Capitalistic fervor fuels wide reforms in Vietnam
HANOI - It was Lenin's birthday. The most important Communist Party meeting in five years was under way. And the star of the show was the world's most famous capitalist, Bill Gates.
The president, the prime minister and the deputy prime minister all excused themselves from the party meeting Sunday to have their pictures taken with a man who has more star power in Vietnam than any of them.
When they heard he was in town, hundreds of people climbed trees and pushed through police lines to get a glimpse of him. He was the top story in the next morning's newspapers.
This is where Vietnam stands today, moving cautiously toward a new version of communism while both the people and their leaders lunge eagerly for the brass ring of capitalist development.
"That was very symbolic," said Le Dang Doanh, an official in the Ministry of Planning, speaking of Gates's reception.
"It is a very clear sign of the new mood of society and the people. Everybody wants to be like Bill Gates."
It is exactly 20 years since Vietnam, still struggling from the aftermath of war, launched a sort of perestroika program that has moved it from a strict planned economy to the more helter-skelter mechanisms of the marketplace.
Over the past decade, Vietnam has been putting its economic house in order - with a bid to join the World Trade Organization later this year - and it is drawing new interest from foreign investors.
"You'll find tremendous enthusiasm among the foreign community for Vietnam as the next rising star," said Jonathan Pinkus, the country representative for the United Nations Development Program.
He said this was partly because major players like Intel, Canon, Fujitsu and Gates himself were leading the way, and partly because Vietnam was being seen as a stable hedge to companies that have invested heavily in China.
In addition, since a previous moment of enthusiasm faded a decade ago, he said, Vietnam has been improving its legal infrastructure, banking system and other regulations, making it a safer and more reliable business environment.
It has tied itself to so many international agreements, including a trade agreement with the United States, that its economic reforms now appear irreversible.
"In just about every sector you can think of, there's been an ongoing process of reform that has proceeded step by step," Pinkus said.
The five-yearly Party congress that ended Tuesday after reelecting the party's general secretary, Nong Duc Manh, 56, was no longer dominated by the ideological debates of the past but by a drive to become, in Gates's words, the next Asian economic miracle.
The party's next five-year plan aims to increase exports, combat corruption and continue its economic integration with the outside world with a goal of maintaining a growth rate of about 8 percent and creating eight million new jobs.
It is seeking to move into a higher level of manufacturing, including electronics, rather than to remain "the world's best maker of socks and towels," in the words of Adam Sitikoff, executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce.
As they balance what they call "a market economy with socialist orientation," the country's leaders are also reshaping the party's relationship with an increasingly materialistic public.
About half the population of 83 million was born after the war with the United States ended 31 years ago.
This is a country that is very much looking toward the future, not to the past.
Reaching out in an unprecedented way, the party published its draft documents for public discussion early this year and received, by Manh's count, tens of thousands of comments, suggestions and criticisms.
It is not clear whether any of these really did affect the congress's final report, but it was at least a gesture of inclusion in the closed workings of the government.
It was significant that most of the comments involved ways to improve the party's leadership, rather than challenging its primacy or demanding a multiparty system, said Carlyle Thayer, an expert on Vietnam at the Australian Defense Force Academy in Canberra.
When people here say they want more democracy, several analysts said, they are not for the most part calling for political pluralism but for a more open and responsive Communist Party leadership.
In another clear response to public opinion, Manh and other leaders also emphasized a commitment to combat corruption - a direct result of a crescendo of press coverage of a scandal that had forced the resignation of the minister of transport.
And in a sign that the party is distancing itself from its orthodox past, this is the first party congress since the meetings began in 1951 that has not invited delegations from foreign communist parties, Thayer said.
As recently as 2000, the party's general secretary, then Le Ka Phieu, told Bill Clinton in Hanoi that socialism was only in temporary decline and remained the wave of the future.
Those words have an odd ring in today's context.
When officials talk of socialism today they are more likely to be referring to one of the casualties of economic free play - a widening gap between the very poor, who make up 20 percent of the population, and the toweringly rich, who are growing richer by the day.
That social divide has for years been a major concern of the party.
The Vietnamese leadership is known for its caution, and as it seeks step by step to get communism right, where it failed elsewhere in the world, it is hoping to get capitalism right as well.
This mixture of the two systems can produce paradoxical results. A large chunk of the country's foreign exchange earnings comes from some $6 billion a year sent home by overseas Vietnamese. Most of these are the families of refugees who fled the victory of the Communists in 1975.
By Seth Mydans - The International Herald Tribune - April 26, 2006.
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