Elliott, W.P.

, David, 2012, Changing Worlds: Vietnams transitions from the Cold War
to 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 was
essentially concluded in that year. It is always tempting to see how the passage of time has
affected the analysis done right at the close of the period analyzed in this book, which
assesses Vietnams efforts to come to terms with the dramatic changes of the postCold War
period and the era of globalization. It is also tempting to assess the extent to which the course
of events after 2007 has confirmed or altered the trajectory of Vietnam's policies and
engagement 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 prognosticationand offered only a few qualified thoughts about
Vietnam's future, and this caveat still stands. The reason is that the main focus of this study is
on a completed historical chapter the period from 1975 when Vietnam confidently
envisaged a future within the orthodox parameters of socialist development and the socialist
world in an international system divided into antagonistic blocs, and 2007 when its entry into
the World Trade Organization capped a contested evolution from the two-worlds framework
of 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 deep
integration with it does, of course, have profound implications for Vietnam's future, though
the way Vietnams next historical chapter will unfold is still difficult to predict, even with the
benefit of observing what has happened in the years since taking the plungeinto the
turbulent waters of the globalized world. One might have thought that the 2008 global
financial crisis would give even the most ardent Vietnamese reformers pause about the
uncertainties that come with global integration, but the evidence so far is that the plunge was
irreversible (though curiously the exact point at which this happened is still not clearly
understood) and, as happened after the earlier 1997 Asian financial crisis, Vietnams
integrationist course was not derailed despite the ammunition that the unpredictable
turbulence of this darker side of globalization offered to opponents of reform and integration
in Vietnam.
But, if the story moving forward has not significantly changed since the first edition of
Changing 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 the
Vietnamese journalist Huy Duc called The Winning Side (Ben Thang Cuoc, published in two
volumes which I will cite as BTC I and II) first disseminated on the internet and then
published in Vietnamese in the United States in 2012. The author explains his ironic title in
the following way: My book begins its chronicles with April 30, 1975, the day when many
believed North Vietnam liberated South Vietnam. Taking a cautious look back at the last
1

three decades, many are stupefied by the impression that the liberatedturned out to be the
North.
Without necessarily endorsing this provocative observation (although Changing Worlds does
have a section titled The South Shall Rise Againwhich explores this theme), I certainly
agree with many highly qualified observers that this is a remarkable book, offering many
unique and rare insights into the inner world of Vietnamese elite politics. The New York
Times characterized this book as perhaps the first critical, comprehensive history of Vietnam
since 1975 by someone inside the country.In the end, I think that this insider account
reinforces most of the analysis of Changing Worlds, which was based on Vietnamese sources
but 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 been
available to me when I wrote the first edition, which confirm or enlarge upon key points of
analysis and interpretation dealing not only with the details of political struggles within
Vietnams leadership over the ways to respond to globalization, but even more importantly
for this book, the impact of mind-sets and ideas and the role that they played in the outcome
of these struggles. It would be pointless to try to incorporate the multiple revelations from this
massive two volume work, but I would like to mention a few examples, and hope that this
may induce the interested reader to read Huy Ducs magnum opus in conjunction with this
book. The Winning Side was written with a different purpose and focus from Changing
Worlds, but the portrait it paints of the events and key characters in this story is a very useful
complement to what I have tried to present.
The first example is his portrayal of the disastrous attempt to impose socialism on the South
right after the Communist victory of 1975 and the unification of the country the following
year. This episode had a significant impact on subsequent events in several ways. First, it was
an economic and political disaster, and provided a powerful negative example of the rigid
version of socialism that then Party leader Le Duan and others represented. This failure
subsequently led to a search for a better way, and to the reform process which officially
started in 1986.
The search for a way out of South Vietnam's economic crisis set in motion a chain events
which ultimately transformed the policies and institutions in North Vietnam that the
leadership had rashly attempted to impose on the South, and spilled over into security and
diplomatic spheres. The improvised responses to the economic crisis in the South led to the
resurfacing of some economists who had served under the pre-1975 Saigon government who
were an important source of reform ideas. A young professor of economics recalled that his
generation began to encounter the idea of a market economy from a series of articles written
in the newspaper Tuoi Tre and, after that in Lao Dong Chu Nhat ... The articles written prior
to 1975 [in South Vietnam] by Professors Nguyen Van Ngon, Pho Ba Long ... began to be put
to use.The circulation of these ideas eventually led to a demand by Vietnamese students to
drop Marxist economics as a required part the Ho Chi Minh City University of Economics. In
February 1990, Nguyen Van Hao, an advisor to the World Bank and a former Deputy Premier
of Saigon, who had left Vietnam in 1981 but had remained in touch with Vo Van Kiet, was
asked by Kiet to return Vietnam for consultations. Nguyen Xuan Oanh, a former International
2

Monetary Fund economist and also a Republic of Vietnam Vice Premier (whose photo
appears 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 Saigon
government 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 of
factors: (1) the number of prominent ideas in a society that might serve as a replacement for
the dominant orthodoxy, and (2) the perceived initial results such new ideas.The intrusion of
market 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 policy
debate in the 1980s was an important contributing factor to the growth and ultimate
ascendency of reform ideas.
Involvement in the debacle of the socialist transformation campaignin the South weakened
the position of the opponents of reform in the period following 1986. Some anti-reformers
tried to minimize their ties to socialist transformationin the South, and pin the entire
responsibility on the then Party leader Le Duan. Others, however attempted to exonerate Le
Duan from blame for Vietnam's earlier economic blunders. Following the collapse of the
Soviet Union, Le Duan's closest aide said during a review of the early decision to impose
socialism on the South, It is really hard to sit here now, following the collapse of the Soviet
Union, and talk about this old story.Another aide to Le Duan, who had at one time been the
head 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 of
development in the South, at that time one would have to have been terribly creative to have
escaped the dogmatism of the entire Communist camp. This creativity would have had to be
based on a mature theoretical foundation, which we were lacking. Our theoreticians had all
studied in China and other socialist countries, and our Party school originated from Chinese
teachers.Another assistant of Le Duan, Professor Tran Phuong, who an informed observer
called a liberal economist[mot nha kinh to tu do] also had to admit that Prior to the
collapse 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 the
socialist bloc concepts and policies which were inappropriate for Vietnam, was a considerable
departure for their earlier pride in being part of such an enlightened and powerful bloc and the
desire to emulate more advanced socialist countries. But, as the examples just cited on the
revival of discussion of market economics in the 1980s shows, the inability to challenge
command economy orthodoxy was not entirely due to lack of alternative ideas in circulation,
although these ideas were considered outside the sphere of acceptability and politically
dangerous at the time. This, in turn, underlines the exceptional courage of the early reformers
who accepted the risks of challenging the conventional wisdom. It also showed that the
reformers would have to be protected and promoted at the very top of the leadership in order
to have an impact.
Even if the old thinking was generally shared by the leadership, including some who later
became converts to reform ideas, the death of Le Duan prior to the 1986 reformSixth Party
Congress eliminated a significant obstacle to what became known as new thinking(tu duy
moi). His transitional successor, Truong Chinh, played a decisive role in moving Vietnam
3

toward economic reform. As Changing Worlds pointed out, this was especially ironic in that
Truong Chinh had been previously identified as a rigid and hard line ideological purist, who
took the blame for the disastrous overzealous land reform of the 1950s in North Vietnam. In
the 1980s he turned out to be a pragmatic realist (a label which some had earlier ascribed to
Le Duan's wartime leadership, in contrast with Truong Chinh's insistence on maintaining
socialist orthodoxy and opposition to Le Duan's whatever worksapproach). Truong Chinhs
investigations 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 retrospective
newspaper series on this period in the liberal newspaper Tuoi Tre, for which Huy Duc once
worked. To this account BTC adds a crucial insight into how this learning experience in the
South was carried back to the North by Truong Chinh: ... in November 1985 he travelled
back to Haiphong and, according to the economist Tran Nham, 'the vivid reality of the South
had 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 against
the middle class and petty traders in the South after 1975, and the disruptive persecution of
the overseas Chinese residents who were the core of the vestigial market economy in the
South, but also a growing concern that economic ties with the outside world were a Trojan
Horse, that would serve as a conduit for subversion. Economic ties were potential avenues
for penetration and control of Vietnam by external forces. It is well known that the 1978
persecution of Vietnams Chinese ethnic minority stem, from this concern, but Huy Ducs
account underlines this with specificity.
The China factor is a recurrent issue in this story. Changing Worlds shows that it was a
significant overlap between the opponents of internal reform, external integration with the
globalizing economy and cooperation with the capitalist powers who were integral elements
of it, and the advocates of closer ties between Vietnam and China as an alternative to the
seductive but (to conservatives) threatening ties with former adversaries and their purported
schemes of peaceful evolutionaimed at subverting the last remnant communist systems.
Huy Ducs book reinforces the account of the China factor in Changing Worlds c relations
with the PRC and with revealing detail about the extent to which the Vietnamese leadership
was divided and how this affected the outcome of the debate over the pace and scope of
Vietnams global integration. Some specific revelations are:1. the role Chinese instructors in
setting up the Party training institute where Marxist-Leninist economics was taught
important because blinkered adherence to this orthodoxy was cited by many Vietnamese
leaders as a reason for their tardy adjustment to reality during Vietnams decade-long
economic crisis following 1975, and delay in responding to the challenges of globalization. 2.
Paradoxically, the adversarial relationship between Vietnam and China that developed after
1975 also prevented Vietnams reformers from citing China during Deng Xiaopings reforms
as a model of how a socialist system could adopt market mechanisms. Despite Gorbachevs
perestroika, the Soviet advisors who were called in the late 1980s to help Vietnam formulate a
response to its economic woes were themselves still stuck in the old orthodoxies and were
themselves, as Huy Duc shows through interviews with leading Vietnamese economists of the
period, part of the problem rather than part of the solution. 3. During the 1990s, after
Vietnams 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
4

reconciling with former adversaries in the capitalist world. Changing Worlds records the fact
that this China cardeventually foundered as China became an increasing security concern
to Vietnam but, again, Huy Duc provides important confirming detail. It was the eclipse of
the China option that finally cleared the way for deep integration in the globalizing system of
international relations and economic ties.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was the main factor that forced Vietnam to reconcile with
China, and also the final blow to the old model of a socialist command econony. The Leninist
political structures of Vietnam largely persisted (with some minor exceptions such as the
increasing role of the National Assembly and a modest attempt to establish limits and
accountability to Party rule), even while the Marxist economic model was challenged and
some of the key Marxist ideological constructs, most importantly the centrality of class
struggle in political life, were downplayed and largely ignored. The international implication
of this was that it helped pave the way for a more relaxed view about the inevitable tensions
involved in Vietnam's relations with countries with different social systems, which was an
essential 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 of
events in the communist bloc during the turbulent year of 1989 -- the Year of Living
Dangerouslyis the chapter tide for this period. The Winning Side contributes a number of
revelations which enlarge our understanding of this pivotal year both in the communist
countries and within Vietnam itself. I will illustrate these with several examples. The first is
the BTC account of extent and gravity of the economic crisis in Vietnam that dramatically
escalated in 1988, which made the external crisis of 1989 all the more unsetling. This is noted
in Changing Worlds but the impact it had on Vietnams leadership was not sufficiently
stressed. The Soviet Union had, in its terminal stage, revived the pragmatic market thinking of
Lenin in the New Economic Policy period of the Soviet Union, which filtered back to
Vietnam both through the large numbers of Soviet economic advisors brought in by Vietnam
(who had earlier merely reinforced the old command economy model) and Vietnamese
students trained in the Soviet Union during the Gorbachev era.
But it was a development much more important than new thinkingthat shut the
door on a return to the old ways. Professor Dao Xuan Sam observed that Fortunately for
Vietnam, the Soviet Union itself refused to grant the sum of money they had said would be
necessary to halt inflation if not, it was quite possible that Vietnam would have gone back
to the old subsidy regime.It became increasingly clear to Vietnams leaders that the
alternative to the constraints of the interdependence (or mutual dependencyas it was often
called at the time) was greater dependency on the Soviet Union. Integration into the
globalizing economy, on the other hand, offered a path to a more independent
economy.
Changing Worlds covers the economic and political crisis in the South in the decade
following 1973, but not the subsequent crisis in North Vietnam in the period just before and
during the momentous year of 1989. Huy Duc writes that At the beginning of 1988 a famine
broke out in twenty one provinces and towns in the North, with 9.3 million people lacking
food, among which 3.6 million have to skip meals and arc seriously famished.A National
Assembly report revealed that In some places, people died of hunger.A reporter wrote that
5

Almost the whole country was short of food, and in a few provinces it seemed like the
famine of 1943 [in which up to two million people died in North Vietnam, creating a societal
crisis that paved the way for the successful communist seizure of power in that year]. Beggars
flooded 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 shocking
immiseration changed the thinking of a number of leaders and forced the Party to change
some of its policiesincluding a return to quasi private farming (the individual contract
system) used in an earlier crisis. The famine had been reported at the time, based on official
Vietnamese requests for aid' but Huy Duc's vivid account casts new light on the extent of the
internal crisis in Vietnam as it headed into the Year of Living Dangerously" and is an
important explanation for the changing views of many in the leadership about the need for
systemic reform. In addition, it show why the reforms initiated in the South to cope with
crises in that region were eventually extended to the North, the original model of socialist
economics.
Another significant BTC revelation concerns the lengthy stay of Vietnam's leader at the time
in East Germany, at a time when Vietnam was engulfed in a sea of troubles both domestically
and externally. Changing Worlds speculates on the reasons for this extendec stay, but there
was no conclusive information available prior to Huy Duc's reporting or what actually
transpired during this critical visit. Changing Worlds devoted several paragraphs to the
October 1989 three week stay of Party leader Nguyen Van Linh in East Germany, and noted
that 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 rigid
authoritarian regime was still viable even in a world of vertiginous change. The unusual
length of Linhs stay in Berlin at a time of great crisis at home and abroad for Vietnam was
mentioned, as was the rumor that he had a heart attack while there, which could explain the
prolonged stay. Huy Duc's account, drawing largely on interviews with the prominent reform
economist Le Dang Doanh who accompanied Linh on that trip (and who plays a key role in
the events discussed in Changing Worlds) discloses graphic details of Linhs health condition,
and the profound impact that this close up encounter with the unraveling communist world
had on Linh. A major reason for the length of Linhs stay in East Germany was a desperate
attempt to persuade Gorbachev and other communist leaders to rally in defense of the
unraveling 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 the
Vietnamese politburo the idea of persuading Gorbachev to convene a meeting of communist
states to rally against the disintegration of the socialist bloc. Unfortunately for Linh, his
remark in a meeting (presumably with East Germans) that Gorbachev is the biggest
opportunist on the planetreached Gorbachevs ears, and Gorbachev sarcastically referred to
it in a grudgingly granted and demeaning meeting with an ailing Linh. The biggest
opportunist on the planet greets comrade Nguyen Van Linh,said Gorbachev. Nevertheless
Gorbachev politely listened to Linhs pleas to save the socialist bloc and also to continue to
subsidize Vietnams forthcoming economic development plan. Thats really tough, thats
really tough,said Gorbachev, the Vietnamese comrades will simply have to take care of it
themselves.

In addition, the East Germans, once firm friends and supporters of Vietnam, largely ignored
Linh, and his appeals to other communist leaders to rally together fell on deaf ears as they
worried about their own futures. Now that we know these details of the Linh-Gorbachev
meeting, it is even harder to understand why the Vietnamese leadership clung to the illusion
that the socialist world as they knew it would somehow weather the storm. The great shock
registered in Hanoi when the Soviet Union finally dissolved is evidence of the denial of
reality by a leadership generation so encased in a belief system that what was obvious even to
the casual observer in 1989 that the socialist world would never be the same did not sink
in to many in the politburo until the actual demise of the Soviet Union in late 1991. This, in
turn, helps us to appreciate the formidable challenge faced by the Vietnamese reformers who
insisted that fundamental changes were needed, and why the decade of the 1990s was a
decade of policy stalemate between reformers and conservatives.
In 1988, Truong Chinh passed away after slipping and falling down a flight of stairs. His
replacement was Nguyen Van Linh, who was initially hailed as a new thinkerand reformer.
As Changing Worlds describes, Linh retreated back into the old orthodoxies in the face of the
collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and Vietnam's own economic troubles. BTC
relates the concern of Linh and his entourage that they get out of East Berlin before a possible
collapse would leave them vulnerable and trapped in a hostile situation in the middle of the
capitalist world without a dollar in their pockets,so they found a doctor to get the ailing
Nguyen Van Linh in shape to travel, and hurriedly grabbed the next flight out of Berlin as the
German Democratic Republic dissolved before their eyes.
This led to an alliance between Linh and the ideological conservatives, which was implied in
Changing Worlds, but made explicit in BTC. Even so, some reformers managed to insert the
words market economyinto the main text for the crucial 1991 Seventh Party Congress,
sugar coating with what they considered empty verbiage (market economy under the control
of the state) in order to placate the conservatives. The conservatives were not fooled,
however, and vigorously protested. At this critical juncture, another unlikely figure salvaged
the reform agenda or at least kept it alive: Do Muoi, the stodgy manager of Vietnams
command economy in an earlier period joined forces with the reformer Vo Van Kiet. BTC
asserts that If the two persons, Do Muoi and Vo Van Kiet had not resolutely defended it, in
1991 the concept of a market economy might not have been put on the agenda of the
Communist Party of Vietnam.This was not, says Huy Duc, a mere question of words; the
struggle between the reformers and their opponents shows that the struggle between the two
pathsin the Party really began at that time.
The pivotal year in the 1990s decade, characterized in Changing Worlds as a period of wary
reconciliationand uncertain transition,was 1995, when a confluence of domestic and
external events created the conditions for an eventual breakthrough in Vietnams stalled
progress 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 also
the year of preparing for the Eighth Party Congress, at which a major generational turnover of
the top leadership was expected. This did not happen, for reasons discussed in Changing
Worlds, but the nature and intensity of the conflict between reformers and their opponents is
underlined 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 Van
Kiet, a blistering critique of the opponents of reform and integration which stirred a virulent
7

counter-attack from conservatives. The contents of this letter have been well known, and it is
discussed in Changing Worlds. It is the reaction to the letter, however, which was less well
documented. And, it was at this point that a new development occurred in Vietnamese elite
politics, the political intrusion of the military and ominously the military intelligence
branch into the affairs of the Party leadership at the highest level. This part of the story was
known only by unverifiable documents circulating on the internet, and Changing Worlds
discussed this development with great caution and many caveats, owing to the difficulties of
documentation.
We discover from Huy Duc that there was considerable substance to the allegation these
internet documents of sinister activities and power plays by the steadily expanding military
intelligence organization known as General Directorate II (GD II). Ironically it was Vo Van
Kiet who, to his later regret, signed the 1997 order that expanded the powers of this body, and
politicized it by taking it from a position subordinate to the Army General Staff and placing it
under the direct and absolute control of the Party.This on surface would seem to insure that
the military intelligence organization would not have an independent role. Mao Zedong had
famously stated that power grows out of barrel of a gunbut, less famously, added that Our
principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command
the Party.But following Kiets order, things did not exactly work out that way. The
conservative ideologists consistently warned of a Western plot to de-politicize the armed
forcesand the consequence was to turn part of the military into a partisan combatant in
Vietnams internal political struggles. GD II was employed by anti-reform Party leaders to
use its technical expertise for political surveillance and even manufacturing of false charges
of conspiracy -- against General Giap, among others. Changing Worlds mentioned some of
these reported incidents, but underlined the difficulty of verifying them. BTC unveils a quite
detailed plausible picture of the sinister side of the GD II, which I could only dimly grasp
from 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 which
there is public evidence of a potentially destabilizing power struggle in Vietnam has involved
the 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,GD
II 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 the
negotiations 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 sees
that most of them had the purpose of influencing the ranks of Vietnams leadership, by
creating an unfavorable mind set in external activities tending to push toward confrontation
with America. I dont understand why, after reading these kinds of reports, the politburo
didn'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 conservative
ideological theoreticians (who tried to brand reform and integration as a political
deviation a dangerous label which could lead to extreme retribution), and this rogue
element 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
8

to be a pyrrhic victory. One of the important propositions of a theoretical model drawn on by

this book, from the writings of Jeffrey Legro is that in order to change a deeply entrenched
mind set, it is necessary not only to show a better alternative, but to discredit the old
orthodoxy.
The better alternative was provided by the reformers. Discrediting the old orthodoxy was
unwittingly assisted by the anti-reform unholy alliance. Changing Worlds observed that The
apparent success of partial reform in the mid-1990s which had seemed to validate the
conservative line on going slow and minimizing change was called into question by the end of
the decade, as Vietnams economy had reaped the easy gains of reform, and stalled as the
unresolved issues of reform blocked further progress. This, in turn, strengthened the position
of the reformers, who had been arguing for bolder action, and brought to the surface again the
central issue of whether or not the main danger for Vietnam was falling behind in the race for
economic development or risking destabilization by opening up. The conservatives had been
somewhat 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 political
intrigues, and by their own involvement in the widespread networks of corruption, made
easier by the partially reformed system, which created artificial monopolies and rewarded
political 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 to
take his word for the authenticity of the sources he cites. Another problem is that his
reportorial style is anecdotal, not analytical. He sometimes cites sources who say contradictory things, and does not pause to analyze or evaluate the relative merits of the assertions. Even so, I think we can have confidence in the accuracy of his accounts based on
personal interviews, and a reasonable degree of confidence in documents he draws upon and
second hand hearsay that he reports. It is mostly consistent with what outside scholars and
observers 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 the
conservatives. Kiet dismissed the conservatives scare talk about peaceful evolutionand
imperialist plots, and declared that In todays world there is no antagonistic contradiction
between imperialism and socialism ...He remarked on the diversity and inclusiveness in the
new globalized system and dismissed the idea of retreating into a cloistered international subsystem of the rump remnants of the once formidable communist bloc (in other contexts Kiet
reminded the conservatives of Vietnams security tensions with China, and the fact that North
Korea had opposed Vietnams invasion and occupation of Cambodia, undercutting the
security rationale for sociali solidarity). Changing Worlds observed that this letter seems
to be a watershed in the evolution of Vietnams new thinking about international relations, in
that it represen a leader at the top of Vietnams political system explicitly closing the chapter
of the two worldsmentality and spelling out the logical consequences of abandoning this us
and themmentality. Kiet argued that it would be a disaster for the countryif the 1996
Eighth Party Congress timidly passed up the opportunityto take advantage of globalization
and make the people wealthy, the country strong, create an egalitarian an, civilized society.
9

The conservative backlash to Kiet and his letter led to the installation of what turned out to be
an interim Party leader, the political general Le Kha Phieu, who was essentiall a front man for
conservative Party ideologists and the economic and political interests of those in the military
and other sectors who benefitted from political monopolies on commercial ventures and rent
or profits from the sale of politically procured valuable land. The self-interested element of
this anti-reform coalition ultimately helped undermine the claim of the conservative Party
ideologists, who were the most visible opponents of reform, that they were standing up for
lofty ideals and sacred principles. A politburo member (later dismissed for political
intriguing) 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 the
corrupt use of political power foi profit (Kiet himself was accused by conservatives of
nepotism and his wife of large scale corruption).
The final contribution of BTC to our understanding of the issues raised in Changing Worlds
does, in fact, point the way toward the future; the question of the significance of generational
turnover in the leadership. But here, BTC is somewhat disappointing. It observes that the
leadership 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 a
group that belonged to the generation of becoming cadresand no longer a generation of
revolutionaries.' This is another way of stating Max Webers routinization of charisma
proposition about the drop-off in political appeal and authority following the passing of
movement founders and succession by followers who have fewer claims to rule by virtue of
heroic deeds. But beyond that observation, there is little discussion of the character and future
impact of this generation, and its implications for the evolution of Vietnams political system.
Thus there is little to add to the discussion of this topic in the first edition of Changing
Worlds.
To simplify a more extended discussion of this subject in Changing Worlds, I advanced the
view that we would see far less of the personalized political conflicts that characterized the
story of Vietnams reforms and integration in the future. It is more likely that the system itself
will submerge the individuals who run it and the conflicts will be struggles over turf and
benefits rather than great matters of state. This means that it is unlikely that we will see
transformational leaders like Truong Chinh and Vo Van Kiet in the future.
But it also means that domineering just say nofigures like Le Duan and Le Duc Tho will
not find it easy to halt a gradually evolutionary process. It may even mean that discordant
elements of the political system, like the rogue military intelligence branch or the group of
conservative ideologues, in the future (though the jousting over polemical terminology
continues) will be hammered down like the proverbial nail that sticks out. Whether this
process leads to a more open and participatory system is open to question, however. It is
equally possible that the challenges of globalization to the powers of the state to control its
political and economic environment, and the entrenchment of localism and familism
described 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 in
ways 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 past
than as guides to the future. Vietnams 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 produced
it. Hopefully this book will be a small contribution to that understanding.

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