Vietnam's Children in a Changing World

Two

24 Vietnam’s Children in a Changing World Two Background to Vietnam 24 Most of the children I met during fieldwork were born in the 1980s, a time of great flux for Vietnam: By the mid-1980s Communistinspired agricultural collectivism was failing, engendering famines and crisis . The crisis was further worsened by the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, which resulted in the end of the Soviet Union’s financial aid to Vietnam . During the sixth Communist Party Congress in 1986, the Vietnamese government introduced reform under a policy labeled Doi Moi, which means “renovation” or “renewal.” This meant that out of pragmatic necessity the Vietnamese government followed its Chinese neighbors in developing a socialist-oriented market economy. This type of mixed market economy held out the best hope for economic growth, and an acceptance of Western economic governance rules, which accompanied this switch in policy, meant that they would be eligible for Western aid and investment. Vietnam is still a one-party state controlled by the Communist Party. The country is referred to as a socialist republic but has a market-oriented economy. This shift in policy has given Western organizations both in the private and non-government sectors new freedom to enter Vietnam and establish working relationships. But it has also resulted in an unclear future for Vietnam, where, as I show throughout this book, Communist-informed Background to Vietnam 25 thinking overlaps on the one hand with older belief systems such as Confucianism and on the other with contemporary structural reform influences exerted at an international level, principally from the West. If it were not for a fundamental shift in policy I would never have had such freedom to stay in Vietnam and been able to meet the children who appear on the pages that follow, but neither would I have become engaged in studying the manner in which children’s circumstances at the local level are being so readily ignored in the application of Western-driven aid policy. Vietnam has historically experienced a hard battle with outsiders intent on reshaping and taking over its territory to claim the country as their own. It has been colonized or fought over by the Chinese, the French, the Japanese , and the Americans. A not dissimilar desire for ownership sometimes seems reflected in the work of modern aid workers and academics working in the region. Contemporary Vietnam is being invaded in a more subtle but nevertheless nefarious manner, this time by cultural hijackers intent on, among other objectives, introducing children in the region to a new set of values and expectations, without necessarily first doing the groundwork to find out why they follow their current lifestyles. In this chapter, to contextualize the experience of the children who appear throughout this book, I discuss some of these historical and cultural influences and explain how they continue to shape the experiences of people living in contemporary Vietnam. Geography and Early History The Socialist Republic of Vietnam lies along the eastern edge of the peninsula of mainland Southeast Asia. The country is more than one thousand miles long, running down from China in the north to the delta of the Mekong River in the south. Vietnam is bordered on the east by the South China Sea; its neighbors to the west are Laos and Cambodia, while to the north lies China. Its land mass totals 329,556 square kilometers (Duiker 1995, 1). Ethnic Vietnamese make up 85 percent of the population, and the remaining 15 percent have had their origins traced back to the Thai, Cham, Khmer, and ethnic Chinese. Today the population is estimated to be about 81 million, and a high growth rate continues. Vietnam’s two fertile alluvial deltas—Red River, or Hong-ha, in the north and Mekong in the 26 Vietnam’s Children in a Changing World south—have inspired the image of the typical Vietnamese peasant carrying two rice baskets suspended at the ends of a pole (SarDesai 1992, 1). The capital city, Hanoi, lies to the north in the grain-producing region of the Red River Delta. Ho Chi Minh City (still sometimes locally known as Saigon) is to the south. Between the two lies a thinner, less populated and less productive coastal region. The seventeenth parallel, which from 1954 to 1975 formed a contested political boundary between what were then North Vietnam and South Vietnam, intersects the central portion of Vietnam. In 1975...