Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2019. xvi, 224 pp. (Tables, B&W photos.) US$49.95, cloth. ISBN 978-1-5017-3638-4.
Speaking Out in Vietnam contributes to our understanding of politics and society in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV)’s renovation era, 1986 to present, focusing on the critical and, author Benedict Kerkvliet argues, transformative, years between 1995 and 2015. Informed by current social science theorizing on the relationships between state and society in one-party systems, and based on readings of Vietnamese websites, blogs, newspapers, and interviews with principal actors, Kerkvliet disputes the view, prevalent in human rights literature, that the SRV is becoming increasingly repressive. On the contrary, he asserts, the party-state’s relationship with its citizens is becoming progressively dialogic, as the authorities, rather than routinely suppressing dissenters, have responded with various methods, including toleration, engagement, harassment, extra-legal violence, interrogation, and confinement.
Kerkvliet investigates four areas in which SRV citizens challenged the party-state during the years from 1995 to 2015: factory workers who demanded better pay and conditions; rural residents who opposed land seizures and/or demanded increased compensation; activists, largely urbanites, who protested against Chinese activities in the South China Sea; and pro-democracy advocates, a diverse group, mainly urban, that called for democratizing the SRV or replacing it with a genuinely democratic polity.
Kerkvliet stresses that, while strikes and work stoppages multiplied during the two decades from 1995 to 2015, none were, strictly speaking, “legal,” i.e., organized by the state-supported unions, as the law requires. Nonetheless, the authorities almost never treated striking workers as lawbreakers, and police rarely arrested strikers, unless there was violence against property or persons. According to Kerkvliet, party-state authorities were largely sympathetic to workers’ demands for higher pay and better conditions, even when expressed outside of the official unions. Furthermore, workers’ demands were generally localized to specific workplaces or industries and focused on material benefits to the exclusion of political demands that might threaten the party-state. However, the SRV still repressed attempts to form independent labour unions, or to link labour struggles to democratization.
Rural resistance to land seizures mushroomed in the period, often in opposition to plans by local officials to seize small-holders’ property according to laws that permit expropriation with compensation for projects deemed to be in the national interest, contributing to economic growth, etc. As Kerkvliet explains, rural residents often refused to sell or insisted that the prices offered would not allow them to survive once removed from the land. In such cases, they often protested when local, regional, or national authorities denied their demands. The party-state did not uniformly repress the aggrieved residents but employed diverse methods, including toleration, negotiation, harassment, extra-legal violence, confinement, and imprisonment. In the early 2000s, local officials pressured the rural residents of a Hà-nội suburb to yield their property for the construction of an Ecopark residential-commercial complex. In response, residents organized demonstrations in the capital, hoping to involve the national leadership. While higher-level authorities met with the aggrieved owners’ representatives, the capital’s police limited the demonstrations’ location, frequency, and durations. Meanwhile, local authorities squeezed owners in various ways: seizures of land, denial of services, threats of expropriation without compensation, and, according to demonstrators, attacks on their homes and persons. Ultimately, the land was taken, violently in some instances, and Ecopark constructed, with most claimants agreeing to sign over their rights. They did receive increased compensation over the original sums offered. While the cases in this category are many and diverse, the author finds that the regime generally employed a mix of concessions and coercion, in which some of the protestors’ perspectives were considered and claims conceded, while making sure that demands and the means used to express them did not threaten systemic change.
The party-state has struggled with its handling of critics who mobilized opposition to Chinese incursions in the South China Sea, as many critics also castigated officials for their pusillanimous responses to China’s actions, which often include violence against Vietnamese fishers in the contested waters. The authorities strived to balance the need to appear resolute in their condemnations of Chinese behaviour, while restraining popular manifestations of anti-Chinese feeling so that peaceful relations with the People’s Republic could be maintained and diplomatic solutions pursued. In practice, many demonstrations were allowed, with the provisions that they did not last too long, did not become regular events, and did not contravene specific injunctions against their organization.
Vietnamese activists mounted campaigns that included founding clubs, creating blogs, circulating petitions, and organizing demonstrations advocating democratization of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, sometimes in cooperation with, but often in opposition to, the Communist Party. Kerkvliet argues that the authorities’ responses have run the gamut from engagement and toleration through harassment and confinement. Yet he detects nuances in the party-state’s treatment of individuals and organizations, including distinctions between those who advocate dialogue and reform of the system as opposed to those who call for its overthrow. The authorities have also treated individual reformers variously, with military veterans and ex-Communist Party members often being treated more leniently.
In each of the four cases studied, Kerkvliet, drawing upon an ever more sophisticated scholarship on the relationship between state and society in authoritarian systems, defines the SRV party-state’s reactions as “responsive-repressive” rather than as repression pure-and-simple. Some of the protestors’ viewpoints were considered and claims conceded, so long as the demands did not threaten systemic change. This dialogic process, he argues, explains in no small measure the durability of the party-state’s domination, as it has provided enough flexibility so that, combined with repression, discontent can be contained. While the four areas selected by the author are important ones, one may wonder if the choice of topics has not unintentionally skewed the results. Indeed, two of the most contentious post-unification issues are not treated: the relationship between the Việt-dominated party-state and those who defend the interests of non-Việt peoples, particularly Highlanders; and that between the Marxist-Leninist party-state and proponents of autonomy for religious communities, principally the majority Buddhists and minority Catholics. Would this “responsive-repressive” perspective lose some of its explanatory power if additional sections were devoted to studying these two issues, potentially more threatening to the party-state’s monopoly of power? Still, Speaking Out in Vietnam applies recent social science perspectives to a detailed investigation of primary sources to bring new light on important issues in Vietnamese studies. Scholars of diverse fields and interests will read it with pleasure and profit, not least for its enlightening endnotes, which, if printed in equivalent size and fonts, would run more pages than the text itself!
Mark W. McLeod
University of Delaware, Newark