Changing worlds: Vietnam's transition from Cold War to Globallization

Ch a n g i n g Wo r l d s

A silent struggle was taking place between entrenched conservatism and the fr agile new thinking .

“Hanoi Life under the Subsidy Economy, 1975–1986,” Museum of Ethnology, Hanoi, 2006–7.

Changing Worlds

Vi et na m’s T r a n s it i o n Fro m Co l d Wa r

to G lo ba l i z at i o n

David W. P. Elliott

1

Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further

Oxford University’s objective of excellence

in research, scholarship, and education.

Oxford New York

Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi

Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi

New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto

With offi ces in

Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece

Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore

South Korea Switzerland Th ailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2012 by Oxford University Press

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016

www.oup.com

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,

without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

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

959.704c4—dc23 2011052938

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper

To Mai

Who Shared the Journey

With Love

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

Preface ix

1. Introduction 3

2. On the Eve of Doi Moi Reform (1975–1986) 25

3. Th e 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 333

Index 391

This page intentionally left blank

ix

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 fi rst to admit the limits of my understanding of the subject, even

aft er 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 pro￾ceed 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 infi nitely more interesting. Between my fi rst visit to unifi ed Viet￾nam 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 offi cial guest of the Ministry of Foreign Aff airs. 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 diff erent were at a loss as to the

x Preface

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 aff air, 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, aft er a number of intervening visits to Vietnam, mostly accompanied by my

wife, who had been raised in presocialist Hanoi, contacts with relatives were warm, famil￾ial, and unconstrained—even in the case of a fi rst meeting with several families on the

maternal side of my wife’s clan, which included several who worked in the party ideolog￾ical 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 re￾searchers 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-confi dence 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 stifl ing and oppressive political atmosphere of 1982 seems very remote. Small

wonder that it is diffi cult 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.

Th e 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 Marxist￾Leninist 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 aft er the invasion and occupation of Cambodia by Vietnam￾ese forces, Hanoi’s troops had just made an alleged incursion into Th ai territory). Pro￾fessor Cuong’s message was clear: Vietnam’s security had been intolerably threatened by

Preface xi

China and its cat’s paw, Pol Pot. Th is was the face Vietnam presented to the outside world

at the time: fi ercely 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 fi t 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

diff erent assumptions. Th at is the starting point of this book.

It was in Bangkok that I met for the fi rst time Luu Doan Huynh, a long-time senior

analyst at the Ministry of Foreign Aff airs’ Institute of International Relations, then

serving in the Vietnamese embassy in Th ailand. Over the course of many subsequent trips

to Vietnam, Mr. Huynh provided keen insight and sage counsel. A key fi gure in the

McNamara seminars on the Vietnam War held in Hanoi in the mid-1990s, the excep￾tional 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 offi cials, who wanted to diversify Vietnam’s for￾eign contacts and begin to open up to the larger world beyond their socialist and Th ird

World friends, and other conservative offi cials who felt that this trip was a gratuitous

concession to someone who had once been in the enemy camp, was a “complicated ele￾ment” who did not fi t clearly into the framework of “friend or enemy,” and who could

provide an opening for subversion through undesirable contacts with Vietnamese citi￾zens. My contacts were carefully limited to meetings with members of various state

social-science institutes and government offi cials, who were impressive and articulate, but

very restricted in the parameters of permissible topics and ideas, especially in conversa￾tion with an American visitor.

What I encountered in 1982 was a closed society, beleaguered and aggrieved in its deal￾ings 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 domes￾tic 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 polit￾ical, ideological, and organizational obstacles that limited their contributions to Viet￾nam’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 guer￾rilla forces in the South during the war. Do became the highest-ranking political dissi￾dent in Vietnam prior to his death in 2002. In 1982, however, General Do appeared

xii Preface

bemused to be sitting in his offi ce at the Ministry of Culture talking with a former mem￾ber 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 Off ensive.

Among the people I met on that trip, he was the last person that I could imagine be￾coming 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 Aff airs (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 Viet￾nam 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 cre￾dentials 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 shift ed once again. I met with Nguyen Khanh Toan, the director of SCSS;

Dao Van Tap of the SCSS; Huu Th o, 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 agri￾culture 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 Th anh. Th e topic of most of my interviews was revolutionary his￾tory, and I did not pursue the issues of reform and international relations that are the

subject of the present book.

Th e fi rst major academic conference in the social sciences involving both Western aca￾demics and Vietnamese offi cials, academics, and analysts was organized and funded by

the US Social Science Research Council in June 1990, aft er some delay and aft er 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 fi gures 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 offi cials in other locales, I

met political fi gures, 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. Th ese two

models of integrity are true “profi les 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 fi gures in Vietnamese diplo￾macy in the context of various trips and conferences organized by Senator Clark; For￾eign Minister Nguyen Co Th ach, a shrewd and skillful statesman, whose brilliant and

controversial tenure in this offi ce ran aground on the shoals of Vietnam’s complex poli￾tics, and his apparent successor, Deputy Foreign Minister Le Mai, whose untimely death

cut short a very promising career. I fi rst met Foreign Minister Th ach in a brief but mem￾orable encounter on the fl ight 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 offi cials who had a quite diff erent view. In 1991, I sat in on

a meeting between Senator Clark and Th ach, during which Th ach underlined his com￾mitment to reform and outreach by presenting Clark with a published Vietnamese

translation of Paul Samuelson’s classic introductory textbook on economics, which

Th ach 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 di￾rector of the Social Science Research Council, arranged support for many academic ex￾changes, 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 offi cial of Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security. He was under the impres￾sion 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 American￾sponsored plot of cultural subversion of Vietnam. Th is accelerated my interest in the

subject of “peaceful evolution,” which was emerging as a primary concern to many Viet￾namese leaders just at that time—though it had been prefi gured 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

xiv Preface

work of Adam Fforde on Vietnam’s economic reforms, and Dang Phong’s work on eco￾nomic history of the reform period. Th is trip provided valuable insight on Vietnam’s

eff orts to integrate into the global and regional economy.

Th e 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.

Th e National University of Hanoi and the National Center for Social Sciences and the

Humanities in Vietnam cosponsored the conference. Th e venerable revolutionary icon

General Vo Nguyen Giap put his stamp of approval on this venture by his prominent

keynote appearance. Th e 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 fi eld in Vietnam (he was one of the “four pillars” of the Vietnam￾ese history faculty which was founded aft er 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 diplo￾matic 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 spon￾sored it—even for someone of the unique eminence and prestige of Professor Le. His

extensive networks of personal connections with leading fi gures in every sphere of Viet￾namese 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. Th anks 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 Th o province in the Mekong

Delta, where I had lived for four years during the war. He introduced me to some impor￾tant 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 aft er 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.