Organizer and Chair: Anita Chan, Australian National University
Discussant: Bruce Koppel, East-West Center
Political Reform In China and Vietnam
Barrett L. McCormick, Marquette University
This paper compares the political response to economic reform in China and in Vietnam. Both of these countries have tried to maintain key Leninist institutions while promoting economic reforms that have dramatically changed the political landscape. Market-oriented reforms have created an expanding sphere of relatively autonomous social and economic activity. An increasing portion of the population is no longer directly dependent on the state for employment and other social services and necessities. Media are increasingly dominated by messages that may not explicitly contradict official ideology, but unlike former times, play little role in promoting it. Foreign influences are increasingly evident. Institutions such as party committees and political study that formerly kept watch on society and asserted party leadership are increasingly irrelevant to the needs of economic reform. In response, both regimes have attempted to build legal institutions and to establish mechanisms of macro-economic control that could replace traditional Leninist institutions, but these new institutions remain tentative and incomplete. The result, in both countries, is a society that is not actively organized to resist the state, but is nonetheless increasingly beyond the state's control. Both Vietnam and China, then, have yet to reach any point of political stasis or stability, and we may expect fluid and dynamic politics in both countries.
Youth, Education, and Cultural Change in China and Vietnam
David Marr, Australian National University
Stanley Rosen, University of Southern California
Using popular magazines and newspapers, as well as interviews and survey material, this paper analyzes discussions in China and Vietnam about the implications of changing economies for education (school curricula, research priorities, institutional structures), employment priorities, and politics (patriotism, role of the Communist Party, and political values). The emphasis will be on how the youth in both countries talk about these issues.
Cycles of Agrarian Transformation in China and Vietnam: Land Reform,
Collectivization and the Household Economy
Mark Selden, SUNY, Binghamton
In the half century since 1945, China and Vietnam have completed two major cycles of agrarian reform. The paper explores temporal and institutional congruences of both cycles as well as important processual, institutional, and performance differences. The hallmarks of the first cycle in both countries were land reform, which landless and land poor villagers in both countries pressed for, and collectivization, which had little popular basis but was imposed by each country's Communist party. Collectivization was more thoroughly implemented in China than in Vietnam, in part because in Vietnam it came during rather than after the war for national liberalization. The second cycle, from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, redistributed to households land and other collectivized means of production, reduced state control over production, and restored markets. This sharp change was principally fueled by a quiet revolt by rural producers. In China, successors to collectives-township and village enterprises-continue to play an important role in the second cycle, whereas in Vietnam they do not, at least thus far. Second cycle reforms in both countries have contributed to accelerated agricultural growth and higher levels of commodification but the effects in Vietnam on urbanization, industrialization, employment, and poverty reduction have been far less than in China.
Vietnamese and Chinese Labor Regimes: On the Road to Divergence
Anita Chan, Australian National University
Irene Norlund, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Copenhagen
The economic reforms in Vietnam and China are affecting the labor regimes in the two countries in many similar ways. The core industrial workforce is shrinking while the peripheral workforce is on the rise. Very different labor regimes are emerging from these two sectors. As a whole, the labor regime on the shopfloor has become harsher. Labor protests in both countries are now a daily occurrence. The trade unions are under great pressure from the workers to react to the new situation. However, due to the countries' recent historical developments, the precondition under which Vietnam and China began their economic reforms were quite different. Further, by comparing these two countries' political changes, trade unions reforms, changes in state-society relationship, the trade union laws and labor laws, the emergence of civil society, and the degree of dominance of political orthodoxy, the authors argue that the two countries' labor regimes are on the road to divergence. Though both countries began with a state corporatist structure in which the trade unions were under state dominance, the emerging trend witnesses the Vietnam's trade unions beginning to function with more political space than the Chinese trade unions. The authors conclude that as the chance of Vietnam going the way of societal corporatism is higher, the Vietnamese trade union is likely to build up more independence from the state and the party.