Posts

Political Institutions: Party, State, and Mass Organizations

  Political Institutions: Party, State, and Mass Organizations "The party leads, the people control, and the state manages," so goes the slogan expressing the Vietnamese Communist Party's idealized vision of how the political system operates. In this vision, each of the three main institutional components of the system—the VCP, the state apparatus, and mass associations—has a distinct function in the system. In practice, however, the state and mass organizations have always been little more than extensions of the party's power. In theory, the overarching leadership role of the Vietnamese Communist Party in the political system maximizes unanimity and ensures that party lines and policies are implemented fully and accurately. In fact, it has simply led to confusion and conflict over the proper roles of party and state and to the bureaucratization of mass organizations. The price of a centralized political structure under the domination of the party has been an overburd...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Socioeconomic Setting

The Socioeconomic Setting  Vietnam occupies 127,000 square miles (an area slightly larger than New Mexico) in the southeastern tip of the continental Asian land mass bordered by China on the north, the South China Sea on the east, and the Truong Son, or Annamite, mountain chain on the west. Vietnam's coastal plain, extending more than one thousand miles from the Cao Bang pass in the north to the tip of the Ca Mau peninsula in the South, swells to three hundred miles at its widest points, the Red River delta in the north and the Mekong River delta in the south. But it narrows to a long, thin, curving strip that is only forty to fifty miles wide for hundreds of miles and only about twenty-five miles at its narrowest. Vietnam is the world’s twelfth largest country in population, with an estimated 64.1 million people as of spring 1989. It also has one of the world’s highest mean population densities. It is estimated that the country had only .51 hectare of cropland per capita by 1990 a...
Post a Comment
Read more