New Perspectives in Southeast Asian Studies. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013. xx, 278 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$39.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-299-29594-3.
Ken MacLean is interested in the mistrust that has pervaded relations between decision makers in Hanoi and lower-level cadres and peasants since the 1920s. In The Government of Mistrust he interweaves archival material, secondary sources, his own ethnographic research and his experiences working for an international NGO to describe the accretion of bureaucratic processes of documentation and control over time. With a focus on the Red River Delta, he traces the unsuccessful efforts of the architects of Socialist Vietnam to achieve reliable insight into the political, economic and social practices of villages, agricultural collectives and communes. This is a balanced study that is attentive to national and provincial actors that occupy the upper reaches of the party hierarchy, as well as lower-level cadres and rural rice farmers.
The book’s central argument is that bureaucratic processes that were intended to dispel mistrust and facilitate central state authorities’ insight into local political and economic practices, actually produced an opposite effect. They created more mistrust and made local practices less legible for leaders of the Vietnamese Communist Party. These enduring and layered illegibilities buffered interactions between national leaders and local actors. While the socialist state was able to extract resources from the countryside and thereby guarantee its own durability over time and space, its partial blindness impeded it from exercising the power that would be necessary to fundamentally reform local political and economic practices. One result is an unintended (at least from Hanoi’s perspective) flexibility in centre-periphery relations that has persisted through independence and until the present. In this context, key national economic policies (including decollectivization and Đổi mới reforms) are shown to be the outcomes of the protracted and complex interplay of the actions and interests of Party leaders, local-level cadres and peasants. Here, change neither arises suddenly in response to crisis, nor as the result of a single group’s agency.
The Government of Mistrust is organized as six chapters grouped into three historical periods (pre-collectivization, collectivization, post-decollectivization). Each chapter offers a genealogy of a particular bureaucratic process, or legibility device, and analyzes its role in the exercise of power and the obscuring of reality from the view of Party leaders.
Chapter 1 examines call and response dialogues as they were deployed from the late 1920s through the 1950s. Vietnamese Communist Party members used these techniques to engage with peasants, identify potential local leaders and (unsuccessfully) nurture new class-based subjectivities. Chapter 2 describes the use of field reports during the 1950s to convey information about the commune upwards in the Party hierarchy and to define exemplary and deviant practices. The next three chapters follow the bureaucratic processes that accompanied the establishment, consolidation and scaling-up of agricultural collectives. During early phases of collectivization the Vietnamese government sought to increase legibility by standardizing the format of field reports using administrative templates (chapter 3). The 1960s brought the consolidation of village collectives into larger-scale collectives with the assistance of labour contracts (chapter 4) that organized and rewarded individuals for specific contributions of labour and material. Chapter 5 follows the implementation of the performance audits that sought to track inputs to and outputs from the Soviet-style collectives of the late 1970s. Chapter 6 addresses the revival of village conventions, a legibility device with pre-colonial origins, to cultivate socialist morality and ideology in decollectivized post-Đổi mới villages. Throughout the chapters, MacLean offers rich historical and contemporary illustrations of how the state’s accumulation of legibility devices has resulted in “a disorganized assemblage of conflicting policies, plans, and projects” (207).
The main arguments of The Government of Mistrust appear credible. Nevertheless, the details supporting them could be more precisely organized and explained. An example of this is the treatment of facts about collectivization. In some instances MacLean deconstructs the facts produced by Vietnamese legibility devices in order to reveal them as official fictions/paperealities. In other instances, facts that were presumably produced by the same kinds of legibility devices are used to arrive at objective descriptions of the historical performance of agricultural collectives. Missing here is a discussion of how the author is able to discern objective facts from official fictions. For instance, when sources indicate that Vũ Thắng Commune made investments and production changes resulting in 10 tons of paddy per hectare per season in the late 1970s (143), how is MacLean able to determine that this is an accurate and objective fact, and not just another papereality? Taken alone the uncertainty about the status of this fact is a minor detail. But as similar instances accumulate in the text, they call for a more fundamental discussion of the author’s own theoretical and methodological basis for conceptualizing fact, fiction and papereality in his empirical material. The reader is left to wonder whether MacLean is influenced by science and technology studies (STS) approaches to understanding the social/natural construction of facts (as the use of John Law’s work in the introduction seems to suggest), or if he is more committed to a theoretical position where facts and truths exist independently of their social and political contexts (as a brief discussion of the work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot in the conclusion seems to suggest)? One would like to see more clarity about MacLean’s own theoretical standpoint, and how he in turn operationalizes that position in his analysis of his empirical material.
The Government of Mistrust is an ambitious text, both for its creative use of mixed methodologies and its temporal thematic and range. Despite its occasional ambiguities, the richly descriptive text will be of value for graduate students and other scholars who are interested in the dynamic power relations that infuse the innovation and accumulation of state bureaucratic processes, as well as for Vietnam specialists interested in the history of Vietnamese governance, agricultural collectivization and economic policy since independence.
Eren Zink
Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
pp. 733-735