Hanoi’s Capitalist Revolution

[Valin]

City Journal:

Free markets, private businesses, malls, and a middle class —not what Ho Chi Minh had in mind.

Michael J. Totten

Summer 2015

 

After the Vietnam War ended in 1975, Hanoi, capital of a now-unified, Communist Vietnam, was a bombed-out disasterscape. Residents lived under an egalitarian reign of terror. The grim ideologues who ran the country forbade citizens to socialize with or even speak to the few foreign visitors. People queued up in long lines past government stores with bare shelves to exchange ration coupons for meager handfuls of rice. The only traffic on the street was the occasional bicycle.

 

Since then, however, Hanoi has transformed itself more dramatically than almost any other city in the world. Today, the city is an explosive capitalist volcano, and Vietnam is rapidly on its way to becoming a formidable economic and military power. “Many revolutions are begun by conservatives,” Christopher Hitchens once said, paraphrasing John Maynard Keynes, “because these are people who tried to make the existing system work and they know why it does not. Which is quite a profound insight. It used to be known in Marx’s terms as revolution from above.” That’s exactly what happened in Vietnam, though the revolutionaries weren’t conservatives. They were Communists.

 

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Vietnam was finally independent and unified, but it fared no better than the Soviet Union, North Korea, or Cuba—and almost everyone knew it, including many in the Communist leadership. In the mid-1980s, a fight broke out between those who wanted to continue with the old system and those who had already benefited from quiet micro-capitalist reforms enacted in 1979 and wanted to expand them. Southerners made noise about returning to the pre-Communist system that they knew, from personal experience, worked much better. The relative economic success of other Southeast Asian nations, especially Thailand, was obvious even to the ideologues.

 

The advocates of change won the argument, and in 1986, the government officially abandoned Marxist-Leninist economics and announced the Doi Moi reforms, defined as an attempt to create a “socialist-oriented market economy.” Presumably, party leaders left the word “socialist” in there because they were embarrassed by Marxism’s failures and couldn’t admit that they’d been wrong. Or perhaps they feared that their remaining supporters were allergic to the word “capitalism.” No matter. Vietnam officially junked Communism a mere 11 years after imposing it on South Vietnam.

 

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I asked one Hanoi resident what the word “Communism” means today in Vietnam. “Communism today just means we’re run by one political party,” he said. “Some people complain about that, but it doesn’t matter to me as long as the government creates a good business and living environment, and it does. I don’t want different political parties competing with each other and creating a crisis like in Thailand.” He may not mind one-party rule, but plenty of Vietnamese do. The government has created the conditions for the kind of middle-class revolt that erupted in Taiwan and South Korea before those countries matured into multiparty democracies.

 

Vietnam is enjoying a holiday from history, basking in the prosperous and relatively “free” post-totalitarian phase of its evolution. Amid all the economic and cultural dynamism, the state is a weirdly distant anachronism, its billboards and slogans as out of place as World War II posters would be in America now. Over a ubiquitous public-address system, the party still blares “news” into the streets and into everyone’s home each morning and evening, but the Vietnamese I talked with dismissed it as “just propaganda.” Not just the ideology but the state itself feels almost irrelevant to anyone who isn’t an outspoken dissident. Controlling Vietnam’s people and imposing order on its freewheeling chaos is an exercise in futility. No-honking signs and traffic regulations are routinely flouted, as are parking restrictions. I saw two police officers pull up in a car across the street from my hotel and yell at people through a bullhorn to move their motorbikes off the sidewalk. They complied, but less than five minutes after the policemen drove off, the space filled up again.

 

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