Asia's Cauldron (12 page)

Yet another reason why communism persists here is precisely because its very substance is slipping away, and thus an uprising is for the time being unnecessary; though, of course, there is a price to be paid for insufficient reform. Vietnam is in a situation similar to that of China: governed by a Communist Party that has all but given up communism, and has an implicit social contract with the population, in which the party guarantees higher or sustained income levels while the citizens agree not to protest too loudly. (Vietnam cannot ultimately be estranged from China, for they are both embarked on the same unique experiment: delivering capitalist riches to countries ruled by communist parties.)

Think of it, here is a society that has gone from ration books to enjoying one of the largest rice surpluses in the world in a quarter of a century. Vietnam recently graduated in statistical terms to a lower-middle-income country with a per capita GDP of $1,100. Instead of a single personality to hate with his picture on billboards, as was the case in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and other Arab countries, there is a faceless triumvirate of leaders—the party chairman, the state president, and the prime minister—that has delivered an average of 7 percent growth in the GDP annually between 2002 and 2012. Even in the teeth of the Great Recession in 2009, the local economy grew by
5.5 percent. “This is one of the most impressive records of poverty alleviation in world history,” says a Western diplomat. “They have gone from bicycles to motorcycles.” That to them may be democracy. And even if it isn't, one can say that the autocracies of Vietnam and China have not robbed people of their dignity the way those of the Middle East have. “The leaders of the Middle East stayed in office too long and maintained states of emergency for decades, that is not the case here,” a former high-ranking Vietnamese political leader told me. “But the problems of corruption, huge income gaps, and high youth unemployment we share with countries of the Middle East.” What spooks the Communist Party here is less the specter of the Arab Spring than that of the student uprising in 1989 in China, a time when inflation was as high in China as it was in Vietnam until recently, and corruption and nepotism were perceived by the population to be beyond control: again, the case with Vietnam. And yet, party officials also worry about political reform leading them down the path of pre-1975 South Vietnam, whose weak, faction-ridden governments were integral to that state's collapse; or to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century China, with its feeble central authority that led to foreign domination. Thus, Vietnamese officials openly admire Singapore: a predominantly single-party
company
state that emanates discipline and clean government, something Vietnam's corruption-ridden regime is still a long way from.

The Singapore model was made explicit for me at the Vietnam-Singapore Industrial Park, twenty miles outside Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon as it is still called by everyone outside of government officialdom. I beheld a futuristic world of perfectly maintained and manicured right-angle streets where, in a security-controlled environment, 240 manufacturing firms from Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, South Korea, Europe, and the United States were producing luxury golf clubs, microchips, pharmaceuticals, high-end footwear, aerospace electronics, and so on. In the next stage of development, luxury condominiums were planned on-site for the foreign workers who will live and work here. An American plant manager at the park told me
that his company chose Vietnam for its high-tech operation through a process of elimination: “We needed low labor costs. We had no desire to locate in Eastern Europe or Africa [which didn't have the Asian work ethic]. In China wages are already starting to rise. Indonesia and Malaysia are Muslim, and that scares us away. Thailand has lately become unstable. So Vietnam loomed for us: it's like China was two decades ago, on the verge of a boom.” He added: “We give our employees in Vietnam standardized intelligence tests. They score higher than our employees in the U.S.”

There are three other Vietnam-Singapore Industrial Parks in the country, whose aim is to bring the corporate, squeaky-clean, environmentally
green
, and controlled Singapore model of development to Vietnam. They are among four hundred industrial parks located throughout Vietnam, from north to south, that all to greater and lesser extents promote the same values of Western-style development and efficiency. The existing megacities of Saigon and the Hanoi-Haiphong corridor cannot be wholly reborn, their problems cannot be wholly alleviated: the future is new cities that will relieve demographic pressure on the old ones. True modernity means developing the countryside so that fewer people will want to migrate to cities in the first place. These industrial parks, with Singapore as the role model, are what will help change the Vietnamese countryside. Because their whole purpose is to be self-contained, they bring infrastructure, such as electricity and water, along with them, as well as one-stop shopping for foreign firms seeking government permits.

Whereas Vietnam was politically unified when the North Vietnamese communists overran Saigon and renamed it Ho Chi Minh City in 1975, only now, through industrial parks and other means of development, is Vietnam becoming economically and culturally unified, through a global standard of production that is connecting Hanoi and Saigon. Because this latest stage of development involves direct input from other Asian tiger economies, Vietnam is becoming increasingly integrated with the rest of the region and thus becoming comfortable with the partial erosion of sovereignty that a future, more robust ASEAN may represent.

“Vietnamese nationalism is aggressive only towards China, an historical
enemy, but not towards any other state in the region,” Dang Thanh Tam, one of Saigon's leading entrepreneurs, told me. Tam, sitting at an empty desk while operating two smart phones almost simultaneously, embodies the new Saigon, which, because it ceased being a political capital in 1975, has henceforth devoted itself completely to business. Whereas Hanoi is Vietnam's Ankara, Saigon is Vietnam's Istanbul. Tam's Saigon Invest Group represents well over a billion dollars in capital invested in industrial parks, telecommunications, manufacturing, and mining. He has started twenty-five industrial parks all along the country's north-south corridor. “The future,” he told me, “is decentralization combined with a more responsive government, and along with a birthrate that stays high in relation to the graying populations of China, Japan, and South Korea.”

He continued. “Transparency and accountability are the keys to making Vietnam a middle-level power,” the maritime equivalent of Turkey and Brazil, he indicated. “And that, above all, means a dramatic improvement in the legal code.” (Indeed, for Vietnam to overcome the economic doldrums that the country has found itself in lately—following decades of growth—dramatic reform on all levels is required.)

Whereas in Hanoi you are told repeatedly how Vietnam hopes to become a regional power and pivot state, in Saigon you get an actual demonstration of it. Everything is on a bigger scale than in Hanoi, with wide streets lined with gleaming designer stores, luxury auto dealerships, and steel and glass towers. There are swanky wine bars and upscale eateries that retain that French-influenced, vaguely naughty edginess of the old colonial French city. The Continental Hotel, the setting for much of Graham Greene's 1955 novel,
The Quiet American
, and a haunt of foreign correspondents during the American War, is—in spite of its spacious white wedding cake aura and neoclassical columns that whisper elegance and scream the past—simply buried amid the new glitz and new brand-name high-rise hotels.

The American GIs' Saigon of nearly half a century ago had 2.5 million people and a $180 per capita GDP; now with a population of
eight million, the per capita GDP is $2,900. Saigon has one third of the country's GDP, though only one ninth of the population. One hundred billion dollars eventually will be spent here on a new city center being planned by a Boston firm, featuring a hundred-story building and five new bridges and tunnels. A Japanese firm is building a six-line metro underground system. Officials at the Institute for Development Studies in Saigon told me that they are emphasizing “sustainable” development: a “green” model within a “global-regional” system. Strict zoning will be introduced, as well as limitations on the use of motorbikes and private cars in the various new and old city centers. Yet again,
Singapore, Inc
. is invoked, with talk of an aesthetically sterile “world-class” city, with a new airport and air cargo hub for Southeast Asia, and a bigger capacity seaport.

Hanoi is about geopolitical and military pretensions; Saigon the capitalist prosperity without which such pretensions can never be realized. Greater Saigon must become a clone of Singapore in order for Vietnam to hold its own against China, its historic rival and oppressor. That is the message one gets here.

Of course, Greater Saigon is still a long way from achieving that status. Vietnam is presently in the throes of an economic crisis similar to the one in China: while both communist parties have brought their populations impressive gains in living standards in recent decades, further progress requires deep reforms and political liberalization that will pose greater challenges than ever before.

In the meantime, Vietnam's communist leaders are trying to rely on their Prussianness, their ruthlessly capitalistic economic policies, and their tight political control to maintain their state's feisty independence from China. They know that unlike the countries of the Arab Spring, their nation faces an authentic outside adversary (however ideologically akin), which might help temper the political longing of their people. But like India, they are wary of any formal treaty arrangement with the United States. To be sure, if the necessity of a defense treaty with the United States ever arose, it would indicate that
the security situation in the South China Sea region is actually much more unstable than at present. In any case, the fate of Vietnam, and its ability not to be Finlandized by China, will say as much about the American capacity to project power in the Pacific in the twenty-first century as Vietnam's fate did in the twentieth.

A boom town of oil and gas revenue erupts out of the compressed greenery; colored glass and roaring steel curves define buildings that are like rocket launch pads located near lakes the hue of algae and mud. I sip a pink cocktail beside a brightly lit rooftop swimming pool at night—glowing balloons float at the surface—and look out at the cityscape. The comic book futurism of Batman and Gotham City comes to mind. Palm trees crowd in on overpasses. Despite the unceasing stacks of high-rises, there is a naked, waiting-to-be-filled-in quality to the landscape of spiky blue-green mountains and coiling rivers: where a hundred years ago tin and rubber were beginning to be extracted in large amounts. This was a time when the capital of Kuala Lumpur was little more than the “muddy confluence” for which it is named. An archipelago of trading posts and river outlets, Malaysia and the Malay world are supposed to conjure up the short stories of W. Somerset Maugham. They don't anymore. Maugham's
vast sprawl of uninterrupted, sweaty jungle, with its intimate and heartrending family dramas played out in colonial plantations, is long gone. And yet there is an oppressive fecundity in everything I see. Though it is now other writers to which I must refer as a result of the cutting-edge panorama that lies before me.

Indeed, the upscale malls of Kuala Lumpur, dedicated as they are to fetish and fantasy, raise consumerism to the status of an ideology. Observing the rushing crowds and thick exotica of a mall inside the Petronas Towers—Malay Muslim women, their hair hidden underneath
tudongs
in every primary color, Indian women in equally stunning saris, Chinese women in Western clothes—my whirling thoughts drift in succession to Thorstein Veblen, V. S. Naipaul, Ernest Gellner, Clifford Geertz, and Samuel P. Huntington, philosophers all, though none was classified as such.

In
The Theory of the Leisure Class
, Veblen, one of America's most brilliant and quirky social critics, wrote over a century ago about the consumerist hunger for useless products, brand names, and self-esteem through shopping sprees. He may have coined the term “conspicuous consumption,” which he identified with city dwellers because people in close contact with large numbers of other people tend to consume more as a mark of social prestige.
¹
I thought the very fact that contemporary Malaysian Muslims conform to Veblen's generalizations about turn-of-the-twentieth-century Americans shows that Muslims are individuals much as everybody else, no different from us. There is no otherness to Islamic civilization, in other words. Of course, this runs counter to what V. S. Naipaul, the novelist and literary traveler, wrote in his 1981 book,
Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey
, in which he noted the “casualness of the Malays” and “the energy of the Chinese.… The difference between the old and the new was the difference between Malay and Chinese.”
²
That might still be the case, but certainly much less so now than when Naipaul made his observation (as Naipaul himself briefly alludes to in his 1998 sequel,
Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples
).
³
There is also Ernest Gellner, the late French-Czech social anthropologist who cast such a microscopic eye on Muslim culture. Gellner observes that
Islam, unlike Christianity, was not born “
within
an empire,” that of Rome, but “
outside
two empires, one of which [Eastern Rome, or Byzantium] it promptly overran, and the other [Sassanid Persia] it conquered in the end.” Thus Islam, Gellner goes on, “had not corroded an earlier traditional civilization, nor lived on as its ghost. It
made
its own empire and civilization.” And as its own “complete and final” civilization, Islam provides—much more so than Judaism and Christianity—an unarguable blueprint for social order.
⁴
But if that is still the case, how come Veblen made the same observations about Americans in the 1890s as I was making about Malaysian Muslims now? Wouldn't that civilizational
otherness
show up in some way at the mall? What had changed in the Malays? I asked myself.