Reflection Paper Week II

The previous paper has been touched on regional and historical setting in SEA as well as Colonialism and nationalism as a main focus. Now let s take a look on Vie tnam as case study which discussed by three articles. The first article entitled Southeast Asia in the New International Era were written by two authors Robert Daley and Clark D.

Nether. In the articles, the authors main messages is to reveal how Vietnam transformed herself from war torn country in to economically impressive in the regions. During the Cold War, Vietnam s territory was divided in two parts at the seventeenth parallel the North and South Vietnam according to the Geneva Conference of 1954.

The Geneva agreements was the provision for national election and Uncle Ho believed that it was partly served to seek for reunification of Vietnam under communist leadership, stated authors. However, the imagination of Uncle Ho tended to be unreal at that time as the intervention of United States. The United State viewed the uncle Ho as main threat communist. Hence the United State involvement continued to escalate the

situation since the South was back by US in term of military and financial support in order to pursue her own policy to prevent the communist spread in SEA. Until 1975 the war was ended, the US was defeated and later on the Vietnam was officially reunified as one country under communist role, and the dream of uncle Ho was reached. Because of war, Vietnam faced a lot of challenges not only social but economic aspect though she successfully unified the country. The text indicated that the Vietnamese people s standard of living was worse than before the war. Having practice socialist ways, Vietnam economy tended to be backward rather than upward. Hence, the Communist Party of Vietnam realized that followed the ideologically conservative was not a solution anymore. Moving away from centrally planned economy, in 1986, Vietnam decided to adopt one policy which usually referred to policy of renovation (doi moi). This policy remarkably highlighted the changes in Vietnam economy, and credited to give better image of Vietnam to accessing the membership of ASEAN as well as the WTO. All in all, I think the article is very good for intended audience since th e authors provide a brief history of Vietnam during and after the cold war and illustrate how Vietnam changes her policy in order to fulfill economic need for the local people. However, there are some weakness appear in the midst of it. The authors failed to provide clear reasons

why communist party won the war during the Vietnam War. In addition, they also didn t explain and provide more details over the Doi Moi policy why such policy make Vietnam potentially has capacity to become Asia s newest economic frontier in the region, and why the old policy was abundant. If the author touch more on that issue it would be good for audience to catch up with and depth understand about the Vietnam s story.

The second article entitled The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia . First and foremost, the authors guided the readers to the periods of French colonial in Vietnam and covered on nationalist aspect. The article stated that Vietnamese had a strong spirit of nationalism which rooted since thousand of years, and most of people practice Confucian. And therefore, the authors argued that numbers of factor contributed to strong nationalist movement in Vietnam. French colonial was incapable fully control Confucian society in Vietnam still has Confucian colonialism. In addition, the defeat of

western power during Rosso-Japanese War make Vietnam perceived that Confucian tradition like Japan could achieve equality with the imperialist western, in case she modernized herself. And therefore, anti-colonial Vietnamese students began to travel to study in Japan and acquired modern political and military training over there. French Romanized Vietnamese words served as enhanced the students to learn greater mass literacy not only about her owns country but the latest Western theories of nationalism. Further, thanked to the printing technology, wide spread the strong communication in sense of nationalism. Such factors above offered a chance for Vietnamese building a solid nationalist movement. Second the authors also touched on Vietnam War which has quite similarly with the first article. However, they also touched on other side of Vietnam after unification over economic aspect. The communist party totally ruled the country and introduced centrally planned economy under which farm collectivization was another form of management. This policy centrally focus on planned agriculture cooperatives by eliminating private ownership of the land, and therefore, oppression of landlords since the communist rules perceived that the farmers were inability to produce above the level of self-sufficiency. However, collectivization didn t work and make the economic well being becoming worse. Hence, the communist government was forced to redefined itself by changing from a planned economy to a more market directed, export lead growth. To conclude, the article is good for reader; however, it has

some weakness as the previous articles since the authors seemed to ignored about issue behind the abandon the centrally planned economy, and th e role of farmer to forced the government to redefined the policy.

A part from these two articles, The Power of Everyday Politics was written by Benedict J. Tria kerkvliet offered a clearer view of peasant role in collective farming which introduced by communist government. The author highlight two key words common-pool resource organization and common-production organization. In the former, though the members shared important resource for their livelihood, they separately produce and consume or sell their production and this method has been applied by Vietnamese farmer during mid-1950s. While latter, members not only shared the important resource but they also working together and share what they produced; this is what the government wanted farmer to do. Collective farming has been drawing a rosy picture and as a promise for farm peasants could produce more efficiently, yield

the productivity, exceed what the villager could consume, and working together enhance villager to reclaimed unused area, construct more irrigation system so on and so forth. However, in the reality it is totally wrong with what collective farming promise. Hence, the author argued that it failed due to several reasons. First, the South Vietnam farmers were not familiar with collective farming, and they are not used to it. Second, lack of trust and commitment among individual lead to decrease in productivity, consequently, those farmers tended to focus more on their private plot of land. Last but not least, poor governance and corruption existed which was break the imaged of collective farming itself. And as a result, the farmers tended to struggle resist toward this policy.