Upcoming Viet Nam Workshops at City University of Hong Kong, 2008 & 2009
From: Jonathan London [mailto:jdlondon@cityu.edu.hk]
Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2008 5:48 PM
To: 'vsg@u.washington.edu'
Subject: Upcoming Viet Nam Workshops at City University of Hong Kong, 2008 & 2009
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
I wish to call your attention to three Viet Nam-focused workshops to be held at the City University of Hong Kong in 2008 and 2009.
These include a workshop titled Remaking the Vietnamese State, 1989-2009; a conference or workshop under the heading Viet Nam, East Asia, and Beyond; and another workshop under the heading Transforming Asian ‘Socialisms’, which will center on developing Viet Nam-China comparisons.
Although there is now a significant volume of academic and policy literature on Viet Nam, I believe each of the proposed events is structured in a way that would make significant and original contributions to existing understandings of Viet Nam, as well as being interesting, etc. Each workshop would run two days or so and would seek to develop intensive discussions around a small number of papers.
Participation will be limited. City University of Hong Kong and its Southeast Asia Research Centre will be funding the conference, and some support will be available for those who need it.
This initial e-mail only sketches the aims of the workshops and seeks to gauge interest. Lengthier descriptions of the events can be found below. If you are interested in participating in these workshops, please send an e-mail to me at jonathan.london@cityu.edu.hk indicating which of the workshops you’d be interested in attending and the possible themes of paper(s) you would contribute. As there may be some flexibility with the timing of these events, please also indicate whether the proposed dates work for you or otherwise indicate times that would work. I will follow-up with firmer dates and deadlines in due course.
Also, if you know people who are potentially interesting/interested folks, please feel free to forward this to them. I am particularly interested in reaching out to Vietnamese Viet Nam scholars as well as scholars of Viet Nam from East and Southeast Asia and other contexts.
Best regards,
Jonathan London
City University of Hong Kong
WORKSHOP A
Summer 2008 (likely late August)
Remaking the Vietnamese State: Implications for Viet Nam and the Region
In 1989, Viet Nam’s state was in the midst of an acute fiscal crisis brought on by the steady erosion of state socialist economic institutions. As we approach 2009, Viet Nam can look back on two decades of rapid economic growth and profound social changes in virtually all its social institutions. Most analyses of Viet Nam have been focused on changes in the economic sphere. Even analyses of issues that are not explicitly economic (e.g. education, health, cultural change) are frequently couched in economistic (and apolitical) terms. But one of the most important – and arguably overlooked – dimensions of change concerns the ‘remaking of the Vietnamese state.’ Although international development organizations and Vietnamese state agencies have devoted consistent attention to ‘administrative reforms’, there has been no systematic effort to assess the scope and significance of changes in Viet Nam’s state up until the present. This workshop would assemble scholars of Viet Nam and policy intellectuals to evaluate the following possible themes.
o The Politics of State Reform
o State Formation and Transformation
o Authoritarian Political Structures/Market Institutions
o Remaking Taxation and State finance
o Gender and Politics
o The Changing Roles of Line Ministries
o Decentralization & Local Administration
o Social Policies (e.g. Education, Health, & Pensions)
o Land, Property Rights, and the State
o Viet Nam’s Foreign Relations
o The State and ‘Cultural’ Management
o Civil Society: Is it happening?
The workshop would different from recent exercises such as “20 Years of Doi Moi” in a number of important respects. First, this project will not skirt politics – it will attempt to explain developments in explicitly political-economy terms. Second, the workshop would be more explicitly theoretical, not in the pie in the sky sense, but in the sense that explanations will rely on diverse ideas and data, and will go beyond standard economistic accounts. Third, however, the workshop will have a practical orientation intended to provoke practical questions about changes in the Vietnamese state and its implications for Viet Nam and the region.
CONFERENCE A
December 2008
Viet Nam, East Asia, and Beyond
Over the past two decades, Viet Nam has experienced profound changes in its social, political, economic, and cultural institutions. Much of these changes can be traced to the erosion and then dismantlement of Viet Nam’s centrally-planned economy. Viet Nam’s associated processes of integration with regional markets and political processes and institutions, while frequently given mentioned, have not been subjected to explicit analysis. And yet Viet Nam’s importance in the region is growing, and not only in economic ways. Suggested papers would address the following:
o Viet Nam and East Asia: Who Cares & Why
o Viet Nam & China: Immutable Tensions and Contradictions
o Viet Nam & Taiwan
o Viet Nam and Hong Kong
o Viet Nam and Korea
o Viet Nam and Japan
o Viet Nam, Singapore, and ‘The Singapore Model’
o Viet Nam, the United States and the Geopolitics of East Asia
o The Migration of Industry from Indonesia to Viet Nam
o Human Trafficking
o The Marketing of Viet Nam: Basket Case to Export Hub
o Viet Nam & East Asian Tourism
The themes of the conference can be left open, or we can troll for broadly political economy themes, that are left open but in some way touch upon core concerns, such as political links, trade links etc. The idea overall is to develop critical analyses of Viet Nam’s significance in the region, political, economic, and otherwise.
WORKSHOP B
Late Spring 2009
Transforming Asian Socialisms
In 1996, parallel conference at the Australia National University and the University of Hawaii explored ‘transforming Asian Socialisms’. The result was an edited volume that teamed Viet Nam and China scholars in explicit comparisons of China in Viet Nam on specific thematic issues. Ten years later, Viet Nam and China have the fastest growing economies in the world. Both countries appear to have consolidated a form of governance that combines Leninist political principles with market-based strategies of accumulation. There, however, important differences between the countries, not only in scale but also in the attributes of each country’s political economies and social institutions. Casual observers of the two countries frequently assume Viet Nam is a mini-China that ‘follows’ China. Scholars of China’s considerable interest in Viet Nam’s experience with grassroots democracy suggests otherwise. Revisiting a comparison of the two countries will advance our understandings of their similarities and differences, and what (if any thing) can be learned. Possible themes include:
State-society relations
Agrarian transformations
Center-local relations
Migration
Land Policy
Health Policies
Education Policies
Urban life
‘Civil Society’ & Democracy
Media and Political Expression
The (ir)Relevance of North Korean Comparisons
Jonathan D. London, PhD
Assistant Professor (Sociology)
Department of Asian & International Studies
City University of Hong Kong