Vietnamese Public Opinion 1979-1986
From: Nguyen Diu Huong
Date: Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:07 PM
Dear list,
I am writing a thesis about general public opinion of Vietnamese people during the post-war and pre-Doi Moi period (particularly 1979-1986). I am interested in the change of Vietnamese views of national issues, such as the nation, the wars, and social life in both the northern and southern part of the country.
I was wondering if you all know of writing documents published in Vietnam in these years regarding the topic area. I am looking for reportage (phong su), reflective essays (tuy but), notes (ky), letters (thu tu) or similar materials that I can access in the US. Does anyone know of descriptions of people’s opinion of society in the south in particular?
Any information would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for the help,
Regards,
Huong Nguyen
Ohio University
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From: Shawn McHale
Date: Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 6:04 AM
Dear Huong.,
This may be a tricky topic to research, given that the meaning of "public opinion" (dư luận) in Vietnam seems to have multiple meanings. I talk a little bit about this in my book. What I would say here is that the Communist Party routinely makes comments about what public opinion is, but the concept of "dư luận" here has no clear sociological content. That is, you have no sense that it was measured in any clear way, whether through a "sense of the mood of the public" or through an actual poll. When the Communist Party or one of its papers uses the term, it seems to refer to views among the masses that support the Party. (Has anyone seen an article that states that "dư luận" was in favor of view X but that the Party had view Y? I doubt it. In this sense, "dư luận" always seems to mean *correct* public opinion according to the Party.
Outside of the Party, it would be interesting to see how one could capture a sense of broadly held beliefs.
I also wonder if, when Kinh make generalizations about "public opinion" in areas where there is a siginficant minority presence, they include this minority opinion in their understanding of the "public."
In recent years, polling/ marketing firms have come to Vietnam. They have a different notion of public opinion. It will be interesting to see how this view of public opinion, based on opinion sampling, changes the meaning of the concept of "public opinion."
Shawn McHale
Director
Sigur Center for Asian Studies
Associate Professor of History and International Affairs
George Washington University
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From: Stephen Denney
Date: Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 11:51 AM
Of course, it is difficult to measure public opinion in a society where the people are not allowed to express their opinions freely. Theoretically, one measurement of political public opinion would be elections, but when all the candidates are chosen by the government, there are only slightly more candidates then seats available, and voting is mandatory, it is not a reliable measurement.
I lack the Vietnamese language skills of Shawn and most others here, but when I began doing research on Vietnam in the late 1970s, sources of information about life in Vietnam were not varied, and fell into a few main categories: Official statements and publications; refugee accounts; visitors' accounts; and statements of dissidents smuggled abroad. Within the first category, official publications, there were occasions when one might get a glimpse of public sentiment through reading between the lines. I recall, for example, reading translated articles from Tin Sang newspaper of HCM City, formerly a dissident newspaperand still edited by Ngo Cong Duc (closed by the government in 1982), which described various means people in the city were using to resist the cultural purification campaign. See : http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/SRV_Cultural_Revolution_1981
Among refugee accounts, Nguyen Long's book, After Saigon Fell: daily life under the Vietnamese Communists, published by the UC Berkeley Inst. of East Asian Studies in 1981, presented his perspective, as a former poltical science professor of Van Hanh University, on changes in daily life in Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, and how people responded to that.
Among dissident accounts, the first major expression of dissent I recall came from leaders of the Unified Buddhist Church, in an open letter protesting religious repression written to PM Pham Van Dong in April 1977, followed by a public human rights appeal two months later. The top six leaders of the church, including Thich Quang Do, were arrested, but the documents did not surface to the outside world until after Thich Manh Giac, another high ranking church official, fled the country in 1978. Catholic archbishop of Hue Nguyen Kim Dien also began publicly protesting religious policies in 1977. Father Chan Tin, formerly a dissident leader against Nguyen Van Thieu's government, began issuing statements critical of regime policies in 1980, these also were smuggled out. Finally, there is the case of poet Nguyen Chi Thien, whose poems were smuggled and published abroad after he broke into the British consulate (or embassy?) in Hanoi in 1978. To what extent the various views of these dissidents reflected general public opinion I can't say, but certainly, they should be taken into account, along with official statements and publications and refugee accounts, in assessing the state of public opinion during the pre-Doi Moi era.
Steve Denney
library assistant
UC Berkeley
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From: william turley
Date: Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 12:42 PM
Dear Huong,
Public opinion will be a difficult thing to gauge in the period you have selected, but scientific measurement of public opinion is no longer an alien concept in Vietnam. See the World Values Survey 2001 at http://www.democ.uci.edu/resources/virtuallibrary/vietnam.php. Contact Mr. Pham Minh Hac at the Institute for Human in Hanoi for further info.
Bill Turley
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From: Sidel, Mark
Date: Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 1:48 PM
I know little about this topic, but I did have the strong sense in the early 1990s in Hanoi that some people from the Party School (= Hoc vien Nguyen Ai Quoc = Hoc vien Chinh tri Quoc gia Ho Chi Minh, etc.) were engaged in interview-based and field research on how people felt about various economic, social and political issues. A few of the openly published 1990s volumes from the Party School may reflect this -- I'm thinking particularly of the volume on rural cooperatives and user groups, for example, that involved significant field research and interviewing at local levels.
It might be useful to try to spend a couple of days at the Party School library, if it's accessible, to see what other late 1980s and 1990s research reports or books available there -- including some internally published that might not be available through normal library and bookstore channels -- reflect interviews, surveys and other work on citizens' views in this time period.
Mark Sidel
mark-sidel@uiowa.edu
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From: Van Tran
Date: Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 2:01 PM
Ms. Ha was a participant in our the SSRC-Vass Interdisciplinary Social Science Research program that Ford funded and works for the Institute of Pubilc Opinon Research--.Her office gather public opinions for the Party and writes about it (these documents are state secrets though). She would be a useful person to talk to.
Name : Do Thi Thanh Ha (Ms)
Current Institution : Institute for Public Opinion Research - Commission for Education and Communication
Job position : Head of Public Opinion Research and Trainning Dept.
Best,
Van
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From: Rylan Higgins
Date: Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 5:34 PM
Hi Huong,
Perhaps you already know of this, but the Center for the Study of Democracy came out with a series of papers entitled something like the Vietnamese Public in Transition. I don't remember the two papers I read being especially revealing. All, I believe, were based on the World Values Survey (2001?). There might be something in one or more of these papers that helps point you to some primary or secondary sources. I remember that one paper (of 3 or 4) dealt with attitudes toward democracy and considered north/south differences, and, I believe, historical change. I don't remember whether that paper had a methodology section or not. If I locate the electronic copies of these papers, I will send them to you offline. Of course, a google search would likely produce them more pretty quickly.
Rylan
--
Rylan Higgins, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Coordinator of Vietnam Programs
Loyola University Chicago
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From: Daniel C. Tsang
Date: Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 5:47 PM
Yes, the papers from the World Values Survey: Vietnam are all here: dan
--
Daniel C. Tsang
Data Librarian
Bibliographer for Asian American Studies,
Economics, & Political Science
University of California, Irvine
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From: David Brown
Date: Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 6:00 PM
Dear Huong,
About three years ago, for about six months, there was an exhibit at Hanoi's ethnographic museum (Viện Bảo Tàng Dân Tọc) on life in Hanoi during the 'bao cap' (rationing) period. As I recall, it was staged with support from a French NGO -- possibly the Musee de la Monde (Paris). Except that it did not (of course) touch on the Party's responsibility for the disastrous attempt to 'build socialism,' the exhibit was a startlingly honest look at the difficulty of urban daily life during that period, with lots of quotations from memoires and thoughtful displays. Presumably you can find a better account than my memory casn supply, and even plans and assessments somewhere. I mention it because for almost all of the many northern Vietnamese in their 50's or older that I've talked with about the 'old days,' it is the terrible privation, mísmanagement and corruption of the bao cấp (subsidy) period (1975-1986) that they remember with dread, not the war years. The worst of it, some have told me, was that they lost their illusions about 'socialism' and the Party's infalliability.
I look forward to reading your thesis, and hope you will share it with the VSG list.
David Brown
VietNamNet Bridge
Hanoi
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From: J Sager
Date: Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 4:52 PM
I believe the exhibit was funded in part by the Ford Foundation. A striking omission we discussed at the time was a treatment of the 30 years of anti-colonial struggle immediately preceding this period, specifically the economic effect such vast devastation and its political aftermath might have had. Those I have spoken to who lived through this time uniformly describe it as "hungry," but some also have called it happy. (Perhaps because many were children then, shielded from the worst privation.) Still, I am surprised to hear that many people preferred (even if only in memory) the wars, and their attendant specters of sudden death or injury for combatants and civilians alike.
Jalel Sager
University of California-Berkeley
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From: Jonathan Pincus
Date: Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 8:47 PM
Dear all,
The "bao cap" exhibit was part of the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences "20 Year Review of Doi Moi" project funded by UNDP and Sweden. What was interesting about it, I think, was that VASS had the original idea and implemented the exhibit on their own, of course with support from the ethnography museum. The topic was not the anti-colonial struggle so I wonder why Jalel thinks it was an "omission"? In any case, the exhibition was partly a celebration ("look how far we have come") and partly a political message ("don't go back"). It had clear political intent given the timing. The public interest that the exhibit generated was also interesting on a number of levels.
Jonathan Pincus
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From: Thaveeporn Vasavakul
Date: Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 7:36 AM
on vietnamese public opinion 1979-1986
i spent the years 1988-1990 in vietnam to do field work and i remembered that luu quang vu's plays were very popular and powerful. the plays , written in the 1980s, were performed after he and his family died in a car accident to/from hai phong. some of the key pieces that still remember included: hon truong ba, da hang thit, toi va chung ta, and vu an 2000 ngay. i discussed their implications briefly in the piece "vietnam: a changing model of legitimation" published in the alagappa-edited volume on political legitimacy in SEA (1995). there was also a book quite widely read during that time entitled "cach mang, khang chien, va doi song van hoc". i think it was by tran le van. i am not sure when it was written/published.
it goes without saying that there are plenty of writings on the 1979-1986 period published in the 1990s, but one may have to be a bit careful when using them. the "bao cap" exhibition can be used as a source, i guess, but probably with a bit of caution also. one may argue that the exhibition should have been organized in 2009 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the abolition of the two-price system. as we all know, doi moi was endorsed in 1986, but the two-price system was not abolished until 1989.
having spent the period from 1988-1990 in vietnam, i should be honest to say that i , as a foreign grad student, did benefit from the "bao cap" system. my vn poriton of the reserach fellowship was small, only good for 3 months at thong nhat hotel (now metropole), but for a bao cap system, the fellowship turned out to cover most of the expenses for the 22 month stay -- for language classes, food, accommodation, train travel expenses, a red peugeot bike (considered luxurious then and with a very good resale value), and field trips in hanoi, ha nam, and hcm city. i don't remember having spent money to bribe anybody.
thaveeporn vasavakul
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From: Ken MacLean
Date: Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 7:51 AM
Dear Huong,
Tuoi Tre Online ran an extensive series of articles on this topic several years ago (đêm trước đổi mới), which included jokes, anecdotes, phong su, retrospectives, policy assessments, and so on--primarily from the perspective of those in the "south." Many of these are still available on line, as is a book version. See, for example, http://www.360-books.com/ebooks/book-store/van-hoa-xa-hoi/cac-bai-viet-ve-dem-truoc-doi-moi.html.
You may also wish to consult my article: 2008 “The Rehabilitation of an Uncomfortable Past: Remembering the Everyday in Vietnam during the Subsidy Period (1975-1986),” History and Anthropology 19(3): 281-303.
Cheers
Ken
__________________________________
Ken MacLean
Assistant Professor of International Development and Social Change
Clark University
Worcester, MA 01610-1477, USA
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From: Thomas Jandl
Date: Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 8:58 AM
With respect to the "20 Year Review of Doi Moi" exhibit, I found it a defensive PR move. Why would the Party remind its own younger people who don't remember these bad times that they existed, and that the Party had its hand in creating these problems?
The Party built its claim of legitimacy on economic success -- a modern Mandate from Heaven. But obviously, one cannot have 8% growth continuously. The Party was aware of that and started to tell people: "Look how bad it was and how good it is now. So if things get better less fast in the future, instead of blaming us, remember how far we have come."
_________________________________
Thomas Jandl
School of International Service
American University
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From: Hue-Tam Ho Tai
Date: Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 9:18 AM
What I heard about the genesis of the exhibit is that the Party wanted to celebrate "Twenty Years of the Achievements of Doi Moi." Exhibit organizers took advantage of this to push for their own exhibition, using the arguments that in order to celebrate Doi Moi, one had to consider what life was like before. In other words, the idea of showing "Look how bad it used to be" did not originate with the authorities and in fact, they had to be persuaded that the exhibit was a good idea.
The videos used in the exhibit were community videos; the people who were featured made the decisions as to what would be included.
I am told that the exhibit was of far more interest to foreigners than to Vietnamese; and yet, I have seen books and articles that were clearly inspired by the exhibit. While many recall the hardships, they also remember the sense of sharing, the importance of events such as Tet which involved careful husbanding of resources months prior. No one, however, wants to return to those days.
Hue-Tam Ho Tai
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From: Ken MacLean
Date: Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 9:30 AM
I too would like to echo these same points. I interviewed Nguyễn Văn Huy (Director of the Museum, some of the researchers involved, Mike DiGregorio (Ford Foundation), Wendy Erd (consultant for the films), among others. All of them acknowledged that there was some initial resistance to the exhibit from high-ranking officials, but these were clearly overcome by the time it opened. So, I would respectfully disagree the exhibit can be reduced to an exercise in "image management."
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From: Thomas Jandl
Date: Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 9:37 AM
I am not clear about that point. The fact that officials did initially oppose it but came around would not seem to indicate that it was not about image management.
To clarify, I did not talk to any officials about it, but went to see it with two journalists from big Vietnamese newspapers. They both suggested that since so many young people are very impatient about progress, the Party wanted to show how far things have come under its leadership and that impatience must be weighed against that success of the doi moi era leadership.
This may or may not be the main reason for official support for the exhibit, but it strikes me that none of what was said would be an argument against the image management assumption.
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From: Hue-Tam Ho Tai
Date: Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 9:48 AM
Nguyen van Huy will be attending AAS, so those interested in this issue can interview him.
The Vietnamese state is interested in every single exhibition that is mounted in Vietnam or abroad about the country (think about the Journeys exhibit which also involved VME). So, of course, it wants to have some control over the image that is projected. What else is new? That is very different from proactively organizing exhibitions to disseminate a particular message or image or even telling organizers what the state wants the exhibition to project.
Hue-Tam Ho Tai
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From: Oscar Salemink
Date: Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 10:03 AM
I don't think that the exhibition was of more interest to foreigners than to Vietnamese. During my visits to Hanoi at the time of the exhibit there was a lot of buzz about it - not just among scholars, journalists and other intellectuals, but alsom among common people. It one point in time I tried to bring up the exhibition during every encounter, with friends and colleagues but also taxi and xe om drivers, people in shops, in public transport, and other chance encounters. I was struck by the fact that everybody I spoke to at least know about the exhibition, and many - if not most - had actually seen it. Although this was very impressionistic and certainly not representative research, I noticed that the exhibition fostered a clear generational phenomenon. Elderly people who had lived and survived through that period often told me that the exhibition presented an occasion to remember a period that was largely forgotten - or better: silenced - during the subsequent Doi Moi period. For them, the exhibition created an opportunity to tell their children or grandchildren (who grew up in a completely different socio-economic environment) about those times; about the hardships and scarcity, about the coupons and the queues, about the corruption, competition (over goodies) and frustration, but also over solidarity and a sense of shared fate and common destiny. Younger people (<30/35) without any personal recollection of that period would often tell me that they had had no idea about life during those times, about the way that (grand)parents lived and had to somehow make a living.
In other words, I was struck by the way this exhibition was known by many people I encountered, and resonated either with their own experiences (for the older folks) or with their lack of knowledge about such experiences (for the younger ones). How representative this observation is I cannot say. Of course, it might be that I happened to run into people who knew about it rather than those who didn't, but I don't think so. And it made me think that I knew of no other exhibition which - on such a small scale - had had such a major social impact.
Oscar Salemink
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From: Hue-Tam Ho Tai
Date: Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 10:10 AM
That had been my impression, too, so I was struck by this comment by a Vietnamese anthropologist (who was familiar with the exhibition)!
But I agree that I know of no other exhibit on this scale which has had so much impact. Compared to the kind of exhibits that non-Vietnamese museums are able to mount, this was rather small.
Hue-Tam Ho Tai
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From: Jonathan Pincus
Date: Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 10:26 AM
Not to make an issueof this, but the "authorities", if we take this to mean the senior leadership of VASS, supported the idea from the beginning. Of this I am quite certain. What is interesting to me is not the genesis of the exhibition but that at the time a group of fairly senior people in the party thought that it would be useful to emphasize how far the country had come from the central planning period. It tells us something about debates in the party at the time. I also wonder if it would be possible to do a similar sort of exhibition in the current political climate. I don't know, but my guess would be that it would meet with more resistance for a variety of reasons.
All the best,
Jonathan
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From: Thomas Jandl
Date: Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 10:35 AM
Oscar,
the two reporters I saw it with told me the same thing about the older generation reminiscing and talking to their grandkids about it, and the younger ones getting an eye-opener out of it. I don't know how many people they had interviewed, but their experiences support your observations.
And of course the media covered it, and the Vietnamese do read the newspapers and watch TV. So the impact was probably rather significant.
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From: Frank
Date: Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 11:37 AM
In 1990, when Nguyen Van Huy made his first visit to the U.S., I took him to the exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History called "A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans and the U.S. Constitution" (see the website: http://americanhistory.si.edu/perfectunion/experience/index.html). When the U.S. was celebrating the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution in 1989, the response of the U.S. National Museum was to present an exhibition showing - in excruciatingly moving testimony - how the Constitution had failed at a particularly difficult time in American history, when Japanese Americans were interned in prison camps during the Second World War. The Smithsonian was roundly criticized at the time in certain circles for not having presented a flag-waving "patriotic" celebration of the Constitution and instead presenting a hard-hitting, self-critical examination of an episode when America had failed to live up to the ideals of its founders and had failed in its duty to its own citizens. At the time, I said to Huy, "Someday, a Vietnamese museum will be able to present an exhibition like this that acknowledges a time that Vietnam failed its own citizens". He smiled, as those who know him can picture in their minds, and said only, "Maybe".
In 2006 - a bare 16 years later - the VME presented an exhibition that (inter alia) expressed stinging public criticism of a period when Vietnam failed its own citizens. As one of the many memorable headlines in the exhibition said, "'Bao cap' was a period during which both the courage and the intelligence of millions of people were suppressed". The exhibition presented the manuscript of the poem, "Remembering Uncle Ho in Spring", the publication of which in 1986 had opened its author Pham Thi Xuan Khai to vigorous denunciation, and caused the publisher to have to undergo self-criticism. It published, for the first time anywhere, a chart showing how ration stamps were allocated inequitably to elites and to normal citizens. It got all of Hanoi abuzz, as Oscar and Hue-Tam report.
I don't see how this can now be remembered as an unalloyed celebration of the Party's prowess and wisdom. The story the exhibition told was much more complicated than some are now recalling.
Best,
Frank Proschan
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From: Bill Hayton
Date: Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 1:03 PM
That was my experience too. If I remember correctly the exhibition was intended to last six months and ran for 18. It was very busy on the occasions I went there.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5301086.stm
Bill
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From: J Sager
Date: Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 1:51 PM
On the "bao cap" exhibit's omission of the anti-colonial struggle--I suppose to me it is like studying the economic hardships of post-WWII London, Paris, or Tokyo without much mentioning WWII. I'm not an expert in Vietnam's economic transitions, so I would be interested in getting a better idea of the dynamics between the economy, the effects of war and post-war political fallout, and the mismanagement, etc. that's made explicit in the exhibit. I may be asking too much, given the time and place of the exhibit (which I found thoughtful and compelling). I also tend to agree with the comments stating that the bounds of discourse served the PR interests of multiple players ("Look how good you have it now")--as economic inequality (and corruption) in Vietnam today rockets far beyond a discrepancy in ration size or the use of a bicycle (take those differences and cube them, then cube them again). And so out goes the bao cap sense of "solidarity and shared fate" mentioned by Oscar Salemink, of which I have also heard friends speak. Despite the tradeoffs, I have never heard anyone express a wish to return to that time, either. I would love to know of any research on the older generation's thoughts concerning the neoliberal globalization underway.
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From: Hoang Vu Nguyen
Date: Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 5:35 PM
On the website of the VME, it is stated that from Jun 17, 2006 until Sep 23, 2007, more than 350.000 visitors came to the Museum, of which 57,6% were Vietnamese and 42,4% were foreigners. This was considered as the most attractive exhibition of the VME. There are more than 2000 pages of comments by visitors. http://www.vme.org.vn/vietnam/news_detail.asp?id=687
For those who are interested in the negotiation process of an exhibition of the VME, please visit the panel No. 89 “Perspectives on Catholic Culture in Vietnam, 1600-2009” at the AAS 2010 in which Nguyen Van Huy will talk about another debatable exhibition “Living in Sacraments: Catholic Culture in Contemporary Vietnam” (http://www.vme.org.vn/exhibitions_special_details.asp?ID=62)
--
Hoang Vu Nguyen
PhD Student
University of Toronto
Department of Anthropology