Changing worlds vietnams transition from cold war to globallization

Tai Lieu Chat Luong


Changing Worlds


A silent struggle was taking place between entrenched conservatism and the fragile new thinking.
“Hanoi Life under the Subsidy Economy, 1975–1986,” Museum of Ethnology, Hanoi, 2006–7.


Changing Worlds
Vietnam’s Transition From Cold War
to Globalization
David W. P. Elliott

1


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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Elliott, David W. P.
Changing worlds : Vietnam’s transition from the Cold War to globalization / David W.P. Elliott.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-538334-8
1. Vietnam—Politics and government—1975- 2. Vietnam—Foreign relations. 3. Vietnam—Economic policy—1975- 4. National
security—Vietnam. I. Title.
DS559.912.E45 2012
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2011052938
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To Mai
Who Shared the Journey
With Love


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Contents
Preface

ix

1. Introduction 3
2. On the Eve of Doi Moi Reform (1975–1986) 25
3. The Year of Living Dangerously (1989) 59
4. Changing Partners in a Changing World (1990–1991) 87
5. Wary Reconciliation (1992–1995) 125
6. Uncertain Transition (1996–1999) 157
7. Taking the Plunge (2000–2006) 189
8. A Strategy for the Twenty-First Century 231
9. Rhetoric and Reality 279
Notes
Index

333
391


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Preface

Although I wrote my graduate-school dissertation on the political system of the
Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), which focused largely on the decade

between 1954 and 1964—that is from the division of Vietnam at the end of the First
Indochina War to the escalation into direct US military action in the Second Indochina
War—I would be the first to admit the limits of my understanding of the subject, even
after extensive documentary research and interviews with a number of people who had
lived in North Vietnam during this period. So what led to the foolhardy decision to proceed with a second attempt to understand the notoriously secretive political system of
communist Vietnam?
In part, it was due to a gradual opening up of Vietnam to the outside world and the
fascination of watching what amounted to a Vietnamese version of glasnost, as more and
more veils of secrecy fell to the ground. In addition, as the process unfolded, the expanded
range of public issues, life choices, and diversity of opinion at all levels of society made
the study of Vietnam infinitely more interesting. Between my first visit to unified Vietnam in 1982, and my last substantial research trip, from December 2006 to January 2007,
extraordinary change occurred.
My 1982 visit was to a country still paranoid about foreigners and external threats, and
was marked by several tense encounters with the public security branch and police,
despite my status as an official guest of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. On the street, I
was routinely addressed as dong chi (comrade) because it was inconceivable to most
Vietnamese at the time that a foreign visitor would not be from a fraternal socialist
country. Even those who suspected that I was something different were at a loss as to the
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appropriate form of address for someone outside the familiar and restricted categories of
visitors, so “comrade” was a safe bet.
Normal social and personal contacts between Americans and citizens of Vietnam were
out of the question in 1982. A Hanoi meeting with my sister-in-law, who had joined the
Viet Minh and persevered in the jungles during the anti-French Resistance, was a stiff and

awkward affair, not least because the American connection put them under suspicion in
that politically tense era—despite the fact that the meeting was authorized at a very high
level. I feared it would not be possible to have a normal relationship with any citizen of
socialist Vietnam in my lifetime.
By 2007, after a number of intervening visits to Vietnam, mostly accompanied by my
wife, who had been raised in presocialist Hanoi, contacts with relatives were warm, familial, and unconstrained—even in the case of a first meeting with several families on the
maternal side of my wife’s clan, which included several who worked in the party ideological sector, and who had kept a discreet distance during earlier visits. By this time I had
developed close and cordial relations with a number of academics and government researchers whom I had met over the years. Far from being an illustration of the regime’s
fears of a drift toward “peaceful evolution” and slackening loyalties, the deep patriotism
and commitment to making the regime better, rather than undermining it, was a
prominent feature of the many Vietnamese who interacted easily and spontaneously with
foreigners—a far cry from the tense and wary encounters of 1982. It was an ease based on
a self-confidence that was not easy to sustain in the prereform period, and the product of
a major shift in the collective mindset of the Vietnamese elite during this period.
Looking back from the perspective of the relaxed and generally open Vietnam of
2007, the stifling and oppressive political atmosphere of 1982 seems very remote. Small
wonder that it is difficult for a younger generation of foreign scholars, and even younger
Vietnamese, to fully appreciate how far Vietnam has come in terms of liberalizing its
political system and adopting a posture of openness. Even though the coercive arm of the
regime is still active in suppressing dissidents and some religious and ethnic groups, and
direct inquiry into many sensitive political areas by foreign scholars is still not possible,
the extraordinary contrast between these two points in time underlines the profound
and extensive transformation that has taken place in Vietnam over the course of several
decades.
The 1982 trip was an outgrowth of an encounter with the Vietnamese delegation to an
international conference on Cambodia at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok in June
1980, led by the head of the Philosophy Institute, Pham Nhu Cuong. He was hardly an
armchair, ivory-tower philosopher. In Vietnam, “philosophy” was the study of MarxistLeninist dialectics, and Professor Cuong was the designated polemical heavy hitter who
would slug it out with the Chinese delegation to the conference at a time of very high
tensions (less than two years after the invasion and occupation of Cambodia by Vietnamese forces, Hanoi’s troops had just made an alleged incursion into Thai territory). Professor Cuong’s message was clear: Vietnam’s security had been intolerably threatened by

Preface

xi

China and its cat’s paw, Pol Pot. This was the face Vietnam presented to the outside world
at the time: fiercely combative, persuaded that any sign of conciliation would completely
unravel Vietnam’s position, and convinced that it was the world against Vietnam—a
stark life or death struggle between “us” and “them.”
I had edited a book which attempted to unravel Vietnam’s reasons for invading and
occupying Cambodia. Complex though these reasons were, from Hanoi’s perspective
they fit comfortably into a familiar paradigm; Vietnamese territory under threat from a
more powerful foreign enemy who, in collusion with local proxies, wanted to impose its
will on Vietnam’s policies and politics. Later, as the Cold War reached its terminal stage,
Vietnam concluded that this occupation was a strategic error of major proportions and
that its security would have to be achieved by other means, and based on fundamentally
different assumptions. That is the starting point of this book.
It was in Bangkok that I met for the first time Luu Doan Huynh, a long-time senior
analyst at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Institute of International Relations, then
serving in the Vietnamese embassy in Thailand. Over the course of many subsequent trips
to Vietnam, Mr. Huynh provided keen insight and sage counsel. A key figure in the
McNamara seminars on the Vietnam War held in Hanoi in the mid-1990s, the exceptional qualities of Mr. Huynh were very visible.1 He had also been involved in my June
1982 trip to Vietnam. My very presence in Vietnam at that time evidently had been the
subject of political debate between some officials, who wanted to diversify Vietnam’s foreign contacts and begin to open up to the larger world beyond their socialist and Third
World friends, and other conservative officials who felt that this trip was a gratuitous
concession to someone who had once been in the enemy camp, was a “complicated element” who did not fit clearly into the framework of “friend or enemy,” and who could
provide an opening for subversion through undesirable contacts with Vietnamese citizens. My contacts were carefully limited to meetings with members of various state
social-science institutes and government officials, who were impressive and articulate, but
very restricted in the parameters of permissible topics and ideas, especially in conversation with an American visitor.

What I encountered in 1982 was a closed society, beleaguered and aggrieved in its dealings with much of the outside world, in a high state of political tension and, though I did
not fully understand it at the time, sharply divided about how to resolve the many domestic and external problems it faced. Still, that impressive group of specialists I encountered
in the institutes and elsewhere showed that Vietnam had a rich endowment of human
resources, if only they could be allowed to realize their potential by removing the political, ideological, and organizational obstacles that limited their contributions to Vietnam’s development in the era before the doi moi reforms.
In retrospect, one of the most interesting meetings during this trip was with the then
minister of culture, Tran Do, who was a former deputy political commissar of the guerrilla forces in the South during the war. Do became the highest-ranking political dissident in Vietnam prior to his death in 2002. In 1982, however, General Do appeared


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bemused to be sitting in his office at the Ministry of Culture talking with a former member of US military intelligence and employee of the Rand Corporation in Vietnam about
Do’s intransigent tract on the dangers of cultural subversion (in which foreigners played
a prominent part), which had recently been published, and his role in the Tet Offensive.
Among the people I met on that trip, he was the last person that I could imagine becoming a fervent democracy advocate. Although there are many distinctive reasons for
Tran Do’s political and ideological transformation, and though he went much farther
than most in his advocacy of political reform, it does parallel some of the broader but less
extreme changes that took place in the Vietnamese elite in the period from the early
1980s into the new century.
My 1982 visit was jointly sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) and
the State Commission for the Social Sciences (SCSS, as it was known then, before it
became the National Center for the Social Sciences and Humanities and then the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences). My liaison with MOFA was a veteran of Dien Bien
Phu, the resourceful Le Trung Nghia, whose imposing demeanor and revolutionary credentials helped overcome the initial resistance of some who were either opposed to the
idea of my visit, or reluctant to take the risk of being implicated with it, in the event
political tides shifted once again. I met with Nguyen Khanh Toan, the director of SCSS;
Dao Van Tap of the SCSS; Huu Tho, deputy editor of Nhan Dan; Duong Hong Hien, a
prominent agricultural specialist (and, unbeknown to him, a cousin of my wife), who was
in the South to do surveys and studies related to the ill-fated attempt to collectivize agriculture there; Le Cong Binh; Nguyen Khac Vien, the editor of Vietnamese Studies and
interpreter of Vietnam to the outside world; Hoang Nguyen; and Tran Do, minister of

culture. Historian Phan Gia Ben was helpful during my stay in Ho Chi Minh City, as was
historian Luu Phuong Thanh. The topic of most of my interviews was revolutionary history, and I did not pursue the issues of reform and international relations that are the
subject of the present book.
The first major academic conference in the social sciences involving both Western academics and Vietnamese officials, academics, and analysts was organized and funded by
the US Social Science Research Council in June 1990, after some delay and after a crucial
round of vigorous debate about economic reform had somewhat subsided.2 Over the
course of this conference I was introduced to many of the key figures in Vietnam’s reform
process. I was fortunate to be in Vietnam and Cambodia in 1991 with former senator
Dick Clark, who met with a number of top leaders in both countries at this critical phase
of terminating Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia.
I also had the good fortune to participate in the larger US–Vietnam dialogue project
organized by Senator Clark and sponsored by the Aspen Institute. In visits to Vietnam
and various conferences involving American and Vietnamese officials in other locales, I
met political figures, notables, and academics who would play a remarkable role in the
story of Vietnam’s opening to the outside and in its internal reform process, called doi
moi or “renovation.” Two of the most intrepid and admirable were the mathematician


Preface

xiii

Phan Dinh Dieu and the reform economist Le Dang Doanh, pioneering advocates of
ideas that were far ahead of their time, both politically and intellectually. These two
models of integrity are true “profiles in courage.” Even if they did not carry the day in the
lonely and politically exposed early years of reform, the example of their ultimate impact
on Vietnam’s adaptation to a new world, even when their bold advocacy threatened
their personal interests, reinforced my views about the importance of ideas in political
behavior.
I should also mention encounters with two remarkable figures in Vietnamese diplomacy in the context of various trips and conferences organized by Senator Clark; Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach, a shrewd and skillful statesman, whose brilliant and

controversial tenure in this office ran aground on the shoals of Vietnam’s complex politics, and his apparent successor, Deputy Foreign Minister Le Mai, whose untimely death
cut short a very promising career. I first met Foreign Minister Thach in a brief but memorable encounter on the flight from Bangkok to Hanoi on my 1982 trip. It was clear that
he was very supportive of my visit and the opening up it portended. I subsequently
learned that there were other officials who had a quite different view. In 1991, I sat in on
a meeting between Senator Clark and Thach, during which Thach underlined his commitment to reform and outreach by presenting Clark with a published Vietnamese
translation of Paul Samuelson’s classic introductory textbook on economics, which
Thach had commissioned.
John McAuliff, founder of the Indochina Reconciliation Project, played a notable role
in trying to maintain open lines of communication between Vietnam and the outside
world. I joined a tour group that he led, visiting Cambodia and Laos, which resulted in
several important contacts in those countries. Mary McDonnell, Vietnam program director of the Social Science Research Council, arranged support for many academic exchanges, which was also helpful in this regard, including the 1990 social sciences
conference mentioned above.
In 1994, on a brief visit to Hanoi, I had unusual feedback on what I thought was the
esoteric topic of Vietnam’s “strategic culture,” in a curious meeting requested by a very
high-ranking official of Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security. He was under the impression that “strategic culture” meant “strategy of culture” (which is the only way it could be
translated into Vietnamese), and that the paper was a cryptic blueprint for an Americansponsored plot of cultural subversion of Vietnam. This accelerated my interest in the
subject of “peaceful evolution,” which was emerging as a primary concern to many Vietnamese leaders just at that time—though it had been prefigured by Tran Do’s writings on
“decadent culture” in the early 1980s.
My education in the economic dimension of Vietnam’s external policies was furthered
by a research trip to Vietnam in the summer of 1995, funded by the Haynes Foundation.
I was accompanied by my Pomona colleague Stephen Marks, a specialist in American
policies on trade and development, who subsequently focused his Southeast Asian
research on Indonesia. In this respect, I must also express gratitude for the pioneering


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work of Adam Fforde on Vietnam’s economic reforms, and Dang Phong’s work on economic history of the reform period. This trip provided valuable insight on Vietnam’s

efforts to integrate into the global and regional economy.
The International Conference on Vietnamese Studies met in Hanoi in July 1998. Up to
that date, it was the largest international gathering of academic researchers on Vietnam.
The National University of Hanoi and the National Center for Social Sciences and the
Humanities in Vietnam cosponsored the conference. The venerable revolutionary icon
General Vo Nguyen Giap put his stamp of approval on this venture by his prominent
keynote appearance. The conference was organized by Professor Phan Huy Le and his
remarkable Center for Cooperation, which facilitated various academic exchanges—a
pioneering venture in the opening up of academic ties between Vietnam and the United
States, Europe, and Japan. Professor Le is a truly extraordinary person, who has helped to
create an entire academic field in Vietnam (he was one of the “four pillars” of the Vietnamese history faculty which was founded after 1954), and led the way in the opening up of
Vietnam to scholarly exchange. I was astounded by his vast knowledge and extraordinary
range of contacts throughout the entire Vietnamese political elite, which did so much to
facilitate my research in the most sensitive area of Vietnamese life, its security and diplomatic policies, even though this subject was not in the mainstream of academic exchanges,
and the sensitivity of this project had a considerable potential downside for whoever sponsored it—even for someone of the unique eminence and prestige of Professor Le. His
extensive networks of personal connections with leading figures in every sphere of Vietnamese life gave me a sense of the distinctive intimacy of intra-elite connections because of
the relatively small size of the political and cultural elite, and its concentration in Hanoi,
Hue, and Ho Chi Minh City. Thanks to these contacts, I was able to talk with a number of
people outside the normal orbit of an international-relations specialist, such as Dr. Chu
Hao, vice minister of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment, and a number
of distinguished historians.
Prof. Le’s pathbreaking 1998 conference on Vietnamese Studies and the Enhancement
of International Cooperation certainly marked a turning point in the growing evolution
of an “epistemic community,” linking Vietnam and foreign scholars. It was a privilege to
cochair a panel at this conference with General Nguyen Dinh Uoc, director of Vietnam’s
Institute of Military History. At this conference I also met Dr. Nguyen Huu Nguyen, a
prominent military historian, and a former combatant in My Tho province in the Mekong
Delta, where I had lived for four years during the war. He introduced me to some important memoirs and to the historiography of the war in that area, which provided valuable
insights for my research on the subject. Dr. Nguyen, attached to the Ho Chi Minh City
Social Sciences and Humanities Center, accompanied me on a tour of that province in

2006. Encounters like this would have been hard to imagine in earlier times, as he pointed
out in an article he wrote after the 1998 conference about the novelty of the unscripted
“corridor meeting” between two scholars who had served in the military forces of the
opposing sides of the Vietnam War.


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Research trips in 1999 and 2000 were made possible by a generous grant from the Smith
Richardson Foundation, which supported extensive travel throughout most of Northeast
and Southeast Asia, to meet with academic and government specialists knowledgeable
about Vietnam, and to do further interviews in Vietnam. These interviews made it clear
that Vietnam had taken further substantial steps in moving toward regional integration,
including the security and political spheres, though it was also apparent that Vietnam’s
partners and interlocutors still perceived that the SRV leadership was hesitant to take the
final plunge into deep global integration. This research provided the basis of chapters 5
and 6 of this book (“Wary Reconciliation” and “Uncertain Transition”), which focus on
the critical period of the mid- and late 1990s, when Vietnam was struggling with the question of whether or not to opt decisively for deep integration into a globalizing world.
My 2006–7 visit was part of an academic exchange between Pomona College, where I
teach, and Vietnam National University in Hanoi, funded by the Luce Foundation and
facilitated by the American Council of Learned Societies. My host, professor and dean of
the Faculty of International Relations, Pham Quang Minh, was a gracious and dynamic
scholar heading up Vietnam’s Faculty of International Relations. His students were exceptionally bright and well informed, and they indicate that Vietnam’s future leaders will
have an even more sophisticated grasp of the global environment in which they are situated than those who went before. Professor Minh spent a semester in 2006 at Pomona
College. He facilitated my 2006–7 visit to Vietnam, sponsored in part by the same ACLS
grant that had brought Professor Minh to Pomona College, and introduced me to a wide
range of academics and government officials. I had the honor of being invited to give a
lecture to the students in the Faculty of International Relations at the University of

Hanoi during this stay. In 1982, this faculty did not exist, and it would have be inconceivable for an American professor to have such access to Vietnam’s premier university, which
had long been insulated from the outside world out of a concern that it might become the
conduit for unwanted ideas infiltrating Vietnam. It was through Dean Minh that I had
the opportunity to meet and interview his predecessor, Vu Duong Ninh, who was in
many ways the founder of the academic program of study of international relations in
Vietnam.
Academic contacts in many of my visits were made through the National Center for
Social Sciences and Humanities. In this regard, I must especially thank Nguyen Duy Quy,
director of the National Center for Social Sciences and Humanities, and Nguyen Duy
Thong, director of the International Cooperation Department of that organization, and,
of course Nguyen Khanh Toan, the director of the precursor State Commission on the
Social Sciences in 1982, during my first visit to postwar Vietnam.
MOFA cosponsored my 1982 trip, and was a frequent point of contact for interviews
and insights in succeeding years. I would like to acknowledge my thanks to foreign ministers (the late) Nguyen Co Thach, Nguyen Manh Cam, Nguyen Dy Nien, and (the late)
deputy foreign minister Le Mai, as well as leading ministry officials Nguyen Manh Hung,
Pham Cao Phong, Tran Minh Tuan, and Nguyen Van Tho.
 

 


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The specialists at Vietnam’s Institute of International Relations (IIR), the think tank
and training center of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, were generous with their time and
ideas over the course of a number of visits: the perceptive senior analysts Luu Doan
Huynh and Phan Doan Nam, and IIR directors Vu Duong Huan, deputy directors Dao
Huy Ngoc, Bui Thanh Son, and Nguyen Ngoc Dien; Ha Hong Hai, deputy editor of

International Studies Review; Pham Cao Phong, in his capacity as coordinator of the
International Peace and Security Studies Program. I am also indebted to the insights of
IIR analysts Hoang Anh Tuan, Le Linh Lan, Nguyen Thai Yen Huong, Luan Thuy
Duong, and Nguyen Duc Duong, as well as Nguyen Vu Tung, who accompanied Luu
Doan Huynh for my final interview with him.
In the sphere of economic issues, I was greatly assisted by Dang Phong who, in addition
to his own research on which I relied, introduced me to Phan Van Tiem, deputy director
of the State Finance and Currency Council, and Tran Phuong, a leading economic policymaker of the prereform era. On a 1995 visit to focus on economic issues, Vo Dai Luoc and
Le Van Sang of the International Economy Institute, Le Nhat Thuc of the Foreign Trade
Institute, and Luu Bich Ho of the State Planning Commission were informative.
Among other key research institutes and their members who shared their expertise were
Dr. Pham Duc Thanh, Chu Viet Cuong, and Pham Nguyen Long at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Do Duc Dinh and the Institute of African Studies, Dao Tri Uc and the
Institute of Law and Government, and officials of the umbrella state organization that coordinated them, known throughout much of this period as the State Committee on Social
Science Research. I was also able to meet with members of the External Relations of the National Assembly thanks to Nghiem Vu Khai, Tran Van Phac, and Nguyen Thi Ngoc Phuong.
Although it was difficult to arrange meetings in the army and security sectors of Vietnam, I am indebted to the following for agreeing to meet with me: Security Ministry:
Senior Colonel Nguyen Quang Binh (director general of the International Relations
Department), Cuc truong, Cuc Quan he Quoc te, Ministry of Defense: Senior Colonel
Le The My (head of international studies, Department of the Institute for Military
Strategy), Senior Colonel Dr. Nguyen Vinh Tu (senior researcher, Institute for Military
Strategy). People’s Army Newspaper: editorial writer and international-relations commentator Ho Quang Loi. Meetings with members of the Party Central Committee’s External
Relations section, Bui The Giang, Le Vinh Thu and Nguyen Xuan Son were interesting,
as were conversations with members of the Ho Chi Minh National Political Academy to
discuss the role of ideology.
In documenting the analysis in this study, I have relied primarily on written sources,
but the interviews with those mentioned above were crucial in getting a better understanding of underlying issues and personalities involved in the fascinating collective dialogue about Vietnam’s appropriate response to the disappearance of the familiar Cold
War world, and its venture into uncharted waters. I have also relied on some crucial
documents circulated on the internet, whose provenance and authenticity cannot be
 

 

 

 


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confirmed with absolute certainty. Given the long tradition of politically inspired fabrication in Vietnam, it would be foolhardy to insist that the reader can place absolute
confidence in these sources, although I been able to verify the authenticity of most of
them with reasonable certainty. The exceptional and unprecedented access these documents provide into the once-impenetrable inner world of Vietnamese politics means
that neglecting these sources would deprive us of key insights.
The trail leading toward a deeper understanding of Vietnamese politics and society
has been blazed by a number of distinguished scholars, to whom I owe a deep intellectual and personal debt for their inspiration and generosity. David Marr introduced me
to the academic study of Vietnam, and is a pioneer in the study of Vietnamese history
who has left an indelible mark on the field. Carlyle Thayer is perhaps the best-informed
student of contemporary Vietnamese politics and a leading authority on foreign policy
and the Vietnamese military. I have relied heavily on the provocative and elegantly
argued work of Adam Fforde on the Vietnamese economy, among others. Bill Turley,
Brantly Womack, Ben Kerkvliet, Gareth Porter, Jayne Werner, Hy Van Luong, Mark
Sidel, Lew Stern, and Nguyen Manh Hung are scholars with whom I have had
long-standing and gratifying personal associations, and whose work has influenced my
own—along with other scholars who I have not had close personal ties with, such as
Heonik Kwan, whose brilliant studies of Vietnamese society heavily influenced the
final chapter of this book.
Murray Hiebert was one of the best-informed journalists during this period. As the
reader will discover, I greatly profited from a number of perceptive journalists who
reported on some of the most sensitive political issues of the times, which foreign academics were rarely able to penetrate. Along with Hiebert’s Chasing The Tigers, Robert

Templer’s Shadow and Wind, Bill Hayton’s Rising Dragon, and David Lamb’s Vietnam
Now are penetrating studies of changing Vietnam. Nayan Chanda’s Brother Enemy
remains a classic.
In addition to the many interviews done in Vietnam, I traveled extensively in Asia to
talk with specialists on Vietnam and the region to get their informed and close-up views
of Vietnam’s post–Cold War transformation, thanks to the generous grant from the
Smith Richardson Foundation. They are listed below, generally (though not in every
case) after the country in which the interviews took place, even when the person interviewed was not a citizen of that country.
Australia: Alan Behm, Greg Polson, Peter Calver, Rosemary Greaves. Paul Dibb,
Miles Kupa, Bill O’Malley, David Glass, Ben Kerkvliet, David Marr, Frank Frost.
Cambodia: Lao Mong Hay, Kao Kim Hourn, Khieu Kannarith, Uch Kiman, Chan
Prasith.
China: Beijing: Dao Shulin, Gu Yuanyang, Han Feng, Jai DuQiang, Lin Zhonghan,
Pan Wei, Yu Xiang, Zhao Baoxu, Zhang Xizhen. Shanghai: Ma Ying, Tian Zhongqin,
Wu Xinbo, Yang Jiemian. Quangxi: Gu Xiaosong, Nong Lifu, Wei Hui.
 

 


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Indonesia: Kusnanto Anggoro, H.D. Assegaff, Bantaro Bandoro, Hashim Djalal,
Clara Joewono, Hadi Soesastro, Rizal Sukma, Jusuf Wanandi.
Japan: Yasuo Endo, Motoo Furuta, Isao Kishi, Hirohide Kurihara, Hisashi Nakatomi,
Kurt Radke, Masaya Shiraishi, Yoshihide Soeya, Seichiro Takagi, Okabe Tatsumi, Susuma
Yamagagi.
Laos: Soubanh Srithirath.

Malaysia: Zakaria Ahmad, Chandran Jeshurun, J.N. Mak, K.S. Nathan, Lee Po Ping.
Republic of Korea: Bae Geung Chan, Yong Kyun Cho, Dong-Ju Choi, Dong-Hwi
Lee, Lee Yong-joon, Insun Yu, Suk Ryul Yu.
Singapore: Amitav Acharya, Khong Yuen Foong, Melina Nathan, David Koh, Ang
Cheng Guan, Kwa Chong Guan, Russell Heng, Kishore Mahbubani, Tin Maung Maung
Than.
Taiwan: Chen Hurng Yu, Robert Hsieu, Lin Yu-fang.
Thailand: Boonsrang Niumpradit, Kavi Chongkittavorn, Khien Theeravit, Kusuma
Snitwongse, Piti Kumpoopong, Pranee Thiparat, Sihasak Phuangketkeow, Suchit Bunbongkarn, M.R. Sukumbhand Paribatra, Vutti Vuttisant, Withaya Sucharithanarugse.
United States: US Department of State: Dorothy Avery, Desaix Anderson, Jim Bruno,
Ray Burghardt, Michael Eiland, Denis Harter, Pete Peterson, Karen Stewart. US Department of Defense: John Bose, Pete Bostwick, John Cole, Frank Miller, Phuong Pierson,
Tom Racquer, Howie Tran, Tim Wright.
Finally, I would like to thank the people at Oxford University Press who made this
book possible. Foremost among these is Dave McBride, executive editor for law and politics, whose interest in the manuscript was crucial, and whose extremely perceptive and
patient editorial guidance made it a much better book. I owe him a profound debt of
gratitude for his support and encouragement. Caelyn Cobb, assistant editor for law and
politics at OUP managed the very complex production process with efficiency and great
skill. Venkat Raghavan Srinivasa Raghavan at TNQ, was instrumental in coordinating
the final phase of copyediting, which was done by Michael Durnin with exceptional
sensitivity and meticulous attention to the many pitfalls of a manuscript replete with
many references in the Vietnamese language.
 


Changing Worlds


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1
Introduction

In the aftermath of the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the unification of Vietnam under
Hanoi’s communist rule, its leaders’ world view was decisively shaped by the external context of the Cold War. The origins of that conflict were already evident at the time Vietnam’s
August 1945 revolution launched the three-decade struggle that would lead to independence and a commitment to building a communist regime. As the newly unified Vietnam
embarked in 1976 on an ambitious program of socialist construction in the North and
socialist transformation in the South, top party officials had a clear view of its objectives
and strategy, the nature of international relations, and Vietnam’s place in the world.
Although the Sino-Soviet split had already shaken the ideological foundations of the
high Cold War period, and deteriorating relations with China and conflict with Cambodia
had injected an element of geostrategic complexity into the world of ideological orthodoxy
that had guided Vietnam’s revolutionary leaders, it was not until the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the end of the Cold War that a profound and comprehensive rethinking of all
elements of Vietnam’s foreign and strategic policies, along with critical aspects of its
political, social, and economic life, was forced on them.
Economic stagnation in the early 1980s had already stimulated a substantial reevaluation of the Vietnamese Communist Party’s policy orthodoxy, culminating in a sweeping
program of economic reform, initiated in 1986. These reforms, however, had still been
legitimized by parallel efforts in the Soviet Union and China, and did not in themselves
fundamentally challenge the world view of Vietnam’s communist leaders.
The beginning of a fundamental shift in the system of international relations was evident by the mid-1980s and provided another reason to question the hitherto accepted
3


4

Changing Worlds

world view of the Vietnamese party leaders. Gareth Porter’s seminal analysis of this
period notes that the then party leader, Le Duan, generally regarded as a pillar of orthodoxy on the subject of the irreconcilable divide between the communist and capitalist

worlds, had conceded by mid-1984 that “Vietnam was building socialism in a ‘new world
situation’”1 But Porter also notes that despite these early harbingers of “new thinking” in
the mid- and late 1980s Vietnamese party leaders “did not completely abandon their view
of the world as a struggle between two systems, and there were signs of lingering ambivalence among Hanoi’s leaders about how much emphasis should be placed on the overriding importance of the global economy and the orthodox theme of struggle” with the
capitalist world.2 This book will trace the gradual displacement of the old world-view of
the party elite by the new thinking which now dominates the scene, despite pockets of
resistance on the part of an “old guard”—now reduced in numbers and influence.
Nearly two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the
communist bloc, Vietnam’s party theoreticians insist that the great changes in domestic and
foreign policy that followed 1989 are still consistent with the tenets of Marxism-Leninism.
Is this only a front devised by Vietnam’s rulers to downplay or to hide from its citizens the
collapse of a vanished world and discredited ideology, or does it still affect the beliefs and
actions of Vietnam’s leadership?
Are today’s party leaders schizophrenics who simultaneously inhabit parallel universes?
Have they built a new system on the shaky foundations of the old, without consideration
for the possible instability that this architectural and conceptual contradiction might
entail? Or does pragmatism rule the day, leaving the reformers a free hand as long as they
pay lip service to the old formulas?
On the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, Los Angeles
Times journalist David Lamb wrote an article titled “War Is History for Vibrant Vietnam,”
which opened by stating that “Thirty years after the fall of Saigon, the firmly communist
nation has a flourishing economy, social freedom and deep ties with the U.S. Half the
nearly 83 million people in Vietnam were born after Saigon fell.” Lamb apparently is using
“it’s history” in a distinctly American sense; if it is “history,” it is no longer relevant to
today’s concerns and has been largely forgotten. His article posed the question, “So what
have the decades since brought to a country that Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay once
suggested the United States should bomb “back to the Stone Age”?” His answer was,
“Ironically, if you took away the still-ruling Communist Party and discounted the perilous
decade after the war, the Vietnam of today is not much different from the country U.S.
policymakers wanted to create in the 1960s.” Lamb characterized the Vietnam of 2005 as

a “peaceful, stable presence in the Pacific Basin,” noting the substantial reduction in the
size of its army and a strong market-driven economy with a flourishing private sector and
growing middle class. “The United States is a major trading partner, and Americans are
welcomed with a warmth that belies the two countries’ history.”3
Could it be that the ideological passions and intense political commitments of revolutionary Vietnam have vanished with hardly a trace? Has Vietnam become merely another


Introduction

5

Asian soft-authoritarian regime, with its state economic sector largely reduced to a form
of crony capitalism? Is Vietnam today more or less what it would have become if the
Saigon side had won—except with a different leadership group in control? Was the
struggle only about who ruled, not how they ruled?
The reader should be cautioned that this book in no way is intended as a triumphalist
tract proving that the Vietnamese revolutionaries have seen the error of their previous
ways and are in the process of becoming “us.” It does not accept or support the “end of
history” view that there is only one destination for Vietnam and all other countries in the
world to reach. On the contrary, the era of globalization is characterized by its unleashing
of forces of diversity along with its homogenizing tendencies. As a result of globalization,
Vietnam has a widely expanded repertoire of models and examples to choose from in
responding to the challenges and opportunities of globalization. In addition, the societal
changes set in motion in Vietnam in the past several decades by internal factors have in
many ways led to a return to distinctive cultural practices and ideas that had gone underground during the Cold War and Vietnam’s prolonged revolutionary struggle, as the final
chapter of this book will discuss.
In 1976, no informed observer in Vietnam would have anticipated a world without an
“order” that expressed the main ideological division of the time, between communism
and capitalism, imperialism and “progressive humanity.” The driving forces of global
change had been laid out by Marx and supplemented by Lenin. Friends and enemies were

sharply defined and the conflict between them was an essential feature of the dynamics of
international relations. A Vietnamese foreign policy based on the undiscriminating idea
of being friends with all who would be friends with it would have jarred the confrontational instincts and attitudes of a triumphant leadership, still savoring the heady experience of defeating the formidable leader of the imperialist world. The idea of Vietnam
(and China, along with a shrunken non-Marxist Russia) participating in an interdependent global market economy and joining the World Trade Organization, founded on
capitalist principles, would have seemed fantastic. Membership in the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) would likewise have been unthinkable. As for the
United States, what was sought was not access to the huge American market (and even a
low-key security relationship, with visits by the US Navy and the Secretary of Defense)
but reparations for war-inflicted damage.
Since this book takes the year 1975 as the starting point of the study of Vietnam’s transformation over the next three decades, it is helpful to remind ourselves of the mindset of
Vietnam’s leaders in the heady period following the military victory in Vietnam. Adam
Fforde and Stefan de Vylder write: “After national reunification in 1975, the Vietnamese
national leadership was composed of individuals whose political education had occurred
during the 1930s. People talk about the time just after reunification as being intoxicating,
a time when people could seriously imagine that Vietnam could become an industrialized
country by the year 2000, ‘after four to five Five Year Plans.’”4 This would not, however,
take place in a placid or benign international environment. Continued antagonism


6

Changing Worlds

between the socialist and capitalist worlds was assumed, despite the end of the armed
conflict involving Vietnam. Growing tensions between China and Vietnam complicated
this world view, but they only intensified Hanoi’s view that its development would
happen despite the international environment, not because of it.
Many years ago, Professor Arnold Wolfers posited the difference between two conceptions of international relations and national security. The first was a traditional
view of the centrality of “possession goals”—the defense (or conquest) of territory and
the protection (or undermining) of national sovereignty and independence. “Milieu

goals” are more abstract, and involve attempts to create a regional or international environment that advances national interests and, unlike the possession paradigm, can be
win–win rather than zero sum. In today’s terms, the best example would be China’s
(and Vietnam’s) conclusion that stable regional and global environments are essential
for the international economic prosperity that has become the lynchpin of their economic development strategy.
As I have argued elsewhere, Vietnam has traditionally viewed its national security in
very conventional terms, of protection of territory from encroaching powers (China,
France, the U.S.) or seizing territory to expand the realm to the south (the Nam Tien, or
Southward March). Vietnam’s rulers have traditionally viewed international relations in
starkly realist terms; a world of power and contestation, in which the “strong did what
they will and the weak did what they must.”5
It might be said that periodic decisions at various historical periods to acquiesce in a
Chinese-dominated “system” or regional environment was in some ways similar to the
current decision to join the U.S.-dominated system of international relations. But
Vietnam’s strategic thinking until quite recently has been almost exclusively focused on
how to defuse the threat from a larger power and how to manipulate power balances to
best advantage in order to defend its own territory, sovereignty, and independence—the
emotional slogan that galvanized Vietnam’s political class in 1945 and continues to
resonate even in today’s interdependent world.
Charles Tilly memorably said that war shaped the modern state: “the state made
war and war made the state.” Creating military power tended “to promote territorial
consolidation, centralization, differentiation of the instruments of government, and
monopolization of the instruments of coercion, all the fundamental state making processes.”6 Although Tilly’s focus was primarily the formation of the modern European
state, it can apply to the modern Vietnamese state, which was created from revolution
and consolidated in war against external intervention. A political system designed to
assert independence may find it difficult to adjust to the constraints of interdependence which characterize the current international system. The shift from a total focus
on political and military security to economic growth requires different processes and
institutions than the garrison state.
And yet, the picture of a dramatic shift from assertive sovereignty to constraining
interdependence is somewhat misleading in the case of Vietnam. Precisely because of the