Asia | Vietnam

Uncle Ho’s legacy

|HANOI

Reuters

Socialism first

HE MAY have won the war, but General Vo Nguyen Giap seems to have lost the plot. Now in his late 80s, the Vietnamese military hero who vanquished first the French and then the Americans recently told an audience that “caring for the nation and fighting foreign invaders are the duties of every generation” of Vietnamese. Like many of Vietnam's older generation, he probably finds it difficult to adjust to change. And yet he was called as a keynote speaker at an academic conference on international co-operation.

The event, held in Hanoi in mid-July with the help of a $200,000 grant from America's Ford Foundation, was the first of its kind to be organised inside Vietnam. More than 300 foreign scholars turned up. The foundation hopes it will open up debate in a communist country where Marxism-Leninism and “Ho Chi Minh thought” are still taught to schoolchildren. Yet General Giap's remarks were not the only sign of how far that debate still has to go.

Apart from the standard summary of 4,000 years of Vietnamese history, the participants also heard from local professors about Ho Chi Minh's poetry and his “initial study on the way of writing foreign proper nouns”. Foreign delegates, with their irritating tendency to come to conclusions at odds with the party line, were mostly ignored.

An American studying suburban development in Ho Chi Minh City was told that she could not hope to research the subject because she was not Vietnamese. Another American comparing rural resistance in China and Vietnam to economic reform was told there was no such thing in Vietnam—despite renewed unrest last year in the northern province of Thai Binh.

Foreigners felt that they had been invited merely to provide window dressing for a feast of cultural self-congratulation. The conference overlapped with a meeting of the party's powerful Central Committee, which concentrated on a future national cultural policy. After ten days of discussions, it declared that the object of all cultural activities was “to preserve Vietnam's cultural identity for the building and defending of the socialist homeland.”

Does this matter? When the Association of South-East Asian Nations meets in Hanoi in December, the delegates will find themselves in a country that rivals Myanmar and North Korea in its inability to speak the common intellectual language of East Asia. Despite Vietnam's attempts at economic integration with the region, it remains constrained socially and politically by the Communist Party. For example, Vietnam's universities have no political-science departments and no real experts on international relations.

As a result, Vietnam is unable to take part in the academic forums on security that are increasingly a part of confidence-building in East Asia. The hope is that, with growing opportunities for Vietnamese scholars to travel abroad, and with more foreign research under way in Vietnam, that will change. Indeed, even five years ago it would have been impossible to hold any sort of international academic conference in Vietnam.

Yet the risk is that such progress will be slowed by a faltering economy: Vietnam has cut its target for economic growth this year, from 9% to under 7%, because of the Asian turmoil. The signs are that the party will now try to bolster support through even more introspection and the contemplation of past glories. Indeed, its meeting ended with a call for a new campaign that would culminate in some sort of national conference in 2000. The subject? National heroes. General Giap would be proud.

This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline "Uncle Ho’s legacy"

Asia’s delicate balance

From the July 25th 1998 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition

Discover more

What next for Pakistan?

The new government faces polarised politics, a faltering economy and terrorist threats

The Islamic State’s branch in Afghanistan is at war with the world

The group which claimed responsibility for the Crocus City Hall attack is increasingly worrying


Arvind Kejriwal’s imprisonment is a stain on India’s democracy

He is the first sitting chief minister in the country’s history to be arrested