Hanoi Loosens Soviet Tie, Follows Own Reform Path

A Soviet documentary about Vietnam that was aired recently on Hanoi television recounted the economic and political reforms enacted in the country under the title “Vietnamese Surprise.”

The program caused hilarity among officials here because it was shown while Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev was grappling with ending the leading role of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

“Perhaps it should have been called ‘The Russians Are Astonished,’ ” one official quipped.

As his remark indicates, Vietnam, which had always been regarded as Moscow’s closest ally in Asia, appears supremely confident that it will avoid the kind of turmoil that has recently swept through Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

Moreover, the Vietnamese are slowly drawing away from the Soviet Bloc--ideologically, militarily and financially. The Vietnamese have arrived at a distinctly Asian vision of how their country should evolve politically. They are looking elsewhere for financial assistance--which has so far failed to materialize--and have cautiously sought to repair relations with China, Moscow’s Communist rival, after a decade-long freeze.

So far, no one has dared to broach publicly the idea of a multi-party system in Vietnam, as Gorbachev has done in the Soviet Union. In fact, Nguyen Van Linh, Gorbachev’s Vietnamese counterpart as head of the Communist Party, declared in a speech Feb. 2 that communism will continue to hold a political monopoly here.

“Apart from the Communist Party, in Vietnam there is no other party of any class capable of shouldering that role,” Linh told a conference on the party’s 60th anniversary. “It was so in past history, it is now, and it will be so in the future.”

Linh said that “present realities” in East European countries underlined the harm done to the prestige of the party and the need for Vietnam to avoid, in effect, making the same mistakes.

Instead, the Hanoi regime has chosen to put its emphasis on the economy with a program called doi moi , or renovation, the Vietnamese equivalent of perestroika . Vietnam was one of the first countries in the Soviet Bloc to enact sweeping economic reforms, beginning in December, 1986, by decreeing an end to state subsidies, devaluing the currency and creating open markets.

The results have been dramatic. Supplies and varieties of consumer goods have increased sharply. Inflation has declined from 700% in 1988 to about 24% last year. The currency has been stabilized, so that a raging black market has virtually disappeared.

On virtually every street in Hanoi, new houses are going up, evidence that people have enough confidence to convert savings into construction materials. Japanese television sets and South Korean stereos are marketed on street corners everywhere.

Perhaps most dramatic of all, rural land and price reform helped Vietnam, which faced widespread food shortages in 1988, to export 1.5 million tons of rice last year, making it the third-largest rice exporter in the world, after the United States and Thailand.

Economic problems still loom on the horizon, however. As the result of staff restructuring under the reforms and recent military demobilizations, unemployment is reckoned at more than 20% of the work force in many areas.

While Vietnam has become a textbook example of the International Monetary Fund’s recipe for economic health, it has not received any injections of Western assistance, usually part of an IMF rescue package. The U.S. government has blocked any aid to Hanoi from the IMF, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank until Vietnam helps find a political solution in neighboring Cambodia.

Even more worrisome to the Vietnamese, the instability in Eastern Europe has put a question mark over the enormous quantities of assistance the Soviet Bloc provides.

“There must be a reorientation,” one Soviet Bloc diplomat here said. “The East European countries will re-establish relations with Vietnam on the same basis as West European countries.”

For example, a Polish shipping line that operates between Europe, Haiphong, Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City has announced that it is closing down here because it has not been paid in years. In the past, such expenses had been carried by governments at a loss.

The biggest concern is the estimated $2.5 billion to $3 billion given by the Soviet Union in a variety of assistance, from trade-deficit financing to subsidized gasoline, which sells for 70 cents a gallon in Vietnam.

One Soviet Bloc diplomat said the assistance is assured through 1990, the end of a current five-year plan, but is being reassessed for later years. He said Soviet-Vietnamese relations will go from being like “father and son to more like husband and wife.”

Western diplomats, looking upon the relationship with a more critical eye, forecast cuts in Soviet aid of up to 40%.

Since Vietnam’s budget deficit rose from $260 million in 1988 to $660 million last year, according to official estimates, a sharp drop in Soviet Bloc aid could reignite inflation in a dramatic way. If the Soviets were to charge world-market prices for gasoline in hard currency, for example, the economy could be devastated.

“As long as the party can continue to deliver economically, I think it can avoid unrest,” an Asian diplomat said.

Despite the political changes in Eastern Europe, few analysts expect the turmoil there to have a significant impact on the way Vietnam is governed, at least in the near term.

Vietnamese officials note that the Communist Party here, rather than being imposed on the country as it was in Eastern Europe, became a source of enduring pride as the rallying point for nationalistic struggles against the colonial French and later the Americans.

Vietnam has no tradition of democratic government, and no serious domestic opposition has ever emerged, perhaps in part because so many opponents of the regime have fled since the collapse of the Saigon regime in 1975.

When university students demonstrated for better living conditions last year--at the same time students were occupying Tian An Men Square in Beijing--the authorities immediately gave in to their demands. Vietnam has been isolated for so long that it has few students who have been exposed to democratic ideas in Western countries, as happened with Chinese students.

Although rival parties have been ruled out, the Communist Party has opened the floodgates to self-criticism, which has led to a litany of published attacks on what are being described as former crimes and mistakes. Party officials talk of more democracy in terms of free speech within the party.

“In Vietnam, the party must obey the constitution; even the highest members must obey the law,” Justice Minister Phan Hiem said in an interview. “Everybody must be equal. We must reinforce the program of legality.”

In a reform implemented last year, party leaders were forced to give up more than 500 villas and country estates, which were converted into guest houses for tourists. Officials said special shops for party members also were closed last year, in apparent response to criticism about perquisites.

Bui Tin, editor of the party newspaper Nhan Dan, said in an interview that in the past two years more than 100,000 members of the Communist Party, including two members of the Central Committee, were expelled for bribery and other forms of corruption. The party now has about 1.8 million members nationwide.

The party leadership has openly discussed two growing scandals: corruption by tax assessors who accept bribes to reduce private business taxes, and a banking scheme in which employees of the state-owned banking system made loans to friends and received kickbacks. More than 100 bankers have been put on trial, officials said.

The National Assembly, formerly a “fairly tame dog of a parliament,” as one Western ambassador put it, has started openly debating government policy. Last year, it held up adoption of the budget while ministers were called on the carpet about spending.

Last August, party leader Linh mounted a scathing attack on “bourgeois liberalization,” a move that many saw as a throwback to the 1950s. But party officials now describe the speech as an internal aberration, and it is rarely mentioned.

Meanwhile, the party leadership has been meeting recently to redefine the relationship between the party and the government, with the obvious goal of putting some distance between the two. For the first time, the platform for the next party congress has been published in advance and debate invited.

“We’re now groping in the dark so that we will be able to solve the people’s demands as well as the demands of history,” said Nguyen Van Dang, deputy editor of the party’s theoretical journal.

For now, Western analysts are debating how Vietnam will publicly cope with the decision of the Soviet Communist Party to give up its monopoly on power. With so many connections to Moscow, they wonder, can Vietnam avoid following suit?

Last summer, as Poland was moving toward a non-Communist government for the first time, the party newspaper Nhan Dan urged the Polish party to fight back against “anti-socialist forces.” After a protest from Poland, the newspaper apologized. The government-dominated media has remained fairly quiet on the later changes in Eastern Europe, except for bare-bones accounts of what is happening.

One Western ambassador said he thinks Hanoi must either salute Moscow’s move or announce that it is “looking for another Vatican, meaning Beijing.”

But other diplomats discounted an open embrace of the Chinese because of the traditional enmity between the two countries and because of China’s current association with repression, an image Vietnam would prefer to avoid as it seeks more ties with the West.

These diplomats note that the Sino-Vietnamese hostility of recent years has only begun to dim, especially memories of China’s invasion of Vietnam in 1979.

“The suspicion of China is deeply rooted,” one diplomat said.