Imposing Communism on the Economy of South Vietnam: A Conjectural View

Abstract

I f a communist-dominated regime came to power in South Vietnam, how would it deal with the staggering problems of the war-distorted economy? How would it go about restoring that economy to some form of peace-time stability and self-support? How would it rearrange the distribution of economic power? While fashioning answers to these questions in a brief article must of need be highly conjectural, the exercise is perhaps worthwhile for the light it may throw on the range of real choices that lie ahead in Vietnam. I shall assume that a communist regime coming to power in South Vietnam would be oriented toward and controlled by the North, and would be politically an offshoot of the Lao-Dong Party of North Vietnam. However indigenously Southern its membership, and whatever their Southern parochial interests, the essentials of power-leadership, control, ideology-would flow from the North. Thus the objectives of such a regime would not be narrowly focused on reconstruction in the South, but would aim at the larger goal of fulfilling the historic revolutionary mission of the Indochinese Communist Party: the national liberation and ultimate unification of all of Vietnam. The distinction is significant, not just for what it tells us about the regime's likely goals and policies, but also for where we must look for a model, or at least for indicators, of the organizational and political strategies that the regime might adopt. The earlier experience-mistakes as well as successes -of revolutionary transformation in the North and the institutions it spawned can be expected, in considerable measure, to set the pattern for the South, particularly if we assume that the same original Northern leadership continues in power and presides over the transformation of the South. This is not to say that Hanoi has no learning capacity and that whatever happened in the North will be dogmatically and slavishly reproduced in the