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Just a half century ago the martyred Ngo Dinh Diem came to have tea in my Greenwich Village studio. I had recently returned from a year as a correspondent with the French army in Hanoi. He was in asylum with the Maryknoll Fathers, dedicated as he had been all his life to finding a nationalist solution for his country. It was, of course, all to end in tragedy for Vietnam and the US when John F. Kennedy ordered his murder and ended hope of a peaceful, democratic Vietnam in our time.
Diem explained to me that afternoon how his country’s history had always been a function of what happened in China, and how, he concluded, Vietnam would be condemned to follow the Communist regime then recently established in Beijing. Only and unless a third force from outside intervened, had Vietnam been free of Chinese dominance. And he lamented the suffering of his people at the hands of the French and the Communist-led Vietminh, little realizing how much more was to come with American participation in the Second Indochina War. His lobbying efforts paid off when the French threw John Foster Dulles a sop by naming him Emperor Bao Dai’s prime minister after Paris collapsed following the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. The rest, as they say, is [badly mangled in most of its recounting] history.
This all comes to mind as we watch another turn in US policy. The Bush Administration is presenting a badly flawed trade treaty to the Senate. Retiring Amb. Peterson, more a representative of Hanoi to Washington than our emissary to the Vietnamese, has pushed it through. It is another line thrown to the US in an effort to rescue the country from its incredibly corrupt, inefficient, tyrannical regime. [Washington insiders say US Trade Representative Charlene Barchevsky refused her imprimatur until pushed on through by Bill Clinton’s White House.] Not only does the treaty carry a covering letter negating all its liberalizing concessions, but hopes pinned to it fly in the face of the realities.
Nevertheless, new Trade Representative Zoellick is breaking it out of the trade package in an effort to win the Democrats’ support [headed by Massachusetts’ Sen. Kerry] to extend the President’s authority for fast track agreements with other countries. Thus, again, a combination of the Stockholm Syndrome and simple bubble-headedness will repeat the disastrous recognition agreement which Sen. McCain championed almost a decade ago for the Clinton Administration, giving the crumbling Hanoi regime a new lease on life.
Proponents are trumpeting a new era in Vietnam as a generation of “reformist” Communist politicians headed by Nong Duc Manh, Vietnam´s new Party chief, take over. Manh is reportedly the son of Ho Chi Minh, a notorious womanizer, and an indigenous mountain tribal woman who worked in his household. Whether true or not, the widely believed story has furthered an otherwise not notable career. Mahn presides over a Party that while it takes its cues ostensibly from the Chinese, is far less effective. In truth, 50 local Communist provincial warlords wage a constant wrangle with Hanoi for spoils — the bane of any potential investor. Most, including the Japanese, the French, and even their former Russian allies, have abandoned all hope.
The Vietnamese economy, such as it is, hangs together through total exploitation of the countryside for the “prosperity” of the cities, ominous in a country with a long history of peasant revolt. Offshore oil revenues, and most of all, remittances from the Diaspora, mostly the US, keep the country afloat. Foreign estimates are that 60% of central government revenues come from the largely Overseas Chinese companies operating in the Saigon area. Globalization means that not only would an exporter from Vietnam have to contend with this morass but also he would be up against China competition where investors are seduced despite the prevailing pretended ideology. A recent Asian Development Bank report paints a grim picture of one of the poorest countries in the world where Communist Party members gorge on the growing disparities of income.
Meanwhile, Beijing collaborates with the local corrupt Communist satrapies, a pattern of relationships laid down a few years ago when Li Peng, the notorious butcher of Tien An Mien, played the role of Lady Bountiful, buying up Communist cadre as he toured the country. A flood of cheap Chinese imports — much of it smuggled over a continually contested border [a new border agreement, the fifth or sixth attempt, has recently been negotiated] — has wiped out the cottage industries in Tonkin, the northern third of the country.
That’s why despite propaganda by a few noisy American carpetbeggars, the new agreement will do little for the Vietnamese — or for US-Vietnam relations.
But it will be another prop for China’s traditional wish-title for the region, An Nam [“the pacified South”].
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@abac.com), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.