Vietnam Related Panels and Paper Abstracts at the Association for Asian Studies Conference 1998

Session 15: Recasting the International History of the Indochina Wars (Sponsored by the Vietnam Studies Group)

Organizer and Chair: Mark Bradley, University of Chicago

Discussant: James Hershberg, George Washington University

Despite hundreds of studies on the Indochina wars, we have had scant knowledge of the critical roles played by North Vietnam, China and the Soviet Union. The recent opening of archival materials in Beijing and Moscow, and a more limited opening of primary sources in Hanoi, provides the first opportunity to examine the policies of the communist powers and impact of alliance politics within the communist world on the nature of the Indochina wars. This panel brings together four scholars from Europe and Asia whose pioneering work with these newly available materials promises to recast scholarly understanding of the conflict. The papers present four case studies-Vietnamese-Soviet relations in the wake of the 1954 Geneva accords; debates in Hanoi and Beijing in 1964-65 over Chinese intervention in Vietnam; a 1967 campaign against revisionists in Hanoi that alleged Soviet support for a military coup; and the reaction of Hanoi, Moscow and Beijing to the crisis the 1968 Tet Offensive posed for the United States-in an effort to illuminate some of the most important unanswered questions of the war. What were the Soviet and Chinese attitudes toward the Vietnamese revolution? How did the Vietnamese perceive Chinese and Soviet advice and guidance? And finally, who influenced whom? Was North Vietnam forced to adopt the policies of its more powerful allies or was it able to maintain its freedom as an independent actor? While each panelist is a specialist in a particular national history, their papers aim to address these questions by locating the place of North Vietnam and the Indochina wars in the larger context of the international history of the Cold War.

The Soviet Union and the Vietnamese Communists, 1954-1960

Mari Olsen, Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies

This paper is based on Soviet and East German documents and will focus on the relationship between the Soviet Union and Vietnam from August 1954 to the end of 1960. I will start with the results of the Geneva Conference, the division of Vietnam and the prospects for reunification. Three main issues will be discussed in the paper. First, the degree of Soviet influence in, and attitude toward, the Vietnamese struggle for reunification. How did Moscow perceive the growing wish among the Vietnamese to develop a strategy based on armed struggle to reunify Vietnam? And did Moscow attempt to influence North Vietnam's policies toward southern Vietnam? Second, Vietnamese perceptions of Soviet attitudes toward their reunification policy. Did Hanoi alter its policies according to Soviet preferences? And third, the Moscow-Hanoi-Beijing triangle. To what extent did the Sino-Soviet relationship influence Soviet-Vietnamese relations? In Vietnam, the Soviet Union was pulled between ideological solidarity with the Vietnamese communists and its emerging need to improve relations with the West. However, from 1956 this picture started to change and Moscow's desire for peaceful coexistence with the West prevailed over its solidarity with the Vietnamese communists. This paper aims to show how and why Moscow and Hanoi drifted apart, and the consequences their deteriorating relations based on a consideration of political, military and economic relations between the two allies.

Would Mao Intervene? Beijing, Hanoi, and the American Escalation of the Vietnam War, 1964-65

Chen Jian, Southern Illinois University

The period 1964-65 represented a crucial period in the escalation of the Vietnam War. How did the leaderships in Beijing and Hanoi perceive the danger of further American military involvement in Vietnam before the Gulf of Tonkin incident? How did they respond to the incident? If the United States brought the land war to North Vietnam, would China intervene? And if so, in what forms? These are some of the key questions concerning the history of the Vietnam wars which have not been answered in the past because of the lack of reliable documentation. Drawing upon recently available Chinese and other documents covering exchanges between top Chinese and North Vietnamese leaders, this paper will provide new answers to these important questions in an effort to examine the roles of ideology and realism in the relationship between Beijing and Hanoi.

"Revisionism" in Vietnam

Judy Stowe, Independent Scholar, London

In 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War, over forty people were arrested in Hanoi as so-called revisionists. Among them were veteran revolutionaries, army generals plus leading academics and journalists. They were interrogated and detained without trial, often in solitary confinement for the next nine years. No word of their fate has ever been published in the Vietnamese press. According to official party documents leaked in recent years, however, they were involved in what is called "An Organization to oppose the Party and the State by following the line of modern revisionism and supplying intelligence to a foreign power." The leak of these documents results from an attempt of the party to rebuff a spate of petitions and memoirs clandestinely circulated in Vietnam by survivors of the 1967 purge who argue they were victimized by claims that they had been a part of a plot by the Soviet embassy in Hanoi to carry out a military coup to engineer a shift in party leadership. These memoirs raise intriguing questions about the nature of Soviet-Vietnamese relations in a period when they were allegedly close allies. The paper also discusses the role of the Chinese in these events and the common assertion in these memoirs that from 1964 onwards Ho Chi Minh was little more than a figurehead behind whom swirled a bitter internal and international power struggle.

The International Dimensions of the Vietnam Crisis of 1967-68

Ralph Smith, SOAS, University of London

American studies of the Vietnam War, using American archives wherever possible, have focused overwhelmingly on the perspective of United States decision-making, diplomacy and military operations; while a very small number of studies have focused, almost as exclusively but without access to any archives, on Vietnamese Communist policies and aspirations. In An International History of the Vietnam War (3 vols., 1983-91) I argued for a more global analysis of the unfolding situation, treating it as a major international conflict whose significance cannot be fully appreciated in terms of U.S. policies alone. Now that it is becoming possible to throw new light on the war by using Russian archives of the Soviet period, and also much more detailed official histories coming out of Beijing and Hanoi, we must avoid falling victim to any opposite tendency to focus on the various strands of Communist decision-making, while forgetting Washington and Saigon. In this context my paper will concentrate on two American dilemmas which became apparent by the end of 1967 and which helped shape the crisis in Washington following the Communist offensive of Tet Mau-Than in early 1968. First, the global extent of U.S. military commitments and the fear of international Communist actions in Korea and Berlin, which affected the issue of whether to send more troops to Vietnam; second, the impact on Vietnam decisions of the U.S. deficits and the global monetary crisis of November 1967-March 1968. We need to consider American calculations and debates in these two areas in the light of the way they were perceived in Moscow, Beijing and Hanoi, paying attention also to the extent to which Marxist-Leninist analyses of the global situation may have affected actual strategies and decisions.

Session 34: Individual Papers: Politics and History in South and Southeast Asia

Organizer and Chair: Sara Dickey, Bowdoin College

Rebellions and Smuggling: Forms of Anti-colonial Resistance in Vietnam 1890-1920

Philippe Le Failler, Institut de Recherche sur le Sud-Est Asiatique, Aix-en-Provence

By the turn of the century, the French colonial administration had launched a new system of taxes to collect revenues directly from the peasants without the collaboration of local Vietnamese officials. Taxes on alcohol, salt and opium were the heaviest and the most unpopular in Vietnamese villages which had led to regular uprisings in the Red River Delta. But rebellions were not the only forms of resistance to the colonial power. The smuggling of alcohol, salt and opium, encouraged and often supported by local mandarins flourished as a parallel economy. At the local Vietnamese market, buying smuggled alcohol, salt and opium became an act of resistance. This paper discusses how smuggling became a political instrument in the struggle for independence and shows how it indirectly corrupted and destroyed the principles of the French colonial rules.

Session 35: Textbook Nationalism, Citizenship, and War

Organizer: Laura Hein, Northwestern University

Chair: Ellen H. Hammond, Kei-Ai University

Discussants: Yue-Him Tam, Macalester College; Kathleen Woods Masalski, Five College Center for East Asian Studies

This panel will explore the way that textbooks specifically and public memory generally have become a major site of debate over nationalism, war responsibility, and the relationship between citizens and their state. This panel treats textbook nationalism comparatively because textbooks' content and their relationship to nationalism is often presented as a peculiarity of one country alone, as has been the case at various times in Japan, the USA, and the Peoples' Republic of China, the tripartite focus here.

In Japan in 1997, two of the top ten best-sellers in Japan were Fujioka Nobukatsu's Japanese History Not Taught in School Texts, vols. 1 and 2. Charging that current textbooks demean the nation, Fujioka called for more positive views of the Japanese state during WWII and denounced Japanese who in any way wish to criticize their own wartime government. This is just the latest salvo, although one of the most intense, in an on-going battle over textbook content in Japan, as Inokuchi will discuss. The assessment of war, particularly the Vietnam war, is equally contentious in American history texts, as Potts explores. Like the Japanese case, the battleground is as much over the level of criticism Americans should allow of their own government as it is of depictions of the enemy. Selden and Hein add the example of China, where World War II is still presented as a great moment of national unity, although there too the message about the relationship between citizen and state is changing.

Whose War Are We Teaching? Vietnam in American Classrooms

Steve Potts, Hibbing Community College

Great efforts have been made in recent years to develop adequate curriculum for teaching about the Vietnam War in American colleges and universities. Publishers have produced college-level text books that, despite the competing demands of adequate coverage yet brevity, generally include the latest research and scholarly debate on the war.

Unfortunately the same cannot be said for high-school and primary-level textbooks produced for American students. The lack of adequate textual context for the war is compounded by political, pedagogical, and ideological considerations that sometimes reduce teaching about the war to a few hastily assembled and carefully proscribed approaches to a complex subject.

This presentation will discuss some of the challenges facing primary and secondary educators who wish to approach this complex subject in a globally aware, culturally sensitive, and informed fashion. This includes constraints of time, space, and budget. The presentation’s focus, however, will be on the creation and appropriation of a culturally nationalistic view of the war in American primary and secondary textbooks.

Session 53: History, Gender, and the State in Southeast Asia

Organizer: Barbara Watson Andaya, University of Hawaii

Chair: Lorraine Gesick, University of Nebraska, Omaha

Discussant: Shelly Errington, University of California, Santa Cruz

Feminist historiography has argued that the development of the state had lasting consequences for gender relationships, regardless of the society concerned. In contemporary Southeast Asia, work on gender has tended to support the argument that in general the position of local women was adversely affected by the intrusion of the state, the spread of world religions, and the expansion of a capitalist economy. In a field where the "high status" of women in "traditional" society is part of received wisdom, such research has been largely conducted without the benefit of detailed studies by historians. This panel seeks to open up discussion by examining the historical processes by which specific states constructed and fostered conceptions of gender. Employing separate lines of inquiry, each contributor focuses on a particular society or societies to show how the state was instrumental in creating and promoting models of gender relations. These models were prescriptive rather than descriptive, and their application was always contingent on context. Since requirements and expectations from the state did not affect the dealings between and among men and women in Southeast Asia in any uniform way, generalizations across the region remain problematic. Nonetheless, these four contributions demonstrate that the state has played a critical role in delineating the spaces and identifying the behaviors appropriate for women and men of different social ranks and in different cultural-ethnic communities.

An anthropologist has been deliberately selected as discussant for this panel. Her comments will serve as a reminder of the mutually profitable interdisciplinary conversation that has been so important in Southeast Asian studies and that will be vital as we begin to explore the history of gender in the region.

The Literati Voice in Early Modern Vietnam

John K. Whitmore, University of Michigan

This paper examines the ways in which the early modern political form, the "state," affected the pattern of gender relations in Vietnam. Using the state of Dai Viet in what is now northern Vietnam, it will show how an emerging group of males, the literati, acted both to advance this political form and to define the female role in Vietnamese society by bringing the male role to the fore, by legitimizing this role through law, and by utilizing the state in making these changes.

In Vietnam, the literati worked to advance the state's political, economic, and cultural integration by strengthening the central government, pushing forward economic development, and promoting Confucianist orthodoxy. Historical evidence shows that women in Vietnam played an active role both ritually and politically, a pattern which attracted criticism from the Vietnamese literati who emphasized the moral correctness of their present and argued against the actions of the past. From the 15th century to the early 19th, literati scholars such as Ngo Si Lien (15th century), Ngo Thi Si and Le Quy Don (18th century), and Phan Huy Chu (early 19th century) put forward their views on proper gender relationships and argued for the active involvement of the state as a means of reshaping expectations for appropriate female roles. By examining the ways in which the early modern "state" acted on the fluidity and ambivalence that contributed to cultural and contextual understandings of gender, studies of Southeast and East Asia can advance the discussion and understanding of gender history in our modern and interactive world.

Session 108: Development Trends in Vietnam's Northern Uplands

Organizer and Chair: A. Terry Rambo, East-West Center, Hanoi

Discussant: Neil L. Jamieson, Winrock International Institute

Vietnam is one of the most mountainous countries in Asia. Development trends in its uplands strongly influence the whole nation. As Vietnam enters its second decade of economic reform, however, the situation in the northern uplands is a matter of growing concern. Despite the official policy goal that the uplands should be developed simultaneously with the lowlands, the already large gap in economic and social conditions between the regions appears to be widening. Uplanders are worse off than their lowland compatriots on most development indicators (e.g., income per capita, level of education, health, food security). Rapid population growth has overtaxed the carrying capacity of traditional agricultural systems, with consequent widespread environmental degradation.

In the face of these threats, the Vietnamese government has assigned upland development a high priority. Efforts are focused on improvement of infrastructure, especially transportation and commun-ication systems, intensification and diversification of agriculture, reforestation, and poverty alleviation. Distribution of land to households and expansion and deregulation of markets may significantly change the political economy of the uplands.

This panel will review key development trends in the northern uplands, examine current policies and programs intended to foster upland development, and discuss how to adapt development projects to the specific needs and realities of the uplands and to better incorporate the knowledge of local people, especially ethnic minorities, into development planning. The paper presenters in this panel are all leading Vietnamese specialists on problems of development in the northern uplands, giving their voices a prominence that has not previously characterized discussions of Vietnamese development policy in the United States.

Human Ecological Perspectives on Upland Development in Northern Vietnam

Le Trong Cuc, Vietnam National University, Hanoi

The northern uplands cover twenty-seven percent of the country. Topographically and ecologically the area encompasses astonishing diversity. The northern uplands are also characterized by very great cultural diversity as represented by more than thirty ethnic groups found living there. Each of these ethnic groups is associated with a different ecological setting, and each displays a distinctive cultural adaptation to its environment. Overall, the combination of great biophysical diversity combined with the high diversity of cultures has generated extremely complex human ecosystems that present major difficulties for development planners. Understanding this complexity is vital in order to properly design the many different government policies and programs, as well as internationally supported projects, that will have major influence on the development of human ecosystems of the northern uplands in the next decade.

There are some important natural and social constraints affecting development of the upland human ecological systems that need to be taken into account in the design of projects for sustainable development. The remoteness and unfavorable terrain are natural givens that cannot be significantly changed by human action. The rapid rate of population growth cannot be changed in the short-term, but it can be brought under control within a generation if appropriate family planning programs are implemented now. Social differentiation arising from inequitable distribution of forest lands and shortages of credit reflecting the urban bias in government investments are policy matters that are subject to rapid change, once the existence of such problems is recognized.

Development Policies and Programs in the Northern Uplands of Vietnam

Cao Duc Phat, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Vietnam

Vietnam's northern uplands are characterized by diverse natural resources, poor infrastructure, mainly self-sufficient small farmer household economies, low per capita incomes, and a high rate of poverty. Deforestation in the uplands has had adverse environmental effects both within the region, where 8 million people live, and in the downstream areas where 30 million people live.

For the last decade the region has participated in the dot moi economic reform process. As a result, the overall economic situation has improved as have living conditions of many households. Food production has increased by 4.2 percent/year and food supply has improved even in remote areas. A large group of farmers still suffer from food insecurity, however, largely because of their low incomes.

Agriculture is becoming more diversified as farmers shift towards raising perennial trees, animal husbandry, and forestry. This has created a stable base of raw materials to support development of processing industries. The rural infrastructure, especially the road network, is being improved although much remains to be done. The Vietnamese government plans to carry out many development programs in the northern uplands during the forthcoming 15 years. These programs will focus on improvement of the road network, expansion of irrigation and water supply systems, electrification, forest protection, agricultural diversification and commercialization, resettlement and poverty alleviation, and development of education and health care. Hill lands are being allocated to individual farm households to manage, thus motivating farmers to participate in the development process. Credit, including long and medium term loans, is to be provided to farmers; extension services organized, markets deregulated, and domestic and foreign investments encouraged.

The Crisis in Agriculture in the Northern Uplands of Vietnam

Dao The Tuan, Vietnam Agricultural Science Institute

Agriculture in the northern uplands is at a crisis point. Population has increased faster than food production. Population pressure has already exceeded carrying capacity under existing systems of agriculture. Almost all forests that can be destroyed have already disappeared so that the possibility of development based on forest products has ended. Expansion of shifting cultivation on hill slopes is no longer possible and productivity in existing areas is declining due to the loss of soil fertility resulting from the shortening of fallow cycles. Rice yields on permanent fields in the valleys are increasing, but production is insufficient to meet the basic food needs of the upland population. There is potential for increasing yields of other upland crops, but the area planted to these crops is limited. Perennial crops offer considerable potential, but markets for these products are limited. Expansion of livestock production is constrained by lack of pasture and the declining market for buffalo. There are many constraints on the development of non-agricultural activities within the framework of the market economy. In the face of limited opportunities, many ethnic minority people have migrated to the south.

One development option is to accelerate the transition from subsistence production to commercial agriculture. This would generate jobs and income, but the technical services needed to assist the farmers in making this transition have not yet been created. A second option is to intensify agricultural production by using new technology. This would help to meet food needs, but is difficult to achieve due to lack of appropriate technology and economic incentives. Therefore, it is expected that the crisis in agriculture in the northern uplands will persist for some time in the future.

Indigenous Knowledge and the Improvement of Mountain Agriculture in Vietnam

Hoang Xuan Ty, Research Center for Forest Ecology and Environment, Hanoi

In response to living under diverse bioclimatic and cultural conditions, the many different ethnic minority groups in Vietnam's northern uplands have developed a diversified body of indigenous knowledge that plays an important role in guiding their agricultural practices and survival strategies. Unfortunately, research and development projects on rural development and agricultural extension have largely ignored this intellectual resource. Examples are given of interesting forms of indigenous knowledge in relation to the success or failure encountered in the implementation of agriculture and forestry projects in the uplands. Current weaknesses of indigenous knowledge in the situation of rapid changes in ecological and social conditions that characterizes the uplands today are examined.

Some recommendations relating to preservation and improvement of present indigenous knowledge and to its rational application in the field are advanced. Proposals are also made to incorporate indigenous knowledge in agriculture and forestry extension work, primary and secondary school curricula, and projects to conserve biological and cultural diversity. Priorities for research on indigenous knowledge in northern Vietnam's uplands are proposed.

Session 125: Social Change and the Family in Vietnam

Organizer and Chair: Daniel Goodkind, University of Michigan

Discussant: Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Harvard University

Families constitute the most basic social unit in any society. The patterns they evince at any point in time reflect both a distant historical past as well as more recent social, economic, and political forces. Family life course transitions offer numerous nodes at which to explore such patterns. Fortunately, over the past half decade, there has been a proliferation of new sources of data on Vietnamese families as well as opportunities for first-hand field research in Vietnam.

Our interdisciplinary panel has taken advantage of these new sources and opportunities to examine various aspects of social change and the family in Vietnam. Each paper focuses on a different phase or aspect of the life course-reproduction and the value of children, childbearing among unwed mothers, marriage and household formation, and the living arrangements and social security of the elderly. One common link running through most papers is gender inequality, as well as its causes and consequences. Each paper also illuminates patterns that speak to broad historical concerns, such as the establishment of regional cultures, post-reunification gender imbalances and their after-effects, and the interplay between free market reforms (Doi Moi) and current family strategies.

The Social Security of Elderly Vietnamese: Legacies, Current Realities, and Future Challenges

Daniel Goodkind, University of Michigan

This paper presents some results from a recent project on the elderly and social security in Vietnam. The first stage of this project consisted of two multi-provincial surveys (centered around Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, respectively) focusing on living arrangements as well as sources of social and economic support. With the exception of urban areas in and around Hanoi, support provided from within the family is far more common than non-familial support (such as pensions, social welfare, and private investments). In all regions, the vast majority of elderly Vietnamese live with, or adjacent to, at least one child. Married sons constitute the most critical source of familial support in both regions, although this patrilineal pattern is far more pronounced in the northern region. We discuss historical reasons for the aforementioned regional differences in both familial and non-familial support. Based on more recent field research in Vietnam, we also discuss how demographic shifts and free market changes present challenges for the future social security system.

Regional Differences in Household Structures and Family Formation Patterns in Vietnam

Daniele Belanger, University of Western Ontario

This paper examines household structures and their corresponding family formation patterns in Vietnam in the early 1990s. Our analysis of family structure is based on Hammel and Lasletts classification of households as presented in their well-known article, "Comparing Household Structure Over Time and Between Cultures" (1974), and uses data from the 5 percent sample of the 1989 census as well as from the Vietnam Living Standards Survey of 1992-93, which was completed using a sample of 4,800 households and 23,839 individuals. The results of our analyses based on nationally representative data indicate that family types become increasingly complex as one moves from north to south. The variety of household patterns in which young married people live point to even larger regional differences in family formation patterns. The results show that whereas the young couples of the north form an independent household shortly after marriage, couples in the south tend to live with their parents much longer. The discussion explores differences in marriage patterns, regional culture and regional history for explaining the results.

Reproductive Identity and Desire Among Unmarried Women in Northern Vietnam

Harriet Phinney, University of Washington

This paper seeks to expand existing understandings of the culture of reproduction in contemporary Vietnamese society. Starting from the premise that reproduction needs to be examined from a different angle, that of the right and desire to reproduce, the author uses her ethnographic data on unmarried women as an entry point into examining shifting notions of marriage, woman, and family in northern Vietnamese society. Since the reunification of North and South Vietnam, single women considered to be past marriageable age have been "asking for a child"-arranging to get pregnant so that they too may raise and nurture a child and create families of their own. To a large extent these women's positions and decisions stem from high mortality among men during the wars with the United States and China. Yet, they are also the product of Vietnamese notions of love, fidelity, marital law, and ideas about what it is to be a woman. This paper will discuss the discourse of reproduction in order to elucidate the manner in which unmarried women develop and seek to fulfill their own sense of female identity and desire. In addition, I hope to touch upon the implications of these women's agency: as women not bound by marital tradition, they have the potential for stretching existing cultural definitions of reproductive time and the purpose of reproducing in a patriarchal Confucian society.

The Economic Value of Children in Vietnam

John Luke Gallup, Harvard University

Vietnam has one of the highest population densities in the world, and its population is still growing. This paper studies the motives for having children with a focus on the economic value of children. I develop a model of household demand for children that emphasizes the allocation of children's time across productive activities: work on the farm, in the labor market, and going to school. Whether children are needed to work on the farm is shown to depend on labor market imperfections.

Demand for child labor on the farm and in the family enterprise, school attendance, and mother's schooling are estimated to have a large effect on family size. Access to contraceptives also affects family size but the magnitude of the effect is small. Son preference is important; it is not clear how much this is an economic motive (old age security) or a cultural preference. The effect of rural decollectivization under Doi Moi on the demand for children is considered. The results suggest that the government's focus on contraceptive delivery to reduce Vietnam's population growth should be complemented by policies that affect the economic motives for having children.

Session 143: The CIA and the Vietnam War

Organizer and Chair: William R. Heaton, Central Intelligence Agency

Discussants: Douglas Pike, Texas Tech University; Evelyn S. Colbert, U.S. State Department

Newly declassified CIA documents shed new light on the involvement of the Agency in the War in Vietnam. This panel will have two former experienced intelligence officers who were intimately involved in the CIA effort in Vietnam present their research on the basis of these documents. Through such documentary research and personal experience, Hal Ford and Tom Ahern will provide new insights into developments during the war. Douglas Pike, a former intelligence officer and now the head of the Vietnam archive (in the process of moving to Texas Tech), and Dorothy Avery, an intelligence officer with INR, Department of State, are also experts on this period and will discuss how these studies contribute to our analysis of the war.

National Intelligence Estimates on Vietnam

Harold P. Ford, Central Intelligence Agency

This study will discuss what the NIEs said and how they compared with military assessments. Working with newly declassified documents, including NIEs, this paper will clarify how the CIA viewed the prospects for U.S. policy during the war.

The CIA and the Diem Regime

Thomas Ahern, Central Intelligence Agency

Tom Ahern has completed a landmark study of the CIA's interaction with the Diem regime, including the events leading up to Diem's assassination. This study also is based on newly declassified documents, which will become public for the first time with his presentation on the panel.

Because of the unique nature of this material, instead of adding an additional paper, we are proposing two discussants, both of whom have distinguished intelligence backgrounds and can evaluate the contribution of this newly released information. Because only two presenters will speak, we anticipate additional time for audience discussion-which we think will be lively given the nature of the subject and the material.

Session 164: Individual Papers: Gender and Agency in Southeast and South Asia

Gender, Trade, and Smallness in Ho Chi Minh City's Ben Thanh Market

Ann Marie Leshkowich, Harvard University

Approximately eighty-five percent of Ben Thanh Market's cloth and clothing stalls are run by women. Deeply rooted in Vietnam's history, women's dominance of market trade is usually attributed to Confucian notions disdaining commerce as base and suitable only for women. The persistence of these perceptions today can easily be blamed for the apparent inability of women traders to expand their market stalls into larger private businesses.

This paper advances a different interpretation: rather than hampering women's businesses, the conceptual links between gender, trade, and smallness serve as a protective cloak enabling women traders and their families to conceal their activities from officials. Interweaving traders' life histories with an exploration of the kin and social networks through which they conduct business, this paper argues that many traders consciously choose to remain "small" because they perceive that the overall social, economic, and political environment actively discourages them from becoming larger. Maintaining a facade as "just a stall run by a woman" becomes a strategy to survive or even prosper.

As an important symbol of both Vietnamese markets and Ho Chi Minh City, Ben Thankh has recently become central to debates about the city's future. In state-sponsored discussions of development, "market trade" seems a symptom of economic backwardness or a quaint vestige of Vietnamese tradition. The very notions of smallness which many traders have manipulated may now mean that they are unable to advocate for the importance of this sector as an engine for Vietnam's economic growth.

Session 181: Processes of Privatization in China and Vietnam and their Social and Political Implications

Organizer and Chair: Thomas Heberer, University of Trier, Germany

Discussant: Irene Norlund, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Copenhagen

In contrast to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, China and Vietnam followed their own gradualist path of economic change without attempting to introduce radical political reforms. The overall political goal was (and still is) to maintain political stability while promoting economic liberalization. Since one of the driving forces behind the economic development at grass-root level are the private entrepreneurs this change is bottom-up oriented. However, the process of economic change and especially the privatization process developed its own dynamics leading to sociopolitical change in both countries that was neither foreseen nor intended at the outset of the reform processes. Though there are significant similarities between both countries, their respective development of privatization is not an identical one and may lead to different outcomes of the reform processes.

The papers of the panel address four core questions of the processes of change in China and Vietnam: (1) What role do the entrepreneurs play in the processes of change? (2) Does the private entrepreneur constitute a new social stratum or even class? (3) What are the main characteristics of this new stratum (class)? (4) How do state and society react at national and local level to these processes of change? The papers are mainly based on extensive field research.

Private Entrepreneurship and Socio-political Change in Vietnam

Arno Kohl, University of Trier, Germany

Since the 1980s the marketization and privatization processes in Vietnam caused an evolutionary process of change that started for the main part spontaneously from the economic subsystem and led to structural changes in the social and political subsystem. One of the driving forces of change is that of the private entrepreneurs, whose behavior affect their social environment, thus contributing to or even causing change in behavior and values of the non-entrepreneurial segments of the population. Since this occurs at many places simultaneously, the process of change at micro level intensifies and develops its own uncontrollable dynamics.

With the private entrepreneurs a new social group (class ?) emerges and changes the social stratification in a significant way. Especially the successful entrepreneurs constitute a highly self-confident group. They regard it to be natural that the introduction of the market mechanism does change the structure of the society, leading to the formation of different social groups and resulting in the long run in a capitalist multi-party system. They see socialism and market economy as not compatible.

The economic power and the steady expansion of the private sector put pressure on the political system. The local political elite of cadres and the new economic elite of entrepreneurs are often driven together by their respective interests. Thus the political power of the ruling Communist party and the central government is eroding under the impact of the privatization and marketization processes.

The paper presents the results of field surveys conducted in Vietnam in 1996 and early 1997.

State-Private Business Interaction in Vietnam: State Management of Network Capitalism

Rolf Herno, Roskilde University, Denmark

This paper seeks to analyze the interaction between the emerging private economic sector and the state apparatus in Vietnam. A bottom-up perspective based on neo-Weberian economic sociology is applied to the relationships between entrepreneurs and local government officials. A discussion of state policies and practices vis-à-vis the private, capitalist sector inspired by Foucault's notion of "governmentality" represents a top-down perspective. The combination helps identify continuities and disjunctions between the local and national levels.

Prevailing political rationalities at the national level have resulted in a highly ambiguous policy environment with conflicting discourses on the role of the private sector. While private enterprise has been instituted in law, the stress in national politics is on strengthening the capabilities of the state apparatus to enforce "strict state management" of the private sector.

At the local level, relations between businesses and the administration are characterized by clientilism, corruption, and reinterpretations of national policies. "Network capitalism" is used as a short-hand reference to the organization of the economy because informal networks penetrate all aspects of it. Obviously, local practices are far removed from the ideal of state management, although a lot of organizational energy is spent on symbolic adherence to state laws and regulations.

This paper emphasizes that diversity and particularism of local practices spring from the contradictory political rationalities at the national level, which create a room of maneuver for local officials. Post-transition Vietnam represents a unique form of capitalism-perhaps only comparable to that of China.

Session 196: Vietnamese Literature Outside Viet Nam: Beyond the National Tradition

Organizer: Dan Duffy, University of North Carolina

Chair: Nancy K. Florida, University of Michigan

Discussant: Laurie J. Sears, University of Washington

In Boston Public Library there are seventy-five feet of imaginative works in Vietnamese written in the United States. The year 1997 has seen the publication in New York and New Haven of two hefty collections in English by dozens of Vietnamese American authors. Francophone Vietnamese around the world are also creating fiction and poetry.

These literatures are of current interest in Asian American Studies, as that field embraces Southeast Asians and faces transnationalism; in American Studies, with increasing interest in ethnicity and immigration; in departments of French, where Francophone literature offers cases for post-colonial theory; and in Comparative Literature, where the question of American literatures in languages other than English is a new focus for comparatist concerns.

But these literatures from Vietnamese people are as little known in Vietnamese Studies as they are in Viet Nam. The best recent work on Vietnamese literature has come from historians, who focus on texts that address questions of the nation, whether in colonial times or in the recent period of social renovation. Academic professionals outside Viet Nam write about the same texts that Ha Noi's Literature Publishing House prepares for its canons.

This panel will call into question a tacit reading list for Vietnamese literature that has been little problematized. By bringing interdisciplinary critics of the emerging literatures to a panel of the Vietnamese Studies Group, and asking for a formal response from a critic of Southeast Asian literature, we plan to make the question, "What is Vietnamese literature?" of interest to wider disciplinary circles.

Asian Immigrant Women's Writing and the Rhetoric of Self-Definition: Tran Dieu Hang and Bharati Mukherjee

Qui-Phiet Tran, Schreiner College

The discourse of home and exile, which is common in Asian immigrant literature, is presented as a confining notion in the works of Tran and Mukherjee. These two authors' female protagonists, in order to cope with the problematics of displacement, develop numerous strategies: re-defining themselves as new Americans, coming to terms with their new lives in America, and viewing their relocation as a positive act. But whereas Mukherjee's Indian women tend to see their American experience as a transformation, a rebirth, a will to power-in brief, a way of re-defining the postcolonial female subaltern that the critic Gayatri Spivak speaks of, Tran's Vietnamese women assert themselves as refugees of the postmodern age who seek to connect the Western and Eastern worlds and transcend their condition as victims of oppression and discrimination through creative acts of re-invention and love.

Writing Interculturality: Pham Van Ky's Des femmes assises ça et là

Karl Ashoka Britto, University of California, Berkeley

In 1964, three years after winning the Grand Prix du Roman de l'Academie francaise, Pham Van Ky published his sixth novel: Des femmes assises ça et là. An intricate interior monologue related by a Vietnamese man living in Paris, this novel explores the ambiguous and often unsettling condition of the immigrant intellectual. The unnamed narrator finds himself caught between two cultures, between his obsessive attachments to three French women (one of whom, the young Eliane, is dying of leukemia), and his filial duty toward his mother, who near the beginning of the novel sends him a telegram from Viet Nam stating simply, "j'attends pour mourir." Pham Van Ky's text raises a number of troubling questions, many of which are left unanswered as the narrator's voice gradually gives way to that of the dead Eliane, whose letters-unfinished as they are-close the novel.

In this paper, I will examine Des femmes assises ça et là closely, exploring the ways in which Pham Van Ky seeks to represent the "conscience hybride, mi-asiatique, mi-occidentale" of his narrator. At the heart of the novel is a complex network of insights into the relationships between homeland, culture, identity, language, and writing; my paper will attempt to map out some of these insights while arguing that Pham Van Ky's text ultimately demonstrates the impossibility of choosing between cultures, and the hazards of constructing an immigrant identity around the desire for an intact, pre-colonial Viet Nam.

Transgressive Humor in Recent Vietnamese American Fiction: Andrew Lam and Khoi Luu

Renny Christopher, California State University, Stanislaus

Vietnamese American writing has tended to be somber, if not grim, in treating the war and exile. Recently, however, some younger generation Vietnamese American writers have introduced a new element into their works: humor.

When Andrew Lam read "Grandma's Tales" at the "Vietnam: Twenty Years After" conference in Davis, California in 1995, the scholarly audience laughed so hard Lam could hardly finish reading his story. This was a remarkable moment, since the conference as a whole had tended toward the grim: anti-communist elements of the local Vietnamese American community had picketed and protested the conference because of the presence of government representatives from the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam. But Lam delivered his story almost like a standup comic, broke through the tension, and fomented a spirit of communality through laughter.

Paula Gunn Allen writes that "Native people have long known and American humorists have recently discovered: the way to liberation from oppression and injustice is to focus on one's own interest, creativity, concerns, and community." Both Lam and another young author, Khoi Luu, attempt to use humor to break down boundaries of culture, of history, of family tradition, in order to create a new, syncretic literature that reflects the cultures they come from, the cultures they've entered into, and the hybrid culture they have created out of the old and the new. At least one strand of Vietnamese diaspora literature is poised to enter the twenty-first century not on tears, but on laughter.

Vietnamese Literary Production in the United States, in General and in Particular: Vo Phien's Nguyen Ven and Thuong Vuong-Riddick's Two Shores/Deux Rives

Dan Duffy, University of North Carolina

After 1975 the literary publishing industry of the Republic of Viet Nam moved to the U.S. Twenty years later, the émigré Vietnamese-language authors and editors are producing more books than ever, while younger, immigrant Vietnamese authors are making their way in the English mainstream. What is the relation of these literatures to the tradition of modern literature in Viet Nam? For this paper, I will examine two transitional texts that have readily discernible links to the old country and the previous tradition. An examination of the American novel Nguyen Ven (Intact) by the exemplary Vietnamese exile man of letters Vo Phien bears out the following observation: where modern literature in Viet Nam narrates and examines national history as if for a reader who is an actor in the great events of the day, Vietnamese writing in North America shows confusion and nostalgia about the nation and the past of Viet Nam. Two Shores/Deux Rives, a trilingual book of poems by a Canadian woman, Thuong Vuong-Riddick, who first emerged as an author in the New World, manifests a tacit acceptance of her exile from Viet Nam and her marginal status in Canada, by sampling and revising well-known texts of international Modernism alongside popular songs from wartime Saigon, to demonstrate the poet's distance from the national culture to which she still feels continuing ties.

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