Vietnam Joins the World

American and Japanese Perspectives

James Morley, Masashi Nishihara

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781563249754
• eBook ISBN: 9781315479279
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria politica

Ten American and Japanese specialists offer a comprehensive analysis of one of the most dramatic developments in Asia today: the re-emergence of Vietnam - not as the belligerent champion of a militant ideology and socialist cause, but as an open, friendly country seeking a respected place in the world community. Basing their observations on five years of study, visits to Vietnam, and numerous interviews with knowledgeable officials, scholars and businessmen there and in the United States and Japan, the authors evaluate the political, ecnomic, social and foreign policy changes that have been taking place in Vietnam over the past decade, trace the responses of the United States and Japan and offer a policy prescription for responding to the challenges of the future.

Reform at Home

1
Politics in Transition

James W. Morley

Vietnam, like China, is conducting a political experiment of historic proportions, testing whether a communist party-state can liberalize its economic system without weakening the dictatorship of the party.

Since the late 1970s, when the Vietnamese leadership first began to accept the fact that the dream of the revolutionary generation had failed, Vietnam has come a long way, thanks particularly to the economic reform program inaugurated at the Communist Party’s Sixth Party Congress in December 1986. It was then, following years of experimentation with new models, that the party decided to deconstruct its Soviet-style command economy.

On that occasion the party recognized also that the political system was not in good shape. Over some forty years of nearly constant warfare, decay had set in. As described in the Political Report adopted by the congress, the leadership had failed to renew itself.¹ The organs of the state as well as the party had been allowed to grow “too big” and “overlapping.” Cadres had become dissolute. “Social justice” was being denied. Corruption and the abuse of power were flagrant. As a result, the party had not adapted itself to changing circumstances as rapidly as it should have, and “the confidence of the masses in the party leadership and the functioning of state organs” was weakening.

There was no sense that the system itself was at fault. The leadership was convinced that the party’s control was still secure. The former military officers and civilian officials of the defeated southern regime had been safely put away in reeducation camps, and among the remaining population, in spite of a growing sense of frustration, there had been no riots or strikes, or even demonstrations. In any event, the delegates knew that it was the party that had led the country to victory in the war for independence and unification, and they were convinced now that it was only the party that could bring victory in the struggle for economic reform.

No, it was not the Leninist model of the party-state that was at fault. Rather, it was the abuses to which it had been subjected. The call for reform of the polity, therefore, was not for transformation of the system as in the economy, but for the tightening of the “proletarian dictatorship” and for a rectification of the party’s “shortcomings” in ideological and organizational activity and in its cadre work: in short, a return to first principles.

Whether such a “renovated” Leninist system can long endure is a question. For there are reasons to believe that the anomalous attempt to graft the mixed capitalist economy, now being experimented with, on a Leninist political system, even one rectified as envisaged by the Sixth Party Congress, is bound to fail. Already social changes are eating at the system. Eventually more fundamental political changes would seem to be required. The question is: what form will these changes take, and when and how will they come about?

Doi Moi: Reform within Limits

When the delegates to the Sixth National Party Congress met in December 1986, their first imperative was to rejuvenate the leadership. Ho Chi Minh had passed from the scene in 1969, but many of his old revolutionary comrades had continued in power long after. Le Duan, for example, who had been elected secretary general in 1960, was still in office 26 years later. Others had continued even longer, exercising power from within the Central Committee and the Political Bureau (Politburo), the party’s ultimate seat of power. They found it difficult to adjust to new circumstances, yet they were reluctant to go, and the party was reluctant to force them out. Factional fights and coups were not in the party style.

Nevertheless, there could be no renovation without new faces. In fact, the effort to rejuvenate the Political Bureau had already begun. In 1976, several new members had been added, including the conservative Vo Chi Cong, a leader in the effort to socialize the South, and the reform-minded Nguyen Van Linh and Do Muoi, each later to hold the post of secretary general. In 1982, the retirement of six of the old comrades from the Politburo had brought in additional new blood and at the same time had opened the way for a second generation of leaders to move into responsible party and state positions. Among the new Politburo members and alternate members, for example, Nguyen Co Thach, a reforming technocrat, was named foreign minister; Nguyen Duc Tarn was made chief of the party’s Organization Department; General Van Tien Dung became minister of national defense; and Vo Van Kiet, another economic reformer, was given the office of vice premier.² But several key elders hung on.

It was the death of Le Duan six months before the Party Congress in 1986 that finally enabled the party to complete the transition. All but one of the remaining first-generation seniors were finally eased out of the bureau. Nguyen Van Linh, a southerner and an economic reformer, was given the supreme post, that of secretary general. At the same time, the membership in the Central Committee was expanded from 152 to 173. In the process, representation from the military and from central state and party offices was reduced. Administrators and technicians from the provinces now held the plurality.³

The surviving elders were not rusticated. The first-generation leaders retiring from the Politburo were made “advisers” to the Central Committee. The premiership, technically a position determined by election by the National Assembly, but actually like all important posts decided by the Politburo acting through party members in the assembly, was left for another year in the hands of Pham Van Dong, who had held the post for the past 32 years. The following year it was transferred to Pham Hung, the last of the early revolutionaries still in the Politburo. It was not until 1988, when Pham Hung died, that the premiership passed out of the hands of the first generation, going briefly to Vo Van Kiet, then later to a co-member of the Politburo class of 1976, Do Muoi.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of this generational transition. Its peaceful accomplishment greatly strengthened the belief of the party in itself at a very critical time, and while individuals in the new leadership cohort have changed offices from time to time, the cohort itself has proved to be remarkably durable.

Having resolved the leadership question and having enjoined the cadres—once again—to observe strict party discipline, the delegates turned their attention to what the Political Report called the party’s “shortcomings.” These were acknowledged to be primarily in the areas of ideology and organization.

Not that there was any inclination to challenge the “truth” of “Marxism-Leninism and the Thought of Ho Chi Minh.” After all, that doctrine provided the fundamental rationale for the party’s monopoly of power. Nor was there any inclination to challenge the doctrine’s overarching programmatic conception that the nation’s fundamental task was to complete the “transition to socialism.” But the delegates were acutely aware that the “transition” had been taking an intolerably long time and that efforts to speed it up, most recently the frantic effort to collectivize the South following the end of the war, had brought not the increased productivity expected, but an intensification of poverty. How was this to be explained without vitiating the underlying theory?

The party’s first attempt had been to lower expectations. At the Fifth National Congress four years earlier it was suggested that the party’s understanding of the Vietnamese reality had been incorrect and therefore its application of theory had been faulty.⁴ The party had tried to move too rapidly. It had been wrong in pushing so hard so early for collectivization and heavy industrialization. The further pursuit of these tasks—though ultimately required—would have to be deferred to a later time. Vietnam had been and still was simply too weighted with an impoverished rural population for the fruits of socialism to be within grasp. Regrettably, said the Central Committee, the party had t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Contributors
• List of Tables, Figures, and Maps
• Overview
• Reform at Home
• The Opening to the World
• The Responses of Japan and the United States
• Index