This book explores the way in which the state has become commercialised under reform as party and government officials have gone into business and considers the impact that this has had on politics within Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. The book charts the way in which power has been decentralised to the lower levels of the party-state but argues that the central state retains significant power. These issues are explored through a variety of case studies including the implementation of different reform policies, struggles over political and business activity, and the prosecution of two major corruption cases. Particular emphasis is placed on piecing together the myriad of informal practices which dominate business and political life in Vietnam.

This book presents an overview of political economic change in Vietnam during a period of significant social and economic change and an era of international turbulence. It combines various political economic perspectives to offer an integrated and comprehensive review of Vietnam’s recent development, discussing topics such as public administrative reform, labour markets and special economic zones, environmental management and other important contemporary issues. This concise and highly readable book includes a considerable amount of research, and as such provides valuable insights for scholars and researchers interested in political economic change and in Vietnam.

This book examines how the interaction between political and economic factors under Doi Moi has shaped Vietnam’s China policy and bilateral relations since the late 1980s. After providing a historical background, the book examines the conflicting effects that Doi Moi has generated on bilateral relations. It demonstrates that Vietnam’s economic considerations following the adoption of Doi Moi contributed decidedly to the Sino-Vietnamese normalization in 1991 as well as the continuous improvements in bilateral ties ever since. At the same time, Vietnam’s economic activities in the South China Sea and China’s responses have intensified bilateral rivalry and put their ties under considerable strains. The book goes on to argue that Doi Moi has indeed brought Vietnam newfound opportunities to develop a multi-level omni-directional hedging strategy against China. Finally, the book concludes by looking at the prospects of democratization in both countries and assessing the future trajectory of their relations under such circumstances. As the most comprehensive and up-to-date survey of Vietnam’s relations with China over the past thirty years, the book is a useful reference source for academics, policymakers, students, and anyone interested in contemporary Vietnam foreign policy in general and Vietnam–China relations in particular.

“My husband doesn’t have a head for business,” complained Ngoc, the owner of a children’s clothing stall in Ben Thanh market. “Naturally, it’s because he’s a man.” When the women who sell in Ho Chi Minh City’s iconic marketplace speak, their language suggests that activity in the market is shaped by timeless, essential truths: Vietnamese women are naturally adept at buying and selling, while men are not; Vietnamese prefer to do business with family members or through social contacts; stallholders are by nature superstitious; marketplace trading is by definition a small-scale enterprise. Essential Trade looks through the façade of these “timeless truths” and finds active participants in a political economy of appearances: traders’ words and actions conform to stereotypes of themselves as poor, weak women in order to clinch sales, manage creditors, and protect themselves from accusations of being greedy, corrupt, or “bourgeois” – even as they quietly slip into southern Vietnam’s growing middle class. But Leshkowich argues that we should not dismiss the traders’ self-disparaging words simply because of their essentialist logic. In Ben Thanh market, performing certain styles of femininity, kinship relations, social networks, spirituality, and class allowed traders to portray themselves as particular kinds of people who had the capacity to act in volatile political and economic circumstances. When so much seems to be changing, a claim that certain things or people are inherently or naturally a particular way can be both personally meaningful and strategically advantageous. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and life history interviewing conducted over nearly two decades, Essential Trade explores how women cloth and clothing traders like Ngoc have plied their wares through four decades of political and economic transformation: civil war, postwar economic restructuring, socialist cooperativization, and the frenetic competition of market socialism. With close attention to daily activities and life narratives, this groundbreaking work of critical feminist economic anthropology combines theoretical insight, vivid ethnography, and moving personal stories to illuminate how the interaction between gender and class has shaped people’s lives and created market socialist political economy. It provides a compelling account of postwar southern Vietnam as seen through the eyes of the dynamic women who have navigated forty years of profound change while building their businesses in the stalls of Ben Thanh market.

Rent seeking continues to be a topic of much discussion and debate within the political economy. This new study challenges previous assumptions and sets out a new analysis of the dynamics of rent and rent seeking in development, using Vietnam as a case study. This book provides an alternative approach to the study of economic development and illuminates new perspectives in a contemporary context. It argues that not only has there been an incomplete understanding of Vietnam’s industrial development over the last three decades, but that neoclassical economics do not adequately address many of the issues endangering Vietnam’s development. A significant observation of the Vietnamese experience is the analytical view that rents can be developmental and growth enhancing if the configuration of rent management incentivizes industrial upgrade and conditions firm performance. Underlining the need to reexamine how economic actors and the state collaborate through formal and informal institutions, this study fills a gap in the scholarship of the political economy of rent and rent seeking and how rents might be used for developmental purposes.

This book is based upon extensive and repeated fieldwork, close observation and familiarity with institutional detail. It traces Vietnam's early attempts to create in State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) a basis for a military-industrial complex, and the ways in which these attempts failed, which explains the nature of state commercialism through the 1980s and into recent years. Since the 1990 breakout to a market economy, Vietnam has shown outstanding development success, with rapid GDP growth, macroeconomic stability, swift poverty reduction, maintenance of social spending and extensive globalisation. Her SOEs have played a major role, not only in showing that performance gains in 1989-91 could compensate for loss of the large Soviet bloc aid program, but also as major players in the rapid economic change of the 1990s, during which the officially reported state share of GDP remained high. By the middle of the 2000s, however, a rising private sector was, in harness with a large presence of foreign companies, sharply increasing pressures upon SOEs. Against this background, the book concludes with an assessment of the extent to which Vietnam's commercialised SOEs are now no longer seen as an effective compromise, but acting as a major hindrance to Vietnam's development. Historical analysis of the process by which Vietnam's SOEs shifted from central-planning to operation in an increasingly globalised market economy Draws upon regular and repeated fieldwork going back to the late 1970s Uses a wide range of Vietnamese language and other sources

Throughout the entire Cold War era, Vietnam served as a grim symbol of the ideological polarity that permeated international politics. But when the Cold War ended in 1989, Vietnam faced the difficult task of adjusting to a new world without the benefactors it had come to rely on. In Changing Worlds, David W. P. Elliott, who has spent the past half century studying modern Vietnam, chronicles the evolution of the Vietnamese state from the end of the Cold War to the present. When the communist regimes of Eastern Europe collapsed, so did Vietnam's model for analyzing and engaging with the outside world. Fearing that committing fully to globalization would lead to the collapse of its own system, the Vietnamese political elite at first resisted extensive engagement with the larger international community. Over the next decade, though, China's rapid economic growth and the success of the Asian "tiger economies," along with a complex realignment of regional and global international relations reshaped Vietnamese leaders' views. In 1995 Vietnam joined the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), its former adversary, and completed the normalization of relations with the United States. By 2000, Vietnam had “taken the plunge” and opted for greater participation in the global economic system. Vietnam finally joined the World Trade Organization in 2006. Elliott contends that Vietnam's political elite ultimately concluded that if the conservatives who opposed opening up to the outside world had triumphed, Vietnam would have been condemned to a permanent state of underdevelopment. Partial reform starting in the mid-1980s produced some success, but eventually the reformers' argument that Vietnam's economic potential could not be fully exploited in a highly competitive world unless it opted for deep integration into the rapidly globalizing world economy prevailed. Remarkably, deep integration occurred without Vietnam losing its unique political identity. It remains an authoritarian state, but offers far more breathing space to its citizens than in the pre-reform era. Far from being absorbed into a Western-inspired development model, globalization has reinforced Vietnam's distinctive identity rather than eradicating it. The market economy led to a revival of localism and familism which has challenged the capacity of the state to impose its preferences and maintain the wartime narrative of monolithic unity. Although it would be premature to talk of a genuine civil society, today's Vietnam is an increasingly pluralistic community. Drawing from a vast body of Vietnamese language sources, Changing Worlds is the definitive account of how this highly vulnerable Communist state remade itself amidst the challenges of the post-Cold War era.