Reluctant Compliance and Collaborative Fiscal Disobedience: How Hmong Consumers Evade Value-Added Tax in Vietnam’s Northern Uplands

Abstract

For decades, the Vietnamese socialist state has failed to enforce taxation on local Hmong in Đồng Văn, a vast karst plateau in the country’s northern upland region. A recent rise in local tax revenue from Value-Added Tax (VAT) is optimistically perceived by state authorities as a turning point in the fiscal relationship between the state and the evasive population. This article shows that what appears to be a ‘success’ of taxation is the result of both reluctant compliance of local Hmong with a new technique of state control that ties consumer desires to the payment of tax, and their continued pursuit of ‘fiscal disobedience’ using various tactics to evade the novel taxing power of the state. Compared to their previous efforts of tax evasion, evading VAT requires fiscal disobedience of a collaborative kind, involving not only Hmong consumers but also vendors and even agents of the state.