Free Asia's Cauldron by Robert D. Kaplan Page A

fixation with the Middle East rather than with the rise of China in East Asia. Though such an analysis is self-serving, it may nevertheless be true; or, rather, partly true. Then there is the fear of the United States selling out Vietnam for the sake of a warmer relationship with China: Xuan, the vice chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, specifically mentioned Nixon’s opening to China as providing the geostrategic context for China’s invasion of Vietnam. “It can happen again,” shaking his head in frustration. Contradictorily, the Vietnamese want the United States to be more of a coldhearted, realist actor in international affairs just like themselves. “The elephant in the room during our discussions with the Americans is democracy and human rights,” one official of the communist government told me. The Vietnamese live in fear that because of Congress, the media, and various pressure groups in Washington, the Americans may one day sell them out the way they have for periods of time other coup-prone and autocratic countries: Thailand, Uzbekistan, and Nepal, for example. The Vietnamese look at the former unwillingness of Washington to balance against China for decades in Burma because of Rangoon’s human rights record and bristle. “The highest value should be on national solidarity and independence. It is the nation, not the individual, that makes you free,” Le Chi Dzung, a Foreign Ministry deputy director general, told me, trying to explain his country’s political philosophy.
    In fact, the survival of communist rule in the face of Vietnam’srampant capitalism is partly explained by the party’s nationalist credentials, having governed the country during wars against the French, Americans, and Chinese. Moreover, as was the case with Tito in Yugoslavia and Enver Hoxha in Albania, Ho Chi Minh was a homegrown leader not imposed on the country by an invading army, unlike so many other communist rulers. Moreover, the Vietnamese communists have always played up the similarities between Ho Chi Minh Thought and Confucianism, with its respect for the family and authority. “Nationalism builds out from Confucianism,” Le Chi Dzung of the Foreign Ministry says. Neil Jamieson writes of “that common Vietnamese quality of ‘absolutism,’ ” an assumption of “some underlying, determinative moral order in the world.” 15 This, in turn, is related to the idea of
chinh nghia
, which might be loosely translated as one’s social obligation, to one’s family and larger solidarity group.
    Yet another reason why communism persists here is precisely because its very substance is slipping away, and thus an uprising is for the time being unnecessary; though, of course, there is a price to be paid for insufficient reform. Vietnam is in a situation similar to that of China: governed by a Communist Party that has all but given up communism, and has an implicit social contract with the population, in which the party guarantees higher or sustained income levels while the citizens agree not to protest too loudly. (Vietnam cannot ultimately be estranged from China, for they are both embarked on the same unique experiment: delivering capitalist riches to countries ruled by communist parties.)
    Think of it, here is a society that has gone from ration books to enjoying one of the largest rice surpluses in the world in a quarter of a century. Vietnam recently graduated in statistical terms to a lower-middle-income country with a per capita GDP of $1,100. Instead of a single personality to hate with his picture on billboards, as was the case in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and other Arab countries, there is a faceless triumvirate of leaders—the party chairman, the state president, and the prime minister—that has delivered an average of 7 percent growth in the GDP annually between 2002 and 2012. Even in the teeth of the Great Recession in 2009, the local