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The Communist Party

Sunday, October 20th, 2002

People everywhere in Viet Nam confided in me, as a foreigner who would not know who to tell anyway, that they hated the corrupt officials in the Communist Party that are entangled in a growing web of organised crime. They hate the police. The Party has a smug stranglehold on the poorest of the people, especially the Catholics in South Vietnam who find it almost impossible to find a job even if they can scrape up the money to “buy” it as do most people. (This is why you see so many jobless men sleeping during the day in their cyclos or on their moto taxis.)

Those in the Party get the best jobs…those who work for the government get 10 times the salary of ordinary Vietnamese. Doi Moi, which translates as ‘renovation’ similar to the Soviet ‘glastnost’ or openness, does not reach the lives of these people. But as Templer puts it at the very end of his book “The Communist Party has been coerced to relax economic restrictions but it has not liked some of the results. Unable to regain the control or respect it once commanded, its response has been to clench and release its grip on the economy and society in an increasingly desperate manner as its power slips slowly away.”

I told Mr. Binh in Lang Co that this could not last forever as more and more of Vietnam’s youth, like Mr. Binh’s son, become educated and empowered to act. Ten years…he said as he put his finger to his lips. When I left him as I got on the bus, promising to write to him from America, he said “ten years, our secret, ten years.” I made the tears stay inside my eyes until I could find my way inside the bus.

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‘Peaceful Evolution’

Sunday, October 20th, 2002

In Viet Nam, the enemies of the Communist Party, in the absence of conflict, has become the democracy and human rights promoted by the forces of ‘peaceful evolution.’ Enemy jets unload tourist dollars and foreign investment rather than bombs. Robert Templer, in Shadows and Wind explains: “Local news publications have become a master at inventing new enemies to excite its military readership. In 1996 it located a hidden menace ‘sleeping under trees around Hoan Kiem Lake’ in Hanoi. This undercover force spoke the language and ate Vietnamese food. They were up to no good riding around in cyclos, dressed in shorts and T shirts. Vietnam could no longer ignore the threat they posed. It was ‘too easy in this age of information flow to mistake enemies for friends’, the newspaper told its readers. The country, the army daily warned, was under siege from young foreign backpackers! Doubtless the Vietnamese breathed a little easier knowing who was the enemy in their midst. But the Lonely Planet Legions were not the only security threat. Executives from overseas, the newspapers said accusingly, were attending business seminars because of their interest in information that helps them work out their investments, calculate prices and put pressure on their Vietnamese partners.” Indeed, a BP Oil executive from the UK that I met in a restaurant in Hanoi said that the BP holdings in Vietnam were larger than Vietnam’s national budget.

Posted in Hanoi, Reading, Viet Nam | Comments Off on ‘Peaceful Evolution’