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Vietnam Vietnam after 1975
The sudden collapse of Saigon in April 1975 set the stage for
a new and uncertain chapter in the evolution of Vietnamese
society. The Hanoi government had to confront directly what
communists have long called the struggle between the two paths of
socialism and capitalism. At issue was Hanoi's ability to
translate its wartime success and socialist revolutionary
experience into postwar rehabilitation and reconstruction, now
that it controlled the South territorially.
Foremost among the regime's imperatives was that of restoring
order and stability to the war-torn South. The critical question,
however, was whether or not the northern conquerors could inspire
the southern population to embrace communism. Initially, Hanoi
appeared sanguine; the two zones had more similarities than
dissimilarities, and the dissimilarities were expected to be
eliminated as the South caught up with the North in socialist
organization.
The December 1975 Vietnam Courier, an official
government publication, portrayed Vietnam as two distinct,
incongruent societies. The South was reported to continue to
suffer from what communists consider the neo-colonialist
influences and feudal ideology of the United States, while the
North was considered to serve as a progressive environment for
growing numbers of a new kind of socialist human being, imbued
with patriotism, proletarian internationalism, and socialist
virtues. The class of social exploiter had been eliminated in the
North, leaving the classes of workers collectivized peasant, and
socialist intellectual, the last consisting of various groups. In
contrast, the South was divided into a working class, peasantry,
petit bourgeois, capitalist--or
comprador (see Glossary)--class,
and the remnant of a feudal landlord class.
In September 1976, Premier Pham Van Dong declared that his
compatriots, North and South, were "translating the revolutionary
heroism they [had] displayed in fighting into creative labor in
the acquisition of wealth and strength." In the South
particularly, the old society was undergoing active changes as
the result of "stirring revolutionary movements" by the workers,
peasants, youth, women, intellectuals, and other groups. In
agriculture alone, "millions of people" participated in bringing
hundreds of thousands more hectares under cultivation and in
building or dredging thousands of kilometers of canals and
ditches.
From all indications, however, these changes occurred more
through coercion than volition. In Dong's own words, the party
had initiated "various policies aimed at eliminating the
comprador capitalists as a class and doing away with all vestiges
of feudal exploitation." These policies radically realigned the
power elite so that the ruling machine was controlled
collectively by the putative vanguard of the working class--the
party--and by the senior cadres of the party who were mostly from
the North.
In its quest for a new socialist order in the South, Hanoi
relied on other techniques apart from socialist economic
transformation and socialist education. These included thought
reform, population resettlement, and internal exile, as well as
surveillance and mass mobilization. Party-sponsored "study
sessions" were obligatory for all adults. For the former elite of
the Saigon regime, a more rigorous form of indoctrination was
used; hundreds of thousands of former military officers,
bureaucrats, politicians, religious and labor leaders, scholars,
intellectuals, and lawyers, as well as critics of the new regime
were ordered to "reeducation camps" for varying periods. In mid1985 , the Hanoi government conceded that it still held about
10,000 inmates in the reeducation camps, but the actual number
was believed to be at least 40,000. In 1982 there were about
120,000 Vietnamese in these camps. According to a knowledgeable
American observer, the inmates faced hard labor, but only rarely
torture or execution.
Population resettlement or redistribution, although heralded
on economic grounds, turned out to be another instrument of
social control in disguise. It was a means of defusing tensions
in congested cities, which were burdened with unemployed and
socially dislocated people even after most of the rural refugees
had been repatriated to their native villages. These refugees had
swelled the urban population to 45 percent of the southern total
in 1975 (up from 33 percent in 1970). The authorities sought to
address the problem of urban congestion by relocating many of the
metropolitan jobless in the new economic zones hastily set up in
virgin lands, often malaria-infested jungles, as part of a
broader effort to boost agricultural output. In 1975 and 1976
alone, more than 600,000 people were moved from Ho Chi Minh City
to these zones, in most instances, reportedly, against their
will. Because of the barely tolerable living conditions in the
new settlements, a considerable number of people escaped or
bribed their way back to the city. The new economic zones came to
be widely perceived as places of internal exile. In fact, the
authorities were said to have used the threat of exile to such
places against those who refused to obey party instructions or to
participate in the activities of the mass organizations.
Surveillance was a familiar tool of the regime, which was
bent on purging all class enemies. Counterrevolutionaries, real
and suspected, were summarily interned in reform camps or forced
labor camps that were set up separately from the new economic
zones in several border areas and other undeveloped regions.
The Hanoi government has claimed that not a single political
execution took place in the South after 1975, even in cases of
grave war crimes. Generally, the foreign press corroborated this
claim by reporting in 1975 that there seemed to be no overt
indication of the blood bath that many Western observers had
predicted would occur in the wake of the communist takeover. Some
Western observers, however, have estimated that as many as 65,000
South Vietnamese may have been executed.
In March 1982, the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) convened
its Fifth National Party Congress to assess its achievements
since 1976 and to outline its major tasks for the 1980s. The
congress was revealing if only because of its somber admission
that revolutionary optimism was no substitute for common sense.
Despite rigid social controls and mass mobilization, the party
fell far short of its original expectations for socialist
transition. According to the party's assessment, from 1976
through 1980 shortcomings and errors occurred in establishing
transition goals and in implementing the party line.
The congress, however, reaffirmed the correctness of the
party line concerning socialist transition, and directed that it
be implemented with due allowances for different regional
circumstances. The task was admittedly formidable. In a realistic
appraisal of the regime's difficulties, Nhan Dan, the
party's daily organ, warned in June 1982 that the crux of the
problem lay in the regime itself, the shortcomings of which
included lack of party discipline and corruption of party and
state functionaries.
In 1987 the goal of establishing a new society remained
elusive, and Vietnam languished in the first stage of the party's
planned period of transition to socialism. Mai Chi Tho, mayor of
Ho Chi Minh City and deputy head of its party branch, had told
visiting Western reporters as early as April 1985 that socialist
transition, as officially envisioned, would probably continue
until the year 2000.
In the estimation of the party, Vietnamese society had
succumbed to a new form of sociopolitical elitism that was just
as undesirable as the much-condemned elitism of the old society.
Landlords and comprador capitalists may have disappeared but in
their places were party cadres and state functionaries who were
no less status-conscious and self-seeking. The Sixth National
Party Congress in December 1986 found it necessary to issue a
stern warning against opportunism, individualism, personal gain,
corruption, and a desire for special prerogatives and privileges.
A report to the congress urged the party to intensify class
struggle in order to combat the corrupt practices engaged in by
those who had "lost their class consciousness." Official efforts
to purify the ranks of the working class, peasantry, and
socialist intellectuals, however, failed to strike a responsive
chord. In fact, the proceedings of the Sixth Congress left the
inescapable impression that the regime was barely surviving the
struggle between socialism and capitalism and that an early
emergence of a communist class structure was unlikely.
As ideally envisioned, the socialist sector was expected to
provide 70 percent of household income and the "household
economy," or the privately controlled resources of the home, was
to make up the balance. In September 1986 cadres and workers were
earning their living mainly through moonlighting and, according
to a Vietnamese source, remained on "the state rolls only to
preserve their political prestige and to receive some ration
stamps and coupons." The source further disclosed that the
society's lack of class consciousness was reflected in the
party's membership, among whom only about 10 percent were
identified as from the working class.
Data as of December 1987
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