State, Society and the Market in Contemporary Vietnam: Property, Power and Values

by Hue-Tam Ho Tai (Editor), Mark Sidel (Editor)

Lively debates around property, access to resources, legal rights, and the protection of livelihoods have unfolded in Vietnam since the economic reforms of 1986. Known as Doi Moi (changing to the new), these have gradually transformed the country from a socialist state to a society in which a communist party presides over a neoliberal economy. By exploring the complex relationship between property, the state, society, and the market, this book demonstrates how both developmental issues and state-society relations in Vietnam can be explored through the prism of property relations and property rights. The essays in this collection demonstrate how negotiations over property are deeply enmeshed with dynamics of state formation, and covers debates over the role of the state and its relationship to various levels of society, the intrusion of global forces into the lives of marginalized communities and individuals, and how community norms and standards shape and reshape national policy and laws. With contributors from around the world, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of East and Southeast Asian studies, including politics, culture, society, and law, as well as those interested in the role of the state and property relations more generally.

252 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2012

About the author

Position: Kenneth T. Young Professor of Sino-vietnamese History

Field: East Asia

Specialty: Social and cultural history of modern Vietnam

Current Interests
Public memory and public history; the famine of 1945 in northern Vietnam as experience and memory; telling lives: biography and autobiography.

Selected Publications
*"Remembered Realms: Pierre Nora and French National Memory" in The American Historical Review(2001)
* The Country of Memory:Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam (2001)
* "Representing the Past in Vietnamese Museums" in Curator (1998)
* "Monumental Ambiguity: the State Commemoration of Ho Chi Minh" in Essays into Vietnamese Pasts (1995)
* Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (1992)
* Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam (1983)