Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vol 3, No 2 (2017) 171-186

Consuming doi moi: Development and middle class

consumption in Vietnam

Arve Hansen*
Abstract: Since doi moi, Vietnam has undergone a variety of social and economic
transformations. Among the most obvious are found in the realm of consumption. The new
openness to international trade and foreign investments has radically increased the
availability of goods. And new opportunities for income have led to increased purchasing
power in most social strata, although to very different extents. High-consuming urban
middle classes are emerging rapidly-Vietnam’s middle class is indeed considered the
fastest growing in Southeast Asia-symbolising economic progress and modernisation on
the one hand and growing inequalities and environmental unsustainability on the other.
These changes are reflected in surging consumption of a wide variety of goods, from
household appliances and food items to vehicles and luxury products. This paper
approaches the new ‘socialist consumer classes’ partly through the particular political-
economic contexts that have fostered them, but mainly through the consumption patterns
and consumer culture that define them. Combining secondary statistical data with insights
from ethnographic fieldwork, the paper discusses the drivers of changing consumption
patterns and investigates the new roles of goods in everyday middle-class practices in
Hanoi, in turn using consumption as a lens to analyse post-doi moi society.
Keywords: Middle class; consumption; practice theory; doi moi; Vietnam; development.
Received 2nd April 2017; Revised 25th April 2017; Accepted 29th April 2017

1. Introduction* to represent 80 percent of the global middle

The shift of the global economy that
Peter Dicken (2015) has been analysing
since 1986 continues materialising.
However, while production has been
moving East and South for decades, a new
shift is underway in the form of
consumption. The number of middle-class
consumers in Asia has now been estimated
to be close to equal that of North America
and Europe (Kharas et al. 2010). The middle
classes in the ‘South’ are roughly projected
* Numbers from the Human Development Report 2013,
Centre for Development and the Environment
University of Oslo. Guest Researcher, Institute for
European Studies, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences;
email: arve.hansen@sum.uio.no
171
class by 2030 and to account for 70 percent
of the world’s total consumption
expenditure the same year, much due to
Asia’s rapid economic growth (UNDP 2013;
Hansen et al. 2015)1. From an academic
point of view, understanding the social,
economic and cultural realities hiding
behind these numbers represents an
intriguing field of inquiry. From the
perspective of environmental sustainability
understanding this shift becomes imperative.
1
based on estimates by the Brookings Institution (2012, in
UNDP, 2013). They consider middle class those that earn
or spend between USD 10 and USD 100 a day in 2005
USD PPP terms.
172 Arve Hansen / Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vol 3, No 2 (2017) 171-186
In a world that is already consuming the
planet to excess, and where the mature
capitalist countries have not managed to
create the ‘development space’ called for by
the Brundtland Comission in order to let
poorer parts of the world raise their living
standards (Hansen et al. 2015), the rapid rise
in levels of consumption in other parts of the
world will put further strain on the
environment. The so-called ‘Rise of the
South’ thus reaffirms the position of
increasing levels of consumption among the
main challenges to sustainable development
globally (McNeill et al. 2015).
While much effort has been made in
recent decades to make energy use more
efficient and production processes cleaner,
governments in affluent countries appear
both unable and unwilling to curb upwards
spiralling consumption patterns. A complex
combination of reasons is behind this
disinclination. Most fundamental, however,
is the fact that limiting consumption often
challenges economic growth (Wilhite et al.
2015). Capitalism’s growth imperative is at
the core of the world’s sustainability
challenges, and so far, theories of
decoupling and green economy remain
highly theoretical when analysing trends
globally (Hansen et al. 2015; McNeill et al.
2015). Thus, while major technological
advancements have been made, the global
resource use continues increasing rapidly.
However, in a time when high-growth
capitalism seems to represent the only
remaining viable alternative for developing
countries, a few of the fastest growing
economies in the world are claiming to have
found their own model of development; the
‘socialist market economies’ of China,
Vietnam and Laos. Over the past three
decades, these three countries have stood out
globally with consistently high rates of
economic growth (Malesky et al. 2014).
Vietnam is presented as a development
success story and even ‘textbook example’
of development by the World Bank and
other development donors (JDPR 2012); no
small achievement for a country ruled by a
communist party.
The governments of the three countries
claim to have found a middle-ground, using
the market economy as a tool to deliver
sustainable and just progress in a socialist
society. However, questions are asked
regarding the sustainability of the
development models of all three countries.
Considerable challenges for economic
development persist, social inequalities are
increasing rapidly, and the environmental
impacts of resource-intensive development
strategies have been severe. With export-
oriented development strategies, much of
the environmental degradation has been
closely tied to consumption elsewhere, but
domestic consumption is representing an
increasing share. The alarming levels of air
pollution in Beijing and Hanoi are for
example to a significant extent caused by the
transition to private motorised mobility in
these cities.
Also in these countries high-consuming
urban middle classes are emerging rapidly,
and domestic consumption is targeted as
important drivers of future growth in both
China and Vietnam. Can we expect the
‘socialist market economies’ to handle
consumption better and develop more
sustainably than the mature capitalist
countries have done? And how does the
emergence of high-consuming urban middle
classes fit into the socialist visions of these
countries? This paper focuses on Vietnam,
and approaches the development of the
‘socialist market economies’ from the
perspective of consumption and
sustainability, focusing on rapid changes in
urban consumption patterns at the
 Arve Hansen / Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vol 3, No 2 (2017) 171-186
intersection between development strategies
and everyday practices.
Vietnam’s development success story
following the introduction of the doi moi
market reforms are well-known by now
(Van Arkadie et al. 2003). Some attention
has also been given to the challenges that
Vietnam is facing in both crafting its own
development model (Beresford 2008), in
sustaining growth and achieving industrial
upgrading (Masina 2006, 2012), and dealing
with the negative effects of development,
such as inequality and environmental
degradation (Hansen 2015a). This paper will
take inequality as a starting point, but
mainly focus on the relatively well-off side
of the coin. That is, the paper will not focus
on the elite, but the rapidly expanding
middle class. The presence of these new
consumers is being felt in Vietnam’s cities,
where new shops, supermarkets, cafes and
gated communities are popping up at an
impressive speed, as well as in the heavily
motorised streets. After a discussion of the
theoretical starting points for the paper’s
discussion of development and
consumption, I will analyse some of the new
consumption patterns that arise with the new
middle classes, giving special attention to
the private automobile. I will then discuss
these new consumers in the context of
Vietnam’s vision of a socialist market
economy.
Methodologically, the paper draws on
fieldwork in Hanoi between 2012 and 2017,
mainly through what I have termed a
‘motorbike ethnography’ (Hansen 2016ab).
This also included semi-structured and in-
depth interviews with policy makers, car and
motorbike retailers, car and motorbike
manufacturers, and a total of 30 car owners
173
and 16 motorbike owners. For the latter
group of informants, I mainly used snowball
sampling. My informants came from a wide
range of occupations and social positions,
and included military officials, state-
employed academics, businessmen and
businesswomen, and public sector
employees and government officials of
different ranks, including family members
of high ranking officials. As is discussed
below, all my car-and motorbike-owning
informants can be lumped together as
belonging to the Vietnamese middle classes.
Their incomes ranged from average to very
high, and while none could be considered
poor, a few were clearly bordering the upper
class.
2. Development and middle class consumption:
theoretical starting points
How can changing consumption patterns
be approached in contexts of rapid economic
growth? First of all, this paper is in line with
the now substantial body of social scientific
research that dismisses mainstream
economic theories of the rational self-
maximizing human individual as a useful
starting point for understanding
consumption. Instead, I will discuss the
symbolic meaning of goods as well as
approaching consumption through practices,
before briefly discussing the combination of
consumption and development research.
The classic social scientific approach to
consumption looks at the symbolic
meanings of goods. From Veblen’s (2005
[1899]) conspicuous consumption and
emulation effects through Douglas and
Isherwood’s (1979) The World of Goods and
Bourdieu’s (1984) Distinction, this has
represented a central part of enquiry into
174 Arve Hansen / Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vol 3, No 2 (2017) 171-186
how consumption patterns change and how
humans use material objects in social
situations. The ‘cultural turn’ of the social
sciences took the focus on symbolic
communication to another level, to the
extent where consumption was close to
totally divested from the material world
(Warde 2005).
Obviously, status-seeking behaviour is
central to many forms of consumption, and I
will return to this point below. An
exaggerated focus on symbolism does
however lead to a neglect of more mundane
forms of consumption. Thus, in the 2000s a
body of research started emerging that
instead focused on everyday life and
inconspicuous consumption (Gronow et al.
2001; Shove 2003). These strands of
research eventually converged in the highly
influential revival of social practice theories.
Consumption research, along with many
other parts of social sciences, has indeed
seen a practice turn.
Although the practice approach has deep
theoretical roots, its application to
consumption research is a rather recent
phenomenon. As Warde (2005) argues, even
the two most prominent figures in modern
application of practice theory, Giddens and
Bourdieu, seemed to ignore their own
practice approach when discussing
consumption. This was particularly so for
Giddens (1991), who attributed most agency
to individuals and intended action in his
discussion of lifestyle, but also Bourdieu
(1984) focused more on habitus and capital
than practice in his most famous work on
consumption, Distinction (Warde 2005). In
consumption research, sociologists such as
Alan Warde and Elizabeth Shove have
played prominent roles in advocating the
practice shift, but the approach is currently
being applied and developed across
disciplines by a range of contemporary
consumption researchers (Gregson et al.
2009; Gram-Hanssen 2011; Shove et al.
2012; Warde 2005, 2014; Sahakian et al.
2014).
Consumption is not itself a practice, but
almost all practices involve some sort of
consumption, and consumption always
happens as part of, as moments in, a practice
(Warde 2005). In line with the overall goal
of practice theory to transcend the structure-
agency dichotomy, the practice approach
bridges a fundamental dualism in
approaches to consumption; that between
‘consumers’ as dupes or sovereign agents.
Whereas economic orthodoxy (and to some
extent culturalist and post-modern
approaches) conceptualises the consumer as
a sovereign agent which actively makes
calculated and rational decisions, Marxist
and other radical approaches have tended to
view the individual consumer as powerless
in the encounter with structural forces
(whether this is capitalism or other social
structures). Indeed, from the perspective of
practice approaches the very concept of ‘the
consumer’ disappears (Warde 2005). As put
by Warde (2005: 146):
‘The [practice] approach offers a
distinctive perspective, attending less to
individual choices and more to the collective
development of modes of appropriate
conduct in everyday life. The analytical
focus shifts from the insatiable wants of the
human animal to the instituted conventions
of collective culture, from personal
expression to social competence, from
mildly constrained choice to disciplined
participation. […] the key focal points
become the organization of the practice and
the moments of consumption enjoined.
Persons confront moments of consumption
neither as sovereign choosers nor as dupes.’
Practice theory is thus a competing
approach to both the methodological
 Arve Hansen / Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vol 3, No 2 (2017) 171-186
individualism of economic approaches and
the emphasis on cultural expressivism in
cultural approaches, focusing on routine
rather than action, doing rather than
thinking, the material rather than the
symbolic, and ‘embodied practical
competence over expressive virtuosity in the
fashioned presentation of self’ (Warde 2014:
286). As already indicated above, this
involves a broadening of the concept of
agency, what Wilhite (2008) conceptualises
as ‘distributed agency’, including people
(and bodies), social context and material
context (Wilhite 2009, 2012; Sahakian et al.
2014). In contexts of rapid economic
development, I argue that such an approach
should be combined with an analysis of
larger scale development process, and
particularly the role of the state.
Development, the state and consumption
In development research, consumption
seldom enters the debate apart from as a
poverty indicator (lack of consumption), as a
measurement of inequality (in some versions
of the GINI index) or as overall demand. In
macroeconomic analysis consumption is
usually approached through its function as
forming part of the overall demand in an
economy (along with investment and
government expenditure), and as the
alternative to saving (which is seen as
postponed consumption). Although there
have been different interpretations of the
primacy of consumption versus production,
from the classical economic belief in Say’s
Law (production creates its own demand) to
Keynes’ focus on stimulating aggregate
demand, there is no disagreement to the fact
that consumption is a necessary part of the
economy. No matter from which perspective
it is approached, it is obvious that
production requires consumption, since
175
without it a capitalist economy ends up in a
crisis of overproduction or stagnation.
In development research, the role of the
state frequently represents the starting point
for academic inquiry. In consumption
research, however, the state is rarely given a
prominent position (Sanne 2002). The state
is crucial for processes of economic
development on arguably all scales. In a
globalising (and regionalising) world
economy states are ‘containers’ of distinct
institutions and practices, as well as
international competitors and collaborators
(Dicken 2015). Nationally, state policies to
various extents influence everything from
the functioning of the economy to everyday
life. The state’s influences on consumption
could thus be approached in a variety of
ways. Government policies are crucial for
achieving developmental success as well as
for distributing the gains from development.
The level of welfare provided by the state
furthermore strongly influences the capacity
of its citizens to consume beyond
subsistence.
The state can in many ways be
considered as what Myrvang (2009) has
called ‘consumption agents’. In capitalism,
the overall national economy benefits from,
and indeed depends on, increasing levels of
consumption. The capitalist state can aim
policies towards shifting consumption (e.g.
away from tobacco or alcohol), but will
rarely, if ever, aim to reduce overall levels
of consumption, since this would negatively
affect the national economy through
declining aggregate demand (and be bad for
popular support). This is a fundamental
difference between an economy based on
delivering ‘enough’ goods to the population
(such as Vietnam before doi moi) and one
where the expansion of production and
consumption is fundamental to the ‘health’
of the economy. It is widely agreed that to
176 Arve Hansen / Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vol 3, No 2 (2017) 171-186
create sufficient domestic demand, a
significant middle class of consumers is
necessary.
3. Doi moi and the socialist middle classes
‘Middle class’ is an elusive and slippery
category, and one that is frequently highly
imprecisely used in contexts of development
(Birdsall 2014). A transition context makes
matters even worse. Contemporary Vietnam
clearly is home to large and often intersected
classes of peasants and workers. While neat
classifications of these are hard due to the
frequency of temporary migration and
seasonal jobs, the elites and middle classes
are often even harder to pin down. As
Gainsborough (2010) has highlighted, it is
often difficult to distinguish the private from
the public sector in Vietnam. As he puts it,
both the bourgeoisie and the salaried classes
in Vietnam are still ‘very much of the
system’ (Gainsborough 2010: 17).
Furthermore, measurements of the middle
class tend to use income as a starting point,
but in Vietnam the large amounts of
informal income sources complicate such
measurements.
The World Bank and the Ministry of
Planning and Investment have recently
categorised 10% of Vietnam’s population as
‘global middle class’ and about 55% as
‘emerging consumers’. These numbers are,
as often is the case, based on consumption
statistics. The people found within the first
category spends more than 15 USD PPP per
day, while the second spends between 5.51
and 15 USD PPP per day (World Bank and
Ministry of Planning and Investment,
2016). Interestingly, in these statistics there
is no room for an upper class. This is
nevertheless a clear improvement from
earlier publications were international
organisations have labelled anyone earning
or spending more than 2 USD per day as
middle class (Birdsall 2014). Yet, numbers
like these remain disputed. Our ability to
measure consumption expenditure
accurately is limited, and it is also
questionable to what extent middle classes
can be captured by quantifications of
income or consumption.
Entering a detailed discussion about
numbers and measurements is beyond the
scope of this paper. What we know for
certain is that the middle class in Vietnam is
rapidly expanding; it is indeed considered
the fastest growing in Southeast Asia
(Huong Le Thu 2015), of course also due to
a low starting point. I furthermore argue that
we should be using the plural form and talk
about middle classes. Clearly, there is no
uniform group of people hiding behind this
expanding social segment. At least we can
divide them into two groups, the upper
middle classes and the lower middle classes.
Of course, we could further divide them
depending on cultural and economic capital,
as Bourdieu (1984) would have, but I will
leave that out for now. Instead, I will
consider some of the consumption patterns
that define this new consumer segment of
Vietnam’s society, as well as what political
economic and ideological shifts that have
been necessary to create them.
4. Consuming doi moi
Through opening for foreign investments
and liberalising trade, doi moi has obviously
led to dramatic changes in the availability of
goods in Vietnam, and consumption of a
wide range of commodities has increased
rapidly (Belanger et al. 2012). This has been
well documented by Vietnam’s General
Statistics Office (GSO) through their
biannual publication of the Household
Living Standard Survey. Table 1 captures
 Arve Hansen / Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vol 3, No 2 (2017) 171-186
the rapid changes in consumption of a range
of technological appliances among
The table neatly captures one of the most
discernible manifestations of ‘development’
to most people: the improved access (due to
availability and income) to goods. It shows
the rapid expansion of especially motorbike,
telephone and TV ownership, but also
significantly increased ownership of
refrigerators and video players, as well as to
some extent of washing machines and water
heaters. The table furthermore reveals the
uneven development between rural and
urban areas.
These numbers are averages, and are of
course tilted by the fact that some
households own a lot of goods. Some
wealthy households in the cities own several
cars and 5-6 motorbikes, while other
household own none. Transport indeed
represents a particularly interesting
consumption domain, and one that has even
been suggested as an appropriate way to
capture middle classes globally.
177
Vietnamese households.
As Huong Le Thu (2015: 7) explains, in
vernacular Vietnamese belonging to the
middle class is often expressed as ‘having
enough to eat, enough to save’. If we were
to be more accurate in using material
possessions as a starting point for defining
the Vietnamese class system, which
commodities should we use? In one of the
many attempts to capture the global middle
class, Dadush and Ali (2012) have suggested
‘the car index’ as an appropriate tool,
measuring the middle class in a given
country through the number of cars in
circulation. For the case of India, Krishna
and Bajpai (2015) also use a car approach
and argue that in a context of fluctuating
income and expenditures, assets represent a
more reliable base for classification than
income. They furthermore find that
transportation assets hold a special position
as markers of status groups due to their
capacity to limit or enhance individual’s
‘ambit of operations’ (Krishna et al. 2015:
71). They argue that in India those able to
178 Arve Hansen / Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vol 3, No 2 (2017) 171-186
possess a motorbike broadly fit into the
category of lower middle class, while those
able to afford a car fit into the upper middle
class. This is an original (yet crude) starting
point for thinking about class, and one that I
believe holds some potential also in
contemporary Vietnam. As Truitt (2008: 4)
has argued in her analysis of motorbikes in
Ho Chi Minh City: in Vietnam ‘it is in
traffic that one sees the emergence of the
middle class’. I believe this to a large extent
still holds true, but while Truitt saw the
middle class as those owning motorbikes,
the car is perhaps a more accurate marker
today.
While estimates for China and India find
good matches between cars and the size of
the middle class (Dadush et al. 2012;
Krishna et al 2015), however, Vietnam’s
comparatively low number of cars
(approximately two million in 2013
according to OICA (2014) estimates) would
make the middle class quite small. Using
Dadush and Ali’s method of car per
household, the Vietnamese middle class
would include between seven and eight
million people while other estimates count it
to 12 million (Huong Le Thu 2015).2
Furthermore, in Vietnam’s ‘motorbike
society’ we cannot let go of the motorbike
so easily. Among my car-owning
informants, very few had got rid of their
motorbikes. There are however clear
differences in the type of motorbikes that are
driven. Vietnamese consumers’ appetite for
‘premium’ motorbike models is considered
extraordinary, something that led Italian
manufacturer Piaggio to use Vietnam as a
base for manufacturing their different
2
The car index includes multiplies the number of cars on
the road with average household size (Dadush and Ali,
2012). Vietnam is home to around two million cars and
the average size of a Vietnamese household was 3.8 (and
rapidly declining) in 2009 (Guilmoto and de Loenzien,
2015).
Piaggio and Vespa models for the Southeast
Asian market (Interview with Piaggio
Vietnam representative, November, 2013).
Despite costing several times the price of
their competitors, Piaggio has been a
remarkable success in Vietnam (Wunker
2013; Hansen 2015c). I would argue that the
Piaggio is another obvious material proof of
membership in the well-off strata of post-doi
moi Hanoi. Nevertheless, car ownership can
certainly help identify the upper and upper
middle classes in contemporary Vietnam,
and who is able to purchase a car in Hanoi
and how they manage to muster the financial
ability to do so, can provide important
insights into contemporary Vietnamese
society.
4.1. Who are the Hanoian car owners?
A car is undoubtedly still a luxury
commodity in Vietnam. With a wide range
of taxes and fees, purchasing a car is far out
of range for the vast majority of Vietnamese
people. Although it may be possible to
acquire a used car for 200-300 million
VND, a new car usually starts at more than
500 million. A new Toyota, one of the most
popular brands in Hanoi, will often cost
closer to 1 billion. By comparison, a new
Honda motorbike is available for less than
20 million VND (although the most
expensive Piaggio models cost several
hundred million). Moreover, using a car is
very expensive. Expenses such as fuel,
parking, insurance, and road fees added up
to between 3 and 10 million a month for my
car-owning informants. The expenses for
just using a car one month thus often exceed
the monthly income of the average worker.
Beyond the upper class of ‘super rich’, I
have found that those who are able to own a
car in Hanoi can broadly be considered to
belong in the two groups Gainsborough
(2010) has located as the middle class in
 Arve Hansen / Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vol 3, No 2 (2017) 171-186
Vietnam: high-ranking professional state
employees and professional Vietnamese
employed by foreign companies or aid
institutions.
Businessmen obviously belong to the
middle class, and constituted a significant
part of my car-owning informants. By
businessmen I refer to those employed in
foreign firms, or run their own small firms.
They work in the new market economy, as
part of usually regional or global firms, and
many of them are, as this social segment
often is across the world, very conscious of
appearance. Many of the businessmen I
interviewed were open about how they used
their cars as strategies of distinction, for
displaying their success in the market
economy in order to achieve further success.
They explained in detail that they needed
relatively expensive cars to show potential
and existing business partners that they were
successful members of the market economy
(Hansen 2016b). The large group of
(relatively) high-ranking state employees are
interesting, as is discussed below. Clearly,
there is a strong overlap between the two
groups. And the higher up you get in the
public sector hierarchy, the stronger the link
is also to the capital owning classes. Many
use public positions mainly as a springboard
to better private business opportunities. This
overlap between the private and public
sectors is common in transition economies,
particularly where economic transition has
not been accompanied by political
transition, such as in Vietnam and China (Li
2010). The higher the public ranking the
higher is also the access to informal sources
of income.
179
4.2. Poor people with lots of money: The
public-private middle class
Although displaying wealth has become
accepted in contemporary Vietnam, sources
of income can still be a sensitive topic. For
example, the sources of the wealth of so-
called dai gia, or new rich, is subject to
controversy. As put by a young female
anthropologist in Hanoi: ‘The transition of
Vietnam has made many people suddenly
become rich with money falling from the
sky but not from their effort and capability’
(Interview, May 2013). Relatedly, a
marketer for a large, foreign auto company
in Hanoi commented: ‘demand is very high
on cars now. We usually make [a] joke:
Vietnam is a very poor country but we have
the best and the most beautiful cars in the
world. People are very poor but they have a
lot of money’ (Interview, October 2013).
The comment on poor people with lots of
money takes us back to my two groups of
car owners. It is no big surprise that
businessmen and other private professionals
can own a car. Incomes in the foreign sector
are often significantly higher than in the rest
of the economy. In the public sector,
however, even high-ranking officials earn
about five million VND a month. A young
female public employee raised my question
herself:
Do you wonder why people have so
much money even though they don’t have
money? […] Do you question how a poor
country can have lots of people with cars?
(Interview, May, 2013, translated from
Vietnamese)
As she was driving a car, she was
concerned I would think they were
‘breaking the law’, but explained that this
was not the case. In her case, her husband
who was ‘doing business’ had bought the
180 Arve Hansen / Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vol 3, No 2 (2017) 171-186
car.3 Other informants were more cryptic. In
an interview with two senior, male state
employees, I was told that they earned a few
hundred dollars a month but still bought
expensive cars. Their expenses for just using
the car were equivalent to their income, they
explained. The highest ranking of the two
was quite serious and said that it was just
about ‘extra jobs’. The other laughed, put on
a funny smile and said that even doctors did
not have the salary to afford a car. He
showed his new smart phone and explained
that it cost him two months’ salary. He
laughed again and said he had not eaten for
those two months. They ended up explaining
that as high ranking state employees they
have other sources for income, and the
highest ranking of them returned to saying
that they take on many different jobs, like
being involved in consultancy with
international organisations. They explained
that the government paid their salary even
though they were doing other jobs, and that
they were probably allowed to work ‘two
thousand percent’ outside their formal
positions (Interview, April, 2013). The last
point is relevant for all of the car-owning
informants employed in the public sector.
They all reported to have extra income, and
some of them ran private businesses that
occupied large portions of their time.
In another interview, when asking a
young female professional who she thought
could own a car in Vietnam today, she
giggled and answered that ‘it’s difficult to
say, because, you know, here, income
doesn’t come from your job’ (Interview,
October, 2013). Her father had bought the
car for her, which was a common statement
3
Quite typical for the Confucian patriarchal gender
relations of modern Vietnam (see Drummond and
Rydstrom, 2004), most car owners in Hanoi are men.
Even though women are to an increasing extent driving
cars, men usually own the vehicles.
among my younger informants. Getting
closer to what is probably an important part
of the truth, a young and obviously wealthy
businessman laughed out loud when asked
how government officials and other state
employees can afford a car. He said that ‘In
Vietnam, being a government official is like
being a businessman. Your money is like
someone in business. So you can have
different kinds of income’. He explained
that they have the right to decide who will
be promoted, as well as the fact that they
receive money from a range of different
sources. ‘If other people earn money, they
can share it with government officials.’
‘Commission’, he added (Interview, May,
2013). This statement reflects the rather
well-known fact that personal connections
and money can get you more or less
anything in today’s Vietnam. In the Leninist
political structure and state-influenced
economy, who you know certainly matters
much more than what you know. This fact is
also clearly visible in the market for ‘lucky
numbers’ (so dep, literally beautiful
numbers). Getting a nice license plate brings
luck and represents a significant status
symbol in Hanoi (Hansen 2016b). However,
for cars, buying and selling lucky numbers
is illegal. Instead they are randomly drawn
at the registration office by pushing a
button. Still, there are ways of getting
around this system, and the response by
young, female car owner (who was lucky
and got a license plate adding up to the
number nine) is a telling example:
Author: Did you choose to get a lucky
number?
Informant: You cannot choose it! You
get it randomly.
Author: But I think some people still
manage to?
Informant: Ah, yeah, yeah, if you have a
lot of money. And relationship.
 Arve Hansen / Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vol 3, No 2 (2017) 171-186
(Interview, October, 2013).
In one of my interviews with a car
retailer, the process of obtaining a lucky
license plate was explained to me in detail:
Informant: Actually the government
restricts the selling of numbers, so you have
to push the button. But you can do another
way, it depends on relationship and money.
Here if the customer ask we can help them.
[Laughter] We know somebody so we can
go to the place for registering, ask them to
come out and give them some money. So we
still just press the button, but it will give us
the number we want. [Laughter]
Author: And how much does it cost?
Informant: It depends on the number and
the relationship. It’s more difficult now. We
cannot use a fixed price, it’s unfixed price.
If you want to know the price, just ask God.
[Laughter]
(Interview, April, 2013, translated from
Vietnamese).
The important role of political
connections as well as the significant
amounts of informal income also resonate
with Vu’s (2014: 31) findings concerning
‘selling of office’ as one of the most serious
forms of corruption in Vietnam today and
how party officials can make fortunes by
‘selling state positions to the highest
bidders’. Vu is discussing very high-ranking
officials, but from my own observations this
is prevalent across the public sector. For the
case of transport, an interesting example is
that it according to several informants is
possible for traffic police to buy a lucrative
spot in the streets. This gives a relatively
low salary, but very high opportunities for
easy money in the pocket. It is generally
known in traffic in Hanoi that the police can
stop you without necessarily having a very
good reason, and that they will always find a
181
reason to give you a fine. In order to avoid
having to go through a time-consuming
process to pay the fine, where the vehicle is
often kept by the police until the fine is paid,
people rather ‘pay the fine directly’ to the
officer, usually including a bribe. The
standard ‘fine’ seems to be 200.000-300.000
VND on a motorbike, often significantly
higher if driving a car. My car-owning
informants reported that the fines they had
to pay to the police were often more than
twice as high in a car compared to on a
motorbike. According to many of my
informants the exception is if the car looks
particularly luxurious, perhaps even with an
expensive license plate. Then the police
would usually not stop it. Although an
expensive car could signify a profitable
‘client’ to the police, it also means that its
driver probably has very powerful political
connections. Nevertheless, the point here is
that public sector employees despite low
salaries use a variety of legal and illegal
ways of generating enough financial
capacity to participate in consumption
practices-including owning a car-that
qualifies for middle class categorisation.
The main point, as I have discussed in
several publications (Hansen, 2015bc,
2016bc, 2017), is that a growing number of
people can afford a car in Vietnam today,
and that the private car has emerged as a
‘must-have’ object in among certain social
segments. Drawing on Bourdieu (1984), we
could say that people drive cars to belong to
the middle class, while belonging to the
(upper) middle class comes with
expectations of automobility. And crucially,
this is not necessarily about displaying
status, it also concerns generally higher
expectations to comfort, convenience, and
safety. No matter the reasons, however, car
ownership is rapidly increasing in Vietnam,
182 Arve Hansen / Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vol 3, No 2 (2017) 171-186
and the country is now considered among
the fastest growing car markets in the world
(Saigoneer 2017).
5. Consumption, development and doi
moi
The case of cars is perhaps the most
visible one, but a wide range of consumer
goods are relevant for understanding the
Vietnamese middle classes today. Private
consumption arguably represents one of the
clearest shifts away from the planned
economy in Vietnam. While able to produce
large number of goods, history has shown
that socialist economies have tended to
include ideological limitations on what an
individual should consume. With doi moi
the official position towards private
consumption has changed from limitations
to encouragement (Vann 2012; Huong Le
Thu 2015). From a macro-economic
perspective, this of course makes perfect
sense. While a planned economy usually
focuses on producing and delivering enough
goods to people, a market economy
fundamentally depends on growth, and thus
on increasing levels of consumption
(Wilhite et al. 2015). With reforms,
widespread ownership of goods beyond
strict necessities thus had to be accepted,
and in time even the consumption of luxury
goods appears to be considered as beneficial
for the road to socialism in Vietnam.
The market reforms have surely involved
more than strictly economic measures.
Although there has been no political
transition in Vietnam, the socio-political
changes in terms of relative economic
freedoms and the official position towards
commodities have been radical. The social
and indeed political meanings of consumer
goods have changed drastically. As Vann
(2012) argues, in a country ruled by a
communist party and with little freedom of
speech or media, consumption has
represented the strongest sense of liberty
brought along by doi moi. The reforms have
led to a new acceptance of consumption and
display of wealth, and those who can afford
it are now able purchase and display
consumer objects that would surely be
judged as bourgeois excess not long ago.
Let us return to motorised transport.
Spreading so rapidly and becoming so
integral to everyday life in Vietnam,
motorbike ownership quickly became fairly
uncontroversial. A private car, however, is
in many ways a more conspicuous object.
As Broz and Habeck (2015) note on the dual
role of cars in the Soviet Union, cars have
from a socialist perspective historically
represented suspicious items with
connotations of individualism and
consumerism rather than socialist progress
(Siegelbaum 2008). Similarly, a hotly
debated topic in China after market reforms
was whether the Chinese auto industry
should support what was considered
bourgeois consumption patterns by
producing cars for private use (Notar 2017).
Some of my informants recalled that even as
late as the 2000s high-ranking public
servants would avoid purchasing a car due
to the signals a private car sent about its
owner (probably of both corruption and
extravagance). They stressed that this was a
thing of the past and that people now were
rather afraid of buying a car for more
practical reasons such as high costs and lack
of parking space (Hansen 2016c). The
signals a car sends can however still
influence the type of car purchased. One
relatively high-ranking public servant I
interviewed stressed how people in the
private sector want to show that they are
rich, even if they in reality are not, and if
 Arve Hansen / Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vol 3, No 2 (2017) 171-186
they do not own a car they will borrow one
and display it as their own. Conversely, he
argued, government officials are rich but do
not want to show it, and will thus adopt a
more careful approach to car consumption
(Interview, April 2013). Nevertheless, both
the economic and political elites (with their
considerable overlaps) in Hanoi are
increasingly found within the confines of a
private automobile.
Similarly, it is now generally accepted to
spend large amounts of money on clothing,
food, alcohol, housing and a wide range of
consumer products. Meanwhile, the
symbolic meaning of goods are continuously
negotiated and changing. And apart from
certain categories, such as cars, housing and
restaurants, it is hard to generalize what
exactly are middle class consumption
patterns in Vietnam today. Within the
middle classes there are many different
categories. In line with Bourdieu’s (1984)
argument in Distinction, what is considered
appropriate within the subgroups high on
economic capital may not be considered
appropriate within the subgroups high on
cultural capital. In the latter too conspicuous
consumption is often frowned upon, while at
the same time more subtle ways of
conspicuousness are integral to cultural
middle-classness.
What is nevertheless certain is that goods
play a decisive role in defining class in
Vietnam today. Furthermore, everyday
practices get more consumption intensive.
This is similar in processes of economic
development and increasing affluence
around the world. The exact ways that this
plays out, however, are usually highly
context specific. Nevertheless, the more
consumption and thus resource intensive
practices carry with them higher ecological
footprints. At the same time, however, parts
of the Vietnamese middle classes are
183
becoming increasingly environmentally
conscious. Buying green products, riding
(often very expensive) bicycles and even
turning vegetarian are new trends that may
hold some promise of greener lifestyles.
Lessons from other countries do however
show us that we can expect these to be
‘compensated’ by other carbon intensive
practices, such as car ownership, in general
more shopping of for example clothing, and
more frequent holidays involving longer
flights.
For Vietnam, the expanding middle
classes lead to a growing domestic market
and a more dynamic domestic economy. At
the same time, however, they come with
higher expectations of material wellbeing
and potentially of political rights, although
for the latter seemingly to a lesser extent
than what conventional theory tells us (see
Gainsborough, 2010; or Chen 2013 for a
similar discussion on China). The
consumption patterns of the higher end of
the middle classes, together with those of
the elites, are simultaneously very visible
manifestations of the social inequalities
embedded in the post-doi moi economy and
society. How the government deals with this
situation within the context of the socialist
market economy will represent a fascinating
venture for further social scientific research.
6. Conclusions
Investigating the middle classes in the
context of Vietnam’s attempt to find an
alternative development model remains a
rather understudied aspect of Vietnam’s
transformations. This paper has discussed
how not only the economic changes but also
ideological softening has been necessary for
the middle-class consumption patterns we
see today. The paper mainly used the private
car as a starting point for the discussion,
184 Arve Hansen / Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vol 3, No 2 (2017) 171-186
showing how owning a car, maybe the most
conspicuous consumer item of all, only in
the recent decade became an accepted part
of Vietnamese aspirations. Accepting high
levels of private consumption is a necessary
part of a market economy, and the question
now is to what extent Vietnam’s new
development model can bring about more
sustainable consumption patterns than in the
rich countries (and if so, how), as well as
how to deal with the deep inequalities that
are so visibly manifested by the
consumption patterns of the upper middle
class and the elites in Vietnam today.
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