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Vietnamese Reforms: A Chinese Perspective
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16438 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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5 / 1989 |
4,661 Words |
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Ma Zongshi
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A chronic and ever-deepening economic crisis has plagued the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) since its 1975 victory. This is in sharp contrast to the rapid progress prevailing in most of its Asian neighbors. After thirteen years of national reunification and nine years of energetic attempts at economic reform, the country is deeply bogged down in a disastrous economic stagnation seldom seen elsewhere in Asia, with one policy blunder following another and with living conditions becoming more desperate than even during the most trying war years. Indeed, in a spate of recent Western academic works on current Asia-Pacific economic dynamism, SRV counts only as a military existence, a puzzling aberration, or a negative example of down right absurdity. Without massive injection of Soviet aid, the national economy might have collapsed long ago.
What went wrong? Whey did Vietnam, a country with fertile land, industrious people, and relatively favorable natural endowments, a victor in the war for national independence lasting over three decades, come to such a miserable pass instead of enjoying the fruits of victory and achieving remarkable economic development as its neighbors? Why has the national heroism displayed so admirably in the war years evaporated overnight in the post-war period? Why has economic reform in Vietnam fallen flat time and again without any workable solution in sight? The Vietnamese experience may appear to be downright absurd but it is definitely not a hopeless puzzle. Neither China, ASEAN, nor any other country for that matter, is to be blamed for its moribund economy as Vietnamese leaders used to claim. It is a self-inflicted tragedy, pure and simple. And its woeful predicament could only be rectified by the wrongdoers themselves…
At the end of the war, in the euphoria of victory, the Hanoi leadership in response to urgent exigencies committed a series of fatal policy blunders which caused a severe economic crisis and led to the subsequent hasty, ill-conceived reform. Instead of putting the task of rehabilitation of the war-torn economy above everything else not excluding socialist transformation, the Hanoi authorities instead, hastily launched the Second Five-Year Plan (1976-80). (It took China three years after 1949 to recover from the war before starting the First Five-Year Plan (1953-57) and the implementation of an orderly, step-by-step socialist transformation program until the calamitous 1958 Great Leap Forward coupled with the impulsive setting up of rural People's Communes). Hanoi demanded a "leaping development" in agriculture in 1976 and envisaged self-sufficiency by 1980….
[In 1986] The Sixth National Party Congress marked the end of a protracted period of generational leadership succession. It witnessed the rise to the top leadership of pragmatists, mostly southerners, who carried out reforms in Ho Chi Minh City and elsewhere in the South in the past several years, such as party General Secretary Nguyen Van Linh and his associate, vice-premier Vo Van Kiet. The Congress was held at a time when economic restructing was being carried out throughout the socialist countries, when Gorbachev raised the slogan of perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union and when it eventually dawned on most Vietnamese leaders that drastic political and economic overhaul is the only way for Vietnam, otherwise the country would lag still further behind its Asian neighbors….
Why is Perestroika not
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