generous comments on earlier drafts of this article, and the two anonymous reviewers of the journal for their great comments that really help improve the manuscript.

Notes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The study leading to this work was generously supported by Vietnamese Government Graduate Scholarship; the Wenner-Gren Wadsworth International Fellowship; the Cambridge University Fieldwork Fund; the Richards Fund of the Department of Social Anthropology, the University of Cambridge; and the Evans Fund of the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology, the University of Cambridge. The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

1. In this article, I use the term “marketization” to refer to the processes of economic liberalization and market reforms officially launched in Vietnam in 1986, and elsewhere in Asia, Africa, Latin America and post-socialist Eastern Europe throughout the 1980s and 1990s in the forms of structural adjustment programmes and “shock-therapies” policies (Burawoy and Verdery, 1999). Yet as Toby Carroll (2012a) points out, marketization is an all-encompassing term that has been used to describe many different versions of market reform. While marketization in today’s Vietnam and China has been actively led by socialist states as a means to achieve economic prosperity and protect the legitimacy of the socialist regime (Beresford, 2008; Nonini, 2008), in other Asian contexts it is now led by international financial institutions and Western neoliberal economists that seek to foster “deep marketization” that works on, through and around the state (Carroll, 2012b).

2. There has been a long debate about why the Vietnamese state authorities have placed more emphasis on rural modernization than their socialist neighbour China. Many argue that China already made substantial progress on modernizing and industrializing the countryside in the 1970s and 1980s (Oi, 1989), while Vietnam failed to do so (Kerkvliet and Selden, 1998). Others suggest that since the 1980s the Chinese government has identified fast GDP growth as the top priority, leading to an over-emphasis on developing urban industrial centres at the expense of the countryside (Tobin, 2011; Zhang, 2008; Zweig, 2000).

3. As many have pointed out, what the Vietnamese government visualizes as the country’s path to industrial modernity is a Fordist-style industrial workforce, comprising highly specialized types of workers in clearly differentiated occupations, working to fixed shift time in big, regularized factories, not an army of under-trained workers recruited on an ad hoc basis, working to flexible times and constantly changing jobs as in the ‘flexible mode of production’ widely encountered in globalized Asian economies (De Neve, 2014). The latter is regarded by Vietnamese officials as unorganized and unproductive (Bình, 2008; Sửu, 2009).

4. Throughout this article, I use pseudonyms for the village and all informants to protect their anonymity.

5. Unlike in China where rural land is collectively owned and managed by villages (Cai, 2003; Ho and Lin, 2004), all land in Vietnam by law belongs to ‘the entire people’ and is managed by the state. The state in turn authorizes provincial and district authorities to decide how land should be used and allocated. On land ownership in today’s Vietnam, see Kerkvliet (2006); Sửu (2009).

6. Scholars in China (Chan, 2010; Ngai, 2005; Ngai and Huilin, 2010) have widely pointed out that Chinese migrant workers accept terrible working conditions in factories like Foxconn because they cannot return to their home villages, where they do not have enough land to farm and no money to start a business. Angie’s (2012) and Taylor’s (2004) accounts of migrant workers from rural Vietnam display the same picture: they have to struggle for a starving wage in urban textile and garment enterprises. Despite being constantly threatened by retrenchment, wage cuts and the undesirable conditions of industrial work, they still strive for industrial employment as a forced choice to survive in cities, having lost their arable lands and being unable to find alternatives in their hometown.

7. During fieldwork, I joined daily routines with villagers at their homes and workplaces, observing and personally helping them with their economic practices. Ethnographic materials discussed in this article are collected largely through everyday conversations, when I helped my informants weed the paddy fields, fed chickens and made rice-noodles. I took particular pleasure in the friendly but informative discussions I had with Xuan village workers and household members in homes and in dining and drinking outlets, and at numerous ceremonial events in the village: weddings, funerals, death anniversaries, house-building celebrations and rituals at the village pagoda and other temples of folk religions. Materials from everyday conversations are supplemented by nearly 30 formal interviews that I arranged with local officials, factory managers, shift managers and village workers. All interviews made during visits to the factories were arranged in advance with the workers and their managers.

8. In Vietnam’s centrally planned economy (1958–1986), central planners determined where to locate industrial facilities based on known economic traditions and local comparative advantages (Beresford and Phong, 2000; Phong, 2002). Xuan village, which in the view of central officials was part of a region best reserved for agricultural production only, was never considered to be a destination for the country’s then limited and hence immensely valuable factories.

9. 1 pound sterling equals 30,000 VND.