Abstract
Anyone who has researched Vietnam has most likely faced getting lost in the opaque jungle of deviating and often inconsistent information and data available from sources such as statistical yearbooks and countless government reports. Discrepancies between what is reported to superiors and what is actually done in reality predate the socialist period. In ‘The Government of Mistrust’ MacLean sheds light on this phenomenon. Rich in empirical case studies drawn from archival research and interviews conducted in northern Vietnam, the author traces historically the evolution of documentation in conjunction with the Leninist state apparatus since the 1920s, and considers how it altered against the backdrop of policy shifts in the respective wakes of building socialism and the subsequent turn to market socialism from the late 1980s onwards. Conceptually, MacLean refers to what James Scott (1998) termed ‘legibility’ in the context of technocratic state planning, namely the centralised state’s desire for the simplified, standardised documentation of information and data relating to complex local realities. In other words, the prerequisite for the scientific and centralised state management of people, space and things is typical for Leninist states.
In the first two chapters the author considers the socialist revolution carried out in the liberated zones of the Red River Delta during Vietnam’s anticolonial struggle. He shows how central directives were interpreted and implemented arbitrarily in different localities against the backdrop of a class struggle, changing property regimes and the self-serving interest of local cadres. After independence, as we learn in chapters three, four and five, the central state made substantial efforts to standardise, centralise and systematise documentation devices. Capturing the situation in rural areas then became more relevant for guiding collective agriculture in the late 1950s and 1960s. The author portrays well the subsequent and gradual shift from non-standardised and narrative-based field reporting towards a more professional and impersonal reporting system based on standardised templates that required local cadres to provide numbers, statistics and graphs instead of extensive descriptions. Following the former Soviet Union, qualitative forms of documentation were gradually replaced by simplified, quantitative ones, which lacked a detailed description of grassroots development.
Paradoxically, MacLean reveals how, despite increased information flows, these central-state interventions generated even more vagueness and obscured paper realities, making the centralised state become increasingly blind. For instance, while state officials propagated fabricated success stories of model cooperatives as ideals for emulation, local cadres faced the disastrous reality of inefficient collective production. To escape from undersupply and starvation, they opted pragmatically to deviate from central planning in the form of illicit, but more efficient, household-based production models, while reporting differently to central decision makers. Incomplete, inaccurate and manipulated bottom-up reporting decreased legibility. MacLean, in this regard, concludes that central administrative control over localities was neither uniform nor constant. Rather, it was uneven and in continual flux. While high-ranking officials in Hanoi set planning targets far beyond reality and feasibility, they held local cadres accountable for policy failures and deviations, blaming the cadres for a lack of capacity, ideological awareness and discipline, and accusing them of only following their individual interests. Local cadres at the other end of the system faced utopian policies, pressure to carry out illusionary emulation campaigns and the prospect of being criticised and disciplined when things did not go according to plan. This together with sudden policy shifts in light of the class struggle ideology and poorly formulated directives from above exposed local cadres to an environment of permanent insecurity. As a result, mistrust permeated the different layers of state apparatus, constantly increased and spread to society as a whole; mistrust, as the author claims, encourages people to engage in “strategic action and tactical manoeuvring” to pursue their own interests.
MacLean convincingly elucidates that it was actually the politics of mistrust, and the paradoxical impact it had on technocratic state planning, which hampered the building of socialism. In a vicious circle, consecutive measures introduced by the state to create legibility had a reverse effect and, eventually, led the state to become illegible to itself. In the final chapter (six), the author examines state-directed efforts to ‘civilise’ the countryside following de-collectivisation in the 1990s, demonstrating how the politics of mistrust has carried on in the transitional era, albeit under an increasingly decentralised system of administration. In essence, MacLean has produced an insightful and highly readable analysis of state-run documentation processes, mistrust and bureaucratic power in Vietnam, including the symbols and language we find therein. It helps us to understand the persistence of ‘empty signifiers’ and ‘stereotyped phrases’ in government reports and many directives adopted by the party state. The book is therefore relevant not only to scholars with an interest in the Vietnamese state, but also generally for all those who have to make sense of documentation realities and the far-reaching consequences for policy processes in Vietnam.