Content area
Full text
Renovating Politics in Contemporary Vietnam. By Zachary Abuza. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001. 271p. $52.00.
Zachary Abuza has written a valuable and timely study of Vietnamese politics. The book is rather narrowly centered around an examination of dissent, but that has important implications for the larger political sphere. Although the focus is on contemporary Vietnam, the author maintains that today's dissidents cannot be properly understood without considering their historical antecedents: the protest of intellectuals in the mid- and late 1950s against party domination of literature and the arts, as well as the mid-1960s split within the party about the relationship between socialism and the war, the so-called Hoang Minh Chinh affair. The first, according to the author, not only provided a model and precedent for later dissidents but also established the subservience of all intellectual life to the dictates of the communist party. The second ended "democratic centralism" and tolerance for debate even within the party, although the question of inner-party democracy resurfaced in the 1990s.
Abuza details the various forms of contemporary dissidence in separate chapters on democratization and legalization, intellectual freedom and freedom of the press, the internal dissent of former southern guerrillas in the late 1980s (the Club of Former Resistance Fighters) against the policies of a northern-dominated party central leadership, religious freedom, and internal dissent within the party. He concludes that the short-term effect of these various dissident voices is limited.
Furthermore, most dissidents do not challenge the fundamental structure of the regime but instead want more pluralism and debate within the party itself. The problem, Abuza argues, is that the party is unable to "renovate," a term that became the watchword of the economic reform process started in 1986 but was never really applied to the political sphere. The author ascribes this immobilism, in part, to the fact that the party is structured by clientalism but operates on the principle of consensus. Moreover, the party's continued monopoly on information has prevented accountability (p. 238)....