Vietnam's Contradictions

Andrew J. Pierre

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2000

Article preview: first 500 of 5,769 words total.

Summary:  Despite recently signing the long-awaited trade deal with the United States, Vietnam's communist leadership is split by uncertainty about the country's economic and political future. Without an economic overhaul soon, Vietnam risks being relegated to the global dustbin. Officials, however, remain wary of too much international engagement and know that capitalism would destroy the one-party state. Change in Vietnam is inevitable. But it will occur through an evolution, not a revolution.

Andrew J. Pierre recently spent four months in Vietnam at the Institute of International Relations of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He is Senior Associate at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy and Adjunct Professor in the National Security Studies Program, both at Georgetown University.

NOT A SYNDROME, BUT A COUNTRY

In November, President Clinton will become the first U.S. president to set foot in a unified Vietnam. His visit will finally draw American attention to a country that is vastly different from the one many remember. Contemporary Vietnam is characterized by paradoxes and contradictions. The bustling streets of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are packed with youth on Honda Dream motorbikes, weaving between the bicycle-taxis and the many peddlers balancing enormous pyramids of vegetables or other wares. The energy is palpable: 60 percent of Vietnam's population is under 30 years of age, and 85 percent is under 40.

But first impressions are often misleading, and appearances frequently deceive. The vibrant and hard-working younger Vietnamese love to congregate at the many "cybercafes" or more modest street-front computer rental shops. But this country of 80 million people -- the 12th most populous in the world -- still has fewer than 60,000 Internet subscribers, two-thirds of which are ministries and other governmental or Communist Party institutions. An hour on the Internet costs more than the average Vietnamese earns in a day (per capita GNP in 1999 was $320). When one looks into those cybercafes and sees very little "surfing" going on (a lot of word-processing and games instead), the Internet revolution appears a long way from opening Vietnamese society to the outside world.

In the early to mid-1990s, the Vietnamese economy seemed to be opening, and many foreign investors rushed in with high expectations of future growth. But as a result of Vietnam's three-year-old economic decline, these investors have mostly disappeared. The newly built hotels and office buildings that now stand empty starkly symbolize the lowered expectations.

Many Vietnamese would welcome the economic opportunities that increased foreign investment would create. But the country's leadership has been hesitant to open the economy. Frequent warnings cite the dangers of "peaceful evolution," a term used to deride those perceived as seeking to discredit communism by advocating the "Western" values of capitalism, democracy, and human rights. Vietnam has yet to reconcile its centrally controlled economy, one-party political system, and historic fear of foreign interaction with the growing pressures for change in a rapidly globalizing world.

PRESENT-DAY PARADOXES

The end of what the Vietnamese call the "American war" was a truly epochal triumph for the North. Independence was finally won in 1975 after a century of struggle against the French, the Chinese, the Japanese, and ultimately the Americans. Hanoi was the cockpit of this fight and is now the nation's capital; Ho Chi Minh, the nation's deeply venerated founder, lies here in a mausoleum fully equal to Lenin's on Red Square. But on April 30, 2000 -- the 25th anniversary of the final victory against the United States and South Vietnam's "liberation" from foreign influences -- Hanoi lay eerily quiet. Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam) hosted the major ceremony instead. The authorities' tight control over the day's festivities belied the populist rhetoric celebrating the ...

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