| |
THE ROVING
EYE
Vietnam, Leninism and
capitalism
By Pepe Escobar
HANOI - The remains of a B-52 shot down by North
Vietnamese anti-aircraft artillery lie in the middle of
Huu Tiep Lake in northern Hanoi, by the side of a busy
back road. For old residents of Ba Dinh district, it's a
powerful reminder of what the country fought for: during
the American War - as it is known nationwide - the
district was almost razed to the ground by US bombing.
For the young generation, the debris is little else than
conceptual art.
The B-52s might one day be back
- figuratively of course. US Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld has officially invited Vietnamese Defense
Minister Pham Van Tra for a Washington visit. There has
been no response yet: according to diplomats in Hanoi,
the Politburo is carefully studying its options,
considering this is a key national security issue. The
US rationale is a subtle variation of the classic "the
enemy of my enemy is my friend": the George W Bush
administration's aim, using the Vietnamese claim on the
Spratly Islands, is once again to contain China, and
prevent the South China Sea from inevitably becoming a
"Chinese lake" - Beijing's de facto perception.
The Pentagon's strategy is not getting much help
from the US Department of Commerce, whose International
Trade Commission (ITC) officially announced early this
month that Vietnamese catfish exports would be slapped
with 36 and 64 percent tariffs. Frozen catfish-fillet
exports are a very important business for Vietnam. The
Vietnamese Association of Seafood Exporters and
Producers (VASEP) is furious. General secretary Nguyen
Huu Dung says the US decision was illogical: "America's
farmers have experienced losses due to adverse weather
and natural disasters, not due to Vietnamese
production."
But catfish fillets are one thing,
and bigger fish swimming in the South China Sea are
another. In the mind of many a Pentagon strategist lurks
the siren call of Cam Ranh Bay, 50 kilometers south of
Nha Trang and one of the world's largest natural
harbors. Cam Ranh Bay used to be a huge US naval base
before it was taken over by the Soviet Union. After the
departure of the Soviets, the port was almost deserted.
But now it is being developed as an export processing
zone, part of the Vietnamese Communist Party's drive to
"accelerate the economic restructuring" and increase the
exports of the provinces.
From a US point of
view, Vietnam has everything to gain from a deal:
dollars (more foreign investment in Cam Ranh Bay) and
military muscle (US ships in the South China Sea as a
warning to China). From a Vietnamese point of view, the
further encirclement of China in such a blatant fashion
may not be such a good move. A European diplomat in
Hanoi says, "The themes of preventing Chinese influence
in the South China Sea and forging stronger
economic-military ties with the US are inscribed in a
much more profound logic of what vision those cautious,
deliberative analysts of the Vietnamese Communist Party
have of the future of the country."
Ngo The
Thinh, a former officer in the Vietnamese People's Army,
professor of geography and history and writer in
Vietnamese magazines such as Science and Fatherland,
Historic Research and Buddhist Research, is an acid
critic of the communist leadership. His father, a
scientist living in France in the 1940s, was persuaded
by Ho Chi Minh himself to come back and join the maquis
to fight the French. In Thinh's words, "Ho Chi Minh
convinced my father to come back to Vietnam and change
his salary from US$5,000 a month to $20 a month. As a
reward, my father took Ho Chi Minh for an interview with
[Karl] Marx and [Friedrich] Engels." Ho Chi Minh died in
June 1969, Thinh's father three months later.
Thinh is an intellectual in a Confucian culture
that for a thousand years has praised the role of men of
learning: "Religiously we are Buddhists. Culturally we
are Confucian," says Thinh. For confirmation, one just
has to visit the Van Mieu pagoda - or Temple of
Literature - in Hanoi, founded in 1070 by Emperor Ly
Thanh Tong and dedicated to Confucius. Van Mieu soon
became the intellectual and spiritual center of the
kingdom - as a cult of education and literature spread
amongst the court, the mandarins and the common people.
The Confucian examinations held at the Temple of
Literature offered the possibility for even the humblest
peasant to rise to the position of mandarin. It was a
question of merit.
Not so with the Communist
Party, say Thinh and many of his disillusioned
intellectual mates at the University of Hanoi. They have
a clear assessment of the best and the brightest of Ho's
generation: "They were patriots, not communists." Now,
their recurrent themes are the lack of freedom of
expression in the press, and the corruption of the
Communist Party: "They are thieves," says Thinh. His
university salary is $20 a month. He gets a maximum of
$10 for each published article in a magazine. But a
Confucian intellectual never loses his sense of irony.
On a visit to the sublimely delicate Golden Lotus pagoda
in northern Hanoi - now besieged by monstrous examples
of property speculation - he comments: "This bamboo
architecture has lasted for 300 years. The Iron Curtain
fell in less than 50 years. Long live the bamboo!"
When he says that "Ho gave power to the
patriots; now they give power to the dollar", Thinh is
expressing the disgust of countless educated Vietnamese
revolutionaries who have made immense, unbelievable
sacrifices to get rid of a social system imposed by
foreigners, only to see the "return of the living dead":
the reproduction of this system in a superficial way,
via a Hanoi Hilton over here, a KFC over there, CNN on
cable and most of all Vietnam appealing for aid from the
former invaders - be it Japan, France or the United
States. Thinh and other Vietnamese intellectuals are
very much aware of the ultimate irony: what the US
didn't get with its powerful military, it is getting
with its financial muscle. Serious questions are being
asked - not publicly, because the press is heavily
monitored - of what might have happened had the
Americans managed to influence and control South Vietnam
as they did other Asian tigers such as Singapore, Taiwan
and South Korea. These former Asian tigers are now the
very model for the Vietnamese Communist Party. But the
tragedy is that Vietnam cannot become a tiger by
enjoying the same privileges they enjoyed before the
1997 Asian financial crisis. The Cold War context is
gone.
Vietnamese revolutionary leaders were
practical people, and very good managers. As in China,
they came mostly from the intelligentsia and the
bourgeoisie. They didn't know anything about Marxist
theory - unlike their sons and grandsons, who had to
study it in school. For decades the Party has tried to
manage a profound contradiction: theoretically it is a
Leninist party, but in practice it doesn't enforce the
Leninist concept of "democratic centralism". The party
encourages self-criticism from all members, but the
leaders are unable to take serious criticism: the same
small committee of old men is always in charge. Today,
intellectuals in Ho Chi Minh City and even in Hanoi
mercilessly criticize the mediocrity of Party cadres -
regarded as a bunch of careerists who in many provinces
far from the center have in fact become a new,
dictatorial rural elite.
Unlike the simplistic
recipes of the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund (IMF), it's impossible to assess Vietnam's economic
development without taking into consideration the
after-effects of the Vietnam War, as well as the
invasion of Cambodia in late 1978 (which lasted for 10
years) and the short but vicious war with China in 1979.
Vietnam suffered a virtually global boycott for more
than a decade. There was simply no productive
investment. Hyperinflation was the rule in the
mid-1980s. Salaries became pitiful. There were three
options for Party cadres: leave the state sector, die of
hunger or become corrupt. Most chose the third option.
So the Vietnamese Communist Party entered the 1990s in a
situation where its authority did not depend on its
moral standing as the leader of a war of liberation, but
on its privileged network of power.
It's fair to
say that the Party's decomposition is now almost
universally recognized - and not only by critical Hanoi
minds such as Thinh's. As early as in 1994, the road
ahead was clear: "The leadership of the Party is the
decisive factor in maintaining a socialist orientation
for our market economy and the entire development of our
country." Translation: the road to socialism is the
Party plus capitalism. The question is inevitable: where
does this outlandish mix of Leninism and capitalism go
from here?
During wartime, "revolutionary
morality" was a powerful antidote against this same
corruption that today is eating the party from within.
But there's no morality anymore: just no-holds-barred,
IMF-sanctioned capitalism. The Politburo actually hangs
on the IMF's and the World Bank's every word. The
Politburo cannot have it both ways. It simply cannot
achieve a balance between greed and social peace - or
between aggressive accumulation of wealth and absence of
corruption.
The Party today seems to regard
foreign investment as the cure for everything. It may be
setting itself even one more trap. The Party wants
foreign investors to profit from an army of cheap,
educated labor. At the same time it wants
state-enterprise managers to show profits at any cost.
Who's to pay the price? The working class, whose
interests are supposed to be defended by the Party.
Apart from that from Japan and South Korea, most of this
foreign investment is doing nothing but to reinsert
Vietnam in the Chinese diaspora business map of
Southeast Asia. These investors favor quick and high
returns. And to top it all, most indigenous Vietnamese
capitalists are also Chinese: they've always been. By
getting too cozy with the Americans in a military way,
says another European diplomat in Hanoi, the Vietnamese
Communist Party may fear upsetting not only mainland
China but most of all these key Chinese diaspora
investors.
The future of Vietnam can already be
glimpsed in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. This is urban
Vietnam, unequal like in any comparative parts of the
developing world, but overall in much better financial
situation than rural, poor Vietnam. This means that
social problems will explode in a classic scenario:
poor, unskilled peasants plus the army of excluded from
the capitalist banquet will inevitably oppose
dictatorial rulers - whether they call themselves
Leninist or market socialists or whatever.
Very
few people outside Vietnam - and even inside, for that
matter - have any trust in faceless bureaucrats such as
Prime Minister Phan Van Khai, Permanent Deputy Prime
Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, Deputy Prime Minister Pham Gia
Khiem, President Tran Duc Luong, Communist Party General
Secretary Nong Duc Manh or National Assembly Chairman
Nguyen Van An. Empty rhetoric in the manner of "to gain
people's trust by serving them devotedly and showing a
just and perceptive attitude" won't cut it either - as
the Politburo is increasingly regarded as 13 very
mediocre men who have lost contact with the masses.
Because of them, Vietnam may be left with the worst of
both socialism and capitalism. And that will be the
enduring tragedy of the Vietnam War: What have 2 million
Vietnamese died for?
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times
Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
