In June 1999, Le Kha Phieu, the secretary general of the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP), admitted that "the main reason for the slowing down of the economy has been the inefficiency of the state bureaucracy". A few months earlier, in a special feature entitled "Once again, the Prime Minister's directives are not applied", the newspaper Lao Dong (Labor) published a lengthy readers' letters section full of complaints. One old woman for instance recounted her revolutionary activities and contribution to the struggle for the independence of the country before accusing the People's Committee of misappropriating her land.

This finger-pointing orchestrated by the party reached its high point in late 1999, when the lives of 8 million people in Central Viet Nam were ravaged by fearsome floods. The PCV seized this opportunity to highlight the incompetence of the public functionaries in the face of the disaster and to contrast the state with the VCP, last bastion of national solidarity and unity.

In "The source of the Communist Party's strength", an article published on January 2, 2000 in the official newspaper Nhan Dan (The People), the party is likened to a dam, both linking and protecting the people. For the past year, the tension between the state and the party has steadily risen, with the latter going all out to discredit the former, with some success.

Once upon a time, the motto was "The Party is the guide, the People the master, the State the leader". Through a combination of popular demand and pressure by foreign investors, the Politburo has been forced, in the last ten years, to give the state a certain degree of initiative in the handling of the economy. It now wants to regain control, and what better way than by publicizing the state's failures: economic difficulties, the fall in foreign investments, widespread poverty, unrest in rural areas….

Ever since the establishment of a centralized monarchy at the end of the Fifteenth Century, the state has been a major political player on the Vietnamese scene. According to Confucian traditions, the sovereign was the recipient of a celestial mandate, but he was very much responsible and accountable for his actions. His power was not absolute - on the contrary, it was intimately linked to his performance and it was possible for him to be stripped of his mandate should he not live up to his duties. Political legitimacy was closely associated to secular administration.

The state apparatus was represented by the mandarins, recruited through competitive examinations held at regular intervals. The examinations were opened to all without distinction of rank or wealth. This was the only way a man could exchange the hardships of life in rural Viet Nam for a brilliant career in the bureaucracy, but at the same time, the chance was real and anyone could have a go. The system made it possible for the state to dip into its rural population and recruit the best. It unified a country stretching over 3,200 kms and comprising 54 different ethnic groups. The bureaucrats who emerged from the examinations shared the same core values, the same academic background, the same mode of thinking. It can be said that power in ancient Viet Nam was rural in its origins, and legitimized by common learning. The system made it possible to integrate the people into the mechanisms of power.

The colonial period saw the brutal disappearance of these ancient balancing acts between knowledge and power, urban and rural areas, the learned and the uneducated. Examinations were cancelled, and the learned mandarin was replaced by the intellectual, trained in colonial schools and adept at using the Romanized quoc ngu script. Power left the rural areas, embedding itself in the towns, around the colonial infrastructure. Learning and politics became separate.

Under communism, there is a parallel between the state apparatus and the party apparatus. Party structure mirrors state structure in every way, from the highest bodies to the lowest village cell. While the state acts, the party enlightens. On the one hand, there is the practice of power, on the other, the doctrine of power. Statistics show the distinction between learning and power: only one third of the officials at district level and 3.5% at commune level have college training. It is no longer a matter of the state harvesting talent from the rural areas, but the rural areas giving power to the uneducated. Vietnamese bureaucracy today consists of 17,000 officials at district level and 220,000 at commune level and the party has approximately 50 cadres per village.

Viet Nam has been a member of ASEAN since 1995 and of the South East Asian Forum for Economic Cooperation since 1998. Next year, ASEAN is setting up a customs union. Viet Nam will have to join it three years later, but it is already clear that this will represent a huge problem for Hanoi: smuggling is paramount and will make it difficult to develop a competitive industry. Out of the 24,000 vehicles imported in 1996, one third were smuggled in. In 1998, the automobile factory Mekong had to close down and Ford and BMW are struggling.

In the year 1997-1998, foreign investments fell by 40%, growth slowed down and fiscal output remained low. The state is getting poorer. Its share of the GNP has gone down from 30% to 20%. The private sector corners more than half of the industrial output and eight jobs out of ten, and the reality is that the state has lost all real control over the economy ⁱ .

Economic conditions are closely linked to the matter of national independence.

After ten years of laissez-faire, the party is regaining control. Its avowed mission is to unite ideology and practice of power in order to improve the economic infrastructure and get the country ready for the future. Ideology, too long neglected, has suddenly become the guardian of national independence.

The current policy is regional integration and (relative) openness to the world. Viet Nam's main trade partners and investors are its neighbors, starting with Japan. Le Kha Phieu is often seen on the front page of newspapers welcoming foreign delegations, and it was he who went to Beijing to negotiate the territorial border agreement. It is thanks to the party that shareholding practices were developed ten years ago and after a slow start, these have now reached cruising speed ⁱⁱ.

This turning point in Vietnamese politics does not illustrate, as we might have thought, a conflict between "conservatives" and "renovators". In fact, the Vietnamese experience is the opposite of what has been seen in most other Communist countries experimenting with reforms.

The goal of Deng Xiaoping's "market socialism" was to reform the economy without adversely affecting the power monopoly of the Chinese Communist Party. Similarly, the objective of Doi Moi was to avert a political crisis and to maintain power, even if it meant a dramatic ideological departure. There are enough similarities between the two for us to talk about an Asian mode of transition. In both cases, economic reforms were not coupled with political reforms and left in place an authoritarian mode of government ⁱⁱⁱ.

Article 4 of the 1992 Constitution defines the Vietnamese Communist Party as the "driving force of the state and of society". Between the party and the people, there is a mass organization called the Front of the Fatherland which includes the party as well as other groups like the Union of Women, trade unions and others. The Front plays an important part in elections to the National Assembly - it has to approve the nomination of candidates, although some of the nominees are selected centrally by the party and the government. In the July 1997 elections, 141 out of 525 candidates were centrally selected, the rest locally. The party controls all the key political, administrative and public production posts and yet, its total membership is only 2 million (out of a population of 80 million). Furthermore, in the South, it has a very limited base, just 1% of the population (9% in the North).

The army - approximately half a million people - remains a force to be reckoned with. Most of its equipment is of Soviet origin and dates back to the 80s. The appointment in September 1998 of Lieutenant-General Le Van Duong, long-time assistant to General Le Kha Phieu, as head of the armed forces indicates the party's intention to keep a firm hand over the army.

The party's control over the political life of the country is without question, as shown by the fate befalling its handful of opponents. In spite of some limited improvement in individual rights, freedom of expression is still inexistent. Articles 69 and 70 of the Constitution make a clear distinction between freedom of belief and religion, presented as absolute, and freedom of expression, information and association, limited by law. Any person whose writings or statements are deemed undesirable are swiftly dealt with. Duong Thu Huong, author of Beyond Illusions, was excluded from the party in 1990 and prevented from full expression for many years. In August 1993, fourteen critics were sentenced on charges of attempting to overthrow the government. Thich Quang Do was imprisoned in 1994 and only released in late 1998.

In a speech commemorating the 70^th anniversary of the party, Le Kha Phieu stated that Viet Nam "innovates without changing color". Marxist-Leninism and Ho's philosophy are still the sun and moon. And capitalists are promoting the free exchange of goods only to widen the gap between the rich and the poor.

The party's control is keenly felt in the economy where the private and public sectors coexist uneasily. Over the years, a new class has grown in Viet Nam, people who hold office in both sectors. For instance, the director (and often, this is a woman) of a public firm is also the secretary of the union or party cell. Often, they manage their own private production units which sometimes, can be as large as 100 employees.

In this new capitalism a la Vietnamese, how much capital you amass depends on whom you know, and whom you know depends on your place within an intricate political and trade union network within the state apparatus. In Eastern Europe and China, privatizations have often benefited former officials of public companies. In Viet Nam, those who benefit from privatizations are more numerous because of the mushrooming of private units alongside the public entity. A bourgeois class is on the rise.

This kind of capitalism is accompanied by the usual social ills: corruption, smuggling, prostitution, financial schemes, and the latest addition, drugs. Corruption is the biggest problem, with the bureaucrats themselves flouting the rules they set up. It takes all shapes and forms, from the embezzlement of say, a quarter of the production of the coalmines in Hon Gay and illegal constructions in the heart of the capital to generalized fiscal fraud. Pervasive fiscal and customs fraud means that the state does not have enough resources to provide basic public services like health and education. State employees cannot afford the consumer goods that are now plentiful. The gap between their needs and their means is such that they have to look for additional work to complement their meager earnings. The problem is serious enough for former secretary general Do Muoi to allude to the necessity of raising the salary of state employees during the opening ceremony of the VIIIth Party Congress ^iv.

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In conclusion, Viet Nam is faced with a situation where a dysfunctional state is no longer able to fulfill its role. The laws mean very little and every one is free to find his own way to get what he wants. The old system is no longer functioning but the new market system too is not working properly.

Where is Viet Nam going? In what century does it live?

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