Any New (ish) Research on The DRV?

From adam@aduki.com.au Fri Sep 10 02:26:31 2004

Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 19:23:59 +1000

From: "Adam @ Aduki" <adam@aduki.com.au>

Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Any new (ish) research on the DRV?

Does anybody out there know of interesting research into social, economic and political conditions in the DRV that has come out in the past 10-15 years? I have been re-reading my 1987 The Limits of National Liberation as input to a paper I am revising, and have had a reasonably good trawl through the relevant English language databases for published work, and their seems to be very little. 'Limits' argued strongly that the trajectory after 1975 should be explained by, amongst other things, what happened during the 1st FYP (1961-65). Especially the situation revealed by the 10th Plenum. I know of Kim Ninh's book (we don't have it yet) and Goshcha's paper on Sino-Vietnamese trade. The work in Limits is really little more than one of the two big background studies for my PhD, amplified by additional Vietnamese materials I had picked up when I was in Hanoi in 1985-86 to supplement those from 1978-79 and UK libraries and refugee interviews.

The book takes a strong position and I cannot see that it has been challenged, which is a pity. The reviews were generally favorable, apart from Kolko's which dismissed Suzy Paine and I as a pair of Cambridge neo-liberal dons who had seduced the VCP from the True Path. As she died in 1986 her response is inaudible. A wider criticism from a range of colleagues was that it did not pay enough attention to the war, which is one of the things I am re-thinking. But much of the argument did hinge on the interpretation of the 1st FYP. I will look up citations of the book next week.

Adam Fforde

Website: www.aduki.com.au

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From h-nguyen@northwestern.edu Fri Sep 10 08:57:44 2004

Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 10:56:08 -0500

From: Thanh Nguyen <h-nguyen@northwestern.edu>

Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Re: Any new (ish) research on the DRV?

Dear Adam, I am doing my senior thesis on vietnamese women and outmarriage there has been a lot of good work in that area on doi moi renovation, sex trade in vietnam, the like.... you can browse through my book list and search from there, good luck!-

Thanh Nguyen.

From dduffy@email.unc.edu Fri Sep 10 09:20:20 2004

Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 12:18:50 -0400

From: Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu>

Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Re: Any new (ish) research on the DRV?

Adam, I would like to know what an FYP is. Bearing in mind that such is how much I know, it seems to me that the argument of David Elliott's Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta 1960-1975 has to do with your topic.

Elliott's theme is that the war in the Delta created a middle class throughout the countryside, especially among those who previously had good reason to follow the revolution. The two volumes have immense documentation from the US researchers in wartime and from more recent Vietnamese monographs.

Hope this isn't too naive a suggestion. Have to go read your book now -

Dan Duffy

From adam@aduki.com.au Fri Sep 10 15:51:37 2004

Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 08:48:27 +1000

From: "Adam @ Aduki" <adam@aduki.com.au>

Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: RE: Any new (ish) research on the DRV?

Yo Dan D

Thanks for the reply.

FYP is a Five Year Plan ... What have you being reading (don't reply!)? The work I have in my own mind about the creation of a lop trung nong is Nguyen Thu Sa's article, which is the one I tend to cite. But thanks for the Elliott reference. This idea for me provides a girder to the problems imposing collectivisation in the Mekong and to underpin what Melanie Beresford called the 'procurement strike' of ca 1978-79, which helped to crash the second FYP (the product of what David Marr calls Le Duan's hubris). But I keep coming back to the northern economy, and the peculiar way in which there was over-supply of fixed assets. This comes up in the data (deny it if you like) in the Fforde & Paine book, and suggests that the aid program more than compensated for the bombing (as was argued by US officials at the time in a work I cite somewhere), and provided a potential that could be exploited economically if conditions changed (that is a point of my article ~QResourcing conservative transition in Vietnam: rent-switching and resource appropriation~R Post-Communist Economies Vol 14 No 2 June 2002.).

Regina's thesis is arguing (so I have just been acidly reminded) that the politics of the early 1960s underpinned a more positive attitude to markets (it "... links the origins of the market to state ideas of the role of class struggle in socialist development (itself tied what was understood as legitimate forms of economic motivation). It locates the origins of market formation in these processes that date well prior to the 1975. There is material on how it affected the post-75 period."). My second recent paper on SOEs just up at SEARC City University Hong Kong puts this in terms of the Law of Value (Stalin) and tolerance of markets under existing socialism, and so on. The idea that markets were anathema to neo-Stalinists is a good red herring.

Rock and roll.

Adam