Organizer: Anita Chan, Australian National University
Chair: Mark Selden, SUNY, Binghampton
Discussant: James E. Nickum, East-West Center
While the former Soviet Union and Eastern European block have succeeded in establishing new political institutions, their economies tend to be in a shambles and some countries are being ripped apart by internal ethnic strife. Meanwhile, China and Vietnam, two of Asia's principal socialist countries, are enjoying economic booms while significantly changing their economic systems but without undergoing the convulsions of tumultuous political or social upheavals.
To start to understand this broad difference, the authors of the papers in this proposed set of panels think that we need to have a deeper appreciation for the similarities and differences between China and Vietnam. Virtually no comparative work has been done on these countries, particularly since they both began major economic transformations in the late 1970s-early 1980s. The papers in the proposed two panels compare China and Vietnam on each of eight themes. They are the result of collaborative analyses by specialists from three continents. The authors draw on their own primary research in the two countries as well as an array of pertinent secondary resources.
The Latecomer Notion and its Difficulties in the Chinese and Vietnamese Economic
Reforms
Alexander Woodside, University of British Columbia
Chinese comparisons of contemporary Chinese and Indian economic reforms are numerous, and have important latent functions in Chinese reform thought itself. But comparisons of Chinese and Vietnamese economic reforms are rare in China and perhaps too sensitive for extensive public discussion in Vietnam. This paper will argue nonetheless that there are important intellectual stakes in the comparative study of Chinese and Vietnamese reforms. It will then look at the reformers' particular notion of themselves as "latecomers" whose modernization involves the assimilation of external capital and technology and market "models"; the changing legends of Japanese success which lie behind this notion in both Beijing and Hanoi; and some of the difficulties of the latecomer notion when it is applied in a Chinese or Vietnamese political environment.
Asian Socialism's Open Doors: Guangzhou and Ho Chi Minh City
William Turley, Southern Illinois University
Brantly Womack, University of Virginia
A comparison of Guangzhou (Canton) and Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) is immediately attractive for two reasons. First, the cities seem similar in many respects. They are both major urban centers, the leading metropolises of the southern halves of their respective countries, and the most advanced centers of international openness. Second, they are each the leading cases of the growing autonomy and diversification of both countries, and therefore they would each merit special treatment in a general study of modernization and openness in China and Vietnam. Nevertheless, they are very different places in very different countries, and the comparison should help to understand these differences as well as to explore the similarities.
The paper is organized in five sections. The first discusses the absolute and relative masses of Guangzhou and Ho Chi Minh City, and the differences in their national roles. The second and third sections narrate the political and economic histories of Guangzhou and Ho Chi Minh City, the second in the pre-reform periods, and the third in the current, post-reform period. The fourth section addresses the changed role of intermediate governments such as Guangdong/Guangzhou and Ho Chi Minh City in the new political and economic context being created by reform. We distinguish between decentralization, which involves granting greater freedom of activity to lower units of government, and decontrol, which involves the loosening of restrictions within a level of government and in that level of government's oversight of societal activities. The fifth and final section treats the similarities and differences in international openness.
Wealth, Power, and Poverty in the Transition to Market Economies: The Process of
Socio-Economic Differentiation in Rural China and Northern Vietnam
Hy Van Luong, University of Toronto
Jonathan Unger, Australian National University
Both Vietnam and China have experienced rural economic reforms that in most respects are parallel. But the consequences have not been similar thus far in terms of their socio-economic effects. This paper seeks to show how several systemic differences in the interplay of governmental policies and community processes between China and northern Vietnam have led to greater intra-community differentiation and the faster emergence of a composite monied class in rural China than in rural northern Vietnam.
One set of reasons involves the weakness of rural industry in Vietnam in comparison to China. This means that such rural enterprises in Vietnam provide employment to a considerably smaller number of rural workers, that they employ far fewer workers from outside local communities, and that rural accumulation of wealth and the economic differentiation between households is far more limited than in China.
Also, government programs in the two countries differ. In general, the dynamics of government policies and community pressures in northern Vietnam helped to contain the wealth gap within villages, while in the case of China, the lack of strong community pressures in face of "bet-on-the-strong" governmental policies and a two-tiered price system for grain and other staple crops have had regressive effects on income distribution in communities.