Post-Cold War Vietnam: stay low, learn, adapt and try to have fun - but what about the party?

Abstract

The paper compares political ideas and acts in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev and in Communist Vietnam. It argues that the Gorbachev group, committed to progressive change, concluded that power granted to them by their position in the Soviet system needed to be eliminated, creating a 'boot strap' problem. To secure progressive change they had first to destroy their own power base. By contrast, the ruling Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) attempted, in the two decades after the emergence of a market economy in 1989-1991, to rule an increasingly open society through Soviet political institutions. By the late 'noughties' Vietnam faced a crisis of domestic sovereignty, with politics largely a m..