Steve Bass et al. (2010) Viet Nam’s development priorities to date aim at high rates of economic growth – but in ways that constrain integration of environment objectives

The prevailing development narrative in Viet Nam is to achieve middle-income status through economic growth, under conditions that (it is assumed) will also reduce poverty en route. This is in spite of environmental damage becoming apparent and export markets increasingly demanding sustainably produced goods. Viet Nam’s market orientation excites competition between provinces to attract foreign direct investment (FDI), which continues to drive a ‘race to the bottom’ in ignoring environmental standards; state-owned enterprises (SOEs) continue to ‘steal from the future’ by polluting air and water. Heavy costs are imposed on the environment, with much natural resource degradation and pollution, which in turn explains much entrenched poverty. The National Environmental Performance Assessment (n.d.) is consequently gloomy, noting how water and air quality having been static or deteriorating and big losses of biodiversity in particular.

Environment is not central to the economic growth philosophy, except that poverty is seen to be a cause of environmental degradation. Indeed, environmental problems are sometimes attributed explicitly to some ethnic minorities – suggesting that changing the resource use practices of poor people should be the priority. Various policy documents suggest that environmental protection to make up for recent ‘environment sacrifices’ can be ‘afforded’ only once middle-income status is achieved.

The ‘economic growth first’ narrative creates great pressure to ignore environmental considerations at all levels. Production, income and economic growth are the top targets by which officials will be assessed. The associated quantitative indicators are compelling and the lack of similar quantitative environment indicators does nothing to balance the growth incentive. Furthermore, the honourable notion of ‘victory means sacrifice’ would seem to justify acceptance of the idea of sacrificing environment in the medium term – why create only one ‘green job’ if two ‘polluting jobs’ can be created today and the resultant income used to clean up associated environmental damage later? This short-term drive for growth may indeed be efficient if environmental assets can later be rebuilt, or if environmental hazards did no lasting harm, but this is not always the case. Unlike Thailand, Laos, Malaysia, Indonesia, and other neighbours, Viet Nam’s environment was already highly degraded before the growth spurt of the 2000s. Without significant change, the likely outcome of continued degradation may resemble China’s – with its huge social costs.

Steve Bass, David Annandale, Phan Van Binh, Tran Phuong Dong,Hoang Anh Nam, Le Thi Kien Oanh, Mike Parsons, Nguyen Van Phuc,and Vu Van Trieu (2010) Integrating environment and development in Viet Nam: Achievements, challenges and next steps

OECD (2015) Recent state of natural resource endowments and environmental pressures in Vietnam

A considerable proportion of Vietnam's economic growth in the past two decades has been the result of exploiting natural resources, especially the intensified use of both land and water, and a large degree of deforestation to plant export crops.

Vietnam is relatively rich in water resources, but regional and seasonal differences are significant and local shortages occur during the dry season, in particular in Southeast provinces. Moreover, almost 60% of Vietnam's total water resources are generated outside its borders, making the country vulnerable to decisions made about water resources in upstream countries (FAO AQUASTAT, 2013).

The economic scarcity of land is significant, with just 0.12 ha of agricultural land per capita, one-sixth of the world average, on par with Belgium, just below the Netherlands, but less than China or Indonesia and just above the Philippines and India (FAOSTAT, 2015). There are also growing pressures to convert agricultural land into higher-value non-farm uses (both urban and industrial).

Only about 30% of soil resources in Vietnam are of good quality. Due to the excessive use of fertilisers, pesticides and other chemicals, there has been a progressive degrading of the land and soil environment (MONRE, 2014). This leads to the widening prevalence of soil erosion, decline of soil fertility and growing risk of eutrophication (Pham et al., 2006; Vietnam Soil Association, 1996).

Deforestation, from increased planting to profitable agricultural crops, notably coffee, occurred heavily until the early 1990s. While the area of natural forest continues to decline, reforestation efforts in the last 15 years have increased total forested areas, in particular of planted and naturally regenerated forests. Despite these efforts and successes, over two-thirds of natural forests are considered to be of  'poor' or 'recovering' quality and low land forests have been almost completely depleted (UN-REDD, 2009). Vietnam has one of the highest rates in the world of the deforestation of primary forests.

Vietnam is listed among the ten countries potentially the most affected by climate change. Climate change scenarios developed by the Vietnamese government predict increases in average temperature, rainfall and rising sea levels. The potential impacts on agriculture are serious, as floods and droughts are predicted to happen more frequently. In particular, large cultivation areas in Mekong and Red River deltas are likely to be even more affected by salt water intrusion to sea level rise (ISPONRE, 2009).

OECD (2015) Agricultural policies in Vietnam 2015 

Minh T.H. Le, Sara Holton, Huong Thanh Nguyen, Rory Wolfe, Jane Fisher (2015) Prevalence of Poly-Victimisation among Vietnamese High School Students

Although there are more than 30 million children and adolescents in Vietnam, and they account for more than a third of the nation’s population [32], there is limited evidence about poly-victimisation among them. Most previous studies in Vietnam only investigated specific forms of victimisation. The UNICEF Multi Indicator Cluster Survey 3, investigated mothers aged 15–49 years about their care of their under-five year old children and the children's health and development. Conducted in fifty low and middle income countries, it found that Vietnam was among the countries in which corporal punishment and psychological and physical abuse of children were the most prevalent [33]. Nguyen et al [18] investigated 2,581 grade 6–12 students in Vietnam and found that 67% reported at least one form and 6% all four forms of neglect, physical, emotional and sexual abuse.

This is the first study in Vietnam to investigate poly-victimisation among adolescents systematically and comprehensively.

Victimisation was widespread in this sample of high school students with nearly a third having experienced more than ten forms of victimisation.

There were much higher rates of lifetime victimisation among these Vietnamese adolescents than among secondary school students from China [29] and South Africa [31], which are upper-middle income countries. Compared to China—a country which shares many social and cultural similarities with Vietnam, the prevalence was double that reported by Chan [29]. The same conclusion can be made when the results are compared with those reported from high income countries. The prevalence of poly-victimisation in this sample (31%) is much higher than that reported among Australian 23-24-year-old young adults (14%) [3] and triple that reported by Turner et al (10%) among a national sample of American children and adolescents [22, 45]

Exposure to more adverse life events, the presence of a chronic disease or disability, living with a step-parent, perception of family as unhappy, punishment at school and rural residence increased the risk of poly-victimisation when controlling for other variables in this [study's] sample.

Minh T.H. Le, Sara Holton, Huong Thanh Nguyen, Rory Wolfe, Jane Fisher (2015) Poly-Victimisation among Vietnamese High School Students: Prevalence and Demographic Correlates, PLoS ONE 10 (5)

Jane Fisher, Thach Duc Tran, Trang Thu Nguyen, Tuan Tran (2012) Common perinatal mental disorders and alcohol dependence in men in northern Viet Nam

This study is to our knowledge the first to establish the prevalence and correlates of common perinatal disorders and alcohol dependence in men in a low or lower-middle income country and in Viet Nam.

We found that the prevalence of PCMD [perinatal common mental disorders of depression and anxiety] in men(17.7%) was less than that in women in this setting (29.9%) (Fisher et al., 2010), but that alcohol dependence, which was not found in women, was widespread in men in both rural and urban areas (33.8%).

The prevalence of any depressive disorder in men in this study (12.6%) is higher than the pooled prevalence in high-income countries (9%) (Paulson and Bazemore, 2010) and much higher than in the studies which used the same diagnostic assessment in well-resourced Asian countries:Singapore(1.8%) (Cheeetal.,2004) and HongKong(3.1%) (Laietal.,2010).

As others have found, alcohol dependence was highest among men occupying the lowest socioeconomic position.

Non-psychotic mental health problems in men have been neglected not only in Viet Nam but also in other resource-constrained countries. The results of this study suggest strongly that perinatal mental health problems represent a significant public health concern not only among women but also among men in northern Viet Nam. These data suggest that interventions should not be confined to women, but should also include men and should be combined with community-based strategies to reduce alcohol misuse and family violence

Jane Fisher, Thach Duc Tran, Trang Thu Nguyen, Tuan Tran (2012) Common perinatal mental disorders and alcohol dependence in men in northern Viet Nam, Journal of Affective Disorders 140: 97-101

Jane R.W. Fisher, Huong Thu Thi Tran and TuanTran (2007) Mental health during and after pregnancy and links to socioeconomic conditions

There is emerging evidence that poor mental health is common in women in the postpartum year in Vietnam. Two detailed investigations using psychological autopsies to investigate maternal deaths (defined as those occurring during pregnancy or up to 42 days postpartum) in ten provinces have found that 8% to 16.9% are by suicide, which is exceptionally high by world standards [16,17]. Fisher et al. [18] found that 32.7% of 506 women attending immunisation clinics with their six week old babies scored in the clinical range of >12 on a translated and culturally verified version of the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale [EDS] and 19% expressed explicit ideas that they did not want to go on living. Tran Tuan et al. [19] found that 20% of the 2000 mothers of six to eighteen month old infants surveyed for the Vietnam arm of the Young Lives Project, an investigation of childhood poverty, met screening criteria for psychiatric clinical caseness on the locally validated WHO SRQ 20. Both of these studies surveyed representative samples of women who had recently given birth. Given that depression during pregnancy is a risk factor for depression after childbirth, these data indicate that antenatal depression might also be common in Vietnamese women.

[In this study's cohort] higher EDS scores indicating lower mood were associated with psychological and social adversity including experiencing criticism and coercion in the intimate partnership, overcrowded living conditions, low security of employment and unwelcome pregnancy. Although few women reported symptoms of sufficient severity to suggest clinically significant disturbance, these data indicate that these factors may contribute cumulatively to causing more severe mood disturbance and associated disability.

Jane R.W. Fisher, Huong Thu Thi Tran and TuanTran (2007) Relative socioeconomic advantage and mood during advanced pregnancy in women in Vietnam,  International Journal of Mental Health Systems 1: 3

Khai Thu Nguyen (2012) State reform and use of cải lương

Scholars have situated cải lương's development to the building of Vietnamese (particularly Southern) culture at the turn of  the century. Vuong Hong Sen, the author of A Diary of Fifty Years of Love for Singing, a memoir about cải lương in the early years of its formation, ties the birth of cải lương with a brewing sense of national identity emerging in the south during colonialism: "At that time, in the South there was a mysterious wind: 'the rise of patriotism.' We no longer resisted, because we could not defeat [the French] with force, we could no longer be revolutionaries, so patriotism boiled and brewed silently within us" (Vuong 1968: 26). Vuong Hong Sen attributes cải lương's ability to double as a pure form of entertainment as a means through which national identity could be (surreptitiously) imagined: "At first, singing and playing, mixing French into our language, playing at life, making fun. .., putting a love of country into an old performance, we kept on transforming, changing it, and cải lương was born unexpectedly, from what year no one knows for certain" (Vuong 1968: 21-22; see also Ba 1988). Cải lương was a means of "burying" the patriotic spirit "within a surface of enjoyment and play" that allowed the latter to develop (Vuong 1968: 18-19).

Philip Taylor writes that many of the Chinese stories, costumes, and choreographies were eliminated from post-1975 reformed cải lương, as well as "Western melodies, musical genres from the tango to love songs, eclectic foreign costumes, use of Western stories and motifs drawn from sources as varied as Ancient Rome, Egypt, India and the US Wild West" (Taylor 2001: 151). According to Taylor, revolutionary reforms in the south after 1975 tamed the "excesses" of cải lương by directing its emotional components toward the building of socialist and revolutionary values. The emotions of reformed cải lương expressed merely "fearlessness and optimism" (Taylor 2001: 152) and were stripped of personal components. 

Yet the reformed post-1975 cải lương plays did not abandon cải lương's historical relationship with sentimentality and narratives of the woman and family. In remaking cải lương, the state would borrow from the immensely popular form to create nostalgia for an original and coherent state, or "homeland," as a way to erase the loss of southern society and facilitate an imaginary of a united nation.

Khai Thu Nguyen (2012) A Personal Sorrow: "Cải Lương" and the Politics of North and South Vietnam, Asian Theatre Journal, 29(1): 255-275

Tai-lok Lui (2005) Middle-class politics in contemporary China

The middle class in China’s major cities — which is often expected to be a social force to bring about democratization and an open society — is likely to be a source of disappointment to the optimists, at least in the near term. My interviews with professionals, managers, and administrators in Shanghai reveal that they are low-profile liberals, if not conservatives. True, they are well aware of rising  social  inequalities,  regional  imbalances,  corruption,  and  other  social problems. They understand that the political environment is far from satisfactory and they would like a more responsive and accountable government. Yet,they will not push for democratization; in fact, it is not even high on their list of priorities of future changes. They prefer gradual reform, meaning a slow process of the loosening of existing authoritarian governance. Their conservatism is, in a way, understandable. Their interests are firmly rooted in the existing economic structure and they are eager to preserve what they have earned in recent years. Although many of those I interviewed were uneasy about the glaring gap between the rich and the poor, and express their concern about the welfare of the needy, on the whole they feel they deserve the level and the kind of material rewards they have attained.

Attempts to quicken the pace of liberalization and democratization in China will almost certainly scare the middle class away from politics. In fact, it is often when confronted by the authoritarian state that the middle class takes a pro-liberalization stance. Thus, middle-class politics (more appropriately, a kind of nascent middle-class politics) is two-faced. On the one side, it is a soft challenge to the Chinese authoritarian state. It will be a social force to promote liberalization and during such a process of liberalization we may see the emergence of civic and pressure groups that will loosen the existing top-down authoritarian control in many aspects of social life in China. On the other side, as noted above, the middle class is more conservative when it comes to concrete state policies and the direction of future economic and political reform. Middle-class politics as such does not guarantee the fostering of the kind of democratization that will truly empower those who are suffering in the course of the capitalization of the Chinese economy, namely, workers and peasants. Nor will middle-class politics necessarily include the interests of the poor in their political platform and re-form agenda. Middle-class politics, unless re-articulated to more radical ideology brought about by dramatic changes in the structural setting at a critical conjuncture, is primarily about the interests of the middle class.

The rise of the middle class and the gradual emergence of middle-class politics in China are no substitute for agitation and resistance from below. Paradoxically, what is absent in contemporary Chinese politics is a true representation of the interests of the oppressed in the existing political structure.

Tai-lok Lui (2005) Bringing class back in, Critical Asian Studies, 37(3): 473-480

Catherine Locke, Nguyễn Thị Ngân Hoa and Nguyễn Thị Thanh Tâm (2012) The plights of low-income migrants: family, marriage, children upbringing

'Low-income migrants acknowledge that spousal separation impinges on marital affection and conjugal intimacy but have to put their anxieties aside in the face of needing to secure their families’ economies. Mai says “We are rural people, what can I say about love? . . . We did not think about love or our emotions.”'

Catherine Locke, Nguyễn Thị Ngân Hoa and Nguyễn Thị Thanh Tâm (2012) Struggling to Sustain Marriages and Build Families Mobile Husbands/Wives and Mothers/Fathers in Hà Nội and Hồ Chí Minh City,  Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 7(4): 63-91

Nguyen Thi Nguyet Minh (2012) Migrant domestic workers in Hanoi

'... the rural-urban differentiation has been increasing and the movement of rural migrants into domestic service and their experiences at work are part of this process. The rural domestic workers migrated as a result of the rural-urban disparity within Vietnam. In the course of migration, they were again confronted with a hierarchical order in the urban labor market, being channelled into its lower-end sectors with demeaning occupations like domestic work. Working in the intimate home sphere of urban families, the domestic workers experienced intensely this rural-urban hierarchy to an even greater degree. It was there that their rural personhood was consumed, scrutinized, supervised, and looked down on at the same time. It was there that they were relegated to their proper place and expected to serve. The social relations within domestic service in Vietnam thus represent a major shift from the ideology of an equal and classless society of the state socialist period, which the country still pursues in theory.

The migratory experiences of the domestic workers showed contradictions. As migrants, they aspired to improve their life or the life chances of their children by migrating to the city. Yet they were confronted with a pronounced hierarchy in the urban workplace, which reinforced their marginalized status. Young migrant domestic workers might wish to escape from the restrictions of village life, yet were even more highly controlled in the city. It was indeed a case of thwarted aspirations. On the other hand, in order to be able to provide for their family, many domestic workers had to leave it; to be able to bring their children up, they were supposed to devote themselves to the care of other people’s children. They were not in a position to “both live with (their) family and support it.” In the words of Mary Romero, they are “restricted to the most basic ‘mothering’ agenda of sending money home to house, feed and clothe their children” while helping urban families give their children better nurturing. This arguably “determines child-rearing and socialization while reproducing class differences,” further accentuating the existing rural-urban gap.'

Nguyen Thi Nguyet Minh (2012) '“Doing Ô Sin” Rural Migrants Negotiating Domestic Work in Hà Nội', Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 7(4): 32-62.

Jacqui Baker & Sarah Milne (2015) Southeast Asian dirty money states

Illicit revenues have not been part of the normative story of state formation. Rather, illegal practices and monies have been framed under the banner of “corruption:” an aberrant, irrelevant and dysfunctional side economy to official narratives of statehood. Yet, as the articles in this thematic issue show, to dismiss corruption and criminal activity as outside of the realms of state activity is to exclude an important dimension of state formation in contemporary Southeast Asia. The sums generated by these illicit economies are considerable, and parts of the state are heavily dependent upon them for everything from everyday state work, to the extension of sovereignty and the shoring up political stability. Little wonder then that these states exert enormous effort in the capture, control, and organization of dirty monies. The empirical evidence therefore challenges conventional narratives about how weak fiscal states are unable to build fiscal power, and instead suggests that Southeast Asian states often degrade their fiscal architecture in pursuit of illicit profits.

The relationship between illegal rentier economies and the state does not necessarily entail chaos or an absence of the rule of law. Rather, illegal economies are systematically established and protected by the state – as seen in the highly organized and visible deployment of the tools and devices of state territorialization. For example, state laws and institutions are used to demarcate areas for illegal logging; public infrastructure and equipment like roads and trucks are used for illicit timber extraction; and specialized drilling machines are deployed openly for the construction of underground mining tunnels that enable so-called informal mining. This level of capitalization and investment indicates how “illegality” can be systematized and normalized at a remarkable scale and how actors involved expect such practices to endure over time. 

Perhaps the most prominent example of this is in To’s article on Vietnam, where the state has recently re-zoned woodland around an upland village as “national forest.” This territorialization has not only changed the legal status of the land, extending state propriety over it, but has ushered in a host of government officials, law enforcers, and park rangers to “protect” the forest and uphold the logging ban. Residents who engage in traditional timber extraction are effectively criminalized and local law enforcers have the authority to confiscate village-logged timber or issue fines. However, the law is rarely enforced as stated on paper. Instead, the law is “taxed” through bribes extracted from villagers, who effectively conduct logging on behalf of local authorities. As timber is subsequently transported through government checkpoints, local middlemen known as lawmakers – who are themselves officials with familial ties to the government-run People’s Committee – skillfully maneuver the illicit timber through and over the formal law. The biggest rents from this illegal logging industry are not kept by the villagers who fell the timber, but are accumulated by state institutions and state officials. In this way, territorialization of upland Vietnam is central to the establishment of an illicit regime of extraction that finances and enriches the state.

Jacqui Baker & Sarah Milne (2015) Dirty Money States: IllicitEconomies and the State in Southeast Asia, Critical Asian Studies, 47:2, 151-176