Vietnamese urban civilization and the "conduct of behaviors

Urban growth in Vietnam, because it is the driving force behind the economy, is accompanied by new challenges that call into question modes of government and the relationships maintained between the various players involved in urban production. As a neo-communist state, Vietnam has abandoned the dictatorship of the proletariat in favor of the global capitalist market. Nevertheless, a study of the party-state's rationality of power and governing techniques reveals a continuity that the Đổi mới of 1986 and the urbancivilization program confirm.





The Đổi mới is characterized by Việt Nam's integration into international trade circuits, the construction of road and tourism infrastructures, agricultural diversification, liberalization of the land market, and so on. Nevertheless, the country still subscribes to democratic centralism, multipartyism is not an option and the state alone decides on public policies in addition to strictly controlling investments. Marxism-Leninism, which has proved its worth in terms of mobilizing and controlling the masses, is still the ideological framework for the party-state's actions, and continues to define the political space for relations between the people and their governing structures. After spending 58 years in party service and 30 in the army, General Trần Độ, speaking of the need to turn the country around by establishing a democratic regime, asserted:



"The holders of power need an ideology that must guarantee power, its stability and reinforcement. It condemns all deviance, all criticism and all opposition. This ideology doesn't care about doctrines, theories or even morals, as long as it guarantees the existence and strength of power. Its subsistence becomes the sole criterion of reference, principle or morality. This is why it allows itself to lie, deceive, repress and terrorize in order to subsist and reinforce its power.
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Even more recently, dissenting voices are becoming increasingly vocal, with some intellectuals regularly calling for a second Đổi mới like economist Lê Đăng Doanh, who insists on the need to "refresh the party".



Yet if "recourse to the immutable in order to face the transition" remains the regime's watchword, it's precisely because the party-state doesn't intend to abandon its role as guide and father of the nation. Acknowledging its gradual loss of legitimacy and the growing number of acts of mistrust, since the 1990s the Vietnamese party-state has been promoting a new project for modernity and society: "urban civilization".
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Whether it's a question of creating a new man or erecting powerful metropolises inhabited by civilized urbanites, the process remains authoritarian and tied to a hegemonic logic. For it is precisely on this project that the legitimacy and therefore the durability of power depend. The ability of the authorities to listen to citizens' "demand for normalcy", and the room left for compromise, negotiation and arrangements at all levels (within the administrative apparatus, but also between the State and the population), reveal a soft authoritarianism, with variable geometry.





Since the country opened up to the market economy at the end of the 1980s, the city, once home to the comprador bourgeoisie, has become the driving force behind the economy, which must then be defended as an ideology (36% urban dwellers in 2020). As a result, it gradually became one of the levers giving greater substance to the discourse of political leaders on the party's efforts to make Việt Nam a Republic with a "strong economy, a fair and civilized society" (propaganda slogan of the Vietnamese Communist Party - VCP). The speeches and slogans used try as much as possible to associate and articulate the party's paternalism with the new urban ideology that would be a source of wealth, modernity and civilization.



The Vietnamese party-state thus makes a point of explaining its developmentalist approach, even if it means sweeping aside the old political referents and the maximalist goal of the revolution. Thus, just as the government no longer speaks of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" but rather of the union of the entire people (toàn dân), in the urban and societal sphere, the terms urban civilization (văn minh đô thị, văn minh is derived from the Chinese wenming (文明)) and civilized urban have replaced references to the new man. The concept of urban civilization, proposed in 1983, was first applied to Hà Nội before spreading to the whole country, and gained renewed interest during the celebration of 1000 years of Thăng Long (皇城昇龍). Resolution 8 of 1983 states that "the capital of Hà Nội must be built to become an exemplary city of socialism in Việt Nam, a place based on the revolutionary path of the whole country". In Resolution 15 of 2000, terms such as "elegant", "modern", "identity" and "hero center" are added. The concept of urbancivilization thus fits in perfectly with the continuity of virtuocratic governability (Susan L. Shrik, 1982) seen as much in China as in Việt Nam.





According to this understanding of urban civilization, the city's appearance reflects the situation of the entire country and the actions of its community; it is a showcase. A civilized urbanite is an educated individual who governs himself for the good of society and not for himself alone. In the civilized city, city dwellers are "graduated", "well-educated", have mastered the verb and are "modern". Each is then called upon to work for the good of other city dwellers, to respect the environment and, of course, to respect the revolutionary heritage. Urban civilization is thus linked to the celebration of the country's greatness and its patriotic, revolutionary and nationalist history, with explicit reference in particular to the collectivist framework.



The program of urbancivilization, timidly deployed until the late 1980s, is, from the 1990s onwards, part of a new political rationality designed to govern and discipline the masses in a general context marked by an atomization of society. Thus, the term urbancivilization operates on a dual level. Firstly, it acts as a legitimizing process for political authorities. Secondly, urban civilization refers to an injunctive corpus as well as to the redefinition of a new authoritarian norm imposed from above on populations. A marker of a relationship of domination, civilization aims to promote individuals and territories to higher levels of organization, while smoothing out relations between individuals and homogenizing society as much as possible in order to artificially create correspondences between society and ideology. These normative injunctions, which define the moral framework of everyday life, participate in a form of control over city dwellers, who in turn, through their standardized and more or less dominated behavior, validate this process of control. One of the aims of urban civilization, through its ability to deploy a regime of mores in the sense of Norbert Elias, is to bring about the emergence of an urban class with "good morals", i.e. a class dominating both the national geographical space (superiority of the city over the countryside) and the social space (civilized, polite, courteous and educated city dweller versus countryman and boorish migrant, poorly educated and little integrated into the new territories of ongoing modernization).



Nevertheless, "specific interests in obeying" (Max Weber) need to be taken into account when analyzing the domination of subjects who are often wrongly considered docile and passive. It's also important to bring back into the debate the way in which the various actors invent a way of navigating between normative injunctions, legal obligations and their particular interests. All of this reveals day-to-day practices marked by innovation and creativity (Michel de Certeau's "ruse"), modulating the reading based on a simple command-obedience relationship. Subalternity, as developed by James Scott (2009), opens up the perspective of political experience, emphasizing that politics cannot be reduced to declared political activities or to the public activities of the dominated.
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Lastly, urbancivilization also questions the governmentality at work. This is a subject that deserves to be addressed, particularly in the context of the neo-liberalization of the Southeast Asian region's economy and its bridgeheads of capitalist globalization: the metropolises. The concept of governmentality defined by Michel Foucault was designed to be applied to modern Western societies, but as a number of studies of neo-liberal Chinese socialist government show, this concept can be articulated in non-liberal contexts. The transition from "plan" to "market" is indeed accompanied by significant changes in the way the practice and objects of government are understood, calculated and standardized. This transition is leading to the emergence of a hybrid neo-liberal socialist form of political rationality[1]. Large swathes of society are targeted by self-improvement programs, which encourage the emergence of self-awareness through coercive and authoritarian measures.





Yves Duchère

ATER in geography of Southeast Asia



[1] Read the abstract of Duchère (Y.), 2019, Hà Nội and its region. Une géographie du compromis en régime autoritaire, Les Indes Savantes, 238 p.

Image caption: Lane residential district Thọ in Hà Nội. - Credit: Đào Thị Tạo

The sign at the top reads "Thọ residential district stands together in building cultural life" and the recent banner reads "Thọ residential district stands together in building civilized city".





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