[Vacets-local-dc] [The Truth about Vietnam today by Le Dang Doanh]

[Hai Tran]

FYI, Dr. Le Danh Doanh was Director of the Institute for Economic Research and Management in Hanoi. He served as advisor to former PM Pham Van Dong, General Secretaries Nguyen van Linh, Do Muoi, Le Kha Phieu, etc., (with the end result of a corrupt bureaucracy and a pilfered economy.) He fits in very well with the phenomenon of "speaking out only when safe" of the communist big shots.
 
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The truth about today's Vietnam, as told by Le Dang Doanh 
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 See the Sol Sanders Archive
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By Sol SandersSPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
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June 16, 2005 
Prime Minister Phan Van Khai meets President Bush on June 21, the interview marking the highest-ranking Vietnamese official visit since the Vietnam War and continuation of a campaign to find common ground. 
The muffled announcement [released on a holiday] and its media blackout is typical. Much of Vietnam policy through six decades was made absentmindedly – until the Vietnam War catastrophe! [President Johnson’s Secretary of State Rusk said when, as a then young officer on Lord Louis Mountbatten’s World War II South East Asia Command, after the Cairo Summit in which President Roosevelt announced a decolonization policy, he asked Washington for policy on French Indochina. He never got an answer.] 
But State Department spokesmen have been circulating “good news” in parochial meetings where Vietnam is discussed [including among some otherwise antagonistic two million American Vietnamese]. The pitch: as bad as things have been under a ruthless and corrupt Communist regime, there has been a sea change; liberalization of the economy, the regime moving away from its Stalinist past, and great progress. 
In their enthusiasm, they sometimes lapse into Soviet-style percentage figures [an xhundred percent increase on a minimal base]. 
The truth is despite every effort by the American bureaucracy including trade incentives extended usually only to U.S. allies, the Vietnamese economy is caught in a time warp. The bustling nature of Ho Chi Minh City is only a reminder Saigon was a thriving entrepot, living by hook and crook through French colonialism, Japanese Occupation, “the French War”, “the American War”, and repression after the Northern takeover in 1975. 
Last fall Le Dang Doanh, a properly brought up Soviet-bloc-style Communist economist and bureaucrat, laid out the sorry mess to a subcommittee of the Politburo. Le was economic adviser to Vietnam’s first prime minister, later adviser to the Communist Party secretary-general. 
As late as 2000, Le made half-hearted defense for the 1996 decision for “Do Moi” [economic renovation], the Vietnamese Party’s copy of “the Chinese model”. Now he points out financial stability and credit ratings are only slightly better than bankrupt North Korea. 
Constant comparison’s to Vietnam’s past are irrelevant, Le says; at the present rate of development with a per capita income of $500, Vietnam would take 50 years to reach the current stage of Thailand with $2500. He says Prime Minister Phan Van Khai’s talk of reaching OECD income levels is ludicrous. He points out all Vietnamese exports are raw materials, all imports value added products [overwhelmed by smuggled/dumped Chinese consumer goods]. Taxes are providing only 2 percent of the budget with 27 percent from offshore oil. 
Le’s bombshell was denouncing its authoritarian system and rampant official corruption at the heart of Vietnam’s poor economic performance. Le says social justice does not exist; the Party only uses laws for oppression. The Party’s parallel government makes government ineffective, creates confusion and irresponsibility. Le has even thrown in a zinger: the open secret former South Vietnam has kept the country going and Hanoi’s policy victimization of the South has held back development. 
Putting a point to Le’s remarks is the Khai visit coincides with new crackdowns against Vietnam’s religious and the minority indigenous tribals. "Our current political system is inappropriate, inadequate, and severely inefficient," Le said. Le warned that corruption has led to rule of a mafia and that “
[S]ome day this situation may erupt into uncontrollable instability
The weakest point of the system now is the regime of one-party rule, which is authoritarian and severely undemocratic." 
But in the interest of realpolitische, State’s Michaevellians-manques see this rickety Vietnam slum as a potential ally in the coming increasing competition – if not worse – with China. They have grabbed at straws: traditional Vietnamese fierce nationalism, in pre-French times, a function of ambivalent relations with China; isolated incidents like Hanoi’s flaunting of Chinese control by setting up tourism to one of the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea; tempting the American military with the Cam Rahn Bay ex-U.S. base, etc. [U.S. Assistant Defense Secretary Peter Rodman has just held talks with Vietnam's Defense Minister Pham Van Tra and his deputy Nguyen Huy Hieu on a two-day visit.] 
The siren call from Washington might have takers in Hanoi. The Vietnamese CP has always had its anti-Chinese faction [pro-French CP, pro-Moscow in the old days]. And there may be many, at high levels, whispering sweet nothings in American officials’ ears. But many years ago, in U.S. exile; the martyred Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem lectured me on how because of Vietnamese geography and history, China had always dominated Vietnamese politics – when it had a strong central regime and there was no third party intervention. 
For all the wishful thinking in Washington, it is as true today as in the past, alas! Given Vietnam’s Communists doctrinal and economic dependence [the Chinese hardliner Li Peng laboriously set up a lucrative network among the regional Vietnamese CP cadre almost a decade ago] one can be pretty sure Khai’s visit has been “cleared” in Beijing. 










Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders at comcast.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.


June 16, 2005



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