Tuong Vu

State formation and the origins of developmental states in south korea and indonesia

Tuong Vu is an assistant professor at the School of International Graduate Studies at the Naval Postgraduate School. His research focuses on revolution and state formation in Pacific Asia. Recent publications include “Contentious Mass Politics in Southeast Asia: Knowledge Accumulation and Cycles of Growth and Exhaustion,” Theory and Society 35(4) (August 2006) and “Workers and the Socialist State: North Vietnam’s State-Labor Relations, 1945-1970,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies (September 2005).

Persistence Amid Decay: The Communist Party of Vietnam at 83

In the last few decades the theoretical literature on communist regimes has closely followed the rise and demise of the communist camp. In the early 1970s when those regimes were at their peaks, analysts were preoccupied with the question of how they had successfully evolved and adapted after seizing power (Huntington 1968; Huntington and Moore 1970). Strongly influenced by modernization theories, this scholarship assumed that, as vanguard forces of modernization, communist parties were born to last. While most scholars failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the late 1980s, theoretical attempts have since shed much insight into the causes of that collapse (Kalyvas 1999; Ekiert 1996; Solnick 1998; Bunce 1999; Goodwin 2001). However, the literature remains limited for the surviving communist systems in China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, and Cuba. There, communist parties still dominate and, for China and Vietnam, have overseen successful economic reforms. Among analysts of China, a sharp debate exists between “optimists” (Shambaugh 2008; Nathan 2003),1 who view the communist dictatorship as viable, and “pessimists” (Pei 2006), who emphasize decay and possible collapse. There is no such well-positioned debate in Vietnam, although similar questions have certainly been raised and have even gained salience in the context of developments in 2012 and 2013.

Cold War Studies and the Cultural Cold War in Asia

Until recently, historians of the Vietnam War thought Vietnam was pushed into the Soviet camp because the United States failed to respond to Ho Chi Minhs repeated appeals for support from 1945 to 1950. In this conventional view, the United States missed many opportunities to avoid what would become a costly Vietnam War in the 1960s. Yet this thesis of missed opportunities appears simplistic in light of newly released materials from Vietnamese archives. These new sources have revealed that Vietnamese leaders firmly believed in their communist cause and acted boldly at opportune moments to realize such beliefs. Even if the United States had behaved differently in 1945, there is no guarantee that Vietnamese communists would have been content only with their own independence. Given their deep ideological commitments, it is likely that they would have sought to export their revolution to neighboring countries if circumstances were viewed as favorable.2