To sum up, what we have, then, is a state which is little more than a disparate group of actors with a weak notion of 'the public good', using uncertainty, not impartial rules, as the basis of order. However, this is only part of the picture since the state also appears as greater than the sum of its parts - an institution which has 'self-preserving and self-aggrandizing impulses', to quote Benedict Anderson (1983), which takes people in and spits them out, and which re-creates itself in a way that cannot be reducible to the wit of any one individual. In Vietnam this comes across most clearly in terms of the way in which when this 'collectivity' of institutions and actors feel its core interests threatened, it is able to mobilize fairly robustly in order to clamp down on people or activities deemed to threaten the 'whole show'.
Martin Gainsborough (2010) Vietnam: Rethinking the state
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