CONCLUSION
IN 2005, AS an expanding economy pulled Vietnam from the depths of poverty, the communist authorities of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam allowed Hoang Minh Chinh to travel to the United States for medical treatment. Chinh had joined the Indochinese Communist Party in the 1930s and distinguished himself as a commando during the First Indochina War before becoming one of the country’s leading experts in Marxist theory. He had worked closely with the leadership in tailoring communism to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Chinh had also landed himself in hot water when, in 1963, he had questioned the politburo’s ideological dogmatism and decision to go to war. Having studied in Moscow in the late 1950s as de-Stalinization spread across the communist world, he returned home to argue with the leadership that socialism could best be attained through peaceful evolution. But for those in Hanoi who wanted to return to war (and gain Mao’s support for it), Hoang Minh Chinh’s views made him a ‘revisionist’. He was in and out of prison until the 1980s, when a second wave of communist reformism led by the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev released him from his semi-criminal revisionist status and seemed to vindicate him.
It certainly emboldened him. As Gorbachev allowed home-grown democracies to replace dictatorships of the proletariat in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Chinh urged the Vietnamese communists to do the same. This was the message he carried with him to the United States in 2005. In interviews, speeches, and meetings, he called for the introduction of the rule of law, freedom of speech and religion, liberty of the press, free elections, and multiparty politics. In a comparison designed to remind communist leaders that they were on the wrong side of history, Hoang Minh Chinh praised the nineteenth-century German socialists, who, despite Marx’s rebuke of their ‘revisionist’ moderation, had pushed through a ground-breaking political program at Gotha in 1875 (one of the pillars on which modern social democracy stands). Until his death in 2008, Chinh championed the creation of just such a social democratic state working within the framework of a capitalist economy.1
Of course, Vietnamese communists saw things differently. Even though they had authorized a capitalist economy to flourish, Lenin’s single-party state still suited them just fine for ruling. Political change has certainly occurred with the introduction of a market economy and with it the opening of the country to the non-communist world, its international organizations, rules, capital flows, and interactions with civil society. However, today’s communist leaders have nevertheless carefully defined political change in reformist terms, so as to co-opt those who would do away with the vanguard role of the party. What all this means for the country’s political future is anybody’s guess. But if the past is any guide to this, the leadership can count on Vietnamese republicans to continue opposing authoritarian rule while Vietnamese citizens will push for more political change in their everyday lives.
MAINTAINING COMMUNIST LEGITIMACY IN A POST-COMMUNIST WORLD
In an economy where the Vietnamese Communist Party pushes capitalism as its policy and has abandoned a centrally planned economy in favor of one allowing private entrepreneurship, its leaders have had to shift their ideological raison d’être from defending ‘class struggle’ and ‘proletarian internationalism’ to promoting economic prosperity and inclusive nationalism for all social groups. Through school textbooks, official histories, museums, billboards, and the media, the party now highlights its historic role as the defender of national independence against the invading French, Japanese, Americans, and Chinese. School children learn how the party led the August Revolution to victory in 1945, defeated the French colonizers at Dien Bien Phu a decade later, and united the entire country against all odds in 1975. This, in turn, is presented as the latest chapter in an ancient tradition of resistance reaching back two thousand years. The message is clear: the communists are legitimate because, like their ancestors, they are the nation’s defenders.
Meanwhile, party chroniclers carefully prune problematic events from the narrative. Close collaboration with Mao’s China into the 1960s, for example, fits badly with the country’s present problems dealing with their northern neighbor in the South China Sea. Ho Chi Minh may have created the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930, but his role in spreading communism to Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, and Laos is not what authorities want to emphasize today in their role as a member of the common market-minded Association of South East Asian Nations. And when a special exhibition on the land-reform campaigns of the 1950s opened in Hanoi in September 2014, authorities closed it within days, as young people gasped at the class violence the party had unleashed against its own people and angry farmers used the occasion to vent their anger about current land disputes.2
Party historians have been particularly careful to shield Ho Chi Minh from accusations of any wrongdoing in the carrying out of such grandiose projects designed to remake society in the communist mold. To suggest that the country’s president was responsible for assaults on his own people during the land-reform programs weakens the leadership’s ability to use its great leader to weave nationalism and communism into a powerful source of legitimation. Indeed, the potential for Ho’s life and work to define communist rule in nationalist terms was such that when he died in 1969 his disciples refused to honor the president’s request that he be cremated and have his ashes scattered across the country. Instead his followers embalmed him and placed his body on display in a massive mausoleum in downtown Hanoi, where Ho lies to this day. School children, cadets, civil servants, officers, and party cadres all file by at one time or another to pay homage to the father of the nation. Etched into the granite entrance are Ho’s famous words: ‘Nothing is more precious than freedom and independence’.3
This is part of a wider personality cult the party has built around Ho since 1945, in the form of rituals, holidays, museums, iconography, and countless biographies. In 1991, as communism crumbled globally, the leadership extended this to include ‘Ho Chi Minh Thought’ (‘Tu tuong Ho Chi Minh’). Teachers, textbooks, documentaries, stamps and pictures all tell the story of the founding father of the nation. Readers follow Ho as he leaves Saigon on the eve of the First World War in search of ways to free the country from its colonial shackles. After searching far and wide, he discovers the path to independence in the form of Marxism-Leninism. With this light now guiding him, he goes on to create the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930, the Viet Minh nationalist front in 1941, and leads the country to independence in 1945. Ho’s patriotism trumps all in this personification of the nation.4
Ho, his life, and his thoughts are still the objects of intense official worship. Civil servants at the Nguyen Ai Quoc Party School study the Ho Chi Minh canon in the form of his Collected Works. They learn to imitate his unique leadership ‘style’, stressing as it does, moral rectitude, incorruptibility, and patriotism. The official slogan is clear enough: ‘Study and Follow Ho Chi Minh’s Example of Moral Conduct’. Ho Chi Minh Thought asks all to emulate this fatherly, gentle, humanistic, indeed Confucian man in their lives and deeds. And there is an exemplary Ho for everyone—the army, the party, teachers, peasants, workers, the young, and the old. But, as in earlier chapters of Vietnamese history, this political religion seeks above all to establish ideological homogeneity and reinforce party control over the state and society from top to bottom. Whether it does so in practice is questionable. But, as in North Korea’s state-sponsored adulation of Kim Il-sung, a communist form of the accusation of lèse-majesté awaits those in Vietnam who would challenge the deification of Ho Chi Minh.5
Communist rulers have simultaneously prevented living, charismatic competitors from stepping in to claim the nationalist mantle from Ho in a post-communist world. Religious leaders remain subject to close surveillance and official scrutiny. Today, the last thing the authorities want in a rapidly changing society is a religious revival that could resurrect the likes of magical, millenarian leaders like the Hoa Hao’s Huynh Phu So in the 1930s, a Buddhist Zen master capable of mobilizing thousands of believers as Thich Nhat Hanh was in the 1960s, or an energized Catholic clergy with Vatican connections. Through a series of officially sanctioned Churches, the party seeks to control its Buddhist, Catholic, Protestant, Hoa Hao, and Cao Dai populations, their clergy, and property. Like their Vietnamese and French predecessors, the communist authorities have not hesitated to arrest religious leaders who fail to follow the rules. Similar controls exist to prevent non-Viet populations from pushing ethno-nationalist and, increasingly, ethno-religious identities which are at odds with the official line emphasizing national harmony of a secular kind. And any Vietnamese equivalent to Czechoslovakia’s Václev Havel or Poland’s Lech Walesa preaching the end of communist rule will find him or herself subject to arrest. The army, police, and intelligence services remain firmly in the regime’s hands. Like the Chinese, the Vietnamese authorities invest heavily in technology which allows them to trawl the web, social media, and emails in search of seditious activities.6
Some of the most spectacular challenges to communist legitimacy following the official adoption of the doi moi (‘renovation’) policy in 1986 came from veterans of the Vietnam War. What made their attacks so noteworthy was that they challenged the party’s right to define the thirty years’ war in patriotic terms at precisely the time when the leadership desperately needed the banner of ‘glorious resistance’ to divert attention from its failed communist policies. Controlling the meaning of the wars is no minor affair in Vietnam. In a land where upward of three million people may have perished between 1945 and 1975, the party has long done its best to define such massive suffering as a sacred event (‘cuoc khang chien than thanh’) on its terms. The leadership has done this by creating an elaborate system of state rituals and ceremonies to commemorate and render homage to those who have died ‘for the fatherland’. Officially run veterans’ associations, immaculately groomed cemeteries, solemn memorials and monuments, moving sculptures, and countless documentaries all promote the sacredness of the struggle. Like the British and French leaders who scrambled to define the Great War’s bloodletting in heroic terms after the event, Vietnamese authorities have carefully ennobled their past conflicts through all the commemorative tools at their disposal.7
The party’s monopoly hold over war and remembrance cracked, however, with the economic reforms that began in the 1980s. To some extent, the party had only itself to blame. In order to reinforce its new economic policies, then General Secretary Nguyen Van Linh initially urged intellectuals, civil servants, and journalists to speak their minds, to tell the truth (‘noi that, noi thang’). The party welcomed, indeed published their constructive criticism of inefficiencies and corruption. What the politburo didn’t see coming was how writers would seize upon this invitation to speak openly in order to give their own meaning to the social suffering that thirty years of war had generated.
Nowhere was this more evident than in the title of the bestselling novel published by Bao Ninh in 1991—The Sorrow of War. In a few hundred pages, this veteran of the Vietnam War described in detail the terrible toll of the great patriotic war on the Vietnamese people. Where the communists spoke of war as a noble endeavor, Bao Ninh drew on his combat experience to remind readers that the war was, in fact, a very ugly affair. It had maimed and it had killed—combatants and civilians, young and old, Viet and non-Viet. And there was more, Bao Ninh shows us: the Second Indochina War had spread sorrow so deeply that it still flowed into the present and had even invaded the spiritual world. Appearing throughout Bao Ninh’s novel are the souls of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese fighters who went missing in action. (The novel opens with the protagonist, Kien, searching for them, a figure who clearly represents Bao Ninh himself.) Having lost their bodies, these men and women are unable to receive the proper burial rites required to move their spirits into the next world. Instead, they remain trapped in their ‘screaming souls’, hurtling in a terrifying no-man’s land from one end of the country to the other. Surviving family members know their loved ones are ‘there’, but they can only see them in dreams: bad ones.8
It was a bombshell of a novel, not only for its ability to unveil the deep social suffering the party’s official cults, rituals, and official atheism had been unable to heal, but also for its success in redefining the meaning of the war in ways the state could not control. Although Bao Ninh did not intentionally seek to undermine the party’s legitimacy with his book (what mattered most to him was unpacking the memories that were driving him mad), he had nevertheless turned the party’s war myth on its head when, early on in the story, he had one of his soldiers ask what had been on the author’s mind for years: ‘So much blood, so many lives were sacrificed for what?’ Our Vietnamese veteran had just taken a swipe at what one poet-soldier of the Great War, Britain’s Wilfred Owen, had called the ‘Old Lie’—‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’. Bao Ninh was soon under house arrest for suggesting that the party’s take on the war was just as deceitful.9
Another veteran, Duong Thu Huong, went even further. In the course of equally hard-hitting novels, this fearless writer critiqued not just the brutality and senselessness of the war, but she went on to attack the party’s right to rule. She was ruthless in her critique of the violent land-reform programs of the 1950s and the corrupt cadres who had implemented it. In her novels, she made no secret of the fact that she thought the party was out of its league when it came to modernizing the country. In Zenith, she even dared to treat Ho Chi Minh as a mere mortal. This was too much for those in power. Hopping mad, Nguyen Van Linh had her thrown out of the party and jailed, but not before publicly insulting her as ‘that dissident slut’. After serving time in prison and then living under house arrest, Huong obtained political asylum in France in 2006, from where she calls for the democratization of her country’s political system, the introduction of the rule of law, and the protection of individual rights.10
BACK TO THE FUTURE? VIETNAMESE REPUBLICANISM OVER THE LONG TWENTIETH CENTURY
There is nothing new about Duong Thu Huong’s embrace of democracy. She is one in a very long line of Vietnamese people opposed to authoritarian regimes. While it is tempting at this point in our journey through modern Vietnam to sum up the political changes that have occurred since 1986, let us step back one last time to remind ourselves that the building tensions between Vietnamese authoritarianism and pluralism today reach back over the long twentieth century. Vietnamese republicanism is not a post-1986 phenomenon. Nor is reformism. It emerged over a century ago, before communism arrived; and therein lies one of the keys to understanding political change in modern Vietnam today and what lies ahead.
As we know, by the early 1900s, a host of republican ideas were entering Vietnam via port cities, through the French colonial state itself, and pouring off printing presses from Hong Kong to Saigon by way of Tokyo. Converts to republicanism were many. Indeed, the pantheon of early converts reads like an early twentieth-century Vietnamese Who’s Who—Phan Chu Trinh, Phan Boi Chau, Phan Van Truong, Nguyen The Truyen, Huynh Thuc Khang, Nguyen Thai Hoc, Nguyen Tuong Tam, Tran Trong Kim, and perhaps the country’s greatest democratic spirit, Nguyen An Ninh. They all embraced the notion of popular sovereignty, rule of law, free elections, and representative government. Even the young emperor Bao Dai had shocked his colonial masters when he proposed the creation of a constitutional monarchy in the early 1930s. After all, no other emperor had ever recognized such a temporal claim on divine right.
Ho Chi Minh was initially a member of this club. While his official biographers prefer to start his story in Paris with his conversion to communism, they conveniently forget that the father of communist Vietnam had first championed the democratic ideas flowing into Vietnam from abroad. He travelled to Europe on the eve of the Great War in the hope of forcing the French to make good on their promise of political change. In France, he joined the League of Human Rights, the Freemasons, and the Socialist Party. In 1919, as the victorious Allies convened at Versailles to determine the fate of the postwar world and, many hoped, its colonial parts, Ho joined fellow republicans in Paris to ask the French to implement reforms respectful of Vietnamese individual rights and provide them with a say in governance. The republican nature of the ‘Demands of the Annamese People’ in 1919 is unmistakable:
1.General amnesty for political prisoners;
2.Reform of the justice system so as to guarantee equal legal rights between Europeans and Vietnamese, including the complete and definitive eradication of special courts that serve to terrorize and suppress the Vietnamese people;
3.Freedom of the press and freedom of opinion;
4.Freedom of association and freedom for gathering;
5.Freedom to emigrate and travel abroad;
6.Freedom of education and the creation in every province of technical and professional schools;
7.The end of [special] laws;
8. The creation of a permanent delegation within the French parliament that can convey the desiderata of the Vietnamese to the government.11
Governor General Albert Sarraut’s famous speech in Hanoi in 1919 had held out the hope that the Third Republic would finally reform its authoritarian colonial state in democratic ways. Such hope vanished within a few years, however, as the Vietnamese realized that colonial reformism was designed above all to co-opt and subvert Vietnamese republicanism. Sarraut’s liberalization of the press and expansion of voting rights for a select few were real, but such measures also coincided with the creation of the powerful political police, the Sûreté générale. Censorship remained firmly in place. The French licensed printing presses as carefully as the communists monitor the web today. Repression without rule of law remained part and parcel of colonial policy. Governor generals authorized special commissions and courts to try, condemn, incarcerate, and execute ‘rebels’. Not even the French leftist coalition that came to power in the 1930s, the Popular Front, could bring itself to create the Indochinese equivalent to the Indian National Congress.
Intensely frustrated, men like Ho Chi Minh converted to Marxism-Leninism. But not all republicans did. Just as many carried on. They used existing institutions to push the limits of colonial reformism and exploit French and international conjunctures to roll back authoritarianism. Equally important, a proliferation of new associations, clubs, charities, self-help, literacy, and anti-poverty groups recalibrated society and local politics in new ways. Urban planning, taxation, state monopolies, and economic development projects stimulated lively debates and new forms of political culture. The printed word in its quoc ngu form moved ideas and connected people together. A new professional class of Vietnamese lawyers emerged to assume a range of briefs (although land disputes probably occupied more of their time than juicy political cases). Intellectuals, writers, journalists, and artists took greater interest in the everyday lives of the urban poor and the majority peasant population. Local municipalities and village councils were often the forums for grassroots change. And during the brief period when the Popular Front was in control in France (1936–8), Nguyen An Ninh rallied a wide array of supporters, including workers, to win political posts in local elections, before the authorities ended this short but important experiment in colonial democracy.12
Vietnamese republicanism also had its radical wing. By the late 1920s, a handful of dedicated men and women in the Vietnamese Nationalist Party concluded that only violence could secure an independent and truly democratic state. Colonial reformism was a political dead-end. Days before his execution, Nguyen Thai Hoc, the mastermind of the failed Yen Bay insurrection of 1930, sent a letter to the French National Assembly in Paris in which he explained that the French failure to implement real political reforms in Vietnam had left his party with no choice but to use violence to achieve a ‘Vietnamese republic’. Another ranking member told a journalist that what he wanted was what the French had, nothing more, nothing less: ‘a democratic government, universal suffrage, freedom of the press, respect of human and citizen rights, and, why not, independence’.13
This tension between colonial authoritarianism and Vietnamese republicanism is only half the story, though. Just as important was the clash between Vietnamese republicans and communists over the future of Vietnam. Each side wanted to overturn the colonial state holding them down, but each had a very different ideological road-map for how to get there and what the postcolonial state should look like once they did. Official historians would like us to believe that, in the wake of the Yen Bay fiasco (see chapter 5), the real nationalists in the Vietnamese Nationalist Party and elsewhere became communists. It makes for the seamless story discussed above; but it also forgets that a generation of Vietnamese republicans continued to embrace a representative form of government based on popular sovereignty, universal suffrage, multiparty politics, free elections, and an independent national assembly and judiciary. The communists on the other hand, including Ho Chi Minh, adopted democratic centralism, class struggle, and collectivization via land reform as their road-map. Their postcolonial communist state would draw its legitimacy from the protection of workers and peasants and operate in the form of a dictatorship of the proletariat. In short, from the late 1920s onward (and not from a starting-point in 1986), one group looked to Atlantic republicanism for a model of liberal governance; the other drew upon the Soviet Union’s combination of Marxism and Leninism to create a single-party state.14
Although the competition between these two types of governance was occurring across much of the globe at the time, it played itself out very differently in the Indochinese context, where an authoritarian colonial state opposed both Vietnamese republicanism and communism. This is why the first debates, indeed, clashes between the two sides occurred in the cell blocks of Poulo Condor (where the French had sent so many of their political prisoners). Similar exchanges surfaced in the press and political campaigns during the brief period of the leftwing government coalition known as the Popular Front. In the end, though, the tensions between the two groups only came into the open in 1945–6 when a fragile coalition government led by Ho Chi Minh struggled to hold itself together in the form of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. With colonial control absent for the first time in eighty years, and thanks to the Chinese nationalist troops the Allies sent into Vietnam to accept the Japanese surrender in northern Indochina in September 1945, Vietnamese democrats and communists expressed their ideas in a remarkably open press, organized political demonstrations and rallies, and created political parties free of colonial molestation. Some of the liveliest debates in Vietnamese political history occurred during this short period. This was particularly the case in their National Assembly which emerged in March 1946, and whose delegates hammered out the country’s first constitution throughout the rest of the year. Although this republican moment was limited to the north (as the French had already attacked in the south), for the first time in the history of modern Vietnam a fragile democratic state was born. Emperor Bao Dai helped on that score, when, in August 1945, he abdicated the throne, thereby ending a millennium of monarchical rule. He intentionally referred to himself thereafter as ‘citizen Vinh Thuy’. This was in contrast to Cambodia’s King Norodom Sihanouk, who welcomed the French back in order to preserve his rule, save the monarchy, and combat democrats keen on creating a constitutional democracy.15
This republican moment in Vietnam did not last for more than a year. With the outbreak of full-scale war in late 1946, the French immediately began rolling back democratic rights as the army restored the colonial regime. A formal ‘state of siege’ was declared in December 1946 and this authorized the army to take over policing, administrative, and judicial affairs. Censorship returned, as did special commissions and courts to deal with the ever-increasing number of ‘rebels’ taken prisoner in a war the French refused to declare was going on. To do so would have meant recognizing the existence of a competing state. Tens of thousands of political prisoners thus found themselves in colonial cells or working in military labor camps with few rights.16
Meanwhile, the communists had no intention of letting their Vietnamese adversaries use a democratic constitution and a multiparty state to force them to compete in free elections so that they would have to govern like communist parties in republican France and Italy. And to be fair, the Chinese occupying forces and their Vietnamese allies such as Nguyen Hai Than and Vu Hong Khanh were just as willing as the communists to use undemocratic methods to increase their control over the DRV or overthrow it. This is also why, as the Chinese army withdrew in mid-1946, the French colonialists and the Vietnamese communists both moved against their common Vietnamese adversaries before turning on each other. In the north, Vietnamese communists closed down the opposition parties by force or co-optation, took control of all presses and papers, prohibited unauthorized demonstrations, and arrested those who defied them. When the new constitution became law on 8–9 November 1946, only two members of the opposition were present. The French had already done much the same against the Vietnamese nationalists in the south.
The 1946 constitution did, however, enshrine many of the political rights so many Vietnamese had wanted since the turn of the twentieth century—universal suffrage, an independent National Assembly and judiciary, rule of law, freedom of expression, an unfettered press, religious liberty, the right to an education, freedom to travel, private property, and more. It was a milestone in Vietnamese political theory. Moreover, it was an entirely Vietnamese initiative—not a French- or an American-driven one. And it was also a joint Vietnamese effort—not a communist-imposed one. United by their fierce opposition to the return of French colonialism, most republicans who had been dissatisfied with the Chinese-backed parties joined Ho’s coalition government in 1945–6, convinced that they would be able to partake in the construction of a multiparty state guaranteed by the 1946 constitution once the guns fell silent and the country was free.17
This was not to be. While communists and democrats kept the Democratic Republic of Vietnam alive against all odds, starting in 1950, Mao Zedong’s military assistance, political models, and advisors allowed Ho Chi Minh and his followers to transform it into a single-party communist state, regardless of what the 1946 constitution stipulated or non-communists in their ranks said. There was no debate allowed about the (Chinese-modeled) rectification and emulation campaigns which followed. No one voted on the party’s confiscation of the state bureaucracy, police, judiciary, and army. The National Assembly met only one time during the entire First Indochina War—in 1953, to approve the land-reform policy the communist core led by Ho Chi Minh had already worked out with their Soviet and, above all, Chinese advisors.
Upon taking over all of northern Vietnam following the Geneva conference in 1954, the communist party continued consolidating its hold over the single-party state it had forged from war. Having taken control of the police and the army, the communists had no real intention of sharing power as they had in 1945–6. Sidelined, republicans could do nothing to stop the promulgation of the new constitution of 1960 that validated the wartime shift in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam away from a parliamentary socialist democracy to a single-party communist state. Based on the Soviet model, the 1960 constitution enshrined ‘socialism’ as the official ideology (use of the word ‘communism’ was avoided so as not to play into the hands of the man building an anticommunist state in the south, Ngo Dinh Diem). For the communists today, the 1960 constitution is the founding document for their Vietnam, not the 1946 one. And this is why republicans in Vietnam today push so hard for the restoration of the 1946 constitution, which they consider to be the ‘real’ one. It would allow them to roll back the communist confiscation of the state during the First Indochina War.18
Authoritarianism was not a communist or colonialist monopoly, however. The DRV’s competitor, the Associated State of Vietnam led by Bao Dai, failed to create a functioning parliament: in part, because the French refused to let go colonially, but also because of their own ineptitude. Following the French withdrawal, Ngo Dinh Diem took over as the president of the Republic of Vietnam that replaced the State of Vietnam below the seventeenth parallel after the Geneva conference. But he did little better than Ho Chi Minh in respecting individual liberties, the rule of law, representative politics, and the freedom of the press. In what could have easily been mistaken for a communist election, in 1955 Diem received almost one hundred percent of the popular vote, making him president. The president and his family controlled the National Assembly, the judiciary, and ruled by decree. And if Ho’s regime went after the ‘bourgeois’ and the ‘landlords’ in a class war during the land-reform programs of the 1950s, Diem used special powers and courts to exterminate the ‘communists’ and forcibly moved hundreds of thousands of peasants into strategic hamlets during the same decade. Diem had no patience with Vietnamese democrats clamoring for rule of law. Scores ended up behind bars or, ironically, crossed over to the other side, convinced, again, that the communists would honor their democratic promises once the war had ended. While recent research suggests that the Republic of Vietnam began evolving in democratic ways after Diem’s assassination in 1963, the final communist victory in 1975 denied it the chance to transition from its anticommunist authoritarianism into a functioning parliamentary democracy as in Taiwan and South Korea. That is certainly what those who despise the communists wish to believe today. But it is equally possible that had the state in the south survived, it might have remained an authoritarian one like the military regime in Burma, at least until recently. Counterfactual history moves in many directions, especially for those who use it to fit the needs of the present; but in the end we will never know what could have been.19
REPUBLICANISM AND COMMUNISM: A TURNING-POINT?
The Global Wiring of the Vietnamese Public Sphere
What we do know is that the competition between authoritarianism and republicanism is not going away any time soon. By adopting market-oriented policies, the party has set far-reaching change into motion and has made it harder for its own agents to monitor the public sphere, define public opinion, control citizens, and limit their contact with the rest of the world. The party’s embrace of capitalism has also limited its own room for manoeuver, by integrating it into a web of institutions ranging from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and, in late 2015, the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership. These institutions impose legally binding rules which the national authorities in them must obey in order to obtain loans, attract investment, and trade. The same goes for the new stock markets in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. They might offer attractive returns to investors and generate much-needed investment capital; but they are also closely tied to world financial markets and are subject to their fluctuations, including downward ones.20
The shift to the market economy since 1986 has ushered in an era of economic prosperity that only the south knew for a few years before the war destabilized it in the late 1960s and the communists dismantled it a decade later. The renovation policies have fueled the rise of a middle class that is anxious to buy things—shiny washing machines, big-screen smart televisions, faster cars, bigger houses, and investment property. Families have tightened their belts to place their children in some of the finest private schools in Vietnam and many have shelled out even bigger bucks to send them abroad for study. Thanks to family, governmental, or international support, tens of thousands of Vietnamese are now going abroad to obtain advanced degrees in science, medicine, law, banking, finance, mathematics, engineering, agricultural economics, animal husbandry and the like. At ease with modern economics, law, and governance, these highly educated people are increasingly in charge of modern Vietnam’s transformation at many different levels.
Change has not been a solely urban phenomenon, however. If anyone forced the party to backtrack on its grand schemes to collectivize agriculture in the north in the 1960s, and then the south after 1975, it was the peasants resisting in their everyday lives. The renovation policies of the 1980s have reduced rural poverty levels dramatically. Farmers can now produce more to earn more. Rice production took off with the end of the state-planned economy in the 1980s. New technologies, fertilizers, and machinery have been introduced into agriculture, making Vietnam the world’s second-largest rice producer today. Household incomes have risen as a result. Farmers have the freedom to diversify their activities into commercial crops such as fruit, vegetables, and coffee. Vietnam is also the second-largest coffee producer in the world after Brazil. Commercial pig farming and fisheries have flourished over the last two decades, as the feed industry expands rapidly to keep up.21
Having based its legitimacy on providing economic prosperity based on free-market principles, Vietnamese communists, like their Chinese counterparts, must maintain high levels of growth at all costs. The party’s legitimacy now depends on that, not on the myth of glorious war. The urban middle class, professionals, and farmers all count on sustained growth. So do the large numbers of young people entering the labor market each year. In 2015, 50 percent of the country’s estimated 94 million people were aged under twenty-nine. They know little of the war years; their gaze is turned squarely toward the future. If ever economic problems overwhelm the ruling communist class, stymying its ability to main expected growth levels, these groups will use their voices, economically and politically. They have too much at stake not to do so. Highly trained bankers, investors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, and business elites will have urgent advice for those in power, in the event that the latter prove unable to keep an increasingly complex economy on track.22
This is also why endemic party and state corruption draw such heavy criticism, not only from diehard republican militants, but also from urban and rural economic leaders with real economic power and interests to protect. It is hard to predict how the growing working class would react in the event of an economic downturn, but there is no guarantee that it would be on the communist side. To date, the party has resisted the unionization of labor. The message is, nonetheless, clear: great political risk will confront those who fail to manage economic development and capitalism competently.23
Globalization, however, is more than the spread of Atlantic capitalism across the planet. It is also an accelerated process of integrative, technological change. The French presided over an early form of this through the introduction of the printing press, print media (newspapers, novels, pamphlets, textbooks), radios, telephones, the telegraph, cinema, and new transportation systems. More open to the world than its communist competitor in the 1950s and 1960s, the Republic of Vietnam took it further during its short lifespan (as discussed in chapter 12). But another technological revolution starting in the late twentieth century has further accelerated this integrative process of interconnectedness. It has occurred in Vietnam, as elsewhere, through the introduction of computers, the internet, email, social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs), and mobile phones. As of 2014, 39 percent of the Vietnamese population is online; that is a higher rate than in Thailand or the Philippines. Twenty-two percent of the population uses social media, mainly Facebook, with twenty million active accounts. Of the online adults, a staggering 72 percent use a social network, and 51 percent use the internet on their mobile phones. Thirty-six percent of the population owns a smartphone. Internet cafés are increasingly a thing of the past, because homes are now wired: indeed, 85 per cent of the online users have internet access at home (though not at comparatively high speeds). Vietnamese start-up companies are now using technology transfers to develop and commercialize their own hi-tech products.24
The significance of this global wiring of Vietnam from within and without is obvious. Vietnamese citizens in the cities as well as in the countryside have access to alternative sources of information about their country, the region, and the world. Citizens are also in a situation where they can broadcast their demands and share their view on government policies with friends via email, through social platforms like Facebook, or by circulating online petitions to masses of people with the click of a button. Neighborhood and village communities can connect on very specific local problems, while others can reach out to a larger audience to discuss national matters in real time. In April 2015, for example, tech-savvy Hanoi citizens created a Facebook page that brought hundreds of people into the streets to protest against the local municipality’s unilateral decision to start chopping down over 6,000 old trees. The government backed down when petitions flooded in and people took to the streets.25
The government has also acquiesced in the emergence of an increasingly vibrant civil society. While the communist party has certainly tried to control associations by placing them within its all-encompassing mass organization, the ‘Fatherland Front’ (a direct descendant of the communist-controlled Viet Minh), it has allowed hundreds of associations to organize their members around a wide range of different activities: charity, the family, economic development, the environment, ethnic minorities, science and technology, women’s issues and professional clubs. Many of these groups operate with considerable independence, while others have negotiated increased room for maneuvering within the state despite their nominal subordination to party control. Informal and community-based networks running online have joined in to express their opinions and give support (often through donations and fund-raising) on a range of socio-economic issues.
Very often, the communist authorities have found it useful to work with these groups to improve their governance and transparency, and thereby increase the state’s effectiveness and legitimacy. Local groups have also found it in their interest to work with the government, rather than oppose it, in order to realize their goals. Collaboration on environmental, family, and women’s rights is a case in point. The same is true of international Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). The state may control and monitor their movements, but it also benefits from collaboration with NGOs. The number of NGOs operating in Vietnam has increased from 200 in the early 1990s to almost 2,000 today. The party might monopolize power at the top levels, but its control over society at the lower levels is hardly totalitarian.26
Reform or Revolution?
The problem for the communists today is much like the one facing colonialists during the interwar period: when does state-sponsored reformism risk turning into outright revolution? It’s not that Vietnamese communists are colonialists. The problem is opposition to political authoritarianism and economic change. Calls for democratic reform have come in many forms since the renovation policy of the late 1980s began. In the early years, the push for political reform came from within the system, first from those whom the revolution had discarded like Hoang Minh Chinh, then from retired, disillusioned senior leaders who had nothing to lose by speaking out. Veteran army officers and longstanding party members were also among the first to criticize the inefficiencies and corruption of the party apparatus. Most did not seek to overthrow the party through the force of arms. Rather, they used their prestige and impeccable resistance credentials to urge the leadership to reform the political system peacefully. Particularly attractive to them were the multiparty parliamentary systems that had emerged without much bloodshed in Eastern Europe in the 1990s.
General Tran Do was one of the most important members of the communist party to speak out against party corruption and about the need to introduce a democratic system to check its spread. He had joined the party in 1940, commanded troops during the historic Battle of Dien Bien Phu, fought the Americans in the south until 1975, and then became vice-deputy of the National Assembly. In Do’s view, the party had been right to revamp its economic policy by ending collectivization and central planning. But he added that equally important political reforms were urgently needed in light of the demands the people would soon make in this era of prosperity. In letters, articles, petitions, and, by the late 1990s, via the internet, the general urged the party to lead the democratization of the state by returning to the 1946 republican constitution. This would mean introducing free elections and legalizing opposition parties. But it would obviously open up the possibility of ending single-party communist rule. This the leadership refused. In 1999, the politburo expelled Tran Do from the party. There would be no return to the 1946 constitution. The party might have revised its constitution in 1992 to approve its embrace of capitalist economics, but it had not relinquished its monopoly hold on politics (article 4), despite an unprecedented number of voices calling on it to do so. Tran Do was part of this bigger debate.27
A growing sense of dissatisfaction has emerged over the last decade as more Vietnamese have become convinced that communist reformism is designed above all to co-opt a century of Vietnamese republicanism. Like Nguyen An Ninh who called Sarraut’s reformist bluff in 1925, many Vietnamese today—and not just twenty-somethings as in the 1920s—have begun to adopt a more confrontational approach toward the regime by actually demanding the end of communist rule. Defiance has returned to the Vietnamese political scene and many republican-minded Vietnamese, young and old, seem to be willing to go to jail for their ideas. Whereas Nguyen An Ninh had latched on to quoc ngu, print technology, and the newspaper to take his message to the people in the 1920s, democratic activists today have turned to the internet, Facebook, YouTube, mass email, and created web pages and blogs to make their case for revolutionary political and social change in the cities and countryside.
In 2006, a group of Vietnamese democrats using the internet circulated their ‘Declaration of Freedom and Democracy’ calling on the communist government to accord the people a representative form of government, freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom of religion, and the protection of individual rights. They went further by calling for regime change. As the declaration put it, the communist regime ‘is incapable of being renovated bit by bit or modified” and it should be “completely replaced”. One of the 2006 declaration’s authors, Do Nam Hai, came from a communist family with an impeccable resistance pedigree, but for him, the party’s time was up. It lacked the competence needed to fully modernize the country, and corruption, again, was ruining everything. Hai had studied abroad and admired the ability of South Korea, Taiwan, and ultimately even the Philippines and Indonesia to combine political pluralism with successful market economics. If they could do it, so could Vietnam. Communism, as he wrote in 2004, ‘has been, is and will be the problem of all problems, the reason of all reasons for the nation’s many painful disasters and shameful laggard status’.28
Do Nam Hai also joined other like-minded democrats in 2006 in founding the BLOC 8406 (its number recalls the date of its creation on 8 April 2006) to ‘pressure and force’ the Vietnamese Communist Party to relinquish its total hold over the political system. BLOC 8406 was an organization which initially consisted of over a hundred people, who ranged from militant republicans to religious leaders, journalists, doctors, writers, teachers, and others. Its republicans published online and hard-copy journals, newspapers, and pamphlets of a pro-democracy kind. Although BLOC 8406 didn’t last more than a few months before the party sent in the security services to stop its members, they had managed to blur the line between reform and revolution.
As in earlier periods, lawyers got involved in pushing for individual rights against authoritarian rule as well. Starting in the late 1990s, Cu Huy Ha Vu and his wife, Nguyen Thi Duong Ha, dedicated their careers to defending common people from government abuses, malpractice, and corruption. Trained in law at the Sorbonne and the son of a famous communist cultural icon, Vu relished holding the government accountable to its own laws. He took the couple’s legal offensive to a new level in 2005 when he sued local authorities in central Vietnam for building a resort complex and thus violating laws made to protect a heritage site. The couple won the case. In 2008–10, Vu defended a military officer who had been sentenced to prison for ‘injuring the state’. Vu showed that this honest man had, in fact, been illegally attacked for revealing high-level corruption in Da Nang. In 2009, Cu Huy Ha Vu took it to a level Nguyen An Ninh could never have imagined, when he tried to sue Vietnam’s prime minister for illegally authorizing Chinese companies to mine bauxite in the highlands. Vu lost when the powers that be concluded that neither the Hanoi People’s Court nor the country’s Supreme Court had the right to judge a prime minister. In the eyes of many, however, Vu had nonetheless scored a major victory by showing up the party’s playing of the system. Determined to stop this gadfly who openly called for the creation of a republican form of government, the party had Vu sentenced to a seven-year prison term in 2011. Defiant, Vu went on a hunger strike in 2013 and in so doing attracted attention inside and outside Vietnam. In April 2014, the authorities agreed to let Vu and his wife accept asylum in the United States and quickly scuttled them out of the country.
The bauxite question, however, was much bigger than Vu. The outrage generated by the party’s willingness to allow Chinese companies to stripmine a huge portion of the central highlands brought together—on the ground and online—democracy activists, civil society advocates, scientists and engineers, environmentalists, concerned citizens, dissidents, overseas Vietnamese, and even General Vo Nguyen Giap into a bloc of opposition of historic significance. The genesis of the Bauxite controversy is long and complex. What set off the firestorm, as noted, was the party-state’s decision to let Chinese companies extract millions of tons of bauxite from the central highlands. The Chinese were ready to come in with their people to do the job, when a range of concerned scientists and environmentalists within the government joined together to find ways to discuss the issue legally and convince the government to think twice about the potentially disastrous environmental, economic, and political effects of removing the surface of the central highlands to get at this mineral. Leading the incipient coalition were people like Tran Thi Lien, who had been active in running NGOs aimed at helping the environment, women, and the highland areas since the 1990s, and scientists like Nguyen Thanh Son who had been tasked by the government to work on the bauxite project, but who knew from experience that strip-mining was a recipe for disaster. Together they organized workshops and published articles in the press and online which drew attention to the dangers of going in too fast. The former rector of Ho Chi Minh City’s Economics University agreed, saying that the ‘Central Highlands w[ould] die’ because of the government’s bauxite project.29
When the prime minister appeared to turn a blind eye, a core group of seventeen scientists and researchers, almost all of them tied to the government, submitted an internal petition in November 2008 calling on the leadership to study the question more carefully before proceeding. To strengthen their argument, they also added something new by underscoring the importance of the highlands for Vietnam’s ‘national security’. Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung was determined to go through with the bauxite project. In early 2009, he clamped down on press reports on the matter, reaffirming that the project was good for the country and in line with what the party and the government had already decided. What Dung did not see coming was another general, this time the single most important general in communist Vietnam—Vo Nguyen Giap. He knew the topic and he knew many of the government professionals opposed to it. They had all previously listened to the Soviets when, in the 1980s, the latter had advised them not to destroy the highlands to get at the bauxite (Vietnam may in fact hold some of the largest bauxite deposits in the world). Giap wrote an internal letter to the party reminding his equals of all of this and asking them to stop the project until more studies could be done. He also pointed out that it might not be a good idea to let the Chinese send their own people into the highlands. This letter was leaked within days, and was soon appearing on websites faster than the government could put a firewall around them. A few weeks later another general going rogue left no doubt that the bauxite project was more than just a potential environmental catastrophe. It was a national security issue too. By going ahead with it, the communist party was on the verge of letting the historic enemy, the Chinese, into the country.
Voices from all horizons came together in 2010 in opposition to the project. Overseas Vietnamese, dissidents, BLOC 8406, lawyers, scientists, and NGOs, as well as Catholic priests and Buddhist monks all coalesced in opposition to the bauxite program. This allowed them to turn the nationalist tables on the party by accusing it of caving in to the Chinese at the very time the latter were expanding their territorial claims against Vietnam in the South China Sea. No longer was opposition to the bauxite project limited to government scientists, environmentalists, and famous communist generals. It had now become part of a widening call for freedom of expression and political change couched in anti-Chinese discourse. An online anti-bauxite project petition gathered thousands of signatures from people in all walks of life. Soon usually docile delegates in the National Assembly were debating the issue in heated exchanges not seen since 1946.
With the presence of Chinese companies on site, the bauxite project continues to this day, albeit with the party promising to extract bauxite on Vietnamese terms whilst being respectful of the environment and the highland peoples. Not everyone is convinced, however, and the surge in oppositional politics it generated has not subsided. In 2014, protestors hostile to Chinese actions in the South China Seas descended into the streets across the country, calling on the government to take a harder line against Vietnam’s northern neighbor. Despite the party’s willingness to arrest those who go too far and to firewall dangerous websites, a disparate coalition of voices has coalesced over the last decade against the government, and what unites them more than anything else is that they are less afraid to adopt more confrontational methods to make their interests heard. For many their interests now include the implementation of a democratic system of government, the only one they feel is capable of reconciling the diverse needs and voices of the Vietnamese people.
Only time will tell what will come of this. In December 2015, prominent Vietnamese republicans—army officers, professors, teachers, communist party members, priests, monks, and others—signed and published an online open letter to the Vietnamese Communist Party on the eve of its congress in January 2016. In a move designed to put the party on the wrong side of Vietnamese nationalism following the bauxite affair, the authors of the petition reminded the party that the leadership had the ultimate duty to protect the country against Chinese expansionism. Secondly, they rejoined Hoang Minh Chinh’s critique of the failure of communism to serve as a viable ‘ism’ in the twenty-first century. As Chinh had argued, the petition’s advocates called on the communist leadership to adopt measures to move the country toward a social democracy of a Western European type. The daring required to sign such a provocative document and publish it openly leaves no doubt that Vietnam’s republicans are not going to be cowed easily. What remains to be seen is to what extent activists, entrepreneurs, professionals, middle-class urbanites, farmers, and defenders of civil society will remain as a cacophony of disparate voices or whether they will come together to remake Vietnam or to make yet another Vietnam.30