POLI7012 Chap.8 Vietnam: Party State, Everyday Politics and Civil Society
Vietnam: Party State, Everyday Politics and Civil Society
What this week on Vietnam is asking
Vietnam offers a puzzle for anyone comparing regimes in Southeast Asia. The Communist Party has governed without interruption since reunification, it tolerates no rival parties, and it runs the mass organisations through which most citizens meet the state.
Yet in the late 1980s the same party gave up collective farming, the rural programme it had defended as central to socialism for three decades, and handed land back to households. The three readings for this week try to explain how a regime can be dominant and still be moved.
Chris Dixon examines how reform changed the party-state, Benedict Kerkvliet traces how villagers wore down collectivisation, and Carlyle Thayer asks whether organised dissent is now a force in its own right.
Dixon: a softened, negotiating party-state
Dixon starts from Kerkvliet's three interpretations of Vietnamese politics, the dominating state, mobilisational corporatism and dialogue, and argues that each captures part of a system that commentators have observed from different angles.
He stresses continuity. Before reform the North already ran through layered bureaucracies with considerable local autonomy, and the centre tended to consult lower levels and avoid imposing policy against strong opposition. Reform deepened those tendencies.
Provincial administrations and parts of the state became business actors, the 1992 Constitution raised the standing of the National Assembly, and the media grew more critical, though with repeated clampdowns.
Dixon ends with labels such as soft authoritarian-corporatist and participatory-authoritarian, and he expects further change to come from inside state institutions.
Kerkvliet: everyday politics and the end of collective farming
Kerkvliet's study of the Red River delta shows that collectivisation, pushed hard between 1958 and 1961, never met the conditions that durable cooperatives need: voluntary commitment, trust, effective monitoring and confidence in governance.
Villagers responded not with protest but with everyday politics, meaning quiet, unorganised conduct that complied with, modified, evaded or resisted the rules. They favoured household plots, took paddy, worked collective fields half-heartedly and made private deals with local cadres.
Because such behaviour was massive, leaderless and hard to punish, and because many local officials went along with it, national policy was repeatedly adjusted until family farming was endorsed.
His conclusion is that decollectivisation began in villages and Hanoi followed.
Thayer: the rise and repression of political civil society
Thayer pushes back against both the everyday politics approach and the donor-driven language of civil society. Most organisations that foreigners call NGOs, he argues, belong to the Fatherland Front network and deliver state programmes.
What the literature neglected was political civil society: small parties, independent unions and rights groups that in 2006 formed the network known as Bloc 8406, supported in part by overseas groups such as Viet Tan. The state repressed this movement around the APEC summit, and Thayer judges the opposition too weak to take power.
Of his five scenarios, transformation led by elites inside the party is the most plausible, with a joint elite and opposition path possible over the longer run.
Using the week in your term paper and presentation
The readings give you a ready structure for a paper on any pressing issue in contemporary Vietnam, such as land disputes, labour unrest or press freedom.
First say which arena is doing the work: the party leadership, the authorised mass organisations, unorganised daily conduct, or openly political groups. Then say which interpretation that evidence supports, and whether the regime is likely to absorb the pressure, respond to it, or suppress it.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Kerkvliet's three interpretations of Vietnamese politics as Dixon uses them
- 02
Continuity between the pre-reform and reform party-state
- 03
Local administrations and the new business elite inside the state
- 04
Official, advocacy and everyday politics as three kinds of politics
- 05
Compliance, modification and evasion, and resistance in collective farms
- 06
Why scattered peasant behaviour changed national farm policy
- 07
Bloc 8406, Viet Tan and the limits of political civil society
Worked example · free
Did villagers or leaders end collective farming in Vietnam?
- 2Concede what the claim gets right: collective farming was a top-down creation, and the formal change of policy in the late 1980s was made by the party leadership.
- 2Introduce everyday politics and its forms, and show that villagers shifted labour, land and inputs towards household production without organising.
- 3Explain why this mattered nationally: peasants' leverage, leaders' unwillingness to use mass force, the scale of the behaviour, its leaderless character and complicit local officials.
- 2Place the case in an interpretation: the dialogical reading, which Dixon folds into a softening authoritarian corporatism, and note other causes such as the end of war and aid.
Key terms
- Everyday Politics
- Everyday politics is Kerkvliet's term for low-key, largely unorganised conduct through which people accept, adjust or contest the rules about resources. It happens at work and at home rather than in public campaigns, and it can shift policy when it is widespread.
- Mobilisational Corporatism
- Mobilisational corporatism is the interpretation that party-sponsored mass organisations for peasants, women, youth and workers both rally support for state programmes and carry sector concerns back up to decision makers. Influence is real but runs only through authorised channels.
- Dialogical Interpretation
- The dialogical interpretation holds that communication between rulers and ruled continues after a revolution, much of it through nonconfrontational action by ordinary people. It stresses that the state's capacity to implement is weaker than official claims suggest.
- Remainder System
- The remainder system paid cooperative members from whatever was left after state obligations and expenses were deducted, divided by the total workdays recorded. Because nobody knew a workday's value in advance, it weakened the link between individual effort and reward.
- Political Civil Society
- Political civil society is Thayer's label for non-violent parties, unions and rights and religious groups that press an authoritarian state for democratisation and freedoms. He contrasts it with service NGOs that are closely tied to the state.
- Grassroots Democracy
- Grassroots democracy is the party's local participation policy launched in 1998 after serious rural unrest in Thai Binh. It required communes to publish plans, budgets and land-use decisions so residents could discuss and supervise local government.
Vietnam: Party State, Everyday Politics and Civil Society FAQ
Is Vietnam simply a dominating party-state with no room for society?
Not according to this week's readings. Dixon shows that even the pre-reform North ran on negotiation between levels of the bureaucracy, and that reform created powerful provincial and business interests inside the state. Kerkvliet adds that unorganised villagers effectively dismantled collective farming before Hanoi formally abandoned it.
What is the difference between evasion and resistance in Kerkvliet?
Both are quiet and unorganised, but resistance is intentional and aimed at people or institutions above the actor, such as an abusive cooperative chief. Evasion can come from distrust of neighbours, hunger or a belief that family farming works better. Both still count as everyday politics because they contest resource rules.
Why does Thayer think Bloc 8406 matters if it was repressed?
He argues it showed that previously isolated democracy, labour and religious activists could network and coordinate, and that overseas Vietnamese were now offering money, training and non-violent tactics. Although its leaders were jailed after the APEC summit, he treats it as a sign of future pressure on performance-based legitimacy.
Assessment move
Build a three-column table with Dixon, Kerkvliet and Thayer as headings. For each author write one sentence on where political change originates, one piece of dated evidence with its page, and one limitation another author exposes. Before each weekly reading group, add a current Vietnamese news story to a fourth column and decide which author explains it best, giving one sentence of justification you can say aloud.
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