សៀវភៅ៖ វៀតណាម នយោបាយនៃរបបសង្គមនិយម ដោយ Gareth Porter

 Foreword

That broad area lying between China and India which since World War II has generally been known as Southeast Asia is one of the most heterogeneous in the world. Though it is generally referred to as a region, the principal basis for this designation is simply the geographic propinquity of its component states and the fact that collectively they occupy the territory between China and the Indian subcontinent. The fundamental strata of the traditional cultures of nearly all the numerous peoples of Southeast Asia do set them apart from those of India and China. Beyond that, however, there are few common denominators among the states that currently make up the area except for roughly similar climate conditions and agricultures.

The political systems presently governing the lives of Southeast Asia's 400 million inhabitants have been built on considerably different cultures; the religious component alone embraces Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam. Except in the case of Thailand, the politics of all these countries have been conditioned by periods of colonial rule—ranging from little more than half a century to approximately four—each of which has had a distinctive character and political legacy. Even the nature of the Japanese wartime occupation, which covered the entire area, varied considerably among the several countries and had different political consequences. And after Japan's defeat, the courses to independence followed by these states diverged widely. Only through revolutionary anticolonial wars were two of the most populous, Indonesia and Vietnam, able to assert their independence. Although the others followed routes that were peaceful, they were not all necessarily smooth, and the time involved varied by as much as a decade.

Moreover, subsequent to independence the political and economic character of these states has continued to be significantly affected by a wide range of relationships with outside powers. In a few cases these have been largely harmonious, attended by only relatively minor external efforts to influence the course of local political developments. However, most of these countries have been the objects of interventions, covert and overt, by outside powers—particularly the United States—which have been calculated to shape their political life in accordance with external interests. Thus, the range of contemporary political systems in Southeast Asia is strikingly varied, encompassing a spectrum quite as broad as the differing cultures and divergent historical conditionings that have so profoundly influenced their character.

This series, "Politics and International Relations of Southeast Asia," stems from an earlier effort to treat the nature of government and politics in the states of Southeast Asia in a single volume. Since the second, revised edition of that book, Governments and Politics of Southeast Asia, was published in 1964, interest in these countries has grown, for understandable reasons, especially in the United States. This wider public concern, together with a greater disposition of academics to draw on the political experience of these countries in their teaching, has suggested the need for a more substantial treatment of their politics and governments than could be subsumed within the covers of a single book. The series therefore aims to devote separate volumes to each of the larger Southeast Asian states.

Presumably one no longer needs to observe, as was the case in 1964, that the countries treated "are likely to be strange to many of our readers." But even though the increased American interaction with most of the countries has clearly obviated that proposition, many readers are still likely to be unacquainted with their earlier histories and the extent to which their pasts have affected the development of their recent and contemporary political character. Thus all these volumes include substantial historical sections as well as descriptions of the salient features of the present social and economic setting. In order to provide as much similarity of treatment as is compatible with the range of cultures and political systems presented by these states, the authors follow a broadly similar pattern of organization and analysis of their political history, dynamics, and processes. This effort to achieve some basis of comparability may appear rather modest, but to have attempted any greater degree of uniformity would have militated against the latitude and flexibility required to do justice to the differing characteristics of the political systems described. All the books are written by political scientists who have lived and carried out research in one or more of these countries for a considerable period and who have previously published scholarly studies on their internal politics.

In this book Gareth Porter brings to bear more than a quarter century of his research and writing on Vietnam, involving numerous periods of fieldwork there of up to a year in duration. In this undertaking he has been the recipient of awards for research in Vietnam from the Social Science Research Council, American Philosophical Society, Christopher Reynolds Foundation, and Cornell University's London-Cornell and International Relations of East Asia projects.

Having held professional positions at American University, the City University of New York, and Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, Dr. Porter is currently director of International Programs for the Washington-based Environmental and Energy Study Institute. He has also served on the staffs of members of Congress, was from 1975 to 1976 staff consultant to the House Select Committee on Missing Persons in Southeast Asia, and for the two preceding years was co-director of Washington's Indonesia Resource Center.

Author of A Peace Denied: The United States and the Paris Agreement and editor of Vietnam: A History in Documents as well as the major documentary collection on the Vietnam War, the two-volume Vietnam: The Definitive Documentation of Human Decisions, he has also written chapters on Vietnam in seven books and more than a dozen articles.

The present volume well reflects Gareth Porter's unusually wide range of study and experience concerning Vietnam and the international environment that has so markedly affected its modern economic and political development.

GEORGE McT. KAHN

Peface

The Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV, 1976 to the present) and its predecessor, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, 1945-1976), have shown a remarkable capacity for mobilizing human and material resources for a series of protracted conflicts with foreign enemies. They have also proved well adapted to maintaining political stability under tremendous pressures. But as the decades-long struggle over Vietnam has receded, the basic deformations of the Vietnamese political system have become increasingly clear. All those deformities originated in the unrestricted monopoly on political power enjoyed by the Vietnam Communist Party (VCP) and its predecessors, the Vietnam Workers’ Party (VWP, 1951-1976) and the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP, 1930-1951).

In this book I aim to describe and analyze the inner workings of the Vietnamese Communist political system. The VCP's political monopoly affects every aspect of Vietnamese politics from policy-making and policy implementation to popular participation and human rights. Although I trace the broad outlines of the evolution of the Vietnamese political system from the founding of the Communist regime in 1945, I focus mainly on political structure and process in the SRV between the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 and 1990, with special attention to the economic reforms of the 1986-1990 period.

Until the latter half of the 1980s, scholars could do little more than describe the formal-legal outlines of the Vietnamese Communist system. Vietnamese media, with few exceptions, suppressed anything but the most self-congratulatory information about the SRV regime and Vietnam’s social and economic development. It was difficult to analyze the links between the SRV’s authoritarian system of policy-making and the evolution of Vietnamese society. And scholars seldom addressed the subject. But beginning in 1986, an unprecedented.

I have chosen the term bureaucratic socialism to designate the type of political system that the SRV shares with the People's Republic of China (PRC) and other Communist states. In the context of analysis of the SRV, "bureaucratic" has two different meanings that reinforce each other: one derived from the field of comparative politics, the other from the Vietnamese Communist leadership's own analytical scheme. The Vietnamese system is "bureaucratic" in that the policy-making process is dominated by a bureaucratic elite and countervailing extrabureaucratic forces are weak or absent. In that sense, it has much in common with non-Communist authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia. In Communist theory, "bureaucratic" denotes separation of the state apparatus from the people, which VCP officials have conceded since 1985 is a serious problem for the Vietnamese political system. It also suggests the use of coercive methods to achieve compliance with state policies, which is condemned in theory but has been a consistent pattern in practice.

A primary theme of the book, introduced in the historical overview in Chapter 1 but reappearing in other chapters as well, is that the authoritarian impulses underlying the SRV's political system are deeply rooted in Vietnamese culture and political history. Those Vietnamese Communist leaders whose careers spanned more than fifty years from the origin of the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930 to the 1980s inherited an authoritarian political tradition that remained far stronger than the relatively feeble shoots of liberalism introduced by French colonialism. One of the tragedies of the Vietnamese revolution is that the rejection of bourgeois freedoms and legal rights that would restrain the party-state bureaucracy became deeply engrained in the attitudes of party leaders and cadres.

A second theme is that the SRV's economic and social crisis, outlined in Chapter 2, is linked inextricably with its authoritarian political structure. I connect political structure and policy-making styles and outcomes in the chapters on political institutions (Chapter 3), leadership selection and policy-making (Chapter 4), and political participation (Chapter 6). I develop this theme in depth in Chapter 5, in which I show how state control over the economy, which was a direct outgrowth of its political monopoly, has systematically undermined the objectives of the Vietnamese revolution itself. Instead of contributing to a society more egalitarian than that which existed .

During French colonial rule, the SRV system gave rise to a new class structure based on access to commodities through official position and, paradoxically, sapped much of the strength of the Marxist-Leninist state.

A third major theme is the unprecedented process of economic and political change in Communist Vietnam since 1986. As discussed in Chapter 5, the lack of accountability of top party leaders slowed and blunted the regime's policy response to socioeconomic crises during the 1970s and early 1980s. Nevertheless, the leadership of the VCP groped its way toward economic liberalization in the latter half of the 1980s even as it insisted on preserving the fundamental political monopoly of the party.

In part, the period of change inaugurated in 1986 is a function of a generational transition in the Vietnamese leadership during the 1980s, from a first generation of Vietnamese party leaders who were inflexibly committed to orthodox political and socioeconomic development models to a second generation that included some figures whose experience in the South made them more pragmatic. In part, it reflects the fact that the contradiction between orthodox assumptions and sociopolitical reality had grown too obvious for most party leaders to deny as they had in the past.

In the 1990s not just economic change but political change as well is being impelled by powerful domestic and international forces beyond the power of the SRV regime to control or direct. Chapters 5 and 6 document several trends that have begun to undermine the strength and stability of the SRV regime and add to pressure for change: the collapse of Leninist systems in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; the discrediting of the party and Marxist-Leninist ideology within Vietnam and the emergence of ideological pluralism within the party itself; and the increasing political assertiveness of peasants, intellectuals, students, and merchants, especially in the South. The significance of this incipient political pluralism remains to be tested, but whether the Vietnamese leadership ultimately makes sweeping political changes in the manner of the former Soviet Union or tries to cling to the status quo, it is likely to face momentous challenges to its grip on power before the century ends.

A final theme, discussed in Chapter 7, is the transformation of Vietnam's external relations from a predominant orientation toward anti-imperialist struggle to an orientation toward finding an export niche in the world economy—a shift that has profound implications for the future of Vietnamese politics and society. Historically, Vietnam’s foreign relations have revolved around resisting external

...powers in the name not only of Vietnamese national independence, but of a global revolutionary movement. But the reduction in global East-West tensions, combined with Vietnam's growing realization that it had to have the stimulus of ties with the global economy, began to reshape Vietnam's foreign policy priorities as well as its leadership's worldview by the mid-1980s. As the Soviet Union and the socialist states of Eastern Europe lurched toward pluralism in 1989–1990, the Vietnamese leadership, realizing they governed one of the few remaining socialist states in the world, began to lapse into a siege mentality. But the collapse of the Soviet Communist State in 1991 put an end to the party's ideologically based worldview.

Can a state that is rooted firmly in an antidemocratic ideology and led by a party that has lost the legitimacy it once had continue to adapt to the dizzying internal and external changes that are washing over Vietnam? Or will it confront the same kind of regime crisis that the former Soviet Union suffered under Gorbachev? The Vietnamese leadership need not concede that the SRV must go the way of the Gorbachev regime. Its erstwhile mortal enemy, China, provides an example that combines economic liberalization with a firm hand in opposing political pluralism. The two Asian socialist states appeared to be moving toward a new era of cooperation in 1990–1991 as common ideology and shared political concerns softened the ancient quarrels that had flared up in the 1970s and 1980s.

What this analysis of the Vietnamese political system suggests is that the SRV regime is, by a number of measures, notably weaker in the early 1990s than it was earlier in its history. In the past, culture, social structure, memories of social injustice, and colonial oppression in pre-revolutionary Vietnam and the role of the party and state in rallying popular support against foreign foes all gave the DRV a strong underlying political legitimacy that buffered it against domestic and foreign shocks. Now that buffer is gone, and the SRV is, therefore, likely to be extremely vulnerable to unexpected turbulence, even if it is relatively successful in the 1990s in bringing about rapid economic development.

Although the bulk of the writing was concentrated in the 1987-1990 period, this book is the product of research that has stretched over nearly two decades. My research on the Vietnamese Communist political system began with a visit to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in December/January 1974/75, and I returned to Vietnam after the war four times—in 1978, 1981, 1982, and 1984—primarily but not exclusively to research Vietnam’s foreign policy.

The Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Institute of International Relations, and the Committee on Social Sciences each hosted one or more of those research trips. In 1981 and 1982 I traveled as an Associate with the Indochina Project of the Center for International Policy; the U.S. Social Science Research Council provided the financial support for my 1984 trip.

I thank those friends and colleagues from whom I have learned the most about Vietnam over the years: George McT. Kahin, David W.P. Elliot, Christine Pelzer White, Carlyle Thayer, Jayne Werner, Nguyen Huu Dong, Motoo Furuta, David Marr, William S. Turley, Ngo Vinh Long, Tran Van Dinh, William Duiker, Nayan Chanda, Edwin Moise, and Huynh Kim Khanh, whose untimely death as the manuscript was being completed is a great loss to Vietnamese studies. Motoo Furuta of the University of Tokyo was exceptionally generous in sharing with me valuable documents from his personal collection. Dorothy Avery of the U.S. Department of State assisted me in obtaining some important translations of Vietnamese party documents from the department's files.

Motoo Furuta, David Marr, and William S. Turley read drafts of particular chapters, and I have profited from their suggestions for revision. George McT. Kahin and Ngo Vinh Long read and offered helpful comments on earlier drafts of the entire manuscript. I am deeply grateful to George Kahin, as teacher, editor, and friend, for his advice and for unfailing patience, support, and encouragement over the years. Special thanks are also due to my wife, Camille, for enduring many months of long, late hours on the book.

Gareth Porter