Rural Revolutions: Socialist, Market and Sustainable Development of the Countryside in Vietnam and Laos

Abstract

The pursuit of rural development has been a central tenet and tool of legitimacy for both the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and Lao People’s Democratic Republic since their respective revolutions. Both regimes relied on the support of predominantly peasant populations through struggles for independence, and later sought to harness the rural sector as a means to socialist transformation, reassembling war-shattered economies and nation building. This chapter traces rural policies and their consequences through different developmental phases in post-revolutionary Laos and Vietnam, joined by shared ideology yet facing differing national circumstances that would shape their approaches to the management of rural spaces and people. As command planning began to unravel in both countries in the late 1970s, the countryside underwent a seismic reversal from the setting of experiments in collective farming to the loosening of state controls on individual production, exchange and trade that prefaced the broader pivot to ‘market socialism’. The reopening of the Lao and Vietnamese economies was soon swept along by the gathering pace of regional and global integration, bringing both widening opportunities and new risks to formerly isolated rural places and people. The concurrent rise of sustainability as an enveloping international discourse added new contradictions to rural development, with opposing aims to harness resources while also conserving them, while powerful state and non-state actors moved to monopolise their exploitation. The extent that shifting policy landscapes and objectives have translated to the equitable improvement of rural living conditions promised by earlier socialist ideals remains unclear.