As expected the conservative backlash was laundied in late 1988: there was a crackdown on media and public opinion.
tive difficulties are too monumental to be solved rapidly. Meantime his opponents await the propitious moment to strike. It might seem cynical to envisage, yet the specter that will one day haunt Vietnam's political arena may very well be Khrushchev's shadow.
Postscript: The Retreat of the Reformists

With some ironical surprises the dreadful prophecy has corne true within the past two years. As the policy of openness progressed, tensions began to develop. Determined to play a greater role in public affairs, writers and social thinker were asserting more authority and spoke openly of democracy and civil liberties. As intellectuals gained in stature and numbers, they began to push for further liberalizations or even to attack the regime, alluding to Maoist-Stalinist remuants and tendencies within the part itself.11 Public opinion, a phenomenon the VCP had previously underestimated was becoming more and more a political reality that not only exerted pressure in the regime but also began to re-examine the role and nature of the party.118 In creating a dangerous situation of polarization between the population as well as the intelligentsia that want ever more freedom and a petrified oligarchy ever more determined to fight back to maintain the status quo, the campaign of openness and thought renewal advocated by Nguyen Van Linh was bound to corne to a head.

Already since the famine of spring 1988 - just four months after Linh's meeting with the artistic community - there has been a discernible change in policy, the aim of which has been to contain media exposure of the famine."' The steadily increasing conservative trend was also reflected by the election of former arch-conservative Do Muoi to the post of Premier in June. However, the resolution of the regime to shift to a tougher policy was clear during the last quarter of 1988 when it decided to do away with the make-believe Democratic Party and Socialist Party, cancelling the publication of their respective liberal monthly Doc Lap and To Quoc; and to attack openly the famous literary weekly Van Nghe. In September 1988, following the closed meeting within the Writers' Union, the executive board issued a resolution explicitly condemning the deviationist trend of the weekly's publications. Besides its frank documentation of the country's major social problems,120 Van Nghe during the editorship of Nguyen Ngoc also gave expression to dissonant voices such as Nguyen Huy Thiep and Pham Thi Hoai.121 In this occasion, however, the classic technique of intimidation against certain chosen scapegoats with the object of terrorizing a whole community into submission has been useless. Armed with a new sense of identity and purpose, the embattle cultural and artistic groups strongly reacted nationwide. Associations of writers and journalists in important political and cultural centers like Hue and Saigon immediately issued petitions supporting Nguyen Ngoc, 122 a poet even went as far as to collect signatures to object against the repressive act, inaugurating thus a new mode of public intervention in Vietnam.123 After the resignation of Nguyen Ngoc, another leading literary monthly named Song Huong took over from Van Nghe the role of social and political critic in publishing devastating analyses and virulent repudiation of the regime's ideology 124 Subsequently, the offending publication was silenced after its last issue of September 1989, a couple of months before the Fourth Congress of the Writers' Union. This period also witnessed a general crackdown on media and public opinion, indicating the regime's will to stop all dissenting views and to return to more authoritarian ruling to curb the liberating influence of the intelligentsia on the eve of the decisive congress.125 In contrast with the enthusiastic days of reform and openness, these lead to a setback which announced a "post-Krushchev" era in Viet
Indochina Report 20	Oct-Dec 1990