'Culture for development and development for culture is the ideology of the day': The politics of culture in Vietnam's post-1986 transition.

摘要

During the doi moi (or "renovation") period, as the post-1986 period is know, the problem of "culture" was at the center of the Vietnamese Communist Party's (VCP) debates regarding key areas of policy reform, including foreign relations and official approaches to the new social problems that had emerged with the economic liberalizations launched after 1986. This dissertation discusses the political significance of the party discourse on "culture" in the post-Cold War context of Vietnam's integration into the global economy and the international debate regarding human rights. This discourse is also presented as the basis for the VCP's effort to find a "Vietnamese-style solution" in resistance to the claim of the triumph of liberal capitalism at the "end of history." Against the prospect of cultural domination by such things as Western political ideas and individualistic values in the context of greater openness, the new party perspective represents a new ideological foundation for maintaining party unity, as well as a new set of interpretations of the challenges it faced after effectively abandoning Marxism-Leninism as its guiding philosophy. This work, therefore, suggests that official attention to the problem of culture shaped political renovation in the doi moi period and also defined the limits and character of political reform in post-communist Vietnam.