BOOK REVIEWS

N I G E L T H R I F T A N D D E A N F O R B E S

The Price of War: Urbanization in Vietnam, –.

New York: Routledge, 2015. xiv + 188 pages. $49.95 (paper).

D A N I E L L E L A B B É

Land Politics and Livelihoods on the Margins of Hanoi, –.

Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014. 228 pages. $29.95 (paper).

The world, particularly Asia, has undergone unprecedented urbanization in

recent decades. These bewildering physical changes cannot be understood
without examining history. Two recent books on Vietnam’s urban history
provide insights by looking at change over a period of time before the Đổi
Mới [Renovation] era: Nigel Thrift and Dean Forbes’ The Price of War and
Danielle Labbé’s Land Politics and Livelihoods on the Margins of Hanoi. Both
primarily focus on twentieth-century Vietnam, beginning in the colonial era.
The Price of War is a reissue of a book first published in , just as
Vietnam began its market-oriented economic reforms. The book is orga-
nized chronologically and focuses on how the socialist state impacted cities
and towns in the north and the south. The theoretical discussions are a bit
dated now since it was written before the fall of the Berlin Wall, but one
could read the book as a piece of intellectual history itself. During the waning
years of the Cold War, the authors first try to map the “new socialist third
world” into categories. Some tables in the book are less helpful, such as
categories of nations that have been “socialist for a long time.” But the
authors rightfully show that the messiness of real places made it increasingly
difficult to fit nations neatly into the ideological labels of the Cold War. The
various nations’ institutional evolutions began to foretell their impending
dissolution with the final “technocratic” version of socialism.

Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. , Issue , pps. –. ISSN -X, electronic -.
©  by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all
requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of
California Press’ Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp.
DOI: https://doi.org/./vs.....

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Thrift and Forbes’ most helpful contribution to the literature is to provide

a comparative overview of historical urbanization trends in the diverse
group of nations they study. Despite having different starting demographics
and urban conditions, disparate places such as the already urbanized Eastern
Europe and more rural parts of Asia shared similarities in their socialist anti-
urbanization stance and divestment from urban centers. The authors paint
a trajectory of phases. The revolutionary phase involved a sharp urban
population decrease in the beginning, either by forcibly moving people out
of the city or by financial neglect; small and new towns were promoted
instead. The authors’ focus is to elaborate the reasons why, during the next
“bureaucratic phase,” there was some “slow” growth—defined as urban
population growth rates that are still positive but slower than the industrial
employment growth rates—rather than no urban growth. The previous
literature’s main explanation is that the development of a ruling “state class”
disproportionately benefited by being in the city and required that some
urban development take place, albeit with a cost-economizing logic. This
book is written on the cusp of the final stage that allows market reforms and
rapid urbanization.
Within the landscape set by their literature review, Thrift and Forbes aim
to extend discussions about the socialist urbanization process by focusing on
how nations under the impact or threat of war had different urbanization
processes. This is where Vietnam’s particular history comes into play. As the
new regimes had to maintain standing armies for their armed conflicts with
China and Cambodia, the domestic economic consequences were disastrous.
This brought about greater nationalism in these socialist countries rather
than a strict vision of socialism. For Vietnam, this was intertwined with
a shifting of socialist alliances away from China towards the USSR, who
could provide more military aid. The authors’ main point is that unlike in
Eastern Europe, Vietnam’s urbanization patterns are further explained by
war. Both the allowance of slow urban population growth during –
in the north and zero urban growth from – was because of dire
economic necessity resulting from independence and warfare more than an
ideological industrialization program.
The consequences of the war on urbanization are an important and
under-theorized phenomenon, so the aims of the book are welcome and
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laudable. I was left wanting a broader conceptualization of “urban.” The

discussions about “urbanization” were primarily about population move-
ment counts: the southern cities flooded with refugees during wars, then
depopulated after the revolution with refugees fleeing the country and the
government’s expulsion of urban populations. In addition to population
numbers, I wondered what was happening to the cities as places. While at
its roots urbanization in the twentieth century has been brought about by
population migration rather than natural population growth, its human mate-
rial implications such as changes in the built environment and socio-spatial
property relations are also a part of urbanization. It may be impossible to find
data about such phenomena during wartime and in the economic recovery
period, but some more qualitative accounts could have helped fill in. Ulti-
mately, I found the book most helpful as a recounting of the impacts of
Vietnam’s most recent wars on population movements.
The research challenge helps us appreciate the fieldwork investment dis-
played in Labbé’s book. One cannot compare them directly as the two books
are operating in different scholarly worlds. Labbé’s book is rooted in urban
planning, geography, and Vietnam area studies literature, whereas Thrift
and Forbes’ book addresses the institutional political sociology and interna-
tional development policy literature. Still, it is interesting to note that both
books are essentially interested in Vietnam’s state-society relations in urban
areas—though they approach this from different directions. In contrast to
Thrift and Forbes’ book, which spans across Vietnam and the globe, Labbé’s
book is situated in a specific, particular place: Hòa Mục, a peri-urban village
that was absorbed in Hà Nội’s expansion. While Thrift and Forbes first
expounded on the policies and actions of the state in order to understand
the resulting population flows, Labbé’s premise is that focusing on the live-
lihood and land strategies of everyday people will provide insights into
sociopolitical and economic changes. She provides rich ethnographic narra-
tives of how people dealt with history.
Beyond population numbers, another measure of urbanization is the
conversion of agricultural land into urbanized land, which primarily hap-
pens on the urban periphery. Labbé’s detailed research reveals how critical
Hòa Mục village’s spatial location was in developing the institutional seeds
of its incorporation into Hà Nội’s urban growth. In order to understand why
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the periphery might so readily urbanize, her study uncovers that there were
already established linkages between villages in the periphery to Hà Nội’s
markets and ultimately international trading networks at least as early as the
colonial era. She shows that the agricultural village had already developed
a cottage textile industry because it was still possible to make the most
rudimentary of commutes by foot within a half day to Hà Nội. When hunger
and scarcity set in during wartime, authorities demonstrated exceptional
pragmatic tolerance for this economy to continue in the urban periphery
for survival reasons. Furthermore, because of villagers’ experience with
industrial production and commerce and their ability to commute (and
therefore not need state-provided worker housing), such villagers became
relatively preferred industrial workers. During the most restrictive post-
revolutionary period, these peri-urban villagers were able to produce pri-
vately grown food for the black market—another important and pragmatic
survival strategy—and even increase their private residential landholdings.
Labbé contends that this history contributed to the rapid urban expansion of
Hà Nội’s peri-urban area during the Đổi Mới era.
It is entirely plausible that these practices and institutions played a factor,
although we do not have a counterfactual of peri-urban areas that did have
such locational advantages but did not eventually urbanize. One wonders if
the contemporary urban expansion might happen just as easily with purely
agricultural villages, where it might be relatively cheaper and easier to
acquire land control. Labbé emphasizes that Hòa Mục’s villagers do express
their agency by resisting the state’s plans for urban expansion and the taking
of their land by state-owned enterprises and master-planned new urban
areas, albeit with limited effect. However, popular land disputes against local
government plans have happened all over Vietnam and Asia, in city centers,
peri-urban areas, and rural areas.
What is significant for the literature is Labbé’s finding of such long-
standing villager agency and state pragmatism in practice in northern Viet-
nam. Her argument that the seeds of Đổi Mới’s rapid economic change are
rooted in a tradition of bending official policies was made by previous
studies that assumed a southern Vietnam exceptionalism. Some have theo-
rized there is more rule-bending and local discretion of policy enforcement
in southern Vietnam either because of being physically distant from imperial
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rule and more open to syncretic adaptations with Khmer customs or because
of the south being physically removed from the party in Hà Nội and needing
pragmatic ways to survive during and after the wars. It appears that the
south is not so exceptional after all. Rather than being far, being close to Hà
Nội was key to places like Hòa Mục.
Read together, the books have some interesting complementarity. Both
books are helpful in further enunciating the current approaches in the social
sciences and humanities more generally: a more tempered stance towards
the state’s power and ability to control populations, and an increased
emphasis on the impacts of history on everyday people and how these people
demonstrate agency. The history of urbanization is a broader dynamic
rooted in economic survival particular to a situated place.

Annette Kim, University of Southern California

N A M C . K I M

The Origins of Ancient Vietnam.

New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. xvii + 335 pages. Price unknown.

This book is devoted to an archaeological site that was significant in Viet-

nam from  to  BCE. At the beginning of this period, the Red River
Delta had not yet been invaded by Han Chinese. According to later Viet-
namese chronicles, a conqueror named An Dương Vương or Thục Phán
established the kingdom of Âu Lạc in the early third century BCE with his
capital at Cổ Loa Thành [Old Snail City], so-called because of its concentric
walls.
In the late third century, Qin Shihuang sent troops south of the
Yangzi. One goal of these forays was to seize ports through which luxury
items prized by the Han elite entered China from the South Seas. The
southernmost of these ports lay in the Red River Delta; it was part of
a sphere of commerce and trade that spanned the South China Sea, and
was probably linked to another sphere in the Indian Ocean. Unfortu-
nately, no ancient ports have yet been excavated in Bắc Bộ. The distri-
bution of Heger Type I Đông Sơn drums delineates another sphere of