Book summary: Vietnam - Rising Dragon

Summary: Based on vivid eyewitness accounts and pertinent case studies, Hayton’s book addresses a broad variety of issues in today’s Vietnam, including important shifts in international relations, the growth of civil society, economic developments and challenges, and the nation’s nascent democracy movement as well as its notorious internal security. With a firm sense of historical and cultural context, Hayton examines how these issues have emerged and where they will lead Vietnam in the next stage of its development.

The communist capitalist playground

What kind of society is 'The New Vietnam' becoming? It's still nominally communist but it certainly isn't communist in the way North Americans and Europeans usually think of the word.

It's not drab or depressing - it's bright, exciting, fast-moving and colourful.

Its leaders came to power fighting French colonialism, American imperialism and domestic capitalism, yet under their direction the country has opened its doors to corporations from France, the United States and every other country, and allowed private enterprise to flourish.

Yes, restrictions on private enterprise have been lifted, markets have been allowed to flourish and foreign investment has been encouraged - but Vietnam's success is far from being a triumph of World Bank orthodoxy.

Some might snigger at the official description of a 'socialist-oriented market economy' but it's not an empty slogan.

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.

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.

Vietnam's economic growth model

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.

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.

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.

But growth has exposed Vietnam's weaknesses. Manufacturers regularly complain that roads are falling to pieces and ports are too congested.

More seriously, when Intel started to recruit staff it discovered that out of 2,000 applicants, just 40 were qualified to work in its factory, the lowest proportion of any country where it operates.

COCC

There are many, many more examples. So many, in fact, that the Vietnamese now have special phrases to describe them: 'COCC and '5C\ COCC is the junior tier of the new Party-business elite - the provincial bosses and lower-level national Party and government officials.

It stands for Con Ong Chau Cha - literally 'son of father, grandson of grandfather' but the meaning is obvious to anyone familiar with the traditions of Vietnamese families - the young offer loyalty, the old offer protection. Those under the umbrella of COCC can get away with almost anything, for their patrons outrank the police and the courts.

The real elite is known as 5C: they can get away with absolutely anything.

5C stands for Con Chau Cac Cu Ca - literally 'all children and grandchildren of the great grandfather'. Cu is the most exalted position in the Vietnamese family and every national President and Communist Party General Secretary is eventually given the title. The umbrella of the 5C spreads wide - beyond direct descendants to include more or less the whole family.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Control of the internet

Vietnam is far from alone in wanting to control its citizens' access to harmful content on the internet. It's just that its definition of what is harmful and the lengths to which it is prepared to go to control it have landed it on the list of 'Enemies of the Internet' compiled by the media freedom organisation Reporters Sans Frontieres. 'Politics and religion are taboo,' says RSF. 'Almost 2,000 sites deemed politically or morally 'dangerous' are filtered [and] authorities target foreign news and human rights sites created by the large Vietnamese community overseas.'

Research by the OpenNet Initiative, a collaborative project of four British and North American universities published in summer 2006, discovered that, 'While [Vietnam] doesn't block any of the pornographic sites ONI tested, it filters a significant fraction - in some cases the great majority of- sites with politically or religiously sensitive material.'

In other words the Vietnamese firewall allows youngsters to consume plenty of porn but not Amnesty International reports.

The party leading the state

In most countries, national commemorations are led by state officials. Not in Vietnam. The birthday celebration, like the country, is led by the Communist Party. The state and the government follow on behind.

The man at the head of the procession was the Party General Secretary, Nong Due Manh, and next to him was his predecessor Le Kha Phieu.

Only in the second row came the leaders of the state, President Nguyen Minh Triet and Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung. In spite of expectations to the contrary, this is the way things are likely to stay.

Just as it did in the mandarinate of seventeenth-century Vietnam, success in the Party depends upon having a combination of three factors: talent, connections and money. Of the three, connections are the most important.

Local bosses rise to the top by creating patronage machines, buying support and buying off opposition as necessary.

How the party attracts fresh blood

Young Party members are frequently recruited explicitly on those terms, being told: If you want promotion you have to join'.

Rather than burying selfish motives under a veneer of altruism and pious sentiments about wanting to help develop the country, it's now quite acceptable for a new Party member to tell their friends that they're doing it for personal gain.

Indeed, it's embarrassingly uncool to admit wanting to build socialism or defend the revolution. It seems to have worked. The Party claimed that 60 per cent of the 170,000 people who joined it in 2005 were aged between 18 and 30.

During the war years its slogan was: 'Ready to fight; ready to join the armed forces; ready to go anywhere and do whatever the Fatherland requires'. Now its message is more careerist. Just like members of the Scout movement in other countries they're expected to join in organised community work, team sports and official celebrations, and to be patriotic and show respect for their elders and leaders. The model is deliberately exclusive.

Only about 15 per cent of young Vietnamese are members of the Youth Union - and the leadership tries to keep it that way.

Members must come from a 'good family' and be hard-working students. The Union actively winnows its membership to exclude those who don't set a good enough example - members have to keep a book in which details of their family, school and personal behaviour are recorded. The Communist Party calls it a 'socialist school for youth'.

Its purpose is not to mobilise large numbers of young people but to be a vanguard organisation whose members will lead their peers and from whose ranks subsequent generations of political and social leaders will emerge.

Vietnam-China relations

The similarities between Chinese and Vietnamese cultures are easily apparent, particularly when compared to the differences between Vietnamese cultures and those in the rest of Indochina'.

Most of the main streets in Vietnamese cities are named after heroes and heroines, real or mythical, who fought the Chinese:

Hai Ba Trung, the two Trung sisters who led a rebellion in AD 40; Ngo Quyen, whom Vietnamese regard as the first ruler to separate the country from 'China' in 938; Ly Thuong Kiet who fought the Sung in 1076; Tran Hung Dao who defeated the Mongols in 1284; Le Loi/Le Thai To who defeated the Ming in 1428; and Nguyen Hue/Quang Trung who defeated the Qing in 1789.

Most of this is anachronistic myth. At no point until 1979 did two countries corresponding to the present borders of 'Vietnam' and 'China' go to war against each other.

Conflicts in previous millennia were mostly battles pitching rebels, regional lords and self-proclaimed kings against various empires and raiders from the north. All, however, have been subsumed into the twentieth-century nationalist myth of a transcendent Vietnam forged in the crucible of resistance against China.

Even the name of the country was generated in opposition to China. In 1802 Gia Long, the first Emperor of the Nguyen Dynasty, had wanted to call his new country 'Nam Viet'. But the Chinese Emperor objected.

To him, Nam Viet - southern Viet - implied a territorial claim on 'northern Viet', the provinces of south-western China incorporated into the Han Empire long before. The Chinese Emperor insisted the new country be called Viet Nam - meaning 'to the south of Viet'.

The Nguyen reluctantly agreed but then unilaterally chose to use a different name, Dai Nam - the Great South - in their own documents in preference to the one imposed upon them by China.

The name 'Viet Nam' was revived by nationalists in the early twentieth century, mainly in opposition to the French division of the country into three: the two protectorates Tonkin and Annam, and their colony, Cochin China.

Balancing between China and USA

China and the United States are not just countries that Vietnam has to balance;

they are symbols of the two broad currents running within its leadership - one which favours more integration with the outside world, the other more suspicious of it.

Vietnam's attempts to find some kind of position between these various gravitational pulls epitomises the new multi-polar global order.

It wants to give the big powers a stake in Vietnam's future but not too great an influence over it.

Perhaps it would be helpful to see Vietnam, and in particular its elite, as motivated by competing xenophobias based upon rival memories of the past:

between China the eternal oppressor and China the twentieth-century liberator, between America the twentieth-century destroyer and America the twenty-first century investor.

In the meantime no Vietnamese government could be stridently anti-US, nor overtly anti-China. Without the support of both, Vietnam's economy couldn't provide the jobs and rising living standards its people demand.

Then the regime's survival would be in jeopardy and that's far more important than the preservation of anyone's memories: real or imagined.

Conclusion

There's nothing inevitable about what happens next in Vietnam. Whether the country thrives or stagnates will depend upon the choices made, in the main, by the Communist Party. The ingredients of national success are already in place.

Some are easy to measure: a young population, widespread basic education and plenty of foreign investment. Others are less tangible, in particular the optimism, energy and acquisitiveness of the people. But these ingredients could easily be wasted or allowed to spoil.

The country is storing up troubles - the entrenchment of the new elite, the hollowing out of the state, the over-exploitation of the environment, ethnic inequality and the others I've described in the preceding pages. All of these problems are solvable, but the longer they remain unaddressed, the worse they will become. The question is whether the Party leadership has the will to tackle them in time.

Citizens have the right to raise the alarm about abuses and inefficiency, but not to blame Party leaders or their proteges for their creation or perpetuation. The real causes of problems like corruption, pollution and financial instability are being swept under the carpet, ignored until they turn into crises.

If the Party becomes a tool of the business elite then other groups, particularly workers, may choose to act outside Party structures. Moreover, new forces are emerging in society, outside the Party. If the Party doesn't find ways to incorporate them into decision-making, they may become restive.