May 24, 2009
HO CHI MINH CITY, VIETNAM — The Vietnamese Communist Party, like its fraternal party in China, has identified the No. 1 threat it faces. The looming danger is called “peaceful evolution.”
That may sound like the weatherman warning of the menace of clear, sunlit skies. But the architects of Market-Leninism, who have delivered fast-growth capitalism to one-party Asian states, are in earnest. The nightmares they have are not about revolutionary upheaval, but the drip, drip, drip of liberal democracy.
Twenty years after Tiananmen Square, revolt is dormant and students docile from Beijing to Hanoi. They’ve bought into development over democracy for the foreseeable future. They may want more freedom, but not to the point that they will confront the system, as the Tiananmen generation did.
“The major task for China now is development,” a Peking University ecology major named Song Chao told my colleague Sharon LaFraniere. That’s the mood here in Vietnam, too, where moving up from motorbikes to cars is more likely to occupy the next generation than pushing for multiparty democracy.
As in China, this pragmatic sentiment is related to trauma. Both countries saw civil wars in the second half of the 20th century that exacted tremendous tolls. So stability is prized, especially as it has brought fast-rising living standards.
But there’s more to the shift that has made “peaceful evolution” the specter keeping Asian politburos awake at night.
Technology has taken the “total” out of totalitarian. The Stalinist or Maoist dark night of the soul has been consigned to history by wired societies. Neither China nor Vietnam is free. At the same time, neither is so un-free as to make their citizens ache for liberty. Shi Guoliang, who researches the social outlook of young people at Beijing’s China Youth University for Political Sciences, told the Financial Times that: “Students don’t do sit-ins, they blog and use Twitter.”
Of course, the Chinese authorities block some Web sites deemed hostile. Internet freedom is limited. Here in Vietnam, where things are generally more tropical-lax than up north, that freedom is far greater. (Vietnamese rivalry with China is a constant beneath all the official fraternity.)
In both countries, communication and the online world serve as safety valves for one-party states where Communism is little more than the brand name given to power retention.
In general, I’d say the era of revolutions is over. Google has gobbled the insurrectionary impulse. That is the main difference between the Tiananmen generation and Asia’s rising “Generation Global.” Heat rises in a confined space. When walls and borders are porous, it gets dissipated.
So what’s a party functionary, having digested the lessons of Mao and Ho, to fret about if not “peaceful evolution?”
The almost noiseless implosion of the Soviet system and the velvet revolutions of central Europe have made an indelible impression on the architects of 21st-century soft repression. They’re alert not to bangs but to whimpers.
Their systems are quiet. They are based not on terror and Gulags, but on the establishment of red lines that only impinge on freedom where freedom begins to mean the right to denounce or organize against the authorities.
So what the custodians of repression-lite Communism with a capitalist face fear are not revolutionary cells armed with AK-47s but harmless-sounding nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). They’re on the watch for puffy-faced, over-educated Western idealists who, behind talk of human rights and the rule of law, may be blurring those red lines and sucking the fiber of a Communist cadre.
“You can register a company here in a day, but forget about registering an NGO or charity,” Jonathan Pincus, who runs a branch of Harvard’s Kennedy School in Ho Chi Minh City, told me. A Russian delegation was in Vietnam recently giving advice on how to counter the NGO menace.
That’s regrettable but hardly disastrous. The best should not be the enemy of the good. The rapid rise of China and Vietnam, accounting between them for some 20 percent of humanity, has ushered hundreds of millions of people from poverty since totalitarian Communism fell. The West is in no position to say it knows better.
Something there is about a single doctrine that rubs humanity the wrong way. For a brief moment, after the Berlin Wall fell, free-market, multiparty liberal systems seemed set to sweep everything in their triumphant path. But from Moscow to Beijing to Hanoi, reaction came. Markets and nationalism trumped freedom and the vote; the noble spirit of Tiananmen and Berlin faded.
America, born as a liberating idea, must be true to that and promote its values. But, sobered and broke, it must be patient. As the emergent middle classes of Vietnam and China become more demanding of what they consume, they will also be more demanding consumers of government.
They will want more transparency, predictable laws, better health care, less corruption, broader education, freer speech and fewer red lines.
One-party states will be hard pressed to provide that. Another quarter-century down the road, I’d bet on more democracy and liberty in Beijing and Hanoi, achieved through peaceful evolution, no less.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/opinion/25iht-edcohen.html
