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Negotiating Uncertainty in Late-Socialist Vietnam: Households and livelihood options in the marketizing countryside

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 May 2019

LAM MINH CHAU
LAM MINH CHAU*
Affiliation:
College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University, Hanoi Email: chaulm@ussh.edu.vn
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Abstract

This article makes a case for Vietnam as a distinctive example of late- and post-socialist marketization, a painful experience that has brought widespread immiseration to rural societies within and beyond Asia. Building on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in a northern Vietnamese village, I explore a hitherto under-researched aspect of Vietnam's massive social and economic transformation in the 30 years since the onset of market transition or Renovation (Đổi mới): the surprising ways in which rural households have negotiated both the risks and opportunities of the state's push to de-cooperativize and marketize village livelihoods. The state expects that a minority of rich farmers will rapidly move into large-scale, mechanized farming, while the majority will abandon small-scale subsistence farming to specialize in trade or participate in industrial waged employment. Surprisingly, all village households insist on being đa gi năng, that is, on retaining multiple livelihood options instead of following the official modernization scripts. Their refusal to follow state plans is not market-averse ‘resistance’, but something rarely documented in the literature on peasant life in marketizing contexts: a local sense of agency and taking personal responsibility for the security and long-term welfare of their families, in the face of highly unpredictable state policies.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 6 , November 2019 , pp. 1701 - 1735
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

I wish to express my most sincere gratitude to Susan Bayly for her invaluable guidance and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. My thanks also to the anonymous reviewers of Modern Asian Studies for their thoughtful comments and suggestions.

References

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6 Although land consolidation and commercialization of farming only became official policy in the early 2000s, this idea had been hinted at since the start of Renovation and was made increasingly explicit throughout the 1990s. For the party-state's modernizing agenda from the onset of Renovation, see Vietnam Communist Party, Final Resolution of the Communist Party's National Congress, Number VI (1986); Number VII (1991); Number VIII (1996), and Number IX (2001), National Politics, Hanoi. For the modernization scripts for agriculture and the countryside specifically, see Party, Vietnam Communist, Resolution on Speeding up the Industrialisation and Modernisation of Agriculture and the Countryside 2001–2010, National Politics, Hanoi, 2002Google Scholar.

7 Although the state allocated land to rural households, officially villagers only have land use rights (quyền sử dụng), not ownership rights (quyền sở hữu). According to the 1993 Land Laws, revised in 2003, all land belongs to ‘the entire people’ and is managed by the state, which retains absolute power to decide how it should be used and allocated. On the nature of land use rights, see Kerkvliet, B., ‘Agricultural Land in Vietnam: Markets Tempered by Family, Community and Socialist Practices’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 6(3), 2006, pp. 285–305Google Scholar; Sửu, N. V., ‘Contending Views and Conflicts over Land in Vietnam's Red River Delta’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 38(2), 2007, pp. 309–34Google Scholar.

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15 All households with land included in the appropriation scheme received compensation set by the district government. Initially no households whose holdings were appropriated were hostile to the scheme, and everyone recalled that they happily took the compensation and released their holdings to the officials. However, three years later, when the construction of the industrial park was nearly completed, virtually every household whose holdings were appropriated in 2007 launched a much-publicized agitation to pressure the district authorities into increasing the compensation. Villagers said that although they considered the original compensation generous for their holdings, they later learned that villagers in land appropriation projects elsewhere in Vietnam had received even larger sums and therefore they protested to claim justice. The protest came to an end when the district government decided to give villagers additional compensation. Every household who had land appropriated was granted title to a piece of unused state-owned land, equal to five per cent of the appropriated holdings, on a site next to the industrial park. The villagers were told that they could use the land to open retail stalls to sell goods to workers in the industrial park to replace the income they had lost from cultivating rice on the appropriated holdings. For more details of the protest, see L. M. Chau, ‘“Extremely Rightful” Resistance: Land Appropriation and Rural Agitation in Contemporary Vietnam’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, doi:10.1080/00472336.2018.1517896.

16 During my fieldwork, I observed the daily routines of the villagers at their homes and workplaces, and helped them with their economic practices: weeding the paddy fields, feeding the chickens, making rice-noodles, managing the sales of Mrs Han's retailing stall in the village market, and visiting the factories in the industrial park. I also accompanied villagers on their translocal business trips to neighbouring villages, the district centre, and even Hanoi to obtain inputs and sell products. I took particular pleasure in the friendly but informative discussions I had in the villagers’ homes, in various village dining and drinking outlets, and during numerous ceremonial events in the village: weddings, funerals, death anniversaries, house-building celebrations, and rituals at the village pagoda and other temples of folk religion.

17 ‘Government set to relax farmland ceiling’, in Vietnam News, 18 March 2017, http://vietnamnews.vn/society/373093/govt-set-to-relax-farmland-ceiling.html#8s1ocQAfZeKGsx3X.97, [accessed 18 March 2019].

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20 Deininger and Jin, ‘Land Sales and Rental Markets’.

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23 The issue of rising inequality and differentiation among rural farming households in today's Vietnam has also been highlighted by Luong, and Unger, , ‘Wealth, Power, and Poverty’; Taylor, P. (ed.), Social Inequality in Vietnam and the Challenges to Reform, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 2004Google Scholar. For a typology of diverse pathways of agrarian transition to rural capitalism, see Hall, D., Hirsch, P. and Li, T. M., Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia, NUS Press and University of Hawai‘i Press, Singapore and Manoa, 2011Google Scholar.

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25 Ibid.

26 Burawoy and Verdery (eds), Uncertain Transition.

27 Hann, ‘From Production to Property’.

28 Vietnam did not have collective farms of the kind instituted under socialism in China and the former Soviet Union. Rural cooperatives in Vietnam were much smaller in terms of population and the size of arable holdings under the centralized authority of cooperatives: see Kerkvliet and Selden, ‘Agrarian Transformation in China and Vietnam’. Another key difference was that under Vietnam's cooperativized economy, there was more space for households’ private economic activities than that in collective farms in the former Soviet Union and China: see Luong and Unger, ‘Wealth, Power, and Poverty’.

29 Mr Nham's father was initially sentenced to death as a class enemy. However, when the Party launched the 1956 Rectification Campaign, he was classified as a ‘resistance landlord’ (địa chủ kháng chiến), the most acceptable category of landlords, referring to those who supported the revolution and provided shelter to guerrillas in the 1945–1954 anti-French war. The holdings and assets taken from him, however, were never returned. On the different classifications of landlords in the 1950s land reform in northern Vietnam, see Malarney, S., Culture, Ritual, and Revolution in Vietnam, University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2002, p. 36Google Scholar.

30 In the land redistribution scheme in 1993, having a ‘bad-class’ family background was ignored and no longer criminalized by the state, thus the entire village was included in the scheme, regardless of their family history.

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34 The new role of the cooperative as a marketizing agent for rural farming households is widely seen across Vietnam under Renovation: see Kerkvliet and Selden, ‘Agrarian Transformation in China and Vietnam’, p. 54. This is a good example to show that Renovation in Vietnam is very different from the ‘structural adjustment’ that has taken place in post-socialist Eastern Europe or neo-liberal reforms in India. The Vietnamese government under Renovation does not consider farming and agriculture an unprofitable zone to be abandoned and state investment to be focused on high-value sectors like financial services and industries. In the early Renovation days in particular, when the state needed rural families to farm to bring the country out of the 1980s food shortage, the Vietnamese government deliberately avoided the full privatization of the market for agricultural inputs products, a policy that has hit farmers hard in India and Eastern Europe.

35 Luong and Unger, ‘Wealth, Power, and Poverty’, p. 68.

36 Kerkvliet, B., The Power of Everyday Politics: How Vietnamese Peasants Transformed National Policy, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2005Google Scholar.

37 The ‘five-per-cent’ plot (đất năm phần trăm) was equal to five per cent of the households’ collectivized holdings. It was granted by village authorities to households in Xuan and across northern Vietnam in the early 1960s to subsidize their everyday subsistence needs.

38 Verdery, The Vanishing Hectare.

39 Mohanty, ‘“We are Like the Living Dead”’.

40 The VND or Vietnamese Dong is Vietnam's currency unit. Roughly 30,000 VND equal £1.

41 Levien, M., ‘The Land Question: Special Economic Zones and the Political Economy of Dispossession in India’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(3–4), 2012, pp. 933–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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44 Ibid. Ravallion and van de Walle, Land in Transition.

45 Akram-Lodhi, ‘Vietnam's Agriculture’.

46 The issue of rural households’ reluctance to purchase large holdings for fear of unexpected land appropriation schemes has been widely addressed in the scholarly literature on land use and agrarian transformation in contemporary Vietnam. See Taylor (ed.) Social Inequality in Vietnam; Ravallion and van de Walle, Land in Transition; Kim, A., ‘Land Taking in the Private Interest: Comparisons of Urban Land Development Controversies in the United States, China and Vietnam’, Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research, 11(1), 2009, pp. 19–31Google Scholar; Kerkvliet, ‘Protests over Land in Vietnam’.

47 According to the new 2013 Land Laws, effective since 1 July 2014, Vietnamese rural households still do not have ownership title to land. However, tenancy was automatically extended from 20 to 50 years.

48 Akram-Lodhi, ‘Vietnam's Agriculture’; Byres, ‘Neo-Classical Neo-Populism’.

49 Burawoy and Verdery (eds), Uncertain Transition.

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52 Deininger and Jin, ‘Land Sales and Rental Markets’.

53 Byres, ‘Neo-Classical Neo-Populism’.

54 Ravallion and van de Walle, Land in Transition.

55 Akram-Lodhi, ‘Vietnam's Agriculture’.