Here She Is, Miss Vietnam

As The Washington Post reports today, the lucky girl who ascends to the throne of Miss Vietnam this year will win more than the traditional tiara and scepter: She'll also win the official nod of the ruling Communist Party. For the first time in the pageant's 15-year history, the government has announced it will bestow the winner, who will be chosen in September, with an official certificate, thereby condoning a ritual that the party has "long considered a sign of capitalist decadence."

The change of heart is yet another sign that Vietnam is embracing, however ambivalently, a market economy. The U.S.-Vietnam bilateral trade pact, negotiated by former President Bill Clinton, finally went into effect in December 2001, capping over a decade of incremental market reform.

With freer trade, of course, comes freer culture and freer politics that are difficult to contain, much less control. As Vietnam draws a record number of tourists and more money flows to all parts of Vietnamese society, the government can also expect to encounter increasing numbers of homegrown daredevil bikers, who openly defy the police in forbidden late-night races through the streets of Vietnamese cities. And increasing gray market activity, too, such as big sales for Vietnamese-American pop singer Y Lan, whose CDs, while not officially approved by the government, are nevertheless available on every street corner in Saigon.

Which isn't to say the ruling party is giving up without a fight. Doan Viet Hoat, who spent 12 years as a political prisoner in Vietnam, offered this assessment in a 2000 speech that was only published recently in the Harvard Asia Quarterly: "The reluctance of the communist leaders to smoothly transform Vietnam from authoritarianism to democracy creates a time bomb of social unrest and political upheaval." Hoat's fear is that the government, while interested in gaining the benefits of economic liberalization, will resist granting more political and cultural freedom. The worst-case result of such a dynamic: a Vietnamese version of Tiannamen Square.