Martin Gainsborough's Vietnam: Rethinking the state makes an important contribution to the small but growing body of literature on politics in contemporary Vietnam. The book advances our understanding of politics and the state in Vietnam, as it sets out to do, despite an analysis perched on the somewhat awkward assumption that ‘if we are to stand a chance of shedding light on the state it is important that as researchers we do not focus directly on it’ (p. 3). The focus of the book then, we soon learn, is more on business, state business, and state–business relations than the ‘state’ as it is conventionally understood. An analysis of business, says Gainsborough, provides ‘a particularly fruitful window onto the political, and ultimately the nature of the state’. And he is right, to a point.
Among Vietnam: Rethinking the state's most important contributions are the admonitions it issues forth toward those interested in Vietnamese politics. For example, Gainsborough suggests a need to jettison perspectives on the last two decades of social history in Vietnam as primarily a process of ‘reform’, as some observers have done, or giving undue emphasis to ‘change’, as continuities with the past are deep and pervasive. Such a perspective, he warns, overestimates the significance of policy processes vis-à-vis the more ‘Machiavellian aspects of politics’, such as competitions for power, resources, and patronage. Making this simple but important point is a contribution in its own right.
Beyond the introductory chapter, the book rethinks the state through chapters that address such concerns as Communist Party rule, new state–business interests, corruption, the ‘hollowing out’ of the state, local politics, rent-seeking, and elite resilience. The reader might be somewhat disappointed to learn that the analysis of Communist Party rule includes no analysis of the Communist Party per se, but instead a freewheeling (though at times stimulating) survey of the qualities of several discernible (or imagined) ‘classes’ that Western social theory says are necessary for development of democracy which, in any case, is an eventuality which Gainsborough does not foresee. Subsequent chapters on state–business interests and corruption focus mostly on developments in Ho Chi Minh City in the late 1990s, a municipality that is to this day widely regarded at the forefront of ‘reformism’. Gainsborough reveals why such a label is so problematic, demonstrating how, as in other regions, the local state apparatus appears to function mainly as a gatekeeper for rent-seeking of various stripes, mostly emanating from within the state.
Across several chapters toward the middle of the book, Gainsborough offers insightful analyses of corruption and the ‘equitisation’ process (i.e. the transfer of state enterprises to private, oh pardon me — ‘non-state’ ownership) and its relation to central–local relations. Much of this discussion is focused on Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam's commercial hub and most populous city. Gainsborough's chapter on corruption addresses several prominent cases of corruption, and puts forward an analysis of their meaning with respect to central–local relations. A more general analysis of corruption (as a pervasive set of phenomena) would certainly have been helpful. His chapter on ‘equitisation’, ‘The hollowing out of the state’, might be better titled ‘How state officials got rich by ripping off public assets through quasi-legal and unaccountable means’. Instead Gainsborough is more interested in explaining how and why captains of state enterprises waited until conditions were ripe before leaving the state sector. Interestingly, Gainsborough concludes that equitisation has increased rather than eroded the power of the state, for equitised companies, even as commercial entities, still operate within the governance structures of the state. In this context more explicit attention to the role of the Party might deepen the analysis, as would sociological analysis of local political networks.
In his exploration of local politics, Gainsborough uses the border provinces of Lao Cai (in the north) and Tay Ninh (in the southwest) to test hypotheses about globalisation's effect on ‘the local state’. He finds that if anything, globalisation has strengthened local states. In his analysis of elite politics, Gainsborough emphasises the significance of competition within and across patronage and protection networks over policy-centred activities. This observation, while not original, is plainly correct. Indeed, it now appears that competition among self-maximising interest groups is paralysing the state.
One of the unusual features of contemporary Vietnam is that it combines a market-based economy with many seemingly neoliberal features under the banner of a truly Leninist and avowedly socialist state. In the final chapter, Gainsborough notes that Vietnam's elites have, through integration with the increasingly neoliberal global political economy, benefited from certain convergences of interest with foreign elites, including those heading recognisably neoliberal agencies (such as the World Bank) and bilateral donor agencies who, Gainsborough observes are (when it comes to Vietnam's politics) operating ‘well out of their depth (p. 173). While neoliberal ideas have filtered into Vietnam, Gainsborough cautions against overestimating neoliberalism's transformative effects.
Gainsborough concludes by restating what is to be gained by not focusing directly on the state and outlining his thoughts on a ‘universal theory’ of the state which, while interesting, may have better been titled ‘Notes on the state and its nature’. Despite its occasional strangeness (e.g. ‘it is important that we not focus directly on the state’) Vietnam: Rethinking the State marks a thoughtful, illuminating, and substantive analysis of politics in Vietnam. The book marks an important contribution to the literature on politics in Vietnam and demands serious attention from anyone interested in this subject.
