PART I: HOW TO LOOK AT STATE–SOCIETY RELATIONS IN VIETNAM

Is the state in Vietnam stronger than society, or is it the other way round? If the answer is for the state, why do party-state objectives in public policy get stonewalled, stalled, and even succumbed to changes and reversals by societal responses? If Vietnamese society has its strengths in this regard, why have the more politically conscious members of society not been able to do more to change the state, the party, and eventually the political system? These questions about the relative strengths of state and society, when they square off and interact, are key questions for understanding the nature of the contemporary political system of Vietnam, especially the question of where the political system is heading towards. They hover in the background of the research and writing for this book. They are interesting questions that can bring forth much debate on Vietnam.

This chapter argues that the present schools of thought on the subject need to move beyond their regular views of the Vietnamese party-state. These viewpoints, while contradictory to each other in some aspects, are complementary to each other; they are competing and complimentary representations of the ways state–society relations in Vietnam really work. Many scholars and writers concerned with Vietnam have a sense of this composite reality, but somehow this view has not been pointed out in a systematic manner. This book marshals facts and viewpoints to demonstrate this reality, and this chapter shows why a synthesis of two seemingly contradictory viewpoints is useful. This chapter argues that the state-disaggregation approach provides a tool to a more comprehensive understanding of state–society relations in Vietnam. This is because it makes us look into specific arenas. It makes us realize that generalizations, such as whether one is weaker or stronger than the other, guide us in the initial steps towards understanding, but they are limited in their usefulness in a situation that is very complex, such as that in Vietnam.