A quarterly record of significant political. military and economic trends in Cambodia. Laos and Vietnam.
Number 25
Oct-Dec 1990
MCI(P) No: 31/1/90
lu No: 0217-8451
GLASNOST IN VIETNAM
LIMITS TO OPENNESS
PHUONG KIEN KHANH*
L-1 fter two years of "Glasnost a la Vietnamienne', which provoked a nation-wide renaissance in information and culture, similar to the 1956 "One Hundred Blooming Flowers" campaign, the communist party leadership decided, at the Seventh Plenum in August 1989, to restablish control over the media and other literary and artistic activities. The conservatives within the party hierarchy believed that the liberalisation campaign, launched by the party secretarygeneral Nguyen Van Linh, had gone too far. The public opinion and the intelligentsia were indeed asserting with more and more authority their newly acquired role of checking the party leadership and ils policies. It was also predictable that the shock effects of the dramatic changes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union led the Hanoi leaders to the conclusion that the mushrooming of new media phenomena and other forms of intellectual expression was "part of a larger scheme to subvert socialism in Vietnam". In this respect, the most significant attempt to set the dock back was the promulgation of the New Press Regulation in January 1990, which tightened control over the media. However, it is unlikely that the various manifestations of a civil society, which has begun to reemerge in Socialist Vietnam, could be eliminated during the current repression. It is in this troubling context that Indochina Report has asked Mr l'huong Kien Khanh, a Vietnamese sociologist, to give an assessment of the New Policy of Information and Culture, implemented by the Vietnamese communist leadership after the Sixth Party Congress in 1986. His indepth analysis constitutes a major contribution to the understanding of Vietnamese society, where irresistible pressures for change are currently at work. e
Information & Resource Center in coopération with the Hanns-Seidel-Foundation