This book has looked at mediation space in several arenas of everyday life in Hà Nội. In reality, this mediation space exists — in parallel with compliance — in most arenas of non-political life in Vietnam. In many arenas not covered here, the agent of mediation may not be the ward but the issue would generally be similar: it is, how compliance is aborted, covertly or overtly, by co-operation between local officials and the people. Among the other arenas, the more well-known ones include taxation, smuggling, residential registration, driving licences, business registration, sale of prescribed drugs, illegal logging, the use of public space in parks, pornography, prostitution, and many others. Therefore, the scale of mediation is very wide across the country.

Several reasons account for mediation. One is inefficiencies of the administrative system. Chapter 1 pointed out complaints, from both the party-state and the people generally, on how the wards' inefficiencies diminished the party-state ability in managing society. Paradoxically, these were caused by features of the party-state itself, especially the lack of open competition in elections as well as the lack of regular checks on implementing officials, including those at the ward level. Chapter 2 examined the ward party-state machinery, which is a part of the countrywide administration system organized to manage society. Power in the ward party-state machinery is concentrated in a cluster of top party-state officials. Senior and leading officials of the ward party-state machinery are usually party members. Through paid volunteers at the sub-level of resident clusters and resident cells, the Vietnamese party-state can reach into every household to mobilize people to comply with party-state policies. More importantly, such a reach can be used to grasp the details of the private lives of troublesome individuals who might dare to challenge the partystate's political domination.

In Chapter 3, we saw that the election machinery and election process are firmly under the control of the party-state. Party officials occupy leading positions of the Vietnam Fatherland Front, the organization that screens candidates for elections at every level.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter discusses the role of Hà Nội's wards in enforcing the housing regimes of Vietnam from 1954 to 1998, and how that role affects Vietnamese party-state–society relations. It argues that Hà Nội's wards play a critical role in mediating between the party-state and ward residents. It examines illegal housing construction in Hà Nội from 1975 to 1995, and what the wards did to deal with it. While the time-frame is so limited, the problems of illegal construction is still a current problem of law and order in urban areas and it represents the disregarding and/or negotiation of party-state boundaries. Along with raised living standards and new areas of urbanization, illegal construction has spread beyond Hà Nội.

By “housing regime” I mean official “answers to questions such as who may use [housing units], do what with [them], and with what rights and obligations.” Therefore, a housing regime has official rules aimed at regulating various housing issues and activities, such as ownership, purchase, use, construction, and renovation. There are two distinct Vietnamese housing regimes from 1954 to the present in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, 1945–75) and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV, from 1975). The first, which I call the socialist housing regime, lasted from 1954 to 1990. Its main feature was heavy state regulation in all housing matters. Housing demand was mainly to be satisfied by the state. The second, which I call the liberalized housing regime, began in 1991 and continues until now. Its main feature has been allowing the private sector to participate in the housing sector.

The socialist housing regime drastically and negatively affected housing conditions, especially after 1975. It discouraged private construction by requiring numerous licences and permits. Moreover, the state bureaucracy took many months, even years, to issue those licences and permits.

Like many other countries, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam has a system of local administration. In socialist countries, where every need of the people is supposed to be taken care of by the state, the local administration system also functions as the channels through which the state dishes out benefits, and both state and society carry out tasks (such as penalties, punishments, compliance, and applications) in public administration. In the interests of efficiency and effectiveness, a large local administration bureaucracy that comprises administrative bodies at different levels is set up. In Vietnam, under the national government there are the province/central city, district, and commune/ward levels of local administration.

This chapter analyses wards (phuong), the lowest level of government and administration in Vietnam's cities and smaller urban areas. Ward officials carry out state policies and enforce the law on a daily basis. This chapter examines how the ward local administration is organized to implement policy, and how this machinery of local administration is appraised with reference to its effectiveness in achieving state objectives. In particular, this chapter will contribute to the argument that the ward local administration, set up for effective mobilization of people to follow the leadership of the state and the party, is also a daily tool of mediation that allows society to negotiate state policies and laws. This chapter will demonstrate conditions in the organization and operations of the ward state machinery that makes this possible.

I will first analyse the structure and organization of the ward state machinery as well as the informal but state-directed network of neighbourhood party and residents' organizations beneath the ward state machinery. The second section examines the dilemma surrounding the debate on whether wards should continue to exist, in particular, highlighting how policy-makers, administrators, and academics in Vietnam have been appraising the ward and the obstacles that wards have been facing since their beginning.

Since the early 1980s, many people in Hà Nội have taken to the pavement to sell goods and services. They include many former state employees, and they do so for basic livelihood and to supplement income. These needs came hard and fast in the mid and late 1980s, the years of hyperinflation and economic restructuring. The biggest blow to the economy then was the drastic reduction of the state sector, which had provided most, if not all, the employment in Vietnam. Here went a four-liner that slightly exaggerated and teased:

People in Hà Nội were joined by roaming vendors (hàng rong), who came into the city from the villages to peddle farm produce, especially after 1988. In addition, though mainly in the older parts of the city where housing space for each family was tight, many Hà Nội residents reluctantly did their personal, family, and business chores on the pavement, including activities such as washing, cooking, recreation, and storing and displaying goods. A journalist of the Hà Nội Moi (HNM) newspaper criticized a typical scene he saw, whereby the pavement, a public space, became a yard for many families:

THE JAKARTA CHARTER

During the Japanese occupation of Indonesia (1942 to 1945) little occurred in the way of Indonesian Muslim intellectual development; the effort to survive in a food-short and severely authoritarian society apparently dampened abstract thought. Indonesian political leaders, however, did continue their efforts at achieving independence, and in 1945 the Japanese authorities allowed them to plan for that eventuality. At the ensuing preparatory conference, delegates met to draft a constitution and other documents necessary for such action, with the blessing of the Japanese administration. The delegates were drawn from wide ethnic, regional, religious, and social groupings. The dominant group consisted of the Dutch-educated elite that had been in exile or prison during the Dutch era, but had been used by the Japanese to mobilize the Javanese population through a series of organizations with quasi-governmental authority. They overwhelmingly favoured a state which would be based on secularism and nationalism, but specifically not Islamic.

The Muslim grouping represented associations in good standing with the Japanese or individuals with considerable personal standing of their own. These Muslim leaders had been to Islamic schools in their formative years and had been in Muslim nationalist organizations throughout most of their lives. They favoured Islam as the guiding principle for the state and its operation. Consequently nationalist and Muslim outlooks were strikingly different, as they had been before the Japanese arrived. As well, both nationalist and Muslims leaders had their own group networks that allowed communication among members, and they were largely separate from one another and from the networks of still other groups, such as the Christians and Balinese. In the limited time available to the delegates, however, they had little communication with the larger population or with the organizations that the leadership groups represented.

A subcommittee charged with drafting a preamble to the constitution discussed and accepted a proposal from the Muslim group that came to be known as the “Jakarta Charter”.

Indonesian Muslim thinking reflected the major political developments of twentieth-century Indonesia. Accordingly, the creation and development of the Indonesian state was a central focus of their thinking. Further, the intellectual constructs that were presented were generally consistent with well-accepted notions in Sunni Muslim intellectual history, but at least twice prominent thinkers departed from orthodoxy. Those two ventures — concerning the superior place of reasoning in thinking and the use of a type of secularism — were not universally accepted by Indonesian Muslims, but they provided a leaven that was important in the progress of the intellectual movement that would not have happened otherwise. Overall, that thinking had several important features.

1. The creation and perpetuation of an Indonesian nation-state was important to nearly every intellectual in the group, with the possible exception of the first case at Aceh. It is apparent that nearly all identified with that state, wanted it to come into being before it existed, and supported it after it was created. If developments concerning the Indonesian state did not always go the way these intellectuals wanted it to, they generally did not give up hope and even adjusted their thinking to accommodate their identification with it. There were only a few exceptions to this trend.

2. The intellectuals identified with three Islamic communities. There was a historical Muslim community, identified especially with the Islamic Golden Age in the Middle East, which was referred to as the high point of Muslim civilization and as a model to be emulated. There were many references to such a historical community. There was a contemporary worldwide community of believers, which was implied but seldom given much attention, but recognized as existing and having some vague relevance to Indonesian Muslims. There were only a few indirect references to such a worldwide community. The third community was that of Indonesian Muslims which was regarded as having commonality, as striving for a historical mission, and as an important factor in determining the direction the Indonesian state should take.

There are some matters in Islam that are defined in great detail and remain strongly resistant to change. Prayer and other rites of worship, dating to the seventh century, are witness to that continuity. The belief in a never-changing law of God is unchallenged among Muslims. On the other hand, there is a rich intellectual tradition in Islam where historically Muslims have explored, probed, and analysed to expand knowledge. The scholars of the Islamic Golden Age in the ninth to thirteenth centuries at Baghdad and Andalusia were widely known throughout most of the world and were highly influential in creating the classical flowering of Islamic civilization. The physician and mathematician Ibn Sina (d. 1037), the philosopher Ibn Rushd (d. 1198), the geographer al-Mas'udi (d. 956), the historian Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), the man-of-letters Ibn Hazm (d. 1064), and the biographer Ibn Khallikan (d. 1282) were leading contributors to that great intellectual adventure. Each made significant contributions to human knowledge.

More important to this study, there were also political thinkers during that era, notably al-Farabi (d. 950), al-Mawardi (d. 1058), and Nizam ul-Mulk (d. 1092). Al-Farabi envisioned the perfect society ruled by an educated elite, where every citizen was placed where he would do the best job for the good of all. Al-Mawardi suggested that the ruler should be chosen by the leaders of society based on his moral awareness, religious knowledge, and wisdom. Nizam ul-Mulk outlined the practical sense and strength of leadership that the good ruler should develop. Even as Muslims revere their law and their commitment to worship, they have been equally proud of this history of intellectual exploration and accomplishment.

Within Southeast Asia there have been centres of Islamic culture as well, particularly in arts and letters. Melaka in the fifteenth century, Aceh and the north Java cities in the sixteenth century, Palembang and Makassar in the seventeenth century, and central Java from the fifteenth to nineteenth century all provided illustrious royal courts, scholarship, and promotion of several art forms.

Politically, the early New Order period, from 1966 to 1974, was marked by the rise of an authoritarian state under the leadership of President Suharto, with support from the army, entrepreneurial business, civil servants, a technological elite, and creditor nations from Europe and North America. Political power was consolidated in the national executive, with the legislature having very limited functions and political parties having almost no influence. National economic development was stressed, supported with large loans from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. As a result, financial institutions, the education system, the industrial base, transportation, and communications were all made targets of development. In religious matters the regime attempted to remove Islam from its earlier association with politics, yet still have all religions in the country support the modernization drive as they provided spiritual guidance to the Indonesian citizenry.

Pancasila, discussed earlier, was regarded as the definitive statement concerning the role of religion in the state. Muslims were expected to accept government interpretation of Pancasila without question. Some Muslims had difficulty accepting these limitations, but reluctantly were brought into line during this period. But still this was a transitional time period when very unsettled political and economic conditions existed at the beginning and which slowly became stable as the New Order government brought competing political groups into line or eliminated them as participants.

At the end of the Guided Democracy era a number of “technocrats” trained in the West, primarily in the United States, had an opportunity to remake government as Indonesian politics shifted from association with the “leftist” states over to association with those nations under the international umbrella of the American-European alliance. The most notable of these newly-educated elites were the economic administrators, termed the “Berkeley Mafia” because several of them received advanced degrees at the University of California (Berkeley).

The New Order government had a strong hold on the political system of Indonesia by 1974 and continued to rule until the end of the twentieth century, when it was brought to an end in forced elections after the government was unable to weather a severe economic crisis in 1997. During the quarter of century that it ruled with little challenge, it upgraded the economic conditions of the population. Most indicators of progress, such as per capita income, literacy, and graduation rates, indicated considerable improvement, but they were still low by economic standards of Asia. As well, the society was concerned over lack of rights and corruption in government operations. Many elements of society disliked the political system, in large part because it predetermined election results while going through an unconvincing charade of public participation. When the system unravelled, it lost support quickly. But throughout most of the period it was a strong, vibrant, yet authoritarian political system.

THE NEOMODERNISTS

The reconstructionist movement developed into a more advanced stage that was sometimes referred to as the neomodernist movement. Actually the grouping of intellectuals concerned with this movement was quite large, probably some twenty-five people, who associated with one another and wrote on similar subjects. The most well known were the core group of Nurcholish Madjid, Dawam Rahardjo (b. 1942), and Kuntowijoyo (b. 1943), and two organizational leaders, Abdurrahman Wahid (b. 1940) and Amien Rais (b. 1944), but included Abdul Mukti ʿAli, mentioned above, and Taufik Abdullah (b. 1936), an important Indonesian historian. There were other less well-known members, such as Ahmad Saefuddin (b. 1940), Sjafii Maarif (b. 1939), and Jalaluddin Rahmat (b. 1949). Significantly they were not all Muslim modernists, as a few were from traditionalist backgrounds and some were closer to revivalism than modernism per se. The educations of these intellectuals differed considerably, although all had some form of Islamic training somewhere in their backgrounds. Most had also studied in the West, often at leading universities in the United States or Europe.

A COLONIAL CULTURE AND ITS PROBLEMS

The second quarter of the century in the Indies was a period of general Dutch political repression towards indigenous nationalism and the creation of a colonial state given over to the benefit of an immigrant European population. Education became widespread, but it was education in which one's access was determined by status in the colonial system. For the Europeans and the Indonesian gentry an extensive and advanced school system was instituted, while the general population of the Indies was provided a short, very limited education designed to serve a traditional agricultural world. Politically, nationalism gained in popularity, in part due to the education of the Indonesian gentry, but by more popular forces as well. However, indigenous political organizations remained small and vulnerable, with their leaders targets of Dutch police services that viewed them as threats to public security. Many prominent nationalist leaders were sentenced to prison or sent into internal exile.

Late in the era efforts were undertaken to form coalitions of the many “nationalist” organizations that existed, which had some limited impact on the debates in the Volksraad (People's Assembly), the advisory council to the colonial administration. On the Muslim scene a second wave of Muslim modernism occurred and it generated the founding of several Muslim organizations, while the traditionalist reaction created still more organizations to counter the influence of the modernists. It was a period of repression for Indonesian nationalist movements, but a golden age for the foundation of Muslim organizations.

MUSLIM MODERNISM SPREADS TO JAVA

The second wave of modernist Muslim activity took place on Java and involved several different ethnic groups — primarily the Javanese, the Sundanese, and the Arabs, although one Tamil immigrant was important as well. None of these groups was part of the new “Indonesian” culture that produced the leadership for the Sarekat Islam or for several other groups outside this study, such as the literary elite.