Politics in Contemporary Vietnam: Party, State and Authority Relations.

• Author: Morris-Jung, Jason
• Position: Book review

Politics in Contemporary Vietnam: Party, State and Authority Relations. Edited by Jonathan D. London. Hampshire, England, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hardback: 229pp.

The tremendous public response to the Chinese deep-water oil rig stationed illegally inside Vietnamese waters from May to July 2014 showed how much Vietnam's domestic politics has changed in recent years. Through social media, online petitions and mass demonstrations (before a few of them descended into violent riots), broad segments of Vietnamese society showed that they too have an important voice in the nation's politics.

And so when Jonathan London argues that "Vietnam has entered a new if indeterminate phase of its political development" (p. 185), he has a point. Boldly, London asserts that Vietnamese politics is "today characterized by a sense of uncertainty and possibility that has no precedent in the country's postwar history" (p. 1). His new edited volume on Politics in Contemporary Vietnam is an exciting collection of essays that brings together some of the most important contributors to the study of Vietnam's domestic politics over the past two decades and offers a kaleidoscope of complementary yet contrasting views on the party-state. For the purpose of this review, I will discuss them according to three main groups, focusing on the Vietnamese communist party (Tuong Vu), state administration (Thaveeporn Vasavakul, Thomas Jandl and Edmund Malesky), and state relations with the wider society (Benedict Kerkvliet, Carlyle Thayer and Andrew Wells-Dang).

As with many discussions of Vietnamese politics, this book begins but does not end with the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV). Tuong Vu provides a rich historical account of the institutionalization of the CPV through successive periods of expansion and institutionalization (1945-60), ossification and decay (1970-86) and reforms at the top but continued decay below (1986 until present). While Tuong Vu emphasizes violence and the CPV's "near-total grip on society" (p. 22) as the most critical factors in its institutionalization, his narrative of decay leaves much in doubt about the party's political future. As he presciently suggests, "Not development but involution seems to be the trend, as the party can grow only by sucking from the state sector and the military already under its control but not by expanding its roots into a rapidly changing society" (p. 30).

The next three chapters deal with different aspects of...