Abstract
In 1986, the Vietnamese state formally launched an open door policy in order to reform its socialist economic system and get integrated into the global economy. This policy, as Gillen (2016) notes, is fraught with conflicts, struggles, and compromise among the central government in Hanoi, local authorities in Ho Chi Minh City, state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and private investors. With a focus on tourism development in Ho Chi Minh City, Gillen’s book is a timely contribution to our understanding of how urban entrepreneurialism plays out in a transitional economy. Entrepreneurialism and Tourism in Contemporary Vietnam offers an impressive account of the ways in which these actors equip themselves with entrepreneurial discourses and practices to compete in the marketplace of tourism in Ho Chi Minh City. While it is debatable whether today’s Vietnam is a socialist or capitalist country, Gillen’s book provides necessary details to illustrate the dynamic relationship between tourism development and urban entrepreneurialism.
A key strength of Gillen’s book is to articulate the role played by tourism development in capital accumulation, in territorial competition, and in ‘creating the materiality and social meaning of places’ (Britton, 1991: 452). For instance, private investors and SOEs compete and collaborate, though reluctantly, with each other to boost up the tourism market in Ho Chi Minh City so that they can make profit from tourists. Meanwhile, the tenuous tension between Ho Chi Minh City in the south and Hanoi in the north is embedded in the representation of urban tourism sites and in the arrangement of tour routes for international tourists. In order to cater to different tourism markets, sites related to the ‘Vietnam’ War or the ‘American’ War are carefully crafted to sell painful past memories in the marketplace. The key challenge is to reshape the meanings of war landscapes from hatred and affliction to ‘sympathy, empathy, and commiseration’ (Gillen, 2016: 79). Like other cases of urban tourism development (Gotham, 2005; Su and Teo, 2009), war-related memory sites in Ho Chi Minh City are engineered into unique tourist products to enhance the city’s attractiveness in the tourism industry. Importantly, Gillen terms this engineering of memory sites as part of the overall cultural-economy. By doing so, Gillen makes an important contribution to bridge cultural economy and tourism development in cities under rapid social and spatial transformation.
While urban tourism development is the central focus of Gillen’s book, his work is more related to the condition of conflicts and struggles in the process of economic transition in Vietnam. As Gillen aptly argues, the Vietnamese state constructs and utilizes national culture as an ideological tool for nation-building and as a disciplinary weapon against foreign aggressors. By portraying foreign aggressors as selfish, individualistic, and competitive, the Vietnamese state, as Gillen points out, can defend national culture and reinforce the binary of insider and outsider, or of friend and enemy. In detailing the various forces that have shaped the production and protection of culture in the reform era, Gillen provides insight into how the Vietnamese state deploys a strong stance against the tenets of neoliberal capitalism. The juxtaposition of open market and cultural patriotism does not only appear in Vietnam but also becomes a key national policy to maintain social stability and political security in many East Asian countries, as shown in the case of music industry in Singapore (Kong, 1997), red tourism in China (Zhao and Timothy, 2015), and intelligent landscapes in Malaysia (Bunnell, 2004). Here, we are given an important geographical account of neoliberalism with Asian characteristics, as political elites refuse to submit to ‘the inevitability of neolibralization’ (Gillen, 2016: 49). Indeed, Vietnam’s engagement with the global economy via tourism and other sectors, as similarly in the case of China, exemplifies ‘how to reap the benefits of the global market-place whilst maintaining strong defenses against the dangers of [neoliberal] globalization’ (Breslin, 2004: 16). Gillen provides an insightful account of how neoliberal capitalism is negotiated and warded off in Vietnam.
In this sense, Entrepreneurialism and Tourism in Contemporary Vietnam can be read alongside a broader cohort of literature on the practice of neoliberalism in various cities. A central component of neoliberal capitalism in urban (re)development is the so-called public–private partnership (PPP). To entrench neoliberal market economy, national states are hollowed out to multi-level governance involving PPP. This hollowing-out does not mean that the state power retreats from people’s everyday life but is mobilized to work with private forces to establish ‘more authoritarian and often softly but sometimes openly repressive political regimes’ (Swyngedouw, 2000: 69). In Vietnam, as Gillen tells us, the local authorities in Ho Chi Minh City conduct business rapaciously and competitively, in order to make profit and also mobilize political power to regulate the local marketplace. Meanwhile, private, or non-state, players have to be complicit with SOEs to avoid fraudulent punishment and obtain much-needed advantages. The public–private division is technically blurred to such an extent that officials in the local authorities reach out to private investors to build business alliance while these investors actively work with powerful cadres as necessary backers. As Gillen demonstrates through close examination of ambiguous relationships between these two groups of people, the public–private partnership cannot be taken for granted. Having said this, Gillen does not go further to discuss how these ambiguous relationships erode the party-state system and jeopardize the long-term trajectory of economic development in Vietnam. After all, public–private collusion is deemed illegal and corrupted in many countries, including China.
Even as Entrepreneurialism and Tourism in Contemporary Vietnam generates valuable insight into the logics and practices of entrepreneurialism that shape the tourism industry in Ho Chi Minh City in particular, and economic development in Vietnam in general, relatively little attention is given to the ways in which real urban landscapes are represented and developed for tourism development. The focus is more on discourses via policy documents and semi-structured interviews with tourism managers. This means that tangible landscapes, including streets, museums, attractions, and parks, become invisible in the book. Furthermore, Gillen does not afford sustained attention to the ways in which tourists, international or domestic, negotiate, contest, or comply with the production and protection of Vietnamese national culture. For sure, the book is about the entrepreneurial connections and contestations between local actors and the state—yet tourists as an important component of the tourism market might articulate the culture differently across citizenship, ethnicity, and class. In the absence of a geographically contextual analysis of tourism consumption in the tourism market, we are left knowing little of how the dynamic of production and consumption plays out in Ho Chi Minh City. Even with these points largely untouched, this is an important case study of entrepreneurialism and tourism. Entrepreneurialism and Tourism in Contemporary Vietnam remains an insightful resource for those who are interested in understanding urban entrepreneurialism, economic reform, and tourism development in transitional economies.