Top Quotes: “Vietnam: Rising Dragon” — Bill Hayton
Introduction
“Many people have assumed that, with billions of dollars of foreign investment piling into Vietnam, political change will inevitably follow. But liberalisation only began because of the need to feed and employ a burgeoning population and even now its limits are rigorously policed. The trappings of freedom are apparent on every city street but, from the economy to the media, the Communist Party is determined to remain the sole source of authority. Beneath the great transformation lurks a paranoid and deeply authoritarian political system. Vietnam’s prospects are not as clear as they might first appear to outsiders. The risks of economic mismanagement, of popular dissatisfaction and environmental damage — made more dangerous by an intolerance of public criticism — mean the country’s prospects are far from assured. Everything depends upon the Communist Party maintaining coherence and discipline at a time when challenges to stability are growing by the day.
The problem for the Party leadership is how to stay in control. The Party has never been a monolithic organisation; 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 favour and laying the ground for future crisis. As well-connected businesspeople build top-heavy empires with cosy links to cheap money and influence, 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!!”
“The sick have to pay for healthcare, parents have to pay for schooling and the unemployed are left to fend for themselves.”
“Even today, the Communist Party retains control over most of the economy; either directly through the state owned enterprises which monopolise 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. Every year Vietnam’s schools produce a million new peasants and proletarians, the product of a huge postwar baby boom which is showing little sign of slowing down despite an intense two-child policy. Growth is vital, but not at the expense of creating too much inequality. So is reducing poverty, but not at the expense of impeding growth too much. Over the past 30 years policy has swung back and forth, sometimes favouring growth, sometimes stability. The beneficiaries have been the peasants and proletarians. Vietnam’s achievements in reducing poverty are impressive. In 1993, according to government figures, almost 60 per cent of the population lived below the poverty line. By 2004 that figure was down to 20 per cent. The country has met most of its Millennium Goals, the development targets set by the United Nations, early and escaped the ranks of the poorest countries to join the group of ‘middle-income states.’ People’s living standards are soaring, their horizons are widening and their ambitions are growing But there is danger in this success. The ‘New Vietnam’ is different to the old. The marriage of state control and liberalisation, of Party and private interest, is distorting the economy towards the wants of the few rather than the needs of the many. And these networks of ‘crony socialism’ are becoming a threat to Vietnam’s future stability. Wietnam risks the fate of many of the World Bank’s previous poster boys — boom followed by bust.”
“Vietnamese state socialism couldn’t deliver. By 1979 heavy industry was swallowing resources without much effect on output, light industry was contracting and agriculture stagnating, as peasants in the newly communist south resisted attempts to collectivise them. The country was forced to import 200,000 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. Something had to be done. The decision which the Communist Party leadership took in August 1979 was intended to preserve the communist economy they’d spent a quarter of a century building but ultimately would unravel it. Centralised economic planning and the allocation of resources by the state — all this dogma would eventually dissipate. The leadership called for production to ‘explode’. State-owned enterprises still had to meet their commitments to the central plan — but they were now allowed to buy and sell any surplus independently. Farmers could also sell any rice they had left over once they’d supplied their allotted quota to the state. In 1979, before China and the Soviet Union opened the door to industrial capitalism, Vietnam’s communists had already started experimenting with it.
The purpose of the policy was not to abandon socialist planning, but to try to save it. Some State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) were already trading informally, and some even doing business with foreigners, just to pay the bills. By tacitly approving these informal transactions the Party leadership hoped to control them and gradually rein them in. Instead the opposite happened. Illegal trading doubled from 20 per cent of the market in 1980 to 40 per cent two years later. This became known as pha rao — fence-breaking — the bending of rules to get things done. In January 1981, the leadership tried to get tough. It issued Decree 25 CP, ordering all state firms to register their market trading, It was an attempt to control the black market but at the same time it al. lowed SOEs to ‘self-balance’ — to buy and sell independently — once they had fulfilled their commitments to the official Economic Plan. It was the real beginning of economic reform. Provincial bosses in the south pushed things even further. At the end of 1985 Ho Chi Minh City’s authorities ignored national law and unilaterally allowed firms to use ‘new methods’ of management. Economic liberalisation was well underway long before the ‘official’ start of reform in 1986.
And in that year a lot of things happened at once. Growth fell, as did food output, and inflation hit almost 500 per cent. Le Duan, the Stalinist Party boss who’d formally led the country since Ho Chi Minh’s death in 1969 (and informally for at least a decade before that), died. The Party called a national Congress and all the pressures that had been building up inside it for a decade exploded. The driving force was partly a group of economic reformers within the Party, but mainly the bosses of the state enterprises who were now enjoying the fruits of their fence-breaking and wanted to legitimise their freedom to trade. They forced the Party leadership to abandon central planning and let the market have greater influence — the process now known as doi moi: literally ‘change to something new’, but more usually translated as ‘renovation’. Gradually the parallel ‘free’ market became dominant, allowing a transition away from old-style central planning far gentler than in any other state socialist country. A vast land reform programme gave farmers control over their fields, agricultural output (which still accounted for 40 per cent of the economy) boomed, Vietnam pulled its troops out of Cambodia and restored relations with China, which in turn allowed cheap imports to resume across the northern border. Peace allowed big reductions in military spending and the fall in Soviet aid forced bigger cuts in public spending generally. By 1991, inflation had fallen to manageable levels.
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 liberalisation. 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 centre and the Communist Party’s determination to take an independent path, regardless of the advice of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other advocates of laissez-faire capitalism. At every crisis and juncture 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 liberalisation, 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.’
When Communism collapsed in Europe, it was foreign capitalists and international donors who maintained Communist Party control in Vietnam. In 1981, aid from the Soviet Union funded about 40 per cent of the Vietnamese state budget. In 1991, it was cut off completely. The Party declared Vietnam open for foreign investment and the combination of low wages, under-used factories and a great geographical location was too tempting for overseas corporations to miss. But even at this point, the state remained in control, and foreign investment was directed into joint ventures with state firms. In every other communist country that has embarked on economic transition, the proportion of the economy controlled by the state has fallen. In Vietnam it actually rose: from 39 per cent in 1992 to 41 per cent in 2003.”
“In almost every other country where the state’s share of the economy has risen, the consequences have been stagnation, fiscal crisis and hyperinflation. Vietnam was different because its state enterprises operated largely without state support; so much so that their ‘owners’ — government ministries, provincial authorities, Party structures and so on — treated them as, in effect, private companies, albeit ones with privileged access to borrowing from state banks and protection by state agencies. Adam Fforde, a leading economic analyst of Vietnam, calls them ‘virtual share companies’. They made profits, they expanded and diversified: Vietnam’s exports increased fourfold between 1990 and 1996. Their managers made deals, paid off their protectors and prospered. It was easy for those with the right connections to shut down competition from rivals, imports or newly arrived foreigners. Corruption became endemic, state banks lent money with abandon and some of the firms tried to turn themselves into mini-empires — to the extent, in some cases, that they formed unofficial joint ventures with secretive investors well beyond the scrutiny of the state which was supposed to own them. In the worst cases some of these corporations became outright criminals.”
“While the battle with the Bank was raging, the Party began to realise that, even with foreign investment, the state sector wasn’t going to be able to provide the necessary million jobs a year. It took an historic decision: to let private industry flourish. In May 1999 a new Enterprise Law was passed, abolishing most of the cumbersome bureaucracy which had prevented private companies from formally registering themselves. The impact, once it came into effect on 1 January 2000, was almost instantaneous: over the following five years 160,000 enterprises were registered. Most of these were existing businesses which had been operating without licences and took advantage of the new law to register. 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 steamrollered them into the ground. Vietnam has done much better in this regard than many other ‘transition’ economies.”
“The highway between Hanoi and Haiphong once ran through rice helds. Now the helds are mostly hidden behind a chain of industrial parks and manufacturing sheds stretching almost the entire 50 miles between the two cities. On the outskirts of Haiphong, one of those great sheds is home to the Taiwanese-owned Stella Shoe Factory. Within its massive compound 7,000 workers toil in four vast halls.”
“Graeme has watched the factory deveiop, literally, from a greenfeld site in just a few years. Its first employees came straight out of the rice paddies and had to be trained from scratch. Many had never used a modern toilet before and would instead bring their own banana leaves to work. But they slowly acquired the skills necessary to make sports shoes and then, as their abilities improved, leather footwear. In mid-2006 each worker eamed, on average, between $60 and $80 per month. In Europe and North America that would be below subsistence, but at the time it was double the minimum wage in Vietnam. It was also much more than any local farmer could earn.”
“To sustain growth the country needs to attract higher-skilled industries which pay better. Vietnam has been very lucky 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. The Japanese electronics giant Canon is one of them. It now makes more than half its computer printers in a complex of plants around the city of Bac Ninh, north-east of Hanoi. In 2005 it was the thirteenth-biggest company in Vietnam. Beginning with relatively simple ink jet printers, it has now expanded output to include more sophisticated laser printers.
The factories are big, grey, windowless boxes. Security is a major concern; strangers aren’t allowed inside lest they see the company’s technological secrets. Within, everything is highly disciplined. When the gates open early in the morning, hundreds of workers ride in on their bikes, change into their company overalls and stand in line to sing the company song.”
“Although Vietnam has been very successful in spreading literacy — official statistics show literacy levels of more than 90 per cent — university education has long suffered from corruption and over-emphasis on Marxist-Leninist studies and national defence training. The requirements for getting a degree from a Vietnamese state university typically include being able to sprint 100 metres and fire an AK-47. There’s less emphasis on vocational skills.”
“No one gets elected to the CV’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 Dung province, just outside Ho Chi Minh City. 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 Ho Chi Minh City and then to head of state. But his base is still Binh Dung 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 them.”
“Even truly private companies find it almost impossible to obtain licences, registrations, customs clearance and many other vital documents without good connections. Businesses that don’t play the game quickly get into trouble. Surveys suggest that 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 Communist Party elite are turning Vietnamese capitalism into a family business. The new business elite are not separate from the Communist Party but members of it, or related to it.”
“In Vietnam such relationships have a cash value. Companies — both domestic and foreign — are prepared to pay large fees for introductions and access to decision-makers. Those who already have access — through family connections — have a big advantage. A good introduction to a key official can be worth as much as $100,000. The money doesn’t usually go directly to the politician, it goes to the facilitator — often a relative. Sometimes it’s not money but a gift, even a free apartment, which is why state employees on nominal salaries of $100 per month can enjoy a standard of living equivalent to that of a successful business leader. Vietnamese talk of having one leg inside and one leg outside the system. A family member with a low-paid job somewhere in the bureaucracy is a useful way to keep the connections alive while wives, brothers and cousins fish for business outside. Official jobs now also have a value. Heads of departments can charge several thousand dollars for a junior position which offers opportunities and connections.”
“In the early 1990s, when the World Bank wanted to stimulate private sector development in Vietnam, it awarded many scholarships to young people, including one to a woman called Dinh Thi Hoa who became socialist Vietnam’s first Harvard MBA. On her return she founded a company called Galaxy which now incorporates a PR agency, most of the good Western-style restaurant chains in the country, a big cinema in Ho Chi Minh City and a film production company. In many ways it’s a model of private sector success. But Galaxy didn’t just spring from nowhere. It’s one of the many firms created by the children of the Party elite. The World Bank chose Hoa for the scholarship in part because her father was Deputy Foreign Minister. From the beginning reform has been encouraged by giving politicians a direct, tangible stake in it.”
“Unlike farmers’ leaders in most other countries Ky didn’t see his job as defending his members’ right to stay on the land. He was candid about what needed to be done. ‘At the moment we have 32 million rural labourers and we can say around 10 million of them are underemployed.’ His answer was not to demand greater subsidies for farmers to preserve their way of life. The Party had decided to industrialise the country, a large number of farmers needed to leave the land and, as head of the Farmers Union, he would make sure it happened. Ky expected a third of the country’s farmers to lose their jobs over the coming years as a result of agricultural modernisation and competition from imports. ‘So the most important thing now is to provide training for them so they have better skills which will satisfy the requirements of the service industries,’ he said.”
“Hanoi was moving quickly to try to enforce collective agriculture — in spite of having falled to make it a success in the north for the previous 20 years.
On collective farms peasants were generally organised into work brigades’ and were paid — in food and sometimes in cast — on the basis of ‘’work points,’ broadly calculated on the amount of labour they contributed. But because farmers were paid on the basis of the whole brigade’s achievements it was easy for idlers to let others take the strain and morale fell. Making things worse, the ‘farm gate’ price of rice was kept deliberately low in order to provide cheap food for the cities at the expense of low incomes for the farmers. In the end, peasants put more effort into the 5 per cent of the collective’s land that they were allowed to farm privately than into the 95 per cent they were supposed to be working for the common good. Rice yields in the north fell from the early days of collectivisation in 1958 right to the early 1970s. When the Party tried to impose the system in the south the most productive farmers simply refused to join in. By 1986, ten years after unification, just 6 per cent of farmers in the Mekong Delta were in collectives. But rice yields still fell. They dropped by a quarter in the south in the four years after 1976 because the supply of inputs such as fertiliser had been put under the control of inefficient state-owned enterprises at prices set by the state. The response from the farmers was to sell more and more of their production outside state channels through unofficial markets. By the end of the 1970s, falling output, a lack of foreign aid, falling levels of state investment and a series of natural disasters meant the country was facing starvation: in 1979 it had to import 13 per cent of its basic subsistence needs.
Conceivably, the Party could have followed a path previously trodden by Joseph Stalin and the Khmer Rouge, sending the troops into the countryside, compelling peasants to work harder and liquidating those who resisted. But it didn’t. Whether for reasons of principle or pragmatic politics it decided to pursue a different path. Two years after China had done the same thing, it moved away from collective farming and back towards household production. The 1980s was a decade of growth. In 1989 the country exported rice for the first time in many years. A decade after Hanoi had tried to impose northern-style land policies on the south, the Party had been forced to recognise their limitations. With farmers now responsible for the basic decisions about production, output has exploded — at least in the south. Vietnam is now the second biggest rice exporter in the world, after Thailand.”
“The province of Thai Nguyen is famous in Vietnam for tea. There are dozens of varieties, from red-brown to bright green, tea for relaxation, tea for medicine and tea for secialising. Most of Thes Nguyen’s tea cultivation has little in common with irs Indian or Chinese counterparts with their great contouring estates of identical bushes tended by armies of contracted labour. Although some farmers work on contract to big industrial tea growers, most of That Nguyen’s tea is cultivated by families on tiny fields at awkward angles, most without the benefit of irrigation. The dry earth is not the only difficulty they face. Vietnam is a significant exporter of tea — but its product is generally of low quality and historically its biggest market was Iraq, which took 40 per cent of the industry’s exports. The US invasion in 2003 wasn’t just a disaster for the people of that country; it badly hurt the livelihoods of tens of thousands of Vietnamese tea growers too.”
“International NGO Oxfam found that incomes in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi are — on average — more than five times higher that those of rural labourers. The brutal truth is that the quickest way to escape poverty is to abandon farming. However, those who are poorest are usually the least able to be successful migrants. Without the resources to finance such a big risk, or the networks to guide them into good jobs, it’s more difficult for them to find work in the booming assembly and manufacturing plants. Some work as petty traders, selling in markets or from the back of their bicycles on city streets, Plenty more work in construction.”
“A contribution to a road-building project was demanded of an elderly and infirm member of one household on the grounds that her funeral procession would have to pass over the new route.”
“There are vast amounts of money to be made in converting agricultural land into housing or industrial sites, particularly those plots with direct access to major roads. The World Bank estimates that, every year, around 10,000 hectares of agricultural land on the margins of towns and cities is being taken for development. Given that the national average land holding is half a hectare and that supports an average family size of five people, around 100,000 people are likely to be losing their land through development alone each year: one million people in a decade. Some like Tran Thi Phu in Hai Duc village resign themselves to their fate — but others fight it.”
“Corruption in local government has fuelled a large and growing number of rural protests in recent years. The most dramatic was in the province of Thai Binh in 1997 where something close to an uprising took place, requiring the deployment of large numbers of police and visits by delegations from the top Party leadership to both suppress and resolve the dispute. In the commune of An Ninh, villagers smashed up the local People’s Committee building which had just been fitted out with $70,000 worth of chinaware and furniture and then trashed the houses of eight local officials. At one point 10,000 people gathered in the district capital to protest, before being dispersed by police and fire engines. Another major dispute in Ha Tinh province in 2001 began when villagers in one district refused to do their compulsory service helping to repair the main north-south National Highway One in a protest against corruption. They later attacked government buildings. and managed to block the highway for several days. Smaller disputes occur almost constantly, and increasingly farmers bring them to the streets of Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City.”
Street Life
“Modern Hanoi has always been overcrowded. When the French left in 1954 the Communists inherited a capital with more than a quarter of its housing stock destroyed or badly damaged by fighting. Bloated by refugees, the population had swelled to 300,000. A third of them were crammed into the old centre and many of the rest in slums and shanty towns around the city fringes. The answer seemed obvious. The property of departed colonial administrators and the old Vietnamese elite was seized and reallocated to those the Communist Party wanted to reward. In Hanoi they gave the best villas to themselves. The yellow-painted houses along the avenues north of Ba Dinh Square still house the leadership, the ex-leadership, their think-tanks, state agencies and ministries. Elsewhere in the city, properties were allocated to the people. All houses larger than a single room were nationalised. The new rulers simply partitioned the grand houses and apportioned them out. The original inhabitants were given just one room, which they had to rent from the state for a nominal sum. Other rooms were then allocated to other families by Party cadres. In some houses this was forced upon the inhabitants. But others who could see what was coming divided up their own houses and invited in relatives and friends, rather than have the state impose strangers upon them.”
“Privacy barely existed in these shared houses; cooking and washing facilities were communal and moving around often meant passing through other families’ rooms. This might have been just about bearable when numbers were small and all the occupants came from one extended family. But in collective households which had been pushed together by the state, relations were frequently difficult, and as the city’s population began to rise, so did overcrowding. Life spilled out onto the streets. The streets weren’t being used for very much else — there was little trade taking place (most private business activity then was illegal) and precious little entertainment. Looking at the mayhem in Vietnamese cities today, it’s almost impossible to imagine them without shops or motorbikes, without street traders, televisions or karaoke and often without tarmac or electric lights. But as recently as 20 years ago city streets would be quiet most of the day and night. Life was turned inside out; the streets became ‘private’ places where domestic life could take place. Women cooked meals on the pavements and in the alleyways families would wash hair, clothes and children. To some extent this was a reflection of the ‘ruralisation’ of the city. Peasants who’d migrated to Hanoi retained many of their village ways — such as doing things outdoors. But for longtime urbanites too, living on the street became a necessity.”
“In 1989, as state-owned enterprises and the military laid off a million and a half people, the streets were ‘opened’ and Vietnam’s street-food revolution began. Women led the way. They took control of the means of production: a charcoal burner, a large pot and a few wooden (later plastic) stools, and began to support themselves and their families by selling tea, pho noodle soup, bun cha mini kebabs on noodles, lau stew and all the other homemade delights for which Vietnamese food has now become justly famous. Previously petty trading like this would have been quickly, and literally, stamped out. Now, a change in police behaviour made it obvious that they’d been told to leave the women alone.”
“Informal shopping streets are now known as ‘frog markets’ because of the way the traders leap up and carry away their merchandise at the sight of a policeman.”
“Recreation is being transformed too. After work has stopped and things get a little cooler, Hanoi’s sidewalks turn into the world’s most democratic badminton club. The pitches are already marked out in white paint on the paving slabs and tarmac; all the players have to do is bring along their racquets and shuttlecock, tie their net between the trees and serve. The courts are squeezed in wherever possible. In some cases the court markings go up over the corner of a flowerbed and down the other side. All along the former colonial boulevards convivial groups of sprightly men and women in white chat and play, oblivious to the traffic rushing past them. There’s no shame in sweating on the street, no concern about the recklessness of swinging a racquet close to the noses of pedestrians and motorcyclists. But street badminton players are noticeably middle-aged and older. It’s not a sport for the new middle classes. The nouveaux riches don’t want to exercise in public. They choose instead to play their sports behind closed doors.”
Sex and Drugs
“In spite of this burgeoning market of young consumers, Hanoi has very little nightlife, particularly in comparison with Ho Chi Minh City and other cities in the south. Until April 2007 it had one mega-club, the New Century. A cavernous venue, with a capacity of 2,000, it became a legend. As flash as any nightspot in Europe or North America, it regularly hosted stars from the south, international DJs and singers from Vietnamese communities abroad. It was well ‘connected’. The security guards were said to be local police officers, and visiting VIPs had carte blanche to use the grounds of the National Library opposite as a car park. For eight years it had led a charmed life. No matter that the place was notorious for drug use, prostitution and even a few killings, the club remained open and won awards from the Hanoi city authorities for ‘contributing to the fight against drugs’. The reason was simple: it was owned by a friend of the son of the Prime Minister, Phan Van Khai. But after Khai retired in mid-2006, the days of the club were numbered. Less than a year later, in the early hours of Sunday, 29 April, the place was permanently closed down in what looked like a military operation.”
“The gap between the official doctrine of civilized living and the reality of city life gets wider each day. Prostitution is now so integral to male life in Vietnamese cities that it seems ridiculous even to try to eradicate it. An official report from 2001 estimated that at least half a million women were working as prostitutes — more than 1 per cent of the female population — and the number has probably grown since then.”
“Paying for sex is, for the most part, a communal experience. Groups of friends go out together. In Hanoi, they call them ban choi — literally ‘playmates’ — but the same phenomenon is found across the country. The evening usually begins with food and bia hoi (fresh-brewed weak beer) in a noisy bar. Many places double as entertainment venues and brothels, in particular bia om — literally ‘cuddle beer’ — bars where men can have a glass in one hand and a girl in the other. The evening progresses through the international male bonding rituals of jokes, stories and more alcohol — leading, almost inevitably, to sex. The communal spirit is often reinforced by the group pooling their money to buy the services of a few prostitutes whom they will share. While it may be possible for a member of the group to excuse himself from sex if he can think of a good reason, it’s almost impossible if he is with his boss or a business partner. In these cases paid-for sex is a respected way to form bonds of trust and friendship and thus an essential part of doing business. Deals will often be lubricated and celebrated with the assistance of a cohort of sex workers.”
“Male drug users are sent to ’06 centres’. Female sex workers, who may also be drug users, are sent to ’05 centres’ and street children to social protection centres. These are usually in remote places and although they are managed by the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs (MoLISA) rather than the Ministry of Public Security, in practice they are run like prisons. There are more than 80 state-run 06 centres in the country, each holding around a thousand inmates. There are few, if any, trained drugs counsellors or social workers in the centres; staff are simply allocated to work there by the Ministry. Inmates are all treated the same; little attempt is made to understand individuals or why they might have become involved with drugs or sex work. Re-education isn’t exactly stimulating. Half the day is spent memorising Party positions and the laws on crime, and chanting slogans such as: ‘The whole nation condemns social evil’. The rest is spent performing manual labour. The inmates wear blue striped pyjamas, conditions are hard and they are frequently beaten.
Unsurprisingly, the centres usually fail. They keep people off the streets for two or three years but then return them to the same neighbourhood and the same social problems, and the result is almost always the same. They’re then likely to be picked up again and sent away for another spell in the camp. While the centres may give the authorities the impression that they’re in control of the problem, in many ways they’ve made it worse. Surveys suggest that 60 per cent of the inmates of 06 centres are now HIV-positive. Though the authorities deny it, intravenous drug use is rampant and there is plenty of unsafe sex between inmates. Given that neither problem is supposed to exist, MoLISA refuses to provide them with clean needles or condoms.”
“Which is the better solution to the problem? Although some of these children have run away from home, most are in the city with their families’ consent. Statistics aren’t reliable, but there’s evidence that most child workers actually come to the cities with their families. Child labour is a fact of life in Vietnam. The average two-adult, three-child rural household relies on the children to do at least a third of the work and families generally regard it as not only necessary for survival but good for their children’s development. Sending them away to work is simply an extension of what they would do at home.”
Local Government
“Mr Hai’s instructions will cascade down to every district, ward, neighbourhood, and eventually to every home. By the time the process is complete, each household in Hanoi will have been asked to account for its behaviour and submit itself for judgement by its neighbours. Stories of disputes and squabbles will have been retold, allegations made and refuted and the intimacies of family life anatomised. And the reward for this public exposure? A yellow certificate which can be proudly displayed on the wall. Framed and mounted, the certificate is official recognition that the household has achieved the status of Gia Dinh Van Hoa — a ‘cul-tured family’.
Mr Hai is in charge of what’s called ‘The Office of Civilised Living and Cultured Families’ for Hanoi City People’s Committee. Part of his work is to manage the civilised living campaign. The rest is to bring culture to the backward. But culture, for the city authorities, is not a question of reading books or appreciating opera. The official booklet specifying the requirements for the certificate is concerned with a very different kind of culture. It sets out 22 criteria under four headings: ‘Having a harmonious and progressive family’; ‘Improving the material and spiritual life of the family’; ‘Strengthening mutual assistance within the neighbourhood’; and ‘Fully implementing citizens’ responsibilities’. For ‘culture’, read ‘model citizen’. Under each heading are such specific requirements as: having ‘harmonious and faithful relations between husband and wife’; ‘legitimate income’; ‘reasonable and thrifty consumption’; ‘basic audio and visual equipment to get access to public news and information’; and ‘no third child’. There are also requirements to take part in community activities and consent to rules such as: ‘implement the community’s conventions’; ‘fully implement the Party and state’s guidelines, policies, regulations and laws’; ‘fully implement citizens’ responsibilities (such as military service and payment of taxes)’ and ‘obey regulation of all authority levels’; and ‘participate in protecting political security and social safety and order’. In effect, Mr Hai is the Hanoi representative of a national system of social control.
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 honour very seriously and 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. Each neighbourhood in the country, about 60–80 households — a unit Vietnamese call a to dan pho — has a ‘neighbourhood warden’; most wardens are retired officials from some part of the Party or state. Their role is to monitor the activities of residents and visitors. The system seems totally Orwellian to westerners, but it is generally accepted in Vietnam because of the way it has been spliced into the traditional social order. The wardens are not simply spies; they also advise, mediate and persuade, try to keep the local peace and help resolve disputes. They are answerable to the Ministry of Public Security but they also ‘belong’ to the community: they are local and they are usually elected by the neighbourhood for four-year terms. They also tend to be older, grandfatherly (sometimes grandmotherly) figures, with all that implies for respect and honour. It’s a very flexible form of very local control.
There are many reasons why Vietnam has been able to maintain both growth and stability far better than most of its neighbours. Some of them can be found in the long development of its communal culture and others in very modern techniques of political control. Uniting them is the way Vietnam’s rulers have successfully grafted Leninism — in particular the idea that the Communist Party should take the leading role in society — on to Confucianism with its traditions of respect for elders. More precisely, the Party has tried to co-opt traditional extended family structures into its vast state surveillance system.
Every January, each warden, sometimes accompanied by officials from the People’s Committee of the ward (phong in Viet-namese, the lowest level of local government), is supposed to visit the families in their neighbourhood and discuss which of the 22 criteria they wish to achieve. Each criterion is given a mark and the household has to achieve 80 out of a possible 100 to be given its ‘Cultured Family’ certificate. At the end of the year the family is given a form so they can assess themselves. Then the fireworks can begin. On the appointed night, the heads of every household in the neighbourhood are invited to a formal meeting to pass judgement on their neighbours. Most meetings will go smoothly but in others arguments will be rehashed and old scores settled.
After all this, the warden will decide whether each household deserves the status of a ‘cultured family’. If they do, the certificate is presented to the head of the extended family, usually the grandfather, who is then responsible for ensuring his household lives up to its commitments, using all the power that traditional Vietnamese society confers upon him. If he fails, the certificate will be publicly taken away. In effect, the campaign tries to turn grandfathers into the state’s enforcers. As a tool of discipline in a close-knit society it has no equal.
Mr Hai insists that the certificate does not affect residents’ entitlement to help from the state. That’s not, however, supported by the evidence from the street. Since each neighbourhood and village can also be awarded ‘Cultured’ status and one of the criteria is that 80 per cent of households within it are also regarded as ‘Cultured’, there’s every incentive for neighbourhood wardens and Party officials to use all the leverage at their disposal to ensure they reach their target. So if the family thinks that it’s likely to require help or permission for something — whether it’s a building permit or a licence to set up a tea stand — the pressure to conform to the local authority’s requirements will be intense.
The campaign can be rolled out for other purposes too. During major international events the neighbourhood wardens are sent out to remind citizens of the need to behave well and perhaps refrain from driving their motorbikes near the event venues. For those living near the Sheraton Hotel in November 2006, the neighbourhood advice included a warning not to venture out on to their roof terraces to hang out their washing in case it unnerved the security team of visiting US President George Bush. In the run-up to the South East Asian Games in Hanoi in 2003 there was an added incentive to sign up to the rules of good behaviour: all the completed pledges were to be entered into a lottery where the first prize was a modern apartment and others included a TV, refrigerator and washing machine. The Games were a success and passed off without disorder and, even better for the city authorities, they didn’t have to give away a flat because the winner of the lottery, a resident of Dong Da district according to Mr Hai, had unfortunately lost the winning form to the incisors of a rodent. The winner may have been cultured, but was also infested.
Since the 1990s, the ‘Cultured Families’ campaign has become more prominent, mainly because of the failure of a more heavy-handed system. From the earliest days of communist Vietnam, the cornerstone of social control was a system of household registration called the ho khau. It still exists. 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 liberalised, 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. Villagers left their villages without permission, unregistered housing sprang up in the cities and illegal traders tramped the streets. Daily life could, to a larger extent, bypass the authorities. (Hence the need to augment the ho khau with the ‘Cultured Families’ campaign.) The ho khau survives, however, because it continues to be a useful tool for the state: it reduces migration, provides useful economic data and, above all, helps the police to keep tabs on people. It’s another lever in the official tool kit. 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 misbehave, life can get very difficult.
The consequence for the unregistered can be severe. If an unregistered couple wants to get married, register the birth of their child or even be buried in the cemetery they will find it difficult, sometimes even impossible. They could return to the place where their official ho khau was registered, but if they have been absent for more than six months, they may find that their name has been removed from the register. As a result they will be officially beyond the law. Often the only way to survive is through bribery — paying local officials either to grant them a ho khau or to turn a blind eye whenever they need to do something which requires it. Their births won’t be registered or their marriages licensed, their housing will be illegal and their living conditions precarious. They’re not included in population statistics, poverty calculations or social services provision. More than a quarter of the babies born in 2000 weren’t registered. In just one year that implies 250,000 undocumented children. As a result, the government was forced to adjust the rules to fit reality. New laws and regulations were introduced from 2004 allowing children to be registered where they are born, not where their parents’ ho khau was issued. But local authorities are reluctant to regularise so many new inhabitants whom they would then be obliged to take care of. Consequently communities are growing up across Vietnam, perhaps a few million people in all, who do not officially exist.”
“Carl Thayer of the Australian Defence Force Academy, probably the Western world’s most authoritative observer of the Vietnamese military, has estimated the size of Vietnam’s various security forces as at least 6.7 million. Given that the country’s total working population is around 43 million this suggests that one person in six works either full or part time for a security force. And given the lack of published data, even this figure is probably a significant underestimate of the total size of the internal security apparatus.”
“Twice a day, at 6.30 a.m. and 4.30 p.m., the loudspeakers blare out news and views to the citizens. Production qualities are basic. It’s an extraordinary throwback to the days when a radio was a rare and prized possession and it continues despite the ubiquity of radios and televisions today and the Party’s monopoly of the airwaves. But the loudspeakers have something broadcasting lacks — local character. Each system is managed by the district People’s Committee and provides a mixture of national propaganda and local information. A typical address might include news of the latest decision by the Party Central Committee and a reminder that the post office will be closed the following afternoon. 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 mobilisation when questioned about it by a local Party cadre.
It might seem strange, given the system’s surveillance and security networks, but the Communist Party is wary of high-profile law enforcement campaigns. Failure would be worse than embarrassing for a party which is supposed to represent the people’s will. Such campaigns are only ever risked at times and in ways which demonstrate the Party’s continuing hold on power. But when such a moment arrives, the Party has the capacity to mix propaganda, persuasion and punishment with impressive efficiency. One such campaign was fought in late 2007, over a new law to force motorbike riders, which means almost everyone in the country, to wear helmets. Although it had been compulsory for some time to wear helmets on highways, it was almost unheard of within towns and cities. Everyone agreed helmets were too hot and cumbersome to wear and women complained that they messed up their hair. However, with an average of 30 people being killed on the roads each day, and an estimate from the Asian Development Bank that casualties were costing the country around $885 million each year in lost earnings and health bills, the Party decided something needed to be done.
The campaign was a classic of its kind, combining co-option and coercion, propaganda and punishment. It began by obliging those over whom the state had direct leverage to set a good example: government employees were required to wear reinforced helmets from 15 September, as were people in rural areas. This gave the authorities three months to work on the cities before the ban came into force there on 15 December. But even in mid-October it was easy to find riders asserting that the law was unworkable. Yet on the day the ban actually came into force there was near-total observance. For many it was compliance in name only: some strapped kitchen pots to their heads, others wore their helmets without straps and children continued to travel unprotected. As a result, the effect of the law on human health was less dramatic than hoped. A year later, road deaths had fallen just 10 per cent. Wearing helmets doesn’t prevent speeding, drink-driving, ignoring traffic signals or carrying insane loads. Nonetheless the Party had achieved what some thought impossible: getting the population to observe the helmet law. It had laid its credibility on the line and demonstrated its ability to enforce its rule.”
Politics
“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 selects the President and Prime Minister, manages the Supreme Court and the legal system, amends the Constitution 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. Almost every law passed by the Assembly carries a preamble stating which piece of Party policy it is based upon, and its internal elections are everything that one might expect in a one-party state.
The elections of the current President and Prime Minister, in late June 2006, were a case in point. They came in the final week of the National Assembly session, the international press were invited and every member of the Assembly wore their finest: hundreds of besuited men, army officers in crisp uniforms, women in their most beautiful a dai, ethnic minorities in traditional dress and Buddhist monks in saffron robes and woolly hats. The vote for each post was a piece of theatre. The single candidate (who had been selected by a meeting of the Party’s Central Committee a few weeks earlier) was formally announced and gave a speech. Each member of the Assembly was given a voting paper printed with a single name and a question: ‘Do you vote in favour or against?’ Then, at the given moment, they all trooped up on to the stage to deposit their papers in a large transparent ballot box. They did the same for each position and then had tea while the results were calculated. They were, unsurprisingly, almost unanimous — 92 per cent for Prime Minister Dung and 94 per cent for President Triet.
Because of spectacles like this, it’s tempting to dismiss the National Assembly as a joke parliament. Of its current delegates, 91 per cent are members of the Communist Party. The remaining 9 per cent 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.”
“In Vietnam, politics is just another area of life under central control, subject to the same kind of guidance as the economy.
This ‘guidance’ helps make the National Assembly one of the most socially representative parliaments in the world because the Party decides in advance who needs to be represented: how many women, how many members of ethnic minorities, how many delegates from different interest groups — the elderly, the military, the youth union, religious groups, etc — what proportion from government ministries, provincial authorities and so on.”
“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 notionally ‘represent’. The Prime Minister, Nguyen Tan Dung, for example, represents the city of Haiphong where he has neither lived nor worked but still gets elected with 99 per cent of the vote. This allocation process is carefully done; indeed it’s the centrepiece of the election management process. Centrally nominated candidates never run against each other and are usually placed in districts against much weaker local rivals.”
Corruption
“Almost every official transaction is likely to require some form of hidden payment: kindergarten teachers will have to bribe the boss to get hired, the children’s parents will have to bribe the teacher to ensure their children get well treated, high school pupils will bribe their teachers to get good marks in exams and PhD students pay to get their theses written for them by their examiners’ colleagues. The education system is not alone; extra payments are required to get good treatment in hospitals, to get electricity connections fixed and to get business. Corruption is systemic. Economic liberalisation and inflation, the rising cost of living and budget constraints in the state mean the entire administrative system now depends upon backhanders for its existence. A teacher is expected to live on $60 per month, for example; a university lecturer on $150. Even government ministers are supposed to get by on $200 per month.
The continual need to pay off officials is a cause for constant grumbling but over the past two decades bribery has been the way the system survived. Without it, schools, universities and hospitals would have become bereft of teaching staff. 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.”
Media
“There are no legal, independent media in Vietnam. Every single publication belongs to part of the state or the Communist Party.”
“The end of Soviet aid meant the end of subsidies. 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? Readers of Cong An Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh (Ho Chi Minh City Police) are treated to a diet of sex and murder — with reportage straight from the horse’s mouth. The editorial line of the paper both terrifies the audience and reassures it that the police are on hand to catch the bad guys and keep the streets safe. It’s a successful mix, making it easily one of the country’s biggest selling papers.”
“International news outlets are governed by a completely different set of rules to local ones. The government still tries to block out unwelcome messages transmitted from abroad. Satellite dishes were banned in 1997, except for certain government offices, local authorities, smarter hotels and radio and television stations. If viewers want to see international channels they have to subscribe to cable. But anyone watching BBC World News or CNN International on Vietnamese cable networks learns not to set their watch by them. 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 realise what usually happens and because they could be reasonably confident that almost all the coverage would be positive.”
“Overseas papers too are subject to censorship, but the regime has failed to keep up with the electronic revolution. From time to time, foreigners in Vietnam find foreign publications vandalised. Editions of the Financial Times or the International Herald Tribune will have silver paint sprayed over an article which MIC has decided is too negative. When, in April 2008, the Economist magazine published a supplement on Vietnam, most readers inside the country found it lacked something; the final page. The last article in the supplement was about the future prospects of the Communist Party and a team of MIC minions had carefully razored out each one. Given that the article and others the minions block out remain easily accessible on the web, the idea that this bowdlerisation will prevent the information from circulating within Vietnam is absurd, yet the practice continues. It’s the sight of the article on display which offends the censors. The ritual of censorship seems to be more important than the effect.”
The Environment
“To make matters worse an international shipping route has been dredged through the middle of the Bay. No matter that there’s a well-established deep-water port in the city of Hai Phong just up the coast, the authorities in Quang Ninh, the province which includes Ha Long Bay, decided that they needed one of their own. Ships of up to 70,000 tonnes can now dock in Hon Gai. A few are cruise ships but most are container vessels and bulk carriers with much lower environmental standards. And all of them stir up dust and sediment in the Bay’s shallow waters, coating the sea bed in a life-drenching blanket.
And these aren’t the only sources of pollution. Ripped-up mangrove forests used to be the vital barrier which preserved Ha Long’s coral and fish life — slowing down the rivers and streams flowing into the Bay and filtering out the soil they carried. That kept the sea clean and allowed the delicate corals to flourish. When the mangroves went, the silt flowed free, covered the corals, preventing them photosynthesising, and killed them. Then the fish which fed on the coral died, and so on, up the food chain. Thirty years ago the waters in and around Ha Long Bay teemed with life and were harvested by fishermen who had worked the sea for generations. Most of them were ethnic Chinese, descendants of people who’d moved back and forth between China and Indochina for centuries. But in 1979, after relations between Vietnam and China collapsed the fishermen, and most of the rest of the Chinese community, were expelled. Around 30,000 are thought to have left, creating a huge gap in the market for anyone who thought they could fish. Most of those who tried were poor, without proper equipment and lacking knowledge of the sea. In place of nets, lines and generations of skill they used explosives, electric shocks and poison. Breeding populations were decimated. Those who want to make a living from fish now do so with intensive farms in the floating villages. But the oils in the feeds leak into the water along with all the other waste, making the problem even worse.”
“This focus on Vietnam’s international image rather than on domestic realities seems to affect the country’s entire approach to the environment. Vietnam has signed up to all the right pieces of paper — it’s one of the few Southeast Asian countries to have ratified the four big conventions on conservation — but it’s also an environmental disaster in slow motion. The problem, as in so many areas of Vietnamese life, is implementation. There are people who understand the problems: Vietnam had its first national park in 1962, its first National Conservation Strategy in 1985 and a Plan for Sustainable Development in 1990. On the surface it looks impressive. But laws have great loopholes in them, pieces of legislation contradict each other and when it actually matters regulations can be bent, dodged or ignored.
The disaster is more acute because of the rich diversity of Vietnam’s forests just a few years ago. 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. (The problem is that what is now being grown is plantation acacia and eucalyptus for the furniture industry.) But the war and the lack of development afterwards also preserved large parts of the country from industrialisation, and from the 1980s onwards international conservation groups and a few home-grown experts have put a lot of effort into trying to keep them that way.
About 6 per cent of the country has been turned into national parks or nature reserves. Some of these places are among the most spectacular landscapes in the world: huge karst limestone pillars, dense mountain forests, mangrove swamps and pristine islands. They’re home to some of the rarest creatures on the planet, including elephants, rhinos and tigers. Every few months zoologists discover species they thought had become extinct: the hairy-nosed otter, the world’s rarest animal; an oryx-like member of the cow family called the sao la; the white-lipped keelback snake and dozens of orchids and other plants. But at the same time habitats are being destroyed, the animals hunted for eating or traditional medicine, the snakes bottled in jars of rice wine and the orchids stripped for collectors. There is one set of rules for the rich and powerful and another for the poor. Vinacomin’s continuing pollution of Ha Long Bay is one example. Another is the wildlife trade.
At the western end of Ha Long Bay is its biggest island, Cat Ba. Designated a Global Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO, it should be a jewel in the Bay’s crown, but it’s turning into a dump. Almost all the island is included in the Reserve and about half has been declared a national park but neither designation has prevented the development, since 2001, of a boom town resort on its southern coast. A strip of tall, thin, five-storey budget hotels lines the seafront, like a slice of Hanoi rising out of the sea. Bigger hotels lie on the edge of town. This thin strip of land receives more than 350,000 visitors a year. And, just as in Ha Long City, the main attractions are the bars and restaurants along the seafront. Some openly feature wildlife on the menus, others are more discreet. Organised gangs can supply almost anything within a couple of days. Deer, turtles, snakes, lizards — tastes are broad and the National Park can provide them all.”
Conclusion
“Many Vietnamese who fought the war find themselves trapped in voiceless rage. They know why they fought, they know what they and their fellows suffered, they know how unjust it felt — but they’re banned from expressing any of it in public because the Party has decided that the country needs the support and resources of the United States.”
“What is Vietnam getting to make all this forgetting worthwhile? In short, its basic needs: development and security. Without normalisation 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.”
“Throughout most of the twentieth century Vietnamese nationalists and communists repeatedly took sanctuary and inspiration from China. Without Chinese support from the 1940s up until the end of the ‘American War’, the Vietnamese communists would not have prevailed.”
“On Christmas 1978, in response to the deaths of hundreds, perhaps thousands of civilians in cross-border raids, the Vietnam People’s Army invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge.”
“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. That image was sustainable so long as travel restrictions and poverty kept people confined to their locality, but more and more Vietnamese are travelling around the country and discovering the contrasts between north and south. However, the taboos against openly discussing them remain strong. The trauma of the war, the fear of reopening a split in the nation is too strong among the older generations. It took a 17-year old to prick the national bubble.
Hanoi’s assumed supremacy is the basis of the collection of stories which make up what is, in effect, the officially approved national Vietnamese history. The ‘Official History’ teaches Vietnamese that the spiritual home of their country is the north and that the south only became a part of the national story once northerners arrived there just a few centuries ago. Even the official name of the majority ethnic group, ‘Kinh’, implies northerness — it’s derived from kinh do, meaning ‘capital’. This national myth predates Communist Party rule, but is one of its main buttresses. Its maintenance helps legitimise Hanoi’s dominance over the reunified country, but it’s also a major reason why significant minorities maintain grievances against the majority.”
“Land was cleared and New Economic Zones (NEZs) were created, with state farms to create jobs and grow commercial crops. Party members, volunteers, political prisoners and Chinese traders in need of ‘re-education’ were transported from the Lowlands and told to make the Highlands safe for socialism. Upland minority groups had traditionally practised ‘swidden’ (slash-and-burn) agriculture — using the land for short periods and then moving on to allow the poor soil to recover before returning many years later. But given the Montagnards’ previous links to US Special Forces and their ongoing resistance to Communist control, Hanoi wanted them to be pinned down, stuck in one place where the Party could keep an eye on them.
The results were a success for the state: 25 NEZs were established in the Highlands, the Degar uprising was contained, Vietnam rose to become the world’s second-largest coffee producer and hundreds of thousands of jobs were created. Somewhere between four and five million people are thought to have migrated to the Highlands in the years after 1975. Even after the NEZ policy was abandoned, migrants kept on moving, attracted by the lure of easy money from coffee; ‘brown gold’, they called it. But for the highlanders all this was disastrous. Minorities made up almost half the population of Dak Lak province in 1975. By 2002 they were just a fifth. At the same time, the Party, in the tradition of ‘mutual assistance’, had been bringing the benefits of socialist (i.e. Kinh) culture to the highlanders. Some things — singing, dancing and handicrafts — were preserved, but ‘backward ways’ such as swidden agriculture, communal living and animist religion were suppressed. Unhygienic burials were banned and marriage rituals modified to be ‘less wasteful.’ Even the words of traditional songs were changed by Party functionaries and taught anew to children.
The highlanders’ situation had been just about tolerable when land was under collective ownership. Traditional lands were managed communally. But once economic reform began, the land was bought, squatted or stolen by Kinh people. The government frequently argues that the dramatic fall in poverty in the Central Highlands is evidence that they’ve improved life there for everyone. But the numbers tell a different story when broken down by ethnicity. In 1993 (according to World Bank figures) 45 per cent of Kinh there were in poverty versus 95 per cent of minority people. By 2004 the Kinh poverty rate had fallen to 15 per cent, but for minorities it remained at 75 per cent.”
“It’s clear that the protests were not entirely spontaneous. The ground had been laid by supporters of the US-based Montagnard Foundation Inc., an organisation run by militants who’d once fought with American forces. The MFI is an overtly Christian organisation, which sees itself as the heir to FULRO and demands autonomy for the Highlands. Around half the minority population of the Highlands are now Christians. Bereft of the spaces, animals and ritual objects used in their traditional animist ceremonies, and simultaneously under constant cultural assault from local officials, most Degar have abandoned the rituals which were once the foundations of the old life and turned to Evangelical Protestantism to fill the gap. The Word is being spread by local pastors and broadcast in local languages from transmitters in the Philippines — all subsidised by American Christians. The choice of religion increases the paranoia of the authorities, linked as it is to right-wing interests in the United States, but that seems to be a conscious part of the attraction. Unlike Catholicism or other forms of Christianity which have working relationships with the Communist authorities, Evangelicalism clearly demarcates the Degar from the Kinh.”
“They complained that only 8 per cent of the company’s employees had so far bought cars and that the rate needed to be 30 per cent for managers to receive their annual bonuses. The memos also stated that VinFast cars would soon be the only cars permitted to park at the company’s buildings. The company was determined to increase its sales figures by any means necessary.”
“If Vietnam really wants to move up the value chain and deliver upper-middle-income status to all rather than just those living the Vinlife, it will need to enable a society where disruptive start-ups can raise money, experiment and grow, not one where banks starve small companies of finance, officials leach off them and big conglomerates squash them.”
