Written by Jonathan Smylie
We had only one day to explore Hanoi. At dinner the night before I asked Tanh what we should see. The Museum of Ethnology, he said, “Make sure to see the Bao Cap exhibit that documents when the whole country starved.” What I didn’t know until our museum visit was that Tanh was handing me the answer to one of my questions. What had happened in Vietnam since 1975?
For me, after the last helicopter left the roof of the US embassy in Saigon, the country dropped into the back of my thinking, my knowledge of it never deepening beyond the occasional release of another war movie. One of the things I was looking for and what Tanh in answering my question was giving me was a chance to understand the history of the country over the last 32 years or at least draw an outline of it. His emphasis on the Bao Cap exhibit showed again the candor we had experienced from him all along.
After the country was unified in 1975, the communist leaders moved quickly to socialize the southern economy turning food production into a forced collectivization. This time of “subsidy economy” was called “Bao Cap”.
The underlying goal was the maintenance of a tight control over the people and for the leaders the preservation of their power. The result was chaos. All rice distribution was controlled by the government, which set up a system of rice stores. Citizens were only allowed to buy rice at the store where they were registered. It was as if you were assigned to buy all your food at one particular grocery store. Each family was given rice coupons on which appeared their names, their jobs and the amount of rice they were allotted. The lines at these rice stores grew long and the stores were often closed before everyone received their ration. Not surprisingly, corruption was widespread with the most powerful and wealthiest people able to obtain more and better food then the vast majority. Often because the best rice never made it into the stores, the people were forced to trade their coupons for “moldy, smelly, worm-eaten rice.”
With no incentives in place for farmers to obtain more food by working harder or growing more crops, rice production dropped.
Stacked on top of this weak economic structure were a number of events in the late 1970s and early 80s that shattered the economy.
Because their incentive based work life in the south was taken away, hundreds of thousands of people, mainly ethnic Chinese, fled the country on foot or by boat causing a drain in vital human capital. It also didn’t help that thousands of the south’s intellectual and government leaders along with many skilled and educated people, who did not leave the country after the war, were interned in re-education camps.
During the late 1970s the country suffered major floods and drought that severely reduced food production.
Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December 1978 after the Phnom Penh government had claimed part of Vietnam’s southern region as its own and had instigated a series of border clashes. Vietnam quickly took control of Cambodia. To fight back, the Khmer Rouge retreated into isolated areas and began a guerrilla war which forced Vietnam to station 200,000 troops in Cambodia. United States and most of the other western countries instigated an embargo on Vietnam to protest this war, which isolated the country. To punish Vietnam for invading Cambodia, China launched a brief invasion. This month-long war destroyed many northern towns, but it also stung the Chinese. It is reported that China may have lost 50,000 troops during this revenge act. For Vietnam the cost of supporting troops in Cambodia and defending its border with China grew high.
Meat and rice became scarce. The lines at the rice stores grew longer.
The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union cost Vietnam its only supportive nation, but in watching how glasnost and perestroika worked in Russia, Vietnam was given an idea for how to get out of its troubles.
Under a new leader, Nguyen Van Linh, the party’s motto became “to change or to die.” A contract-system was set up with the farmers to encourage cultivation. They were allowed, for the first time since the war, to sell their excess crop. In 1989, when Tanh was 13, rice production for the first time in years, increased significantly.
The new leadership understood it had to end its forced isolation with the world. Vietnam withdrew its troops from Cambodia and signed a peace agreement with the country in 1991. Hanoi began assisting the US in determining the fate of Americans missing-in-action, which in turn led to the US lifting its embargo in 1994 and establishing diplomatic relations with Hanoi in 1995. That same year the country became a member of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and foreign companies began to invest again.
Today Nike is the largest employee in Vietnam. The farmers are expanding their crops and everywhere one senses the Vietnamese see a more abundant future. Tanh, with his girlfriend, own a motorbike. Their country has a long way to go, still. But for some, like Tanh, it is happening now. For his two weeks of care and guidance, a group of six American cycling tourists gave him a $600 US dollar tip – a little less than Vietnam’s average annual per capita income.
We had only one day to explore Hanoi. At dinner the night before I asked Tanh what we should see. The Museum of Ethnology, he said, “Make sure to see the Bao Cap exhibit that documents when the whole country starved.” What I didn’t know until our museum visit was that Tanh was handing me the answer to one of my questions. What had happened in Vietnam since 1975?
For me, after the last helicopter left the roof of the US embassy in Saigon, the country dropped into the back of my thinking, my knowledge of it never deepening beyond the occasional release of another war movie. One of the things I was looking for and what Tanh in answering my question was giving me was a chance to understand the history of the country over the last 32 years or at least draw an outline of it. His emphasis on the Bao Cap exhibit showed again the candor we had experienced from him all along.
After the country was unified in 1975, the communist leaders moved quickly to socialize the southern economy turning food production into a forced collectivization. This time of “subsidy economy” was called “Bao Cap”.
The underlying goal was the maintenance of a tight control over the people and for the leaders the preservation of their power. The result was chaos. All rice distribution was controlled by the government, which set up a system of rice stores. Citizens were only allowed to buy rice at the store where they were registered. It was as if you were assigned to buy all your food at one particular grocery store. Each family was given rice coupons on which appeared their names, their jobs and the amount of rice they were allotted. The lines at these rice stores grew long and the stores were often closed before everyone received their ration. Not surprisingly, corruption was widespread with the most powerful and wealthiest people able to obtain more and better food then the vast majority. Often because the best rice never made it into the stores, the people were forced to trade their coupons for “moldy, smelly, worm-eaten rice.”
With no incentives in place for farmers to obtain more food by working harder or growing more crops, rice production dropped.
Stacked on top of this weak economic structure were a number of events in the late 1970s and early 80s that shattered the economy.
Because their incentive based work life in the south was taken away, hundreds of thousands of people, mainly ethnic Chinese, fled the country on foot or by boat causing a drain in vital human capital. It also didn’t help that thousands of the south’s intellectual and government leaders along with many skilled and educated people, who did not leave the country after the war, were interned in re-education camps.
During the late 1970s the country suffered major floods and drought that severely reduced food production.
Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December 1978 after the Phnom Penh government had claimed part of Vietnam’s southern region as its own and had instigated a series of border clashes. Vietnam quickly took control of Cambodia. To fight back, the Khmer Rouge retreated into isolated areas and began a guerrilla war which forced Vietnam to station 200,000 troops in Cambodia. United States and most of the other western countries instigated an embargo on Vietnam to protest this war, which isolated the country. To punish Vietnam for invading Cambodia, China launched a brief invasion. This month-long war destroyed many northern towns, but it also stung the Chinese. It is reported that China may have lost 50,000 troops during this revenge act. For Vietnam the cost of supporting troops in Cambodia and defending its border with China grew high.
Meat and rice became scarce. The lines at the rice stores grew longer.
The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union cost Vietnam its only supportive nation, but in watching how glasnost and perestroika worked in Russia, Vietnam was given an idea for how to get out of its troubles.
Under a new leader, Nguyen Van Linh, the party’s motto became “to change or to die.” A contract-system was set up with the farmers to encourage cultivation. They were allowed, for the first time since the war, to sell their excess crop. In 1989, when Tanh was 13, rice production for the first time in years, increased significantly.
The new leadership understood it had to end its forced isolation with the world. Vietnam withdrew its troops from Cambodia and signed a peace agreement with the country in 1991. Hanoi began assisting the US in determining the fate of Americans missing-in-action, which in turn led to the US lifting its embargo in 1994 and establishing diplomatic relations with Hanoi in 1995. That same year the country became a member of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and foreign companies began to invest again.
Today Nike is the largest employee in Vietnam. The farmers are expanding their crops and everywhere one senses the Vietnamese see a more abundant future. Tanh, with his girlfriend, own a motorbike. Their country has a long way to go, still. But for some, like Tanh, it is happening now. For his two weeks of care and guidance, a group of six American cycling tourists gave him a $600 US dollar tip – a little less than Vietnam’s average annual per capita income.
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