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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2020
Building on ethnographic fieldwork in a northern Vietnamese village, this article explores how rural households have negotiated the opportunities and uncertainties of marketisation (Đổi Mới). I focus on the surprising ways local households have handled the state's push to diversify livelihoods and adopt commercial home-based sidelines: by means of being đa gi năng, a local term that means ‘keeping many livelihood options and never putting all eggs in one basket’. In pursuit of đa gi năng, local households have actively adopted home-based production even when they were doing well with paddy farming and faced no subsistence crisis. However, they have evaded what state officials want most: specialising in a single home-production enterprise in rational maximising ways to accumulate transformational wealth. The idea of đa gi năng calls into question two contrasting universal approaches to rural households’ motivations for livelihood diversification: either a desperate search for survival by passive victims of market forces, or a quest for wealth accumulation by rational maximisers without careful judgement of potential risks to one's family.
I wish to express my most sincere gratitude to Susan Bayly for her invaluable comments on earlier drafts of this article. My special thanks also to the Editor and the Managing Editor of JSEAS for their guidance and support throughout the submission and peer-review process, and the journal's anonymous reviewers for their enormously constructive comments and suggestions.
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8 Throughout this article, I use pseudonyms for the village and all informants to protect their anonymity.
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10 Initially the households were happy to accept the compensation and give up the land, for an amount set by the district government. However, three years later, when the construction of the industrial park was nearly completed, virtually every household involved launched a much-publicised protest to pressure the district authorities to increase the compensation. Villagers said that they had learned that villagers in land appropriation projects elsewhere in Vietnam had received larger compensation. The protest ended when the district government gave villagers an additional compensation fee. Every household who had land appropriated was also granted title to a piece of unused state-owned land, equal to 5 per cent of the appropriated holdings, on a site next to the industrial park. The villagers were told to use the land for opening stalls to sell goods to workers in the industrial park as a replacement for the income they previously got from the appropriated land.
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