Since the mid-1990s public protests in Vietnam have been increasing compared to the 1976–1995 period. Particularly numerous have been demonstrations by peasants and workers. This article examines protests by urban workers in private and state-owned factories and other types of workplaces.

Most of these workers' public protests have taken the form of strikes, the primary focus of my analysis. I address two sets of questions. One set concerns the protests themselves. What are workers pressing for, and why? What happens during strikes? Where do they occur, and are they peaceful, disruptive, or violent? How are they organized? And how do they occur, given that thus far they have all been illegal? The other set of questions concerns the consequences of these protests. What are the outcomes? What happens to the workers involved? How do employers respond? What are the reactions of state authorities, including those in the official labour confederation, and what do those reactions reveal about Vietnam's political system?

Although labour protests in contemporary Vietnam are my main concern, I compare them, insofar as available sources allow, to similar phenomena in the southern part of Vietnam (then the Republic of Vietnam [RVN]) during 1954–75, prior to the country's reunification. Because many of the strikes today occur in the southern half of Vietnam, a comparison between current and past protests reveals some differences between labour protests today and those of some fifty years earlier. Another goal of this study is to compare the forms and consequences of labour unrest in the two political settings — the anticommunist, semi-democratic/semi-authoritarian RVN that together with the United States was fighting internal wars, and the current, largely authoritarian, Communist Party-governed Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV). The analysis shows some similarities in what workers sought and the consequences of their protests. The contrasts, however, are more remarkable and help to highlight the significance of today's labour unrest for the present political system.

The context of this book is discussions and controversies regarding governance in Vietnam today. Although an old concept, governance has attracted new attention among academics, development agencies, and government offices around the world. It means, according to one widely cited definition, “the exercise of political, economic and administrative authority to manage a nation's affairs” and includes “the complex mechanisms, processes, relationships and institutions through which citizens and groups articulate their interests, exercise their rights and obligations and mediate their differences”. This highlights a feature in many analyses and uses of the concept: governance includes both government and citizens. It is a process in which government officials and institutions make and implement policies, rules, and regulations while at the same time being accountable to the public. Bad policies and poor accountability equal bad governance. Good policies and accountability mean good governance.

The rhetoric of the Communist Party in Vietnam advocates good governance. Party leaders claim to have high regard for what people want and need; and they take pride in trying to make policy that serves the people and the nation as a whole. These orientations are encapsulated in such well publicized slogans as government “for the people, by the people, and of the people” (cho dan, do dan, vi dan) and “the people know, discuss, implement, and evaluate” (dan biet, dan ban, dan lam, dan kiem tra). At the same time, Vietnamese officials acknowledge considerable shortcomings. To improve the situation, they have taken numerous measures, among them national campaigns against corruption and for “grassroots democracy”. Foreign aid agencies have been giving considerable development assistance to Vietnam aimed at improving “governance” — both the ability of government to make and implement policy and the ability of citizens to know about and influence what officials do. Meanwhile, criticisms inside and outside the country range from saying that officials are not doing enough to contending that good governance under Communist Party rule is impossible.

Although governance is this book's context, it is too vast a subject to examine here. More manageable, colleagues and I decided, is to look at topics related to governance.

When the word “Vietnam” is mentioned, many people still think of a war that ended twenty-nine years ago. Yet Vietnam, the country, possesses the second largest population in Southeast Asia and ranks twelfth largest in the world. Surely it deserves to be approached on its own terms, not as a foreign memory.

A stern test of this prescription is to study governance in Vietnam. Undoubtedly, Vietnam's entire political system was profoundly influenced by war and revolution from 1945 to the late 1970s. On the other hand, those western writers who labelled Vietnam “totalitarian” had very little to go on except their own Cold War ideological predilections, extrapolations from Stalin's USSR, and Hanoi's determination to portray Ho Chi Minh and the Communist Party as infallible. Scholars who rejected the totalitarian epithet for Vietnam still found themselves severely limited as to sources that might support alternative models. Fieldwork was impossible, archives were closed, provincial newspapers inaccessible. By default, the utterances of central leaders and public intellectuals dominated writings on contemporary Vietnam. And governance — being inherently political — proved more difficult to research in practice than economic, social or cultural topics. Vietnam's research conditions have improved substantially during the past decade, with scholars able to reside in the countryside, some archival materials rendered accessible, and back sets of hundreds of local periodicals readily available at the National Library in Hanoi. Of equal importance, a new generation of Vietnamese and foreign scholars has emerged and is making its mark in PhD theses and publications. Growing up after the war, these young men and women are looking at received wisdom critically, asking fresh questions, and eagerly taking advantage of the wider range of study opportunities. are delighted that a number of promising young scholars are represented in this book.

While governance is the context for this book, it is still only feasible in Vietnam to examine certain aspects rigorously.

Beginning in 1990, the Australian National University (ANU) has been holding its series of Vietnam Update conferences almost every year. The chapters in this volume began as papers presented at the Vietnam Update 2001 held at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) in Singapore on 19–20 November. The theme of that particular Update was “Governance in Vietnam: The Role of Organizations”.

By the time of the Vietnam Update 2003, there would have been 10 conferences, each focused on a particular theme. Over the years, the Update has looked at agriculture, education, law, civil society, mass media, urban culture, local government, and social differentiation, to name just a few of the themes. Conference proceedings have resulted in eight publications (books and monographs). The specialized nature of ANU's Vietnam Update is its hallmark, attesting to a capacity to draw on a critical mass of experts, both Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese, to explore specific topics. It also underlines the university's long record in researching Vietnam.

The 2001 Update was the first time the conference left the shores of Australia. Holding the conference in Singapore tapped into the island's strategic location in the region and drew a greater attendance from people working in Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries. Since then, ISEAS has continued to co-host the conference in Canberra in 2002 and 2003. This book underlines how fruitful this ANU-ISEAS collaboration has been. More titles will be available when the volumes from the 2002 and 2003 Updates are published.

Finally, we would like to thank all those who funded the Vietnam Update 2001: the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID), ISEAS and the ANU's Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. We are also grateful to staff members of both ANU and ISEAS who rendered invaluable organizational, editorial, and secretarial support.

In the early 1990s, observers began to comment on the increasing diversity of groups and associations in Vietnam. Phan Dai Doan, a distinguished professor of history in Hanoi, marvelled in 1994 at the “abundant and complex forms of organizations” that had emerged in rural villages following the end of collectivized farming. Unlike during the agricultural collective period, he found that villagers were joining together for mutual assistance, animal husbandry, charity work, religious activities, and adult education, among other purposes. Meanwhile, Carole Beaulieu spotted what looked like NGOs (non-government organizations). People in Hanoi and elsewhere, she said, were creating “what they believed were independent organizations” and they felt free “to decide their own agenda and to raise money to act”. During the rest of the decade, evidence accumulated that the numbers and range of associations and groups were expanding.

To look at this phenomenon, scholars of Vietnam at the Australian National University and Singapore's Institute of Southeast Asian Studies made organizations the theme of the Vietnam Update conference held in November 2001. The chapters that follow began as presentations to that gathering. The conference was one of two looking at aspects of governance in Vietnam. Governance has several meanings and many features. Two aspects stood out for us: the ability of government authorities and institutions to make and implement policies and regulations that serve citizens and the country at large; and the accountability of authorities and institutions to the citizens and the public generally. We reasoned that one way to examine governance is to analyze organizations that claim to speak on behalf of certain sectors of the public, represent their interests, provide linkages between citizens and government, and enable people to hold authorities accountable. Our call for papers invited analyses of organizations in Vietnam that do these things or at least claim to. They could be government-created, government-linked, non-government, or other types of organizations, associations and groups.