Social Inequality in Vietnam and the Challenges to Reform by Taylor, Philip (Editor)

Introduction: Social Inequality

in a Socialist State

Philip Taylor

As one of the world's few states that remains nominally socialist, Vietnam is today caught up in a set of profound changes. These changes are reshaping its society in a manner that the expounders of this nineteenth century doctrine and the founders of the twentieth century states who drew upon it for inspiration could scarcely have imagined. At the forefront of such changes has been the opening up of a substantial role for private economic interests, the intensification of commerce and integration with the global capitalist economy. Political institutions from the National Assembly to mass organizations such as the Farmer's Association have had to contend with the decentralization of the economic landscape and now serve as venues for the voicing of ever-more diverse social interests. The media holds up a mirror to an increasingly pluralist society, and emerging civil society groupings, sectoral interests, and localist emphases have dragged the initiative for setting political and economic priorities away from the bureaucracy and the country's sole political party. The society has become more urbanized, the popularization of technologies such as motorbikes, the Internet, and [page 2] mobile phones has transformed the way people communicate with each other. A flow of human movements both within the country and across borders has refigured people's relationships to place and home. The growing importance of particularist cultural, ethnic, and religious affiliations, both new and reaffirmed, gives voice to the complexity and dissonance of Vietnamese people's temporal and spatial experiences and to the tensions and divisions that have opened up within their society.

This book is about one of the most challenging of these changes in reform-era Vietnam, the emergence of social inequalities. Social inequality refers to differences between people in their material well-being, their social position, cultural standing, or ability to influence others. It also refers to disparities in people's ability to ensure that they have a better future and that their children are secure, healthy, and have viable livelihoods. By most accounts such inequalities are growing and becoming more visible, in contemporary Vietnam. That inequality has begun to receive attention as a object of measurement and policy intervention, and as a topic of debate and contestation is a striking development in a country in which such differences were long seen as a legacy of a former more iniquitous era, or imposed upon the country from without. The contributors to this book, many of whom are from Vietnam, are in many respects representative of a growing trend within Vietnam towards scrutinizing patterns of social disparity and identifying their sources. Many of the authors use data generated by the government itself and the aid organizations and foreign research projects with which its officials closely collaborate, indicating that the Vietnamese state too sees social inequality as a significant challenge.

This introductory chapter attempts to set the contributions to this book in context by offering an overview of some of the key vectors of inequality in present-day Vietnam. It will then discuss the comparative, cultural, and political significance of these inequalities, before introducing the individual contributions. Getting at the meaning of social inequality is an elusive task, for in a game of comparisons dominated by interventions made by economists and huge development bureaucracies, the terms of the debate are often couched in predominantly numerical terms and mind-numbing equations. Nevertheless, in the discussion that follows I also try to address the interpretive dimensions of this question and attempt to provide illustrations of what inequality means to people in experiential terms.

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An Overview of Social Inequalities

The picture of social inequality in Vietnam can be captured in a number of quantitative formulae. Let us start with the question of income differences. In 2002 a person among the richest ten per cent of the population earned on average 12.5 times more per month than a person in the poorest ten per cent. Families in the richest five per cent of the population earned on average 20 times more than those in the poorest five per cent (Nguyen Manh Hung 2003).^, This is a substantial disparity. Of course on reflection, this contrast really only addresses income differentials and does not measure all of the non-monetarized transactions, and the significant cultural or intangible factors that affect people's standing in Vietnam or in any society. However, analyses based upon 1998 data show how much these discrepancies matter.[3] Comparative expenditures between the wealthiest and poorest 20 per cent of households differed by a factor of six (Houghton 2001, p. 15). The wealthiest 20 per cent of households spent about seven times more on health care than poor households did (Do Thi Phuong Lan et al. 2001, p. 177). A child born in a poor household was 7.5 times more likely to be severely stunted due to malnutrition than one born in a wealthy household (Koch and Nguyen 2001, p. 67). 43.3 per cent of children from the poorest households dropped out of secondary school compared with just 18.2 per cent of those from the wealthiest households (Vo Thanh Son et al. 2001, p. 162). Forty-four per cent of the poor lived in "temporary" houses (made of perishable and high-maintenance organic materials) compared with nine per cent of the rich (Do Thien Kinh et al. 2001, p. 37). In a country where the motorbike is a valued mode of transport mobility and material status, one per cent of the poorest households owned a motorbike compared with 55.4 per cent of the wealthy (ibid.).[4]

A wide gap in standards of living exists between urban and rural areas. In 1998, when three-quarters of the population lived in the countryside, annual per capita incomes in urban areas were twice as high as in rural areas (Kinh and Baulch 2001 p. 97). Nearly all (96 per cent) of the poorest 20 per cent of households were to be found in rural areas and 63 per cent of the richest 20 per cent were in urban areas (Do Thien Kinh et al. 2001, p.40). Rural children were twice as likely as urban children to drop out of secondary school (Vo Thanh Son et al. 2001, p. 166) and had poorer access to clean water (UNDP 2003, p. 223).  [page 4]  Even greater gaps exist between geographical regions. For instance, in 1998 per capita incomes in the wealthiest region in Vietnam, the southeast (which incorporates Ho Chi Minh City), were double those in the Red River delta (which incorporates the capital Hanoi), and nearly three times higher than in the northern uplands (Kinh and Baulch 2001, p. 97). Yet much higher income inequalities are to be found within the southeast region itself where, in 2002 the top five per cent of households (concentrated in inner urban areas) earned nearly 25 times more than the poorest five per cent (found in outer suburbs and rural districts) (Scott and Truong, in this volume). Similarly stark discrepancies between localities are revealed if one compares the capital Hanoi with the northern mountainous province of Lai Chau, the two extremes of a human development indicators study published by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in 2001. Per capita GDP in Hanoi was 5.5 times greater than in Lai Cliau. Hanoi's adult literacy rate was twice that of Lai Chau, its high school enrolment rate seven times greater, and tertiary enrolment rate 27 times higher. Hanoi^'s infant mortality was six times lower and its under-40 mortality rate five times lower (UNDP 2001). Upland areas such as Lai Chau (and elsewhere in the northwest, northeast, and parts of the central highlands) are not only far poorer than the lowlands,[5] they are also places where some of the sharpest inequalities between the rich and the poor are to be found (Minot et al. 2003, p. 39; Vu Quoc Ngu, in this volume).

According to a recent report compiled by Vietnam's National Committee for the Advancement of Women, women are half as likely as men to be in salaried employment and thus also miss out on the associated range of workers' entitlements such as pensions and various types of paid leave. Women who hold salaried employment receive 78 per cent of the average hourly wage earned by men, which in 2002 was about US 20 cents an hour. Women are over-represented among unskilled and manual workers and are less likely than men to be found in senior management positions. Although the gender gap in primary education is very small, women are 11 per cent less likely to be enrolled in secondary school (NCFAW 2002) and 27 per cent less likely to attend university (UNDP 2003, p. 203). According to the UNDP, adult illiteracy among women (13.1 per cent) is more than twice that of men (UNDP 2001). Politics presents a mixed picture. In 2003 the UNDP reported that 27.3 per cent of National Assembly seats were held by women, a better [page 5] parliamentary representation than found in other regional countries with the exception of New Zealand (UNDP 2003). However, the picture dims quickly when one leaves the national capital and descends through the levels of the administrative apparatus to the locales that comprise the most salient political contexts for the majority of people. This is seen in the composition of the local People's Committees; women constitute only 8.2 per cent of People's Committee members at the provincial level, 4.8 per cent at the district level, and 4.5 per cent at the subdistrict or commune level. Communist Party committee membership is more similar to the local administration than the national legislature in this regard, with women comprising only 8.3 per cent of the party Central Committee's members. Paradoxically women's involvement in party committees increases slightly in significance the farther one goes from the centre, 11 per cent at the provincial level, 13 per cent at the district level, and 12 per cent at the subdistrict level (NCFAW 2002).

Ethnic minorities who, according to official statistics, make up about 14 per cent of the population, face many difficulties as revealed in household living standards surveys that describe their lower incomes, much higher rates of poverty, poorer health, lower school attendance, and poorer access to infrastructure and services.[6] At the same time it is quite evident that measures such as incomes or school attendance are an unsatisfactory way to understand the well-being of people among whom many relations are non-monetarized, and who have different concepts of well-being, prestige, and status. Indeed one of the most serious problems ethnic minority people in Vietnam have faced is the evaluation of what constitutes the good life in accordance with a set of externally imposed criteria and the consequent attempt to remake them according to that model. On the other hand, many members of ethnic minority groups such as the Khmer in the Mekong delta do regard their unequal access to mainstream institutions and resources as serious problems and the categories of analysis found in such survey data are not entirely foreign to their way of thinking. This is becoming increasingly true as ethnic minorities everywhere in Vietnam face a huge influx of migrants into their traditional lands. Along with markets, aid projects and roads, this influx has displaced the former residents and has brought money, connections, and Vietnamese language literacy into new prominence as necessary factors for one to do well in these parts.

Today there is a sense that never before in the nation's history have [page 6] so many people been able to travel, study abroad, accumulate wealth, and build beautiful houses in thriving centres of commerce, industry, and culture. Accounts by journalists, tourists, and academics report the rise in national prosperity evidenced by the growing number of motorbikes, mobile phones, Internet kiosks, schooling options, and an increasingly cosmopolitan lifestyle (Drummond and Thomas 2003). However, these enormous changes are restricted to a relatively few number of those living in urban localities. A far greater number of people, who live in remote and rural areas, struggle to subsist, retain tenure of their land, maintain communal safety nets, and educate their children or cope with the effects of policy changes, development projects, and investments into whose planning they have little input. In rural areas many people face fluctuating commodity prices, rising input costs, mounting fees for health and schooling, and consequently rising debts. Even in the food-rich and rice-exporting region of the Mekong delta a large number of farmers are rapidly losing their land, becoming a landless rural proletariat of a size not seen since the French colonial period. Drifting around depressed rural areas in search of scarce seasonal employment or migrating to the cities to undertake unskilled work as cyclo drivers, construction workers, waitresses, or housemaids, they are one lifetime or many away from being able to enjoy the privileges of their more established urban compatriots. Ethnic minority residents of the central highlands or Mekong delta are not only over-represented in this underclass, their economic marginalization is compounded by their poor educational attainments, weak grasp of Vietnamese, loss of their cultural traditions, and lack of participation in political and economic decision-making.

Longitudinal survey data show that in recent years the gap between the haves and the have-nots, in regard to access to the factors that allow one to get ahead has been widening rapidly. While access to economic resources, schooling, and decision-making were not equally distributed in the 1980s (see, for example, Porter 1993), most observers agree that the Vietnam of that era was a more egalitarian society. Up to that time government policies had tried to break up concentrations of wealth, overcome or reverse urban-rural differences and erase the cultural legacies of less egalitarian colonial and post-colonial regimes, producing what has been described as a "common poverty" and a monotonous cultural landscape. Since the liberal reforms gained traction in the early 1990s [page 7] social disparities have grown quickly. The rise in the Gini coefficient for consumption expenditure from .33 in 1993 to .37 in 2002 indicates that wealth is increasingly being concentrated in the hands of fewer people (UNVN 2003, p. 5). The income disparity between the top and bottom ten per cent of households, which was 10.6 times in 1996 and 12.5 times in 2002 shows that the society is becoming increasingly polarized.[7] It is now not uncommon to see a new multi-story "villa" of brick, glass, and steel towering alongside neighbouring dwellings made of thatched palm leaves. Child mortality and malnutrition declined sharply between 1993 and 1998, thanks mainly to the much better health enjoyed by wealthier groups, but not for the poorest fifth of the population who saw no improvement at all in their survival prospects and only marginally improved nutrition (World Bank 2003, p. 59). The gap in household expenditures between urban and rural areas is widening, along with access to health and schooling. [8] The transition to a user-pays approach to healthcare has hit rural households particularly hard, limiting poor farming families' access to hospitals and health clinics and significantly contributing to household indebtedness (Segall et al. 2002). Regional differentiation in terms of incomes, capital investment, and access to infrastructure and services is also becoming more pronounced (see Scott and Truong in this volume).[9] The liberal reform era has seen gender gaps widen, the feminization of agriculture, the informalization of women's work in the service sector, the rise of subcontracting in the garment sector, a rapid increase in prostitution and in the trafficking in young women, and the reduction in women's political participation (Luong 2003a; Werner 2002; Trail 2002; Nghiem Lien Huong, in this volume).

To a great extent social differentiation is not simply increasing, it is changing form. In the communist era the decisive factor determining whether one could study abroad or hold office was class background. Those classified by the Communist Party as coming from poor peasant families were favoured over those from wealthier families or with close links to the former colonial regime. In such a context a limited degree of upward mobility was possible through demonstrated loyalty to the communist revolution or participation in wars. For those with negative political capital such as landlords or members of the former regime in the south it could mean exclusion from employment or access to key social services. Large sections of the urbanized entrepreneurial elite left the country in the 1970s because their occupation, economic power, and [page 8] foreign connections were liabilities in the eyes of the new regime (Duiker 1989; Thomas 1999, pp. 6-10). Although the early reform era saw a contraction in direct state involvement in the economy, when foreign investment levels peaked in the middle of the 1990s, political office or connections to those in authority were still seen as a decisive basis for accumulating capital through securing deals with foreign investors and using influence to evade the law.

In 2004 we can no longer say with confidence that this is the case. If one looks at the richest and most rapidly growing region in the country, the southeast, political capital (such as party membership, or contribution to the war) competes in importance with factors such as access to financial capital, education, entrepreneurial talents, overseas relatives, or advantageous location in an urbanized commercial and industrial centre. In many cases this transition in bases for getting ahead is less a rupture than a conversion of one set of advantages, such as political capital, into new forms of capital such as education, professional training, and economic capital. Many migrants from the north have cashed in on their revolutionary merit or party membership and have mobilized kinship relationships with southern-based relatives to secure a position in a state enterprise or employment in a strategic sector such as banking, security, tourism, or oil. Yet at the same time those with poor political backgrounds have also thrived, drawing on remittances from overseas relatives, educational skills, family entrepreneurial traditions, or ethnic solidarity. The presence of a large foreign investment sector in this region, whose loyalty is to governments or localities that can provide them access to cheap and high-quality labour, mean that professionalism, education, and bicultural experience have become more important than political background for both administrators and citizens alike.

The ability to speak foreign languages, use new technologies, and mesh with corporate demands has become increasingly significant for people living in regions where foreign investment predominates. However, globalization has introduced a large element of unpredictability into the system. Fluctuations on global markets have destabilized farmers all over the country. The sharp boom and bust in the central highlands coffee frontier and subsequent religious and ethnic conflicts in the early years of this century made news headlines but the less dramatic collapse in the price of rice since the late 1990s has undermined far greater numbers of people who had been exhorted by the government to produce [page 9] this prestigious export commodity. As Tran Thi Thu Trang in this volume observes is the case for the small Muong community she studied in Hoa Binh province, the early stages of liberalization brought economic rewards to those already advantaged by political and cultural capital in the former collectivized era. Yet globalization has since undone the fortunes of many of these initial beneficiaries, so that members of this local community are increasingly uncertain about how best to plot their futures. At the same time, the relative poverty of this remote rural community shows that deeper structures such as language, ecology, distance from centres of power, industry and trade networks constrain local fortunes in ways that recent steps towards global integration have not fundamentally altered.

Comparative Implications

Let us turn to explore the comparative significance of social differentiation in Vietnam. If we look at Vietnam's ranking in the community of nations, on a per capita basis in 2003 the Vietnamese were twice as well off as the citizens of Chad. People in China were about twice as wealthy as the Vietnamese. Chileans were ten times better off and Norwegians almost 100 times wealthier (UNDP 2003). These staggering aggregate differences in wealth, materialized in dramatic investment and consumption disparities, are well known to people in Vietnam, thanks to news reports, imported films, and soap operas as well as an influx of foreign tourists and return migrants from wealthier countries. Such evidence leads Vietnamese people from widely disparate backgrounds to describe themselves collectively as a poor nation and foreigners as "rich". On a positive note, Vietnam's economy grew three times faster than nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) during the 1990s, a decade in which most countries in Africa, Latin America, and South Asia fell further behind these wealthy countries (UNDP 2000).[10] As for internal differentiation, Vietnam looks very good in comparison with a wealthy nation such as the United States, where, according to one observer, the top one per cent of the population own 42 per cent of all stocks, 55.7 per cent of all bonds, 44 per cent of all trusts, and 37 per cent of all non-home real estate (Yates 2004, p. 2). However, comparison with the equally wealthy but highly egalitarian Scandinavian countries, shows that national prosperity need not come [page 10] at the expense of such pronounced internal inequality. Among former socialist countries, Vietnam is much doing better than its former patron of many years Russia, where inequalities rose sharply in the years following the dismantling of socialist structures (Agder 1999; Milanovic 1999). Comparisons with other developing nations are also pertinent and less flattering for a nation that still calls itself socialist. In 1998, expenditure inequalities in Vietnam were roughly similar to those in Peru, India, Bangladesh, and Indonesia, at a time when its gross domestic product (GDP) was also lower than any of these countries (Do Thien Kinh et al. 2001, P. 34; UNDP 1999, p. 180).

The inequalities within Vietnam have emerged in the context of widening global disparities that cut across national borders, and divide high-income professionals, urban middle classes, and wealthy political elites from their poorer co-nationals in rural areas and low-income occupations. Inequality in Vietnam needs to be understood in such a global context, one in which the richest fifth of the world's population earn 86 per cent of its income (UNDP 2000, p. 24). Of course, Vietnam is far from being torn apart by globalization. At a time when the richest fifth of the world's population spent 16 times as much as its poorest fifth (UNDP 2000, p. 24), the same disparity within Vietnam was only one-third as great. This suggests that unlike most African and Latin American nations (where in several cases the rich spend 30 to 50 times more than the poor; see UNDP 2003) the state still retains considerable initiative in maintaining social equity. But as inequalities continue to grow they challenge the nation-state's ability to promote cohesive growth. It is noteworthy that Vietnam's liberal reformers draw inspiration from China's open door and privatization policies, which have made Vietnam's neighbour the world's number one foreign investment destination and fastest-growing economy but also a place where income disparities and urban-rural and regional inequalities have sharply increased.

One scenario plausibly open to Vietnam would be to follow the path taken by other countries in the region such as Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, which have grown rapidly industrialized and delivered high standards of living, while remaining relatively equity-based and enjoying high levels of social inclusion, as measured for instance by equitable income distribution and favourable access to education and health. Notwithstanding its problems, China too remains something of a model among the formerly socialist countries. While regional inequalities and [page 11] a sharp decline in relative income in the countryside have emerged in both China and Russia's transitions from a socialist system to a market economy, as in Vietnam, China has protected its higher education, health care, and science sectors better than Russia (Gailbraith et al. 2003, p. 17), while China's income disparities remain lower than Russia's (UNDP 2003). In other areas Vietnam appears to be following the lead of Southeast Asia. The ratio of female to male tertiary students in Vietnam (.73) comes close to the high rate in countries such as Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines (where women outnumber men), exceeding the rate in Korea or South Asia (UNDP 2003). Malaysia has dealt with severe ethnic inequalities with affirmative action policies that redress inequality along ethnic lines, while maintaining a high rate of growth, although Malaysia also has one of Southeast Asia's most pronounced income gaps. But Vietnam is also experiencing many of the same problems as other regional countries. One only need look as far as Myanmar and Indonesia to see cases where a lack of political and economic inclusion have led to severe ethnic and religious conflicts, which have caused widespread human suffering and have devastated their economies.

Time will tell whether Vietnam manages to attain the level of inclusion in growth and prosperity characteristic of the East Asian tiger economies although its similarities with China indicates that it may not. Decentralized industrial investments such as the Ca Mau petrochemical complex in southern Vietnam and the Dung Quat oil refinery in central Vietnam, along with poverty reduction and rural development campaigns show the government attempting to balance equity with growth. On the negative side, the rapidity with which education and health have emerged as de facto private concerns, benefiting the minority who have the income to afford quality services, sees Vietnam going in a different direction from that formerly followed by the newly industrializing economies (NIEs). Yet it is still doing better than nations such as Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines at a similar GDP level, where extremely wealthy elite families, large urban slum populations, highly concentrated land ownership, and cultural exclusions nurtured insurgencies and ethnic violence. Where Vietnam may fall in this picture is not entirely certain as in economic terms it remains far behind Thailand and Indonesia and rural-based and ethnic conflicts have already broken out along the socio-economic faultlines that have recently opened up in the country.

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Cultural Significance

The regional comparison highlights the effect of cultural legacies in the trends evident in Vietnam. Aspects of Vietnam's social system such as its high rates of educational participation, the cultural valuation of mental over manual labour, and the continued stigmatization of private trade have been traced to the Confucian heritage that Vietnam shares with the countries of East Asia (Luong 1992, p. 68; Malarney 1998, p. 283; Woodside 1976). To some observers, the Confucian cultural heritage, in many ways inimitable to individual wealth accumulation, helps account for why Vietnam's Communist Party, like that of China and North Korea, formerly legislated against private commerce and individual accumulation." Malarney situates the restricted development of commerce in the Red River delta in the context of pre-colonial Vietnam's Confucian culture, according to which wealth acquisition through commerce was shunned and traders ranked lowest in an occupational hierarchy si, nong, cong, thuong, that placed scholars who were literate in the Confucian tradition at the top of the hierarchy (Malarney 1998, p. 271). Aspects of Vietnam's communist political culture have also been traced to Confucian traditions of statecraft, which model appropriate political behaviour and state-subject relations on familialist metaphors. In pre-colonial Confucian ideology, individualism was muted by notions of filial responsibility in the family, and the competitively selected bureaucracy was expected to conform to an ethic of disinterested public service (Woodside 1971). During Vietnam's wars with France and America a strong emphasis was placed on individual and family obligations to make sacrifices for the country. In the post-war era, the party has advanced a paternalistic notion of citizenship as the populace uniting together as the nephews and nieces of their Uncle Ho.

To the extent that such cultural orientations have shaped Vietnam's modern political economic trajectory they have been challenged by recent social realignments in Vietnam, which have transformed the ways people relate to each other. The ethic of sacrifice to the collective is being replaced by notions of individualism, private property, and an increasing importance placed on market-based routes to prosperity. An urbanized civilization has replaced a rural one as a locus of social values and cultural leadership. The twin north/south poles of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are now the critical contexts for enacting and expounding elite lifestyles and values as distinct from the era when the Hue-based [page 13] court calibrated the cultural pulse of the country. In rural areas of the Red River delta off-farm commercial activities, exports, and remittances have become significant new grounds for wealth accumulation and have led to a sharpening in local income differentiation (Adger 1999). These structural transformations are often experienced as bewildering and confronting processes that challenge people's conventional understandings about their relationship to locality and to each other. Today wealthy urban-based traders, many of them poorly educated, use transnational family networks to buy up property and expensive imported vehicles and deport themselves in ostentatious high-status clothing, eating establishments, households, and vehicles. Many of them make expensive offerings to formerly anonymous prosperity spirits such as Ba Chua Kho in Bac Ninh province, to whom they attribute credit for their success (Le 2001). Such modes and assumptions offend against elite concepts of how societal leaders should behave and challenge Confucian and communist values of rationality and decorum and their stigmatization of commerce and cultural heterodoxy. An efflorescence of books written by local intellectuals about traditional values, which include negative commentary on such commerce-orientated religious practice, show a degree of discomfort among an educated bureaucratic elite at the cultural priorities of an ascendant class of entrepreneurs and consumerist moneyed classes (Taylor 2003).

Of course the traditional status system, aspects of which were selectively reinforced by colonial governmentality, modernist concepts of rationality and a mass mobilizing party's mistrust of the accumulation of private property, is itself an ideological or motivated view of the culture. Constructions of the past which stress a stable system of stratification with the mandarin-scholar at its apex is at heart a statist image of Vietnamese culture derived through the documents produced over the centuries by state-employed scholarly elites. To position scholars at the pinnacle of traditional Vietnamese society would be to overlook the historically dominant role that the military has played in the pre-colonial state apparatus. According to Cooke's analysis of the pre-colonial examination system, military officials outranked civil ones in the ruling bureaucracy from the mid-1500s to the 1830s (Cooke 1994). Neither should one too artificially divide "traditional" scholastic or bureaucratic pursuits from "new" economic pathways, for historically degrees and office were very often purchased and power was used to increase the economic [page 14] position of families and individuals. In conflict with a centrist view that projects a unified status system as a traditional baseline is the historical evidence of a range of alternative routes to social esteem and privilege. Regional background, kinship, commercial occupations, martial prowess, and religious charisma have all been decisive pathways to power, wealth, and prestige at different times in Vietnam's history (Choi 2004; Cooke 1998, 1999; Do 2003; Tai 1983; Li 1998). The Vietnamese court had constantly to contend with rival sources of authority and the historical succession of political capitals and cultural centres shows that the pre-eminent centre of its day has struggled to delimit the power of rival centres, with varying degrees of success (Taylor 1998).

In fact if we look at the sub-national level we see a degree of continuity and predictability in the principles that are espoused as the key to social advancement. In the Red River delta, the political centre of the country, kinship or carefully nurtured connections with those holding office are seen as determinate to getting ahead but domestic observers say that this has long been the case in a region where civil service has been the principal route for the children of peasant families to raise themselves and their families out of a subsistence lifestyle. This is in dramatic contrast with coastal regions and ports and the urban riverports of the southern part of the country. In these locales commerce, transport, or cultural translation services have for centuries brought prosperity and prestige to those acting as mediators in a translocal economy (Li 1998, 2004). Long before the doi rnoi era commenced it was well-established practice among residents of commercial enclaves such as Hai Phong, Hoi An, and Cholon to make offerings to spirits of commerce and travel before embarking on a transaction or commencing a journey, for it was known that prosperity and security came to those who did so (Taylor 2004). In the cosmopolitan, heterogeneous world of the Mekong delta, power and prestige has long gone to monks, priests, Achars, Hadjis, daoists, and mystics, those best able to navigate the delta's ethno-religious diversity and effect a compelling synthesis or communal charter, on behalf of their fellow residents, that makes sense of the cultural complexity and social flux in which local people live (Brocheux 1995; Do 2003; Tai 1983; McHale 2004, pp. 150-64).

A locality-based analysis also helps us understand the dynamics of resistance to social differentiation. Hy Van Luong observes that the rate of landlessness and land concentration in southern Vietnam is currently [page 15] far greater than elsewhere in the country, which he suggests reveals the existence of a widespread ideological premise among locals that treats land as a commodity, a view which he situates in terms of their century-old familiarity with commercialized agriculture (Luong 2003, p. 99).[12] Such a view has its merits, particularly given that the local political elite has been the prime beneficiary of land transactions in the reform era. However, the fact that in the colonial era the south was also a bastion of Trotskyism, which sought to mobilize the proletarianized peasantry against their class exploitation (Tai 1992, pp. 232-43), and that Mekong delta peasants continue to protest against unfair terms in land transfers, suggests that we need to position this ideology even more finely in terms of its exponents' class position, as well as in terms of locality and ethnicity. For instance, in the former revolutionary heartland of Tien Giang province, where resistance against France was led by the owners of moderate-sized land holdings who were steeped in Confucian norms of civility (Taylor 2001), large-scale industry and commerce have yet to emerge strongly despite favourable transport connections and a large inflow of overseas remittances. Locals attribute the economic stagnation of their province to the conservatism of the local leadership, who retain a principled commitment to equity and revolutionary austerity and nurture a mistrust of outsiders, be they party leaders from other provinces or foreign investors. In sharp contrast, the nearby border town of Chau Doc is home to a dynamic fish-raising industry and thriving pilgrimage economy that suggests a very different orientation among local leaders to economic and cultural innovation. Meanwhile, Khmer communities in the delta have lost their land at a very high rate in the last decade, due to political, social, and cultural exclusions that they describe as longstanding. Many members of this community nurse resentments about these injustices that are similar to those which animated violent protests in the nineteenth century (Brocheux 1995, p. 95; Taylor, in this volume).

In important respects contemporary varieties of differentiation are neither continuous with tradition nor complete ruptures with the old, but transformations of previous stratification patterns. In a study of agrarian reform in the northern uplands, Sikkor shows that when market relations were introduced in the late 1980s, economic life continued to be mediated through the social and cultural relations of local Black Thai households. However, what superficially looks like the reproduction of socialist and pre-socialist structures in the face of macro-level economic [page 16]change might be seen as the ongoing shaping of Black Thai sociality as a work-in-progress, involving the combined influence of past and present as well as local and extra-local factors in creative tension with each other (Sikor 2001). The significance of commerce as a pathway to success is not novel in Ha Noi^'s old quarter or Ho Chi Minh City, but the highlighting of commercial indexes of success in national political culture is reflective of the rising power of these urban contexts as national cultural centres. Professionals who work in the urban corporate sector earn salaries that can exceed US$1,000 per month. Some see themselves as agents of change, bringing a new ethos of transnational modernity to Vietnam. One university graduate working as a human resource manager in a multinational company in Ho Chi Minh City told me he wanted to make his fortune as "an economic man not a political man", distinguishing himself from that still pervasive breed of "red capitalists" who abuse their power to get rich. However, such white-collar corporate managers rarely handle their companies' money and they contribute to corporate wealth through research, planning, training, and report writing rather than through transportation or retail sales. This distinction mirrors the mental/material divide and stigmatization of money evident in both the communist movement and former authoritarian regime in the south.

Several theorists see the informalization of women's work to be a recent consequence of Vietnam's integration into new market structures, a rupture with a pre-existing gender-neutral socialist mode of production (for example, Desai 1995; Werner 2002, p. 34). Another perspective would see this as consistent with an older gendered pattern in the division of labour (Luong 2003a), or as a mode that was substantially unreconstructed in the case of the south (Taylor 2004, pp. 104-7). Still another approach might be to view the female-dominated informal sector as a creative combination of the old and the new. For instance, many women migrate to Vietnam's cities to work as hospitality providers, petty traders, domestic workers, or sex workers, often servicing the needs of a male migratory workforce. Such economic transactions can be seen as the extra-localization of and commercial elaboration upon patterns of domesticity, intimacy, and gendered household specializations that still pertain in the rural areas where the main protagonists in these transactions come from.

Although contemporary patterns of differentiation are not completely novel, the impact upon the losers in the equation is often [page17] unprecedented. Smaller localized peoples who live in upland regions, far from markets, political capitals, and urbanized centres in which the Viet ethnic group has consolidated itself, are deeply disadvantaged in their interactions with the lowland group by their lack of economic power, weak political power, and unfavourable location in a translocal economy. In many respects, such inter-ethnic group inequalities are not new but have persisted for centuries. However, many of these groups previously enjoyed a degree of autonomy provided by their relatively remote location. In such circumstances, facility in their own language, participation in local social networks, prowess in subsistence agriculture and hunting, or shamanistic pursuits were the salient factors underlying local differentiation (for example, Salemink 1997). Recent years have seen a dramatic acceleration in the disparities these localized communities face in a context where the regions in which they live have been overrun by migrating members of the mainstream group (Rambo and Jamieson 2003). In increasingly diverse, intimate, and powerful ways, not to be culturally Vietnamese, not mainstream, is becoming an extreme liability for certain ethnic groups such as the Ede, the Khmer, and the Tay.

The power to define what is at issue in this encounter is also changing. In recent years it has become increasingly common to read in government reports and those issued by Hanoi-based international agencies such as the World Bank and UNDP offices, that "poverty" is a problem disproportionately faced by Vietnam's ethnic minorities. However, their characterization as "poor" imposes upon Non-Viet ethnic groups a definition of social success that is culturally loaded, emphasizing household monetary incomes and expenditure, remoteness from ethnic Viet markets, and lack of participation in Vietnamese language-based education as indicators and causes of their poverty. It follows that to eliminate poverty means to incorporate them into such mainstream indexes of cultural identity as monetarization and Vietnamese language education. As Taylor (in this volume) argues, attempts to do so risk uprooting longstanding connections to locality and mutual support systems and may well aggravate perceptions of ethnic-based discrimination. Policies that aim at eliminating ethnic difference are by no means new in Vietnam. However, where formerly the peoples living at the frontiers of the Vietnamese polity were regarded as children to be cared for by a paternalistic king or all-knowing party and assimilated [page 18] into the mores of lowland society, they are now being assessed as "poor" from an urbanized criteria, and according to the criteria of consultants working for international agencies. This indicates that while in many ways a familiar story, the power to define and intervene in the "problem" of ethnic difference has shifted away from the Confucianized capital of ethnic Viet chauvinism to the urbanized and international contexts that today shape what it means to be Vietnamese.

Challenges to the State

Is this portrait of widening inequalities consistent with the ideological orientation of a state that calls itself socialist? What has been the state's response to these yawning inequalities and what motivates it?

The Vietnamese Communist Party emerged out of an anti-colonial movement that was directed against the injustices of French colonialism. France had violently seized control of Indochina in the middle of the nineteenth century and for almost a century the former kingdom of Vietnam was governed by this European power to serve its own interests. In their case against France, Vietnamese anti-colonialists exposed the double standards of the colonial regime, its exploitative nature, and the arrogance and corruption of the local elites who served it. Most leading members of this movement were members of the urban petty bourgeois class that had grown up out of colonialism (Marr 1981, pp. 31-32). One theory is that their protest was motivated by frustration at the restrictions placed on their advancement within colonial society (McAlister 1966, p. 323). Far from being the most destitute members of colonial society, their demands for self-determination resonated with those advanced by urban nationalists throughout the colonized world. This is true of the early communist leadership, who were also largely recruited from this class. Ironically, for a party that was to fight both France and then the United States, Vietnam's communists were inspired by the ideals of the French and American revolutions, in which the demand for equality was paramount. The declaration of independence which President Ho Chi Minh read to the crowd assembled in Ba Dinh Square on 2 September 1945 demanded equal status for the Vietnamese people within the community of nations. Quite significantly for a party that called itself communist, this proclamation did not appeal for equality between all members of the newly declared nation. Indeed in the brutal wars of [page 19] resistance against France and later America the communist leadership was to rely heavily on coalitions such as the Viet Minh that enlisted the patriotic support of Vietnamese from all sectors of society, both wealthy and poor, for the struggle for national independence.

Nevertheless, the party's success against France was substantially attributable to its leaders' ability to overcome their urbanist bias and harness the discontent of the peasants, who were the real losers in colonial society and who comprised the majority of the population. This orientation distinguished the communists from many other urban-based anti-colonial groups, such as the Nationalist Party. Communist leaders Vo Nguyen Giap and Truong Chinh marked out this agenda early, publishing a report about the exploitative conditions faced by peasants under colonialism in the 1930s (Truong Chinh and Vo Nguyen Giap 1936). Policies such as the 1950s land reform campaign, which eliminated well-off landowners in the north, the promoting of peasants into the party apparatus, and the nationalization of industry in the south after the communist military victory, would appear to constitute further evidence of the communist's preoccupation with equity concerns.[13] However, such policies can also be viewed in a different light, as means to the end of consolidating a strong grip over national territory. Land reform, collectivization, the attack on private commerce in the post-war south effectively undermined the economic and social bases of resistance to the communist's efforts to centralize power. These moves freed up resources, which were distributed to less well-off members of society to secure their support for the regime's objectives. According to this analysis, the communist's primary objective was not necessarily to construct an egalitarian social order (cf. Kolko 1997, p. 119) but to consolidate control over the society. This interpretation would help to explain the party's toleration of the contemporary accumulation of private wealth combined with an acute sensitivity to instances of this that threaten to undermine the state's power.[14] It also explains the typically rapid moves to muffle demonstrations against regional, ethnic, or religious inequalities, which, despite the validity of the grievances that have generally informed such protests, occur along faultlines that the party is concerned might be exploited by foreign-based groups to promote a politically divisive agenda.

Hy Van Luong advances a culturalist interpretation of the Vietnamese Communist Party's orientation towards inequality. He argues that the [page 20] collectivist impulse in Vietnamese communism has its roots in an indigenous social justice ethic such as was manifested in the institution of communal land, a shared resource in Vietnamese villages that was periodically redistributed to the less well-off residents of the village (Luong 1992; see also Scott 1972). The Communist Party's concern for the problems of rural people has been likened to the strong links that Vietnam's predominantly rural-based Confucian scholars traditionally maintained with the peasantry and, according to this perspective, the rural orientation of the party belongs within this lineage (Nguyen Khac Vien 1974). Luong considers that rural-based party members enjoyed an esteem similar to that in which the scholar-gentry had been held by the peasants, which he argues aided their mobilization of the peasantry against France (Luong 1992, p. 232). Yet he observes that this same tradition of authority entailed a valuation of hierarchy, which allotted mandarins, the elderly, and males a high social ranking (1992). Hence the revolution's debt to pre-colonial modes of authority helps to account for the enduring inequalities in post-revolutionary society (ibid., p. 229). Among these iniquitous continuities could be included the ambivalence with which party leaders and intellectuals regarded peasant smallholders, due to their alleged attachment to private property (Montira Rato, in this volume). Certainly the elitism of the leadership clique in the post-war years, manifested in such practices as receiving tribute gifts from locals when on tour, their aloofness from ordinary people and the deferential manner they treated each other, has been linked by one former regime insider to the Confucian influence on the party leadership (Bui Tin, 1995, pp. 102-5). In Luong's view, such traditional legacies also explain the persistent gender inequalities under the communist state and into the reform era (Luong 1998, 2000, 2003a).

Yet another source of these hierarchical tendencies was the colonial context in which many revolutionaries grew up. In the 1920s and 1930s, the French governors general Sarrault and Varenne paternalistically depicted the Vietnamese as children under the wise tutelage of a more civilized race (Tai 1992, pp. 30, 143). Despite the colonial government's pretensions as a modernizer, during the colonial era people in the north and centre of present-day Vietnam were governed through institutions such as the royalty, the mandarinate and, at the village level, the council of elders, traditional arrangements that were reshaped by France as mechanisms of indirect rule. It is significant that the early leaders of the [page 21] party came disproportionately from the regions that had been under such forms of governance. Many of them came from collaborating mandarin families or had trained in schools set up for colonial era civil servants. Ho Chi Minh was himself a graduate of one such school, the Ecole Imperiale (Quoc Hoc) of Hue (Tai 1992, p. 67). Although the party led the way in throwing off colonial rule, the elitism and paternalism demonstrated by the leaders of the post-colonial communist regime in many respects reprised the hierarchical relations that were embodied in the institutions through which France had exercised its rule. After winning power, some of the revolution's leaders moved into the luxurious residences and offices built for high-ranking colonial functionaries and maintained large retinues of servants. The journalist Bui Tin reports being disconcerted at the reverence and delight shown by post-war party secretary Truong Chinh at the privilege of being able to sleep in the plush chamber of the Emperor Bao Dai, the last member of the Hue-based dynasty to be propped up by France during the colonial era (Bui Tin 1995, p. 110). I have heard Vietnamese people make the criticism that the party regards itself as an aloof and all-knowing mother and father, a charge similar to that made against the French governors in the 1920s and 1930s.

The south, the region of Cochinchina, ruled directly by France and set up as an export agriculture colony, experienced far higher levels of economic inequality than evidenced in the centre and north (Henry 1932). Yet urban concentrations and indigenous enterprise were also more developed. Many of those who led resistance against colonialism in the south were from wealthy rural and urban bourgeois backgrounds and were educated in French schools. Influential leaders such as Nguyen An Ninh and intellectuals from the fruit-growing village of Vinh Kim in the Mekong delta, assessed the political economic and cultural inequalities of colonial society against more cosmopolitan standards to which they were exposed in the cities and the metropole (Tai 1992, pp. 72–87; Taylor 2001, pp. 159-91). Thus, in ways that differ from in the centre and north, both the process of social differentiation in southern Vietnam as well as the case against it that was made by its critics, owed a great deal to the region's colonial-era incorporation within extra-local political, social, and cultural structures (see also Brocheux 1995). Subsequently southern-based leaders have argued that their region's high degree of integration into broader economic and ideological currents was already evident in pre- [page 22] colonial times (for example, Nguyen Cong Binh et al. 1991). Certainly it is in such exposure to extra-local factors that we may understand the dynamics of inequality in the post-colonial south. For instance, the explosion of prostitution under the southern regime during the Vietnam War was an outcome of militarization that was equally evident in the other sites in East and Southeast Asia that hosted large concentrations of troops during the Cold War (Barry 1996). In the reform era, prostitution was again markedly pronounced in the south's urban centres, an aspect of the highly commoditized social relations in such areas. Attempts by local authorities to combat this included the construction of prostitution as a public health risk and the privatization of responsibility for the maintenance of healthy families (Nguyen Vo 2002). Appeals that placed the onus on women themselves for maintaining their family's health intact by keeping their husband's sexual appetites satisfied within the confines of the conjugal bond could arguably be viewed as an administrative attempt to mobilize traditional gender responsibilities in the fights against prostitution. However, as Nguyen Vo Thu Huong convincingly demonstrates, such an approach also drew upon liberal governance practices perfected in capitalist societies and upon discourses of eroticized bourgeois femininity that had circulated in the pre-liberation urban south (2002, pp. 135-37, 146), evidence indeed of the cosmopolitan ideological context of the region in which these solutions have been forged.

The state's response to emerging ethnic inequalities, which could be characterized as the attempt to uplift disadvantaged ethnic minorities materially and inculcate in them the cultural attributes that have served the majority group in their own efforts at self-advancement, are not unprecedented measures for a state that for centuries presented itself as a civilizational centre in relationship to the smaller nations of peoples who lived at its fringes (Woodside 1971, Chandler 1993, p. 114). These peoples made tribute prestations to the Vietnamese centre, although in reality, located beyond the limits of state structures, they remained culturally autonomous. Yet as the Viet people moved south and into the hills where non-Viet people live, these original peoples were not only displaced but also exposed to a more intrusive form of paternalism through policies of assimilation. Both north and south regimes pursued policies of sedentarization, population concentration, and highland development (Hickey 1993; Rambo and Jamieson 20031. Described by [page 23] one observer as internal colonialism (Evans 1992) these policies were also motivated to secure borders. The marginalization of many ethnic minorities has continued apace with rapid migration of lowlanders into the hills and the extension of markets. These processes have dramatically undercut local livelihoods and culture. An acute sense of cultural crisis has led members of some ethnic minorities to convert to Protestantism (Rambo and Jamieson 2003) and others to attempt to insulate themselves from cultural contact and assert innate ethnic differences (Taylor, in this volume). The most overt cases of political protest against ethnic discrimination were riots in the central highlands in the early 2000s (UNHCR 2002) and demonstrations that occurred in the highlands again in April 2004. The state's response to these was rapid, and in each instance substantial blame was attributed to foreign interference, demonstrating concerns about the threat to national sovereignty to be at the forefront.[15]

Thus we can say that the current patterns of inequality along class, regional, gender, and ethnic poles do not necessarily fatally undermine the state's ideology, in which socialism has been admixed with nationalism, and inflected with patriarchal, ethnic, and regionalist biases. When inequalities have threatened social cohesion or the party's control, the state's response has been swift. The gap between urban and rural standards of living, which grew wider through the 1990s, is an example of this. Reports by social scientists provided vivid accounts of a countryside being left behind in the reforms (see, for instance, Nguyen Xuan Nguyen 1995; Do Thi Binh and Le Ngoc Lan 1996). Such disparities were not only ideologically awkward for a party that had come to power through mobilizing the peasants. Rural unemployment, school drop-outs, mass migration to the cities, and a rise in urban crime and prostitution, which many urban residents attributed to the influx of rural migrants, weakened the party's grip in rural areas and threatened directly the standard of living enjoyed by those in urban enclaves. In 1996 the government made rural development one of its priority areas, channelling foreign aid and domestic revenue into roads, irrigation, sanitation, electricity, and health clinics in remote and rural areas. Yet this influx of monies into the coffers of the rural bureaucracy only exacerbated another issue that had been exercising the party even before the liberal reforms were promulgated, the corrupt and exploitative behaviour of local government authorities. In Vietnam's increasingly decentralized economy, local officials have enjoyed widening scope to [page 24] use their position for personal gain (Kerkvliet 1995; Luong 2003b, p. 94). In report after report throughout the 1990s, the party acknowledged the gravity of this problem but also its intractability. The party was also under intense pressure from below in this regard. In 1997 people in Thai Binh protested against unfair land compensation decisions, corrupt officials, and mistreatment of petitioners, going as far as to beat and lock up corrupt officials. Protests and demonstrations took place all over the country against the lack of fair and effective government in their countryside (Kerkvliet 2003, pp. 47–48; Nguyen Van Suu, in this volume). Peasants travelled to the city and camped outside the National Assembly, or the Prime Minister's residences to directly petition national leaders about the abuses they were subject to in their localities. Notably these demonstrations did not question the party's reform policies themselves nor the gap in incomes and services between rural and urban areas. But they did effectively highlight country-city differences in political representation, and the disproportionate share of the benefits of economic reform accruing to local political representatives in rural areas.[16] Pressure of this kind forced a response from the government, which, in the late 1990s, began to implement grassroots democracy reforms at the local level.[17]

One of the most overt social agendas of the government in the reform era has been its commitment to reduce the number of people living in poverty. In comparative terms the marked decline in the proportion of people living below the poverty line, from 58 per cent in 1993 to 29 per cent in 2003, represented a remarkable achievement (Viet Nam News, 20 February 2004).[18] This poverty reduction focus and its successes have been taken by some to indicate the government's commitment to social equity (International Monetary Fund and International Development Association 2001, p. 2). Prime Minister Phan Van Khai put it differently, equating poverty reduction with building socialism in Vietnam (Voice of Vietnam, 2003, p. 1). Such an equation is revealing for, during a period in which the number of people living below the poverty line did indeed shrink, the gap between the rich and poor yawned ever wider, to the extent that the richest fifth of the population now account for 44.5 per cent of total household consumption (UNDP 2003). The goal of raising people above a poverty line defined in terms of minimum subsistence or a monetary figure such as one dollar a day tells us little that is meaningful about equality or social mobility. Although the number of people living on less than one US dollar a day at just 17.7 per cent [page 25] — seems like a low figure, it is sobering to note that almost two-thirds of the population (63.7 per cent) live on less than two dollars a day (UNDP 2003). Analytically, the tendency for "poverty reduction" to be addressed as a specialist programme divorces those who are technically defined as "poor" from the society of which they are a part. Interventions to reduce poverty do not address the social relationships that tie the relative losses of the poor to the gains of the rich. The state can claim success against the limited criteria of such a programme, which fail to address the countervailing effects of the new commitment in Vietnam to the market as the ultimate arbiter of human well-being.[19]

Vietnam's poverty reduction achievements have won it plaudits from members of the international donor community, while the government's representatives have in turn bestowed awards upon donor organizations such as the World Bank for their assistance in the attack on poverty (World Bank 2002, p. 1). The adoption of international definitions for poverty, and the co-operative nature of the attack on poverty are significant developments for a party that rose to power in a context in which hunger and poverty were attributed to the intervention of foreign powers. In some respects the regime has been more successful in acquitting itself against a universalistic yardstick of human need and in winning praise from international institutions than it has been in satisfying the aspirations for justice and inclusion of its own citizens. When Vietnam's leaders assign themselves credit for national poverty reduction accomplishments deemed by one party theoretician "a contribution to the whole of humankind" (Nguyen Tuc 2003), they rehearse a script that Confucianist and nationalist elites before them perfected in claiming, in a language intelligible to a wider audience, the attainment of universalistic parity, or pre-eminence, notwithstanding the jagged social contours that internally divide the populace for whom they speak.

The Vietnamese state's response to inequality-based disputes and its commitment to poverty reduction suggests that its concern is less to attain social equity than to minimize the risks that overt forms of social exclusion might pose to its underlying quest for a strong nation, a cohesive society, and a coherent ideological mandate. In short, it would appear that Vietnam's socialist state is significantly tolerant of social differentiation. With this tentative conclusion in mind, there is scope to treat social inequalities in Vietnam in a more nuanced manner as both [page 26] a target of and consequence of state policy. Another implication is that labels such as socialism, which rank societies according to their position in a supposedly law-like progression of history, do not teach us much about actual conditions in a country that claims for itself such a label. We can similarly question the validity of law-like theories about social differentiation that seek out determinate variables but are weak on the messy local dynamics at play in different places and over time. The neat universalistic models that inform many development theories do not really let us see or explain how social inequality has emerged in local context. This suggests that the institutional interventions that are based on such models may not attend to local realities and may actually exacerbate inequalities. A further implication is that we may miss out on something important if we keep the focus on the state or development institutions as the principle protagonists in the struggle against inequality. Rather, social inequality is a problem that a variety of non-state agents have contended with and contested, according to their own agendas and with varying degrees of success. Finally, as official descriptions of social disparities have all the shortcomings of an arcane numbers science, a language that is accessible to an elect few, we ought therefore to explore other representational genres and registers in which inequalities have been depicted and exhibited in ways that are culturally meaningful to a broader spectrum of people.

With these issues in mind we can hence turn to the contribution made by authors in this volume.

Contributions to this Volume

The first two chapters in this collection provide insight into the recent political and economic context of social inequalities in Vietnam. David Koh argues that the Vietnamese government, while continuing to push its liberal reform agenda, is consolidating itself in a form of soft authoritarianism that characterizes other states in the region. The party is working to retain its hold on power with a focus on maintaining parity among the different regions from which its leaders are drawn. At the same time politics is becoming more standardized and predictable and the National Assembly has an increasingly significant role in the political process. The party has responded to pressures to promote accountability and transparency by introducing measures to improve [page 27] the quality of state officials and in campaigns such as the grassroots democracy movement. Koh suggests that the state's poverty reduction campaign is predicated on a sense of ideological unease with the emergence of social disparities. Nevertheless, ordinary people have continued to advance their own interests by forging connections with those in positions of influence. However, the danger that reliance on such informal pathways poses is that the ability to exert influence in this way can corrupt those holding office, and Koh argues that resolving this political dynamic in a context of increasing differentiation represents one of the key challenges that the party faces.

Vo Tri Thanh and Pham Hoang Ha assess the government's two ­decade-long economic reform process promoting a multi-sectoral economy, integration with world markets, and market-driven growth as comparatively successful. They provide an account of the key reforms that have been advanced since the Asian financial crisis slowed the economy down in the later 1990s. Although Vietnam's post-crisis economic recovery has been significant, the authors also outline a number of paradoxes and challenges that planners have to contend with if this encouraging trend is to continue. Among these is the emergence of social disparities, an issue that the remaining chapters in this collection address from a variety of perspectives.

The first three chapters dedicated substantively to this theme describe social inequality in terms of how it is spatially manifested and what it means in the context of actual histories. Steffanie Scott and Truong Thi Kim Chuyen's chapter provides an overview of the geographic dimensions of social inequality, exploring regional differences, urban-rural divide, lowland-highland differences, and those between localities. In some respects these divisions are a new phenomenon, blurring the stereotyped regional distinctions through which the country has been comprehended. For instance, the hoary north-south division of the country is today complicated by the fact that there is more demonstrable diversity within these regions than those that divide the north and the south. Residents of downtown Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City share more in common with each other than they do with their respective suburban peripheries or rural hinterlands. Scott and Truong's chapter argues that socio-economic differentiation in Vietnam has opened up opportunities for inter-regional development initiatives at the state level and in more spontaneous ways among the population of different locales. They present [page 28] a dynamic account of how a variety of migration trajectories and strategies are being pursued that overcome the geographical disparities opened up by decollectivization and economic liberalization policies.

The next chapter, by Tran Thi Thu Trang, offers a nuanced picture of what inequality has meant in local context and over time in a Muong community in Hoa Binh province. Employing a methodologically rich approach that combines ethnographic observation with use of in-depth interviews, she explores the factors that have determined success during different stages in this locality's recent history -- the pre-socialist, collective, liberal reform and globalization eras. While to a certain degree those who benefited from the collectivization era in this Muong community were able to convert their political, economic, and experiential capital into relative advantage in the early stages of the liberal reform era, the unpredictability inherent in their involvement in globalized agriculture make their continuing success far from certain. The unstable and increasingly unknowable factors that affect their economic standing mean that locals are increasingly uncertain as to which strategies to adopt and which to avoid.

Using longitudinal data from three provinces in the Red River delta, Jee Young Kim's chapter explores the intersection of biography and history by examining the effect of different variables in people's backgrounds such as inherited political or cultural capital on their occupational mobility in the new circumstances of Vietnam's market economy. By reading what social legacies individuals and families bring from their past into the present, she attempts to identify the factors that have helped them get ahead. She presents some unexpected findings, that in certain instances "political capital" such as party membership or war service, or "human capital" such as high educational attainments, do not automatically confer success to people in the post-war market economy. She also finds that war experience has had a significant and sometimes negative effect on people's involvement in entrepreneurial activities and argues for the need to distinguish between party membership and varieties of wartime experience as different forms of political capital. These conclusions point up some weaknesses in existing theories about occupational mobility in societies undergoing a transition from socialism to a market-based economy. Her analysis highlights the need to understand existing inequalities in terms of actual histories and biographies. It also reveals problems inherent in the search for universalist [page 29] indicators and theories of change that might see rising differentiation as an inevitable, naturalistic or law-like process, and confirms the value of trying to see what differentiation has meant in the context of local histories.

As the next two contributions make clear, the state's attempts to advance collective well-being and redress inequality through judicious policy interventions have not always brought the intended results. The chapter by Vu Quoc Ngu in this volume argues that the attempt by the state to provide financial support for education has not been sufficiently sensitive to local conditions. As his analysis of recent socio-economic data reveals, Vietnam's most disadvantaged groups live in rural and remote areas, where economic opportunities and access to services are poor. Access to education is one of the areas where their disadvantage is most marked. Vu Quoc Ngu argues that public spending on education aimed at boosting educational participation has not helped people in such areas; in fact, it has tended to increase disparities. This is because the criteria used to allocate state funding do not take into account determinate factors such as the actual number of students in a given locality or the ratio of teachers to students. Furthermore, given the high degree of school fee contribution exemptions in such poor and remote localities, central educational funding needs to be increased to make up for the deficit in private funding that schools in such areas receive.

Taylor's chapter takes issue with the assumptions informing institutional interventions to redress perceived economic and social disadvantages in the Mekong delta. The chapter focuses on four development interventions: the liberalization of access to land, the construction of roads, the emphasis on formal schooling and efforts to extend the purported benefits of such policies to the delta's Khmer Krom ethnic minority communities. These have, in many cases, accentuated inequalities within the region. In contrast to these institutional interventions, locals have recourse to a variety of informal pathways to overcome their problems. Many of these local responses are more effective in improving people's socio-economic well-being than measures advocated by the state and development agencies. However, Taylor argues that in failing to take local conditions and responses into account, existing patterns of inequality have been accentuated and local solutions to overcome inequality have been undercut. He suggests that development planners should recognize the strengths of local economic, [page 30] ecological, and cultural adaptations and work to strengthen them as contextually relevant responses to the problems locals face.

These contributions indicate that the state is not the only, nor indeed the most effective protagonist in the identification and challenging of social inequalities. The next two chapters look beyond the state to explore other loci of agency. Nguyen Van Suu provides an account of the barriers in access to land facing farmers in Bac Ninh province. By investigating villagers' own experiences he discovered that they were concerned about inequality in access to land use, communal land output, and in decision-making over land. Nguyen Van Suu shows these to be the concerns animating local disputes as villagers actively contested their position. His account of a number of conflicts over land explores farmers' different responses, which included discussions, holding meetings, circulation of petitions, the denunciation of corrupt cadres, the deferral of tax payments, and representations made to higher-level state authorities. He also shows that in some cases this active agency elicits a response from the state to intervene and resolve problems as locally defined.

Nghiem Lien Huong's chapter focuses on migration as another of the strategies rural people use to redress inequality. Her chapter is about female garment workers whose migration to an industrialized zone outside Hanoi comprises an attempt by women from rural backgrounds to overcome the hardship of agricultural work and the pressure to marry early. Yet the emancipation they seek is at best qualified. Many are drawn to urbanized areas by the romance of an urbanized modern life, although the stressful routines of garment work are anything but romantic. The promises of self-realization through consumerism prove elusive, while garment workers feel nostalgia for the rural life they have left behind. Marriage is a dilemma as garment workers are caught between the opposing trends of early rural marriages and increasingly late marriages in urban areas due to the pressures of industrial life. As state discourse and urban popular culture shift to place, increased emphasis on feminine self-actualization through romantic love and domestic wedded bliss, garment workers' difficulties in finding self-realization through such dominant scripts compounds their sense of marginalization and of their betwixt-and-between status. Nghiem draws out the parallels between the liminal status of migrant workers and the female volunteers of the war years, whose personal sacrifices for the country ironically have begun to receive public attention as the meanings of femininity, and indeed of [page 31] the war against America, shift from an emphasis on collective to personalized forms of self-actualization.

The tension between ideals and the realities of peasant lives also provides the topic of the next chapter in this collection. Montira Rato argues that the figure of the peasant in the writings of bourgeois intellectuals has been one of the most critical relationships in the coming­into-being of the modern Vietnamese nation. Depictions of the exploitation of peasants under colonialism were crucial to their mobilization by intellectuals against the French. The peasants bore the largest sacrifices of the wars only to find, in a market economy, that the urban bourgeoisie had reaped the largest benefits of the urban-centric society of the reform era. Rato's chapter shows the paternalism and ambivalence inherent in the representation of the peasantry by urban-based writers and in the attempt by central planners to construct a society free from external oppression but also the purported pettiness and acquisitiveness of peasant culture. Yet this devastating portrait of a peasantry betrayed is qualified by the success of some writers of peasant background in portraying a more objective view of their lives and of some urban writers in honestly confronting the harm wreaked upon the peasantry by the failure of idealistic attempts to remake their lives. Like the more perspicacious authors whose work she skilfully interprets, Rato's narrative is a sobering reminder of the wide gap that still pertains between agents of development and those whose lives they aim to improve and of the high stakes involved when politicized representations of social inequality become the building blocks of a project of social transformation.

If Rato's chapter brings into relief the key categories through which Vietnam's momentous modern history has been played out, the final chapter shows the play of symbolic representations in the fashioning of contemporary Vietnamese lives. Catherine Earl's chapter describes the domain of leisure as an arena in which urban middle-class women attempt to maintain and exhibit their elite status. In their migration to the city, female intellectuals in Ho Chi Minh City negotiate a gendered urban space that is at the same time liberating and enabling, yet potentially domesticating and dangerous. Converting horizontal mobility into socially upward mobility takes some work, as the women in Earl's account secure status through leisurely practices of consumption and travel, and socialize in spatial enclaves such as cinemas, shopping malls, [page 32] and cafes, where their command of symbols of high status can be affirmed and displayed. Earl's account provides striking insights into the energy that is invested in the production of social distinctions in modern-day Vietnam. She also shows the categories of social inequality to be both dynamic and lived. Distinction is attained and reproduced through social actors' skilled performance of leisure, a form of agency that charges the new symbols of status in Vietnam's urban landscape with an aura of inaccessibility and, for those who secure endorsement through such practice, the authenticity of their own experience.

NOTES

1. Support for writing this chapter was provided by the Anthropology and the Political and Social Change departments of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University. I would like to thank David Man, Ben Kerkvliet, Nola Cooke, and Kathryn Robinson for their constructive comments on a draft of this chapter.

2. These figures come from a preliminary analysis of a households living standards survey conducted in 2002 by Vietnam's General Statistics Office.

3. At the time of writing, the most sustained analyses available of social disparities in Vietnam employed figures from the 1998 Living Standards Survey. This survey was the second of its kind conducted by the General Statistical Office (GSO). The first was conducted in 1993.

4.   After 1998, a large number of relatively affordable Chinese-made motorbikes began to pour into Vietnam making household motorbike ownership more ubiquitous in both urban and rural areas.

5.   According to Vietnamese news reports in February 2004 the proportion of those living under the poverty line in Lai Chau stood at 75 per cent, or 32 times higher than the poverty rate in Ho Chi Minh City (Lao Dong, 19 February 2004, p. 4).

6.   For a recent discussion of some indicators of inequality among ethnic minority peoples and residents of upland areas, see Baulch et al. (2002), Rambo and Jamieson (2003), and Scott and Truong, Taylor, Tran Thi Thu Trang, and Vu Quoc Ngu (in this volume).

7.  The sharp increase in income polarization from 1996 to 2002 is even more obvious if we look at the income disparity between the highest and lowest 5 per cent of households, which grew from 15.1 times in 1996 to 19.85 times in 2002 (Saigon Times, 2003; Nguyen Manh Hung 2003).

8.   Haughton cites GSO figures that show that between 1993 and 1998 urban expenditures increased at twice the rate of those in rural areas (2001, p. 16).

9.   Between 1995 and 1998 the GDP in the southeast grew twice as fast as in the north central coast (UNDP 2001, p. 109).

10.    At current rates of economic growth it will be generations before Vietnam converges with the OECD nations. And the gap with its neighbour China is widening. Between 1990 and 2001 Vietnam's per capita annual GDI' growth rate was 6 per cent, slower than China's, whose economy grew 8 per cent during the same period (UNDP 2003, p. 73).

11. The equitable growth in the East Asian states that did not follow a communist path also attracts analysis that attributes these twin accomplishments to Confucianism. Weberian analysts believe that a cultural emphasis on the deferral of individual rewards is key to Japan, Korea, and Taiwan's extraordinary economic growth in recent decades. At the same time the value placed on enduring social relationships and paternalistic responsibility is evident in the workings of the large conglomerates, cliaebol in Korea and keiretsu in Japan, which employ a large proportion of the workforce in these two countries. These organizations reward the staff who exhibit loyalty to them with lifelong employment and cradle­to-grave social services. The workforce enjoys a relative parity of income that was uncommon among the societies that embarked earlier upon a similar process of industrialization. Promotions to senior management are allotted on the basis of age seniority, a practice that distinguishes Japanese and Korean corporate modernity from that shown in other capitalist countries.

12. Recent studies by Tana Li (1998, 2004) and Choi Bvung Wook (2004) demonstrate that southern Vietnam's history of commercialized agriculture is at least two centuries old.

13. Christine White demonstrated that concerns for the plight of poor peasants informed debates leading up to the policy of collectivization in the late 1950s (White 1981).

14. Corruption is one of these trigger points. Its description by state leaders as a threat to national security and as a "national disaster" are informed by the concern that corruption not only undermines the party's legitimacy but also allows those who bribe cadres to effectively derail implementation of the laws of the country. The ability of large business conglomerates such as Minh Phung and Tamexco and criminal networks such as that headed by the gangster Nam Cam to buy the connivance of the highest levels of state officialdom in their illegal activities spread alarm through the party apparatus and accounts for the severity of the treatment meted out to them and the officials they bribed, a number of whom were dealt the death penalty.

15. Another approach, with long roots in the socialist polity, has been to assert that Vietnam is a multi-cultural nation, all of whose official 54 ethnic minorities enjoy the right to preserve their cultural integrity (for a historical contextualization of this discourse see Pelley [2002]). However, the even-handed representations of ethnic minority culture in the internationally renowned Museum of Ethnology in the national capital are a far remove from the political, economic, and cultural exclusions that many non-Viet groups experience as the local everyday reality.

16. Notably many of the people who lead these movements were very often themselves former officials, military officers, and party members, whose reserves of political capital, prestige, and organizational experience helped them to effectively mobilize opposition against corrupt local cadres, whose excesses were compared unfavourably with the sacrifices made by all sectors of society during the war years. At the same time this possibly explains why protests of such kind rarely extended into challenges to the legitimacy of the party, although some who were sympathetic to such movements, such as former head of the Party Central Committee's Culture, Literature and Art Commission General Tran Do, did go as far as to voice doubts about the validity of the communist path he had for so long supported (Agence France Presse 2002). In stark contrast, the Khmer Krom of the Mekong delta, although their feelings of exclusion from society are pronounced and certainly not diminishing in recent years, have not mounted sustained protests that publicly articulate such sentiments. Indeed the severity of their political, economic, and cultural marginalization as well as their dispersed settlement among the ethnic majority have made protest logistically difficult for them.

17.  In my own reading of Vietnam's urban-centric media, the government has come under relatively little pressure from the urban middle classes on urban-rural disparities. Certainly many stories have been published about the hardship and misery faced by people and localities in rural and remote areas. However, in recent years the issues that have drawn the hottest debates among the urban middle class relate to threats to cultural or national sovereignty, such as the "social evils" (te nan xa hoi) issue, the purported loss of cultural identity (ban sac dan toc), and territorial quarrels with China. Equity-related issues such as exploitative industrial labour conditions, the rise of prostitution and marriages to foreigners have also been prominent topics of debate. Yet even these debates, in which the theme of humiliation features large, exhibit a pronounced nationalistic or ethnic bias. Stories about workers who are beaten by their bosses or women from poor families who marry a Taiwanese frequently emphasize the role of foreigners in the exploitation of Vietnamese workers or women rather than highlighting domestic factors such as the state's reform policies.

18. The poverty line used here is calculated at the expenditure level that would insure a person can buy enough food to provide them with 2,100 calories a day plus some non-food items that satisfy basic needs (see Haughton 2001, p. 13).

19. In recent years some party thinkers have lent their voice to ethical orientations, which, like poverty reduction itself, emphasize the mitigation rather than the eradication of market-based inequalities. See, for instance, the late party secretary Nguyen Van Linh's profession to the journalist Neil Sheehan that in fighting colonialism he had been inspired more by the humanistic compassion evidenced in the novels of Victor Hugo than by the critique of capitalist exploitation in the writings of Karl Marx (Sheehan 1991, p. 75). The party's poverty reduction campaign has also been equated by elite party theoreticians with the Christian ethic, "love others as one would love oneself", which is claimed as a Vietnamese tradition (Nguyen Tuc 2003).

 

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