How long can the party last?

The Communists have relaxed everything except their grip on politics. Might that be next?

Apr 24th 2008 | The Economist – Special Report

Dreamt up by a Marxist-Leninist chartered accountant 

“Vietnam's leaders have embraced the parlance of the market economy and the trendy development-speak of the UN agencies, but when they talk politics they revert to cold-war communist language as embalmed and stiff as the old man's body.”

“Vietnamese worry that if they say the wrong thing they will be jailed on trumped-up charges. One Vietnamese businessman interviewed for this report visibly squirmed when asked about the party cells that remain mandatory for all businesses, even private ones. Another affected not to know about this requirement, then remembered when pressed.”

A QUEUE of people hundreds of metres long, mainly Vietnamese but including some foreigners, shuffles into the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum in Hanoi, shepherded by stern guards in white uniforms and peaked caps. They file silently into a room where the revolutionary leader's embalmed corpse lies in a well-lit glass case with a guard at each corner, his long, grey-white beard extending over his black tunic. The guards usher small children on to a ramp alongside the glass case. This gives them the best view of the illustrious Uncle Ho, the visionary nation-builder with the “exemplary morals” that they will be instructed to revere from kindergarten to university.

“As for those “hostile forces” who question the party's right to a monopoly on power, they are “terrorists”, however mildly they may advocate change.”

Vietnam's leaders have embraced the parlance of the market economy and the trendy development-speak of the UN agencies, but when they talk politics they revert to cold-war communist language as embalmed and stiff as the old man's body. Party meetings still pass declarations that “the working class is the leading class of the revolution” and the party itself is “the vanguard class in the socialist building”. As for those “hostile forces” who question the party's right to a monopoly on power, they are “terrorists”, however mildly they may advocate change. The huge propaganda posters in the rice paddies along the main highways read as if they were devised by Marxist-Leninist chartered accountants. “Organisations and individuals paying tax is a factor to push national economic growth and the national budget!”, declares one.

Since the start of the doi moi reforms 22 years ago a great deal has changed in Vietnam, almost all for the better. Most significantly, its people have been given sweeping economic freedoms, whether in setting up their own business or choosing between a growing variety of providers of goods and services. They can travel abroad and are positively encouraged to send their children to foreign universities, and increasingly they can afford to do both. Many are able to receive foreign television and radio and look at foreign websites.

Yet even as the government tolerates a wide range of outside influences, it still tries to keep control over all things political and cultural. Foreign universities are being encouraged to build campuses in Vietnam, yet a recent official circular stipulates that they have to teach “Ho Chi Minh ideology” to all Vietnamese students. Bookshops are full of the translated works of authors from Mother Teresa to Jackie Collins, yet under a 2004 regulation actors are banned from dyeing their hair or even appearing bareheaded on stage.

It remains difficult to know what to make of all this because the internal workings of the Communist Party's leadership remain as mysterious as ever. In China, Hu Jintao is clearly the paramount leader, combining the jobs of president, party chief and head of the party's military commission. Vietnam, by contrast, is led by a rather self-effacing triumvirate: Nong Duc Manh, the party's general secretary; Nguyen Minh Triet, the president; and Nguyen Tan Dung, the prime minister. No individual is praised except the late Uncle Ho. The national assembly and the party's central committee are forces in their own right, not rubber stamps.

Some foreign diplomats and experts in Hanoi think it is Mr Dung who is driving the continued economic liberalisation; others reckon the party leadership as a whole is pushing reform against a reluctant government bureaucracy. What is clear is that in terms of personal freedom, cautious liberalisers seem to have the upper hand. Vietnam's regime can be less nasty than those of some of the country's democratic neighbours: anti-government activists and clerics are in little danger of being murdered, as in the Philippines, and orderly protests are more readily tolerated than in uptight Singapore.

The Communist Party has all but given up religious persecution, though Buddhist monks, Catholic priests and Cao Dai followers are still arrested for political activities. Indeed, senior officials now praise the positive contribution of religion to society, though they still insist on vetting senior clerical appointments.

Ethnic minorities are being treated better too. In the 1990s, as Vietnam's agriculture was expanding, little was done to stop lowland ethnic Vietnamese grabbing land traditionally farmed by minorities in the mountains. Big protests in 2001-04 in Central Highlands province forced the government to provide more protection for the rights of minorities, some of which still live in poverty. Provision of electricity and water to minority villages has been stepped up. An American academic who has made a close study of Vietnam's minorities says they have an easier time than in most other South-East Asian countries.

Newspapers and broadcasters are still tightly controlled by the party, but reasoned criticism of government policy—for instance, the recent handling of inflation—is now permitted. A recent study of the Vietnamese press by Catherine McKinley, a former Dow Jones correspondent, found many upstanding young editors and reporters who want the country to be better-run. Quite senior people may face corruption probes and often prosecutions.

  

Clean up

Party leaders are well aware that public disgust with official corruption is the biggest threat to their continued rule. However, as Ms McKinley's study notes, it is not clear whether the latitude given to journalists really amounts to the “no-holds-barred corruption crackdown” that senior leaders like to talk about. For example, one editor was told to stop reporting a scandal in the transport ministry if it “reached beyond ministerial level”. The authorities have allowed the media to expose corruption since the start of doi moi, and two decades later Vietnamese public life is not obviously cleaner. Still, in its reporting of stories embarrassing to important people and its comments on policy, Vietnam's press is no less free than its neutered Singaporean counterpart.

The legal system is unreliable and chaotic, and even the cautious World Bank expresses worries about a tendency to “criminalise” civil disputes. This often seems to happen in cases where one side is a state enterprise. America's State Department, in its annual human-rights report published in March, expressed worries at the Communist Party's continuing influence over the selection of judges, but then it says much the same about Singapore and its ruling People's Action Party. The government insists that there are no political prisoners in its jails, though some detained dissidents have done nothing more than call for democracy. But China has a worse record of using the courts as political tools and treats its dissidents more harshly.

Uncle Ho is still watching -Magnum

A diplomat with experience of China and Vietnam notes two other key differences. In China the revolutionaries are mostly dead, and party chiefs are cut off from reality by layers of sycophantic bureaucrats. Vietnam's revolutionaries, who were young men in the 1950s-70s wars, are still around—in government, business, academia and elsewhere. Continuing social links between these “war heroes” may make the leadership more sensitive to ordinary people's concerns. If so, rising tensions such as those that caused China's Tiananmen Square protests may be dealt with and detected sooner—and a Chinese-style crackdown would also be less likely.

So where is the party heading? As the state becomes less important as an employer and a provider of goods and services, the party also matters a little less, particularly in the cities—until someone runs afoul of it. It is still feared, despite the relative mildness of the regime. Vietnamese are reluctant to talk about it, even if they are living abroad, in case it hurts their families back home. They worry that if they say the wrong thing they will be jailed on trumped-up charges. One Vietnamese businessman interviewed for this report visibly squirmed when asked about the party cells that remain mandatory for all businesses, even private ones. Another affected not to know about this requirement, then remembered when pressed.

As Vietnam continues to open its economy to business and meet the UN's poverty-reducing Millennium Development Goals, both foreign investors and the multilateral agencies like to play down the iron fist that still inhabits the velvet glove. There are no reliable polls on what the Vietnamese public thinks of its country's politics. Perhaps the nearest is a recent poll by TNS and its affiliates, which found Vietnam's youthful population to be the most optimistic in Asia. That seems to support the view that the public, however grudgingly, gives the party credit for reuniting and rebuilding the country and, more recently, improving living standards. But continuing corruption and rising inequality may be using up this goodwill. A recent World Bank report notes that big business can afford the bribes but most individuals have trouble finding the money.

An economic setback that reverses the recent rise in living standards might make people turn against the party. Or, as they get used to economic freedom and learn more about richer, freer countries, they may hanker after more political freedom too. Unlike, say, the Thais, the Vietnamese are not at all deferential. If, one day, they get too fed up with the party, they may lose their fears and ditch it.

A flicker of democracy

A university student says her generation is “interested in doing business, not politics” and does not have much respect for those in power. Like some of the returned exiles interviewed for this report, she feels that the government will have to open up to change one day. A Catholic priest says many people want change now but, having suffered so much in war, they have become peace lovers and are “making do” with the current government.

In the past two years there have been glimmers of a pro-democracy movement. As the Communist Party held its tenth congress in April 2006, a new dissident group, Bloc 8406, emerged with a “manifesto on freedom and democracy”. An exile-backed political party, Viet Tan, is sending members back home to recruit members and agitate for change, and several have been detained or expelled. When Hoang Minh Chinh, the leader of another group, the Democratic Party of Vietnam (DPV) and one of the founders of Bloc 8406, died in February, hundreds of activists turned up for his funeral in Hanoi.

Having spent so much effort making Vietnam respectable, the leadership might find it hard to know how to react if the nascent pro-democracy movement gathered momentum. Would it tell the army to shoot its own people if confronted with the equivalent of China's Tiananmen Square, and would the army obey? So far all the party has done is to allow some debate about whether it should drop the obsolete “C”-word from its name and become the Labour Party or some such.

David Koh, a Vietnam expert at Singapore's Institute for South-East Asian studies, says some degree of political liberalisation is being considered, though perhaps not as much as the West would like. Mr Koh thinks there might be change from within once it is seen to have become inevitable. He quotes a Vietnamese saying to the effect that “it is time to jump when the water reaches the feet.”

The party, which claims almost 3.2m members, still recruits from among the high schools' brightest pupils, a student says, but those who join are resented by their classmates for the privileges they get. It may be that most of them are motivated by a desire to make useful political connections for their own advancement rather than a wish to serve the nation. The danger is that Vietnam may end up like some other South-East Asian countries, stuck firmly in the middle-income trap it is trying so hard to avoid, and suffering from predatory elites, weak institutions, crony capitalism and a pseudo-democracy.

Fortunately it has two much more attractive models close by. In both Taiwan and South Korea, one-party dictatorships in the late 1980s embarked on gradual political liberalisation. These countries' politics can be rather rough-edged, but their democratic transition helped them develop a high-prosperity, high-tech economy of just the sort that Vietnam wants.

One possible route is already becoming clear. Elections for national-assembly seats are often contested, sometimes by people who are not party members. Allowing more non-party candidates to run would be a good first step.

As the Vietnamese leadership is finding, running a vibrant market economy is much harder than running a stunted command economy. The question is whether it can accept that a market economy works best when there is a free market in politics too, as in almost all the world's rich countries. Exiled dissidents are often pessimists, but Ngai Nguyen, the DPV's spokesman in America, sees some hopeful signs. Some members inside Vietnam have identified themselves as belonging to his party without being arrested so far, he says. He even thinks there may be a chance of the DPV being allowed to run candidates in the 2011 national-assembly elections.

This may all seem rather optimistic now. But if the Communist Party, which inherited a war-wracked, divided and impoverished nation, could deliver a united, prosperous and, at long last, free and democratic Vietnam, it would surely be rewarded at the ballot-box.