The Old Revolutionaries of Vietnam (Page 2)

It is difficult to discern the truth across these cultural divides. Scholars like Gabriel Kolko have predicted the disintegration of the Vietnamese Communist Party for decades, but the political situation by most accounts is stable, even improved. Thao Griffiths, a 30-year-old who directs the Hanoi office of Vietnam Veterans of America, reminded me of certain fundamentals on my first day adjusting to the new Hanoi. "Since thirty years ago when you were first here, we have motorbikes in addition to bicycles, cellphones more than land lines, an Internet, and most of our population like myself was born after the wars. It has been a time to catch up in peace." As for Hanoi's accepting the WTO, Thao said, "We knew the mechanism was not fair, but the strategic reason is that we had to get inside. We didn't really have 'normal' economic relations with the US until 2006, for four decades. Even last year, Bush was saying America should have stayed the course in Vietnam." Thao herself reflected postwar Vietnam: fluent in English and a former Fulbright scholar, she spent two years at the Vietnam veterans' office in Washington, DC, deeply involved in the normalization process. She has two children with her Australian husband, Patrick, a researcher for the United Nations. Her little boy, Liem, immediately befriended our 7-year-old Liam on sleepovers and trips to fabled Ha Long Bay.

Vietnam's annual economic growth of 7-8 percent in recent years has been remarkable, though it has come at the price of rising inequalities, a pattern in many other countries under neoliberalism. Per capita GDP has risen from $200 in 1993 to $835 last year. That's still less than $2 per day for most Vietnamese, but it comes close to removing Vietnam from the World Bank's category of the poorest nations. The Vietnamese government estimated foreign direct investment at $13 billion in 2007, the highest investors being South Korea, the British Virgin Islands (a conduit for offshore Hong Kong money) and Singapore. Poverty has fallen from 58 percent to 20 percent, though the majority of ethnic minorities and rural Vietnamese still live in poverty, and growth has created catastrophic problems of infrastructure, traffic congestion and pollution.

The party introduced its drastic doi moi market policies in 1986, a "renovation" plan that opened doors to private foreign investment and a Gorbachev-style internal perestroika. An exhaustive European study concluded in 2006 that a remarkable result of the doi moi reforms has been "the absence of organized social opposition among workers, peasants and youth. They are generally content with their growing economic opportunities."

Of course, Vietnam is a one-party state that closely monitors the Internet and pockets of dissent among religious and ethnic groups. But the institutional controls have been steadily relaxed since the 1970s, with none of the uprisings that accompanied the fall of Soviet or Eastern European Communism. Nor has there been a Tiananmen Square in Hanoi. "Democratic debate within the party and within the National Assembly, as well as personal freedoms, have made much progress since the war," observes John McAuliff, a reconstruction specialist who has made an estimated fifty trips to the country. "It's true that it wouldn't be wise to stand up on a soapbox and advocate the overthrow of the government," says Lady Borton, a longtime American expatriate and translator in Hanoi. "But there is widespread criticism of the party leaders on all levels in private and in the press," whom she describes as "bulldogs." In an observation I shared, Borton described Vietnam as "a place of constant talk, all the time, and they talk freely."

Kent Wong, the director of UCLA's labor studies center, discerns a positive spirit among Vietnam's working class based on taking several union delegations to Vietnam. "I've seen poverty in many developing countries, and Vietnam is different. There are no shantytowns," Wong says. Vietnamese unions, Wong acknowledges, are not constituted as adversarial bargaining units, but the many members he has interviewed have high morale. "Four years ago when I was there, they had a plan to organize 1 million more workers in the public sector, and they actually met the goal," he says. Wide income disparities prevail in the private sector, but inequalities in the public sector are less pronounced. Wong, who wants to turn the AFL-CIO away from its lingering cold war (and CIA-financed) heritage of anti-Communism toward Vietnam and China, is working to build direct worker-to-worker relationships to foster labor solidarity strategies in the age of globalization.

To make sense of the contradictions between Vietnam's grinding poverty and rising affluence, between defeating Americans in war but joining the WTO in peace, one must consider Vietnam's history. Perhaps no country in the modern world has suffered the sorrows of war more heavily and for a longer consecutive period than Vietnam. Leaving out the century of French colonialism, the Vietnamese survived, even prevailed, during the Japanese occupation in World War II, the nine-year war against French reconquest (365,000 battle deaths), the fifteen-year war with the Americans (2.1 million battle deaths) and the ten-year war with Pol Pot's Cambodia and China in the 1980s. Millions of Vietnamese died of famine as well, or lived with hunger and deprivation as everyday experiences. After the American war, at least 38,000 more Vietnamese were killed by unexploded bombs and landmines, and countless numbers continue to live with the deformities resulting from 20 million gallons of dioxin-laced Agent Orange and other defoliants. Their sufferings are beyond Western imagination. All this sacrifice was accepted as either a duty in the war for independence or a reality to be accepted and survived. It was accompanied by the deep personalized pain of Vietnamese killing one another, not simply the French or American invaders. At least 185,000 Saigon soldiers died, for example, dishonored as the losing side.

Here, perhaps, is the explanation for Vietnam's two-decade quest to achieve something resembling a normal life, to avoid exclusion from the world community. This memory is why they believe normalization with the United States, accession to the WTO and a (nonpermanent) seat on the UN Security Council are strategic "victories" on a long road to recovery. It is a matter of great pride that a Vietnamese Bronze Age drum is placed at the entrance to the UN Security Council today.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.