Tai Lieu Chat Luong Changing Worlds A silent struggle was taking place between entrenched conservatism and the fragile new thinking. “Hanoi Life under the Subsidy Economy, 1975–1986,” Museum of Ethnology, Hanoi, 2006–7. Changing Worlds Vietnam’s Transition From Cold War to Globalization David W. Elliott 1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education.
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Changing worlds : Vietnam’s transition from the Cold War to globalization / David W. Includes bibliographical references and index. Vietnam—Politics and government—1975- 2. Vietnam—Foreign relations.
Vietnam—Economic policy—1975- 4. National security—Vietnam.704c4—dc23 2011052938 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper To Mai Who Shared the Journey With Love This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface ix 1. On the Eve of Doi Moi Reform (1975–1986) 25 3. The Year of Living Dangerously (1989) 59 4.
Changing Partners in a Changing World (1990–1991) 87 5. Taking the Plunge (2000–2006) 189 8. A Strategy for the Twenty-First Century 231 9. Rhetoric and Reality 279 Notes 333 Index 391 This page intentionally left blank Preface Although I wrote my graduate-school dissertation on the political system of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), which focused largely on the decade between 1954 and 1964—that is from the division of Vietnam at the end of the First Indochina War to the escalation into direct US military action in the Second Indochina War—I would be the first to admit the limits of my understanding of the subject, even after extensive documentary research and interviews with a number of people who had lived in North Vietnam during this period.
So what led to the foolhardy decision to pro- ceed with a second attempt to understand the notoriously secretive political system of communist Vietnam? In part, it was due to a gradual opening up of Vietnam to the outside world and the fascination of watching what amounted to a Vietnamese version of glasnost, as more and more veils of secrecy fell to the ground. In addition, as the process unfolded, the expanded range of public issues, life choices, and diversity of opinion at all levels of society made the study of Vietnam infinitely more interesting. Between my first visit to unified Viet- nam in 1982, and my last substantial research trip, from December 2006 to January 2007, extraordinary change occurred. My 1982 visit was to a country still paranoid about foreigners and external threats, and was marked by several tense encounters with the public security branch and police, despite my status as an official guest of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
On the street, I was routinely addressed as dong chi (comrade) because it was inconceivable to most Vietnamese at the time that a foreign visitor would not be from a fraternal socialist country. Even those who suspected that I was something different were at a loss as to the ix x Preface appropriate form of address for someone outside the familiar and restricted categories of visitors, so “comrade” was a safe bet. Normal social and personal contacts between Americans and citizens of Vietnam were out of the question in 1982. A Hanoi meeting with my sister-in-law, who had joined the Viet Minh and persevered in the jungles during the anti-French Resistance, was a stiff and awkward affair, not least because the American connection put them under suspicion in that politically tense era—despite the fact that the meeting was authorized at a very high level.
I feared it would not be possible to have a normal relationship with any citizen of socialist Vietnam in my lifetime. By 2007, after a number of intervening visits to Vietnam, mostly accompanied by my wife, who had been raised in presocialist Hanoi, contacts with relatives were warm, famil- ial, and unconstrained—even in the case of a first meeting with several families on the maternal side of my wife’s clan, which included several who worked in the party ideolog- ical sector, and who had kept a discreet distance during earlier visits. By this time I had developed close and cordial relations with a number of academics and government re- searchers whom I had met over the years. Far from being an illustration of the regime’s fears of a drift toward “peaceful evolution” and slackening loyalties, the deep patriotism and commitment to making the regime better, rather than undermining it, was a prominent feature of the many Vietnamese who interacted easily and spontaneously with foreigners—a far cry from the tense and wary encounters of 1982.
It was an ease based on a self-confidence that was not easy to sustain in the prereform period, and the product of a major shift in the collective mindset of the Vietnamese elite during this period. Looking back from the perspective of the relaxed and generally open Vietnam of 2007, the stifling and oppressive political atmosphere of 1982 seems very remote. Small wonder that it is difficult for a younger generation of foreign scholars, and even younger Vietnamese, to fully appreciate how far Vietnam has come in terms of liberalizing its political system and adopting a posture of openness. Even though the coercive arm of the regime is still active in suppressing dissidents and some religious and ethnic groups, and direct inquiry into many sensitive political areas by foreign scholars is still not possible, the extraordinary contrast between these two points in time underlines the profound and extensive transformation that has taken place in Vietnam over the course of several decades.
The 1982 trip was an outgrowth of an encounter with the Vietnamese delegation to an international conference on Cambodia at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok in June 1980, led by the head of the Philosophy Institute, Pham Nhu Cuong. He was hardly an armchair, ivory-tower philosopher. In Vietnam, “philosophy” was the study of Marxist- Leninist dialectics, and Professor Cuong was the designated polemical heavy hitter who would slug it out with the Chinese delegation to the conference at a time of very high tensions (less than two years after the invasion and occupation of Cambodia by Vietnam- ese forces, Hanoi’s troops had just made an alleged incursion into Thai territory). Pro- fessor Cuong’s message was clear: Vietnam’s security had been intolerably threatened by Preface xi China and its cat’s paw, Pol Pot.
This was the face Vietnam presented to the outside world at the time: fiercely combative, persuaded that any sign of conciliation would completely unravel Vietnam’s position, and convinced that it was the world against Vietnam—a stark life or death struggle between “us” and “them.” I had edited a book which attempted to unravel Vietnam’s reasons for invading and occupying Cambodia. Complex though these reasons were, from Hanoi’s perspective they fit comfortably into a familiar paradigm; Vietnamese territory under threat from a more powerful foreign enemy who, in collusion with local proxies, wanted to impose its will on Vietnam’s policies and politics. Later, as the Cold War reached its terminal stage, Vietnam concluded that this occupation was a strategic error of major proportions and that its security would have to be achieved by other means, and based on fundamentally different assumptions. That is the starting point of this book.
It was in Bangkok that I met for the first time Luu Doan Huynh, a long-time senior analyst at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Institute of International Relations, then serving in the Vietnamese embassy in Thailand. Over the course of many subsequent trips to Vietnam, Mr. Huynh provided keen insight and sage counsel. A key figure in the McNamara seminars on the Vietnam War held in Hanoi in the mid-1990s, the excep- tional qualities of Mr.
Huynh were very visible.1 He had also been involved in my June 1982 trip to Vietnam. My very presence in Vietnam at that time evidently had been the subject of political debate between some officials, who wanted to diversify Vietnam’s for- eign contacts and begin to open up to the larger world beyond their socialist and Third World friends, and other conservative officials who felt that this trip was a gratuitous concession to someone who had once been in the enemy camp, was a “complicated ele- ment” who did not fit clearly into the framework of “friend or enemy,” and who could provide an opening for subversion through undesirable contacts with Vietnamese citi- zens. My contacts were carefully limited to meetings with members of various state social-science institutes and government officials, who were impressive and articulate, but very restricted in the parameters of permissible topics and ideas, especially in conversa- tion with an American visitor. What I encountered in 1982 was a closed society, beleaguered and aggrieved in its deal- ings with much of the outside world, in a high state of political tension and, though I did not fully understand it at the time, sharply divided about how to resolve the many domes- tic and external problems it faced.
Still, that impressive group of specialists I encountered in the institutes and elsewhere showed that Vietnam had a rich endowment of human resources, if only they could be allowed to realize their potential by removing the polit- ical, ideological, and organizational obstacles that limited their contributions to Viet- nam’s development in the era before the doi moi reforms. In retrospect, one of the most interesting meetings during this trip was with the then minister of culture, Tran Do, who was a former deputy political commissar of the guer- rilla forces in the South during the war. Do became the highest-ranking political dissi- dent in Vietnam prior to his death in 2002. In 1982, however, General Do appeared xii Preface bemused to be sitting in his office at the Ministry of Culture talking with a former mem- ber of US military intelligence and employee of the Rand Corporation in Vietnam about Do’s intransigent tract on the dangers of cultural subversion (in which foreigners played a prominent part), which had recently been published, and his role in the Tet Offensive.
Among the people I met on that trip, he was the last person that I could imagine be- coming a fervent democracy advocate. Although there are many distinctive reasons for Tran Do’s political and ideological transformation, and though he went much farther than most in his advocacy of political reform, it does parallel some of the broader but less extreme changes that took place in the Vietnamese elite in the period from the early 1980s into the new century. My 1982 visit was jointly sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) and the State Commission for the Social Sciences (SCSS, as it was known then, before it became the National Center for the Social Sciences and Humanities and then the Viet- nam Academy of Social Sciences). My liaison with MOFA was a veteran of Dien Bien Phu, the resourceful Le Trung Nghia, whose imposing demeanor and revolutionary cre- dentials helped overcome the initial resistance of some who were either opposed to the idea of my visit, or reluctant to take the risk of being implicated with it, in the event political tides shifted once again.