Chat with Hong Kong students

The first part if an interview I conducted with four Hong Kong undergraduates in relation to the pro-democracy civil disobedience movement that intensified in late Sept/early October 2014.

In Part 2 I begin by discussing some the challenges of living as
a Hong Kong citizen and foreigners (especiallly academics)
in Hong Kong in an environment in which the promise of
an increasingly democratic society appears to be fading.

Here’s part 3. We talk about the complex relation between
democratic politics and livelihood issues and conclude.

Warming US ties and Vietnam’s future

Vietnam Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh’s visit to Washington this week marks an important event in a large process of warming ties between the US and Vietnamese state’s. The talks come after several months of high-level discussions between various representatives of the two sides in the face of the Chinese state’s aims to enforce its legally baseless sovereignty claims over vast swathes of the maritime Southeast Asia and change the status quo through various coercive means.

In the face of these threats – to Vietnam’s sovereignty and to regional security – a great deal of attention has been directly to the imminent easing of Washington’s ban on the sale of lethal weapons to Hanoi. Beyond transfers of military and security equipment and technology and its not inconsiderable symbolic meaning, the lifting of the ban portends deeper military-to-military cooperation. Yet talks between the two countries leaders extend well beyond the military sphere. Nearly 40 decades on from their disastrous war, the US and Vietnamese states share numerous interests spanning trade and investment, education, and not least a need to manage what the Vietnamese have diplomatically described as Beijing’s “unchecked unilateralism.”

Internationally, the spectacle of warming ties between Hanoi and Washington nearly 40 years after the culmination of their disastrous war in interesting on all sorts of levels. What is perhaps less understood among foreign observers is the incredible and almost indescribably complexity of recent developments in Vietnam’s domestic politics. These developments, though difficult to make complete sense of, are nonetheless deserving of attention. For Vietnam’s leaders and indeed its people are today engaged in a grand debate about the country’s direction.

The questions facing the Vietnamese today are large and they are multifaceted. Among these the urgent (if familiar) problem of ‘how to cope with China now’ is only the most obvious and intractable. The far more interesting and in many respects more important debates raging in Vietnam concern the course of the country’s institutional and political development. For there is an increasing sense that the country’s institutions and politics – and not any foreign power – are the key factors undermining the country’s economic performance, slowing improvements in living standards, and intensifying inequalities of income, opportunity, and rights.

Vietnam remains an authoritarian polity. Yet in recent years debates about democracy and (to a lesser extent) rights have slowly but surely become regularized features of the country’s tense but gradually liberalizing political discourse. Many of the strongest calls for fundamental institutional and political reforms are longtime party members, whose decades of service immunize them against repression. Other voices for change are found in the country’s vibrant, diverse, and increasingly confident civil society that, though subject to waves of repression, has become a robust force in the country’s politics. Last but not least are millions of overseas Vietnamese – including earlier and very recent international migrants – who together with their countryman are keen to see Vietnam break through its self-made pathologies and join the ranks of East Asia’s open and democratic societies.

How, then, should we understand Vietnam amid the clinking of champagne glasses in Washington? Vietnam remains a country with vast economic potential. The country’s economy can and should be preforming much better than it is, something virtually all Vietnamese sense or know. Vietnam’s people have seen very significant improvements in their living standards, but the improvements have come from a very low base, are unequal across income groups, and are proceeding too slowing owing to various institutional constraints that adversely effect everything from education, to health care, to economic opportunities.

Standing between Vietnam and a more prosperous future are a series of important political decisions about the country’s institutional development. Closer ties with the US are welcome and may assist Vietnam in addressing its institutional challenges. But ultimately it is the Vietnamese who must together decide.

JL