Vietnam's Bumpy Road to Reform • 285

“As in China, political and intellectual reform in Vietnam has lagged behind the stunning transformation of the economy.” Vietnam’s Bumpy Road to Reform SOPHIE QUINN-JUDGE he economic reforms carried out in socialist feels irreversible. Its progress can be measured by Vietnam since 1986 have made it a favor- hard data, and it is benefiting the whole popula- Tite of multilateral lenders and development tion, from party cadres to street vendors. Political agencies. The movement away from a planned, reform, in contrast, remains ambiguous and hard state-controlled economy has brought this once to evaluate, without clear boundaries or guarantees impoverished, war-torn country economic growth of individual rights. rates close to those of China. At the same time, the Talk of democratization here usually refers to government has implemented a poverty-reduction the opening up of the Communist Party’s struc- program that has made real strides in reducing the tures. Although the National Assembly now plays gap between the newly rich and the poor. a more visible role in debating legislation, it is Two decades ago Hanoi was a crumbling French elected from carefully pre-selected candidates, most colonial city, with a few drab socialist apartment of whom are party members. The rights guaran- buildings on its fringes. Now it is spreading far teed by Vietnam’s 1992 constitution are consistent beyond its old limits. From the top of one of the with modern democratic practice, but they can be upscale high-rise hotels in central Hanoi, one can overruled if individual actions are judged to have look out over the red-tiled rooftops of the old city, to damaged the party. Vietnamese intellectuals say the Red River and beyond, where middle-class hous- that this situation has led to an impasse in which ing developments are sprouting up in the suburban new, unconventional ideas are stifled by pressure rice paddies, nearby to new factories constructed by to conform to the status quo. As the country looks Japanese firms. Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon to the future after its tenth party congress in June and now often called just “the City,” has returned 2006, there is considerable uncertainty about what to its vibrant, chaotic self. Its streets are so choked the next phase of reform will look like. with motorbikes that some city planners have con- sidered banning them, though no one in the city’s THE PRE-HISTORY OF REFORM leadership seems willing to risk such a radical and One might think that charting the history of potentially unpopular move. reform in Vietnam would be a straightforward pro- As in China, political and intellectual reform cess, an enumeration of new policies and decrees. in Vietnam has lagged behind the stunning trans- But there are a number of complexities. The politi- formation of the economy. It is true that greater cal history of this period, from the first reform dis- contact with the outside world, Internet access, cussions of the late 1970s until the present, is not and the government’s growing self-assurance have something on which all Vietnamese leaders would brought a more relaxed attitude toward once-taboo agree. At present there is a distinct lack of interest authors and Western cultural ways, especially in within the Communist Party in clarifying this his- dress and music. Foreigners now travel freely to tory—it tends to be depicted as an inevitable his- most parts of the country. Yet there remains a sharp torical process. This depoliticized view presents the distinction between the two kinds of reform. Eco- party as moving to correct erroneous policies under nomic reform enjoys broad-based support and now popular pressure—a view that some scholars might characterize as the “everyday politics” model. The bold decisions necessary to alter the country’s path SOPHIE QUINN-JUDGE is a professor of history and associate are not seen as the work of any individual—a Gor- director of the Center for Vietnamese Philosophy, Culture, and Society at Temple University. She is the author of Ho Chi bachev, Yeltsin, or Deng—but as the party’s collec- Minh: The Missing Years (University of California, 2002). tive and consensual response to crisis. 284 Vietnam's Bumpy Road to Reform • 285 Yet if one returns to the most difficult years of in restoring food production within a few seasons, postwar Vietnam’s economic collapse, between but it became a target of Chairman Mao’s criticism 1978 and 1982, one is struck by the fact that solu- at several political conferences in 1962, and was tions to the nation’s economic woes were the topic sharply curtailed after that. of bitter debate until at least 1985. And if one turns In Vietnam, this system had been instituted the clock back even further, to the 1960s, one dis- experimentally in several provinces by 1963, but covers that there was an ongoing debate within also became the subject of ideological criticism. By the Vietnamese Worker’s Party (the name of the the late 1960s, the Democratic Republic of Viet- Vietnamese Communist Party until 1976) regard- nam (the predecessor of today’s Socialist Republic ing the relative merits of a mixed economy and a of Vietnam) had become dependent on food aid purely communist one. The basic disagreement from its socialist allies, so perhaps it could afford concerned the speed at which the country would to take a purist line on food production. In late progress toward full communism. 1968 Truong Chinh, the party’s leading ideologist More moderate leaders on social issues, includ- and its general secretary from 1951 to 1956, deliv- ing Ho Chi Minh, Le Duan, and Vo Nguyen Giap, ered a speech denouncing experiments with fam- favored a slower approach to economic change ily contracts as a deviation from the party’s path so long as the war to reunite the country contin- to cooperativization. In another 1968 speech, he ued. They also advocated a more relaxed attitude declared that the party’s goal was to eliminate pri- toward the issue of class struggle, meaning that vate trade. they saw no need to purge the government and Benedict Kerkvliet and other scholars who have military leadership of intellectuals and people from studied North Vietnamese agriculture have shown middle-class backgrounds. Their outlook could be that it was impossible for the party to enforce in generalized as pragmatic support for a united front its entirety the prohibition against family contract within society and a mixed economy. This is the farming and private trade. Peasants did what they approach that eventually triumphed in 1986. had to in order to survive, which often meant In the north, and for a few years after the north engaging in low-level corruption and devoting and south were unified, Vietnamese economic much of their labor to small private plots. Even so, policy from the 1950s to the 1980s was heavily the orthodoxy laid down in 1968, influenced both influenced by trends in the rest of the socialist by the Soviet crackdown on Czechoslovak reform bloc, especially by the changing policies of the and the anti-capitalist ideology of the Cultural Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Revolution, left its mark on Vietnam. It meant that Events such as the 1956 twentieth party congress postwar policies would be designed on heavily ide- in the Soviet Union, the Great Leap Forward and ological grounds. the Cultural Revolution in China, and the Soviet return to Stalinist orthodoxy in the years of Leo- POSTWAR MISSTEPS nid Brezhnev all appear to have affected the path After the April 30, 1975, victory of the North of the Vietnamese economy, as well as the nation’s Vietnamese army in South Vietnam, the Vietnamese political life. revolution entered a new phase. A political confer- In particular, the aftermath of the Great Leap ence the following November announced that the Forward, a disaster for Chinese agriculture, seems country would be unified in 1976. As late as 1973, to have influenced discussions of agricultural pol- the leadership had promised that there would be icy in North Vietnam in the 1960s. From 1960 to a long period of transition for the south, before 1962, the “family responsibility” system of labor the two parts of the country would be reunited. on collective farms was used to restore food pro- Instead, plans for the “socialization” of the south duction in China’s Anhui province, an area that moved ahead rapidly, in tandem with the transfor- had been severely hit by the policies of the Great mation of northern agriculture by the creation of Leap Forward. This system allowed individual large-scale, mechanized collective farms. families to contract to produce a certain mini- In 1978 the government started an anti- mum of grain on land allotted to them, while they capitalist campaign in the southern towns. It aimed were free to dispose of the surplus as they wished. to force private traders to take up “productive” Closer to Vietnam, the responsibility system was labor, if necessary by moving to “New Economic also widespread in southern Guangxi province. Zones” in the countryside to farm. The collectiviza- This modified return to family farming succeeded tion of southern agriculture also began, first with 286 • CURRENT HISTORY • September 2006 farmers being encouraged to pool their tools and FITS AND STARTS labor by joining production teams. Both of these By 1979 the Vietnamese economy was a sham- measures were wildly unpopular and resulted in a bles. Ill-advised economic policies, a war on two shrinking of production at a time when Vietnam borders, and the end of most postwar aid had com- could not afford it.

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