Vietnam: A Pathway from State Socialism.

AuthorDror, Olga
PositionBook review

Vietnam: A Pathway from State Socialism. By Thaveeporn Vasavakul. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Softcover: 79pp.

Thaveeporn Vasavakul's book is part of the Cambridge Elements series on Politics and Society in Southeast Asia that in concise form seeks to elucidate different aspects of regional politics and societies. Vasavakul's book focuses on the period after 1986 when the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) pursued a policy of doi moi (renovation) that resulted in spectacular economic growth. This followed the period which Vasavakul calls "state socialism", from 1954 to 1985, first in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV or North Vietnam) and then in its successor, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV), that emerged after the unification of the DRV and the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) in 1975. The book consists of an introduction and four chapters: "From State Socialism to Transition"; "State Building"; "Accountability of the Doi moi State"; and "Regime Change and Legitimacy from a Comparative Perspective". Vasavakul relies on a significant array of recent Vietnamese sources including monographs as well as print and online media. She has also extensively consulted Western sources on the subject.

Vasavakul characterizes "state socialism" as an adaptation of core Marxist-Leninist principles for state building. While other scholars of Vietnam have called this "bureaucratic socialism", the "DRV model" or a "centralized planning and bureaucratic subsidy mechanism", Vasavakul uses the term "state socialism" to highlight the role of the state, led by the VCP, to control the means of production through economic planning to create an egalitarian society with a social security system using incentives to elicit desired individual responses (p. 4).

Vasavakul's main argument is that "despite the label 'one-party rule,' the party-state apparatus that channels that rule has become fragmented thirty years after the launch of doi moi. This fragmentation is a legacy of thriving commercialized interests at the provincial level during Vietnam's transition from plan to market" (p. 3). The author therefore concludes that the transition to state socialism has undermined the power of the central state as provinces mobilized to accumulate their own resources and bypass central authority. The disintegration of central planning has amounted to the disintegration of the political power of the central state (p. 63).

The book presents much...

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