"Rent the space, pay the taxes, and that's it!"

Here are some excerpts from a fascinating article by Michael Totten in City Journal:

Vietnam officially junked Communism a mere 11 years after imposing it on South Vietnam.

State subsidies were abolished. Private businesses were allowed to operate again. Businessmen, investors, and employees could keep their profits and wages. Farmers could sell their produce on the open market and keep the proceeds instead of giving them up to the state. The results were spectacular. It took some time for a middle class to emerge, but from 1993 to 2004, the percentage of Vietnamese living in poverty dropped from 60 percent to 20 percent. Before Doi Moi, the command economy contracted, and inflation topped out at over 700 percent; it would eventually shrink to single digits. After years of chronic rice shortages, Vietnam became the world’s second-largest exporter of rice, after Thailand. Progress hasn’t slowed. In 2013, Vietnam’s economy grew by 8.25 percent. “The number of malls, shopping districts, and restaurants is amazing compared with when I was a kid,” says motivational speaker Hoan Do. “Eighteen years ago, the entire country was broken down. There was hardly any technology, but now even poor people can go to an Internet café and log on to Facebook and YouTube.”

The city is extremely business-friendly. I asked a local man who works for an American company how hard it is for foreigners to invest and go into business in Hanoi. “The Vietnamese government makes it easy,” he says. “Just present them with a business plan, tell them what you want to do, and you’re good to go.” The same goes for small businesses. All you have to do, he says, “is rent the space, pay the taxes, and that’s it.”

...I could only imagine how a Cuban would feel if he found himself whisked here from Havana with a ration card in his pocket and his state-imposed maximum wage of 20 dollars a month in his wallet. The only “mall” I saw anywhere in Cuba was a dismal space, located inside a concrete box that looked like a parking garage and offering only the most meager selection of wares. I’ve been to better malls in Iraq.

Despite having terrible relations with China, Hanoi is explicitly following Beijing’s economic and political model. The trade-off is simple: the state will yield on economic freedom as long as citizens don’t demand political freedom. Princeton professor and China expert Perry Link describes the bargain as, “shut up and I’ll let you get rich.” So far, it’s working in both countries. Perhaps none of this should be surprising. “Vietnam was never all that ideologically Communist,” former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam Pete Peterson says. “It was always more socialist and nationalist. I told them they should stop calling themselves the Communist Party, but I didn’t get anywhere with it. Everybody pays for everything over there, including health care. The government hardly provides anything. Sweden is more socialist than Vietnam.”

I asked one Hanoi resident what the word “Communism” means today in Vietnam. “Communism today just means we’re run by one political party,” he said. “Some people complain about that, but it doesn’t matter to me as long as the government creates a good business and living environment, and it does. I don’t want different political parties competing with each other and creating a crisis like in Thailand.” He may not mind one-party rule, but plenty of Vietnamese do. The government has created the conditions for the kind of middle-class revolt that erupted in Taiwan and South Korea before those countries matured into multiparty democracies.

Vietnam is enjoying a holiday from history, basking in the prosperous and relatively “free” post-totalitarian phase of its evolution. Amid all the economic and cultural dynamism, the state is a weirdly distant anachronism, its billboards and slogans as out of place as World War II posters would be in America now. Over a ubiquitous public-address system, the party still blares “news” into the streets and into everyone’s home each morning and evening, but the Vietnamese I talked with dismissed it as “just propaganda.” Not just the ideology but the state itself feels almost irrelevant to anyone who isn’t an outspoken dissident. Controlling Vietnam’s people and imposing order on its freewheeling chaos is an exercise in futility. No-honking signs and traffic regulations are routinely flouted, as are parking restrictions. I saw two police officers pull up in a car across the street from my hotel and yell at people through a bullhorn to move their motorbikes off the sidewalk. They complied, but less than five minutes after the policemen drove off, the space filled up again.

...Vietnamese anti-Americanism scarcely exists. What we call the Vietnam War, and what they call the American War, casts no shadow—especially not in the South, which fought on the American side, but not even in Hanoi, a city heavily bombed by the United States. I saw no evidence that the U.S. (or anyone else) ever bombed Hanoi. All the damage has apparently been repaired, and most Vietnamese are under the age of 30—too young to remember it, anyway.

Perhaps it’s not so remarkable that the Vietnamese have moved on. Most Americans don’t hold grudges for long, either, after the furies of war have subsided. Hardly any of us hate the Japanese, the Germans, or the Vietnamese. We rightly despise the Taliban and Isis, but not the innocent people of Afghanistan or Iraq. So the Vietnamese aren’t unique for being emotionally mature about history—but they do contrast with some, especially in the Middle East, who can’t get past even the most ancient of grievances. George Santayana famously said that those who can’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it, to which P. J. O’Rourke added, with the Arab-Israeli conflict in mind, that “it goes double for those who can’t remember anything else.”

Today, both the Vietnamese people and government—in the north as well as the south—view Americans as allies. The leaders are Communists who voluntarily embarked on a journey of economic dynamism and friendship with the United States, first abandoning and then reversing everything they once fought and died for. They’re prospering as a result. May the same one day happen in Havana and Pyongyang.

Read more here.