Organizer: Daniel Goodkind, University of Michigan<
Chair: Thaveeporn Vasakavul,
Australian National University
Discussants: David W. P. Elliott, Pomona College; Hy Van Luong, University
of Toronto
Research on Vietnamese politics and its recent transformations continues to broaden as new sources of information become available. Among the central questions of interest are: (1) the extent to which political transformations towards socialism were successful since the 1940s and 1950s; and (2) the interplay between the more recent free market reforms beginning in the 1980s, political processes, and the changing distribution of influence. Our panel was designed to bring together a variety of disciplinary perspectives and approaches to the study of Vietnamese politics. Collectively, our back-to-back panel extends from the eras of socialist transformations in Vietnam to the present. Papers address the causes, consequences, and structure of Vietnamese political transformations at a variety of levels: the highest echelons of political power (Thayer); local or intermediate associations, legal and business institutions (Vasakavul, Sidel, Stromseth); and ordinary Vietnamese citizens and their families at home and abroad (Goodkind, Bousquet). Several papers also explicitly try to link changes across such levels.
The first panel is focused more on micro-level issues set against a wide temporal panorama since the 1950s. These papers are concerned with postmarital residence patterns as indicators of changes in political economy (Goodkind), hidden influences on and contending approaches to the role of law (Sidel), and recent renegotiations of political space between local and central governments (Vasakavul). The second panel concentrates more on macro-level or contemporary political shifts. These papers address continuity and change in the membership of the Party's Central Committee since 1976 (Thayer), the increasing variety of business organizations and their participation in the political process (Stromseth), and narratives of Viet Kieu returning to their homeland as well as related implications for Vietnam joining the global market economy (Bousquet).
Postmarital Residence Patterns Amidst Socialist Transformations in a Northern
Province of Vietnam, 1948-1993
Daniel Goodkind and Tom Fricke, University of Michigan
We explore the determinants of postmarital residence in Hai Hung, a Northern province of Vietnam. Field survey data collected during 1993 reveal a dominant patrilocal norm (e.g. residence in the home of the grooms' family) over the past 45 years, as well as two notable dips in that norm. Ironically, each dip occurred in the wake of opposing changes in political economy-the Socialist Marriage and Family Law of 1960 and the free market reforms during the 1980s-but for different reasons in each case. Powerful changes in marital characteristics in the wake of the 1960 Law (as well as during the war of reunification) inadvertently contributed to the first dip in patrilocality. The second dip following the free market reforms was associated with a rise in wealth that allowed newlyweds the resources with which to reside on their own.
More generally, as modernization perspectives would suggest, we found that social circumstances and marital patterns associated with contemporary life (e.g. later age at marriage, mate choice independent of parents' wishes, and urban location) were negatively associated with patrilocality. On the other hand, patrilocality was also negatively associated with some traditional prenuptial divination and gift-giving practices. We hazard two explanations for this latter finding, one more economic, the other more normative. First, these practices likely depended on family wealth, and such wealth in turn was associated with independent residence. Second, this association is plausible once we consider which specific practices the socialist state did, and did not, attempt to label as deviant.
Contending Approaches to the Role of Law in Vietnam, 1954-1995
Mark Sidel, University of Iowa
For several decades, foreign (and many Vietnamese) scholars have treated Vietnamese legal development as a simple matter of Party instrumentalism. And in the five decades since 1945, a unified Party leadership has often looked with near unanimity on law entirely as a mechanism of Party rule.
But throughout the 1954-1995 period there have also been different, sometimes important shadings of emphasis on the relative autonomy the legal sector might enjoy. Those differences reflected the views of key Party leaders and of key legal researchers, who emerged from different French and Soviet streams of legal training. And those different emphases have never been clarified or understood outside Vietnam. In addition, there has at times been significant and direct, if episodic, opposition to the instrumentalist theory and policy itself, both from within the party and from without.
This paper seeks to disinter those buried shadings of thought and that sometime opposition, analyzing contending approaches both within and outside the Vietnamese Party toward the role of law in Vietnam between 1954 and 1995.
Renegotiating the Political Space: Local Territory and Central Power in
Post-Socialist Vietnam
Thaveeporn Vasakavul, Australian National University
Writing on Vietnamese politics has tended to treat the Vietnamese state as monolithic. In fact, during the pre-reform period, the relationship between the central and local state (trung uong va dia phuong) had to be constantly negotiated. The transition from central planning to a market economy that took place in the 1980s weakened the socialist period, while strengthening horizontal ties among state agencies and between state and non-state sectors. The rise of local autonomy was often characterized by such terms as "departmentalism," "mandarinism," "bossism" and "provincialism."
This paper examines the breakdown of organized hierarchies during the transition to a market economy and the responses of the Vietnamese Communist Party and the central government to these developments. Specifically, it discusses increasing local autonomy in regulating and executing economic and cultural policies; debates over the authority and power of local government agencies at the municipal/provincial, precinct/district, and quarter/commune levels; and the implications of these processes for the nature of the post-socialist state and state-society relations.
The paper highlights the discourses on "legality," "modernization," and "national interests" as mechanisms used by different parties in the process of negotiating political space.