2016 is a crucial year. Jockeying is going on
behind the scenes
The normally
opaque Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam has made a public
splash with its recently concluded 10thCentral Committee plenum. The stakes are
high and carry implications not only for Vietnam’s development but also for the
strategic outlook of the entire region. So what exactly is going on?
The excitement centers on
the issue of leadership succession and attendant struggles for power. In 2016
the Communist Party will hold its 12th party congress and before it does,
it must choose a new crop of leaders. Several members of the country’s
16-member Politburo are scheduled to retire. After the congress, the top four
positions in Vietnam’s politics – those of party general secretary, prime
minister, state president, and chair of the national assembly – will have new
occupants. Which individuals and coalitions will prevail and in what
combination is the question at hand.
As in most one-party
states, the politics of succession in Vietnam is meant to take place back
stage. Evidence of what is actually occurring is systematically concealed. It
is Vietnam’s present deviation from this pattern that has observers taking
notice. Indeed, the manner in which events are playing out is lifting a curtain
on Vietnam’s elite politics in a way that is without historical precedent.
There have been several sets of surprises.
The first set has sprung
from the process and alleged but non-verifiable outcomes of an unusual and
nominally secretive round of confidence voting, in which 197 members of the
Central Committee rated individual members of the Politburo according to their
degree of confidence in members’ performance. That the Politburo would subject
itself to a round of confidence voting by its formally supervisory Central
Committee reminds us that, when it comes to politics, Vietnam’s party has cut
its own cloth. China this is not.
The long-delayed confidence
vote was proposed by party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong as a means of
naming and shaming bad-behavior within the Politburo. Recall that in 2012, the
bid by Trong and other Politburo members to penalize an unnamed Politburo
member (widely assumed to be Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung) failed when the
Central Committee refused to consent and instead required the entire Politburo
to reflect on its collective shortcomings. Confidence voting appeared to offer
an alternative means of disciplining poor-performers, albeit behind tightly
closed doors.
The second surprise: Rather
than being allowed to pass as “internal business” (công việc nội bộ) the confidence
voting has drawn wide public interest, particularly given its timing. As the
2016 crop of leaders will most likely consist entirely of Politburo members,
the confidence vote – though intended to be strictly secret – has rightly or
wrongly been seen as a barometer on political fortunes ahead of the party
congress.
Though most Vietnamese do
not follow party politics closely, Vietnam has in recent years developed an
increasingly dynamic political culture, thanks to the rapid spread of the
internet and the opportunities it has presented Vietnamese to read about and
comment about virtually anything that strikes them, including politics.
This leads to a third
intriguing development, the appearance of mysterious and heavily visited
website, Profiles in Power, which has within the past several weeks
published scandalous but seemingly well-documented accounts of several
Politburo members’ alleged bad-behavior, including at least two members who
were regarded as likely shoe-ins for 2016. The appearance of the website and
discussion it has sparked has clearly had an impact, and prompted government
calls to steer clear of it.
While some have
characterized Profiles in Power as a “smear campaign” the site aims
to keep tabs on all sitting Politburo members. One of its most
striking features is the seemingly evidence-based reporting it offers. In a
country where the press is comprehensively subordinated to elite power, a
website of this sort has seismic implications. Vietnamese are certainly taking
note.
Who knew, for example, that
a twenty-something year-old child of a conservative Politburo member and
candidate for a leading state post appears to own two homes in southern
California? Subsequent to the confidence voting, the site published allegations
and evidence suggesting that a key minister – who has also been mentioned as a
candidate for a top post – has with his family also amassed properties by
dubious means. Whether the allegations are well-grounded remains to be seen.
The final noteworthy and
somewhat ironic outcome of the plenum concerns the results of the confidence
voting itself. By all accounts it was none other than Dung himself who received
the highest votes. By contrast, several other candidates, including two
featured on the Profiles website prior to the vote, finished near the
bottom.
Among Vietnam’s current top
four leaders, only Dung is eligible to serve beyond 2016. After Dung and
excluding the minister most recently alleged to have amassed ill-gotten
properties, the two Politburo members with the highest confidence scores who
are also eligible to serve after 2016 are Dung allies. All this suggests that
politics in Vietnam are developing in the prime minister’s favor.
For the 85 years of its
existence, the Communist Party of Vietnam has sought to manage its leadership
successions according to principles of closed consensus on the one hand and
faithfulness to the party on the other. This formula, which was seen as a
source of strength during wartime, has also been variously criticized for generating
stale leaders, reinforcing political stalemates, undermining principles of
merit, and preventing the emergence of more decisive leadership. Are conditions
ripe for change?
While it’s too soon to know
who will gain top leadership posts next year, it now seems that Dung is the
odds on favorite to become the next general secretary while several figures
associated with Dung appear to enjoy relatively high confidence among their
party peers. Why might this matter?
Dung remains something of
an enigma. While some question his sincerity, he is nonetheless the country’s
most eloquent statesman and author of the most liberal blueprint for Vietnam’s
development, his 2014 New Year’s address. He has repeatedly announced that
“democracy is the future,” has not flinched in the face of Beijing’s aggressive
antics in the South China Sea, and appears very much at ease with the idea of
close ties to the United States.
While we cannot know the
future, recent events evidence greater transparency in Vietnam’s politics. Though
not by design, this is nonetheless a significant development. It’s a pinhole
view into Vietnam’s increasingly dynamic political scene.
Dr. Jonathan
D. London is a professor in the Department of Asian & International
Studies and Core Member of the Southeast Asia Research Centre at the City
University of Hong Kong. This is reprinted with permission from the Center
for Strategic and International Studies and its blog, cogitAsia, where it first
appeared.
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