The Socialist Market Economy in Asia by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811562488
Publisher: Springer Singapore

Managing Rural Populations

Processes of collectivisation and rural restructuring in post-war Laos and Vietnam also involved significant relocation of rural populations according to policy aims for the development of the countryside. Between 1975 and 1990, as many as 5 million Vietnamese resettled, including those displaced by the conflict itself, as well as a large number who relocated in response to national development policies intended to ‘tame’ Vietnam’s remote uplands (De Koninck 1996). Initially, settling these perceived wild and isolated regions was strategically vital in the fight for an independent Vietnam (Hardy 2003), though waves of economic migrants later followed the market reforms, “hoping to get rich in a region recently described in the lowlands as a ‘promised land’” (Hardy 2000: 22; see also Lenz 2019 on the discursive construction of Vietnam’s ‘resource frontier’). The initial movement of lowland (largely ethnic Kinh) people into Vietnam’s upland areas historically dominated by ethnic minorities was emblematic of Vietnam’s attempts to extend state control into rural areas, as well as to increase agricultural production to achieve national targets. During this period, the total area of agricultural land in Vietnam increased by around 60% (De Koninck 1996). This expansion of agricultural land, as well as intensive logging to fuel Vietnam’s growing wood processing industry, reduced Vietnam’s forests from more than 11 million ha in 1975 to around 9 million hectares, or 28% of Vietnam’s total area, by 1990 (Nguyen 2001). In Laos, resettlement initially focused on restoring bomb damaged and depopulated farmland, which necessitated pooling labour and resources (Evans 1988), while about a quarter of the population had been displaced by the end of the war, many of whom settled in locations other than natal villages (Hirsch and Scurrah 2015).

Laos’ collectivisation campaigns were further linked to government aims to bolster control over forest resources and reduce shifting cultivation, or swidden, which has been historically viewed by the lowland population as destructive and backward (Brown and Zasloff 1986; Kenney-Lazar 2013; Castella et al. 2013). Although shifting cultivation—an agricultural practice that relies on periodically clearing and burning fallow land and patches of forest—dominated upland areas and constituted the livelihood basis for the majority of the rural population, it had come into direct conflict with state interests. The export of timber provided much-needed revenue for the nascent Lao state, while shifting cultivation was an ill-fit with objectives of modernisation and an emerging national identity largely imagined by the lowland Lao elite, as well as an obstacle to state control of the rural peripheries (Baird and Shoemaker 2007). In its initial programme of action in December 1975, the government set out the objective “to persuade and assist the peasants of all ethnic groups in the regions where cultivation on burnbeat [swidden] land is practised to gradually put an end to their nomadic life … [and] to endeavour to renovate the cultivation techniques of burnbeat fields, to expand the area of rice cultivation to dry land terraces and to preserve forests” (Brown and Zasloff 1986: 303).

Starting in the 1970s, the eradication

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