(Kerkvliet 1995, Malarney 1996, Ma 2002, Hsu 2008, Marshall 2009, Gainsborough 2010, Heurlin 2010, Hsu 2010)
Through a case study of Vietnam, this paper explores what happens to neoliberal ideas about development when they encounter the very different political and cultural context of a developing country. The paper argues that although much scholarship tends implicitly or explicitly to emphasise the very great power of neoliberal institutions in our world today, an analysis of continuity and change in Vietnam during two decades of extensive engagement with neoliberal actors suggests that the influence of neoliberalism on the working of the Vietnamese state has been relatively small. The paper seeks both to document and explain this through an account which is attentive to both structure and agency and which in turn sheds new light on the nature of power in our world.
This paper attempts to take the first steps toward developing a theory of non-governmental organizations (NGO)-state relations under dictatorship. Drawing on evidence from East Asia, the author argues that dictatorships typically employ one of two strategies in attempting to govern NGOs. First, some dictatorships follow a corporatist strategy, in which business associations, development, and social welfare organizations are co-opted into the state and controlled through a variety of strategies. Second, other dictatorships pursue an exclusionary strategy in which NGOs are marginalized and replaced with state institutions. Variation in the strategy chosen may be explained by differing levels of elite competition and the type of development strategy. Single-party states tend to regulate elite conflicts better and thus often choose corporatist strategies. In personalist regimes dictators tend to fear the organizational and mobilizational potential of NGOs and thus tend to pursue exclusionary strategies. This choice, however, is conditioned by the development strategy employed, as socialist development strategies reduce the incentives to allow NGOs.
In the last two decades, the People's Republic of China has witnessed an explosion of NGOs. What will the implications be for state?society relations? This article, drawing upon research conducted at seven Chinese NGOs, critiques two approaches to analysing this problem: the civil society framework and the privatization perspective. It then proffers a third way: an approach based on organizational analysis. Both the civil society and privatization perspectives assume a zero-sum game between a monolithic state and NGOs/citizens. Yet empirical evidence reveals that Chinese NGOs are often much more interested in building alliances with state agencies and actors than in autonomy from the government. From an organizational perspective, this makes sense. As organizations, both NGOs and state agencies need to ensure a constant supply of necessary resources for the firm to survive, and their strategies for achieving this goal will be constrained by their actors' own institutional experiences and the cultural frameworks extant in their society. Alliances between Chinese NGOs and state agencies can help both types of organizations secure necessary resources and gain legitimacy.
Beginning in the 1990s, the People's Republic of China has experienced explosive growth in the number of non-governmental organizations. This article examines one of the earliest and most influential Chinese NGOs, Project Hope, a charitable organization which solicits donations to help poor rural children stay in school. The success of Project Hope and the subsequent growth of the non-profit sector are surprising given that China arguably has no history of an organizational form like the Western donative-style charity. As such, this case offers a rare opportunity to examine the rise of a new organizational form. New institutionalist and social capital theoretical approaches will be used to analyse the social mechanisms underlying practice of donative-style charity. Chinese cultural practices of giving to the needy in the premodern era and under Mao Zedong's socialist state (1949?1978) will be explicated to reveal the resources and constraints emerging Chinese charities faced in the post-socialist era. This article focuses on one problem that China's first Western-style charities had to address: how to establish the practice of voluntary giving to non-governmental organizations. It examines two of Project Hope's strategies and their consequences: (1) blurring the distinction between charitable organizations and the state and (2) building personal relationships between donors and recipients.
Why, since 1988, has the Vietnamese government reversed its commitment to collective farming and permitted the revival of family farming? BENEDICT KERKVLIET rejects the obvious explanation-that reversal followed naturally from the post-1986 policy of reform (d oi-moi) or that it merely mimicked Chinese policies. He proposes, as an alternative, that the Vietnamese government has responded with various kinds of accommodations since the mid-1970s to growing popular discontent with its agricultural policies. Borrowing a concept from Brantly Womack, Kerkvliet suggests that Communist parties must be "mass-regarding" both to establish their rule and to maintain it. He links this idea with James Scott's emphasis on the power of everyday peasant resistance to conclude that the Vietnamese Communist Party was responding to popular pressure from below. Thus, Kerkvliet finds that standard characterizations that represent the current regime in Vietnam as a "dominating state" or one that rules through "mobilization authoritarianism" overlook the existence of strong local social pressures that have the capacity for low-level resistance to government policy. Moreover, such characterizations also do not take into account that the Vietnamese state has displayed a long-term concern with ensuring that its policies are acceptable among the peasantry.
Does the surge of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in China indicate a shift in power away from the party-state and the emergence of a civil society? In an attempt to shed light on the relationship between the state and the NGOs, this article examines the aims of official NGO policy and its influence on the growth patterns of NGOs. The discussion is divided into three sections. The first section analyzes the NGO concept in China and the features of official policy. The second and third sections address two models of Chinese NGOs. The study concludes that even as the Chinese government remains the most decisive component in the development of NGOs, the state is withdrawing from responsibilities toward society. The interactive and mutually dependent relations between the government and NGOs indicate the continuing power of the party-state as well as the decline in its capacity to control the growth of organizations.
In this article I examine the history and consequences of the Vietnamese Communist Party's attempt to reform funerary rituals in the post-1954 period. By examining the mixed results of the campaign, I argue that "state functionalism," a phenomenon defined as the use of ritual by state officials to advance official objectives and ideology, cannot succeed in controlling all meanings and values mobilized in ritual. Official ideology, however, does not remain divorced from the values and ideals participants bring to reformed ritual practices. Instead, it enters into a transformative dialogue with its historical antecedents, producing a set of rituals, and ideas about ritual, different from what the cadres intended and what they replaced. [funerary ritual, Vietnam, ritual change, culture and ideology, socialist ritual]
Marshall, V.-N. (2009). "Tools of Empire? Vietnamese Catholics in South Vietnam." from http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/044402ar.
This article examines the social and political activities of Vietnamese Roman Catholics in South Vietnam in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s. The Catholics participation in the public sphere, ranging from joining humanitarian organizations to organizing street protests, suggests that they were highly organized and proactive in trying to change their social and political environment. While Catholics held some political views and goals in common with the South Vietnamese and the United States governments, they pursued their own objectives, engaged in local and national politics, critiqued government policy, and maintained an important degree of independence from state power and influence.
