Those who still believe Vietnam was a “necessary” war must take pleasure at seeing that country in the camp of corporate neoliberalism. A proud new member of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Vietnam is welcoming a $1 billion Intel project to Ho Chi Minh City this year, and has accepted the wholesale privatization of telecommunications and other industries.
Some in Hanoi are dismayed by all this. An American expatriate, Gerry Herman, a former antiwar activist turned businessman and film distributor who has lived in Vietnam for fifteen years, told me the Vietnamese were so desperately eager to normalize relations with the United States that they accepted the most liberal market reforms of any developing country. Having some internal knowledge of the trade negotiations, he says bitterly that Vietnam was blackmailed by U.S. negotiators. To gain export markets for their textiles, shoes and seafood, they slashed subsidies and opened markets in banking, insurance, services and advertising to private corporations. For Herman, the distressing prospect is that Vietnam will follow the failed model of the Philippines, not the more successful Asian Tigers whose development benefited from government subsidies.
China, Herman says, got a better deal than Vietnam, winning twenty years of protection for its telecommunications industry. “The American negotiators said to Vietnam that they were beaten by the Chinese on certain issues and would never do it again, and Vietnam could take the deal or leave it.” The Americans, in deference to domestic political pressure, even demanded market access for Harley-Davidson, against the Vietnamese complaint that the larger, faster Harleys would worsen the high accident rates on their narrow, congested roads. “The Vietnamese negotiator broke down in tears,” Herman said, over the Harley concession. I suddenly remembered the cynical 1960s strategy of Harvard’s Samuel Huntington, that forced urbanization would transform the Vietnamese into a “Honda culture.” It was coming true before my eyes, with the Honda Dream motorcycle and, sooner or later, the Harley. As a Vietnamese named Pham Thong Long blogged last July, “I have only one dream is to buy one of brand new Harley-Davidson, now I waiting for Harley-Davidson deal to open in Saigon. I need a Fatboy.”
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 U.S. 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 McAuliffe, 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”–whom she describes as “bulldogs”–“on all levels in private and in the press.” In an observation I shared, Borton described Vietnam as “a place of constant talk, all the time, and they talk freely.”
