In 1975, Vietnam emerged from a brutal war that by government estimates claimed the lives of 1.1 million soldiers and 2 million civilians. In its aftermath, the Communist Party-led government was faced with a population whose loyalty was divided. The economy was ravaged. Infrastructure was either devastated or underdeveloped. Peripheral regions, containing large pockets of ethnic-minority communities with dubious allegiance to the Party, were unincorporated. Yet in just about 30 years after reunification, Vietnam had transformed itself into a stable, unified, authoritative state with a well-established physical footprint across its territory.
My ongoing doctoral research unpacks Vietnam’s puzzling and remarkable post-war reconstruction success, by exploring factors that facilitated two critical state-building goals: establishing territorial control and winning the “hearts and minds” of citizens. I document the spread of the Vietnamese Party-state’s physical footprint across the territory from the 1960s to the present day, arguing that this infrastructural growth was driven to an underappreciated extent by the internal migration of ethnic majority Kinh settlers, especially where it generated more native-migrant land conflicts.
This process was accompanied by the spread of a system of public education that imposed on its subjects a carefully crafted narrative of national identity and the legitimacy of the Party’s rule, sometimes even delivered in ethnic minorities’ native tongues. My evidence features a quasi-experimental analysis using demographic, archival and spatial data, a content analysis of Vietnamese textbooks, and a potential survey experiment informed by interviews I am conducting across six ethnic minority-concentrated provinces in Vietnam.
In this essay, I present my theory and preliminary findings on the first component of my research, in which I ask: what drove sub-national variations in the spread of state infrastructure and personnel? I collect data on several measures of state infrastructure (such as roads, schools, power grids, hospitals) and state personnel (such as bureaucrats, government employees), spanning 25 years from 1994 to 2019. My analysis focuses on the Central Highlands region of Vietnam, the traditional homeland of various indigenous hill tribes, and the site of major demographic shifts following a surge in global coffee prices in the late 1990s.
My analysis so far suggests that a wave of ethnic majority Kinh migration into the Central Highlands during this period was quickly followed by state infrastructure and personnel. The resulting interactions between settlers and natives were more hostile in some places than others, and this was linked to the degree to which the state was deemed legitimate by indigenous populations. This instance of market-led internal migration might have inadvertently facilitated state expansion into previously unincorporated peripheral areas, but it might also have hurt the state’s effort to win the “hearts and minds” of local indigenous citizens.
My research sheds new light on the interaction of market reforms, internal migration, and grassroots conflicts in building the post-war Vietnamese state. It also advances our knowledge on the multifaceted nature of modern-day state-building. In Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott tells us that state-building is above all a central planner’s effort to make society more “legible”. Through top-down initiatives like imposing permanent last names, standardising systems for weights and measures, running cadastral surveys, instituting a common currency, or settling nomads in state-built villages, the state homogenises society to make it easier to control and monitor.
In Scott’s perspective, state-building is exclusively imposed from the top down. Yet my research suggests that, at least in the Central Highlands in the 1990s, it was the migration of Kinh settlers that facilitated the state’s effort to establish its footprint in remote, previously unincorporated territory. This process was inadvertent, in that these settlers were not always aware of their roles as agents of state expansion or of the impacts that they had on the state-building process. In other words, state-building is not a purely top-down process—rather, its outcome is shaped by the bottom-up dynamics of settler migration, and the resulting interactions between settlers and indigenous minorities.
Markets and migration
In 1986, the Communist Party-state initiated a series of market-oriented reform known as Đổi Mới. This exposed the Vietnamese economy to external fluctuations in prices. From the early to mid-1990s, a hike in global coffee prices attracted tens of thousands of migrants to the Central Highlands. This region is known for its rich basaltic soil and temperate climate, both favourable for growing high-quality Robusta beans.
Prior to Đổi Mới, the Vietnamese government had orchestrated several episodes of large-scale migration. But this wave was different. The state had trouble keeping track of and dictating where migrants were settling. It at times expressed frustration with the unruly scale at which the Central Highlands migration took place—and even attempted, unsuccessfully, to enact policies to send parts of the settler population back to where they came from.
Kinh migrants were better positioned to take advantage of the coffee boom than local indigenous communities. They had more capital, legal knowledge, and familiarity with the techniques required to plant perennial and fruit crops. Meanwhile, indigenous communities tended to sell or rent land and move away to continue growing their traditional crops. The income from selling land also motivated them to clear more land and move further inside the forest.
Examining data on forest cover, I show that the expansion in coffee growing areas accompanied by a reduction in forest area. Moreover, this deforestation was linked to increases in the proportion of Kinh migrants in any given area. As a result, indigenous people increasingly lost access to land that used to sustain their forest-based livelihoods and swidden agriculture.
When disputes over land use rights emerged, Kinh settlers were better able to navigate and exploit the formal framework of land regulation, being more familiar with official policies regarding land ownership. Meanwhile, due to language barriers, indigenous minorities had trouble understanding these new land laws, even if they were communicated in village meetings. Their communities had operated under customary systems of communal land ownership for centuries, yet this system was not recognised by the state. This feeling of injustice sowed the seeds for grievance.
“Inviting in” the state
As the Vietnamese case shows, the dynamics of settler–indigenous relationships influenced the impacts of migration on state-building. When migrants and natives competed over scarce resource—in this case, land—it created conditions for the state to step in. Disputed parties would bring their concerns to local “conciliation boards”, in which most members are agents of the party-state, and more likely than not to be ethnic Kinh themselves: the Chairman of the Commune People’s Committee, a representative of the commune Fatherland Front (a Communist Party-led organisation), head of the village or hamlet, sometimes judicial or cadastral officers of the commune, or representatives of the Women’s Union or the Communist Youth Union. Their shared ethnicity and language meant that Kinh settlers could better make their case in the disputes.
Jim Scott in memoriam, Southeast Asian studies in perpetuum
“The field of Southeast Asian studies has come to resemble the region as he saw and celebrated it, warts and all”
Thus, an influx of Kinh migrants likely allowed the state to penetrate and govern these areas. Over time, higher reliance on state-provided public goods would increase the government’s incentives to invest in state capacity.
To explore whether the data bears out this relationship between settler migration and state expansion, I used a difference-in-differences design, leveraging variations in land suitability for coffee across the Central Highlands. Borrowing Francisco Garfias’s technique in a study of state-building in Latin America, I interacted local land suitability with global shifts in coffee prices to measure differential exposure to the price shock. If my theory is correct, I would expect to see more competition between migrants and natives in areas with more land that is suitable for growing coffee. In the same areas, I would expect internal migration to correspond with higher levels of state expansion. Meanwhile, areas with less fertile land should see less resource competition, and I would expect internal migration to be associated with less state expansion.
Indeed, I found that across Central Highlands districts, the effect of global coffee price shocks on several indicators of state presence was conditional on an area’s suitability for coffee. Following the 1990s price shock, areas with more coffee-suitable land saw more Kinh in-migrants. This increase in migrant populations was correlated with increases in several types of state infrastructure and personnel in both the short and long run. (My statistical models used a variety of controls for total population, extent of previous residence, a proxy for war exposure, and province fixed effects to control for other unobserved factors that vary across provinces.)
Collecting data on different measures of state expansion allowed me to observe variations in the growth of each type. It turns out that Kinh migration was more strongly associated with an increase in classrooms, clinics, teachers, bureaucrats, and government workers—in other words, more localised, “mobile” manifestations of the state—than with larger scale outcomes such as roads, railways, or (large, multi-grade) schools. This was especially true in the periods immediately following the migration shock. The realisation that classrooms and teachers were some of the most robust results also motivated me to look deeper into how public education expansion played a role in state-building and regime preservation in Vietnam, a topic I am exploring in other parts of my PhD research.
One measure of state-building outcome that explicitly engages with James C. Scott’s idea of “legibility” is Myers index—a measure of the accuracy of age data in the Census, popularised in the comparative politics literature by Melissa Lee and Nan Zhang. The concept of legibility captures the degree to which the state knows details about its citizens. The Myers index reflects legibility because it reveals the extent to which citizens might be unwilling to provide information about themselves to the state. Again, I found that an increase in Kinh migrants was associated with lower levels of data inaccuracy, which means higher legibility or stronger state capacity.
Confronting indigenous backlash
While internal migration might facilitate the state’s expansion of its physical footprint, it does not always produce legitimacy. In his 1990 book Legitimacy and the State, Rodney Barker writes that legitimacy is “the belief in the rightfulness of the state, in its authority to issue commands, so that those commands are obeyed not simply out of fear or self-interest, but because they are believed in some sense to have moral authority”.
The entrance of settlers into strategic areas does not automatically transmit perceptions of legitimacy to indigenous populations. Instead, the marginalisation of indigenous peoples that often accompanies such migration episodes may in fact inhibit the feeling of state legitimacy in the very population that the state needs to incorporate.
On this front, the “success” of Vietnamese postwar state-building becomes more contested. Various instances have occurred that cast doubts on the portrayal of Vietnam as a uniformly legitimate state. In February 2001, for instance, thousands of indigenous Jarai, Ede, Mnong, Bahnar, Stieng, and Koho people participated in a large protest in Dak Lak province in the Central Highlands. A key grievance that mobilised these protesters was the confiscation of their ancestral lands—a result of state-organised resettlement schemes and spontaneous migration. In June 2023, an armed attack broke out in Dak Lak province, killing six policemen and commune officials.
These episodes occurred in areas that have been historically marginalised by the state, and have existed outside of state control for a long time. For many indigenous communities, evading the state has been an intentional strategy to avoid state absorption and assimilation. Being outnumbered by the privileged group, and disadvantaged by the state’s formal legal system which rejects traditional customary claims to land, indigenous minorities are unable to physically resist the expansion of state reach via infrastructural development that accompanies migrant entrance.
But there are other modes of resistance available to native groups to subvert attempts by the state to control them. From migrating to areas less accessible to state control such as rugged terrain or forests, to evading taxes, conscription, preserving cultural and agricultural practices that are at odds with the dominant society, marginalised communities can maintain a degree of autonomy from the state. These forms of “everyday resistance” make it difficult for the state, even with expansive infrastructural reach, to effectively govern the people. I theorise that when faced with increasing state expansion, native communities are likely to reduce state compliance and participation.
To explore this relationship with data, I use several measures of compliance with the state from individual-level surveys collected by the Vietnam Provincial Governance and Public Administration Performance Index from 2021 to 2023. These questions ask citizens about their social insurance ownership, health insurance ownership, participation in local elections, level of trust in public courts, and contributions to local funds. I selected these questions because they reflect different aspects of citizens’ willingness to participate in and comply with the state system. Some acts—like contributing to local funds—are voluntary, so higher levels suggest strong willingness to benefit the state. Other acts—like owning insurance—are government requirements, so avoidance of such mandates suggests strong willingness to evade state control.
In a series of statistical models controlling for age, gender, education level, job sector, and province fixed effects, I found that minority respondents in the surveys were less likely to own either health or social insurance, and they tended to self-report lower levels of trust in the court and justice system than Kinh respondents. However, they were no more or less likely to participate in local elections or contribute to local funds.
These initial findings seem to suggest that minorities in the Central Highlands do display lower levels of state compliance, which could indicate lower perceptions of the government’s legitimacy. However, since this data was collected long after the coffee price shock, and the impacts of market-induced migration could have dissipated by then, I am now working to to gather more data in earlier periods to properly examine the relationship between the 1990s migration episode and state compliance among indigenous communities.
Jim Scott in memoriam, Southeast Asian studies in perpetuum
“The field of Southeast Asian studies has come to resemble the region as he saw and celebrated it, warts and all”
In other parts of my PhD research, I examine policies that Vietnamese party-state has adopted to improve its legitimacy among ethnic minority citizens, after multiple protests that demonstrated long-standing grievances and posed internal security threats for the autocratic regime. In the Central Highlands, for example, after the 2001 protest in Dak Lak, the state created commissions to review the national framework of land law, resulting in amendments published in 2003.
Around this time, Dak Lak province also began the process of developing curriculum to teach the Ede language in primary schools. In my interviews with several ethnic Ede citizens in Dak Lak, they directly tied this language promotion policy to the early 2000s protests. I see these as strategies of the state to co-opt minority communities. By offering concessions that may be superficial, the state attempts to encourage greater minority buy-in to the state system.
The costs of state-building
How can we build strong states from ethnically diverse societies with divisive, painful war traumas? My research hopes to make the case that the settlement of the dominant ethnic groups in minority areas can facilitate the swift expansion of state presence, but it can also threaten state legitimacy. By highlighting the marginalisation of ethnic minorities that has come with the building of the Vietnamese state, I shed light on the heavy toll incurred in the making of the country into a post-conflict reconstruction “success” story.
This is not a story unique to Vietnam, or even to Southeast Asia. Vietnam is a country in which a dominant ethnic group has attempted to assert control over territory and other minorities in the short run, and build legitimacy in the long run. In this sense, it is not much different from the US, Australia, China, Sri Lanka, Bosnia, Myanmar, Iraq, India, or many others. All of these countries have a dominant ethnic group that is over-represented in the ruling apparatus. They all constantly grapple with the challenges that diversity poses. Hence, lessons from Vietnam can illuminate other instances of state-building around the world.
• • • • • • • • • •
This post is part of a series of essays highlighting the work of emerging scholars of Southeast Asia published with the support of the Australian National University College of Asia and the Pacific.
The post Coffee, conflict, and inadvertent state-building in Vietnam appeared first on New Mandala.
This post was originally published on New Mandala.