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Vietnam Surveillance
Perhaps the most effective instrument of social control in
the 1980s was the "revolutionary vigilance" surveillance system,
commonly called "the warden method." In theory at least, every
hamlet, city block, state farm, factory, school, and state and
party office had its own Revolutionary Vigilance Committee headed
by a warden and made up of a team of neighbors, usually 25 to 40
households (120 to 300 persons). Institutionally, the Vigilance
Committee was described as neither party nor state, but a form of
alliance. Its purpose was to "help the government in all ways and
aspects," specifically by monitoring the behavior of its members,
reporting public opinion to higher authorities, and promoting
various state and party policies and programs locally. The
committee's authority was shored up by the Ho Khau registration
system, which required each individual to have an identity card
and each family to have a family registration certificate or
residence permit (listing the names of all persons authorized to
live at one address). Both identification cards and family
registration certificates were checked frequently by security
cadres.
It is historical fact that social "control" as administered
by the Vietnamese party and government worked impressively over
the years to organize, mobilize, and motivate the society to
serve the interests of national security. It produced an
implacably determined military force and an internal security
system that virtually policed itself. However, it was evident by
the late 1980s that the system no longer worked as well as it
once had. The Political Bureau acknowledged the influence of
"negativism" that endangered the "quality of socialist life," and
military and security service professional journals emphasized
the need to improve security methods, including "techniques for
suppressing rebellions." Although the spread of full-scale social
unrest in Vietnam was not likely, the idea was no longer
unthinkable.
What developed in Vietnam in the 1980s was not so much a rise
in internal security consciousness on the part of the government
as a change in public attitudes toward security problems.
Military and public alertness to the dangers of
counterrevolution, crime, and antisocial behavior diminished to
the point of indifference. Nguyen Van Linh, before his
appointment as VCP general secretary in 1986, complained that the
"spirit of vigilance" was lagging in Vietnam and that "some
individuals suffer[ed] from revolutionary vigilance paralysis."
Massive indoctrination campaigns, undertaken to correct this
shortcoming by arousing public concern, apparently met with
indifferent results. The condition was symptomatic of a society
that was beginning to be buffeted by the winds of change.
* * *
The major source of research materials for this chapter was
the Indochina Archive at the University of California at
Berkeley. The archive has 2.5 million pages of documentary
material, 15 percent of which relates directly to Vietnam's armed
forces, internal security, law, and judiciary. Much of the
archive is original source material from Vietnam, including
official newspaper and journal articles translated and published
by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service and the Joint
Publications Research Service of the United States Government.
PAVN: People's Army of Vietnam, by Douglas Pike, is
the only book-length study of Vietnam's armed forces; William
Turley has written several lengthy articles on the subject. Human
rights violations in Vietnam have been dealt with in journal
articles by Karl Jackson and Jacqueline Desbarats. (For further
information and complete citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of December 1987
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