Friday, June 23: My attempt to analyze the Vietnamese government

So now I’m two weeks into my life here in Ho Chi Minh City, and I’ve been working really hard to understand how this Communist government works, not just in theory, but in practice. It’s been fascinating to look at the history in Vietnam and see how amazingly resilient the nation has been, bouncing back from decades of war and internal strife. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard someone talk about how fast the country is changing. It almost sounds trite to hear it now, but whole buildings shoot up in less than a week. Vietnam becomes a member of the World Trade Organization in October, and there is a tangible excitement mixed with a little bit of fear.
There have been so many “classic moments” that really have shown me the side of the country that most tourists don’t get to see. The other night I was in my bathroom washing clothes when Viet, one of the roommates came in to chat. He started by showing me the correct technique for washing one’s clothes by hand.
(As an aside—it’s not as easy as you might think to clean two week’s worth of clothes in a bucket. You have to spread out the outfit, apply the washing powder directly, scrub with a brush, squeeze out in a bucket, rinse in the spout, and then wring out and hang up to dry. I’m not going to lie—one of my proudest moments was pulling my hand-cleaned clothes off the clothesline to dry!)
But after I learned how to wash clothes Vietnamese style, we started talking about what was different between our governments and what we liked and didn’t like. I was trying to explain how I liked our government structure, but not the current government, and how I was relieved that in a couple of years it would be completely different. Viet was rather surprised that one could be so invested in choosing the government. With the Communist party this is really a non-issue, and I’ve found that most people my age seem to be fairly apathetic about who’s the President or Prime Minister.
There is voting in Vietnam and voting is compulsory, so it’s not that the turnout is low, but most of the times voting just means that you “approve” the Party’s choices for new leadership. You can send a proxy to vote for you, so college kids generally let their parents vote, and it’s not unusual for someone to cast seventeen or eighteen votes. This isn’t to say that they don’t care, but just that it doesn’t really matter who the leader’s name is—the Communist Party will pick the administration and dictate at least very strict guidelines on what the figureheads can do. I was discussing politics with my translator, and when we were talking about the American elections, she was very animated. Then I asked what she thought about Vietnam’s President and Prime Minister stepping down this week. Her answer was, “Oh, I don’t care about that.” She went on to explain that it didn’t matter to much to her because the Party would do whatever it chose and she couldn’t have an impact no matter how much she worried about it. To be fair, there is starting to be a little choice on the local level, but it’s more like the chance to choose between two individuals who the Communists have approved to take on the job than really getting to choose the ideological background of your candidate.
Of course, these ideas of “elections,” violate everything we have been taught about freedom, but it’s not something that I’ve seen anyone broken-up about here. Certainly no one is protesting publicly, but even privately, no one I’ve talked to has seemed particularly concerned. Choice seems sort of inefficient. When I was talking to Viet, he wanted to know how our government got anything done with all the complete changes and transfers of power. That was a tough one to answer, because any look back at the past 20 years will show a general lack of consistent policy, an inability to quickly gain national momentum for any sort of movement (save for the post-911 moment). Contrary to Western myth, the Communist Party is not some omni-present force that stands on every street corner ready to shoot dissidents. In fact, you are allowed to criticize the government’s policies and actions pretty freely—you just can’t criticize the government structure.
That’s not to say that the Vietnamese idea is perfect. If anything, I’m more sold on Democracy after this trip. I value our unrestricted access to any sort of information anytime. Try to point your web browser to the “Free Vietnam” page anywhere in Vietnam and you run into the government firewall. The “free press” still is somewhat censored, religion is limited, public gatherings are closely monitored, advocating democracy would still land you in jail, and an active “social evils” campaign blocks pornography, gambling, homosexuality, and drug usage as much as possible.
Swinging back to the positives, when the government here decides that they are going to take a stand, they take a stand and mobilize the decision on all levels, from the national stage all the way down to the hamlet (the smallest unit of administration—everything is subdivided, so even local cities or provinces are broken into districts, villages, and hamlets). When the country decided they would work very hard to combat AIDS, they were quickly able to muster the resources, spreading the message as an edict to all levels reaching the vast majority of the population in ways that even the US has not been able to fully replicate.
However, it isn’t very often that everyone in the huge bureaucracy is able to agree on a decision, and one of the biggest problems is that the bureaucracy is so huge and complicated. I just listed all of the local levels of government, and except for the largest cities, cities are grouped into provinces and everything is under Hanoi’s national leadership. The Federal government system is actually similar to ours, with three branches. The executive branch houses the President, Prime Minister, and all of the ministries, the National Assembly “legislates” at the bequest of the Party, and the Judicial System has a Supreme Court and lower court system. This system is reproduced for cities or provinces, districts, and villages as well, with executive People’s Committees and legislative People’s Councils, as well as a court system.
So far, everything is pretty similar to the US system. The real interesting aspect of the government is that each and every level of government has its own Party Committee in charge of appointing, directing, and overseeing the government, and the Party has parallel committees and ministries to oversee almost every government office. Many times it is unclear whether the Party or the government is responsible for a given task or has jurisdiction over a particular field. Then, to make things even more confusing, everyone in the government is also a member of the Party, and many have positions both in the Party structure and in the government, so personal responsibilities also get muddled. To add one more complication, the government is highly decentralized. Vietnam is a very long narrow country, and communication is still not quite up to Western standards, but especially in the past it would have been physically impossible for the Federal government to consolidate rule too much, and it has not been able to do so recently. Thus, as much as Hanoi’s officials may pretend to know exactly what is going on and be controlling activity all over the country, the reality is somewhat different. As a result of all this, even though there is only one official party, there is no shortage of conflicting opinions or leadership styles in the huge tangled web-mess.
After all that, I can’t leave out the biggest problem: the corruption. Vietnam is one of the world’s worst nations for corruption—kickbacks and extra fees exist on all levels and inordinately exacerbate the inefficiency problem. There are stories of major corporations adding large chunks of money to their budgets to cover the sideline fees that are necessary to do business here—or even worse, choosing not to do business here because of the corruption. One of our class readings was an extensive article on how the practice of “envelope exchange” works—the process is nearly a science.
We were privileged to hear a lecture from an influential history professor, esteemed Party member, and local politician who could not have been prouder of the Vietnamese government. Yet, he was very quick to point out the huge problems of inefficiency and corruption. He said there were two main problems that occurred: either the Party and the government in place disagreed and stalled progress on making any change, or the Party and the government agreed to be corrupt together and stalled progress on making any change. In fact, many times when corruption has been identified, it is because the second scenario devolved into the first scenario of disagreement and one side sought revenge.
Currently the Tenth Party Congress is underway in Hanoi. Change is taking place just as fast now as since the beginning of “Doi moi” or “renovation/renewal” that began in 1986 and was Vietnam’s economic liberalization, equivalent to Russia’s Glasnost and Perestroika or China’s reforms under Deng Xiaoping. In case there are any lurking misconceptions that Vietnam still has a Marxist “planned economy,” let me say that everything is capitalist in every way. Everything has a cost, and people look to make a buck in any way they can. You even pay for the napkin on your dinner table. My most ironic capitalist moment here was using my MasterCard to pay high prices to purchase a few of the old propaganda posters from Vietnam’s early “Pure Communism,” depicting the evils of capitalism.
I should make it very clear that just like contemporary Chinese, the Vietnamese do not see communism and capitalism as mutually exclusive in any way. Theoretically, they shouldn’t be exclusive at all—it would be ideal if everyone could trade and prosper in a market economy and also enjoy the safety net of socialism with guaranteed education, housing, and healthcare. These three fundamentals were Ho Chi Minh’s stated goals for every Vietnamese person when he established Vietnam’s Communist Party. The challenge, though, is to provide quality services equally to all despite the inherent aspects of capitalism that lead to stratified incomes.
This is the ultimate goal for the Party and what they are continuing to work towards at this Party Conference. This is the last chance to prepare for Vietnam’s October entrance into the World Trade Organization, which will bring trade and globalization to new levels in Vietnam. The Party is struggling to be liberal enough to embrace globalization and conservative enough to retain it’s stronghold on the flow of ideas and ideology.
This obvious difficulty leads to all sorts of smaller conflicts. For example, should Party members be allowed to participate in private enterprise and make money? Optimally, probably not—they’d be less biased officials if their only concern was the national welfare. But then, how could the Party entice new members. My roommate, Que, is facing this very struggle. He’s about to be offered Party membership at a very young age, which is a huge honor. Accepting is also an honor and a chance to play a role in shaping the country’s future. But unless the Party loosens its restrictions, it cancels the dream of becoming rich in the fast-paced multinational corporate world. Is such a sacrifice worth it? I don’t know, and neither does Que, but this is representative of the country’s imminent crossroads.
I will say, though, that I haven’t seen or heard anything from anyone, anywhere that would suggest that the goal of any of these reforms is democracy. A couple of the readings about the government here written by American authors were titled, “When Will the Party End,” and “Hanging on to Power,” but from everything I’ve seen and heard, this is just a narrow-minded American perspective that assumes Communism is temporary. Criticizing the current system here should not be misconstrued as advocating democracy any more than criticizing the US government should be seen as advocating communism. I don’t think I could live without the freedoms I enjoy in our American Democracy, but if you are raised to cherish different values, it may be that the lack of stability or consistency in democracy would prove unimaginable.
So as Vietnam goes forward, there remains a very strong nationalist spirit. All this debate about government structure seems to mostly come from curious outsiders—the public seems generally rather apolitical. The people support the Party and are immensely proud of their country, but they mostly just want to make money. There is the strong hope that corruption will disappear. If in a few years it is just as rampant, perhaps the support for the Communists will not be so strong. For now, though, there seems to be a willingness to support the government and wait a bit to hold the government completely accountable for social welfare for everyone. Viet said they were “too poor for that now.” If the breakneck pace of development continues, this may not be the case for long. Then, perhaps, the government would be expected to deliver more direct services to its people, but I don’t know. I think few can accurately speculate what services or values the Communist-Market system would look like or provide, but as Vietnam continues to hold out as one of the World’s few remaining Communist states, it will be an interesting ride.