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The Party and the People: Revolutionary and Postrevolutionary Politics in China and Vietnam

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Brantly Womack
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Extract

This essay starts from two premises: that, as far as the articulation and mobilization of popular interest in the countryside are concerned, the “best teams won” in the Chinese and the Vietnamese revolutions; but that, after the success of the revolution, the popularity and responsiveness of the regimes to the people became more problematic. Together, these premises imply a shift in the relationship of party to people between the revolutionary and postrevolutionary stages. That such a shift occurred in China and Vietnam is not obvious; there were significant continuities of personnel, policies, and ideology across the revolutionary divide. I shall argue that, despite the continuities, the rational basis of party-mass relations was deeply affected by victory. Indeed, the very continuities helped mask a structural flaw in the new regimes that has induced current political and economic reforms.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , July 1987 , pp. 479 - 507
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1987

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References

1 The question of Chinese influence in Vietnam is an interesting and disputed one. The Vietnamese had extensive personal experience with Mao's revolutionary methods. However, they also drew lessons from their own experience with failed peasant uprisings in 1930. For differing views, see the following in Turley, William, ed., Vietnamese Communism in Compar ative Perspective (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980Google Scholar): William Turley, “Introduction,” 1–10; Wil liam Duiker, “Vietnamese Revolutionary Doctrine in Comparative Perspective,” 45–73; and Georges Boudarel, “Influences and Idiosyncracies in the Line and Practice of the Vietnam Communist Party,” 137–70. The delicate complexities of the interrelationship are illustrated by the fact that Ho Chi Minh taught guerrilla warfare in China in the late 1930s-before the organization of the Viet Minh.

2 I use the term “mass-regarding” to refer to an attentiveness by the party leadership to the concrete situation of the population under their control, to the masses' perceptions of their own interests, and to the actual reception and popularity of the policies. “Mass-oriented” would be too broad a term, because it could include policies that were programmatically assumed to be in the interests of the masses. I want to suggest a more active and responsive political style.

3 For the sake of brevity, I will not digress on the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of this model. The works of Brian Barry, Mancur Olson, Anthony Downs, Sam Popkin, James C. Scott, Russell Hardin, and Jon Elster provided my primary inspiration.

4 The two most important studies are Scott, James C., The Moral Economy of the Peasant (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976Google Scholar), and Popkin, Samuel, The Rational Peasant (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

5 The best analysis of the linkage in Vietnam is Race, Jeffrey, “Toward an Exchange Theory of Revolution,” in Lewis, John, ed., Peasant Rebellion and Communist Revolution in Asia ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974), 169–204Google Scholar.

6 The best book in this tradition is Selznick, Philip, The Organizational Weapon (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960Google Scholar; first published by Rand in 1952).

7 It should be noted that Selznick is primarily concerned with the Soviet experience. The subtitle of his book is “A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics,” and it fits Lenin's theory and practice better than it does China and Vietnam. However, the theory is advanced as a generic explanation of communist politics.

8 One could argue that victory marks a contextual change from charismatic to bureaucratic leadership, but—at least as Weber presents it—charismatic leadership is very much a question of the person and personality of the leader; the replacement of the leader by bureaucratic followers would proceed whether the leader died before victory (Ho Chi Minh) or after (Mao Zedong).

9 This situation is described by Scott, James C., “Revolution in the Revolution: Peasants and Commissars,” Theory and Society 4 (January-March 1979), 99–134Google Scholar.

10 The best example is Mao's 1934 speech, “Be Concerned with the Weil-Being of the Masses,” Selected Worlds of Mao Tse-tung, I (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), 147Google Scholar–52.

11 Concrete cases of each of these problems are cited by Ziyang, Zhao, “How Were the Masses in Hua County Mobilized,” trans, in Issues and Studies 19 (June-July 1983), 76–100Google Scholar, 101–114.

12 Kuo-t'ao, Chang, The Rise of the CCP, 1928–1938: Volume Two of the Autobiography of Chang Kuo-t'ao (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1972), 197Google Scholar–99; 290.

13 See Mao (fn. 10), “Struggle in the Jinggang Mountains,” 90–92.

14 Hirschman, , Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970Google Scholar). Hirschman's scheme is not totally satisfactory for our purposes because the concepts of exit and voice are rather vague, there is no discussion of apathy, and there is no treatment of the dimension of personnel choice (elections). All of these problems derive from Hirschman's focus on the firm and its customers. A more general theory of loyalty would have to be much more complex.

15 Ibid., 82; emphasis in original. I use the term “clout” for concrete policy influence that is not based on formal democratic guarantees; I reserve the word “voice” for democratic influence within institutional guarantees. Hirschman does not make this distinction, and his usage of “voice” is broader.

16 Olson, , The Logic of Collective Action (New York: Schocken, 1965Google Scholar).

17 See Jeffrey Race (fn. 5), 178–92, for a detailed analysis of organizational policy in Vietnam in the 1960s.

18 See Womack, Brantly, Foundations of Mao Zedong's Political Thought (Honolulu: sity Press of Hawaii, 1982Google Scholar).

19 Fitzgerald, , Fire in the Lake (New York: Vintage, 1972Google Scholar).

20 Differences in party policy in the three regions of Vietnam during the war against the French are well described in Popkin (fn. 4), 223–42. The importance of personal investigations by cadres was constantly emphasized and exemplified by Mao. See Mao Zedong Nongcun Diaocha Wenji [Collected rural investigations of Mao Zedong] (Beijing: Renmin Chubanshe, 1982Google Scholar), passim.

21 Zhao Ziyang (fn. 11), 113–14.

22 1962 NLF document quoted in Pike, Douglas, Viet Cong (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966), 202Google Scholar.

23 Skocpol, Theda, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

24 The famine is very poignantly described in Long, Ngo Vinh, Before the Revolution (Cam bridge: MIT Press, 1973Google Scholar).

15 See Race, Jeffrey, War Comes to Long An (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972Google Scholar)

26 Vien, Nguyen Khac, Contemporary Vietnam (Hanoi: Red River Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1981), 255Google Scholar.

27 Fisher, Charles, “Physical and Economic Resources of Indochina,” Prospects for the Development of the Indochina Peninsula (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1975), 56Google Scholar.

28 It should be noted that in some areas, for instance the Plain of Reeds, the topography was unsuited for concentrations of Northern soldiers, and the struggle remained a Southern guerrilla affair until 1975.

29 William Turley, “Political Participation in Vietnam,” in Turley (fn. 1), 171–98.

30 See Womack, John, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1968Google Scholar); see Scott (fn. 9), 114–15, for other examples.

31 Turley (fn. 29), 183.

32 The forms and importance of such behavior are detailed in Scott, James C., The Weapons of the Weak (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985Google Scholar).

33 See, for example, Minh, Ho Chi, Selected Works (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1977), 143Google Scholar.

34 Nhan Dan, January 9, 1985, trans, in Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Asia and [FBISAPA], January 18, 1985, pp. K 7–9.

35 Marx, Karl, Manifest der kpmmunistischen Partei (1848Google Scholar), Section II, “Proletarier und Kom munisten” (author's translation).

36 Special Commentator, “Do Not Forget the Fish-Water Relationship,” Rentnin Ribao, August 19, 1978Google Scholar. Translated in Chinese Law and Government (Fall-Winter 1982–1983), 46–47

37 Nhan Dan, January 3, 1985, trans, in FBIS APA, January 15, 1985, pp. K 11–13.

38 Contrast, for instance, the progress of rural restructuring in China as reported by Shue, Vivienne, Peasant China in Transition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980Google Scholar), and in Europe as analyzed by Wadekin, Karl-Eugen, Agrarian Policies in Communist Europe (Totowa, NJ: Allanheld, Osmun, 1982Google Scholar).

39 Quoted in Chanda, Nayan, “Vietnam's Economy: Its Domestic and International Dimensions,” in Turley, William, Confrontation or Coexistence: The Future of ASEAN-Vietnam Relations (Bangkok: Chulalongkorn University Institute of Security and International Studies, 1985), 109Google Scholar.

40 See Hinton, William, Fanshen (New York: Vintage, 1966Google Scholar) for land reform politics. For the very different situation of the critique of basic-level cadres in the 1960s, see Chan, Anita, Madsen, Richard, and Unger, Jonathan, Chen Village (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984Google Scholar). For an administrative critique of the Great Leap Forward, see Harding, Harry, Organizing China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1981), 153Google Scholar–94.

41 Duan, Le, “Speech at the Sixth Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam,” FBIS APA, August 17, 20, 21, 1984Google Scholar.

42 See Van Kiet, Vo, “Transformation of Private Industry and Trade in the South,” Vietnam Social Sciences 2 (September 1985), 47–63Google Scholar, and White, Christine, “Recent Debates in Vietnamese Development Policy,” in White, G., Murray, R., and White, C., Revolutionary Socialist Development in the Third World (Brighton, England: Wheatsheaf, 1983), 234Google Scholar–65.

43 Vietnam's alliance with the Soviet Union and its hostility to China are factors inhibiting the articulation of reform. Moreover, the VCP is more Europeanized than the CCP, and probably less inclined to leap about ideologically.

44 For Chinese rural reforms, see Parish, William, ed., China's Rural Development (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1985Google Scholar), and Blecher, Marc, “The Structure and Contradictions of Productive Relations in Socialist Agrarian ’Reform,‘” Journal of Development Studies 22 (October 1985), 104CrossRefGoogle Scholar–26; for Vietnam, see Hiebert, Murray, “Contracts in Vietnam: More Rice, New Problems,” Indochina Issues, No. 48 (July 1984), 1–7Google Scholar.

45 Womack, Brantly, “Modernization and Democratic Reform in China,” Journal ofAsian Studies 43 (May 1984), 417CrossRefGoogle Scholar–40. The most challenging statement of official Chinese thinking on political reform is Liao Gailong, “Lishi di jingyan he women di fashan daolu” [Historical experience and our developmental path], a speech given on October 25, 1980, to the Conference on Party Historiography, and reprinted in the Taiwanese journal Zhonggong Yanjiu 15 (September 15, 1981), 108Google Scholar–77.

46 Chanda, Nayan, “The New Revolution,” Far Eastern Economic Review, April 10, 1986, pp. 24–28Google Scholar. See also Hiebert, Murray, “Vietnam Begins Leadership Transition,” Indochina Issues, No. 67 (July 1986), 1–5Google Scholar. My impression from talks with assembly officials in both countries is that, while political reforms in China have been more striking, political opinions are expressed more freely in Vietnam—possibly because Vietnam has never had an Anti-Rightist Campaign or a Cultural Revolution.

47 Nove, Alec, Economic History of the USSR (New York: Penguin, 1982), 75–86Google Scholar. For the political impact of the NEP, see Medvedev, Roy, Leninism and Western Socialism (London: Verso, 1981), 57–69Google Scholar.

48 For contrast, see Arato, Andrew, “Democratization in East Central Europe,” Journal of International Affairs 38 (Winter 1985), 321Google Scholar–35.

49 The considerable literature on the question of interest groups in communist countries is summarized in Stalling, H. Gordon, “Interest Groups and Communist Politics Revisited,” World Politics 36 (October 1983); 1–27Google Scholar. In my opinion, the best article on the subject is Furtak, Robert, “Interessenpluralismus in den politischen Systemen Osteuropas,” Osteuropa 24 (November-December 1974), 779Google Scholar–92.