Persistence Amid Decay: The Communist Party of Vietnam at 83

In the last few decades the theoretical literature on communist regimes has closely followed the rise and demise of the communist camp. In the early 1970s when those regimes were at their peaks, analysts were preoccupied with the question of how they had successfully evolved and adapted after seizing power (Huntington 1968; Huntington and Moore 1970). Strongly influenced by modernization theories, this scholarship assumed that, as vanguard forces of modernization, communist parties were born to last. While most scholars failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the late 1980s, theoretical attempts have since shed much insight into the causes of that collapse (Kalyvas 1999; Ekiert 1996; Solnick 1998; Bunce 1999; Goodwin 2001). However, the literature remains limited for the surviving communist systems in China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, and Cuba. There, communist parties still dominate and, for China and Vietnam, have overseen successful economic reforms. Among analysts of China, a sharp debate exists between “optimists” (Shambaugh 2008; Nathan 2003), 1 who view the communist dictatorship as viable, and “pessimists” (Pei 2006), who emphasize decay and possible collapse. There is no such well-positioned debate in Vietnam, although similar questions have certainly been raised and have even gained salience in the context of developments in 2012 and 2013. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.