They found out like everybody else that it didn't really work. It led to widespread corruption and economic failure. There's a new generation calling for democracy:
"Pluralism has worked well in economy over the last 20 years, now it's time to try political pluralism too," Le Cong Dinh, a lawyer in Ho Chi Minh City, told the BBC's Vietnamese Service.
Of course the old guard isn't ready for this.
Such talk must be alarming the conservative faction in the party. In a late February issue of Nhan Dan newspaper, the party's chief ideologue, Nguyen Duc Binh, launched an attack on those who had questioned the principle of socialism.
A better place to discuss socialism and the future of the party, he argued, should be an internal magazine, instead of in the national and regional press.
He said, for example, that a new plan to allow businessmen to join the party was "unnatural".
"Open discussion, through all sorts of letters disseminated around the country, is harmful," he said.
Which is pretty much what one would expect to hear from Communist party leadership. But all is not lost. Evidently there are plenty of people who are ready for change.
However, modern Vietnam has changed so much that it is difficult for the party to stick to the traditional interpretation of Marxism-Leninism. Do Ngoc Ninh, director of a party think-tank in Hanoi, dismissed Nguyen Duc Binh's view as "his own private opinion".
Sounds like a hopeful story to me.
3 comments:
That's good to hear. I think many of us here in the US are sort of stuck in the past when it comes to Vietnam. Most people think of a war-torn country, circa 1975. But the fact is Vietnam has developed steadily and progressively since then and but for interventions in Cambodia and some trouble with China, they've done quite well. There's really a lot of hope for the country.
Further proving the futility of the war in Vietnam, for both sides. The Communists won, only to face the fact that nobody wants to live in a Communist country. I wonder what Vietnam would be like if we'd just let things happen there?
Probably about 20 years ahead of where it is now.
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