But Life Is Still Hard Under Glasnost, Vietnamese Style : Hanoi Offers New Look as Regime Loosens Grip

Standing sentry at an official residence, two young cops wearing the lime-green uniform of the Vietnamese police saw a foreigner emerge from a driveway across the road. They smiled and waved.

This is a slightly new look for Hanoi, capital of Communist Vietnam and metropolis of the dour, long-regimented north. A year ago, the average police officer here would muster nothing brighter than a glower.

There is still little reason for joy. Life in Hanoi is as hard as ever. There is just enough food, not nearly enough jobs, and decay stalks the streets. But foreigners who live here agree that the place has lightened up, and returning visitors can see the signs.

In the midst of a year-long government shake-out, with economic reformers in the ascendancy, a kind of mini- glasnost , Vietnamese-style, is in the air.

“In a limited sense,” a Hanoi-based Western diplomat replied when asked if there was substance behind the apparent relaxation.

Errors Conceded

He noted the officially encouraged self-criticism that preceded last December’s Communist Party Congress. The party conceded that there had been leadership errors and chose Nguyen Van Linh, a 71-year-old economic reformer, to take over as general secretary.

The party newspaper, Nhan Dan, received more than 25,000 letters of criticism in the weeks before the congress, and the diplomat pointed out that the written protests continue.

Most of them, he said, are aimed at the Vietnamese bureaucracy, which, along with the country’s aging leaders, accepted responsibility for the disastrous economic performance of the last few years.

“There is a certain sense of liberalization,” the diplomat said. “The leadership wants to get rid of old ideas and bring in new ideas.”

In the streets, he said, the people are openly discussing the options.

Ice Cream Sticks

Perhaps it was just the start of summer vacation, but the other day the streets of Hanoi had the sort of pulse that can still be found in Ho Chi Minh City in the south, the city that used to be called Saigon. Hanoi’s beautiful parks were crowded with couples, and vendors were peddling ice cream sticks by the fistful.

At a downtown movie theater, the crowd perspired in the steamy heat and watched a performance of Cirque Vietnam/Cirque Cuba, a pickup review of Cuban gymnasts and recruited Vietnamese girls. As a rock band played “Roll Out the Barrel,” the Cubans made pyramids and turned handstands to polite applause.

But when Carlos Rodriguez, a mustached performer from Havana, stepped out to a disco beat with two Vietnamese dancers, the house rocked. The girls wore skimpy bikinis and rolled their hips with enthusiasm, presenting an image not seen here even on garage calendars. Rodriguez closed the act spinning on his back across the stage, certainly the first exhibition of break-dancing in this Communist capital.

Party boss Linh himself is presenting a different image from that of the stiff, gentrified revolutionary leaders who headed the party after the death in 1969 of independence leader Ho Chi Minh. Government television shows him out among the people, a man of action.

But the surface signs of economic and social liberalization cannot mask the poverty, the strongest impression of the city. Vietnam is one of the poorest countries in the world. Per capita annual income is estimated at less than $250.

Privately Owned Brick Houses

On the 40-minute ride in from the airport, the suburban villages appear industrious, with men and women in pith helmets or conical straw hats putting up small, privately owned brick houses and tending vegetables planted on the Red River levees.

The city is different. Clustered around coffee shops or squatting against a wall are the jobless. No reliable statistics are available on unemployment, but poorly paid state workers reportedly moonlight to keep up with the galloping inflation, putting added pressure on the job market.

The sidewalks are home to vendors in the buy-sell trade; buy a few papayas from a farmer and try to sell them for a profit on the street.

Rations for state workers, according to a recent speech by Linh, eat up a third of the national budget. Two years ago, the government declared that it was eliminating rations--subsidized food and fuel--in favor of giving the state workers more pay. The reform never took hold and was abandoned, but the announcement and two subsequent devaluations of the dong, the national currency, triggered public anxiety and sent inflation soaring.

The official currency rate, 80 dong to the dollar, has become laughable in the face of a black market rate of more than 700 to the dollar.

Black Marketeers

The beneficiaries are the black marketeers and the few private businessmen. Their families constitute a glaring social stratum. The sons and daughters of private cafe owners and traders can be seen at the Saturday night dance at the International Club. They are wearing “the latest pair of jeans or a slightly better blouse,” according to a Westerner who lives here, and they pay 400 dong to get in.

A state worker making 700 dong a month can only watch with resentment, intensified as more and more East German motorbikes appear among Hanoi’s bicyclists. For his children, liberalization may mean no more than a lipstick for the daughter or a new shirt for the son.

But the state worker can grumble, as can the worker who thinks the state economy holds him back. For the long decades of war and the first decade of independence, the Northerner did not grumble. Last year he did, at the government’s invitation, and the result was a new regime.