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 and will have about .44 hectare per capita by the year 2000. Moreover, the population is very unevenly distributed geographically: the Red River delta, which accounts for only 5 percent of the total cultivated land of the country, is inhabited by 20 percent of its total population. By the beginning of the 1980s, the density of population in that region averaged 463 persons per square kilometer. It reached more than one thousand persons per square kilometer in Thai Binh province—roughly the same density as in Hanoi municipality. The Mekong River delta averaged 366 persons per square kilometer while central coastal provinces averaged 130 persons per square kilometer. Meanwhile, the mountainous provinces of northern and...
1.Vu Quy, "Vietnam's Ecological Situation Today," paper for International Conference on Ecology in Vietnam, New Paltz, N.Y., May 28–30, 1987, p. 6.
2.Vietnam News Agency, June 9, 1988, FBIS-LAS-88-112, June 10, 1988, p. 43.
tral Vietnam were underpopulated with averages of 55 and 41 persons per square kilometer , respectively.
Even during the war, Vietnamese authorities tried to redistribute the labor force to reduce the pressure of population on agricultural land. From 1976 through 1986, some three million people were relocated from densely populated areas to sparsely populated areas in the north and center, and the government plans to resettle ten million more laborers and increase the total cultivated land from 7.6 million hectares to ten million hectares by the year 2000.
Nevertheless, Vietnam must reduce its population growth rate. The opening up of new agricultural land can no longer keep pace with population growth. Land under rice cultivation has increased by only 16 percent, from 4.8 million hectares to 5.6 million hectares since 1960 while population has nearly doubled, growing by an average of 3.4 percent annually during the 1955–1975 period. The cost of opening up more rice land is too high to be practical.
The government launched a family-planning program as early as 1962, and in 1977 it set as its target the achievement of an annual population growth rate of just over 2 percent by 1980, 1.5 percent by 1990, and 1.1 percent by 2000. From 1984 to 1987, however, progress toward that goal stalled at around 2.2 percent annual growth. Although the urban population has already achieved these rates, growth rates in rural areas continue to be much higher, and in a number of provinces the rates have actually been increasing.
3.Judith Bannister, The Population of Vietnam, U.S. Department of Commerce, International Population Reports, series P-95, no. 77, October 1985, table 2, p. 6.
4.Van Lung, “Rational Labor and Population Distribution: A Way to Increase Export Goods,” Nhan Dan, JPRS-SEA-87-061, April 28, 1987, p. 88; “Scientific Conference on the Initial Stage,” Tap Chi Cong San, February 1986, JPRS-SEA-86-097, June 10, 1986, p. 79.
5.Cropland under rice cultivation in North and South Vietnam in 1960 is from Ng Shui Meng, The Population of Indochina, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Field Report series no. 7 (Singapore, July 1974), p. 67; cropland under rice cultivation in 1986 is from Kim Anh Toan, “Achievements on Agricultural Front in 1981–1985,” Tap Chi Ke Hoach Hoá, September 1986, JPRS-SEA-87-019, February 6, 1987, p. 10. Population growth rate estimate is from Anh Phu, “Some Facts and Figures about Labor Distribution in Our Country,” Tap Chi Ke Hoach Hoa, February 1986, JPRS-SEA-86-115, July 9, 1986, p. 85.
6.Tetsubaro Kimura, “Vietnam—Ten Years of Economic Struggle,” Asian Survey, 26 (October 1986), 1,046.
7.Stewart E. Fraser, “Vietnam’s Population Growth: Old Struggle, New Strategy,” Indochina Issues, no. 78, January 1988, table, pp. 3–7; for revised government policies, see “Council of Ministers Decision 162 Concerning a Number of Population and Fam...
Vietnam became far more urbanized during the Vietnam War, primarily because of the forced wartime movement of population from the countryside. Urban population as a proportion of the total population increased from 11 percent in 1955 to 21.5 percent in 1975. After the war, however, the sharp reduction of South Vietnam's urban population from 30 percent to 25.6 percent more than offset increasing urbanization in the North. By 1985 the urban population nationwide was only about 19.2 percent of the national population. At the end of the war, an estimated 67 percent of the labor force was involved in agriculture; by 1984 that figure had increased to 71 percent.
Ethnic Vietnamese, who use the term kinh to differentiate themselves from ethnic minorities living in the country, constitute about 87 percent of the population. The largest ethnic minority is the ethnic Chinese, or Hoa, the official designation used by the Vietnamese state since 1955. As of 1977, there were 1.7 million Hoa in Vietnam, of whom about 1.4 million lived in the south, primarily in Ho Chi Minh City. In the North, the Hoa were concentrated mainly in Quang Ninh Province bordering China, where they were mainly fishermen, forasters, and artisans, and in major cities, where many of them were skilled workers. The Hoa community there retained close ties with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) despite an official transfer of responsibility for them from the PRC to the DRV in 1957.
Although the majority of the Hoa in the South were workers, tens of thousands were businesspeople who controlled the rice trade from purchase of paddy to milling as well as an estimated four-fifths of the wholesale and retail trade, most of the import-export firms, manufacturing, and banking by the 1950s. Some seven hundred thousand Hoa left Vietnam between 1978 and 1982 because they were dissatisfied with their treatment by the new government and the rising conflict between Vietnam and the PRC in the
"ly Planning," Giao Vien Nhan Dan, December 5, 1988, JPRS-SEA-89-007, February 8, 1989.
8.For nationwide data, see Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Statistics General Department, So Lieu Thong Ke 1930–1984 [Statistical data 1930–1984] (Hanoi: Statistics Publishing House, 1985), JPRS-SEA-86-108, June 25, 1986, p. 13. For South Vietnamese urban population data, see Bannister, Population of Vietnam, p. 7.
9.Bannister, Population of Vietnam, p. 9.
10.See E. S. Ungar, "The Struggle over the Chinese Community in Vietnam, 1946–1986," Pacific Affairs 60 (Winter 1987–1988), 596–614.
11.Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States and the Modern Historical Experience (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), pp. 88–89.
12.Gareth Porter, "Vietnam’s Ethnic Chinese and the Sino-Vietnamese Con...
About sixty other minorities total more than six million people, but only seventeen of them comprise more than fifty thousand people. The largest ethnic minority populations as of 1980 were the Tay (775,000), the Khmer (652,000), the Muong (620,000), the Thai (615,000), the Nung (486,000), and the Meo (351,000). Most of the major ethnic groups live in mountainous areas bordering China, Laos, and Cambodia, which gives them a strategic importance in Vietnam's past and present conflicts out of proportion to their numbers. The Tay, Nung, Yao, and Meo, who reside in the mountainous provinces bordering China and Laos, were vital allies of the Viet Minh during the resistance to the French. Several of the minorities straddle the border with China and have been the target of subversive efforts by the PRC. In the highlands of central Vietnam, long considered a strategic security zone by Vietnamese Communist leaders, remnants of Front Unifié pour la Lutte des Races Opprimées (FULRO), an alliance of four minorities, continued armed resistance in the 1980s.
The gap between the ethnic minorities in the highland and border areas and the rest of the population has grown wider since 1954. Illiteracy among these minorities remains high (67 to 88 percent) and has continued to rise, and only 5 to 10 percent of school-age.
13. Ungar, "Struggle over the Chinese Community," p. 614; Murray Hieber, "Cheer in Cholon," Far Eastern Economic Review, August 4, 1988, pp. 20–21.
14. Trinh Quang Canh, "New Developments in Nationalities Policy," Dai Doan Ket, August 19, 1981, JPRS Southeast Asia 79255, October 20, 1981, p. 126.
15. Bannister, Population of Vietnam, p. 10.
16. On the role of ethnic minorities in the North during the resistance against the Japanese and French, see John T. McAlister, Jr., "Mountain Minorities and the Viet Minh: A Key to the Indochina War," in Peter Kunstadter, ed., Southeast Asian Tribes, Minorities and Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 2:771–844; Mai Elliott, "Translator's Introduction," in Reminiscences on the Army for National Salvation, Memoir of General Vu Tan, trans. Mai Elliott, Cornell University Southeast Asia Program Data Paper no. 97 (Ithaca, 1974), pp. 15–30.
17. FULRO was formed by leaders of the Bahnar, Jarai, Rhade, and Chru minorities in response to inequalities in access to schools, government jobs, and health care facilities. For a detailed discussion, see Gerald Hickey, The Highland People of Vietnam: Social and Economic Development, RAND Corporation, Memorandum RM-5281/1-ARPA, September 1967, pp. 27–45; Norman C. LaBrie, "FULRO: The History of Political Tensions in the South Vietnamese Highlands" (M.A. thesis, University of Massachusetts, 1971).
children attend school" Since 1968 the Hanoi government has tried to shift minorities practicing slash and burn agriculture to sedentary farming. Although the shift is supposed to facilitate making educational and other socioeconomic benefits available to the minorities, it is also aimed at strengthening security in the northern border region and in the central highlands.
About 1.3 million minority farmers out of an estimated 2.4 million have adopted settled agriculture at lower altitudes, but many have returned to their traditional ways of life because of economic difficulties. Meanwhile, because of large-scale migration of kin population from cities to the central highlands, particularly to build “new economic zones,” by 1980, the ethnic minorities were for the first time less than half of the population of the central highlands, exacerbating conflicts over tribal land that had begun in the 1970s.
As one might expect from a society deeply imbued with Confucian cultural values, Vietnam has a high rate of literacy and a relatively well-educated population for a low-income country. Between 1955 and 1975 the number of students enrolled in primary and secondary schools in the North and the South combined increased from just under 2 million to more than 11 million. By the 1980s, 90 percent of the children aged six through ten in the North were enrolled in primary school whereas in the South around 70 percent of that age group were enrolled. The students who reach grade five represent 60 to 63 percent of the total in their age groups, with a much higher rate of dropouts in rural areas than in Hanoi and a higher rate in the South than in the North.
Access to secondary education (grades 8 through 11) is limited to…
18. Hoang Truong Minh, “Focusing Efforts on Stabilizing the Living Conditions of the Ethnic Minorities in Highland Areas,” Tap Chi Cong San, no. 3, March 1987, JPRS-ATC-87-002, July 30, 1987, p. 37.
19. Editorial, Quan Doi Nhan Dan, April 22, 1987.
20.Nhan Dan, April 8, 1988; Bannister, Population of Vietnam, p. 12.
21. Information-Documents (Hanoi), no. 107, August 1, 1986, p. 20; Murray Hiebert, “Taking to the Hills,” Far Eastern Economic Review, May 25, 1989, pp. 42–43. For official admission of land disputes between tribal minorities and kin, see the article by Le Phuoc Tho, head of the party Central Committee Agricultural Department, Nhan Dan, September 23, 1988. An estimated 65 percent of the Montagnard hamlets in the central highlands were relocated by the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments during the war, and much of the land was then taken over by kinh who moved into the highland provinces. See Richard West, “Reconstruction in Vietnam,” New Statesman, January 14, 1972, pp. 35–36.
22. Statistical data, p. 162.
23. Suzanne Rubin, “Learning for Life? Glimpses from a Vietnamese School,” in David G. Marr and Christine P. White, eds., Postwar Vietnam: Dilemmas of Socialist Development (Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1988), p. 47.
15–20 percent of that age group. But the rapid increase in students completing secondary education in the 1960s and 1970s has created new pressures on the educational system. Secondary school students usually hope to study at the university level, but Vietnam could not support the higher education of that many students nor provide adequate employment for the increasing number of university graduates. Whereas in the early 1960s most of those in North Vietnam who were interested in university education could gain admission, only 5 to 10 percent of students who applied for admission for higher education in the early 1980s could be admitted. As a result, several hundred thousand discontented youth must be absorbed by the labor force.
Because of the impact of two Indochina wars and the decade-long conflict with China on the Vietnamese population structure, the Vietnamese labor force has come to be dominated by women, a marked imbalance between men and women in the Vietnamese population was evident after the anti-French resistance war; the 1960 census listed only 93.4 males per 100 females. During the war against the United States, the deficit of males in the population further increased dramatically. According to the 1979 census, there were twelve million males and fourteen million females between the ages of sixteen and sixty-four. The dearth of males in the workforce was then exacerbated by the increase in the military forces from five hundred thousand to 1.2 million by 1980. As a result, the agricultural labor force was 65 to 70 percent female. Women also constituted 64 percent of the workers in light industry and more than 80 percent in handicrafts. Male workers are the majority only in heavy industry and construction.
In the 1980s, 54 percent of secondary school graduates were women as were 36 percent of all university students. Yet women's access to leadership positions at the village level has lagged behind their proportion of the labor force and their educational opportunities. During the war against the United States, when the...
24. East Asia and Pacific Regional Office, World Bank (Washington, D.C.), The Socialist Republic of Viet Nam: An Introductory Economic Report, Report no. 1718-VN, August 12, 1977, p. 25.
25. Rubin, Learning for Life, p. 47.
26. Bannister, Population of Vietnam, pp. 25–27; William Parish, "Vietnamese Society," paper presented at the Wilson Center, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., May 3, 1988, p. 6, citing Vietnam Women’s Association, "Vietnam and the United Nation's Decade for Women, 1976–1985," n.d.
27. Parish, "Vietnamese Society," p. 6.
cultural labor force in the North was 80 to 90 percent female; less than one village in ten had a female as president of the Administrative Committee; only one in three had a female vice-president, and less than one in four cooperatives had women as directors or deputy directors.
With the end of the war and the return of men from military duty, even the wartime gains were lost; the number of women in leadership positions on village committees dropped precipitously from three thousand in 1974 to fourteen hundred in 1976 and then to only eight hundred in 1979. Vietnamese war veterans were apparently threatened by the new assumption of leadership roles by women and acted to reassert their authority.
Religious Communities
Five religious faiths have organizations and significant followings in Vietnam: Buddhism, Caodaism, Catholicism, Hoahaoism, and Protestantism. According to the current government estimate, however, only 25 percent of the population identify themselves with any of these churches. The reason is that most Vietnamese peasants have traditionally integrated Mahayana Buddhist teachings with Taoist beliefs and Confucian ancestor worship to form a religious tradition called "the three religions" (tam giao). Even this officially sanctioned syncretism, moreover, was further diluted by the practice of the indigenous cult of guardian spirits of the village. In the North, the incidence of ancestor worship declined during the first three decades of the DRV until it was unfamiliar except to older people. The vast majority of villagers in the Southern zone went to the Buddhist pagoda on holidays during the war but were...
28. Jayne Werner, “Women, Socialism, and the Economy of Wartime North Vietnam, 1969–1975,” Studies in Comparative Communism 2–3 (Summer–Autumn 1981), 178, 180, 182; David W. P. Elliott, “North Vietnam since Ho,” Problems of Communism 4 (July–August 1975), 51.
29. Elliott, “North Vietnam since Ho,” p. 51; Women of Vietnam: Statistical Data (Hanoi: Vietnam Women's Union, 1981), p. 17.
30.See Sophie Quinn-Judge, “Vietnamese Women: Neglected Promises,” Indochina Issues, no. 42, December 1983.
31. Nguyen Quoc Pham, “Lesson: Scientific Communism vs. Religions,” Tap Chi Giao Duc Ly Luan, February–March 1987, JPRS-SEA-87-114, October 2, 1987, p. 59.
32. See Raymond Grivaz, Aspects sociaux et économiques du sentiment en pays annamite (Paris: Editions Domat-Montchrestien, 1942), pp. 10–15.
33.Interview with members of the Hoang Quy Cooperative, Thanh Hoa Province, December 1974.
more likely to describe their religion as "ancestor worship" than Buddhism." The active core of the Buddhist church at its zenith comprised an estimated 10 percent of the population.
The influence of Buddhism in central and south Vietnam increased rapidly during the Diem regime and the early years of the Vietnam War as it became a rallying point for popular resentment against the Diem government and subsequent military regimes. Militant Buddhist monks viewed Buddhism as the expression of Vietnamese national culture and, in some cases, hoped to make it the ideology of the Vietnamese state. Buddhist clergy were particularly influential in Hue and Danang, where the "struggle movement" against the military reached its high point in 1966 before being crushed by force. By the end of the war, however, Buddhism had declined as a sociopolitical force because of political repression and internal divisions.
When the SRV ended military exemptions for Buddhist monks, the number of monks decreased by as much as two-thirds to five to ten thousand. However, Buddhism was far from dying in the South. The government-approved church organization established a university-level institute for teaching Buddhism in Hanoi in 1982, which graduated its first students in 1986, and four Buddhist High Schools in Hue, Nha Trang, Ho Chi Minh City, and Hanoi. Beginning in 1988 some land was to be returned to Buddhist monasteries to support the monks, who were discouraged from the ritual begging from door to door. And Buddhists continued to celebrate their own religious festivals, attended by many young people.
In the 1980s the Catholic church had an estimated six million followers, of whom about one-third were in the North and two-thirds...
34.James Walker Trullinger, Jr. Village at War: An Account of Revolution in Vietnam (New York: Longman, 1980), p. 8.
35.Bo Wirmark, The Buddhists in Vietnam: An Alternative View of the War, Uppsala University, Department of Peace and Conflict Research, report no. 9, March 1974, p. 11.
36.Buddhist struggle movement leader Thich Tri Quang's political views are quoted extensively in Nguyen Tam, Ban Chat Tu Tuong cac cuoc Van Dong cua Phat Giao Viet Nam [The ideological character of Vietnamese Buddhist movements], Gio Van (Saigon), March 22–27, 1971. See also Pierro Ghetto, The Cross and the Bo Tree (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1970), pp. 269–72.
37.Robert Shaplen, Bitter Victory (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), p. 127.
38.Christian Science Monitor, February 8, 1988.
39.Christian Science Monitor, February 8, 1988; interview with Thich Tu Hanh, secretary-general of the United Buddhist Church for South Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City, August 1982.
40.AFP dispatch, November 16, 1981, FBIS, November 20, 1981, p. K8.
in the South. Vietnamese Catholic congregations, usually formed by mass conversions of the poorest peasants in Tonkin beginning in the seventeenth century, formed their own do nang (peasant Christmas) in which the parish priest was the real power in matters affecting the community. Until 1939 Vietnamese Catholics were forbidden to live in villages inhabited by “pagans” because they would have to participate in village ceremonies honoring the dead. Despite the support of many Catholics for the Viet Minh, the Catholic bishops in Vietnam ordered their followers not to collaborate with the Viet Minh against the French.
After the Geneva Agreement temporarily divided the country, there were serious frictions between Catholics and the DRV over the government’s initial refusal to allow large numbers of Catholics to exercise their right under the agreement to move from the North to the South. Ten of the twelve Vietnamese bishops, seven hundred priests, and more than six hundred thousand Catholic faithful moved from the North to the South. The 350 priests who remained in North Vietnam included many who discouraged their parishioners from participating in the land reform program, paying agricultural taxes, or joining agricultural cooperatives.
The U.S. air war against the North, however, helped solidify the loyalty of the Catholic masses to the DRV regime by mobilizing their participation. The party made significant progress integrating itself into Catholic communities. In one predominantly Catholic village, for example, by the end of the 1970s one-third of the party membership was Catholic. By 1975 the priests' influence on social and political affairs was radically diminished. Although most of the bishops in the north remained conservative in their attitudes toward communism, Catholicism ceased to be the sharply divisive force in northern society that it had been in the past.
40.Tom Fox, National Catholic Reporter, April 14, 1989, p. 18.
41.Pierre Rondot, “Le Probleme Religieux du Vietnam, II: Le Catholicisme au Vietnam,” Etudes, December 1950, pp. 332–33; Nguyen Van Trung, “Cong Giao va Cong San o Viet-Nam” [Catholics and Communists in Vietnam], Da Nuoc (Saigon), no. 2, December 1968, pp. 45–46, 64–66.
42.On Catholic opposition to the land reform and cooperativization policies, see David W. P. Elliott, “Revolutionary Reintegration,” pp. 211–15, and François Houtart and Genevieve Lemercinier, Hai Van: Life in a Vietnamese Commune (London: Zed Books, 1984), pp. 168–70. The most serious incident between authorities occurred in Quynh Luu district, Nghe An Province, in November 1956, when Catholics seized control of one or two villages, arrested administrative personnel, disarmed Vietnam People's Army troops, and staged a mass march on the district town. There were a number of casualties on both sides before order was restored. See Elliott, “Revolutionary Reintegration,” p. 211.
43.Houtart and Lemercinier, Hai Van, pp. 162–92.
In the South, on the other hand, the Catholic church’s economic and political power increased after 1954. Hundreds of thousands of Northern Catholic refugees were organized in villages surrounding Saigon to provide a political base and a buffer for the minority Catholic regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. The church hierarchy ran a school to indoctrinate civil servants in the church ideology, and village priests acted as the de facto political teachers in their contacts with the government. The church also owned large amounts of Saigon’s most valuable real estate and many banks and commercial establishments and dominated the educational system, providing education to about one-half of the elementary and secondary school students in Saigon.
All these powers and privileges were stripped from the church after the Communist victory in 1975. The Catholic church hierarchy in the South reached an accommodation with the Communist regime that gave the state veto powers over its activities and appointments. Archbishop of Ho Chi Minh City Nguyen Van Binh, a cautious and diplomatic figure, strove to avoid conflicts with the regime since 1975, abandoning the former Catholic strictures against the faithful joining the Communist Party, for example.
In the 1980s the Cao Dai sect had an estimated two million followers in the Mekong delta region. Filling the spiritual vacuum left by the decline of both Confucianism and Buddhism in Cochinchina after the French conquest, Caodaism built on the existing tam giao religious tradition and the worship of guardian spirits but patterned its organization after the hierarchy of the Catholic church. It was started by educated bourgeois and petit bourgeois spiritualists who recruited hundreds of thousands of landless laborers and tenants in provinces west and south of Saigon during the 1980s through patron-client relations and social welfare schemes.
Caodaism split into two separate branches because of internal rivalries among its leaders, but the largest concentration of Cao Dai was in Tay Ninh Province, the site of the Cao Dai "Holy...
44.Robert Scalapino, South Vietnam: Nation under Stress (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), pp. 53–55.
45.Nguyen Van Trung, Catholics and Communists in Vietnam, p. 56; Nguyen Quoc Pham, "Lesson: Scientific Communism vs. Religions," p. 60.
46.Fox, National Catholic Reporter, April 13, 1989, p. 18.
47.See Jayne Werner, "The Cao Dai: The Politics of a Vietnamese Syncretic Religious Movement" (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1976), pp. 51–76; Frances R. Hill, "Millenarian Machines in South Vietnam," Comparative Studies in History and Society 13 (July 1971), 334–35; A. M. Savani, Visage et images du Sud Viêt-Nam (Saigon: Imprimerie Française d'Outre-Mer, 1955), p. 90.
"During the Japanese occupation, the Cao Dai were armed and trained by Japanese intelligence as an anti-French force, but early in their affiliation with the French against the Viet Minh. The Tay Ninh branch of Caodaism remained strongly anti-Communist throughout the conflict, and the breakup of that branch by the SRV after 1975 reduced its following dramatically. One specialist estimates that the number of believers in the province dropped from nine hundred thousand in 1975 to only three hundred thousand by 1985. Tay Ninh Caodists continued to resist the new regime after 1975 through a number of underground anti-Communist organizations in Tay Ninh.
The Hoa Hao Buddhist sect also had approximately two million adherents in the Mekong delta. Like the Cao Dai, Hoa Hao became a "political-military sect" during the Japanese occupation and became fierce foes of the Viet Minh and later of the National Liberation Front. The founder of the sect, Huynh Phu So, was hailed as an incarnation of a nineteenth-century Buddha from the "Seven Mountains" area near the Cambodian border. So encouraged simple worship of Buddha at home and preached against building more Buddhist temples and using relics of the Buddha, sorcerers and fortune tellers. The Hoa Hao are concentrated mainly in Dong Thap and An Giang provinces of the western delta, where the church formerly claimed at least 60 percent of the population as members.
The Protestant Evangelical Church of Vietnam (Hoi Thanh Tin Lanh Viet Nam) had approximately three hundred thousand members, of whom two hundred thousand were in South Vietnam. Although church officials and clergy in the North long accommodated to the regime and supported its policies, those in the South maintained aloof from or even openly opposed them. Evangelical Protestant leaders have long been active among tribal minorities in the central highlands of South Vietnam. Much of its membership has been localized in that region, and some of the activists in the FULRO..."
48.Nguyen Xuan Nghia, "Vai Nhan Xet ve Cac Phong Trao Ton Giao Cuu The o Dong Bang Song Cuu Long" [Some observations on messianic religious movements in the Mekong delta], Tap Chi Dan Toc Hoc [Ethnic Studies] no. 2, 1985, p. 52.
49.Nguyen Quoc Pham, "Lessons: Scientific Communism vs. Religions," p. 63.
50.The most detailed study of the Hoa Hao is Hue Tam Ho Tai, The Evolution of Vietnamese Millenarianism, 1849–1947. From the Buu Son Ky Huong to the Hoa Hao Sect* (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1977). For translations of some of Huynh Pho So’s writings, see Robert L. Mole, A Brief Survey of the Phat Giao Hoa Hao (n.p.: 1969).
51.See the map inside the frontispiece of Mole, Brief Survey.
sistance have been Protestants. The church also had a particularly large following among young urban professionals in the South."
Vietnam is relatively well endowed with energy and natural resources. Vietnam's main energy resource in the past has been its coal beds near the northeast coast, which hold proven reserves of 3.5 billion tons of high-quality anthracite. The higher-quality coal is now deeper underground and requires more sophisticated and expensive imported equipment to mine. The country also has large offshore oil reserves in the southern continental shelf as well as fields in the Red River and Mekong River deltas. Vietnamese officials hope to reach the production goal of seven million tons of oil annually by 1995, but output in 1989 was still only 1.5 million tons. Natural gas reserves in the two river deltas have yet to be exploited commercially. Vietnamese rivers have the potential to provide an estimated 80,000 million kilowatts of hydroelectric power, so Vietnam should have an electricity surplus during the 1990s.
Vietnam has one of the world’s four largest bauxite reserves, large reserves of apatite (a phosphate used in making fertilizer), a relatively large quantity of chromite, and enough tin, copper, zinc, and graphite to support significant mining activities. The country’s 3,260-kilometer coastline and 400,000 hectares of maritime zone waters contain vast quantities of seafood that have already become a major export.
At the close of the colonial era Vietnam had about 14.3 million hectares of forests, but like other Southeast Asian nations, it is in danger of losing its tropical forest resources. Although Vietnamese jungles have not yet completely recovered from U.S. wartime defoliation, which affected 1.7 million hectares, more forests have been lost since the war ended than during it. Estimates of its remaining forest land vary from less than 7 million to more than 9 million.
52.Reg Reimer, “Evangelicals in Vietnam: ‘We Are Living by Faith,’” Indochina Issues, no. 74, April 1987, pp. 8–9; Associated Press dispatch, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 31, 1982, p. 7; interview with a member of the Evangelical Church of Vietnam now living in the United States, Washington, D.C., January 18, 1988.
53.AFP dispatch, February 18, 1988, Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), East Asia Daily Report, February 26, 1988, p. 46.
54.Socialist Republic of Vietnam, State Planning Committee, Report on the Economy of Vietnam (Hanoi: United Nations Development Programme, 1990), pp. 138–40.
55.Nguyen Tri, “Some Opinions on the Direction of Industrial Development in Our Country in Future Years,” Nghien Cuu Kinh Te [Economic Research], October 1985, JPRS-SEA-86-047, March 17, 1986, p. 65.
hectares, with an estimated 225,000 hectares of forest cover disappearing each year from logging, the collection of firewood, and forest fires—a rate that will leave Vietnam without any natural forests soon after the year 2000 unless it is halted.
One of Vietnam’s major weaknesses is its transport and communication infrastructure. Vietnamese economists estimate that only modern, paved means. The country has about ten thousand kilometers of paved roads, but even the national routes linking major cities have deteriorated seriously from decades of war and lack of maintenance. The country’s only railroad is so antiquated that it takes 50 days in 1945. Vietnamese ports can only handle one-half the tonnage that annually that Vietnam needs. The volume of cargo and the number of passengers carried by the railroad reached peaks in 1977-1978 and declined from that peak by 33 percent by 1985. The transportation system is so poor that it cannot move sufficient rice from the Mekong delta to the rice deficit areas in central and North Vietnam in times of famine.
In theory, the Vietnamese economy has five distinct sectors: the state sector; joint state-private enterprises (an economic unit formed with capital contributed by one or more household heads and the state to conduct joint production or business); the collective economy (agricultural and handicrafts cooperatives in which the means of production are at least partially owned by the collective); the household economy (individuals who produce goods under contracts with the state or collective enterprises); and the private and self-employed sector (private industries, individual agricultural producers, and merchants). However, until the late 1980s, the private and family economies and even the "semi-socialist" collectivized economy were viewed with suspicion, discriminated against in allocating access to land, resources, and credit. After the Sixth Party Congress, the household economy and the private sector in general were recognized as important contributors to the economy, but it was not until 1988 that the Vietnam enacted laws recognizing the long-term existence of private industry.
56.Patricia Norland, “Vietnam’s Ecology: Averting Disaster,” Indochina Issues, no. 60, June 1986, p. 2; Elizabeth Kentr, “The Re-Greening of Vietnam,” Vietnam Today (Canberra) 48 (February 1989), 7; SRV, State Planning Committee, Report on the Economy, p. 106.
57.“Ravages of War,” Far Eastern Economic Review, April 27, 1989, pp. 72–74; statistical data, pp. 125, 137.
When the DRV assumed the administration of North Vietnamese cities in 1954, it began taking over private industrial enterprises and converting them into state-controlled or cooperative enterprises. By 1964 private capitalist industry was completely eliminated. By 1972 the state’s contribution to total industrial production had increased from 12 percent in 1955 to 64 percent. This state-controlled form of the structure of the North remained essentially unchanged throughout the Vietnam War.
After reunification, the state integrated the South’s private industry into the socialist structure by reorganizing 1,500 large and medium-sized enterprises into 650 state and so-called state-private enterprises with 130,000 workers and turning another 1,000 small industrial enterprises into cooperatives. The “state-private enterprise” was a misnomer because the state invested little or no capital in them and by massively undervaluing the private assets provided little income compensation to the factories' former owners.
By 1984 the state presided over some three thousand industrial enterprises in the state/joint public-private sector with a total of seven hundred thousand employees. These state-controlled enterprises accounted for 70 to 75 percent of industrial production in the South, whereas the “collective” sector accounted for an additional 21 percent. The state sector operated at 30 to 50 percent of capacity and, thus, was unable to provide employment for more than one-half to two-thirds of the year.
The performance of the state industrial sector was so poor that the DRV decided in 1986 to approve the establishment of small private industries with ten to thirty employees to stimulate the production of consumer and export goods. They were to have access to state loans with priority going to businesses producing articles when the state enterprises produced in insufficient quantities. Within three years more than three thousand such small enterprises sprang up in Ho Chi Minh City alone, employing an estimated twenty-five thousand people.
58.C. Nguyen Tien Hung, Economic Development of Socialist Vietnam, 1955–1980 (New York: Praeger, 1977), table 4.3, p. 63; Nguyen Xuan Lai, “Stages and Problems of Industrialization,” Vietnam Courier (Hanoi), September 1970, p. 3.
59.Doc Lap, February 1979, JPRS-73-172, April 8, 1979.
60.Nhan Dan, September 12, 1989, FBIS, East Asia Daily Report, October 25, 1989, p. 57.
61.Statistical data, p. 56.
62.Nguyen Van Linh, Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh: 10 Nam [Ho Chi Minh City: 10 years], trans., JPRS-SEA-87-104, August 26, 1987, p. 72.
63.Vo Nhan Tri, “Party Policies and Economic Performance: The Second and Third Five-Year Plans Examined,” in Marr and White, Postwar Vietnam, p. 82.
In 1988 the legal and political restraints on private industry were removed, and by spring 1989 private enterprises were employing as many as one thousand workers, even in the North. In agriculture, the state sector consists of state farms, which are larger-scale farms producing industrial and export crops with the number increased to 457 with 362,000 personnel and 1.5 million hectares of cultivated land in 1989. State farms have been notoriously inefficient, with the vast majority annually losing money for the state.
The collective sector includes fully socialist cooperatives in which land and other means of production are collectively owned and production cooperatives in which land and tools are still privately owned but labor is collective. At first, Vietnamese agricultural cooperatives were limited to the hamlet, or subvillage, level, with an average of only 60 families. During the war, however, hamlet-level cooperatives were combined to form cooperatives at the village or even commune level. The number of cooperatives was reduced from 41,401 at the end of 1960 to 22,360 by 1969, and the average number of households per cooperative increased to 136 by 1968. By the mid-1970s the recommended size for cooperatives was 150 to 200 households organized into work units or brigades, of 50 to 70 families, which cultivated 15 to 20 hectares of land.
The organization of production in agricultural cooperatives in the North changed in 1980–1982 when production contracts between the cooperative and individual cooperative households became generalized. These contracts allowed the household to take responsibility for the later stages of cultivation and harvest on an assigned piece of land rather than assigning all labor tasks to labor brigades. The household could keep all of the crop above taxes and the amounts contracted to be sold to the state.
64.Washington Post, July 15, 1987.
65.Nhan Dan, April 20, 1989.
66.VNA, August 20, 1989, FBIS, East Asia Daily Report, August 21, 1989, pp. 65–66.
67.Editorial, Nhan Dan, June 22, 1989.
68.Quang Truong, “The Collectivization of Agriculture in Vietnam” (Master's thesis, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, 1976), p. 74.
69.Christine Pelzer White, The Role of Collective Agriculture in Rural Development, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, research report, December 1984, p. 117.
70.An excellent discussion of the product contract system is in Christine White.
allocated by the number of laborers per family and for fragmented parcels of land. Although contract quotas were supposed to remain set for a period of five years, they were raised in practice before the end of the contract. So the contract ultimately failed to provide positive incentives for increased production.
In 1988 the household economy was given the major role in agriculture for the first time as land cultivation rights were allocated to households for periods of up to nineteen years, and contracts with the state, as distinct from taxes, were finally made truly voluntary. The agricultural cooperative ceased being a method of “surplus extraction” for the state and instead became a provider of services, such as irrigation, to the households.
In the South, the peasantry strongly resisted the collectivization of agriculture. As late as February 1985, almost ten years after reunification, the party’s theoretical organ admitted that only 25 percent of peasant households in the South had joined some form of collective organization. By mid-1987, 92 percent of the agricultural population was reported to have joined agricultural cooperatives as a result of SRV tax policies. The vast majority of the cooperatives existed in name only, however, as individual households carried out their own production plans.
Despite the dominance of cooperatives nationwide, household production accounted for 48 percent of the value of the country’s agricultural output even before the 1988 reform, including 95 percent of its livestock production. Within the cooperatives, the “family economy”—the production of vegetables, fruit, pigs, and poultry on private family plots that constituted 5 percent of the cooperative land—was the main source of family income. It provided an estimated 68 percent of the personal income of collective peasants in 1988 compared with 52 percent in 1976.
"Reforming Relations of Production: Family and Cooperative in Vietnamese Agricultural Policy" (unpublished paper, n.d.).
71.SRV, State Planning Committee, Report on the Economy, p. 87.
72.Ngo Vinh Long, “Some Aspects of Cooperativization in the Mekong Delta,” in Marr and White, Postwar Vietnam, p. 165.
73.In 1987 various provinces admitted that only a minority of the nominal cooperatives were actually socialist in operation, with the percentage ranging from 25 to 40 percent. Hanoi Domestic Service, July 2, 1987, FBIS, East Asia Daily Report, July 15, 1987, pp. N5–6.
74.SRV, State Planning Committee, Report on the Economy of Vietnam, p. 88.
75.Le Ngoc, “Agriculture, the Main Front: Perceptions and Reality,” Thong Ke, December 1986, JPRS-SEA-87-060, April 27, 1987, p. 51. In the North, before 1965, it was estimated that 61 percent of peasant income came from the family economy.
The state has dominated trade in the North since the establishment of a socialist system there, but it has never established control over most trade in the South, where the volume of commerce has always been much larger. In the North, the state controlled 94 percent of wholesale and 90 percent of retail trade by 1960. In the South, however, the private sector's dominance of commerce has not receded since 1975 despite all the government's efforts.
During the 1978 campaign for the socialist transformation of capitalist industry and commerce in the South, the state nationalized 412 large commercial establishments in Ho Chi Minh City, transformed 70,000 private traders into other occupations and brought another 8,000 small merchants into the state commercial network. But large merchants had already anticipated the move in advance and had dispersed most of their goods among relatives and smaller traders. These merchants managed to organize an effective underground trade network, which continued to determine prices in the market. The state commerce, supply, and procurement sector had 414,000 workers by 1984, but it controlled only 30 to 40 percent of the consumer goods produced by the state and cooperative small-industry and handicraft sector; the rest seeped into the black market.
Development Strategy and Performance
The DRV began its economic development planning as one-half of a technologically backward agricultural country. Before the partition of the country in 1954, North Vietnam had represented the food deficit region of the country with 10 to 20 percent of the population suffering regular food shortages. It depended on an annual shipment of 200,000 to 250,000 tons of rice from the rice-surplus
and only 39 percent from the collective economy. Andrew Vickerman, The Fate of the Peasantry: Premature “Transition to Socialism” in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Yale University Southeast Asian Studies Monograph Series, no. 28, 1986, p. 188.
76.Vickerman, Fate of the Peasantry, p. 120.
77.Nguyen Van Linh, Ho Chi Minh City, p. 72; Le Can, “Our Situation and Tasks,” Tap Chi Cong San, no. 8, August 1986, JPRS-SEA-86-208, December 1, 1986, p. 19, Doc Lap, February 1979.
78.Ngo Vinh Long, “Some Aspects of Cooperativization,” p. 169.
79.Nguyen Kien Phuoc, “Initial Experience in the New Mode of Business at the Binh Tay Market,” Nhan Dan, March 13, 1986, JPRS-SEA-86-142, August 15, 1986, p.
80.Statistical data, p. 20; 1987 socioeconomic development plan, presented by Chairman of the State Planning Commission Vo Van Kiet, Hanoi Domestic Service, December 26, 1986, FBIS, Asia and Pacific Daily Report, December 30, 1986, p. 89.
Mekong delta region to feed its population. Industry represented only 1.5 percent of total production, and there were only seven modern industrial enterprises.
During the first five-year development plan (1961–1965), the development strategy followed the Soviet model: the priority in investment went to heavy industry while light industry and agriculture were given less emphasis. Industry was decided to receive only 22 percent of the investment for the plan, whereas agriculture was given 49 percent. The heavy industrial sectors called “Group A” (electricity, mining, engineering, metallurgy, and chemicals) received 80 percent of the investment in industry, whereas “Group B” (consumer goods industries) got only 20 percent.
The other major feature of the Vietnamese development strategy was the decision to collectivize agriculture before reaching a level of industrialization necessary for mechanization of agriculture. Underlying this strategy was the assumption that cooperatives would create a more efficient division of labor and increase the scale of production even without mechanization and other major technological advances. But collectivization and the substitution of administrative means for economic incentives were also aimed at extracting the maximum surplus from the peasantry, which could then be used to support heavy industry. Heavy industry, also financed in part by loans from the Socialist countries, was expected to provide the technology—chemical fertilizer, the mechanized equipment, and water pumps—needed to achieve much higher agricultural production.
This development strategy did achieve relatively rapid increases in industrial production—an average of about 18 percent annually between 1960 and 1964. With this industrial development and the doubling of the number of state employees to nearly one million people, creating a major increase in demand for rice.
81.Vickerman, Fate of the Peasantry, p. 33.
82.G. Nguyen Tien Hung, Economic Development of Socialist Vietnam, p. 87.
83.For a detailed description, see Vickerman, Fate of the Peasantry, pp. 159–204.
For a critique of the approach, see Adam Fforde and Suzanne H. Paine, The Limits of National Liberation (London: Groom Helm, 1987), pp. 38–41.
84.Nguyen Tien Hung, Economic Development of Socialist Vietnam, p. 140.
85.Fforde and Paine, Limits of National Liberation, p. 59.
which was only partially offset by an increase in subsidiary crops, such as maize, manioc, sweet potatoes, and beans.
The failure of agricultural production to increase between 1960 and 1965 reflected the absence of significant technological improvement as well as the lack of incentives for the peasant to put intensive labor into the collective economy. The family economy was clearly more profitable for the peasant family than the cooperative because there was little relationship between hard work and income in the cooperative and artificially low state procurement prices.
During the war against the United States hopes for industrialization had to be shelved as the DRV abandoned some industries and dispersed the rest throughout the countryside. Because of U.S. production to support of the war effort, the value of industrial and handicrafts production plummeted from 2.7 billion dong in 1965 to 1.3 billion dong in 1968. Agricultural production also continued to stagnate. Average annual rice production for the 1965–1971 period was slightly less than the average for the 1961–1964 period. Only 0.5 million tons of rice supplied to Vietnam by the People's Republic of China annually helped ward off starvation between 1968 and 1972.
With the restoration of peace and the reunification of the country, the SRV embarked on its second and third five-year plans covering the 1976–1980 and 1981–1985 periods. The basic development strategy of the party remained unchanged. During the two plans industry received the largest share of state investment, and its share grew over time. During the second plan, 35 percent of investment was allocated to industry, with more than two-thirds of that...
86.Vickerman, Fate of the Peasantry, table 4, p. 279; Nguyen Tien Hung, Economic Development of Socialist Vietnam, table 7.5, p. 127. Hung suggests that official DRV statistics on agriculture during the 1960s should be discounted by as much as 30 percent based on internal consistency, crop yields, and the available food supply (p. 128). These figures are only useful, therefore, as indications of the overall trend in production.
87.On the state's refusal to rely on material incentives in agricultural cooperatives, see Christine White, “Agricultural Planning, Pricing Policy and Co-operatives in Vietnam,” World Development 13, no. 1 (1985), 102.
88.Nguyen Tien Hung, Economic Development of Socialist Vietnam, table 6.1, p. 98.
89.Ibid., p. 128.
90.For per capita grain output, see Vickerman, Fate of the Peasantry, table 4, p. 279. On Chinese food aid during the war, see Nayan Chanda, “Vietnam's Economy: Its Domestic and International Dimensions” (unpublished paper, 1983).
going to heavy industry and one-third to light industry; 30 percent was to go to agriculture. For the period of the third plan, agriculture received only slightly more than 20 percent of the investment while industry was receiving well over 50 percent. The capital goods sector, moreover, was again allocated 80 percent of industrial investment.
From 1975 to 1980, national income grew at an average annual rate of only 0.4 percent. The average annual increase in industrial output during the period has been estimated at between 0.2 and 0.6 percent, and output in state-controlled industries actually decreased by 6.5 percent during the same period. Inefficient management, low labor productivity, and shortages of raw materials and spare parts because of sharp cutbacks from wartime levels of foreign assistance to Vietnam all contributed to lower growth than anticipated. Probably the main factor in the precipitous decline in industrial production, however, was the huge diversion of investment resources into a major military buildup in 1978, which suddenly increased Vietnamese armed forces from 770,000 to 1.5 million. The diversion was so large that the second five-year plan had become meaningless by 1979 and was quietly scrapped.
The second five-year plan also aimed to increase the size of agricultural cooperatives and their specialization in the most advantageous crops. Paddy production grew at an average rate of only 2.4 percent annually from 1976 to 1980 while total grain production during the plan increased at an annual average rate of 4.1 percent. But this growth was entirely the result of putting fallow land...
91.See William S. Turley, “Vietnam since Reunification,” Problems of Communism 26 (March-April 1977): 46.
92.Vo Nhan Tri, “Vietnam: The Third Five-Year Plan 1981–85: Performance and Limits,” Indochina Report (Singapore), no. 4, October–December 1985, pp. 7, 10; Kim Anh Tuan, “Achievements on Agricultural Front in 1981–1985,” Tap Chi Khoa Hoc Hoa, September 1986, JPRS-SEA-87-019, p. 110.
93.Nguyen Dinh, “Concerning Inflation in Our Country,” Tap Chi Cong San, October 1987, JPRS-ATC-88-002, February 9, 1988, p. 36.
94.Le Can, “Our Situation and Tasks,” Tap Chi Cong San, no. 8, August 1986, JPRS-SEA-86-208, December 1, 1986, p. 18; Vo Nhan Tri, “Party Policies and Economic Performance,” in Marrand White, Postwar Vietnam, pp. 81–82.
95.Le Can, “Our Situation and Tasks,” p. 18.
96.According to an official Chinese source, Vietnamese military expenditures increased from 40.4 percent of the budget in 1978 to 47 percent in 1979. Tetsuro Kimura, “Vietnam—Ten Years of Economic Struggle,” Asian Survey 26 (October 1986), 1051.
97.David Marr, “Vietnam’s Economic Situation,” Vietnam Today, no. 39 (November 1986), pp. 3–5.
98.For a description of this strategy, see Le Duan and Pham Van Dong, Towards a Large-Scale Socialist Agricultural Production (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1975).
under grain cultivation once again as cultivated area increased by 20 percent during the plan period. Meanwhile, yield per hectare actually fell by an average of 25 percent annually. During the plan period, Vietnam had to import 5.6 million tons of food from the Soviet Union.
The poor performance of Vietnamese agriculture was, in part, the result of a reduction in agricultural inputs, such as fertilizer and pesticides, because of the loss of U.S. aid to South Vietnam after the war for which Soviet aid did not compensate. It also reflected the further reduction of consumer goods that could be traded to farmers for their grain surplus, the result of the termination of Chinese commodity assistance in 1976. Another factor affecting grain output was the low level of state investment in agriculture, which was reduced even further because of the military buildup that began in 1978. Finally, collectivization and the obligatory sale of grain to the state at prices 15 to 20 percent below free market prices were disincentives for increased grain production.
During the third five-year plan period (1981–1985), the annual increase in industrial output averaged 9.5 percent, but the efficiency and quality of consumer goods production in the state-controlled sector continued to decline. Agricultural production improved markedly during the third plan. Total grain output, according to official figures, increased by an average of 4 percent annually during the first four years of the third five-year plan (1981–1985), while paddy production increased at 6 percent annually.
99.Statistical data, pp. 81, 83, 84.
100.Le Can, “Our Situation and Tasks,” p. 17.
101.According to Le Duc Tho, the amount of fertilizer available by the early 1980s was only half that received as gratuitous aid during the war. See Le Duc Tho, “On the Question of Developing New Factors and Perfecting the New Management System in Agricultural Cooperatives,” Hanoi Radio, September 4, 1982, FBIS, September 21, 1982, p. K6.
102.Much of China’s assistance before 1977 had consisted of such consumer items as hot water flasks, electric fans, bicycles, canned milk, and fabrics, which had been used as incentives for peasants to sell surplus grain to the state. See Ngo Vinh Long, “Some Aspects of Cooperativization,” p. 169.
103.White, “Agricultural Planning,” p. 110. A 1973 survey revealed that as many as 25 to 30 percent of the cooperatives were losing money each year because they had to sell their paddy to the state at prices that were below their production costs. Chris White, “Recent Debates in Vietnamese Development Policy,” in Gordon White, Robin Murray, and Christine White, eds., Revolutionary Socialist Development in the Third World (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1983), p. 257.
104.Le Can, “Our Situation and Tasks,” p. 17; Statistical data, p. 42.
105.Statistical data, p. 84. One specialist argues that these grain yields were exaggerated and that the 13.3 million tons would be a better estimate of total output than general.
This recovery from the disastrous second five-year plan was driven primarily by the adoption in the early 1980s of new policies to increase incentives in agriculture, including the system of "product contracts" fixing contracted grain quotas for the cooperatives for a period of five years so that the surplus to be disposed of could continue to grow, and sharply increased procurement prices for grain in October 1981. Rice crop yields reportedly increased from 21.1 quintals per hectare in 1980 to 27.5 quintals per hectare in 1984. As a result, Vietnam had to import only one million tons during the 1981–1985 period, and in 1983 it was able to feed its population from its own production for the first time.
By 1985, however, the stimulative effect of the contracts system declined, and yield and output of grain both leveled off. In 1986 food output officially grew by only 1.1 percent, leaving a shortfall of 1.5 million tons of grain, and in 1987 total grain output actually fell by 500,000 tons, causing a famine in northern provinces in early 1988. The biggest reason for the setback in agriculture during the mid-1980s was the increasingly unfavorable terms of trade for farmers as the state increased the prices of agricultural inputs and consumer goods, without increasing paddy prices accordingly, and also increased procurement quotas on cooperatives. As a result, the number of families undertaking product contracts with the cooperative declined dramatically as they put greater effort into household economies. In most cooperatives some families actually re-landed land that had been leased to them under production contracts.
The renewed push for collectivization of agriculture in the South...
the 17 million tons claimed. See Lam Thanh Liem, “Nouvelles reformes et crise persistent de l'économie rurale dans le delta du Mekong de 1981 à 1985,” Annales de Geographie, no. 524, July-August 1985, pp. 403–4.
106.106. W. Evers, R. Baban, F. Le Gall, and A. Pera, Socialist Republic of Vietnam: Recent Economic Developments, International Monetary Fund, May 14, 1982, p. 2; Statistical data, p. 83.
107.107. Le Can, “Our Situation and Tasks,” p. 17.
108.108. See the investigation of famine in Thanh Hoa province in Chinh Tam and Van Ba, “A Question Requiring an Answer,” Lao Dong, June 16, 1988, JPRS-SEA-88-035, August 31, 1988, p. 57.
109.109. Nguyen Thi Hien, “Nha Nuoc Phai Kiem Soat Gia Ca” [The state must control prices], Do Lap, September 2, 1987, p. 5; Verena Stern, “Foreign Capital to Ease Desperate Situation,” Sueddeutsche Zeitung, January 16, 1988, JPRS-SEA-88-014, March 1, 1988, pp. 59–61.
110.110. Do The Tung, “Mot So Bien Phap Hoan Thien Khoan San Pham trong Nong Nghiep” [Some measures to perfect product contracts in agriculture], Nhan Dan, October, 1986.
111.111. Chu Van Lam, “Khoan San Pham va Che Do Kinh Te Hop Tac Xa trong Nong Nghiep” [Product contracts and the cooperative economy in agriculture], Nghien Cuu Kinh Te, nos. 1 and 2, February and April 1988, p. 34.
that began in 1984 also adversely affected output. Many peasants destroyed their rice fields and planted gardens instead or simply abandoned them altogether to become merchants rather than join cooperatives. In many cooperatives, youths were forced into agricultural and were advised by their parents to find nonagricultural employment.
Meanwhile, severe shortages of basic necessities combined with chronic huge budget deficits contributed to hyperinflation. During the 1981–1985 period, the volume of money issued rose at an average annual rate of 83.7 percent compared with an average rise in power of the Vietnamese dong of 6.4 percent annually. By 1985 the purchasing power of the Vietnamese dong was declining by 16 to 18 percent every month. And in 1987 the annual inflation rate was estimated at 700 to 1,000 percent. (The government admitted to 300 percent.)
The economic development strategy underlying the 1986–1990 five-year plan, reflecting the grim economic realities of the time of the Sixth Party Congress in December 1986, abandoned the former strategy of putting the bulk of investment capital into industry and viewing agriculture as a means of supporting industrialization. The new line on economic development was to concentrate investment on grain and foodstuffs, consumer goods, and export goods. Agriculture, rather than industry, was given primary emphasis, and the potential of the non-socialist components of the economy was to be "fully exploited." The SRVN no longer pursued the illusion of revolutionary autonomous industrialization but looked to the model of export-oriented development that had been successful for Asia's newly industrializing countries, relying on Lenin's "New Economic Policy" of the 1920s for a socialist precedent.
The Vietnamese economy benefited from a demobilization of military personnel that reduced the armed forces from 1.5 million in 1987 to between 700,000 and 800,000 by late 1990. Adjustments in government priorities, liberalization of land and allocation policies, and favorable weather conditions also helped to reverse the decline of the mid-1980s. In 1988, food production increased by 2 million tons over that in 1987, and in 1989 it increased by 2 million tons. As a result, Vietnam suddenly emerged as the third largest supplier of rice on the world market, exporting 1.5 million tons of rice in 1989 and 1.6 million tons in 1990.
112.Nguyen Truc Quynh, Saigon Giai Phong, April 19, 1986, JPRS-SEA-86-180, August 1, 1986, p. 80.
113.Tran Dinh Van, “When Is Agriculture Truly Foremost?” Dan Doan Ket, August 27, 1986, JPRS-SEA-86-201, November 14, 1986, p. 115.
114.Nguyen Dinh, “Concerning Inflation in Our Country,” Tap Chi Cong San, no. 10, October 1987, JPRS-ATC-88-002, February 9, 1988, pp. 35–37; SRV, State Planning Committee, Report on the Economy of Vietnam at the Sixth National Party Congress, p. 44.
115.“Political Report of the Central Committee at the Sixth National Party Congress of Delegates,” JPRS-SEA-87-066, May 7, 1987, pp. 51–58.
116.Kyodo News Service dispatch, November 1, 1990, FBIS, East Asia Daily Report, November 2, 1990, p. 55.
Liberal economic reforms also helped to bring hyperinflation under control. The inflation rate dropped to 184 percent in 1988, then plummeted to 32 percent in 1989. But from the end of 1989 to the end of 1990, prices rose 67.5 percent, reflecting the end of imports of petroleum and fertilizer from the Soviet Union at subsidized prices. The government's control over inflationary tendencies remained tenuous and vulnerable to external economic forces beyond its control, including the refusal of the United States to permit assistance to the SRV from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Vietnam's balance of payments deficit since the war has been a serious obstacle to economic development because of both trade deficits and external debt servicing. Vietnam ran a balance of payments deficit every year from 1976 through 1990 with export earnings covering, on the average, less than half of imports and scheduled debt services. Vietnamese exports grew very slowly from $406 million in 1978 to $740 million in 1986. But after economic liberalization took effect, exports increased rapidly from $733 million in 1988 to $1,782 million in 1990—mainly on the strength of rice, oil, and marine products. Most of the increase was accounted for by hard currency exports, which soared from $465 million to 1.3 billion during the two-year period. With imports reduced from their high point in the mid-1980s, Vietnam was able to achieve a slight trade surplus in 1990 for the first time. However, an increase in debt service payments from $85 million in 1988 to $349 million in 1990, mostly to
117.Interview with Minister of Agriculture and Food Industry Nguyen Cong Tan, Vietnam News Agency (VNA), February 21, 1990, FBIS-EAS-90-046, March 8, 1990, p. 70. SRV, State Planning Committee, Report on the Economy of Vietnam, p. 32; David Dollar, “Vietnam: Successes and Failures of Macroeconomic Stabilization,” in Borje Ljunggren and Peter Timmer, eds., The Challenge of Reform in Indochina (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, forthcoming).
118.Socioeconomic report by Council of Ministers Chairman Do Muoi, December 18, 1989, FBIS-EAS-89-244, December 21, 1989, p. 64.
199.Dollar, “Vietnam: Successes and Failures.” Nayan Chanda cites an IMF estimate that the loss of hard currency costs of the loss of subsidized Soviet imports was $250 to 300 million, or 4–5 percent of the country’s GDP (Nayan Chanda, “Indochina Today: Reform and Paralysis,” in The Challenge of Indochina: An Examination of the U.S. Role [Queenstown, Md.: Aspin Institute, 1991], p. 20).
Table 1. Foreign trade, balance 1976–1986 (in millions of U.S. dollars)
Year Imports Exports Trade balance
1976 825.9 215.0 610.9
1977 1,041.1 309.0 732.1
1978 1,465.8 406.7 -1,059.1
1979 1,653.0 383.1 -1,269.9
1980 1,576.7 388.6 -1,188.1
1981 1,697.3 388.6 -1,308.7
1982 1,599.6 479.7 -1,119.9
1983 1,689.2 534.5 -1,154.7
1984 1,892.5 570.5 -1,322.0
1985 2,046.3 560.3 -1,486.0
1986 2,506.9 739.5 -1,767.4
the convertible area, kept its balance of payments in the red
Until the major economic reforms of 1988, the standard of living of the average Vietnamese had fallen over the previous three decades. The monthly average real income per capita of families of workers and state employees in the North was almost 40 percent lower in 1979 than it had been in 1960. Basic necessities such as meat, sugar, fish sauce, fuel, and soap were rationed at subsidized prices to workers and cadres, but their salaries were only enough to keep them going for a few days each month. Unemployment or underemployment was estimated to affect 50 percent of the work force in industry and 30 percent in agriculture, or approximately eleven million workers.
At its low point in efficiency between 1976 and 1980, the Vietnamese agricultural economy was providing between 268 and 275 kilograms of grain per capita, which was about 25 percent less than required to maintain minimum caloric input. In the mid-1980s per capita calorie consumption in Vietnam was 31 percent lower than in Indonesia, 36 percent lower than in the Philippines, 27 percent
Table 2. Balance of payments (in millions of U.S. dollars)
1988 1989 1990
Current account balance −764 −586 −339
Convertible area 209 218 368
Nonconvertible area −973 −804 −707
Trade balance −138 −123 −21
Convertible area 534 463 29
Nonconvertible area −541 −586 −350
Total exports 733 1320 964
Convertible area 465 553 563
Nonconvertible area 268 767 401
Total imports 1412 1670 1181
Convertible area 603 985 1799
Nonconvertible area 809 685 382
Services and transfers −85 −637 −411
Convertible area −71 −219 −22
Nonconvertible area 14 −27 −389
Table 3. Food deficit
Population (million) 49.2 53.7 58.7 63.7 64.4
Food production (paddy equivalent million tons) 13.5 14.4 17.8 19.6 21.4
Food production per capita (kg) 274.4 268.2 303.5 307.3 332.9
Percentage of requirement (100 percent = 365 kg)
Source: Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Statistical Planning Commission, Report on the Economy of Vietnam, UNDP, December 1990, table 6.8, p. 94.
lower than in Thailand, and 33 percent lower than in Malaysia. The breakthrough harvest of 1989 increased per capita grain production to 333 kilograms. But the average Vietnamese still got nearly 10 percent less grain than is needed for sufficient caloric consumption (see table 3). The most serious consequence of the SRV's economic perfor-
123.For World Bank data on the four ASEAN states, see James Clad, "Poor Get Poorer," Far Eastern Economic Review, August 18, 1988, p. 34.
mance was the decline in the nutrition and health of Vietnamese children. A study of villages in Long An, Kien Giang, and Minh Hai provinces in 1987 revealed that between 34 and 40 percent of children were malnourished, whereas researchers in a more recent survey found that 51.1 percent of the children were suffering from malnutrition. In another study they found that since 1980 the number of newborns with abnormally low birthweight has been steadily increasing and in a few localities has reached 20 to 30 percent. Researchers found that the average height of Vietnamese decreased between 1973 and 1985.
Social Structure
Vietnamese social structure has been transformed over the past four decades by both political upheavals and economic change. War, agrarian reform, collectivization, and the process of consolidation of party and state power have all left their marks on this structure. Once hierarchically organized on the basis of access to land, the society has been restratified primarily on the basis of access to position in the economic management and political-administrative bureaucracy.
Before the DRV undertook revolutionary transformation of society, the main source of socioeconomic inequality in both North and South Vietnam was the structure of land ownership. When the DRV came to power in 1945, poor peasants (those who lacked sufficient land to support their families) and landless laborers, who represented about 60 percent of the population of Tonkin, controlled only about 10 percent of the land, whereas the 2.5 percent of the rural population that lived by renting out land owned 24.5 percent of the land. The traditional agrarian social structure was shattered by the land reform campaign carried out by the DRV in North Vietnam from 1954 to 1956. A program of land redistribution, in which poor peasants were mobilized to accuse landlords of crimes and several thousand
124.Quan Doi Nhan Dan, January 5, 1988, JPRS, East Asia Daily Report, May 2, 1988, p. 42; AFP dispatch, March 12, 1990, FBIS, East Asia Daily Report, March 14, 1990, p. 72.
125.Hoang Dinh Cau, "Health Care in the New Stage," Tap Chi Cong San, no. 4, April 1987, JPRS-ATC-87-003, September 3, 1987, pp. 25–26.
126.AFP dispatch, March 12, 1990.
127.Data collected by DRV authorities on all 3,653 villages that underwent land reform cited in Tran Phuong, ed., Cach Mang Ruong Dat [Agrarian revolution in Vietnam] (Hanoi: Khoa Hoc Xa Hoi, 1968), table 8, p. 14.
landlords were executed, eliminated the economic base of the landlord class and leveled the structure of land ownership. After the land reform, the poor peasants and landlords were left with nearly equivalent standards of living. Rich peasants and landlords had a somewhat higher living standard, not primarily because of differences in land ownership but because they owned tools and water buffaloes and because they had an average of 25 percent more laborers per family than did poor peasants. Three years after the completion of land reform, however, former poor peasants represented more than half the families with an agricultural surplus, indicating considerable upward social mobility.
The organization of socialist agricultural cooperatives further narrowed economic differences among rural households in the North. The cooperatives put a floor under the incomes of the poorest families by distributing a subsistence minimum to every household, regardless of the amount of its labor. It distributed income through a system of work points whose egalitarianism depended on whether the system distinguished between different qualities of labor. Throughout the war the work-point system tended to be highly egalitarian, compensating all adult laborers at the same flat rate. In the model cooperatives of the North, therefore, what economic differentiation existed among cooperative households was based on different endowments of labor and varying degrees of skill and industriousness in production in the family economy.
During the war, however, many cooperatives were subcontracting out cooperative land to individual households for the final stages of cultivation and allowing them to retain that portion of the crop beyond contracted quotas. The general application of the production contract system since 1981 created a new stratum of wealthier peasants. In the 1990s a "rich" peasant in the context of the cooperative...
128.For analyses of the land reform program that deal extensively with errors later denounced by the leadership, see Edwin E. Moise, Land Reform in China and North Vietnam: Consolidating the Revolution at the Village Level (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), and Christine P. White, Agrarian Reform and National Liberation in the Vietnamese Revolution: 1920–1957 (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1981).
129.David W. P. Elliott, "Political Integration in North Vietnam: The Cooperativization Period," in Joseph J. Zasloff and MacAllister Brown, Communism in Indochina: New Perspectives (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1975), p. 178; Vickerman, Fate of the Peasantry, p. 202.
130.Vickerman, Fate of the Peasantry, p. 136.
131.White, Role of Collective Agriculture, pp. 119–22.
132.Melanie Beresford, "Household and Collective in Vietnamese Agriculture," Journal of Contemporary Asia 15, no. 1 (1985), 11.
in the north is one who has rice reserves from one season to the next to build brick houses and to purchase such items as beds, sofas, and clocks. Although some well-off families increase their incomes by lending money to poorer families at high interest, most of those in this stratum earn their incomes through skill and hard work, not from hiring workers, acquiring land, or making loans.
The wealthiest families in Northern villages, however, are usually those with members who have positions of authority in the village or the cooperative—both the party committee members and cooperative directors, accountants, and unit heads. The largest houses in the village are often occupied by the leading party or state cadres, who have been able to parlay their positions into economic success. Cooperative management cadres can divert money from discretionary funds or obtain a larger volume of agricultural inputs and sell them at higher prices. They use their profits to build new houses, buy luxury goods, or invest in business. State and party cadres also have the connections with sources of cheap supply needed to make larger profits from the family economy.
The social structure of the Mekong delta presents a dramatic contrast to that of the North. During the Diem period, in southern Vietnam, 40 percent of the land was rented out by landlords, whereas in the Mekong delta region, 6,300 big landlords, representing 0.25 percent of the rural population, owned about 40 percent of the rice land, and 600,000 tenants cultivated nearly two-thirds of the land.
During the Vietnam conflict the delta region was transformed by revolutionary war, U.S. intervention, and economic-technological changes from a system of landlords and tenants into a system of capitalist relations in which family farmers were the dominant socioeconomic
133.Huu Tho, "Income Disparities in Rural Areas," Nhan Dan, September 5, 1986, JPRS-SEA-86-206, November 24, 1986, pp. 95–101.
134.Saigon Giai Phong, July 5, 1986.
135.Interview with Nguyen Van Thang, secretary of the Cu Chi District VCP Committee, Saigon Giai Phong, April 23, 1986, JPRS-SEA-86-128, July 24, 1986, p. 85.
136.See David Wurfel, "Agrarian Reform in the Republic of Vietnam," Far Eastern Survey 26 (June 1957), 81–92; Wolf Ladejinsky, "Agrarian Reform in the Republic of Vietnam," in Wesley R. Fishel, ed., Vietnam: Anatomy of a Conflict (Itasca, Ill.: F. E. Peacock Publishers, 1968), p. 519; MacDonald Salter, Land Reform in South Vietnam, Agency for International Development, Spring Review Country Paper, June 1979, p. 94; Stanford Research Institute, Land Reform in Vietnam, prepared for the Republic of Vietnam and the Agency for International Development (Menlo Park, Calif., 1968), summary volume, p. 199.
stratum. Wartime labor shortages, loss of buffaloes, reduced crop areas, and the introduction of new rice varieties and cheap commodities financed by U.S. aid caused increasing numbers of South Vietnamese farmers to become dependent on expensive agricultural inputs and machinery to grow rice. Even the smallest landowners had to market a large share of their crops to pay expenses. Thus, a new form of agrarian differentiation developed based primarily on the ownership of farm machinery and commercial activities rather than on the ownership of land.
In a survey of eighty rural areas in South Vietnam in 1981, researchers found that 25 percent of the rural households had little or no land; 56 percent of the rural households, which were classified as "middle peasants," owned 60 percent of the land but lacked draft animals and farm equipment; 12 percent of the households were classified as "upper middle peasants" because they controlled 27 percent of the land and could rent out land or hire farm workers and rent out farm equipment to poorer farmers, even though most of their income was from their own labor. The "rich peasants and rural capitalists," representing 2.5 percent of the rural households, owned 7 percent of the land but more than one-half of the larger tractors and other agricultural machinery. On the average, a rich peasant household's income was ten times greater than that of a middle peasant, and there was a tendency for middle peasants to slip into poor peasant status through indebtedness.
In 1983 the SRV moved to eliminate "capitalist exploitation" in agriculture, whether through hiring workers or renting agricultural machinery and buffaloes. It forced wealthier peasants to give up their farm machinery to the collective or to form a "farm machinery team" under state direction, and subjected upper middle peasants to steeply progressive taxation that took more than 80 percent of their incomes.
137.It is clear that the beneficiaries of the RVN land reform program were often different from those of the earlier NLF redistribution, creating postwar conflicts over land ownership for the SRV. See Nguyen Huu Phan, Nhung Dieu Can Biet Ve Chinh Sach Hop Tac Hoa Nong Nghiep Mien Nam [What you need to know about the policy of cooperativization of agriculture in the south] (Ho Chi Minh City: Nha Xuat Ban Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh, 1982), pp. 42–43.
138.Ngo Vinh Long, "Agrarian Differentiation in the Southern Region of Vietnam," Journal of Contemporary Asia 14, no. 3 (1984), 283–305.
139.Ibid.; Tran Quoc Khai, "The Question of Reallocating Land and Eliminating All Forms of Exploitation in the Nam Bo Rural Areas," Nhan Dan, August 11, 1982; FBIS, Asia and Pacific Daily Report, September 23, 1982, p. K7.
140.Lam Thanh Liem, "Nouvelles Reformes et Crise Persistant," pp. 397–99.
The result of this process, however, was a redistribution of the land taken that involved widespread political abuse and favoritism. Many party members and cadres received land more than the average party members appropriated large amounts of the best land for themselves, and some who got land did not work it themselves but rented it out.
In the urban areas, the social structure increasingly polarized between workers and cadres on fixed incomes and those with opportunities to engage in trade or business, whether legally or illegally. As a result of the economic liberalization policies of the early 1980s, the private sector grew much more rapidly than the state sector, especially in Ho Chi Minh City. Some of the old bourgeoisie reappeared, and smaller merchants and capitalists rapidly gained control over money and goods. These businesspeople, usually referred to by officials as "speculators" and "economic saboteurs," would not have been able to obtain so much of the goods produced or imported by the state without the connivance of economic cadres. They bought commodities in bulk from officials and resold them on the black market. Ironically, it was the party-state bureaucracy, which was officially sworn to eliminate such illegal businesspeople as class enemies, that nurtured this class.
The legal differential between the minimum and maximum wages in the state sector during the 1980s was only 3.5 times. However, because the purchasing power of the dong declined in the late 1970s and 1980s so drastically, the living standards of manual workers, civil servants, and cadres depended primarily on the distribution of goods from the state under various semilegal or illegal schemes called "bonuses" or "internal distribution." Access to commodities thus became the primary determinant of the socioeconomic structure in urban areas.
The primary beneficiaries of this practice were middle- and high-ranking bureaucrats who obtained far more than their fair shares of goods and even managed to have access to goods and supplies distributed to...
141."A Summary of Opinions Contributed to the Party Congress concerning Agricultural Production and the Living Conditions of Farmers," Saigon Giai Phong, September 24, 1986, JPRS-SEA-86-218, December 15, 1986, p. 98; interview with VCP general secretary Nguyen Van Linh, Hanoi Domestic Service, December 7, 1988, FBIS-EAS-88-236, December 8, 1988, p. 54, Nhan Dan, April 7, 1988.
142.Nguyen Van Linh, Ho Chi Minh City, p. 61.
143.Tung Van, "Fully Develop the Positive Impact of the Improvement Made to Wages," Tap Chi Cong San, November 1985, JPRS-SEA-86-034, February 24, 1986, p. 39.
friends and relatives. Bureaucrats dealing with economic management or having authority in production or trade units could also convert control over goods into substantial profits either by purchasing goods at subsidized prices for resale or simply stealing them, selling them on the free market.
The disparity between the life-styles of officials and those of the rest of the population extends into other aspects of society. As in other socialist states, party-state bureaucrats have long had preferred access not only to consumer goods but to housing, transportation, education, travel, and medical care. Higher cadres had a system of state stores for higher cadres, one for the Central Committee level and one for directors of offices, which assured them of plentiful supplies of consumer goods despite severe shortages.
Despite the VCP’s condemnation of “special rights and privileges,” cadres with some authority at central, provincial, and local levels commonly appropriated such benefits for themselves. The assignment of housing was bureaucratically administered and was subject to political favoritism and bribery. The vast majority of the urban population lived in extremely overcrowded conditions while leadership cadres at the provincial level lived in villas, and higher-level cadres often had two or three apartments in different cities. Factory directors or deputy directors used factory workers to help build their villas.
Although workers still moved by bicycle, bureaucrats were more likely to go to work by car or motorcycle. In the 1990s, there are fifty thousand cars in the entire country (more than eleven thousand in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City alone). The heads of organizations and agencies commonly buy expensive European or Japanese cars to symbolize their authority although their collective cost was the equivalent of all the foreign currency earned from agricultural exports by a single district. Leadership cadres in the provinces, districts, and villages have opportunities to purchase motorcycles at subsidized prices.
144.For a more detailed discussion of the nature of corruption in the Vietnamese system, see Chap. 5.
145.The stores for higher cadres were established in 1962 according to a well-informed Vietnamese source interviewed in November 1981.
146.Nguyen Trung Thuc, "Ideological Life: Words and Actions," Tap Chi Cong San, April 1987, JPRS-ATC-87-003, September 3, 1987, p. 106; Khanh Van, "Social Fairness," Quan Doi Nhan Dan, January 10, 1987, JPRS-87-060, April 27, 1982, p. 99.
147.Trong Nghia, "A Painful Fact," Tap Chi Cong San, October 1987, JPRS-ATC-88-002, February 9, 1988, p. 42; Quan Doi Nhan Dan, May 6, 1986; Hoang Trung, "Special Privileges and Favors around Imported Motorcycles," Nhan Dan, March 17, 1986, JPRS-SEA-86-087, May 22, 1986, p. 120.
to workers in admission to higher education. Production workers who have "outstanding" records for three years or more have priority over other students to enter universities. But party and government officials appear to be able to pass on their socioeconomic advantages to their sons and daughters. The children of party cadres seldom become workers or artisans because they can usually obtain jobs with various state organizations. The percentage of children of high-ranking cadres in the military is reportedly lower than that of ordinary families. Political criteria have been used, meanwhile, to keep some students out of universities. For many years, the children of former personnel of the Saigon government were not allowed to enter a university even though they passed the examination because of their "personal histories." This political discrimination was denounced by critics as "backgroundism" and supposedly ended as of the 1987–1988 school year.
Vietnamese society has been restructured by the transformational policies of the DRV/SRV regime as well as by the unintended consequences of the regime's system of economic management. The inequalities of traditional agrarian society have been largely eliminated only to be replaced with those of a heavily bureaucratized transitional society. Despite the fact that those bureaucratically based inequalities are the result of illegalities, they are an essential feature of Vietnamese society under VCP rule.
148.Saigon Giai Phong, February 19, 1987.
149.Dai Doan Ket, April 1, 1987.
150.Tran Bach Dang, "Seventy Years of Soviet Government," Saigon Giai Phong, March 10, 1988, p. 43.
151.See Nhan Dan, January 22, 1987. For an example, see Ben Nghe, "Realities Compel Me to Write," Saigon Giai Phong, November 11, 1987, JPRS-SEA-88-009, February 24, 1988, p. 52.
152.Saigon Giai Phong, February 19, 1987.
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