Time: 9:30 AM, Monday, May 15, 2017
Location: Room 314, Building A, USSH, 336 Nguyen Trai Street, Thanh Xuan District, Hanoi
Speaker: Dr. Lam Minh Chau, Department of Anthropology
Through the case of a rural village in Northern Vietnam, which has witnessed remarkable changes over three decades of Vietnam's Doi Moi (Renovation) under a market economy model, this book analyzes the transformations in rural Vietnamese economic life during the opening-up period, comparing them to the complex and turbulent transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy in rural China, Eastern Europe, and beyond.
The two themes discussed in this book are also two themes that have received particular attention from researchers studying Vietnam over the past thirty years. The first theme is Renovation (Doi Moi). From the late 1980s to the present, hundreds of monographs by authors both domestic and foreign have been published on various aspects of this transition process. However, for researchers and readers, there are still specific aspects of Renovation that need further clarification. For foreign readers, one of the primary concerns is the inclusion of research on Renovation in rural areas, given that foreign-language research in Vietnam still focuses mainly on urban and suburban areas. For domestic readers, one of the biggest questions is: what are the similarities and differences between Renovation and the transition to a market economy in China and the former socialist countries of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe? The achievements and limitations of Renovation have been discussed extensively in the research of Vietnamese scholars. However, comparisons between Vietnam's reforms and those of other countries that underwent this pivotal transformation in the 20th century have not received adequate attention. Contributing to these important points is the primary purpose of this book.
The second topic is the Vietnamese rural economy. This is by no means a new topic. Excluding records from the feudal era, academic research on Vietnamese rural areas has a history of at least a century, dating back to Pierre Gourou's journey across the Red River Delta to study farmers and rice-based civilization. Along this path, various viewpoints have emerged regarding the characteristics and trends of the Vietnamese rural economy. However, the biggest debate remains whether Vietnamese rural areas are "stagnant" or "innovative," and whether Vietnamese farmers are "conservative" or "dynamic." The most significant milestone was the late 1970s, when Vietnamese rural areas became the center of a famous academic debate in the history of peasant and rural studies worldwide, between James Scott's "emotional economy" theory and Samuel Popkin's "rational farmer" theory.
For over four decades, the echoes of that debate remain strong in academic research worldwide. In Vietnam, its influence is even more pronounced in the context of the Doi Moi (Renovation) period, when Vietnam was on its way to opening up to a market economy, starting from a predominantly agricultural country with 80% of its land area being rural and 70% of its population being farmers at the time of opening up. Those adhering to the "rational farmer" perspective hoped that the rural areas would be the driving force for Vietnam's modernization and its ability to seize the opportunities for prosperity and development of a market economy. Those with a more "emotional" perspective, however, worried that farmers with their conservative and stagnant "small-scale farming" mentality would be an obstacle to that change.
However, what we have witnessed in the 30 years of Doi Moi (Renovation) shows that applying only one model, whether rational or emotional, has failed to reflect the complexity of the dynamics in rural Vietnam. On the one hand, rural Vietnam was key to the success of the early Doi Moi period, with farmers being the strongest supporter of the dissolution of cooperatives and the shift to a market-oriented individual production model. They were also the driving force that transformed Vietnam from a food-scarce country in the 1980s to a leading rice exporter in the world just a few years later. On the other hand, these same farmers and rural areas are now constantly appearing on television and in newspapers, in reports about FTAs, WTO, or TPP, portraying stagnation, resistance to change, and thus becoming an obstacle to Vietnam's deep integration and economic growth. So, ultimately, are Vietnamese farmers rational or emotional, conservative or dynamic, content with their lot or driven by a desire for wealth and profit? And what is the real driving force that has guided them in the transformation of rural Vietnam during the Doi Moi (Renovation) period? Contributing to answering these questions is the second purpose of this book.
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