Time: 9:30 am Monday, May 15, 2017
Location: Room 314, Building A, USSH, 336 Nguyen Trai, Thanh Xuan, Hanoi
Speaker: Dr. Lam Minh Chau, Faculty of Anthropology
Through the case of a rural village in the North, which has witnessed remarkable changes over the three decades of Vietnam's Doi Moi (Renovation) policy following a market-based economic model, this book analyzes the transformations in economic life in rural Vietnam during the open-door period, in comparison with the complex and tumultuous transition from a centrally planned to a market-based economy in rural China, Eastern Europe, and beyond.
The two topics discussed in this book are also two topics that have received special attention from researchers on Vietnam over the past thirty years. The first topic is Doi Moi. Since the late 1980s until now, there have been hundreds of monographs by domestic and foreign authors on various issues of this transition process. However, for researchers and readers, there are still specific aspects of Doi Moi that need to be discussed more clearly. For foreign readers, one of the top concerns is to supplement studies on Doi Moi in rural areas, in the context of foreign-language studies in Vietnam still focusing mainly on urban and peri-urban areas. For domestic readers, one of the biggest questions is how Doi Moi is similar to and different from the transition to a market economy in China and the former socialist countries in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The achievements and limitations of Doi Moi have been discussed a lot in the studies of Vietnamese scholars. However, the comparison between Doi Moi in Vietnam and other countries that have undergone this landmark transition of the 20th century has not received due attention. Contributing to supplementing those important points is the first purpose of this book.
The second topic is the Vietnamese rural economy. This is not a new topic. If we do not count the records from the feudal period, the academic research on the Vietnamese countryside has a history of at least nearly a century, since Pierre Gourou traveled across the Red River Delta to study farmers and the rice civilization. Along the way, there have been many different views on the characteristics and trends of the rural economy in Vietnam. However, the biggest debate is still around the story of whether the Vietnamese countryside is "stagnant" or "innovative," and whether the Vietnamese peasants are "conservative" or "dynamic." The most important milestone was the late 1970s, when the Vietnamese countryside became the center of a famous academic debate in the history of peasant and rural studies in the world, between the "emotional economy" theory of James Scott on one side and the "rational peasant" theory of Samuel Popkin on the other side.
After more than four decades, the echoes of that debate are still strong in the academic research community around the world today. In Vietnam in particular, its influence is even stronger in the context of the Doi Moi period, when Vietnam was on the path of opening up in a market-oriented direction from its starting point as a small-scale agricultural country, with 80% of its area being rural and 70% of its population being farmers at the time of opening up. Those who follow the “rational farmer” mindset hope that the countryside will be the driving force for Vietnam to move towards modernity and seize the opportunities for prosperity and development of the market economy. Those who follow the “emotional” perspective are concerned that farmers with their conservative and stagnant “small-scale farmer” mentality will be an obstacle to that change.
However, what we have witnessed in the 30 years of Doi Moi shows that the application of a single model, whether rational or emotional, has not reflected the complexity of the movement in rural Vietnam. On the one hand, rural Vietnam was the key to the success of the early stages of Doi Moi, when farmers were the strongest force supporting the process of dissolving cooperatives to shift to a market-oriented individual production model. They were also the driving force that brought Vietnam from a food-deficit country in the 1980s to a leading rice-exporting country 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 the press, in reports about FTAs, WTO or TPP, with the image of stagnation, fear of change, and thus becoming an obstacle to Vietnam's deep integration and economic growth. So, in the end, are Vietnamese farmers rational or emotional, conservative or dynamic, just wanting to settle down or thinking about getting rich and thinking about profit, and what is the real driving force that has been guiding them in the transformation process of rural Vietnam during the Renovation period? Contributing to answering these questions is the second purpose of this book.
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