ABSTRACT
A decade after the reform process was institutionalized in the ‘renovation’ (doi moi) programme of 1986, a renewed optimism pervades commentaries on Vietnam. Armed conflict with Cambodia and China, the failed experiment of Soviet-style command planning, and-for some-the Vietnam War have been relegated to a distant past. The future has become inextricably tied to the shift in the locus of global economic power to the Asia-Pacific that signifies the beginning of the so-called ‘Pacific Century’. For many the fact that Vietnam will be a part of this Pacific Century seems beyond doubt. The World Bank concludes that despite facing ‘a long transition from its lowincome status to being another East Asian Tiger’, continued economic liberalization, the expansion of the private sector, and dissolution of the last remnants of state socialism guarantee that Vietnam ‘will be well on its way to joining the other successful tigers’.1 The metaphor of the ‘Tiger economy’ has become central to the ever-widening consensus about developing capitalist societies in the Asia-Pacific which has taken shape among bureaucrats and scholars inside and outside Vietnam.
