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Elliott, W.P., David, 2012, Changing Worlds: Vietnam’s transitions from the Cold Warto globalization, NY: Oxford University Press.

Oxford University Press paperback 2014

Preface to the Paperback Edition

THE HISTORICAL CHAPTER examined in this book ended in 2.007, and the research wasessentially concluded in that year. It is always tempting to see how the passage of time hasaffected the analysis done right at the close of the period analyzed in this book, whichassesses Vietnam’s efforts to come to terms with the dramatic changes of the post–Cold Warperiod and the era of globalization. It is also tempting to assess the extent to which the courseof events after 2007 has confirmed or altered the trajectory of Vietnam's policies andengagement with the world as presented in the first edition of the book.

Nevertheless, in the concluding section of the first edition of Changing Worlds I observed that“This is not a book of prognostication”and offered only a few qualified thoughts aboutVietnam's future, and this caveat still stands. The reason is that the main focus of this study ison a completed historical chapter— the period from 1975 when Vietnam confidentlyenvisaged a future within the orthodox parameters of socialist development and the socialistworld in an international system divided into antagonistic blocs, and 2007 when its entry intothe World Trade Organization capped a contested evolution from the two-worlds frameworkof the Cold War to the complexities of deep integration into a single globalized world system.

The decision to acknowledge the unity of the new global system and to opt for deepintegration with it does, of course, have profound implications for Vietnam's future, thoughthe way Vietnam’s next historical chapter will unfold is still difficult to predict, even with thebenefit of observing what has happened in the years since “taking the plunge”into theturbulent waters of the globalized world. One might have thought that the 2008 globalfinancial crisis would give even the most ardent Vietnamese reformers pause about theuncertainties that come with global integration, but the evidence so far is that the plunge wasirreversible (though curiously the exact point at which this happened is still not clearlyunderstood) and, as happened after the earlier 1997 Asian financial crisis, Vietnam’sintegrationist course was not derailed despite the ammunition that the unpredictableturbulence of this darker side of globalization offered to opponents of reform and integrationin Vietnam.

But, if the story moving forward has not significantly changed since the first edition ofChanging Worlds, what about the perspective looking backward on the period it covered?Here, there has been a significant development; the publication of the remarkable book by theVietnamese journalist Huy Duc called The Winning Side (Ben Thang Cuoc, published in twovolumes— which I will cite as BTC I and II) first disseminated on the internet and thenpublished in Vietnamese in the United States in 2012. The author explains his ironic title inthe following way: “My book begins its chronicles with April 30, 1975, the day when manybelieved North Vietnam liberated South Vietnam. Taking a cautious look back at the last

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three decades, many are stupefied by the impression that ‘the liberated’turned out to be theNorth.”

Without necessarily endorsing this provocative observation (although Changing Worlds doeshave a section titled “The South Shall Rise Again”which explores this theme), I certainlyagree with many highly qualified observers that this is a remarkable book, offering manyunique and rare insights into the inner world of Vietnamese elite politics. The New YorkTimes characterized this book as “perhaps the first critical, comprehensive history of Vietnamsince 1975 by someone inside the country.”In the end, I think that this insider accountreinforces most of the analysis of Changing Worlds, which was based on Vietnamese sourcesbut still subject to the limitations of being written by an outside observer.

Still, there are innumerable examples of insights and revelations that I wish had beenavailable to me when I wrote the first edition, which confirm or enlarge upon key points ofanalysis and interpretation dealing not only with the details of political struggles withinVietnam’s leadership over the ways to respond to globalization, but even more importantlyfor this book, the impact of mind-sets and ideas and the role that they played in the outcomeof these struggles. It would be pointless to try to incorporate the multiple revelations from thismassive two volume work, but I would like to mention a few examples, and hope that thismay induce the interested reader to read Huy Duc’s magnum opus in conjunction with thisbook. The Winning Side was written with a different purpose and focus from ChangingWorlds, but the portrait it paints of the events and key characters in this story is a very usefulcomplement to what I have tried to present.

The first example is his portrayal of the disastrous attempt to impose socialism on the Southright after the Communist victory of 1975 and the unification of the country the followingyear. This episode had a significant impact on subsequent events in several ways. First, it wasan economic and political disaster, and provided a powerful negative example of the rigidversion of socialism that then Party leader Le Duan and others represented. This failuresubsequently led to a search for a better way, and to the reform process which officiallystarted in 1986.

The search for a way out of South Vietnam's economic crisis set in motion a chain eventswhich ultimately transformed the policies and institutions in North Vietnam that theleadership had rashly attempted to impose on the South, and spilled over into security anddiplomatic spheres. The improvised responses to the economic crisis in the South led to theresurfacing of some economists who had served under the pre-1975 Saigon government whowere an important source of reform ideas. A young professor of economics recalled that “hisgeneration began to encounter the idea of a market economy from a series of articles writtenin the newspaper Tuoi Tre and, after that in Lao Dong Chu Nhat ... The articles written priorto 1975 [in South Vietnam] by Professors Nguyen Van Ngon, Pho Ba Long ... began to be putto use.”The circulation of these ideas eventually led to a demand by Vietnamese students todrop Marxist economics as a required part the Ho Chi Minh City University of Economics. InFebruary 1990, Nguyen Van Hao, an advisor to the World Bank and a former Deputy Premierof Saigon, who had left Vietnam in 1981 but had remained in touch with Vo Van Kiet, wasasked by Kiet to return Vietnam for consultations. Nguyen Xuan Oanh, a former International

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Monetary Fund economist and also a Republic of Vietnam Vice Premier (whose photoappears in the first edition of Changing Worlds) was also consulted by Vietnam's top leaders.The significance of this is that the resurfacing of market economy ideas from the old Saigongovernment era expanded the repertoire of alternatives to the command economy orthodoxy.As Jeffrey Legro has argued “Not only must political actors undermine the old orthodoxy,they need to replace it with a new orthodoxy. Consolidation is shaped i part by two types offactors: (1) the number of prominent ideas in a society that might serve as a replacement forthe dominant orthodoxy, and (2) the perceived initial results such new ideas.”The intrusion ofmarket ideas which had been the object of a ruthless political suppression campaign (the“socialist transformation campaign”) in South Vietnam in the mid-1970s into the policydebate in the 1980s was an important contributing factor to the growth and ultimateascendency of reform ideas.

Involvement in the debacle of the “socialist transformation campaign”in the South weakenedthe position of the opponents of reform in the period following 1986. Some anti-reformerstried to minimize their ties to “socialist transformation”in the South, and pin the entireresponsibility on the then Party leader Le Duan. Others, however attempted to exonerate LeDuan from blame for Vietnam's earlier economic blunders. Following the collapse of theSoviet Union, Le Duan's closest aide said during a review of the early decision to imposesocialism on the South, “It is really hard to sit here now, following the collapse of the SovietUnion, and talk about this old story.’Another aide to Le Duan, who had at one time been thehead of the Faculty of Marxist-Leninist economics at the Ho Chi Minh Higher Party School,recalled that “Although Brother Three (Le Duan) was very uneasy faced with the realities ofdevelopment in the South, at that time one would have to have been terribly creative to haveescaped the dogmatism of the entire Communist camp. This creativity would have had to bebased on a mature theoretical foundation, which we were lacking. Our theoreticians had allstudied in China and other socialist countries, and our Party school originated from Chineseteachers.”Another assistant of Le Duan, Professor Tran Phuong, who an informed observercalled a ‘liberal economist’[mot nha kinh to tu do] also had to admit that “Prior to thecollapse of the Soviet Union, our heads were still imprisoned in the dogmatism of Marxism.”

The fact that Vietnam's mistakes were now blamed on ideological conformism with thesocialist bloc concepts and policies which were inappropriate for Vietnam, was a considerabledeparture for their earlier pride in being part of such an enlightened and powerful bloc and thedesire to emulate more advanced socialist countries. But, as the examples just cited on therevival of discussion of market economics in the 1980s shows, the inability to challengecommand economy orthodoxy was not entirely due to lack of alternative ideas in circulation,although these ideas were considered outside the sphere of acceptability and politicallydangerous at the time. This, in turn, underlines the exceptional courage of the early reformerswho accepted the risks of challenging the conventional wisdom. It also showed that thereformers would have to be protected and promoted at the very top of the leadership in orderto have an impact.

Even if the old thinking was generally shared by the leadership, including some who laterbecame converts to reform ideas, the death of Le Duan prior to the 1986 “reform”Sixth PartyCongress eliminated a significant obstacle to what became known as “new thinking”(tu duymoi). His transitional successor, Truong Chinh, played a decisive role in moving Vietnam

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toward economic reform. As Changing Worlds pointed out, this was especially ironic in thatTruong Chinh had been previously identified as a rigid and hard line ideological purist, whotook the blame for the disastrous overzealous land reform of the 1950s in North Vietnam. Inthe 1980s he turned out to be a pragmatic realist (a label which some had earlier ascribed toLe Duan's wartime leadership, in contrast with Truong Chinh's insistence on maintainingsocialist orthodoxy and opposition to Le Duan's “whatever works”approach). Truong Chinh’sinvestigations of the economic problems of the South are described in Changing Worlds,largely based on the account of Hanoi economic historian Dang Phong and a retrospectivenewspaper series on this period in the liberal newspaper Tuoi Tre, for which Huy Duc onceworked. To this account BTC adds a crucial insight into how this learning experience in theSouth was carried back to the North by Truong Chinh: “... in November 1985 he travelledback to Haiphong and, according to the economist Tran Nham, 'the vivid reality of the Southhad left a deep imprint on the reform thinking of Truong Chinh.”

It was not only the rigidity of the old thinking which led to the disastrous campaigns againstthe middle class and petty traders in the South after 1975, and the disruptive persecution ofthe overseas Chinese residents who were the core of the vestigial market economy in theSouth, but also a growing concern that economic ties with the outside world were a TrojanHorse, that would serve as a conduit for subversion. Economic ties were potential avenuesfor penetration and control of Vietnam by external forces. It is well known that the 1978persecution of Vietnam’s Chinese ethnic minority stem, from this concern, but Huy Duc’saccount underlines this with specificity.

The China factor is a recurrent issue in this story. Changing Worlds shows that it was asignificant overlap between the opponents of internal reform, external integration with theglobalizing economy and cooperation with the capitalist powers who were integral elementsof it, and the advocates of closer ties between Vietnam and China as an alternative to theseductive but (to conservatives) threatening ties with former adversaries and their purportedschemes of “peaceful evolution”aimed at subverting the last remnant communist systems.

Huy Duc’s book reinforces the account of the China factor in Changing Worlds c relationswith the PRC and with revealing detail about the extent to which the Vietnamese leadershipwas divided and how this affected the outcome of the debate over the pace and scope ofVietnam’s global integration. Some specific revelations are:1. the role Chinese instructors insetting up the Party training institute where Marxist-Leninist economics was taught—important because blinkered adherence to this orthodoxy was cited by many Vietnameseleaders as a reason for their tardy adjustment to reality during Vietnam’s decade-longeconomic crisis following 1975, and delay in responding to the challenges of globalization. 2.Paradoxically, the adversarial relationship between Vietnam and China that developed after1975 also prevented Vietnam’s reformers from citing China during Deng Xiaoping’s reformsas a model of how a socialist system could adopt market mechanisms. Despite Gorbachev’sperestroika, the Soviet advisors who were called in the late 1980s to help Vietnam formulate aresponse to its economic woes were themselves still stuck in the old orthodoxies and werethemselves, as Huy Duc shows through interviews with leading Vietnamese economists of theperiod, part of the problem rather than part of the solution. 3. During the 1990s, afterVietnam’s reluctant rapprochement with China as the Soviet Union went into free fall,Vietnamese opponei of reform advocated closer political ties with China as an alternative to

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reconciling with former adversaries in the capitalist world. Changing Worlds records the factthat this “China card”eventually foundered as China became an increasing security concernto Vietnam but, again, Huy Duc provides important confirming detail. It was the eclipse ofthe China option that finally cleared the way for deep integration in the globalizing system ofinternational relations and economic ties.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was the main factor that forced Vietnam to reconcile withChina, and also the final blow to the old model of a socialist command econony. The Leninistpolitical structures of Vietnam largely persisted (with some minor exceptions such as theincreasing role of the National Assembly and a modest attempt to establish limits andaccountability to Party rule), even while the Marxist economic model was challenged andsome of the key Marxist ideological constructs, most importantly the centrality of classstruggle in political life, were downplayed and largely ignored. The international implicationof this was that it helped pave the way for a more relaxed view about the inevitable tensionsinvolved in Vietnam's relations with countries with different social systems, which was anessential precondition to pursuing a path of deep integration with the globalizing world.

A key turning point in the collapse of the Soviet model in Vietnam was the series ofevents in the communist bloc during the turbulent year of 1989 -- the “Year of LivingDangerously”is the chapter tide for this period. The Winning Side contributes a number ofrevelations which enlarge our understanding of this pivotal year both in the communistcountries and within Vietnam itself. I will illustrate these with several examples. The first isthe BTC account of extent and gravity of the economic crisis in Vietnam that dramaticallyescalated in 1988, which made the external crisis of 1989 all the more unsetling. This is notedin Changing Worlds but the impact it had on Vietnam’s leadership was not sufficientlystressed. The Soviet Union had, in its terminal stage, revived the pragmatic market thinking ofLenin in the New Economic Policy period of the Soviet Union, which filtered back toVietnam both through the large numbers of Soviet economic advisors brought in by Vietnam(who had earlier merely reinforced the old command economy model) and Vietnamesestudents trained in the Soviet Union during the Gorbachev era.

But it was a development much more important than “new thinking”that shut thedoor on a return to the old ways. Professor Dao Xuan Sam observed that “Fortunately forVietnam, the Soviet Union itself refused to grant the sum of money they had said would benecessary to halt inflation –if not, it was quite possible that Vietnam would have gone backto the old subsidy regime.”It became increasingly clear to Vietnam’s leaders that thealternative to the constraints of the interdependence (or “mutual dependency”as it was oftencalled at the time) was greater dependency on the Soviet Union. Integration into theglobalizing economy, on the other hand, offered a path to a more independenteconomy.

Changing Worlds covers the economic and political crisis in the South in the decadefollowing 1973, but not the subsequent crisis in North Vietnam in the period just before andduring the momentous year of 1989. Huy Duc writes that “At the beginning of 1988 a faminebroke out in twenty one provinces and towns in the North, with 9.3 million people lackingfood, among which 3.6 million have to skip meals and arc seriously famished.”A NationalAssembly report revealed that “In some places, people died of hunger.”A reporter wrote that

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“Almost the whole country was short of food, and in a few provinces it seemed like thefamine of 1943 [in which up to two million people died in North Vietnam, creating a societalcrisis that paved the way for the successful communist seizure of power in that year]. Beggarsflooded Hanoi in unusual numbers, not as isolated individuals as before, but in entire families.In some places there was nothing to eat at all.”BTC concludes that this shockingimmiseration “changed the thinking of a number of leaders and forced the Party to changesome of its policies”including a return to quasi private farming (the individual contractsystem) used in an earlier crisis. The famine had been reported at the time, based on officialVietnamese requests for aid' but Huy Duc's vivid account casts new light on the extent of theinternal crisis in Vietnam as it headed into the “Year of Living Dangerously" and is animportant explanation for the changing views of many in the leadership about the need forsystemic reform. In addition, it show why the reforms initiated in the South to cope withcrises in that region were eventually extended to the North, the original model of socialisteconomics.

Another significant BTC revelation concerns the lengthy stay of Vietnam's leader at the timein East Germany, at a time when Vietnam was engulfed in a sea of troubles both domesticallyand externally. Changing Worlds speculates on the reasons for this extendec stay, but therewas no conclusive information available prior to Huy Duc's reporting or what actuallytranspired during this critical visit. Changing Worlds devoted several paragraphs to theOctober 1989 three week stay of Party leader Nguyen Van Linh in East Germany, and notedthat he and other Vietnamese leaders had always viewed East Germany as a success story,and proof that old style socialism was economically successful and as proof that a rigidauthoritarian regime was still viable even in a world of vertiginous change. The unusuallength of Linh’s stay in Berlin at a time of great crisis at home and abroad for Vietnam wasmentioned, as was the rumor that he had a heart attack while there, which could explain theprolonged stay. Huy Duc's account, drawing largely on interviews with the prominent reformeconomist Le Dang Doanh who accompanied Linh on that trip (and who plays a key role inthe events discussed in Changing Worlds) discloses graphic details of Linh’s health condition,and the profound impact that this close up encounter with the unraveling communist worldhad on Linh. A major reason for the length of Linh’s stay in East Germany was a desperateattempt to persuade Gorbachev and other communist leaders to rally in defense of theunraveling socialist world and to continue high levels of aid to Vietnam.

Prior to his departure in October 1989 for East Berlin, Linh had discussed with theVietnamese politburo the idea of persuading Gorbachev to convene a meeting of communiststates to rally against the disintegration of the socialist bloc. Unfortunately for Linh, hisremark in a meeting (presumably with East Germans) that “Gorbachev is the biggestopportunist on the planet”reached Gorbachev’s ears, and Gorbachev sarcastically referred toit in a grudgingly granted and demeaning meeting with an ailing Linh. “The biggestopportunist on the planet greets comrade Nguyen Van Linh,”said Gorbachev. NeverthelessGorbachev politely listened to Linh’s pleas to save the socialist bloc and also to continue tosubsidize Vietnam’s forthcoming economic development plan. “That’s really tough, that’sreally tough,”said Gorbachev, “the Vietnamese comrades will simply have to take care of itthemselves.”

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In addition, the East Germans, once firm friends and supporters of Vietnam, largely ignoredLinh, and his appeals to other communist leaders to rally together fell on deaf ears as theyworried about their own futures. Now that we know these details of the Linh-Gorbachevmeeting, it is even harder to understand why the Vietnamese leadership clung to the illusionthat the socialist world as they knew it would somehow weather the storm. The great shockregistered in Hanoi when the Soviet Union finally dissolved is evidence of the denial ofreality by a leadership generation so encased in a belief system that what was obvious even tothe casual observer in 1989— that the socialist world would never be the same— did not sinkin to many in the politburo until the actual demise of the Soviet Union in late 1991. This, inturn, helps us to appreciate the formidable challenge faced by the Vietnamese reformers whoinsisted that fundamental changes were needed, and why the decade of the 1990s was adecade of policy stalemate between reformers and conservatives.In 1988, Truong Chinh passed away after slipping and falling down a flight of stairs. Hisreplacement was Nguyen Van Linh, who was initially hailed as a “new thinker”and reformer.As Changing Worlds describes, Linh retreated back into the old orthodoxies in the face of thecollapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and Vietnam's own economic troubles. BTCrelates the concern of Linh and his entourage that they get out of East Berlin before a possiblecollapse would leave them vulnerable and trapped in a hostile situation in the middle of thecapitalist world “without a dollar in their pockets,”so they found a doctor to get the ailingNguyen Van Linh in shape to travel, and hurriedly grabbed the next flight out of Berlin as theGerman Democratic Republic dissolved before their eyes.

This led to an alliance between Linh and the ideological conservatives, which was implied inChanging Worlds, but made explicit in BTC. Even so, some reformers managed to insert thewords “market economy”into the main text for the crucial 1991 Seventh Party Congress,sugar coating with what they considered empty verbiage (market economy “under the controlof the state”) in order to placate the conservatives. The conservatives were not fooled,however, and vigorously protested. At this critical juncture, another unlikely figure salvagedthe reform agenda or at least kept it alive: Do Muoi, the stodgy manager of Vietnam’scommand economy in an earlier period joined forces with the reformer Vo Van Kiet. BTCasserts that “If the two persons, Do Muoi and Vo Van Kiet had not resolutely defended it, in1991 the concept of a market economy might not have been put on the agenda of theCommunist Party of Vietnam.”This was not, says Huy Duc, a mere question of words; thestruggle between the reformers and their opponents shows that “the ‘struggle between the twopaths’in the Party really began at that time.”

The pivotal year in the 1990s decade, characterized in Changing Worlds as a period of “waryreconciliation”and “uncertain transition,”was 1995, when a confluence of domestic andexternal events created the conditions for an eventual breakthrough in Vietnam’s stalledprogress toward reform and global integration. This was the year that Vietnam joined,ASEAN, and normalized relations with the United States and the European Union. It was alsothe year of preparing for the Eighth Party Congress, at which a major generational turnover ofthe top leadership was expected. This did not happen, for reasons discussed in ChangingWorlds, but the nature and intensity of the conflict between reformers and their opponents isunderlined further by the details concerning the leadership struggles provided by Huy Duc.The focal point of this struggle was a letter to the politburo sent by reformist Premier Vo VanKiet, a blistering critique of the opponents of reform and integration which stirred a virulent

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counter-attack from conservatives. The contents of this letter have been well known, and it isdiscussed in Changing Worlds. It is the reaction to the letter, however, which was less welldocumented. And, it was at this point that a new development occurred in Vietnamese elitepolitics, the political intrusion of the military— and ominously the military intelligencebranch— into the affairs of the Party leadership at the highest level. This part of the story wasknown only by unverifiable documents circulating on the internet, and Changing Worldsdiscussed this development with great caution and many caveats, owing to the difficulties ofdocumentation.

We discover from Huy Duc that there was considerable substance to the allegation theseinternet documents of sinister activities and power plays by the steadily expanding militaryintelligence organization known as General Directorate II (GD II). Ironically it was Vo VanKiet who, to his later regret, signed the 1997 order that expanded the powers of this body, andpoliticized it by taking it from a position subordinate to the Army General Staff and placing itunder the “direct and absolute control of the Party.”This on surface would seem to insure thatthe military intelligence organization would not have an independent role. Mao Zedong hadfamously stated that “power grows out of barrel of a gun”but, less famously, added that “Ourprinciple is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to commandthe Party.”But following Kiet’s order, things did not exactly work out that way. Theconservative ideologists consistently warned of a Western plot to “de-politicize the armedforces”and the consequence was to turn part of the military into a partisan combatant inVietnam’s internal political struggles. GD II was employed by anti-reform Party leaders touse its technical expertise for political surveillance and even manufacturing of false chargesof conspiracy -- against General Giap, among others. Changing Worlds mentioned some ofthese reported incidents, but underlined the difficulty of verifying them. BTC unveils a quitedetailed plausible picture of the sinister side of the GD II, which I could only dimly graspfrom unverifiable bits and pieces of information on the internet.

Even so, Changing Worlds observed that "it is an irony that among the rare instance in whichthere is public evidence of a potentially destabilizing power struggle in Vietnam has involvedthe military— or, more specifically, an element of the military intelligece branch ..."—referring to GD II. In addition to the KGB-like intrusion into matters “internal security,”GDII aligned itself with the opponents of deep integration to sabotage major policies like the US.Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement. GD II sent slanted reports of the progress of thenegotiations to selected individual politburo members in effort to derail the process.According to the Vietnamese trade negotiator, “Looking back at the reports of GD II, one seesthat most of them had the purpose of influencing the ranks of Vietnam’s leadership, bycreating an unfavorable mind set in external activities tending to push toward confrontationwith America. I don’t understand why, after reading these kinds of reports, the politburodidn't demand that they be corrected.”

I stress the importance of understanding the impact of GD II on the story told in this book,because the overreach of the seemingly formidable alliance between the conservativeideological theoreticians (who tried to brand reform and integration as a political“deviation”— a dangerous label which could lead to extreme retribution), and this rogueelement of the military, which provided some real muscle to that anti-reform group,undermined their apparent success in stalling the reform process in the 1990s in what proved

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to be a pyrrhic victory. One of the important propositions of a theoretical model drawn on bythis book, from the writings of Jeffrey Legro is that in order to change a deeply entrenchedmind set, it is necessary not only to show a better alternative, but to discredit the oldorthodoxy.

The better alternative was provided by the reformers. Discrediting the old orthodoxy wasunwittingly assisted by the anti-reform unholy alliance. Changing Worlds observed that “Theapparent success of partial reform in the mid-1990s which had seemed to validate theconservative line on going slow and minimizing change was called into question by the end ofthe decade, as Vietnam’s economy had reaped the easy gains of reform, and stalled as theunresolved issues of reform blocked further progress. This, in turn, strengthened the positionof the reformers, who had been arguing for bolder action, and brought to the surface again thecentral issue of whether or not the main danger for Vietnam was falling behind in the race foreconomic development or risking destabilization by opening up. The conservatives had beensomewhat discredited on the national-security front by the failed China card of Le Kha Phieu,criticism of the territorial treaties with China for giving away too much, meddling in politicalintrigues, and by their own involvement in the widespread networks of corruption, madeeasier by the partially reformed system, which created artificial monopolies and rewardedpolitical influence which could be translated into cash— the worst of both worlds.”

It should be noted that one of the problems of relying on Huy Duc's account is that we have totake his word for the authenticity of the sources he cites. Another problem is that hisreportorial style is anecdotal, not analytical. He sometimes cites sources who say con-tradictory things, and does not pause to analyze or evaluate the relative merits of the as-sertions. Even so, I think we can have confidence in the accuracy of his accounts based onpersonal interviews, and a reasonable degree of confidence in documents he draws upon andsecond hand hearsay that he reports. It is mostly consistent with what outside scholars andobservers have reported, and contains much more elaborating and informative detail.

So it is with Huy Duc's account of the reaction to Vo Van Kiet's 1995 letter to the politburo.Changing Worlds cites the comment of journalist and author Robert Templer that this letter“touched off an intense political struggle, and ultimately diminished the influence of theconservatives.” Kiet dismissed the conservatives scare talk about “peaceful evolution”andimperialist plots, and declared that “In today’s world there is no antagonistic contradictionbetween imperialism and socialism ...”He remarked on the diversity and inclusiveness in thenew globalized system and dismissed the idea of retreating into a cloistered international sub-system of the rump remnants of the once formidable communist bloc (in other contexts Kietreminded the conservatives of Vietnam’s security tensions with China, and the fact that NorthKorea had opposed Vietnam’s invasion and occupation of Cambodia, undercutting thesecurity rationale for “sociali solidarity”). Changing Worlds observed that “this letter seemsto be a watershed in the evolution of Vietnam’s new thinking about international relations, inthat it represen a leader at the top of Vietnam’s political system explicitly closing the chapterof the ‘two worlds’mentality and spelling out the logical consequences of abandoning this ‘usand them’mentality.” Kiet argued that it would be a “disaster for the country”if the 1996Eighth Party Congress “timidly passed up the opportunity”to take advantage of globalizationand “make the people wealthy, the country strong, create an egalitarian an, civilized society.”

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The conservative backlash to Kiet and his letter led to the installation of what turned out to bean interim Party leader, the political general Le Kha Phieu, who was essentiall a front man forconservative Party ideologists and the economic and political interests of those in the militaryand other sectors who benefitted from political monopolies on commercial ventures and rentor profits from the sale of politically procured valuable land. The self-interested element ofthis anti-reform coalition ultimately helped undermine the claim of the conservative Partyideologists, who were the most visible opponents of reform, that they were standing up forlofty ideals and sacred principles. A politburo member (later dismissed for politicalintriguing) called Kiet's letter “100% de viationism.”Kiet pointed out that the “deviationism”that the conservatives accused the reformers of was actually a charge better leveled at thecorrupt use of political power foi profit (Kiet himself was accused by conservatives ofnepotism and his wife of large scale corruption).

The final contribution of BTC to our understanding of the issues raised in Changing Worldsdoes, in fact, point the way toward the future; the question of the significance of generationalturnover in the leadership. But here, BTC is somewhat disappointing. It observes that theleadership elected at the Tenth Party Congress of 2006, the point at which our story ends,“still had some people who had grown up in wartime,”but notes that by and large this was agroup that belonged to the generation of “becoming cadres”and no longer a “generation ofrevolutionaries.”' This is another way of stating Max Weber’s “routinization of charisma”proposition about the drop-off in political appeal and authority following the passing ofmovement founders and succession by followers who have fewer claims to rule by virtue ofheroic deeds. But beyond that observation, there is little discussion of the character and futureimpact of this generation, and its implications for the evolution of Vietnam’s political system.Thus there is little to add to the discussion of this topic in the first edition of ChangingWorlds.

To simplify a more extended discussion of this subject in Changing Worlds, I advanced theview that we would see far less of the personalized political conflicts that characterized thestory of Vietnam’s reforms and integration in the future. It is more likely that the system itselfwill submerge the individuals who run it and the conflicts will be struggles over turf andbenefits rather than great matters of state. This means that it is unlikely that we will seetransformational leaders like Truong Chinh and Vo Van Kiet in the future.

But it also means that domineering “just say no”figures like Le Duan and Le Duc Tho willnot find it easy to halt a gradually evolutionary process. It may even mean that discordantelements of the political system, like the rogue military intelligence branch or the group ofconservative ideologues, in the future (though the jousting over polemical terminologycontinues) will be hammered down like the proverbial nail that sticks out. Whether thisprocess leads to a more open and participatory system is open to question, however. It isequally possible that the challenges of globalization to the powers of the state to control itspolitical and economic environment, and the entrenchment of localism and familismdescribed in Changing Worlds will lead to a weaker, but not necessarily more liberal state.What may eventuate is a system that is self-perpetuating, but also self-evolving— perhaps inways that neither the current leadership nor outside observers could anticipate. So, in the end,both Changing Worlds and The Winning Side will be more helpful in understanding the pastthan as guides to the future. Vietnam’s modem history suggests that it is impossible to

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understand the present, let alone the future, without reference to shaping forces that producedit. Hopefully this book will be a small contribution to that understanding.