Tradition, Revolution, and Market Economy in a North Vietnamese Village, 1925-2006

Chapter 8 The Restructuring of Local Governance

246 C H A P T E R 8 The Restructuring of Local Governance In July 1998, revisiting Sơn-Dương commune for the first time in seven years, I was startled by the profound crisis that had arisen in the relationship between the local population and the commune administration. As a reflection of its magnitude, from 1993 to 1998, under strong local social pressure, many Communist Party secretaries and presidents of the People’s Committee had quickly succeeded one another. Tensions reached a boiling point during my visit: local families were reportedly refusing to pay not only their irrigation fees but also commune levies. These arrears had totaled US $18,000 for half a year. As a result the commune’s cumulative debt to the state irrigation authorities had spiraled to approximately US $15,000. Peasants reported that the flow of irrigation water to the commune had slowed significantly, causing them considerable hardships during the rice cultivation season. For half a year commune cadres had also not received their salaries because of this politically rooted financial crisis. At a major meeting during which the secretary of the Communist Party branch in Sơn-Dương reviewed commune activities in the first half of 1998, a villager was reported to have asked publicly who had elected this political leader to a position of authority. Since I first visited the commune in 1987, relations between the local population and the state seemed to have undergone a fundamental transformation, in parallel to the proliferation of communal - and kinship-based local associations. Within the context of these intricately tight local social networks, the local population was clearly attempting to exert considerable pressures on the state and Party apparatuses , not simply through subtle resistance (Kerkvliet 1995 and 2005), but through open confrontation and occasionally adversarial public dialogue. Spontaneous local associations based on kinship, religious, and communal ties and constitutive of “alternative civilities” in rural northern Vietnam (see Weller 1999) can serve as a strong foundation for the mobilization for collective action in the face of growing local socioeconomic inequal- Restructuring of Local Governance 247 ity. These associations have been at least as effective in strengthening the voice of local populations as bourgeois-dominated voluntary associations are in communities with a greater market penetration. Such dialogues have led to a restructuring of governance in rural Vietnam. The Unfolding of Public Dramas The Public Drama in Sơn-Dương The public drama in Sơn-Dương began on December 13, 1996, when the family members of many war dead (liệt sĩ) and war invalids gathered outside the commune’s cemetery for the revolutionary and war dead. Having been denied access to the commune meeting hall, those Sơn-Dương villagers chose the other officially sacred space in the commune for their meeting. The elderly president of the commune association of gia đình chính sách (policy-favored households) started the meeting with incense burning in commemoration of those “native sons who had sacrificed their lives for the independence and welfare” of the country. The family members of the war dead and war invalids were joined by many residents of one commune neighborhood, whose leader was a sister of one of the war invalids. The villagers were reacting with indignation to what the leaders of a spontaneous, local anticorruption movement had uncovered in the previous few days: 1. A list of eighty-three “war dead and war invalid” households, signed by the president and the main tax official of Sơn-Dương commune, had been submitted in 1996 to higher authorities for full or partial exemption from agricultural taxes, as required by the national government ’s tax exemption decree. However, the list contained nine households that were not eligible for the tax exemption and the commune administration had granted no exemption to a number of exemptioneligible households on the list or only a part of their exemption. 2. Of those eighty-three households, the agricultural land holdings of fifty-nine had been artificially inflated without their knowledge in order to obtain higher exemptions which, needless to say, were not passed on to them. The leaders of the local anticorruption campaign accused local officials of pocketing the difference between the higher, province-granted exemptions and the actual exemptions received by village households. 248 Market Economy and Local Dynamics Eighty-four villagers signed a resolution that demanded the firing of...