FINANCIAL TIMES

21-1-16

Vietnam’s ruling Communists assert power over changing times

Traditional pomp and changing circumstance point to challenges for the country’s new rulers

 Michael Peel in Hanoi

Vietnam’s Communists have set the stage for a choreographed leadership reshuffle at a congress that underscores the party’s continued grip on power even as society shifts beneath it.

A marching band and a sea of red flags greeted more than 1,500 delegates on a misty Hanoi winter morning at the gathering’s official opening on Thursday, in a display of traditionalist pomp designed to delight loyalists.

“Big opportunities have opened up,” said Nguyen Phu Trong, party general secretary. “However, there remain many difficulties and challenges.”

But while this populous Southeast Asian country is at a crossroads — its wartime past receding and foreign influences in ascendance — so too is the five-yearly conclave at odds with a disenfranchised youth.

“In my generation, we don’t really care what they are doing with the conference because we don’t have any influence on it,” said Dat Anh Nguyen, a 25-year-old marketing manager for foreign fashion brands, echoing an impromptu straw poll of three colleagues at his office in the capital. “And we don’t protest, because we think it’s useless.”

Few expect a sharp change in political direction from a congress that has prompted a blooming of national flags and patriotic banners around Hanoi’s tree-lined colonial boulevards. Non-delegate access to the event at a vast conference complex in the historic Ba Dinh district is tightly controlled, while journalists are not allowed to take phones even into the designated media centre.

Even the story of the demise of a turtle was subject to censorship, from government or editors. Media outlets appeared initially to suppress reports of the revered reptile Cu Rua’s demise in a Hanoi lake, leaving social media to take up the tale.  

“According to many opinions, the death of Cu Rua is a bad sign for the top elite inside Ba Dinh, signalling that the end of the party is coming closer than ever,” said a post on the popular Dan Lam Bao blog.

Such online irreverence can obscure the enduring power of the Communist party, particularly among those who fought in or lived through the civil war that ended in the expulsion of the US and the reunification of the country in 1975. But even some loyalists are growing more demanding as memories of Ho Chi Minh, the party’s founding father and Washington’s bête noire, recede.  

Nguyen Van Bang, a 60-year-old war veteran and farmer in Hanoi’s agricultural hinterland, said he hoped the party would relax longstanding rules curbing the size of landholdings.

“I feel gratitude to the party and the government because we have a better life than before,” he said, sitting alongside his son, a 34-year-old teacher. “We now expect the new generation of leaders should be young and dynamic and push Vietnam to a higher economic level.”

Members and supporters argue that the party offers stability at a tense time in the region, standing up for Vietnam in maritime territorial disputes with China and steering a prudent line between Beijing and Washington in their proxy regional battles. Foreign investment has grown in areas from garments to computer-chips. Japan and Korea in particular are becoming ever more heavily involved in infrastructure projects ranging from Hanoi’s airport upgrade to Ho Chi Minh City’s new urban rail network.

But the party’s critics say it has presided over rising inequality and the spread of a debt-fuelled consumerist culture. They also say it is nepotistic as well as domineering, the wellspring of a wider problem of cronyism in politics and business.

One twenty-something daughter of a party member said that for younger people wanting to join the Communists it helped “to be both well off and well connected”. Her father’s status had allowed her to win a job at a government department and “get away with a lot of things”, such as playing truant. “It’s so normal now that people don’t get enraged by it,” she said.

Yet for all the palpable frustrations, few believe Communist authority faces any imminent challenge. Nguyen Anh Tuan, a 28-year-old architect and political blogger, notes that even outspoken people tend to quieten down once inside the party’s structures

“It’s not about the old or the young generation coming to power, but about who will speak for changes,” he said. “The problem is not about how good the people in the system are but how the system prevents people from doing what they think is good for the country.”