Showing papers in "Sojourn in 2001"

An Approach for Analysing State-Society Relations in Vietnam

Abstract: This article examines four arenas in Vietnam's political life in which statesociety relations are problematic: governing institutions and processes, mass media, agricultural collectives, and corruption. Each has evidence to support two common interpretations, which argue that the state and its various organizations in society run the political show in Vietnam. Yet, there is also evidence for a third interpretation, which highlights political activities in society beyond the reach of the state and its organizations. The article also finds ongoing deliberations in each arena about what relations between the state and society should be. Vietnam's leaders say the government is "of the people, for the people, and by the people". Yet the country's political system has only one political party, the Communist Party. Elections typically have only candidates approved by that party. Tight restrictions make very difficult the formation of any organization or the establishment of any publication that criticizes the Communist Party's domination of the political system. In such a system, what is the relationship between the rulers and the ruled, the authorities and "the people"? Secondly, what is being said and debated in the country about what those relationships should be? This article offers an approach to analysing such questions. It uses three interpretations in the scholarly literature to examine specific political arenas. It finds that each interpretation contributes to an understanding of the political system but is incomplete. This approach also reveals contending notions in Vietnam about appropriate relations between state and society.

Public spaces/public disgraces : crowds and the state in contemporary Vietnam

Abstract: This article argues that a semantic shift in the crowd in Vietnam over the last decade has allowed public space to become a site through which transgressive ideologies and desires may have an outlet. At a time of accelerating social change, the state has effectively delimited public criticism yet a fragile but assertive form of Vietnamese democratic practice has arisen in public space, at the margins of official society, in sites previously equated with state control. Official state functions attract only small audiences, and rather than celebrating the dominance of the party, reveal the disengagement of the populace in the party's activities. Where crowds were always a component of state (stage)-managed events, now public spaces are attracting large numbers of people for supposedly non-political activities which may become transgressive acts condemned by the regime. In support of the notion that crowding is an opening up of the possibility of more subversive political actions, the paper presents an analysis of recent crowd formations and the state's reaction to them. The analysis reveals the modalities through which popular culture has provided the public with the means to transcend the constraints of official, authorized, and legitimate codes of behaviour in public space. Changes in the use of public space, it is argued, map the sets of relations between the public and the state, making these transforming relationships visible, although fraught with contradictions and anomalies.