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Article Excerpt
This article aims to advance the discussion of Vietnamese politics beyond contemporary academic preoccupation with so-called "everyday politics" and "civil society" by promoting the concept of political civil society. Political civil society refers to non-violent political, advocacy, (1) labour and religious organizations and movements that seek to promote human rights, democratization and religious freedom in authoritarian states. The term "political" has been included to capture the activist nature of civil society in Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s when citizens became active in creating organizations outside of state control in order to influence the conditions in which they lived, including political pressure on the state. The study of political civil society groups has been largely marginalized by mainstream academics who privilege the role of so-called developmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and community-based organizations (CBOs) in their writings on Vietnamese politics. (2)
This article will focus on the roles of nascent "political parties" and trade unions that emerged in 2006 and coalesced in a political coalition known as Bloc 8406. These groups mounted a series of challenges to the political hegemony of the Vietnam Communist Party (VCP) before they were repressed. This article will also analyse the role of external agents, such as the Viet Tan Party, in providing material, financial and human resource assistance to political civil society groups.
In the past, the activities of human rights, pro-democracy and religious freedom groups were relatively compartmentalized from each other. (3) Due to increasing networking between politically active civil society groups cross-fertilization is taking place and a nascent movement has gradually taken shape despite state repression. This development is occurring when the legitimacy of the VCP is coming under challenges due to public discontent with endemic corruption, rising inflation, environmental pollution and other social ills. The article concludes by noting that Vietnam may face the risk of domestic instability if the one-party state fails to adequately address the challenge of political civil society.
This article is divided into four parts. Part one briefly discusses key characteristics of Vietnam's one-party system. Part two discusses the question: what is civil society in a Vietnamese context? Part three analyses the rise of political civil society primarily through a focus on the activities of Bloc 8406 and the Viet Tan. And finally, part four offers some observations on the challenge these political developments pose for Vietnam's one-party system.
Vietnam's One-Party Political System
Prior to the era of doi moi (renovation), western political scientists had no difficulty in classifying Vietnam as a Leninist political system. The term "mono-organizational socialism" has also been used to describe Vietnam's political system. (4) In such a system the party exercises hegemonic control over state institutions, the armed forces and other organizations in society through the penetration of these institutions by party cells and committees. Senior party members form the leadership nucleus of the state apparatus, National Assembly, the People's Armed Forces and the Vietnam Fatherland Front (VFF). These party leaders are termed "dual-role elites".
The VFF is an umbrella organization grouping 29 registered mass organizations and special interest groups. The Vietnam Women's Union is the largest mass organization with a membership of 12 million and a staff of 300 across the country. It is funded by the state. Other mass organizations include the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union and the Vietnam Youth Federation, with 3.5 million and 2.5 million members respectively. The leaders of these mass organizations regularly serve on the Party Central Committee.
The Vietnam Union of Friendship Associations is the official agency in charge of "people-to-people diplomacy". It controls the People's Aid Coordinating Committee that regulates and monitors all international non-government organizations (INGOs) working in Vietnam. INGOs work with line ministries, technical agencies, local authorities, and mass organizations of women, farmers, workers and youth to deliver various forms of development assistance.
The Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) is a semi-governmental organization that represents the private sector that emerged following the adoption of doi moi. The VCCI's membership is composed of state-owned enterprises and private companies and trade associations in equal numbers. The VCCI is not funded by the state yet it is a member of the VFF. The VCCI is one example of the growth of an organization outside the confines of the Party. Nevertheless, it is policy that Party committees must be established in all private enterprises.
At the other end of the spectrum, the Party has attempted to carry out political reform through what is known as "grassroots democracy". In 1998, in light of widespread peasant disturbances in Thai Binh province the previous year, the VCP Central Committee issued Directive 30/CT that established the policy basis for strengthening participation of communities at the local level (commune, agency and state-owned enterprises). Under the slogan "the people know, people discuss, people execute, people supervise", Decree 29/1998/ND-CP aimed to improve transparency and accountability of local government. Article 4 directed local officials to disseminate information concerning policies, law, long-term and annual socio-economic development plans, land-use policy and annual draft budgets. (5) Citizens were to be kept informed and then involved in discussing, deciding and monitoring the actions of local government. Finally, Decree 79, "On Grassroots Democracy" (2003), approved the participation of community-based organizations in development activities at the commune level. (6)
The term "mono-organizational socialism" merely categorizes the organizational structure of Vietnam. It does not tell us much about the dynamics of public policy formulation and implementation or about "everyday politics". A consideration of these aspects is beyond the scope of this article. What is important to note is that the all-encompassing matrix of Party control has faced challenges to its hegemony as Vietnam has developed a market-orientated economy and integrated with the global economy. In 2006-07, Vietnam's mono-organizational system faced its most severe challenge by politically active civil society groups.
What is Civil Society in the Vietnamese context?
With the adoption of doi moi in the 1980s, Vietnamese society began to change and so too did state-society relations. As Vietnam opened up to the outside world, foreign donors and government aid agencies, as well as INGOs, rushed to assist Vietnam by applying their own models of development. These models incorporated the view that supporting counterpart NGOs was the best way of carving out space for civil society activity in authoritarian political systems. (7) In practice this meant forming partnerships with domestic NGOs and pursuing "bottom up" approaches that stressed participatory development and gender and ethnic equality.
By the early 1990s it quickly became evident that there was an explosion of organizational activity at all levels in Vietnam. (8) Mark Sidel developed one of the first typologies to capture the complexity of this development? Sidel classified these groups into nine categories: (1) newer, more independent policy research and teaching groups; (2) Ho Chi Minh City and other southern social activism and social service networks; (3) quasi-public/quasi-private and private universities and other educational institutions; (4) senior leader-supported patronage groups supporting training and research projects; (5) professional and business associations; (6) peasant associations and collectives; (7) state-recognized and unrecognized religious groups, temples and churches; (8) traditional Party-led mass organizations and trade unions; and (9) political activism groups challenging the Party and state. Sidel explicitly rejected the use of NGO as a collective term to describe these groups; instead he classified them as "newer policy- and development-orientated initiatives and groups". (10)
Writing in the same year, this author developed a typology that classified Vietnamese associations into one of nine categories: political, mass organization, business, commercial and professional, science and technology, arts and culture, social welfare/NGO, religious, friendly associations and public affairs. (11) In 2003, two other typologies were developed. Wischermann and Vinh identified four categories (mass, professional, business and issue-orientated organizations), (12) while Vasavakul identified five categories (political-professional, mass, popular, non-state research institutes and centres and non-governmental organizations). (13)
These typologies have in many respects been overtaken by the rapid growth of non-government voluntary (or non-profit) associations at grassroots level. These groups are collectively referred to by foreign scholars as "community-based organizations" (CBOs). CBOs have taken a leading role in managing natural resources, combating environmental pollution, promoting development for a sustainable livelihood, income generation and disseminating knowledge. Examples of community-based organizations include: water users group, small savings and credit associations, user groups, farmers cooperatives, other special purpose cooperatives, medical volunteers, village development committees and committees for the protection of street children. In July 2005, it was estimated that there were 140,000 CBOs, in addition to 3,000 cooperatives (agriculture, fisheries, construction, sanitation and health care), 1,000 locally registered "NGOs" and 200 charities.
The growth of CBOs put strain on Vietnam's legal system as it struggled to develop a regulatory framework that was relevant to...
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