6 - Conclusion

Summary

This book has looked at mediation space in several arenas of everyday life in Hà Nội. In reality, this mediation space exists — in parallel with compliance — in most arenas of non-political life in Vietnam. In many arenas not covered here, the agent of mediation may not be the ward but the issue would generally be similar: it is, how compliance is aborted, covertly or overtly, by co-operation between local officials and the people. Among the other arenas, the more well-known ones include taxation, smuggling, residential registration, driving licences, business registration, sale of prescribed drugs, illegal logging, the use of public space in parks, pornography, prostitution, and many others. Therefore, the scale of mediation is very wide across the country.

Several reasons account for mediation. One is inefficiencies of the administrative system. Chapter 1 pointed out complaints, from both the party-state and the people generally, on how the wards' inefficiencies diminished the party-state ability in managing society. Paradoxically, these were caused by features of the party-state itself, especially the lack of open competition in elections as well as the lack of regular checks on implementing officials, including those at the ward level. Chapter 2 examined the ward party-state machinery, which is a part of the countrywide administration system organized to manage society. Power in the ward party-state machinery is concentrated in a cluster of top party-state officials. Senior and leading officials of the ward party-state machinery are usually party members. Through paid volunteers at the sub-level of resident clusters and resident cells, the Vietnamese party-state can reach into every household to mobilize people to comply with party-state policies. More importantly, such a reach can be used to grasp the details of the private lives of troublesome individuals who might dare to challenge the partystate's political domination.

In Chapter 3, we saw that the election machinery and election process are firmly under the control of the party-state. Party officials occupy leading positions of the Vietnam Fatherland Front, the organization that screens candidates for elections at every level.