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Vietnam LIVING CONDITIONS
The improvement of living conditions has consistently been
one of Hanoi's most important but most elusive goals. In the late
1970s and early 1980s, food, housing, medicines, and consumer
goods were chronically scarce as agriculture and industry slowly
recovered from the effects of prolonged wartime disruptions,
corrupt and inept management, and the cost of the military
occupation of Cambodia. Consequently, the Hanoi government was
under tremendous pressure to address social problems such as
urban unemployment, vocational training, homelessness, the care
of orphans, war veterans, and the disabled, the control of
epidemics, and the rehabilitation of drug addicts and
prostitutes. These problems were complicated by rapid population
growth, which tested the limits of the food supply and increased
the need to import grains.
In December 1985, Vo Van Kiet, chairman of the State Planning
Commission, nevertheless reported that farmers' lives had
generally improved and that people employed in other economic
sectors were adequately supplied with the basic necessities. The
standard of living remained low, however, because of acute
economic problems that arose between 1981 and 1985, including
unemployment. During the 1981-85 period, a total of about 7
million young people reached work age (age 18), but up to 85
percent remained jobless. Among the unemployed of all ages
nationwide, 80 percent were unskilled, while in Ho Chi Minh City,
the figure rose to 95 percent.
For most Vietnamese having to face soaring inflation and a
rapid drop in purchasing power, austerity was an inescapable fact
of life. In the mid-1980s no one was starving, but the average
diet was highly deficient in protein and amounted to only 1,940
calories per day, 23 percent below the level required for manual
labor. Moreover, as much as an estimated 80 percent of a worker's
monthly wage was spent on food. A reader complained to a Ho Chi
Minh City newspaper in 1986 that the monthly salary and price
subsidies paid to an ordinary worker or civil servant were barely
enough to support his family for part of the month. The writer
also noted that an increasing number of workers and public
officials had succumbed to the lure of "outside temptations" and
were misusing their functions and power to get rich illegally.
"Because life is so difficult," a 1986 article in the military
daily, Quan Doi Nhan Dan, lamented, "even the most honest
people must come up with schemes to earn a living and support the
family."
In 1986 the standard of living was unstable, and cadres,
manual workers, civil servants, armed forces personnel, and
laborers experienced serious economic difficulties in their
everyday lives. In March 1986, evidently as a stop-gap measure,
the government reinstated rationing (discontinued since August
1985) in many parts of the country for such essential goods as
rice, meat, sugar, and kerosene. In addition, the government
granted more autonomy to commercial enterprises and even
encouraged the development of small-scale private industry.
Although the state controlled the economy and most essential
consumer goods, it lacked control of the free market, which
accounted for more than 50 percent of retail trade volume
(see Internal Commerce
, ch. 3). In mid-1987 the free market
flourished, although Vo Van Kiet had reported to the National
Assembly in December 1986 that the government planned to "create
conditions for stabilizing the market and prices step by step."
Meanwhile, Vo Van Kiet revealed that the new wage and
allowance system put into effect in 1985 for state employees and
members of the armed forces had failed to improve living
conditions. Indexed to cost-of-living increases, the 1985 system
had replaced the no-incentive egalitarianism of the past with a
system that linked wages to productivity, quality, and efficiency
of work performed.
Through the mid-1980s, the Vietnamese bureaucracy failed to
act quickly enough to remedy the shortage of consumer goods in
state shops. Shortages of raw materials and energy also
continued, forcing manufacturing enterprises to operate at 50
percent of their production capacity. In 1987 it was hoped that
the reform-minded leaders selected at the Sixth National Party
Congress in December 1986 might begin to turn the economy around.
* * *
Reliable and current information on Vietnamese society
remains relatively scarce. Among the most useful sources of
information are Indochina Chronology, a quarterly of the
Institute of East Asian Studies, of the University of California
at Berkeley, which gives an informative summary of events,
literature, and personalities relating to Vietnam, Cambodia, and
Laos; and the Southeast Asia Report, of the Joint
Publications Research Service, which contains translations of
Vietnamese newspapers and periodicals. For a general
understanding of the political and economic contexts in which
Vietnamese society evolves, readers are advised to consult the
annual summary articles on Vietnam contained in Asian
Survey, Far Eastern Economic Review Asia Yearbook, and
Southeast Asian Affairs. For official perceptions relating
to various aspects of Vietnamese society, see Vietnam
Courier, an English-language monthly of the Socialist
Republic of Vietnam.
William J. Duiker's Vietnam: Nation in Revolution
offers useful, well-balanced overviews on various aspects of
contemporary Vietnam, with a brief annotated bibliography. Also
useful is Nguyen Van Canh's Vietnam Under Communism, 1975-
1982, which depicts life in post-1975 Vietnam as perceived
and experienced by a number of Vietnamese expatriates. Hai
Van: Life in a Vietnamese Commune by Francois Houtart and
Genevieve Lemercinier provides a rare glimpse into the life of a
Red River Delta commune in 1979; life in South Vietnamese rural
communities in the early 1960s is given an excellent discussion
in Gerald C. Hickey's Village in Vietnam. We the
Vietnamese: Voices from Viet Nam, edited by Francois Sully,
is useful for perspectives on various social aspects of South
Vietnam in the 1960s. How Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City appeared to
visiting Western journalists in 1985 is presented in Vietnam
Ten Years After, edited by Robert Emmet Long.
Graeme Jackson's "An Assessment of Church Life in Vietnam" is
a balanced account of religious life; Alexander Woodside offers
an informative analysis on education in his "The Triumphs and
Failures of Mass Education in Vietnam." In "Vietnam 1975-1982:
The Cruel Peace," Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl D. Jackson
present their findings on the question of whether there were
political executions in the years after the communist takeover in
1975. Ethnic minorities are the subject of scholarly treatment in
Hickey's Sons of the Mountains and Free in the
Forest; in Southeast Asian Tribes, Minorities, and
Nations, edited by Peter Kunstadter; and in Ronald
Provencher's Mainland Southeast Asia: An Anthropological
Perspective. John DeFrancis's Colonialism and Language
Policy in Vietnam is a scholarly analysis of the evolution of
the national writing system, quoc ngu; also informative is
Language in Vietnamese Society: Some Articles by Nguyen DinhHoa , edited by Patricia Nguyen Thi My-Huong. (For further
information and complete citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of December 1987
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