Tai Lieu Chat Luong Renovating Politics in Contemporary VIETNAM Renovating Politics in Contemporary VIETNAM Zachary Abuza b o u l d e r l o n d o n Published in the United States of America in 2001 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 2001 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Abuza, Zachary.
Renovating politics in contemporary Vietnam / Zachary Abuza. Includes bibliographical references and index. paper) - ng còng sàn Viòt Nam. Vietnam—Politics and government— 1.
Vietnam—Politics and government—1975– 4. Vietnam— Economic policy—1975– 5. Government, Resistance to—Vietnam. Civil rights—Vietnam.
Political culture—Vietnam.9597—dc21 00-066502 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements ∞ of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39. 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS Introduction: Dissidents and Democratization in Vietnam 1 1 Politics in Vietnam 9 2 The Nhan Van–Giai Pham Affair, the 1967 Purge, and the Legacy of Dissent 41 3 The Debates over Democratization and Legalization 75 4 The Battle over Intellectual Freedom and Freedom of the Press 131 5 The Club of Former Resistance Fighters: Dissension from Within 161 6 Religious Freedom and Civil Society 183 7 The VCP: Coping with Internal Dissent and External Pressure 211 8 Conclusion 235 Bibliography 245 Index 259 About the Book 273 v INTRODUCTION: DISSIDENTS AND DEMOCRATIZATION IN VIETNAM The Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) has ruled continuously in the northern half of the country since 1954 and throughout Vietnam since May 1975. In that time, it has tolerated no dissent, monopolizing all polit- ical power and decisionmaking.
In the twenty-five years since the end of the war, the standard of living for the vast majority of the population has improved negligibly, though Vietnam is situated in the heart of the most economically dynamic region in the world. The VCP has survived the col- lapse of communism in Eastern Europe and its former patron the Soviet Union. It has embarked on a program of limited economic reform in an attempt to raise the standard of living to regain its tarnished legitimacy, but it has countenanced no political liberalization or reform. Since the onset in 1986 of the economic reform program known as doi moi (renovation), there has been a growing chorus of dissent di- rected toward the party and its policies.
That any dissent has emerged in the authoritarian, one-party state of Vietnam is surprising, but there is something even more extraordinary. Most of the dissent comes from an unlikely source: within the party’s own ranks. Although opposition has been voiced by former members of the Republic of Vietnam regime and by the historically political clergymen of the many religions and sects in the country, the most vociferous criticism has come from sen- ior members of the party who are upset at the country’s development or lack thereof. Despite twenty-five years since achieving national unifi- cation, Vietnam at the turn of the century remains one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world.
Vietnam is a paradox in many ways. It is a richly endowed country, but average per capita GDP has remained at $300 per year for nearly a 1 2 Renovating Politics in Contemporary Vietnam decade. Vietnam has one of the highest literacy rates in the world, yet draconian press and culture laws limit all freedom of expression and in- tellectual freedom. Vietnam’s most important authors remain banned, read only abroad, while the film industry has all but collapsed.
The vi- sual arts, especially modern art, have blossomed, but they have only a small domestic audience and are appreciated primarily abroad. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and in Vietnam’s principal patron, the Soviet Union, shocked Hanoi, but Vietnam has re- mained doggedly committed to socialism. Unwilling to embark on any degree of political reform, Hanoi asserts that it simply will not make the same mistakes that its comrades in Eastern Europe made. Yet the inherent corruption of the Eastern European regimes is even more prevalent in resource-scarce Vietnam.
Although the country has been in relative peace since 1989, its leadership still maintains its clandestine decisionmaking style. The Communist Party—whose members com- prise only 3 percent of the population—continues to monopolize polit- ical power, asserting that it alone represents the interests of all Viet- namese people. The military, too, commands a disproportionate share of government resources and has a powerful voice in policymaking. The National Assembly remains for the most part a rubber stamp for party decisions.
Despite assertions of collective decisionmaking and political consensus, policymaking is riddled by factionalism. Since the Communist Party’s Eighth National Congress in 1996, the country has experienced the worst infighting and political deadlock in its history. Vietnam’s hallmark collective leadership has all but broken down, leav- ing the country unable to adequately respond to the economic crisis that rocked Southeast Asia from 1997 to 2000. The Communist Party, which led popular anticolonial wars against France and the United States, also led the country into quagmires with the Chinese and Cambodians that left the country bankrupt and diplo- matically isolated.
The party that had so much legitimacy that it could call on the Vietnamese people to make continued and repeated sacri- fices has squandered much of its popular support. The aging leadership remains profoundly influenced by the war and continues to believe that the population will support it because of its leadership role in anti-colo- nial struggles. But Vietnam has a very young population; over half of its citizens were born after the war ended in 1976. Thus the majority knows only of the war through propaganda and has been confronted with a lifetime of economic mismanagement.
Widespread food short- ages and economic mismanagement forced the regime to embark on an Dissidents and Democratization in Vietnam 3 economic reform program in 1986 that did much to revitalize the econ- omy. But as even those reforms have waned since the mid-1990s, the party has not been able to capitalize on performance-based legitimacy. Hanoi launched a Chinese-style economic reform program in 1986. In the first ten years of the reform program, the economy grew 7 to 8 percent annually.
GDP grew from $2.2 billion in 1989 to $20.3 billion in 1997, and averaged 8.2 percent annually from 1991 to 1996. Agri- cultural reforms that dismantled socialist communes and allowed indi- viduals to lease land and negotiate production contracts with the state turned the country from a net importer into a net exporter of rice. Price and currency reform helped to bring inflation under control, from 400 percent in 1988 to 5 percent in 1996. More importantly, Vietnam shifted its growth strategy from a Stalinist-grounded economy based on central planning, price controls, and heavy industrialization to an out- wardly oriented economy based on foreign trade, foreign investment, bi- and multilateral borrowing, and economic interdependence.
Vietnam received over $16 billion in foreign investment and $8.5 billion in de- velopment assistance, while foreign trade increased from $3.3 billion in 1989 to $17.8 billion in 1996, an average annual growth rate of 16.9 percent in the 1990–1995 period. The World Bank summed up Viet- nam’s transition this way: “Under doi moi, Vietnam began its transition from a centrally planned system towards a market economy by imple- menting a wide range of macro-economic and structural reforms to cre- ate a vibrant economy with several features of a free market system.” There was real zeitgeist surrounding Vietnam, which was hailed as the next “tiger” economy. Yet even before the Asian economic crisis hit Vietnam, the economy was in serious trouble. Even though legally a multisector economy was established, the government has hampered the growth of the private sector and continues to pour public funds into the inefficient state-owned sector.
Over 50 percent of the 5,200 state- owned enterprises lose money, yet the government refuses to shut them down or allow for wide-scale privatization for fears of exacerbating the country’s serious, but underreported, unemployment crisis. The govern- ment failed to create a viable private sector that could absorb the sur- plus labor and the annual million new entrants to the workforce; as a result, foreign investors began to cut their losses, and by 2000 invest- ment rates were below 1992 levels. Popular unrest has increased, yet the VCP has not come up with any innovative solutions to the country’s myriad of woes and increas- ingly divergent social forces. Fearing that radical economic reform or 4 Renovating Politics in Contemporary Vietnam any political reform will diminish its political monopoly, the party has stubbornly clung to power and punished all dissenters.
Why has Vietnam failed to realized its promise as a nation? There are three main reasons. First and foremost, the leadership’s worldview was shaped by thirty years of anticolonial struggle and ten more years of conflict with China and its surrogate, the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. The regime is xenophobic and truly believes that the international sys- tem is hostile and threatens its monopoly of power. Put simply, the VCP equates its own survival with national survival.
Although the gov- ernment asserts that the country is so poor because of thirty years of war and a hostile international environment, bad economic policies are much to blame. The party did take some concrete steps in the late 1980s to reform the economy, but it is fearful of any policy that could cause unrest and destabilize the regime. This is a regime that does not rush into anything. Although so much is said of how radical doi moi was, Vietnam moved in reality very carefully.
The regime intentionally did not use such words as “reconstruction” or “rebuilding” that would imply a fundamental overhaul, because the VCP believes that it only needs to make cosmetic changes. Its style of policymaking is reactive, responding to crises rather than governing with foresight. Finally, de- spite fundamental structural reforms in the economy, there have been no corresponding political reforms. Second, the leadership is stagnant.
Not only do regular transitions of power not occur frequently enough, but the political “gene pool” is very small: less than 3 percent of the population are members of the VCP. The major decisionmaking body, the VCP Central Committee, has 170 members, while the Politburo currently only has 18 members. Membership in both bodies is overwhelmingly male and ranges in age from fifty to seventy years. Within the party, promotion and advance- ment are based on the Soviet-style nomenklatura selectorate process.
Loyalty and slavish subservience to the party and its edicts are the req- uisites for career advancement; leaders with new ideas do not readily rise to the top of the political system. Even though the party talks about the need to “renovate” its personnel, the structure of the political sys- tem makes this nearly impossible. Third, there is something about Vietnamese political culture: re- gardless of regime type, communist or noncommunist, Vietnamese po- litical leaders are very uncompromising. Throughout Vietnam’s modern history, these leaders have perceived politics as a zero-sum game in which compromise is equated with weakness, a view that has reinforced Dissidents and Democratization in Vietnam 5 authoritarian political cultures and made democracy harder to imple- ment.
This was true in the south, under Ngo Dinh Diem and his suc- cessors, as well as in the north, under the VCP—which to this day countenances no dissent, no opposition, and no criticism. Those who transgress party policies are dealt with harshly. The uncompromising na- ture of the party (and of the émigré community and dissident opposi- tion) does not bode well for democratic transition. The Vietnamese Communist Party believes that if it liberalizes the political system, it will lose its monopoly, causing grave instability throughout the country and jeopardizing national sovereignty.