Starting Points: Communist Party

Jun 18, 2010

'Vietnam, Rising Dragon' Book Excerpt by Bill Hayton

Introduction: Another Vietnam

'The Hidden Charm' is Vietnam's seductive tourist slogan. Many Vietnamese don't like it, but it teases foreigners' yearning for adventure and discovery. The phrase conjures an image which sums up the country: the peasant girl looks up, tips back the brim of her conical hat and reveals her shy smiling face beneath. The straw-coloured hat, the bright green paddy fields and the black buffalo grazing all around – a world pure and beautiful, hidden and charming. Make the effort, implies the slogan, and your reward will be a vision of tranquillity, grace and beauty. This Vietnam promises everything your modern world has left behind: delicate women, simple living and unspoilt landscapes. The country once torn apart in prime time has been reborn, its essence untouched by the predations of foreigners. Now it is available to the discerning visitor with the patience to find it.

Those without the time or the patience can still capture it – on canvas in one of the big-city sidewalk ateliers. Paint, tapestry and photography reproduce images of a country we know instantly is Vietnam: bicycle-riding girls in white ao dai, sun-aged women porting bamboo shoulder poles, boys astride buffalo and sampans piled high with fruit. It's overwhelmingly an aesthetic of details – paddy fields, peasants and pagodas – not wide landscape shots. The image of Vietnam we foreigners seek is a close-cropped study in 'otherness'. Zoom out from the girl in the conical hat and the newly erected pylon intrudes on the view. Turn away from the buffalo boy and the scene is 'spoiled' by his parents' new concrete house. Vietnamese development planners don't share the western tourist aesthetic. Call it socialist, call it proletarian or just call it ugly; they'd rather see an electricity substation than a pre-industrial rural landscape. The people want progress and prosperity. The fantasy country we seek is the one they want to leave behind.

We care about Vietnam for one reason above all. Through all the horrors the modern world could throw at it, it prevailed. No other country name has the same resonance: 'the lesson of Vietnam', 'the ghost of Vietnam', 'another Vietnam' – we know instantly all that these phrases imply. This 'Vietnam' has become an abstract place, trapped in a blood-soaked decade between 1965 and 1975. It lives on in daily discourse. 'Vietnam' has become a shorthand reference for so many cleavages within American society that on most days searching the newswires for 'Vietnam' will return more stories about the United States than Southeast Asia. A civil rights law will be described as 'Vietnam-era legislation', a motorist in an accident might be routinely described as a 'Vietnam veteran' and politicians and commentators wield 'the lessons of Vietnam' as a blunt instrument to defend their position on a gamut of foreign policy issues. Americans understand that these phrases imply far more than simply a faraway country.

This book isn't about that 'Vietnam'; it's about a country in Southeast Asia with almost 90 million inhabitants, the 13th most populous country in the world, the country which moved and inspired me and where I lived for a while until I was told to leave. It doesn't claim to be a view of the country untainted by all the different visions others have projected upon it, nor a vision of some 'essential' Viet Nam which exists behind these projections. Vietnam keeps its secrets well. Foreigners can live there a long time and fail to understand why things happen the way they do until Vietnamese friends patiently explain what, to them, is blindingly obvious – and things slowly fall into place. Many times I would finish a news report and think that I had made a breakthrough, that this time I really understood what was going on – only to have a friend or colleague, often from the BBC's Vietnamese Service, point out some vital element of the story that I had no idea even existed. Many times I felt I was just describing ripples on the surface, while beneath great currents were at work. This book is an attempt to describe those currents.

Vietnam is in the middle of a revolution: capitalism is flooding into a nominally communist society, fields are disappearing under new industrial parks, villagers are flocking to booming cities and youth culture is blooming. Dense networks of family relationships are being strained by demands for greater personal freedom and traditions are being eroded by the lure of modern living.

It's one of the most breathtaking periods of social change anywhere, ever. Vietnam is a very different place, even from a decade ago. When Robert Templer wrote Shadows and Wind in the late 1990s, Vietnam was a sclerotic country mired in economic crisis and unwilling to make the changes necessary to unleash its innate dynamism. It still faces mighty challenges and it does so with a severely strained political system but it is also a country in the middle of – to use the official slogan – renovation. There is ambition everywhere: from the kids crammed into after-school English classes to the political leaders who want their country to catch up with the Tigers of East Asia. The question is whether the leaders' ambitions will match those of the masses. Can Communist Party-ruled Vietnam meet the aspirations of its people?

The signs, so far, are broadly positive. Vietnam has made great strides – delivering basic education, healthcare and a rising standard of living to almost everyone. Political leaders have passed on power without violence or crisis and are actively thinking about what they must do to remain in charge of a young, vibrant and ambitious society. Vietnam is proof that development can work; that a poor society can become better-off, and in a dramatically short period of time. International development agencies flourish there, basking in the reflected glory of the country's achievements. They hold up Vietnam as a model of economic liberalisation and political reform. The truth is not so straightforward.

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'.

Vietnam has come a long way in the past 30 years but its evolution has often been through crisis. The contradictions inherent in simultaneously having communist control and eating capitalist cake have come to breaking point near the end of each decade: 1979, 1988, 1997 and 2008. Each time, the Party has found a peaceful way through but the resolution has only set the stage for the next battle. Future outcomes will depend on the balance of forces within the Communist Party and between the Party and outsiders. Anyone who has witnessed the motorised armadas of youth which circulate Vietnamese cities at weekends can appreciate the challenge the Party leaders face. Over the next few years a less hobbled society and vested interests will test and re-test the limits of what is possible while the Party centre tries to recapture power. Every day, petty conflicts are being fought in fields, cybercafés and offices. Whatever happens next is unlikely to be dull.

There is an excellent review of this very candid book in the June 24, 2010 issue of The New York Review of Books, but it is available in full only to subscribers of the _online_ edition. I get the print edition and read it there. For the brief except available online, go to

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jun/24/vietnam-now/?pagination=false