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Vietnam: Reforming One Step at a Time
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20410 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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3 / 1992 |
2,224 Words |
| Author
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Douglas Pike
Douglas Pike is director of the Indochina Studies Program at
the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently co-
editing the Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War, to be published
by Macmillan/Brassey's. |
Hanoi leaders spent a worrisome summer and fall engaged in an internal debate over what loosely can be called the reform process. More precisely, it was over the meaning and nature of political change. This spirited, complex dialogue had at its hear the question; what are the prospects for survival of the governing system and economic philosophy introduced into northern. Vietnam in 1954 and extended to al of Vietnam in 1975 after victory in the Vietnam War?
Much of the discussion was open. There were two major public meetings. The Vietnam Communist Party's Seventh Congress (July 8-24) and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam's Eighth National Assembly (July 27-August 12). The Seventh congress turned out to be a reassessment of the communist party in Vietnam as an internal institution and an agonizing reappraisal of its external relations, involving the profound question of whether communism, as a worldwide phenomenon, has a future. The National Assembly discussed current economic problems, plans to "reorganize" Vietnam's foreign relations in light of the dissolution of the USSR, and, most importantly, perhaps, the proposed rewriting of the existing 1980 constitution.
Vietnam, by mid-1991, had become a much more porous society than it had been even two or three years before. This report is based on a two-week visit to Vietnam in July 1991, augmented by extended systematic research on Vietnam's systematic research on Vietnam's history, culture, and politics dating back to 1960.
Watching these meetings on television, reading between the lines in the speech transcripts, and talking with official and nonofficial Vietnamese helped me piece together a fairly clear picture of the newly named leadership's evaluation of where Vietnam stands at this crucial juncture in its history and to assess its intentions and expectations for the future.
Between Two Worlds
The central inference that I could draw from all that was said that done last summer is that, no paraphrase the poet, Vietnam stands between two worlds, one dead and the other refusing to be born.
In thinking about reform in Vietnam, it is important to distinguish it from what is going on in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the so-called revolution of 1989. There are superficial similarities, and the unwary can be lured into believing that what was past for those socialist
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