AntiCorruption MacLean

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Enacting Anticorruption:

The Reconfiguration of Audit Regimes in Contemporary Vietnam

Ken MacLean

The most general term forcorruption (tham nhng) in Vietnamese combinestwo words,avarice andharassment. Although the terms precise etymologyis not accurately known, the pairing suggests an origin in Buddhist philoso-

phy, which identies desire, along with hatred and delusion, as one of thethree main causes of suffering.1 Greed is, after all, a manifestation of desire,an affective state that inevitably returns to torment its victim no matter howmany times it is fed. This perhaps explains why acts of corruption are closelylinked to eating in Vietnam: corrupt ofcials are said to eat bribes (n hi l)or, more bluntly, to eat money (n tin) itself. In this regard, corrupt ofcialsare not unlike the hungry ghosts that haunt the popular imagination. Bothare insatiable; moreover, the failure to feed them similarly invites their mali-cious interference in ones affairs.

But these metaphysical associations, while they reveal why corruption is

positions : ./-Copyright by Duke University Press


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so difcult to eradicate, obscure other interpretations, such as those that takeinto account the situational ethics that state socialism fostered in Vietnam. Aswas the case in other socialist states, redirecting material goods and grantingbureaucratic favors that could be recalled in the future became a commonway to manage uncertainty in the face of the chronic shortages the centrallyplanned economy produced even though these informal quid pro quoarrangements exacerbated the very problem they were meant to mitigate.2

In recent years, however, it has become much more difcult for govern-

ment ofcials to justify their efforts to capture rents since the living condi-tions, administrative structures, and legal frameworks that once made suchil/licit exchanges necessary have changed dramatically.3 Indeed, ongoingreforms, collectively known as Renovation (i mi), have cut povertyrates from over percent to less than percent and have helped Vietnambecome one of the worlds fastest-growing economies.

In theory, the reforms, which began in , should have constrained the

previous ability of government ofcials to arbitrarily make law (lm lut)on their own. This practice, however, remains widespread and facilitatesthe deliberate misuse of public power for private gain, the most inclusiverendering of the twelve forms of misconduct dened as corruption underVietnamese law.4 Unfortunately, Renovation has not reduced the need tofeed these ofcials so much as it has stimulated their appetites. Indeed,they have become so insatiable that growing numbers of Vietnamese are

now willing to submit formal written denunciations of corrupt ofcials toinvestigatory bodies even though such action makes them vulnerable toextralegal retaliation.5

These trends have helped corruption scandals to become a privileged sitefor (trans-) national debates over accountability in contemporary Vietnamand the notions of power, privilege, and obligation to which they are linked.The debates take many forms; however, their primary focus is upon currentefforts to dene, measure, and enforce greater accountability in a context inwhich the Communist Party maintains that the socialist-oriented marketeconomy is not an end unto itself but the means for the countrys eventualtransition to socialism.6 No denitive answers have yet emerged. Nonethe-less, close attention to the form, content, and timing of the anticorruptionmeasures taken to date, I argue, claries why the different regulatory regimes


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MacLean R Enacting Anticorruption 597

used to audit the nancial-moral conduct of government ofcials have grownnot only more complex and diverse over time but less distinct as well. Thisis because Renovation did not replace one regulatory regime with another;instead, the economic, administrative, and legal reforms implemented since have introduced a range of new auditing procedures but left others intactand contributed to recombinant ones in still others.7 As a consequence, it hasbecome quite difcult to determine where socialist techniques to promotecompliance with existing ethical guidelines and legal requirements end and

neoliberal ones begin, as each approach, although premised on dramati-cally different assumptions, exhibits some of the features thought to denethe other. This unexpected outcome underscores why historically informedand ethnographically nuanced studies of government (i.e., the specic prac-tices that make it possible to guide the conduct of oneself and others towarddesired ends) are needed to better understand how local contexts enable,contest, and rework global modes of regulation.

Contexts

Ofcial as well as popular concern over corruption is not new in Vietnam.The mass media, although still under direct and indirect forms of state man-agement, has reported on scandals, especially cases involving low- and mid-level ofcials, for years. However, nearly all my informants found the cover-

age of a corruption scandal to be unprecedented in investigative scopeand detail.8 This was particularly unusual since the scandal in question the countrys largest to date involved an extremely sensitive topic: thecriminal misuse of overseas development assistance (ODA) by high-rankinggovernment personnel, many of whom were also prominent CommunistParty members.

During the spring of , journalists gradually revealed that ofcialsbased in Project Management Unit (PMU-), which oversees the dis-tribution of ODA for transportation projects across northern Vietnam,had embezzled nearly US million the previous year to pay for differentsocial evils (tnn x hi), that is, practices the party/state deems harmfulto the moral and cultural well-being of the nation. In this instance, the evilsincluded the misappropriation of foreign aid to cover substantial gambling


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debts, the services of high-end sex workers, the cost of expensive drinkingsessions, as well as the steady stream of bribes needed to keep these andother criminal activities secret.

The controversy reached its initial peak in early April of , shortlybefore the Tenth National Congress of the Communist Party. In the weeksthat followed, high-ranking party members issued dozens of ofcial state-ments, portions of which were featured in hundreds of articles that appearedin the mass media and other specialized publications regarding the causes

of corruption in contemporary Vietnam and the actions proposed to eradi-cate them.9 The ofcial responses were unofcially augmented by e-mailthreads, chat room discussions, Web blogs, political cartoons, and lengthyessays Vietnamese posted on digital archives, both inside and outside thecountry. Taken together, these disparate materials, although not analyzedhere, formed a vast distributed archive, and their hyperlinked contents offerintriguing insights into how digitized artifacts are (mis-) used by others,

on- and off-line, to produce multiple and often contradictory truths aboutthe nature of actually existing government in Vietnam.10 The signicance ofthis, especially for comparative studies of how neoliberal models of govern-ment are understood, calculated, and acted upon in nonliberal settings, isseveral-fold.11

First, a substantial percentage of the Vietnamese-authored accounts drawupon their own para-ethnographic expertise, either as ofcials within

different agencies or as people who regularly interact with them, to fash-ion competing representations of the party/state, its inner workings, andthe efcacy of the methods currently used to audit the conduct of govern-ment personnel.12 Close attention to how these authors construct their ownauthority makes it possible to explore the different ways credibility is dem-onstrated and evidence presented in a context in which facts are moreoften fashioned than found. Second, the anecdotes these accounts contain

also provide insights into how government ofcials redirect capital, goods,and services through as well as around state institutions. This practice hasits origins in asking-giving (xin-cho) relations, the exible interagency bar-gaining arrangements the centrally planned economy made necessary byvirtue of its inexibility. However, their continued use in the present sug-gests the categories currently used to distinguish the state from the nonstate,


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the licit from the illicit, and the formal from the informal are inadequate, ifnot also misleading, given the considerable discretionary power many of-cials still enjoy within the socialist-oriented market economy.13 Third andmost relevantly here, efforts by current and retired party leaders to man-age public perceptions of the PMU- scandal did not produce a unied orcoherent position; instead, conicting viewpoints emerged. This outcomereects long-standing tensions within different segments of the party/stateover the nature, direction, and pace of the reform process. But it also signals

high-level disagreements over whether it is possible to harness the positiveaspects of capitalism and discard the negative ones, as some theoreticiansclaim.

Evidence of both concerns quickly disappeared after the NationalCongress, but then reappeared in August of when, following a briefand contentious trial, the Hanoi Peoples Court sentenced nine ofcialsimplicated in the PMU- scandal to lengthy prison terms. (Approximately

two hundred more ofcials, from seventeen different agencies, connected tothe case received disciplinary punishments of various kinds.) The sentenceswere less than half of what was originally recommended by the SupremePeoples Court of Investigation, which monitored the trial on behalf of theNational Assembly, the countrys highest representative body. The ensu-ing controversy over whether inuential gures had intervened behindthe scenes on their behalf renewed debates over the efcacy of initiatives

that different segments of the party/state had instituted between and to ght corruption (chng tham nhng). These initiatives, which of-cially asserted the continued relevance of socialist approaches as they alsoadopted neoliberal ones, are discussed below.

However, the emphasis is on the effects these initiatives have had on insti-tutional arrangements rather than the content of critical commentary thatnow exists on the scandal. This focus, which considers the material conse-

quences of different discursive positions, reveals a curious paradox. Namely,each approach dened the primary source of bureaucratic corruption andthus the forms of intervention best suited for its reduction in terms thatare most often associated with the other. Socialist approaches, which areconventionally thought to rely upon techno-scientic and administrativemodes of regulation, also called for external performance audits and other


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business-management techniques to provide greater incentives for indi-viduals to engage in ethical forms of self-regulation; whereas neoliberalapproaches, which normally abhor regulatory mechanisms, recommendedthe reintroduction of centralized command-and-control measures to limitthe ability of government ofcials to abuse their public positions for privategain.14 This outcome suggests that both regulatory regimes may have morein common than is commonly thought and also raises the possibility thatrecombinant forms exist.

Audit Cultures

The reasons for this unexpected overlap stem from the partial recongu-ration of different audit cultures in Vietnam. The concept comes fromMarilyn Strathern, who employed it to describe how the procedures origi-nally designed to promote scal accountability within corporations have

colonized other domains of public as well as private life.15 The neoliberalturn, she notes, has dramatically accelerated this trend, especially in publicinstitutions in which the demand for greater economic efciency as well asaccountability has transformed how medical, legal, and educational bod-ies provide services to their consumers. Although Strathern was keenlyinterested in the effects auditing procedures have on knowledge productionwithin the academy, her observations remain extremely relevant to other

areas of life in which the nancial and the moral are presumed to meet.Michael Power, a professor of economics and a professional accountant,

has evocatively dubbed these increasingly ubiquitous mechanisms for audit-ing behavior and thus enacting government at a distance as rituals of veri-cation.16 Such rituals, which reect distrust and inequality between theprincipal and the agent, are nowhere more apparent than in the eld ofinternational development in which a range of multi- and bilateral nancial

institutions and inuential nongovernmental organizations (e.g., Transpar-ency International) increasingly require states to implement anticorruptionmeasures as a precondition to further grants and loans. The global prolifera-tion of these interventions, usually conducted in the name of good gover-nance, offer one important means to examine the statelike effects nonstateentities now produce in different contexts.17


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Yet, despite the considerable amount of scholarly attention currently givento neoliberalism, the vast majority of studies conducted to date remain his-torically as well as ethnographically thin.18 Some critics have attributedthis outcome to Nikolas Roses inuential reading of Michel Foucaultsessays on governmentality, which has fostered a preoccupation with shiftsin political reason at the analytical expense of other concerns, such as theconduct of conduct in settings that are neither Western nor liberal.19 How-ever, these preoccupations also reect a broader failure to provincialize

neoliberalism, which, like capitalism, is often assumed to operate accordingto a universal logic that transforms everything in its wake. 20 Consequently,we have little sense of how the intended targets of performance auditsactually understand and respond to these interventions, if at all.21

The paucity of studies on this topic is surprising, as performance auditsare not a recent phenomenon. A range of secular as well as religious institu-tions have long employed auditing practices of their own to promote particu-

lar forms of personhood and sociality. For this reason, it is far more accurateto speak of audit culture in the plural rather than the singular. Moreover,these alternate formulations, which link the nancial to the moral in avariety of ways, have not necessarily disappeared with the passage of time.Instead, these alternate formulations continue to inform how people seek togovern themselves and others, even in contexts in which neoliberal ideolo-gies are dominant.22 Attention to how these multiple and often overlapping

forms of accountability are dened, measured, and deployed in specic set-tings thus offers an important if underutilized means to explore the ways inwhich different audit cultures coexist, challenge, or become counter-wovenwith one another.

Such accounts are particularly needed in contemporary Vietnam wherethe party/state publicly maintains that the socialist-oriented market econ-omy is not an end unto itself but the means to make the eventual transition

to socialism. This outcome is possible, according to the countrys leadingtheoreticians, because capitalism possesses modular qualities that permitthe countrys technocrats to harness its positive features namely, ones thatadvance ofcial interests and to discard its negative ones.23 From this per-spective, the Renovation process was not supposed to be a transition fromone distinct order to another, at least not in the sense that the term was


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widely misapplied to the momentous changes in many parts of Europe afterstate socialism collapsed.24 Instead, ofcial discourse portrays the reformprocess as the strategic revision and renewal of efforts to build socialism inVietnam though many of the government personnel I have spoken withon this issue will privately admit that this outcome is neither feasible nordesired at this point.25 Nonetheless, ofcial assertions that this transitionwill occur at some unspecied moment in the future continue to be madeon a regular basis. This makes it difcult for advocates of different regula-

tory approaches to reach a consensus on what rituals of verication arepresently needed to promote greater transparency and accountability, giventhe hybrid nature of the socialist-oriented market economy and the ongoingprocess of reforms.

These tensions prompt a series of questions that a signicant body ofresearch to date has failed to answer. In what ways, for example, has the shiftfrom a centrally planned economy to a predominantly market-driven one

in Vietnam affected how the practice and objects of government are actu-ally understood, calculated, and acted upon? Do the momentous changesthat have occurred over the past two decades actually signify the retreatof the party/state in the face of market pressures and, as a consequence,grant greater space for ordinary Vietnamese to govern themselves? Or dothe new regulatory regimes put in place over this same period instead markthe reconguration and redeployment of the party/states claims to moral

authority in new areas of public and private life as well as old ones?Again, it is not yet possible to denitively answer these questions. But a

growing body of work on socialist forms of governmentality, much of it setin the Peoples Republic of China, has emerged in recent years. These stud-ies indicate that Foucaults theoretical insights can travel, provided thecategories, concepts, and genealogies that inform it are modied (sometimessignicantly) in the process. While a critical review of this scholarship is

beyond the scope of this discussion, much of it shares two crucial features.The rst is the continued emphasis on techno-scientic and administrativereasoning, which has its ideological roots in Marxism-Leninism and, moregenerally, the forms of High Modernism that profoundly shaped the practiceof government during the twentieth century. The second stresses the contin-


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ued need for the party/state to act as the primary agent of national develop-ment and in a manner that strengthens not only the country as a whole butthe overall quality of all its inhabitants. Hence there is a renewed interestin mass campaigns as a cost-effective way to promote civility, civiliza-tion, and cultural levels as well as address long-standing bio-politicalconcerns regarding the physical size, health, and intelligence of differentpopulations.26

Together, these socialist continuities mean ofcial regulations rather

than market incentives still serve as the primary mechanism through whichthe party/state seeks to dene different kinds of subjects and to guide theirconduct toward specic ends, even as reforms have greatly expanded thescope for individuals as well as groups to engage in seemingly autonomousbehavior. This interface, where at least two different forms of political ratio-nality meet, crucially informs Chinas experiment with a socialist-orientedmarket economy what Li Zhang and Aihwa Ong term socialism from

afar and makes the country such fertile terrain for those interested incomparative studies of governmentality.27

The same argument applies to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, whichliberally borrowed from Maoist as well as Soviet models of political the-ory and practice for much of the twentieth century, in addition to Frenchones from the colonial era. The reforms implemented in Vietnam over thepast two decades have also closely emulated those pioneered in the Peoples

Republic of China. These broad similarities are further reinforced by morethan three millennia of political, economic, and cultural interactions thathelp ensure that ofcial denitions of what it means to be properly Viet-namese continue to be formed in complicated relation to their counterpartsin the north. This is not to suggest that Vietnam can be accurately under-stood to be an extension or derivative of China. Rather, it is to note thatdifferent modes of governmentality similarly exist in Vietnam, though their

specic form and content remain almost entirely unexplored.28Toward this end, the remainder of my discussion focuses critical atten-

tion on an issue in which two ostensibly distinct political rationalities onelabeled socialist and the other neoliberal collide and recombine inways that make visible how the practice of government and its objects are


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being reworked in the present around the problem of corruption. To sup-port my contentions, I discuss some of the rituals of verication used priorto Renovation, which closely resemble those found in other (former) social-ist states. I then turn to ofcial efforts over the past decade to investigateand thus delimit the scale and scope of corruption in contemporary Viet-nam. Interwoven throughout are further details concerning the PMU-scandal, as they help contextualize the rapid implementation of new laws,policies, and procedures and the revival of older ones between and

to promote neoliberal forms of transparency and accountability ingovernment institutions. The interplay of these purportedly different auditcultures shows how each has contributed to the partial reconguration ofthe other.

Pre-Renovation Audit Practices

The misuse of public power for private gain is not a new problem; it emergedat the very moment the rst premodern state appeared. Moreover, since suchforms of ofcial misconduct are made possible by bureaucracies rather thanparticular modes of production, corruption did not disappear but insteadourished in socialist settings. Vietnam was no exception. The CommunistParty historically regarded corruption as a dangerous disease (b bnh) thatthreatened its ability rst to seize power and, after , to govern, in part

owing to the enduring strength of relations based on blood. If one becomesa Mandarin, then the entire lineage will benet (Mt ngi lm quan, chc nh), as one famous proverb bluntly put it. Hence the CommunistPartys repeated efforts to promote revolutionary ethics among its cad-res, which redened the basis of morality in nonkin-based terms: Industry,thrift, incorruptibility, and righteousness.29

To help realize these ideals, the Communist Party regularly identied

model cadres (cn b gng mu) for others to emulate and, through rep-etition over time, become. Such practices commonly took two main forms.Internally, the models served as templates for party members and state of-cials, who were regularly required to participate in criticism/self-criticismsessions (ph bnh/t ph bnh) with their colleagues during which their


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respective shortcomings were publicly identied and plans made to rec-tify them. Externally, mass campaigns, known as emulation movements(phong tro thi ua), formed a regular feature of everyday life and wereused to mobilize the resources needed to reach ofcial targets. While mostexhorted people to exceed these targets, others concentrated on cost reduc-tion through thrift, which was intended to limit proigate spending andembezzlement, two problems the Communist Party acknowledged existedat all levels of society. These modes of surveillance were further institution-

alized through inspection teams (

i cng tc kim sot), which from onwards traveled throughout the country to conduct performance audits to

ensure ideological compliance with ofcial policies, to authenticate produc-tion quotas, and so on. Together, these practices constituted the primaryrituals of verication used in socialist Vietnam.

However, the countrys gradual shift from a centrally planned economyto an increasingly market-oriented one over the past two decades has rap-

idly overwhelmed socialist oversight and inspection mechanisms. Bythe end of the rst decade of Renovation ( ), it was clear to mostobservers that new as well as old forms of corruption were rapidly becom-ing endemic though policy makers were divided over the reason for thisdevelopment. Some attributed it to isolated acts of individuals who chasedpromotions and power and, because of their moral shortcomings, suc-cumbed to temptation and illegally appropriated funds and property for

themselves and their children.30 For those who shared this view, stiffer pen-alties, such as public trials and lengthy prison sentences, offered a temptingsolution to the increasing number and severity of corruption cases. Othersclaimed the corruption was not due to the introduction of market reformsper se, but it reected a broader societal problem that, like other socialevils, required further moral education. For those who held this view, emu-lation campaigns provided one way to improve culture standards (dn tr)

and thus make corruption less socially acceptable.31 Still others concededcorruption had already become a national calamity (quc nn), one thatposed a serious threat to the Communist Partys legitimacy and its contin-ued monopoly on political power. But they were careful to point out thatthis problem was primarily a structural one owing to the endless possibilities


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for collusion the current system part socialist, part capitalist offered;hence their counter claims that the reform process needed to be accelerated

to solve the problem.32

My informants commonly attribute these conicting assessments to polit-ical factions within the Communist Party, which are thought to range fromultra-conservatives, who still oppose the reform process, to progressives, whosupport greater civil and political liberties, including multiparty elections. Inreality, however, these opposed viewpoints are not mutually exclusive sincetheir agendas often coincide on other topics. Moreover, many party elitesadvocate two or more approaches to solving the problem, which, it shouldbe noted, began a decade ago.33

Public Administrative Reforms, cosponsored by the United NationsDevelopment Program (UNDP) and the Vietnamese Ofce of Govern-ment, rst targeted the sources of bureaucratic corruption in . But theseefforts produced few changes until when a series of massive protests

in Thi Bnh Province required twelve hundred special police to suppress.The unrest, which involved several thousand farmers, many of them warveterans, sought to force central-level ofcials to take action after their pro-vincial counterparts had failed to respond to repeated complaints about thewidespread involvement of local cadres in illegal land seizures, extralegaltaxation, and related abuses. Interestingly, large-scale protests also occurredin the southern province of ng Nai that same year, but the events in Thi

Bnh were generally seen to be more worrisome for two reasons. First, ThiBnh Province is widely considered to be one of the cradles of the revolu-tion, and its inhabitants have historically provided strong support for theobjectives of the Communist Party. Second, the protests were a response tothe very forms of socioeconomic exploitation the party/state claimed to haveeradicated decades earlier. For these reasons, many observers interpreted theprotests and the ofcial reaction to them as a direct indictment of the forms

of corruption that have accompanied Renovation.34The fear that events in Thi Bnh could ignite further unrest elsewhere

directly contributed to a number of new legislative measures: the Ordinanceon Anti-corruption (); the Law on Complaints and Denunciations ()to protect whistleblowers; the Ordinance on Public Employees ()to require civil servants to declare conicts of interest where they existed;


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and the Criminal Code (), which dened specic forms of misconductas corruption crimes. But perhaps the most signicant measure was anadministrative one also passed in , popularly known as the GrassrootsDemocracy Decree (GDD).

The GDD was, in some respects, a return to the revolutionary past in thatit exhorted local ofcials to take the people as the root (ly dn lm gc),that is, to seriously consider their interests and needs when making deci-sions that affected their everyday lives. To encourage this, the GDD estab-

lished some general mechanisms for greater popular participation in localadministrative affairs. The intent behind the reform, which was conveyedin the ofcial slogan that accompanied it The People Know, the PeopleDiscuss, the People Do, the People Inspect did not radically transformhow local ofcials conducted their business, however. Instead, popular par-ticipation, where it occurred, remained formalistic in nature and restrictedto ritualized public meetings where the outcomes had been privately deter-

mined in advance.35

Despite this obvious weakness, the GDD did set animportant precedent in that it created, if only on paper, the social space forordinary people to have some input into their governance.

For this reason, the GDD marks a notable departure from the massactivism that characterized the prereform era. Although such activism alsopermitted particular expressions of agency, it typically privileged entire seg-ments of the population (e.g., poor peasants or women), who collectively par-

ticipated in campaigns to achieve targets different segments of the party/stateset for them. The GDD, by contrast, shifted the focus to the individual specically, the policy-aware subject who was now ofcially authorized toengage not only in different aspects regarding local affairs but on an ongo-ing basis, albeit still in highly circumscribed ways. Again, this shift wasnot designed to radically transform how the practices of government areenacted in rural areas at the commune level and below. Nonetheless, the

GDD, which was revised and expanded in , has measurably contrib-uted to popular demands for more meaningful forms of participation andincreased expectations of transparency and accountability.36

For this reason, current anticorruption efforts cannot be reduced to eitherthe PMU- scandal ( ) or inghting among political elites, whosought to use the controversy to promote their respective agendas both


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before and after the Tenth National Congress of the Communist Party inApril . At the same time, as the sections below make clear, they cannotbe entirely separated either. Thus close attention to how each event affectedthe other reveals some of the ways socialist and neoliberal approachesto government unexpectedly intersect around corruption a problemthat is simultaneously moral, political, legal, economic, and socio-culturalin nature.

The Investigations

In late August of , an anonymous denunciation arrived at the Ministryof Public Security that identied Bi Quang Hng as the head of severalgambling rings. Because of the nature of the charges, a copy of the letterwas forwarded to the Lng Bin District of Hanoi where Hng, a formermember of the trafc police, lived, with a request that a preliminary investi-

gation be carried out. A month later, the police submitted their initial nd-ings to the ministry. The denunciation, they concluded, had a factual basis:Hng and his business partner, Nguyn Vn Hng, did in fact manage twosizeable gambling rings. The rst consisted of heavy gamblers, who usedthe Internet to place wagers ranging from several thousand to several hun-dred thousand dollars at a time with bookmakers in Russia, Hong Kong,and Macau who placed bets on European football matches.37 The second

enabled ordinary gamblers to place parallel bets on the daily outcome of thestate lottery an extremely popular but illegal pastime known as gam-bling for fun (chi ). In both cases, the report continued, most of thecustomers were either current or former government ofcials.38

The ndings prompted the General Department of Police to initiatea larger investigation, which began in late September of . By mid-December, investigators had gathered sufcient evidence to move on Hng,

who they quietly arrested in the act of accepting bets in Th L Park, nextto the National Zoo. A computer, seized from his home later that day, pro-vided further details on the direct involvement of high-ranking ofcials,including a half dozen men connected to Project Management Unit (PMU-) the state agency within the Ministry of Transport that over-sees efforts to modernize the countrys infrastructure. These connections


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were of particular concern to investigators, as a substantial portion of thisagencys annual budget comes from the World Bank, the European Union,and Japan in the form of overseas development assistance (ODA).

The fear that some ODA had been fraudulently appropriated anddiverted toward illegal ends also proved true, though it is still not knownwhich donors were directly affected, as the funds were skimmed from theadministrative fees PMU- levied on construction projects it managed.According to media reports, PMU- ofcials siphoned off more than US

million from this revenue stream to engage in various illegal activities andto pay bribes to hide them. At the center of the scandal was Bi Tin Dng,the general director of PMU-, who had personally placed bets totalingmore than US. million between September and December of alone.When asked why he risked his career and home, which he had mortgagedto cover US, he lost on an Arsenal-Manchester United match shortlybefore his arrest, Dng explained that he was driven to gamble because

of an unhappy marital life and to kill time due to boredom.39

But thescandal, which badly strained Vietnams relationship with some of its larg-est donors and required different government bodies to devote considerableresources to bring it to an ofcial end, is noteworthy for reasons beyondscale.

The investigative limits normally placed on corruption scandals involv-ing high-level ofcials were relaxed, though only to a point and for a rela-

tively brief moment in time. Nonetheless, journalists were able to exploit theopportunity to devote considerable coverage to the PMU- scandal, muchof it quite critical, including the unprecedented demand that a sitting min-ister resign. The details leaked to the press also enabled experts somerecognized, others self-appointed to indirectly raise a question that hasyet to receive a direct answer: what, if any, relationship exists between theVietnamese Communist Party, its current model for national development,

and the perceived rise in corruption and other forms of misconduct byofcials at all levels of government?

Efforts to answer this question were made more urgent by two otherevents, which occurred shortly before the PMU- scandal broke andinformed the commentary as well as the anticorruption initiatives thatfollowed. The rst was the Anti-corruption Law passed by the National


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Assembly in late November of . The new law, which extended provi-sions on corruption in the constitution, was later named by Vietnam.net, a leading online daily, as one of the top ten political developments of theyear. Covering twenty-four pages, the law promised sweeping changes thatwould introduce new forms of transparency and accountability at all levelsof the bureaucracy. These included the creation of a comprehensive systemto coordinate the sixteen anticorruption agencies already in existence andthe requirement that all government employees as well as their spouses andchildren declare their respective assets and sources of income primarilyto avoid future conicts of interest. Directors of different government agen-cies were also informed they would be held personally accountable for anycorrupt activities in their units. In short, the law signaled a shift in emphasisfrom ghting corruption after the fact to preventing it from occurring though precisely how this was to be achieved remains unclear.

This shift toward prevention received further emphasis three days later

when selected details from a draft report by the Swedish InternationalDevelopment Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and the Central Committee ofthe Communist Party were disseminated in the state-controlled media. Thereport, based on four years of research, constituted the rst diagnostic sur-vey on corruption ever carried out in Vietnam. Conducted between March and November , the study collected data from , people fromseven different provinces as well as three government ministries. In addition

to the basic survey of questions, the investigators facilitated discus-sion workshops involving cadres, civil servants, employees in state-ownedenterprises, and ordinary citizens.40 Unfortunately, the complete text of thereport is not available to the public and, given the fate of previous studieson controversial topics, it may never be released. The details strategicallyleaked to the public were nonetheless revealing.

More than two-thirds of those surveyed agreed that giving money to

ofcials had become a common way to resolve problems, a response givencredence by the fact that over one-third of the cadres and civil servantsin the study personally admitted to soliciting and accepting bribes. Whenasked why this was the case, two-thirds of them claimed it was because ofinadequate monitoring and inspection mechanisms rather than low wages,a problem long cited as the primary cause of corruption.41 Over percent


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of the cadres and civil servants and percent of the employees in state-owned enterprises further explained that they do not actively implement

existing anticorruption measures owing to the fear of retribution from theircolleagues.42 Given that black expenditures are said to constitute up to percent of the total operating costs within state-owned enterprises, it isnot surprising that many people have a vested interest in protecting theseextralegal revenue streams.43 But perhaps the most striking bit of informa-tion released by the Central Committee of the Communist Party was aTop Ten List of the most corrupt government agencies. The top three,as ranked by participants in the study, included the land administrationagency, import/export licensing authorities, and the trafc police. Of thosesurveyed, more than percent claimed to personally know of instances inwhich staff at these agencies had abused their ofcial positions to obtainmoney or gifts.44

At rst glance, the list offers few surprises for those with rst-hand

experience with government ofcials in contemporary Vietnam, thoughthe rankings prompted vigorous debates over their relative accuracy that Iwitnessed in other social spaces (Internet chat rooms, sidewalk beer halls,and so on). But the decision to selectively disclose some of the unpublishedreports main ndings served other purposes as well. First, by making vis-ible what is normally invisible, the Central Committee of the CommunistParty sought to demonstrate there is nothing beyond its ability to know.45

Second, the study provided some empirical proof of the scale of the problem,even if it did not specically answer the question of why corruption hadbecome endemic at all levels of government. Third, the timing of the leak,almost immediately after the National Assembly approved the new Law onAnti-corruption, signaled the Central Committees intent to govern otherson the basis of this newly acquired knowledge through techno-scientic andadministrative means in combination with older methods.

The rst sign of this intent was Decision No. , which the prime min-isters ofce issued in early February of . More commonly knownas the Action Plan, it outlined what secondary legal documents andrelated mechanisms were needed for the implementation of the new Anti-corruption Law, then scheduled to go into effect in June of . Observersremain divided over whether the timing of the announcement shortly


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after the highly public arrest of PMU- General Director Bi Tin Dngin late January was intended to demonstrate to the public that political

elites were committed to making signicant changes to address the problem.If so, the effort largely failed, as the PMU- scandal proceeded to dominatethe mass media for the next two months, with new details leaked almostdaily.

Curiously, the investigative reports primarily focused the publics atten-tion on two topics. The rst concerned the rapid rise and fall of Bi TinDng, quickly named the millionaire gambler in the press. Readerstended to emphasize his personal shortcomings and many described Dngas drunk on football [and] addicted to gambling, while others comparedhis transformation to that of Dorian Gray.46 Details of Dngs biography,which again became important at his trial in August of , were quicklyovershadowed by the second topic, a racketeering enterprise Dng and hisassociates managed, which forced private contractors to pay inated prices

for over thirty vehicles that were later loaned to contacts in different govern-ment agencies in exchange for preferential treatment on other matters. Thisfacet of the PMU- scandal proved more interesting than Dngs personallife, as the breaking story revealed some of the networks of relationships thatfacilitate such extralegal exchanges within, through, and around govern-ment institutions. But again, clear if unstated limits were imposed on whatcould be reported, as evidenced by the abrupt end to further investigation

into these illicit arrangements following the arrest of Nguyn Vit Tin, theparty secretary for the Ministry of Transport and former general director ofPMU-, on the fourth of April for his involvement in the scandal.

Confessions

Public efforts to identify and punish corrupt ofcials took a dramatic turn

shortly afterward. Less than a week after Nguyn Vit Tins arrest, morethan one hundred party members within PMU- were ordered to partici-pate in a meeting to count the points. Such meetings historically providedthe framework for criticism/self-criticism sessions a ritualized form ofpolitico-moral auditing initially developed in the Soviet Union and thendiffused throughout the socialist world to reinforce conformity, correct ide-ological errors, and so on.47 Most Vietnamese, especially those born after


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Renovation began, now regard such exercises, which require those involvedto confess their shortcomings as well as identify those of their colleagues,

as being outdated; nonetheless, their use continues in ofcial settings, espe-cially when party elites nd it politically expedient to discipline its members.

Not surprisingly, the decision to employ this socialist-era tactic raisedmore questions than it answered. However, most of them could be reducedto this: why were such a large group of corrupt ofcials able to operate solong without anyone else in PMU- or the Ministry of Transport becomingaware of their illegal activities and reporting them to the relevant authori-ties? Chat rooms, blogs, and other social spaces online provided digitalforums for individuals to post their own views as to why this was possible.The mass media, by contrast, refocused much of their collective attention onanother disgraced public gure the minister of transport rather thanthe broader structural factors that contributed to endemic corruption. onh Bnh, the minister of transport, was asked to submit a letter of res-

ignation the same day as Nguyn Vit Tins arrest. But for unknown rea-sons, his case required nine days of closed-door discussions before the letterwas ofcially accepted. While the precise details of these discussions remainsecret, there was considerable speculation that Bnh, who had been ofciallyreprimanded four times since for nancial irregularities, agreed toresign his seats on the National Assembly and the Central Committee of theCommunist Party to avoid criminal charges.48

The following day, General V Nguyn Gip presented a major speech the purpose of which, given its almost immediate appearance in newspapersboth on- and off-line, was to reorient public attention away from the moralfailings of specic individuals and toward the problem of corruption moregenerally. In it, the retired war hero noted that the sharp rise in the numberand severity of corruption scandals threatened the Communist Partys pres-tige and thus the moral basis of its political legitimacy, in addition to the

countrys relationship with foreign donors. Of these scandals, he continued,the PMU- case was the most alarming, but not simply because it was thecountrys largest to date and involved the criminal misuse of ODA. Nor wasit because the scandal exposed what he termed the debauched, decadent,and degenerate behavior of the party members within a prominent govern-ment agency. Rather, the PMU- case was so alarming, the general argued,because it was symptomatic of a much larger problem one that had trans-


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formed the Communist Party into a shield that some members used to hidetheir corrupt activities.49

The Generals decision to focus on the PMU- case, which had alreadydominated media headlines for months, was not surprising. Nor was histiming unusual, immediately before the ofcial opening of the TenthNational Congress (April , ). Well-known party members fre-quently used the period prior to such events to publicly advance politicalpositions later decided behind closed doors. Rather, what made the speechnotable was the manner in which it sought to reinvigorate ideas and prac-tices associated with the socialist past to manage those often attributed tothe market-oriented present.

This effort took several forms, rst and foremost in the gure of Gen-eral Gip himself. General Gip is the last surviving member of the partyelite whose personal involvement extends back in time to the revolutionarystruggles of the late colonial era. During his lifetime of service, General

Gip has held many prominent military and political posts, including com-mander of the Peoples Army of Vietnam, minister of interior, and politburomember, among others. Yet, General Gip (like many others of his gen-eration) is still widely perceived as having not accumulated any illicit per-sonal wealth despite his place in the national order of things. This perhapsexplains why Phan Din, the politburos acting secretary, acknowledged ina major speech delivered earlier that day the need to ght corruption to

further develop the country but left General Gip the task of publicly criti-cizing those involved in the case.General Gip did so, as noted above, in very blunt terms, using the

socialist-era count the points technique. To further emphasize the pur-pose of the exercise, he quoted H Ch Minhs well-known thoughts on thesubject of self-assessment: A Party that hides its own defects is a brokenParty. With that in mind, General Gip closed his speech by exhorting the

delegates slated to attend the Tenth National Congress to clearly and truth-fully assess the problem corruption posed for both the Communist Partyand the country. Only by doing so, he concluded, would it be possible to har-ness the socialist-oriented market economy in a manner that strengthenedrather than weakened the partys stated goal of creating a wealthy people,strong country, and a just, democratic, and civilized society.50


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New Accountabilities

During the week-long Tenth National Congress, many high-ranking of-cials, including Nng c Mnh, the general secretary of the CommunistParty, publicly pledged to do everything necessary to eradicate corruption.For those not inclined to place great weight on such pledges, the next sixmonths appeared to prove them correct, as there was nothing new in themass media about ofcial anticorruption efforts. Then in late October, thegovernment announced Decree No. , which claried many of the ques-

tions regarding the actual implementation of the Anti-corruption Law andthe Prime Ministers Action Plan.Over the next six months, eleven ministries promulgated forty-seven

secondary legal documents regarding their anticorruption activities. Theprime ministers ofce also issued four instructions, which ranged from newguidelines for managing state budgets, assets, and personnel to the explicitprohibition against using public funds for gifts or parties. Twenty-three

provinces and cities across the country also announced new procedures fordisclosing how state funds were annually budgeted within administrativeunits under their control.51 In practical terms, these mechanisms helpedestablish (at least on paper) new norms of behavior within and between stateagencies as well as procedures for identifying, investigating, and prosecutingcorruption cases.

More developments followed. By August of , on the eve of the PMU-

trial, the government and the prime ministers ofce had issued fty-twofurther regulatory documents regarding nancial practices as well as costnorms and standards. During this same period, ministries and local gov-ernment agencies reviewed , regulatory documents, issued , newones, amended , and abolished outdated or redundant ones. Nearly corruption cases were also identied, and administrative sanctions wereapplied against defendants for noncriminal forms of misconduct.52 Forthose familiar with the representational practices of socialist states, the listsof achievements and the statistical gures that buttress them readily evokethe rhetorical claims of the past. But it would be premature to dismiss theseassertions of progress on the problem of corruption, even if it is still muchtoo early to determine their actual effectiveness. Nonetheless, the manner


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in which these reforms were planned and implemented behind closeddoors runs directly counter to their stated intent: greater transparency,

without which lines of accountability would remain difcult to determine.These tensions were not limited to the regulatory measures instituted on theeve of the trial; they also affected the judicial proceedings themselves.

The trial, which began on the rst of August, , was brief. Over athree-day period, lawyers for the prosecution presented evidence againstnine defendants, including three former government ofcials, regardingtheir involvement in organized gambling. Of the defendants, Bi TinDng faced the most serious charges owing to the US, bribe he alleg-edly offered to Major-General Cao Ngc Oanh and three other ofcials toforestall his arrest. Under Vietnamese law, the attempted bribe meant Dngwas eligible for the death penalty, whereas the other defendants named inthe case faced a maximum sentence of twenty years in prison each, if foundguilty.53 According to press reports, Presiding Judge Ng Th Yn kept the

proceedings on schedule, so much so, that six of the ten defense lawyersresigned in protest of the time constraints on them. On the morning ofthe sixth day, following the weekend recess, the Supreme Peoples Courtof Investigation announced all nine defendants had been found guilty ascharged; it then provided sentence recommendations. Although less thanthe maximum allowed under law, the sentences were heavy, especially forBi Tin Dng: twenty-two to twenty-ve years in prison, the forfeiture

of his three homes, and the conscation of approximately US, ofunknown origin found therein.54

In a surprise move the following day, the Peoples Court of Hanoi reducedthe sentences for all nine men. The full details, which required forty-veminutes to recite, noted their criminal conduct had caused public discon-tent and a loss of the peoples faith in state agencies.55 However, the courtalso acknowledged the defendants had cooperated with security ofcials

and conducted themselves well during the trial and thus deserved someleniency. The court further singled out Bi Tin Dng, whose sentencewas reduced by half to six years in prison for gambling and seven years forattempted bribery, because of two mitigating factors: a confession, and hisprevious contributions to the country, which included ve decorations forhis service and numerous certicates of merit.56


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The decision was greeted with considerable skepticism by many observ-ers, particularly given Dngs rapid rise within the Ministry of Transport

following a short stint in the army. In a mere ve years, Dng had movedfrom an entry-level position in PMU- to becoming its director, a posi-tion he held from September of until his arrest in January of .For this reason, some commentators online pointed out that Dngs pastachievements were less relevant here than those of his father, Bi B Bng, awell-known revolutionary who had earned seventeen medals over the courseof his distinguished military career and retired from the Peoples Army ofVietnam with the rank of major-general.57 Although no one claimed Dngselderly father had directly intervened in the case, they asserted the sentencewas reduced in recognition of his fathers far more signicant contributionsto the party/state.58

Others disagreed and argued the sentence reduction had nothing to dowith his fathers past service to the revolutionary cause; instead, they sug-

gested the move was designed to buy the silence of those headed to prison.To buttress their position, they pointed out that the son-in-law of the gen-eral secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam had been implicated inthe scandal as well as several people in the prime ministers ofce, who werethen still under investigation. In their view, very high-ranking ofcials (ifnot the highest) had quietly brokered a deal behind the scenes to abruptlyend the scandal with the arrest of Nguyn Vit Tin, the party secretary

for the Ministry of Transport and former general director of PMU-, toprevent further embarrassment and possible legal action.59

Still others dismissed these rumors of a cover-up. In their view, the scandalwas instead a deliberate attempt by the Communist Party to demonstrate itspower and benevolence in a highly public fashion. As evidence, they notedthat the initial arrests occurred immediately prior to the Tenth National Con-gress, which meant details of the police investigation could slowly be leaked

to the press to make visible the Communist Partys efforts to punish corruptofcials and implement new anticorruption measures.60 (Indeed, investigatorsin the Ministry of Public Security were reputed to be the primary source ofthe leaks.) Thus the ofcial response to the scandal did not in their viewrepresent a genuine shift but was instead a ritualized political performancedesigned to promote unity of purpose at the party congress.61


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Denitive answers as to why the PMU- trial ended as it did are unlikely.What is perhaps more important here are the terms of the debate, as they

reveal the diversity of views on the tactics, mechanisms, and technologiesthrough which authority is actually constituted and rule accomplished incontemporary Vietnam. As the outcome of the case makes clear, differentsets of norms continue to exist; moreover, the political rationalities that helpguide a persons conduct are not entirely reducible to that of ideology oreconomics, be they socialist or neoliberal in orientation.

Conclusion

Stories related to the PMU- scandal quickly disappeared after the trial.They were replaced by yet more news items about new anticorruptionmeasures, such as the continued spread of one-stop shop, a program foraccelerating business registration procedures to reduce corruption associated

with multiple, nontransparent contacts between entrepreneurs and stateofcials across multiple agencies. This was followed by an announcementthat sixteen ministries as well as thirty-three provinces and municipalitieshad completed their own anticorruption action plans.62 Soon after, the massmedia reported that ve ministries as well as the State Bank of Vietnam hadissued professional moral codes of conduct for their staff. After which, theCentral Steering Committee on Anti-corruption proclaimed that it had just

concluded its assessment of forty-eight provinces and cities regarding theimplementation of the Law on Anti-corruption.63

So in the end, what are we to make of this constant reiteration of ofcialprogress in the ght against corruption? The PMU- scandal, like thosethat preceded it, clearly offered the Communist Party the opportunity torepresent and speak for the people as a unitary social body.64 But, insharp contrast to previous crises, competing views emerged on the primary

causes and solutions to bureaucratic corruption. Despite concerted efforts tosuppress these disagreements at the Tenth National Congress, no integratedapproach to anticorruption materialized afterward. Instead, the numberof approaches currently in use continues to grow as different ministries,provinces, cities, and cross-sectoral bodies (e.g., the State Audit of Vietnam)carry out their own anticorruption initiatives in addition to participating in


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nationally sponsored ones. Some of these initiatives are clearly self-interestedand self-serving. Others are implemented at the behest of inuential actors,

such as international nancial institutions, bilateral aid agencies, and for-eign business lobbies. Still others are carried out in collaboration withthem.65 Consequently, ongoing efforts to more accurately dene, measure,and enforce accountability in contemporary Vietnam have not replaced oneregulatory regime with another; rather, they have resulted in overlapping,nested, and hybrid mechanisms for auditing the nancial-moral conduct ofparty/state ofcials, which makes it difcult to determine where socialisttechniques end and neoliberal ones begin, especially as each often exhibitssome features associated with the other.

Calls for greater accountability continue to have their limits in Vietnamas well. In May , security ofcials arrested two investigative journal-ists, Nguyn Vn Hi and Nguyn Vit Chin, for their past coverage ofthe PMU- scandal. Both men had published reports during the height of

the scandal that contained references to statements the director of PMU-made that forty other senior ofcials had accepted bribes to remain silentabout his criminal activities prior to his arrest. This explosive accusation,which was not pursued at Dngs trial, later enabled prosecutors to lecriminal charges against the two reporters for abusing democratic freedomsto infringe upon the interest of the State [and] the legitimate rights andinterests of organizations and/or citizens.66 Both men spent ve months in

detention prior to their trial in late . During the trial Hi changed hisplea to guilty, a decision that reduced his sentence to two years of noncusto-dial reeducation. Chin, however, refused to renounce his story and becauseof his continued deance received two years in prison.

These divergent responses to the PMU- scandal, including the backlashagainst the journalists who used information strategically leaked to thepress, suggest that it has become much harder for the Communist Party

to present a unied position on the nature of the relationship between thesocialist-oriented market economy and the popular view that corruptionis now endemic at all levels of government. This inability reects severalimportant shifts, two of which I mention here to conclude my discussion.

First, it has long ceased to be possible for the party/state to spatiallyrestrict the market from the social body in the form of special eco-


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nomic zones, as was largely the case during the rst decade of Renovation(c. ).67 This approach has since been replaced with a hybrid one,

which seeks to unleash the entrepreneurial skills and energies of individu-als, yet contain them at the same time so as to balance the egalitarian idealsof the revolutionary past with the forms of socioeconomic inequality anddivision that have reemerged in the more commercialized present.68 Closeattention to efforts to manage the contradictions this approach inevitablycreates helps foreground the ways the socialist-oriented market economy hasand, importantly, has not been liberalized to date. Private entrepreneurs, forexample, remain heavily dependent upon personal contacts in the publicsector to obtain information, capital, contracts, and materials.69 But moreimportantly here, it is clear that the gradual adoption of market mechanismsover the past two decades cannot be equated with the gradual adoption ofneoliberal values and practices, especially as the latter, when understood as amode of governmentality, presupposes particular relationships between thestate, markets, and the individual that at present still have limited purchasein Vietnam.70

Second, these same contradictions have increased rather than decreasedthe opportunities as well as incentives for government personnel to engagein practices now legally dened as corrupt. For this reason, efforts tocleanse the party/state to make pure and upright as one theoreticianput it through the periodic purge of corrupt ofcials remain important,

if only to visibly assert leadership in the very area that threatens its morallegitimacy.71 However, political elites are increasingly willing to augmentthese and other socialist audit mechanisms with a range of neoliberalones drawn from the best practices now circulating globally.72 Since thissupplemental approach is quite recent, it is still too early to assess what long-term impacts the proliferation of regulatory regimes and the rituals ofverication that accompany them will have on actual practices or, for that

matter, the kinds of political subjectivities anticorruption initiatives maymake possible. Nonetheless, the ongoing reconguration of who and what isaudited and by whom promises to provide further opportunities to criticallyexplore how values and practices ostensibly drawn from socialist and neo-liberal models shape and reshape one another in contemporary Vietnam.


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Notes

I would like to thank Ann Marie Leshkowich and Christina Schwenkel; they envisionedthis special issue, and their insightful comments greatly improved my contribution towardit.

. Bhikku Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Samyutta Nikaya(Boston: Wisdom Publications, ), , n. .

. Ken MacLean, The Rehabilitation of an Uncomfortable Past: Remembering the Everydayin Vietnam during the Subsidy Period ( ), History and Anthropology , no. (): .

. John Gillespie, Self-Interest and Ideology: Bureaucratic Corruption in Vietnam, AsianLaw Journal , no. (): ; Martin Gainsborough, Corruption and the Politics ofEconomic Decentralization in Vietnam, Journal of Contemporary Asia , no. (): .

. Article , Anti-corruption Law, National Assembly of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,th Legislature, November , .

. PM Leads Conference on Corruption, Vietnam.net, December , , english.vietnam-net.vn/politics////.

. Neither the party nor the state can be accurately understood as unied, coherent entitiesthat think or act like people. Nonetheless, I employ the terms here, including their unortho-dox combined form (party/state), as strategic essentialisms since a nuanced discussion oftheir internal differences is not crucial to my argument, except where noted. The focus isinstead upon instances in which institutional unity is privileged over disunity for politicalreasons.

. David Stark, Recombinant Property in East European Capitalism, inRestructuring Net-works in Post-Socialism, ed. Gernot Grabher and David Stark (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, ), .

. I interviewed more than three dozen professionals in Hanoi and online during . Theirviews are summarized in the text.

. Catherine McKinley, Media and Corruption: How Has Vietnams Print Media Covered Cor-ruption and How Can Coverage Be Strengthened? (Hanoi: United Nations Development Pro-gram, ), .

. These generalizations are based on my survey of newspapers and journals directly managed

by the Communist Party, state-run media agencies that published investigative reports onthe scandal (e.g., Tui tr[Youth],Lao ng [Labor], and Vietnam.net), and overseas sites (e.g.,Ykien.net [Opinion.net] andBBCVietnamese.com). For further methodological discussion, seeKen MacLean, In Search of Kilometer Zero: Digital Archives, Technological Revisionism,and the Sino-Vietnamese Border, Comparative Studies in Society and History , no. (): .


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. Gary Sigley, Chinese Governmentalities: Government, Governance, and the Socialist Mar-ket Economy,Economy and Society , no. (): .

. Akhil Gupta, Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics,and the Imagined State,American Ethnologist , no. (): ; Douglas Holmesand George Marcus, Fast-Capitalism: Para-Ethnography and the Rise of the SymbolicAnalyst, in Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reections on the New Economy, ed. GregDowney and Melissa Fisher (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), .

. Carolyn Nordstrom, Shadows and Sovereigns, Theory, Culture, and Society , no. ():, .

. Sren Davidsen et al., Implementation Assessment of the Anti-corruption Law: How Far

Has Vietnam Come? (Hanoi: Embassy of Denmark, ), ; Dang Ngoc Dinh, Anti-corruption in Vietnam: The Situation after Two Years of Implementation of the Law (Hanoi:CECODES, ).

. Marilyn Strathern, New Accountabilities, in Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies inAccountability, Ethics, and the Academy, ed. Marilyn Strathern (London: Routledge, ), .

. Michael Power, The Audit Society: Rituals of Verication (Oxford: Oxford University Press,).

. James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta, Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neolib-eral Governmentality,American Ethnologist , no. (): .

. Sherry Ortner, Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal, Comparative Studiesin Society and History , no. (): .

. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osbourne, and Nikolas Rose, eds.,Foucault and Political Reason:Liberalism, Neoliberalism, and Rationalities of Government (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, ), ; Dean Mitchell, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society

(London: Sage, ), .. Dipesh Chakrabarty,Provincializing Europe: Historical Thought and Postcolonial Difference

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ).. Donald Nonini, Is China Becoming Neoliberal? Critique of Anthropology , no. ():

.. Andrew Kipnis, Neoliberal Governmentality, Socialist Legacy, or Technologies of Govern-

ing?American Ethnologist , no. (): ; Daromir Rudnyckyj, Spiritual Econo-mies: Islam and Neoliberalism in Contemporary Indonesia, Cultural Anthropology , no.

(): .. L Hu Ngha, The Tenth National Party Congress and Awareness of the Path towards

Socialism in Vietnam, Nhn dn (People), July , , www.nhandan.com.vn/english/news//domestic_tenth.htm.

. Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery, eds., Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies ofChange in the Postsocialist World (New York: Rowman and Littleeld, ).


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. Field notes (, ).. Sigley, Chinese Governmentalities; Kipnis, Neoliberal Governmentality, ; Susan

Greenhalgh with Edwin Winckler, Governing Chinas Population: From Leninist to Neolib-eral Biopolitics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ).

. Li Zhang and Aihwa Ong, eds.,Privatizing China: Socialism from Afar (Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, ).

. For an exception, see Nguyn-v Thu-hng, The Ironies of Freedom: Sex, Culture, and Neo-liberal Governance in Vietnam (Seattle: University of Washington Press, ).

. Shaun Malarney, Culture, Virtue, and Political Transformation in Contemporary North-ern Vietnam,Journal of Asian Studies , no. (): .

. nh Th Minh Tuyt and Nguyn c Mnh, Tip cn mt s gii php phng, chngtham nhng (Reaching Some Solutions to Prevent and to Fight Corruption), Tp chCng sn (Communist Journal) ().

. Phi xem cng tc kim tra ng l yu t sng ca ng (Seeing to the Ofcial Taskof Inspections Is an Essential Element of the Party), Tp ch kim tra (Inspection Digest) ().

. Nguyn c Bnh, Xy dng ng ta tht vng mnh (Building a Truly Stable andStrong Party),Nhn dn (People), February , .

. ng S Lc, y mnh cuc u tranh phng, chng tham nhng (Strengthening theFight against Corruption), Tp ch xy dng ng (Building the Party) ().

. Human Rights Watch,Rural Unrest in Vietnam (New York: Human Rights Watch, ).. Dau Hoan Do and SIDA, A Study on the Implementation of Grass-Roots Democracy,

June July (Hanoi: SIDA and Government Committee on Organization and Person-nel, unpublished draft), on le with author.

. United Nations Development Program, Deepening Democracy and Increasing Popular Par-

ticipation in Vietnam (Hanoi: United Nations Development Program, ).. To place these bets in context, the per capita income in Vietnam was US, ( g-

ures).. Minh Quang, Nhn din con bc Bi Tin Dng (Identifying Bui Tien Dung the Gam-

bler), Tui tr (Youth), August , , tuoitre.vn/Chinh-tri-xa-hoi/Phap-luat//Nhan-dien-con-bac-Bui-Tien-Dung%C%A%C%A.html.

. Vietnam Ofcial Jailed in PMU- Gambling, Bribery Scandal, Thanh nin (Youth),August , .

. Tham nhng ang tr thnh chuyn thng ngy (Corruption Is Becoming an EveryDay Story ), Tui tr (Youth), December , , tuoitre.vn/Chinh-tri-Xa-hoi//Tham-nhung-dang-tro-thanh-%E%%Cchuyen-thuong-ngay%E%%D.html.

. Transparency International,National Integrity System: Country Study Report Vietnam (Berlin: Transparency International, ), .

. Hi tho v kt qa iu tra tnh hnh tham nhng v chng tham nhng (Conference


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and Results of the Inspection into the Corruption and Anti-corruption Situation), Tinphong (Pioneer), November , .

. Tham nhng ph bin nht lnh vc a chnh nh t (Corruption Is Most Wide-spread in the Land Administration Ofce) Vit bo (Viet Daily), November , .. Vng H, C quan tham nhng ph bin nht (The Ten Agencies Where Corrup-

tion Is the Most Widespread),Lao ng (Labor), November , , www.dantri.com.vn/c/s / co-quan-tham-nhung-pho-bien-nhat.htm.

. Sigley, Chinese Governmentalities, .. Tuyn n phin x con bc triu (The Hearing and Sentence of the Millionaire

Gambler ), BBCVietnamese.com, August , , www.bbc.co.uk/vietnamese/vietnam/

story///_btdverdict.shtml.. Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley:

University of California Press, ).. See Vietnam Transport Minister to Resign over Dereliction of Duty, Thanh nin, April

, .. V Nguyn Gip, Kim im v PMU- v bo co i Hi X (Counting the Points:

The PMU- Case and the Report to the Tenth Congress), Tui tr(Youth), April , .. Ibid.. Davidsen et al.,Implementation Assessment, .. Ibid., .. Thay i trong ban chuyn n PMU- (Changes to the Committee for the PMU-

Case),BBCVietnamese.com, April , , www.bbc.co.uk/vietnamese/vietnam/story///_investigation_update.shtml.

. Khi t Bi Tin Dng ti tham (Opening Charges against Bui Tien Dung on theCrime of Corruption),BBCVietnamese.com, August , , www.bbc.co.uk/vietnamese/

vietnam/story///_btdung_update.shtml.. n t cho ng tng PMU- gim mt na (Prison Sentence for PMU- Director

Cut in Half), VNExpress.com, August , , www.vnexpress.net/gl/phap-luat///bfeb/.

. Lut S Ng Ngc Thy: Bi Tin Dng ch chy n ch khng a hi l (LawyerNgo Ngoc Thuy: Bui Tien Dung Was Only Avoiding a Sentence Not Offering a Bribe ),Thanh nin, August , , www.thanhnien.com.vn/news/Pages//.aspx.

. Cng Tin, V PMU- v ni bun ngy Tt ca v tng (PMU- Case and a Sad

New Years Day for the General), VTC News, February , .. Lng K, personal communication, September , .. Tng Duy and Phng Sng, Tng gim c PMU-: Con bc triu (PMU-

Director: The Millionaire Gambler), Tin phong (Pioneer), January , , www.tien-phong.vn/Phap-Luat//Tong-Giam-doc-PMU--- Con-bac-trieu-do.html.

. Bill Hayton, personal communication, April , .

R


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. Hong Dng, Bo ch Vit Nam trc i Hi X (Vietnamese Dailies before theTenth Congress),BBC World Service, April , , www.bbc.co.uk/vietnamese/vietnam/

story///_vietpress_precongress.shtml.. Davidsen et al.,Implementation Assessment, .. Ibid., .. Ann Anagnost, The Politicized Body, inBody, Subject, and Power in China, ed. T. Barlow

and A. Zito (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), .. Global Advice Network, Vietnam Country Prole, Business Anti-corruption Portal,

www.business-anti-corruption.com/country- profiles/east-asia-the-pacific/vietnam/snapshot/ (accessed January , ).

. Article , Vietnam Penal Code.. Aihwa Ong, Graduated Sovereignty in South-East Asia, Theory, Culture, and Society ,

no. (): .. MacLean, Rehabilitation, .. Nguyn-v,Ironies of Freedom, .. Nonini, Is China Becoming Neoliberal? .. Trng Vnh Trng, Tng cng lch s lnh o ca ng, y mnh cuc u tranh

phng, chng tham nhng, lng ph (Strengthening the Historical Leadership of theParty, Stepping Up the Struggle to Prevent and to Resist Corruption and Wasteful Spend-ing), Tp ch Cng sn (Communist Journal), ().

. L, Tenth National Congress.

AntiCorruption MacLean

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Transcript of AntiCorruption MacLean