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Vietnam INTRODUCTION
Unavailable
Figure 1. Administrative Divisions of Vietnam, 1985
The victory of communist forces in Vietnam in April 1975
ranks as one of the most politically significant occurrences of
the post-World War II era in Asia. The speed with which the North
finally seized the South, and the almost simultaneous communist
victories in Laos and Cambodia, were stunning achievements. The
collapse of the three Indochinese noncommunist governments
brought under communist control a region that, over the course of
four decades of war, had become the focus of United States policy
for the containment of communism in Asia. The achievement was
even more phenomenal for having been accomplished in the face of
determined United States opposition and for having called into
question the very policy of containing communism.
The events of April 1975 prepared the way for the official
reunification of North and South in 1976, some three decades
after Ho Chi Minh first proclaimed Vietnam's independence under
one government in September 1945 and more than a century after
France divided Vietnam in order to rule its regions separately.
The departure of defeated Japanese troops, who had occupied
Vietnam during World War II, had created the opportunity for
Vietnamese communists to seize power in August 1945, before
French authorities were able to return to reclaim control of the
government. Communist rule was cut short, however, by nationalist
Chinese and British occupation forces whose presence tended to
support the Communist Party's political opponents. Between 1945
and 1975, the generation of communists responsible for victory in
the South pursued a lengthy war for independence from the French,
acquiesced temporarily to division of the country into a
communist North and noncommunist South, and engaged in a
subsequent war for control of the South against a southern regime
supported by the United States. Reunification and independence,
however, were goals that predated the communists. They were the
long-established objectives of Ho Chi Minh's nationalist and
anticolonialist predecessors, who had resisted Chinese rule for
1,000 years and French domination for a century.
Indeed, Vietnam's unrelenting resistance to foreign
intervention remains a dominant Vietnamese historical theme,
manifested in the repeated waging of dau tranh, or
struggle to gain a long-term objective through total effort, and
motivated by chinh nghia, or just cause. Vietnam's
communist leaders claim that every Vietnamese has been a soldier
in this struggle. Paradoxically, Vietnam's fierce determination
to remain free of foreign domination has often been combined with
an equally strong willingness to accept foreign influence.
Historically, the pattern has been to adopt foreign ideas to
indigenous conditions whenever they applied.
China was the chief source of Vietnam's foreign ideas and the
earliest threat to its national sovereignty. Beginning in the
first century B.C., China's Han dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 220)
imposed Chinese rule that endured for ten centuries despite
repeated Vietnamese uprisings and acts of rebellion. Only the
collapse of the Tang dynasty (618-907) in the early tenth century
enabled Vietnamese national hero Ngo Quyen to reestablish
Vietnam's independence a generation later. The Vietnamese
subsequently were able to fend off further invasion attempts for
900 years
(see
The Chinese Millennium;
Nine Centuries of Independence
, ch. 1).
Whether ruled by China or independent, the Vietnamese elite
consistently modeled Vietnamese cultural institutions on those of
the Chinese. Foremost among such Chinese institutions was
Confucianism, after which Vietnamese family, bureaucratic, and
social structures were patterned. The Vietnamese upper classes
tended also to study Chinese classical literature and to use the
Chinese system of ideographs in writing. Emperor Gia Long, in a
particularly obvious act of imitation in the early nineteenth
century, even modeled his new capital at Hue after the Chinese
capital at Beijing. The process of sinicization, however, tended
to coexist with, rather than to replace, traditional Vietnamese
culture and language. Imitation of the Chinese was largely
confined to the elite classes. Traditional Vietnamese society, on
the other hand, was sustained by the large peasant class, which
was less exposed to Chinese influence.
Vietnam's lengthy period of independence ended in 1862, when
Emperor Tu Duc, agreeing to French demands, ceded three provinces
surrounding Saigon to France. During the colonial period, from
1862 to 1954, resistance to French rule was led by members of the
scholar-official class, whose political activities did not
involve the peasantry and hence failed. The success of the
communists, on the other hand, was derived from their ability to
organize and retain the peasantry's support. The Vietnamese
Communist Party (VCP--Viet Nam Cong San Dang) and its various
communist antecedents presented Marxism-Leninism as an effective
means of recovering the independence that was Vietnam's
tradition. Belief in this ideal was instrumental in sustaining
Northern and Southern peasant-based communist forces during the
lengthy Second Indochina War, which lasted from 1954 to 1975.
In the post-1975 period, however, it was immediately apparent
that the popularity and effectiveness of the communist party's
wartime policies did not necessarily extend to its peacetime
nation-building plans. Having unified the North and South
politically, the VCP still had to integrate them socially and
economically. In this task, VCP policy-makers were confronted
with Southern resistance to change, as well as traditional
animosities arising from cultural and historical differences
between the North and South. The situation was further
complicated by a deterioration in economic conditions that
ignited an unprecedented level of discontent among low-level VCP
members and open criticism of VCP policies. The party appeared to
be in a state of transition, wavering over the pace and manner of
the South's integration with the North and debating the place of
reform in development strategy. The first generation communist
leaders, co-founders of the party together with Ho Chi Minh, were
aging and were beginning to step down in favor of younger, often
reform-minded technocrats. The Sixth National Party Congress held
in December 1986 was a milestone; it marked the end of the
party's revolutionary period, when social welfare and
modernization were subordinate to security concerns, and the
beginning of a time when experimentation and reform were
encouraged to stimulate development
(see Party Organization
, ch.
4).
In the 1980s, Vietnam ranked third in population--60 million-
-and first in population density--an average of 182 persons per
square kilometer--among the world's communist nations. A 2
percent annual population growth rate and uneven population
distribution adversely affected resource allocation, work force
composition, and land use. Population projections indicated a
population of 80 million by the year 2000, if the growth rate
remained unchanged. The Fourth National Party Congress in
December 1976 stressed the need to curtail the population growth
rate and introduced a plan to relocate 54 million people to 1
million hectares of previously uncultivated land, now organized
into "new economic zones," by the mid-1990s. As of 1988, however,
progress toward the plan's fulfillment was considerably behind
schedule
(see Population
, ch. 2).
A predominantly rural society with more than half of its work
force committed to agriculture, Vietnam's standard of living
remained one of the poorest in the world. A series of harvest
shortfalls that reduced food supplies and a scarcity of foreign
exchange that made it difficult to replenish food reserves
contributed to this condition. Shortages of raw materials and
energy forced production facilities to operate at considerably
less than full capacity, and the party bureaucracy remained
incapable of acting quickly enough to reduce shortages
(see Economic Setting
, ch. 3).
Economic development prospects for the 1980s and 1990s were
tied to party economic policy in critical ways. Party leaders, in
establishing economic policy at the Fourth National Party
Congress, envisioned Vietnam's post-reunification economy to be
in a "period of transition to socialism." The plan, or series of
plans, called for the economy to evolve through three phases: The
first, outlining the objectives of the Second Five-Year Plan
(1976-80), set extremely high goals for industrial and
agricultural production while also giving high priority to
construction, reconstruction, and the integration of the North
and the South. The second, entitled "socialist
industrialization," was divided into two stages--from 1981 to
1990 and from 1991 to 2005. During these stages, the material and
technical foundations of communism were to be constructed, and
development plans were to focus equally on agriculture and
industry. The third and final phase, covering the years from 2006
to 2010; was to be a time set aside to "perfect the transitional
period."
By 1979, however, it was obvious to Vietnam's leaders that
the Second Five-Year Plan would fail to meet its goals and that
the long-range goals established for the transition period were
unrealistic. The economy continued to be dominated by small-scale
production, low productivity, high unemployment, material and
technological shortages, and insufficient food and consumer
goods.
The Fifth National Party Congress, held in March 1982,
approved the economic goals of the Third Five-Year Plan (1981-
85). The policies introduced were comparatively liberal and
called for the temporary retention of private capitalist
activities in the South, in order to spur economic growth. By
sanctioning free enterprise, the congress ended the
nationalization of small business concerns and reversed former
policies that sought the immediate transformation of the South to
communism. The July 1984 Sixth Plenum of the Fifth National Party
Congress' Central Committee confirmed the party's earlier
decision, recognizing that the private sector's domination over
wholesale and retail trade in the South could not be eliminated
until the state was capable of assuming that responsibility.
Proposals subsequently were made to upgrade the state's economic
sophistication by decentralizing planning procedures and
improving the managerial skills of government and party
officials. To attract foreign currency and expertise, the
government approved a new foreign investment code in December
1987
(see Economic Roles of the Party and the Government
, ch. 3).
Vietnam's security considerations in the 1980s also
represented a new set of challenges to the party. Until the fall
of the South Vietnamese government in 1975, the party had
relegated foreign policy to a secondary position behind the more
immediate concerns of national liberation and reunification. Once
the Second Indochina War had ended, however, the party needed to
look outward and reevaluate foreign policy, particularly as it
applied to Cambodia, China, the Soviet Union, member nations of
the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the
United States and other Western nations
(see Foreign Relations
, ch. 4).
By the end of the 1970s, the Vietnamese were threatened on
two fronts, a condition which Vietnam had not faced previously,
even at the height of the Second Indochina War. Conflict between
Vietnamese and Cambodian communists on their common border began
almost immediately after their respective victories in 1975. To
neutralize the threat, Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December 1978
and overran Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, driving out the
incumbent Khmer Rouge communist regime and initiating a prolonged
military occupation of the country. Vietnam's relations with
China, a seemingly staunch ally during the Second Indochina War,
subsequently reached their nadir, when China retaliated against
Vietnam's incursion into Cambodia by launching a limited invasion
of Vietnam in February and March 1979. Relations between the two
countries had actually been deteriorating for some time.
Territorial disagreements, which had remained dormant during the
war against the South, were revived at the war's end, and a
postwar campaign engineered by Hanoi to limit the role of
Vietnam's ethnic Chinese (Hoa) community in domestic commerce
elicited a strong Chinese protest. China was displeased with
Vietnam primarily, however, because of its rapidly improving
relationship with the Soviet Union.
A new era in Vietnamese foreign relations began in 1978, when
Hanoi joined the Soviet-led Council for Mutual Economic
Assistance (Comecon) and signed the Soviet-Vietnamese Treaty of
Friendship and Cooperation with Moscow. The agreement called for
mutual assistance and consultation in the event either was
threatened by a third country. A secret protocol accompanying the
treaty also permitted Soviet use of Vietnamese airport and harbor
facilities, particularly the former United States military
complex at Cam Ranh Bay. In return, Vietnam acquired military and
economic aid needed to undertake an invasion of Cambodia and was
able to exploit Soviet influence as a deterrent to Chinese
intervention
(see Foreign Relations
, ch. 4).
After China had cut off military assistance to Vietnam, such
aid--amounting to US$200 to $300 million annually--was almost
exclusively Soviet in origin during the 1980s. As Vietnam's
primary source of economic aid as well, the Soviet Union during
this period provided close to US$1 billion annually in balance-
of-payments aid, project assistance, and oil price subsidies.
Vietnam's growing dependence on the Soviet Union concerned
Hanoi's Southeast Asian neighbors. As did China, the ASEAN
nations thought that the relationship provided a springboard for
Soviet influence in the region and that Soviet support provided a
critical underpinning for Vietnam's Cambodia policy. The ASEAN
nations assumed a key role in rallying United Nations (UN)
General Assembly opposition to Vietnam's interference in Cambodia
and led the UN in preventing the Vietnamese-supported regime in
Phnom Penh from assuming Cambodia's General Assembly seat. ASEAN
members were instrumental in combining--at least on paper--the
various Cambodian communist and noncommunist factions opposing
the Vietnamese into a single resistance coalition.
The decision to intervene militarily in Cambodia further
isolated Vietnam from the international community. The United
States, in addition to citing Vietnam's minimal cooperation in
accounting for Americans who were missing in action (MIAs) as an
obstacle to normal relations, barred normal ties as long as
Vietnamese troops occupied Cambodia. In 1987 Washington also
continued to enforce the trade embargo imposed on Hanoi at the
conclusion of the war in 1975.
Normalization of diplomatic relations with the United States,
however, was not a primary Vietnamese foreign policy objective in
1987. The sizable economic benefits it would yield, plus its
strategic value remained secondary to other more immediate
security concerns, although the potential economic benefits were
judged sizable. Instead, Vietnam prepared to enter the 1990s with
foreign relations priorities that stressed extrication from the
military stalemate in Cambodia in a manner consistent with
security needs, repair of ties with China to alleviate Chinese
military pressure on Vietnam's northern border, and reduction of
military and economic dependence on the Soviet Union.
Domestic and foreign policy in 1987 reflected changes
initiated by the elevation of reformer Nguyen Van Linh to VCP
general secretary at the Sixth National Party Congress. Policies
were characterized by a program of political and economic
experimentation that was similar to contemporary reform agendas
undertaken in China and the Soviet Union. The goal of all three
nations was to pursue economic development at the cost of some
compromise of communist ideological orthodoxy. In the case of
Vietnam, however, the conservative members of the leadership
continued to view orthodoxy as an ultimate goal. According to
their plan, the stress on economic development was only a
momentary emphasis; the real goal remained the perfection of
Vietnam's communist society.
* * * *
In 1988 and 1989, the years immediately following the
completion of research and writing on this book, Vietnam's
foreign and domestic policy was increasingly determined by
economic considerations. The mood of dramatic economic and
political reform, inspired by the Sixth National Party Congress
and Linh's appointment to party leadership, however, appeared to
have dissipated, and the mood of confidence that had prevailed in
1987 gradually evaporated as disagreement among Political Bureau
members over the pace of change stymied the implementation of
many policy innovations.
A campaign for political and economic renewal (doi
moi) was launched by Linh immediately following the congress,
but the progress of change, particularly economic change, failed
to meet expectations. Linh was strongly opposed within the
party's leadership, and his economic reforms were initially
stalled or blocked by the resistance efforts of a strong
conservative coalition of party leaders, made up of ideological
conservatives, bureaucrats, and members of the military
establishment.
Linh's initiatives for dealing with the country's economic
problems were bold, but the coalition of conservative party
leaders opposing his policies effectively denied him the
consensus he needed to implement his plans. Consequently, his
powers to effect change appeared to wane as the severity of the
country's economic crisis deepened.
Despite their opposition to reform policy, reform, per se,
was viewed as "correct" by most, if not all, members of Vietnam's
Political Bureau. A member's position on the subject, however,
was probably determined less by his view of the process in the
abstract than by his willingness to undertake risk, and in 1988
and 1989 the non-risk takers appeared to have the upper hand.
In March 1988 Prime Minister Pham Hung died, and Linh's
choice of conservative Do Muoi over fellow reformer Vo Van Kiet
to replace him was viewed as a clear concession to the non-risk
takers. National Assembly members, however, for the first time
challenged the central committee's nominee for a key government
post by demanding that two candidates be permitted to run. Muoi,
the party's choice, was required to face Vo Van Kiet, the nominee
of delegates from the south.
The dissent displayed in the debate leading to Muoi's
selection was not isolated, but mirrored a dramatic increase in
all political debate and discussion in 1988. The October 1988
meeting of the Congress of National Trade Unions, for example,
was extremely critical of the government's economic failures.
Similarly, the Fourth Session of the 8th National Assembly, held
in December 1988, heatedly debated the issues. It was conducted
without the customary Central Committee meeting beforehand and,
on the surface, appeared to be acting without Central Committee
guidance.
Lastly, a campaign against corruption, initiated by Nguyen
Van Linh in 1987, invited private and official criticism of
public policy and encouraged the press to take the lead in
uncovering corruption. By early 1988, the campaign had resulted
in the replacement of almost all of the country's 40 province
secretaries and 80 percent of the 400 or so district party
chiefs. Eleven-hundred party cadres were tried for corruption in
the first six months of the year, and the press was credited with
the party's removal of Ha Truong Hoa, the party Provincial
Secretary of Thanh Hoa, whose position was widely regarded as
impregnable despite his well publicized abuses of office. The
policy of encouraging criticism, however, was mysteriously
reversed in early 1989 when the press was urged to moderate its
criticism of the Party. It was speculated that the reversal was
meant to appease conservatives within the Political Bureau who
were concerned about the erosion of party authority caused by
public criticism.
Party leaders themselves, however, continued to be critical
of party policy. Nguyen The Phan, the head of the theoretical
department of the Marxist-Leninist Institute, for example, told a
January 1989 meeting of high-ranking officials that by following
the Soviet economic model, Vietnam had developed a centralized
and subsidized economic system "inferior to capitalism," and "had
abolished motivation in people and society." He called on party
leaders to learn about marketplace competition from capitalist
countries.
Goals established and reinforced at the December 1988 meeting
of the Eighth National Assembly were consistent with this theme.
The primary goal was described as development of an economy that
was less controlled by the government and more subject to the
rules of the marketplace. This was to be achieved by subjecting
all economic transactions to the standards of basic business
accountability and by expanding the private sector. Centralized
bureaucratism was to be abolished, and some state-run economic
establishments were to be guaranteed autonomy in their business
practices. Lastly, the system of state subsidies for food,
import-export operations, or for losses incurred by state-run
enterprises was scheduled to be eliminated.
Beginning in 1988, individual farmers were given more
responsibility for the rice growing process in order to increase
their incentive to produce higher yields. Land tenure laws were
modified to guarantee farmers a ten-year tenure on the land, and
the contract system between peasants and the government was
revised to permit peasants to keep 45 to 50 percent of their
output rather than the 25 percent previously allowed. Other
reforms removed restrictions on private-production enterprises in
Hanoi and introduced the concept of developing industry outside
the state-run sector. A law passed in January 1989 helped free
the economy from central control by granting entrepreneurs the
right to pool their capital and set up their own business
organizations. Such concessions were of particular assistance to
entrepreneurs in the South, where the economy in 1988 and 1989
was more or less directed by its own momentum, and where it had
become increasingly evident that Vietnam's economic planners had
opted to exploit the region's economic potential rather than
stifle it by employing rigid controls.
The sixth plenum of the party central committee (Sixth Party
Congress), held in late March 1989, concluded, however, that
despite the establishment of goals and the introduction of some
new policies little was actually being accomplished because local
cadres were failing to implement reform plans or institutionalize
party resolutions in a timely manner. The plenum, therefore,
resolved to emphasize the implementation and institutionalization
of reforms and resolutions already introduced in order to
accelerate the process.
Chinese student pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing a few
months later were watched very closely by Vietnam's leaders. In
their view, the disaffection demonstrated by Chinese students had
resulted directly from China's experimentation with political and
economic reforms. Having undertaken similar changes, they were
concerned that Vietnam was equally vulnerable to displays of
unrest. To avoid China's experience, the government reportedly
dealt with student protesters in Hanoi in May 1989 by acceding to
their demands for improved conditions. Progress toward greater
political liberalization, however, was subsequently checked.
Vietnam's world view noticeably altered in the closing years
of the 1980s, moving from an ideologically dominated perspective,
stressing Vietnam's independence and the division of the world
into communist and noncommunist camps, to a non-ideological view
emphasizing Vietnam's role in a complex world of economic
interdependence. The most significant example of a foreign policy
initiative motivated by this view was the decision, announced in
early 1989, to remove all Vietnamese troops from Cambodia by the
end of September 1989. By disengaging from Cambodia, Vietnam
hoped to remove the single largest obstacle to gaining admission
to the regional and world economic community and to convince its
non-communist neighbors, the West and China, that it was ready to
end its diplomatic and economic isolation.
Ending the Cambodian conflict itself, however, was another
matter, and as events unfolded in 1988 and 1989 it was not clear
whether Vietnam's withdrawal would expedite or prolong a
resolution. Initially, the possibility of ending the stalemate
appeared to improve. Acting entirely on his own initiative,
resistance leader Prince Norodom Sihanouk, in December 1987,
arranged unprecedented direct dialogues between himself and Hun
Sen, the premier of the People's Republic of Kampuchea. Although
they failed to yield major results, the talks nevertheless
initiated valuable face-to-face discussions between
representatives of both sides and introduced diplomacy as a means
of ending the conflict.
In May 1988, eleven days after the Soviets began their troop
withdrawal from Afghanistan and three days before a Moscow summit
between President Reagan and Soviet Secretary Gorbachev was to
convene, Vietnam announced plans to withdraw 50,000 troops by the
end of the year. The withdrawal, commencing in June and ending in
December as promised, involved not only the removal of troops,
but also the dismantling of Vietnam's military high command in
Cambodia and the reassignment of remaining troops to Cambodian
commands.
In July 1988, Hanoi participated in the first meeting of all
parties in the Cambodia conflict. The "cocktail party" meeting,
or Jakarta Informal Meeting (JIM), convened in Bogor, Indonesia,
was termed a limited success because, if nothing more, it
established a negotiating framework and set the agenda for future
discussion. However, it also shifted the emphasis of the search
for a conflict resolution away from Vietnam and to the question
of how to prevent the Khmer Rouge from seizing power once a
political agreement was reached. At the meeting, Vietnam linked a
total withdrawal of its troops to the elimination of the Khmer
Rouge and won the support of the ASEAN nations and the non-
communist factions of the Cambodian resistance coalition, who
also feared that Pol Pot would return to power in the absence of
Vietnamese forces.
A second "informal" meeting of the four Cambodian factions,
held in February 1989 ended inconclusively, deadlocked on
fundamental issues such as the shape of the international force
that was to supervise an agreement and the manner in which a
quadripartite authority to rule in Phnom Penh would be
established. The February meeting was followed by a month-long
international conference, held in Paris in August 1989 and
attended by twenty nations, which also ended short of a
comprehensive agreement. Although the conference had been called
to help mediate a settlement between the Vietnamese-backed
government in Phnom Penh and the three-member resistance
coalition, it foundered over finding an appropriate place for the
Khmer Rouge once Vietnam's troop withdrawal was complete. Thus in
September 1989, on the eve of the withdrawal, the promise of an
impending political settlement in Cambodia remained unfulfilled.
Instead, the inability of the four factions to arrive at a
compromise renewed prospects for an escalation of conflict on the
battlefield.
In 1988 one of Vietnam's top foreign policy priorities was
finding a way to cut China's support for the Khmer Rouge. China,
Hanoi argued, was the key to a Cambodian resolution because, as
Pol Pot's chief source of supply, Beijing alone had the power to
defuse the Khmer Rouge threat. As the year progressed, it became
increasingly evident that Beijing was more interested in a
settlement than in prolonging the conflict and that its position
on Cambodia was shifting to facilitate settlement. This fact was
evidenced in July 1988 when a Chinese proposal, repeating long
standing demands for a complete withdrawal of all Vietnamese
troops and a quadripartite government led by Sihanouk,
surprisingly ruled out a personal role for Pol Pot in any post-
settlement government. The proposal was also novel because it
intimated that Beijing, for the first time, was willing to
discuss a provisional coalition government before the departure
of all Vietnamese troops. At the International Conference on the
conflict held in August 1989, the Chinese appeared to be
undercutting their support for the Khmer Rouge by arguing that
civil war was to be avoided at all costs and promising to cut off
military aid once a settlement was reached. China's position on
the Khmer Rouge, nevertheless, remained ambiguous.
In a 1988 incident, possibly related to Cambodia because it
potentially strengthened China's position at a future bargaining
table, the ongoing dispute between China and Vietnam over
sovereignty to the Spratly Islands erupted into an unprecedented
exchange of hostilities. The situation was reduced to an exchange
of accusations following the armed encounter. Vietnam's repeated
calls for China to settle the dispute diplomatically won rare
support for Vietnam from the international community, but
elicited little response from Beijing.
A conciliatory mood developed on both sides of the Sino-
Vietnamese border in 1989, partly because Vietnam's proposal to
withdraw completely from Cambodia responded to a basic Chinese
condition for improved relations. Formal talks at the deputy
foreign minister level were initiated, and a cross-border trade
in Chinese and Vietnamese goods flourished in the Vietnamese
border town of Lang Son. The internal turmoil experienced by
China in May and June 1989 may have actually benefited the
relationship from Vietnam's point of view. Historically, whenever
Beijing had been forced to turn its attention inwardly to quell
internal dissension, Vietnam's security situation had
correspondingly improved.
Beijing's interest in improving ties with Moscow in 1988 and
1989, however, complicated the situation and put Vietnam
increasingly at odds with the Soviet Union. As the reality of an
eventual Sino-Soviet reconciliation approached, it became
increasingly clear that Vietnamese and Soviet strategic interests
did not always coincide. The presence of Vietnamese troops in
Cambodia, for example, was the leading obstacle to Sino-Soviet
reconciliation. Accordingly, the most significant development to
occur in Soviet-Vietnamese relations in 1988 and 1989 was the
application of increased Soviet pressure on Vietnam to resolve
the Cambodian situation, a pressure that undoubtedly helped
prompt Vietnam's policy of withdrawal.
Hanoi was naturally wary of any talks between the Soviet
Union and China, fearing that a deal would be made on Cambodia at
Vietnam's expense. The two powers convened bilateral discussions
in Beijing in August 1988 and proceeded to normalize relations at
a summit meeting in Beijing in May 1989. Very little with regard
to Cambodia was actually accomplished, however, and the summit
resulted simply in the two sides agreeing to "disagree" on the
mechanics of a political solution.
By actively pursuing an end to the Cambodian conflict,
Vietnam acted also to further the chances of normalizing its
relations with the United States. Both sides in 1988 appeared
particularly receptive to improving relations, and Vietnam's
troop withdrawal as well as its participation in the JIM were
interpreted by the United States as positive gestures directed
toward Vietnam's disengagement from Cambodia, a requirement
imposed by Washington for diplomatic recognition. Hanoi also
acted, in the early part of the year, to remove other obstacles
to recognition by agreeing in principle to resettlement in the
United States of thousands of former political prisoners and by
consenting to cooperate in joint excavations of United States
military aircraft crash sites in an attempt to locate the remains
of Americans missing in action (MIAs). Some remains were
returned. In 1989, additional sets of MIA remains were returned,
and an accord was reached between Vietnam and the United States
granting re-education camp inmates who had worked for the United
States permission to emigrate.
Finally, Vietnam sought to improve its regional relations in
1988 and 1989 by extending a conciliatory gesture to its Asian
neighbors. In response to a rise in the number of Vietnamese
refugees, Vietnam assured its neighbors that it would ease their
burdens as countries of first asylum by reversing a policy that
forbade refugees to return home. Hanoi also proposed to open
discussions with Southeast Asian officials on ending the refugee
exodus. In 1989, however, Vietnam permitted only those refugees
who "voluntarily" sought repatriation to return to Vietnam.
Because genuine volunteers were few in number, the policy was
regarded as inadequate by countries with Vietnamese refugee
populations. More boat people departed Vietnam in 1989 than in
any single year since the beginning of the decade, and their
numbers were no longer limited to southerners fleeing political
persecution but included northerners seeking economic
opportunity. The willingness of countries of first asylum to
accept Vietnamese refugees had lessened considerably since 1979,
however, and many were seriously considering policies advocating
forced repatriation.
Vietnam's relationship with the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations (ASEAN), nevertheless, showed dramatic improvement
during this two-year period, and Thailand, in particular, was
singled out by Hanoi as critically important to Vietnam's
economic future. The success of a January 1989 official visit to
Hanoi by Thai Foreign Minister Sitthi Sawetsila surpassed all
expectations and led Thai Prime Minister Chatchai Chunhawan to
encourage Thai businessmen to expand trade relations with the
Indochinese countries. According to Thai Prime Minister Chatichai
Choonhavan, the Thai goal was to turn the Southeast Asian
peninsula into an economic "Golden Land" (Suwannaphume in
Thai) with Thailand as its center and Indochina, transformed from
"a battlefield into a trading market," as its cornerstone.
Although the plan was controversial, it appeared to reflect the
shift of regional priorities from security to economic concerns.
Vietnam still lacked an adequate foreign investment structure
in 1989, although a Foreign Trade Office and a Central Office to
Supervise Foreign Investment had been established along with a
State Commission for Cooperation and Investment to draft
investment policies. The Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations
convened a three-day conference in February 1989, attended by 500
delegates associated with foreign trade, to discuss modifying
Vietnam's existing foreign economic policies and mechanisms in
order to more effectively attract foreign investors. Ho Chi Minh
City also authorized the establishment of a "Zone of Fabrication
and Exportation" where foreign companies would be free to import
commodities, assemble products, use low cost local labor, and
reexport final products. Ho Chi Minh City, followed by Vung Tau-
Con Dao Special Zone, led all other localities in number of
foreign investment projects and joint ventures initiated, and a
large proportion of the investors were identified as overseas
Vietnamese.
Although changes introduced in the closing years of the 1980s
stopped short of systemic reform, they demonstrated a new level
of commitment on the part of Vietnam's leaders to resolve the
country's peacetime economic problems. Having known great success
in warfare, the government appeared to have accepted that yet
another struggle was underway that would require the kind of
focused resolve previously displayed in wartime. The process was
marked both by the possibility for change and by inertia.
Political and foreign policy agendas were opened to redefinition,
and strategic goals were re-evaluated to emphasize economic
rather than military strength. The process, however, was slowed
considerably by party conservatives, who stressed the danger of
political liberalization and questioned the pace of economic
reform. Change, nevertheless, was evident. In foreign policy,
Vietnam moved to attract foreign investment and to end its
international isolation by disengaging from Cambodia. Likewise,
in the economic sphere at home, where the need for change was
determined to be particularly critical, market forces assumed a
larger role in Vietnam's controlled economy then they had
previously. In undertaking such changes, Vietnam seemed on the
verge of joining the geopolitical trend observed in the late
1980s, in which the behavior of socialist and capitalist systems
alike appeared to favor economic over military development. The
Vietnamese leadership, however, was not prepared to move quickly.
Although committed to the process of change, the Political
Bureau's ability to act was constricted by internal differences
over how to proceed and how much to risk. As the country
approached the 1990s, the question of whether the need to develop
economically was worth the political risk had yet to be fully
resolved.
September 21, 1989
Ronald J. Cima
Data as of December 1987
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