Politics in Transition

Politics in Transition

CONTEXT

When communist ideology began to inform state organization in Russia after 1917, the immediate problem which confronted state leaders was how to reorganize their states to better align them with Marxist principles. The irony of these governments having to reorganize their economies to align with a philosophy based on the idea that they were no longer necessary should be fairly obvious. Nevertheless, different communist states approached these challenges in different ways. Vladimir Lenin (and Joseph Stalin after him) sought to centralize economic control over the state through a rigid bureaucracy. Industry would be built up according to a series of state directed plans, agricultural land would be taken over by the state and farmed collectively. The population would be guaranteed employment, medical care, and cradle-to-grave social supports. In China, Mao Tse Tung adapted the Leninist model to focus on the rural peasants who made up the vast majority of the Chinese population. While China did end up creating large, state owned industrial plants, Mao emphasized mass mobilization and engagement, launching programs in which the peasantry was encouraged to smelt steel in their own backyard furnaces to help China increase its output. Unsurprisingly, the resulting metal was of extremely poor quality. Again, however, the “iron rice bowl” guaranteed everyone cradle-to-grave access to food, work, and housing.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the remaining communist governments in the world were confronted with the necessity of supporting themselves without the aid of their former patron state. The widespread consensus amongst these states, particularly in East- and Southeast- Asia, was that the decades-long contest between communist-era top-down command economies and market-driven capitalist ones had decisively gone to the capitalists. To survive, they would have to transition away from their centralized plans and allow market forces to have increasing influence over their economies.

Generally, this transition has been problematic. The formerly sprawling state-owned sectors of the economy have been rapidly liquidated, the social support system has collapsed, and in many areas unemployment has spiraled out of control. Further, although the communist party has been removed from power in Russia, it remains in power in China and Vietnam, and even the Russian version of democracy seems flawed by western standards. In China and Vietnam, the party has struggled with ways to maintain control over society, even as the traditional instruments of its control in the form of undisputed regulation of employment, housing, and education have atrophied. Further, transition has generally implied a relaxation of central controls to favor regional authorities, which have sought to maintain their authority and control through a variety of means. These have included partial or complete ownership of ostensibly private companies, opaque land deals which transfer large areas of collective farmland to private ownership without particular concern for the farmers attempting to live on the land, and the proliferation of low-level corruption in the form of a galaxy of minor taxes, permits, and stamps which generate revenue that cannot be easily accounted for.

If this is a general portrait of the post-command transition, the specific conditions within Vietnam have informed the specific course of their experience. While the Vietnamese had attempted to impose a centralized economy and collective land reform in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the results had been mixed at best and generally strong local leadership was rapidly able to mitigate the worst privations of the command economy. The imposition of economic controls in the South following reunification in 1975 was irregular, and tended to be far less rigid than it had in the Northern provinces. As will be suggested below, Vietnam had drawn from experience in both China and the Soviet Union, but had never been as successful as either in imposing central authority over stakeholders at the provincial, district, or city levels. In some ways, this seems to have made their transition toward a market economy easier, but the state remains replete with corruption and a surprising degree of state involvement in the civilian economy. Current scholarship is still struggling to understand what this transition means for the average Vietnamese, but it seems clear that they remain in a period of dynamic transition as urban populations swell, mobility becomes a regular feature of economic life, and the rules of economic society are malleable in a way they have not been for at least a generation.

TEXT

Martin Gainsborough, Changing Political Economy of Vietnam: The Case of Ho Chi Minh City. London: RoutledgeCourzon, 2003.

Generally, as communist states have sought to transition their economies from centralized state control to a model which allows some greater level of market influence, they have necessarily been forced to give greater control to local elites. This phenomenon has been more extensively studied in China, and on the theoretical level Gainsborough is examining how well these models fit when applied to the Vietnamese experience, particularly in Ho Chi Minh City. The literature on economic decentralization is mixed with regard to its opinion on the results of political devolution. Some argue that as local government is fundamentally benign and closer to the needs of local economic actors, decentralization tends foster effective economic growth more efficiently than centralized planning while minimizing negative byproducts. However, others suggest that local elites tend to abuse authority, seeking to exploit regional assets for their own benefit through rent collection, land deals, and other shady practices which are difficult to cast as serving a wider public interest.

Gainsborough is definitely a supporter of the latter model. His work is focused on examining the relationship between central authority and regional power centers. If efforts at reform have commonly taken the form of decentralizing power, these reforms have often generated a reciprocal effort to reassert control from national agencies. The process is often opaque, leaving outside observers attempting to discern the machinations of internal power struggles from public announcements geared to obscure as much as they reveal.

Indeed, borrowing from Christopher Nevitt’s work on Tianjin, which argues that city bureaucrats in post-communist Asian states now have parallel career paths from which to choose, he illustrates the development of a new professional path for bureaucrats. Bureaucrats can continue working to appeal to central government authorities on a career arc which might termed “traditional,” but they now also have a competing path, along which they abandon any hope of promotion and seek to enrich themselves locally. Gainsborough suggests that in the case of Ho Chi Minh city, the process has created internal competition between different parts of the city government as different groups compete for power and influence. The top-down structure of state power is beginning to break down as it becomes possible for local interests to play important roles in selecting their bureaucratic masters. He further suggests that most of the major companies that have emerged since decentralization are either largely owned by, or at the least intimately tied to, existing bureaucratic power structures (Eden Trading and Service Company, Ben Thanh Tourist Company, First District Import-Export Company, Saigon Tourist Company, etc.). Banks and land trading companies are ordered along similar lines, and find natural allies in bureaucrats capable of cutting through the haze of fees, permits, and regulations which exist as much to enrich various ministries as they do to administer the city.

Gainsborough goes on to argue that central authorities are not oblivious to the machinations of local leaders, and occasionally seek to moderate the corruption with “clampdowns,” public showcase trials in which prominent businessmen are convicted for conducting what pretty much everyone acknowledges is business as usual, but whose function is more to be seen to be addressing the problem than to actually punish those inevitably convicted. However, Gainsborough highlights cases such as Tamexco and Epco in which businessmen were actually executed for economic offenses. He suggests that these cases should be seen as part of an effort by the central government to utterly destroy some power networks, if not to propagate widespread reforms across Vietnamese political culture.

SUBTEXTS

Martin Gainsborough, From Patronage to “Outcomes”: Vietnam’s Communist Party Congresses Reconsidered. Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. 2, Issue 1, 3-26.

Gainsborough attempts to argue here that the traditional approach to studying Vietnamese governmental policy decisions, a detailed examination of Party Congress meetings, is flawed and in need of careful reconsideration. Party Congress assemblies are Kabuki-like events stage-managed for public consumption and generally intended to present scenes of unity and strong support for governmental decisions. Gainsborough suggests that the traditional approach to reading these events is fundamentally flawed, in that it has tended to focus on personnel changes on the Politburo and Central Committee, and on the white paper they inevitably produce. Gainsborough argues, rightly, that such material is little better than reading tea leaves, and tends to produce very crude divisions between “reformers” and “conservatives” rather than more nuanced gradations of policy intentions, or indeed, any certain evidence that a given political leader actually advocates any given set of policy outcomes. So, according to his argument, a combination of poor predictive ability and the support of an erroneous sense that the congresses reflect the will of some continuous agenda informing personnel and policy choices on a long-term basis create a false impression of relevance.

Gainsborough suggests that instead, scholars should approach the conferences as opportunities to focus on the outcomes created by the decisions announced and the occasional moments when a patronage relationship becomes apparent through the fog of innocuous formality. The approach suggests that patronage is more important than stated policy.

The article proceeds to examine the trial of a number of businessmen associated with a corporation called PMU 18, who were all convicted as part of a wide-ranging corruption scandal which had directed millions of dollars in contracts toward companies owned by their friends and family. The trial, which cast a shadow over that year’s party congress, was widely seen as revealing patronage relationships and laying bare the actual machinery of the state.

Barrett L. McCormick, Political Change in China and Vietnam: Coping with the Consequences of Economic Reform: Coping with the Consequences of Economic Reform. The China Journal, No. 40, Special Issue: Transforming Asian Socialism: China and Vietnam Compared, (July, 1998), 121-143.

McCormick argues that both the Chinese and Vietnamese governments are increasingly threatened by the simultaneous decrease in relevance to the people they govern, and the almost complete lack of any viable alternative to existing government structures that would keep current elites in power. The communist governments in both China and Vietnam had worked to create elaborate systems of both economic and social control, based on the fact that they could regulate access both to housing and food through the use of work units. He suggests that with the introduction of market reforms, both systems are under increasing strain as these foundations of their influence erode. Indeed, he suggests that market economies have created a series of new social and economic forces which the respective governments have been unable to control. While bureaucrats have often been reluctant to enact sustentative changes, average people have often been eager to seize opportunities to escape from farming collectives or earn higher wages. The ultimate result is inevitably less dependence on the state for survival, and the concomitant undermining of state institutions.

As the power to shelter and feed has been stripped away from the state, so has the incentive for average people to engage in the centrally directed political discourse which had previously been central to maintaining ones’ place in communist society. Both Vietnam and China now host large, market driven mass cultures. As the widespread disillusionment between state ideology and personal experience has become more evident, both governments have attempted to compensate with new ideologies based on economic prosperity and nationalism, and fuelled by a narrative of Western decline and Asian ascendance. Further, McCormick argues that the states have increasingly been forced to blend rule of law (as opposed to rule by law) into what are superficially similar institutions of government. However, voting remains an act of ambiguous significance, and actual devolution of political power to elected assemblies remains some way off in an uncharted future.

Alexander Woodside, Exalting the Latecomer State: Intellectuals and the State during the Chinese and Vietnamese Reforms. The China Journal, No. 40, Special Issue: Transforming Asian Socialism: China and Vietnam Compared, (July 1998), 9-36.

In this article, Woodside argues that in both China and Vietnam, observers are able to witness two simultaneous economic revolutions playing out: one, the transition from centrally planned to market based, the other from agrarian-peasant to urban-industrial. He suggests that the incomplete nature of either informs the difficulties both state economies face today.

Woodside argues that both societies continue to want to elevate technical experts to address their problems, which he suggests is a holdover from the days of mandarin rule. Drawing on texts from Mencius and Confucius, these men attempted to centralize power within the state bureaucracy, a tendency communism continued, but altered by maintaining a relatively low number of educated elites from which to draw potential leaders.

Woodside proceeds to examine the extent to which Vietnam has developed within a sphere of Chinese influence, and to what extent it has been able to evolve along an independent course. Certainly, both states moved decisively away from promoting individuals based on their education. While he suggests that this is a sensitive political issue in Vietnam which is therefore rarely explored in anything like the depth it deserves, some conclusions can be drawn. Whereas Mao preached a cycle of perpetual revolution and regularly culled members of the ruling class, Ho Chi Minh espoused a far more corporatist model of government which preserved the ruling gerontocracy into the 1980’s.

Finally, Woodside explores Chinese and Vietnamese efforts to appropriate “Latecomer State” theory, ultimately concluding that this title is appropriate only to the extent that they have come late to the idea of economies which must be qualitatively improved through the application of capital rather than through territorial expansion at the expense of neighboring states.

Barrett L. McCormick and Jonathan Unger, China After Socialism: In the Footsteps of Eastern Europe or East Asia? (New York and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1996).

While this collection of essays offers a wealth of background information on various aspects of the Chinese transition toward a market economy, probably the most interesting for our purposes is Corporatism in China. This essay argues that the most accurate model for understanding the governing model emerging in China by the mid-1990’s is corporatism. Corporatism is defined as a governing model in which there is a single entity which emerges as the sole legitimate representative of the public interest, and which is tasked with mediating and forming unequal relationships between competing subordinate interest groups. There is certainly evidence to suggest that the Chinese government would like to be perceived in this way, but ultimately Gainsborough’s model above probably does a better job of describing the actual conflicts which emerge between competing local and national influence blocs.

Jane Duckett, The Entrepreneurial State in China: Real Estate and Commerce Departments in Reform Era Tianjin. (London and New York: Routledge, 1998).

Duckett writes an interesting examination of the emergence of state entrepreneurialism in China, focusing particularly on Tianjin, during the late 1980’s and particularly in the 1990’s. The formation of for-profit businesses staffed by former employees of the state bureaucracy and largely or entirely owned by state actors, is the defining attribute of this period on Chinese economic development. Duckett points out that it is still too early to determine whether this is a temporary phase in China’s evolution toward a more Western-style economy or will become a permanent feature of the economic landscape. The is little to indicate that the Chinese economy has moved away from this model in the decade since Duckett published.