Exploiting Ideology and Making Higher Education Serve Vietnam’s Authoritarian Regime

The fact that many authoritarian regimes enjoy well-built public support for a long time poses a hard puzzle to scholars. Indeed, the question of authoritarian resilience in five communist countries after the Cold War—namely China, Cuba, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam—requires explanations. Public opinion surveys have consistently shown high support for the communist regime in China (Shi, 2001; Chen, 2004; Yang & Tang, 2010; Chen & Dickson, 2008; Tang, 2005; Zhong, 2014) and Vietnam (Inglehart et al., 2014).¹

Scholars have offered several answers for such high levels of popular support and the resilience of authoritarian regimes, focusing mainly on China, among the communist cases. Besides coercion that is inherent in the regime type, leading explanations include economic performance, higher level of institutionalization, and more effective co-optation (Nathan, 2003; Shi, 1997; Manion, 1996; Dimitrov, 2013). Other important factors that are considered to be responsible for high popular support are populist policies and state-led nationalist mobilization (Brown, 2011; Zhao, 1998; Wang, 2008). Mass mobilization also plays a role in enhancing autocratic durability, mainly as a channel for patronage distribution (Brown, 2011; Handlin, 2016; Brownlee, 2007; Levitsky & Way, 2002).

With a few examples, scholars generally disregard the significance of political ideology in the resilience of authoritarian regimes. In China’s case, Madsen (1993, p. 183) declares “the Communist Party…is ideologically dead”; Nathan (2003, p. 13) states that “the regime’s ideology is bankrupt.” Dimitrov (2013) shares similar findings in terms of key explanatory factors for authoritarian resilience. Among the existing communist regimes that survived the ideological crisis in the 1980s, except for North Korea, orthodox Marxist-Leninist ideology has “hardly been the calling card of mass mobilization and regime legitimacy” in China (Tismaneanu, in Dimitrov, 2013, p. 87). What is underlying this line of argument is that as long as the regime maintains adequate economic conditions, its authoritarian rule prevails. Yet not all scholars ignore the role of ideology. Dukalskis and Gerschewski (2020) demonstrate that ideological flexibility can help legitimize communist parties’ rule in the cases of China and Vietnam, while the “freeze-frame” approach in North Korea and Cuba has undermined these regimes’ ability to do the same. As Gerschewski (2013) argues, ideology “serves as the hermeneutic frame and even justifies the use of hard repression,” and hence contributes to the reinforcement of authoritarian rule (p. 28).

In this article I aim to add to the discussion on authoritarian resilience one important dimension—the deployment of ideological indoctrination in the era of market economy. In so doing, I join scholars who pay special attention to the ideology-education-regime resilience nexus such as Perry (2020), who documents the ways “educated acquiescence” can constitute a major pillar of authoritarian endurance, and Wang (2008), who identifies the significant link between history education and regime rule in China. The case of higher education in Vietnam analyzed in this article reveals how the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) continues tinkering with its ideology as a way to suppress resistance and to generate public support. Although it is hard, if not impossible, to force citizens to believe in the formal ideology, the regime can instrumentally use ideology to discipline the youth, as well as to maintain teachers’ gatekeepers’ behavior.

Vu in this special issue argues that the resilience of post-communist regimes in Asia stems from a triptych of resources, ideologies, and organizations. Three other articles in the issue tap on crucial aspects of the durability of post-communist regimes. The role of material, ideological, and organizational resources in these regimes’ resilience is made clear in the analysis of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (Luo and Un). Huang makes a case of how the Chinese Communist Party drew on foundational myths and institutional resources to build its strength over time since the 1940s. Creak and Barney trace the advantages of the Cambodian People’s Party to its evolution through a liberation movement and counterinsurgency struggle from the 1970s to the 1990s. Like Laos and China, even though Vietnam is still under the rule of a communist party, the regime is no longer what it used to be after more than three decades of market reform (Thaveeporn, 2019). As explained in the introduction to this special issue, it is indisputable that Vietnam and other remaining communist regimes have, since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, been “transitioning out of communism as a socio-economic-political system.” To call them “post-communist” regimes is to highlight those changes that have contributed remarkably to their resilience.

This article adopts parts of the triptych framework with specific reference to Vietnam. I focus on the operation of ideology in Vietnam’s higher education system in which students are the main targets, whereas teachers are both the medium and secondary targets. The article specifically discusses the combination of two aspects: organizational constraints and ideological exploitation. Organizational constraints are revealed in the way the CPV organizes higher education on the basis of strict political control. It involves organizing collectives, surveillance networks, students’ moral evaluation, mandatory curriculum, and self-disciplining organizations. Ideological exploitation strategy engages the cult of Ho Chi Minh, party membership recruitment, academic purge, and self-censorship among academics. Ideology is a unique tool inherited from the past. The tool carries with it certain symbols that still have emotional power. It certainly needs to rely on organizations to execute but is undoubtedly a powerful tool. Although the ideological toolkit has somewhat changed after the market reform, the basic structure of ideology education remains a continuation of a totalitarian legacy.²

The evidence suggests that the discussion of the relationship between political ideology and authoritarian regimes should not be just about whether people still believe in proclaimed formal ideology or not. Nor is it enough to look at the economy in order to tell if the ideology is abandoned or not. Such frameworks might mislead us to a conclusion that ideology is irrelevant to an authoritarian regime’s durability. The examination of how the regime strategically governs citizens using ideological principles on a day-to-day basis gives us a more nuanced understanding. That is, we should not just look at a fading belief to infer declining compliance or a draining trust to predict loosening disciplines.

My argument supports the signaling theory that is highlighted in the works of Huang (2015, 2018) and Schuler (2021). Huang (2015) contends that the use of propaganda, including ideological and political education in colleges, is to signal the regime’s strength in maintaining political order rather than convincing citizens. More specifically, the mechanism by which ideological education impacts college students in China is not through educating college students to be more satisfied with the government, but by making them believe that the regime has a high capacity for maintaining political order, hence making the students dissent less. More generally, even when a heavy-handed propaganda program may worsen citizens’ opinions of the regime, it still can signal regime’s power and therefore reduce citizens’ resistance (Huang, 2018). In the same vein, Schuler (2021) argues that the purpose of legislature in single-party regimes is to “signal authoritarian dominance and legitimacy” rather than provide information or stabilize power-sharing. In the following analysis, I show how academics’ and students’ behavior are dictated by the belief of the regime’s power that are signaled through the ideological discourse. Signaling regime strength in education system involves organized surveillance and targeted strategies on focused groups, that is, students and teachers. This is conducted in a smaller scope compared to other strategies such as elections or legislative representation, but it does share a nature and a goal of strength signaling, which is intimidating potential dissidents. The effect of ideology education on subjects’ behavior is clear in some cases while it might not be definitively determined in others. This uncertainty, to a large extent, reflects the nature of studying political taboo in an authoritarian country, where merely discussion of ideology belief can put people in danger.

The remainder of this article is organized as follows. First, I propose a distinction between ideology as a concept and ideology as an instrument. The next two sections provide analysis of the deployment of organizational constraint and ideological exploitation in a higher education context. I show how the CPV continues to exploit the residual and modification of the once-dominated ideology in the new contexts. The empirical evidence sheds light on how the regime uses ideology tools to signal its power and how such signals may shape individual behavior in the absence of clear laws and regulations.

The evidence used to support the arguments in this article combines organization and discourse analysis, ethnographic observation, and in-depth interviews. The objects for discourse and organization analysis are legal documents, rules and regulations, and institutional structure of Vietnam’s education system. Ethnography is used to explore subjects’ personal views, stories, experiences, and thoughts. I conducted in-depth interviews with teachers, researchers, and education activists in three regions, namely North, Central, and South Vietnam. I talked with various groups of students, including those who have been punished for deviating from expected behavior, those who are praised as “good” students, and those who are recruited for membership in the CPV. The interviews not directly quoted in the article were used for background information, and to substantiate different individual views in order to construct emotional and psychological patterns. Through building rapport with the subjects, I gained their trust and confidence, which helped me put forward questions about their worldviews and obtain their answers. All conversations are kept confidential; the names used in the article are pseudonyms.

Also, it is worth noting some characteristics of the interviewees in this study. Most subjects are competent in English; most of the teachers were trained in an advanced industrial country for at least several years among whom 80% hold a PhD degree; most students have one or more years of study abroad. The fact that the subjects agreed to participate in these interviews already infers that they had some interest in discussing politics and academic freedom, and/or less fear of being involved in these activities (as opposed to those who refused to talk with me for reasons such as “having no interest in talking about this topic” or “disliking sensitive topic”). With one exception, I purposely chose to interview students who graduated from but are not currently enrolled in a university in Vietnam, out of concern for their safety as well as to increase the chance that they could offer more-frank answers. The exception was a student who already spoke publicly about his critical thoughts. Hence, the views presented in this article were expected to be more critical toward the regime compared to the average population. The interviewees’ opinions, hence, make a harder case for my argument, which stresses the power of political training.

One legitimate question that might be raised concerns the use of a small sample of personal stories in this article. Ethnographic studies have often been used to illustrate intrapersonal effects resulting from superstructural factors (Atkinson, 2001). The interpretive approach through interviewing is invaluable as a way to tease out the complex emotional and psychological processes within individuals (Fujii, 2018), who are the targets of the regimes’ indoctrination strategies in my research project. In-depth interviews help to “accumulate systematic information about emotions,” where “informants may be asked directly about their feelings, or scholars can see if certain questions or cues elicit talk of particular emotions—or emotional talk” (Goodwin et al. in Snow, 2004, p. 424). However, these methods are unable to produce generalizations about the public’s general political ideology or public opinion on the regime. I do not claim that these findings are sufficient evidence to prove the effectiveness of the regime’s ideological strategies. What they do is shed light on how authoritarian control mechanisms might work at the micro level. The microdynamics of how a signal from the authority reaches individuals and shapes their behavior and how it triggers self-policing and self-censorship helps us understand the possible mechanisms through which the state generates public support and suppresses open public resistance. Future research could potentially benefit our further understanding by collecting large datasets to test the theory proposed in this article.

The concept of ideology is largely used as “a set of systematic theoretical principles projecting and justifying a sociopolitical order” (Pravda, 1988, in Baradat, 2002, p. 5). Political ideologies are “attempts to find political accommodation” to changes in social and economic conditions (Baradat, 2002, p. 5). In particular, regime ideology refers to any “coherent and consistent system of ideas advanced officially by state elites to define and promote a regime identity and mission that transcends individual leaders, parties, and political generations” (Chen, 2016, p. 24). These theoretical frameworks provide comprehensive definitions of political ideology as a concept, but they don’t capture the notion of on-the-ground practices where ideology is embedded in a regime’s daily exercise of power. In addition, the assumption that ideology is relatively static comes with a trade-off that we miss considering ideology in its deployed stages. That is, regimes can exploit the power of a political ideology even when it is not comprehensive, coherent, or consistent as scholars assume. More importantly, we want to know how regimes may utilize such ideological toolkits to maintain their power.

The political system in Vietnam includes three key components: the CPV, the state apparatus, and the representative institutions and mass organizations (London, 2014). The CPV “is the leading force of the State and society,” as stipulated in the Constitution of 1992. Its membership grew from several hundred in the 1930s to 4.5 million in 2016, accounting for about 5% of the population. The state apparatus is organized vertically from central to local level, with the Ministry of Public Security being the most powerful institution. At the same time, state bureaucracies are controlled by CPV organs at the same level. The highest representative institution, the National Assembly, comprises nearly 500 representatives who are largely selected and appointed by the CPV. Among the most important mass organizations that exist to mobilize support for the CPV are the Fatherland Front, the General Confederation of Labor, the Peasant Union, the Vietnam Women’s Union, and the Communist Youth League.

The CPV adheres to Marxism–Leninism and Ho Chi Minh Thought. The set of ideas that go along with this orthodox ideology such as socialism, communism, class struggle, and proletarian solidarity are becoming extremely hard to sell in the 21st century. Even the Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong once admitted that “[the goal of] building socialism is for the long term. [We are] not sure if [it] can even be realized by the end of this century” (Nguyen, 2013). Essentially, Trong acknowledged that his party’s ideology is suffering a loss of faith. However, the fading faith does not necessarily mean a fading role for the ideology.

On the contrary, the adaptive ideological strategies can somehow balance out this downside. As Vu (2017) emphasizes: “Ideology still wields significant power in the public sphere. Even if few people today, including perhaps most Party leaders and members, truly believe in Marxism–Leninism, it would be politically suicidal for them to challenge the doctrine on which the Party was founded and which is still revered as the quasi-official religion” (p. 278). In contrast to the formal one, which seems to be static and outdated, the practical use of ideology, the main focus of this article, is operated robustly in reality. I argue that the CPV has practically and proactively deployed an ideological toolkit to suppress dissent and to stimulate a self-disciplining system. Over 30 years of reform, the ideological adaptation plans drafted from the top down have been translated into numerous legal documents, guidelines, school textbooks, political campaigns, and mass media programs. The education system, from kindergarten to university, is particularly entrusted with the mission of continuing to raise obedient and loyal citizens.

In the CPV’s history, acquiring more power and sustaining its dictatorship have always been hand in hand with cultural reforms, by purging alternative ideas and by mobilizing writers and intellectuals while suppressing those who did not comply (Ninh, 2002). In the midst of the debate about adopting the market economy while preserving the single party-state regime, the CPV’s Politburo issued Resolution 05-NQ/TW (1987) on “Cultural leadership in a market economy,” holding firm its control over political ideas. Subsequently, the Party Constitution of 1991 clearly stated a mission to “carry out a revolution in ideas and culture to give the Marxist-Leninist worldview and Ho Chi Minh Thought a leading role in the spiritual life of society.” The turn to a more open foreign policy during the 1990s particularly worried the conservatives, who would respond very timely in 1998 with a resolution on “Building an advanced culture [that] is deeply imbued in national identity.”³ The most recent amendment in the Constitution of 2011 reaffirmed the direction, aiming to make the official culture “infiltrate deeply into all aspects of social life” and turn it into “a firm base” for future development. The official culture, as being stipulated in this and all previous documents, is obviously one that is defined and recognized by the CPV.

In 2003, while the pro-reform faction in the CPV was negotiating with other countries for Vietnam to join the World Trade Organization, conservative leaders launched a program to “study, propagandize, and teach Ho Chi Minh’s Thought in the new era.” The goal was to “create a campaign to train people in revolutionary morality to follow the almighty Ho Chi Minh.” This political campaign has been translated into programs at all public organizations and schools to promote the study of Ho Chi Minh Thought.⁴ “Uncle Ho,” as Ho directed the people to call him since the 1950s, is described with all moral values that are well respected both in the Confucian tradition and in communism such as wise, kind, frugal, compassionate, and patriotic. Ho Chi Minh Thought is said to inherit good traditional values of the country, while incorporating Marxism–Leninism and the best things that human civilization can offer. The CPV has venerated Ho as “the center of a newly created political religion that eventually became part of the Vietnamese religious landscape” (Dror, 2016, p. 433). His statues are placed in many temples, where people come to pray for wellness. State leaders’ visits to temples or memorial houses to worship “Buddha Ho Chi Minh” have become a common practice that is televised nationally. It is ironic that the CPV, which once considered religion as the “opium of the people” and once spent considerable resources to crack down on religious practices in Vietnam, now turns to use religion as a domain to strengthen its power.

While internal debates existed, on the whole the CPV has a record of being one step ahead in adapting its ideological strategies before implementing major economic and social changes, mainly under what is called the “cultural front.” The communists have shown their malleability to change their voices and faces when needed without changing their core political goals. The analysis below showcases the continuity of ideology imposition in the economic reform era by highlighting the practical deployment of ideology in the education system.

This article offers a more nuanced understanding of political ideology in practice, that is, the communist ideology in its interplay with organizational strategy in the era of economic transition. Accordingly, the regime ideology being analyzed in this article is not simply a rigid belief or a set of static formal principles. Rather, I intend to capture political ideology as an instrument that shapes subjects’ behavior. As the stories below will demonstrate, we see that the regime does not need to totally convince young citizens about the political lessons in order to penetrate their thinking and behavior. The cult of Ho Chi Minh is set up to cultivate students’ loyalty to the regime. Plus, even an ill-defined political ideology, when being taught on a regular basis for a long time, can persist. Nor does the regime have to make students and teachers truly believe in its ideology to embrace and to guard its rules. The organization aspect of ideological training and the surveillance system are powerful signals of the regime’s strength that can deter dissent. In short, while ideologies by themselves cannot directly create citizens’ obedience, it is a kind of configuration that works in combination with organization and resources to create compliance, which eventually translates into regime resilience.⁵

The CPV casts a wide net to capture students in organized collectives. As of 2017, Vietnam had 22.3 million students, 7% (1.7 million) of whom were in higher education, and a total of about 1.3 million teachers at all levels. All children from kindergarten to elementary school are kept under the tutelage of the Ho Chi Minh Children’s Organization. Those in secondary school are watched by the Ho Chi Minh Pioneers’ Organization. High school students are supervised by the Communist Youth League. By the age of 18, only students with exceptionally bad records are left out of the Communist Youth League. Once entering college, by default, one is a member of, or a subject to be managed by, the Vietnamese Student Organization (VSO) and the Communist Youth League. These two organizations actively mobilize students in summer camps and year-round clubs.⁶ The regime also uses its apparatus in the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Culture and Information, and universities to design multiple activities ranging from art shows to singing competitions to pageant contests and the like to keep students within close control.⁷

Colleges are placed under multiple surveillance networks, an obvious legacy of the totalitarian system established more than a half century ago. Each cohort of students in each department is organized in a collective. Under a supervising teacher, each collective has one captain and one secretary, both of whom are appointed by the Communist Youth League or school administrator. The captain and the secretary are tasked to report to the supervising teacher or to the Department of Student Affairs on any “counter-revolutionary” actions or criticisms that may “harm the state’s reputation.” Occasionally, security staff, who are formally trained in a public security or defense institution, may go undercover to audit college classes as a part of their job training.⁸ Some students whose parents are working in the Ministry of Public Security or the Ministry of Defense can be recruited to be the “eyes and ears” of the local offices. These staff and designated students are empowered to bypass a school’s administrator to report directly to the local or higher security offices.

Notwithstanding the fact that evaluation of students is based on both academic performance and moral behavior, the latter can heavily influence the former. Decision 60 issued by the Ministry of Education in 2007 stipulates five key criteria for moral evaluation of students, including study attitude; compliance with rules and regulations; participation in political-social and cultural activities; good citizenship; and leadership in school.⁹ Some sub-criteria to assess a “good student” are as detailed as donating blood, doing volunteer work organized by the Communist Youth League, and introducing new members to this organization. Some seemingly general criteria need to be understood in the specific regime context of the regime’s ideology. “Compliance with rules,” for example, implies that students should never participate in public protest, while “participation in political-social activities” means students must show up in rallies organized by schools or local governments. “Leadership in school” merely means being an active member in the Communist Youth League, advocating for Vietnamese Student Organization activities, or serving in appointed positions such as cohort’s captain or secretary. All of these are converted into a scale of 100 points. Students with low points for two consecutive terms can be suspended and this can be noted in their transcripts. At the same time, the authorities and schools strongly discourage all forms of civil participation in NGOs, churches, or self-initiative projects. Circular 2016 issued by the same ministry restrains students from participating in collective activities that are not permitted by their schools, and from spreading negative news about the CPV and the state.¹⁰

While the organized collectives and plainclothes security staff place more than a quarter of the population under surveillance, the compulsory curriculum consumes a large portion of young citizens’ lifetime. A typical student who follows the standard public education system up to high school would have about one-third of their school time being exposed to the regime’s political ideology in both direct and indirect forms.¹¹ Moreover, all students have to go through direct political training programs. The current undergraduate curriculum requires college students in all majors to take a minimum of ten credits, equivalent to 150 lecture hours, for political training. These include five credits for “the Principles of Marxism–Leninism,” two for “Ho Chi Minh Thought,” and three for “the Vietnam Communist Party’s Revolutionary Policies.”¹² Students also have to obtain a certificate of “National Defense and Security” training, which is equivalent to 165 lecture hours.¹³ In addition, all colleges have to hold an orientation for all freshmen on “Combating the scheme of the peaceful evolution by imperialist forces” in the beginning of the school year. The session can be as short as one day or as long as one week.

The state simultaneously provides a biased political context to define the role of youth in the nation. Throughout the entire political teaching curriculum stipulated by the Ministry of Education, the leading role and the legitimacy of the CPV is said to be indisputable, while the role of youth is depicted to be the CPV’s followers. Core messages of the whole curriculum are summarized in a document titled “Six Political Lessons for Youth,” issued by the Communist Youth League, which is often used by students to review before political exams.

The first three lessons consist of three theorems: (1) Marxism–Leninism and Ho Chi Minh Thought are the sole theoretical basis for development, (2) the CPV is the sole leader, and (3) socialism is a progressive goal. The fourth lesson dictates that economic development must be subsumed under political stability. The fifth lesson describes the single party-state state regime as a “non-contradicting political system,” as opposed to the “inherently contradicting nature” of a system of political pluralism. The youth’s mission, finally, is defined as “advancing in revolutionary ideology and morality, professionals’ expertise, and physical health.” The main method to achieve such a mission is said to “become a person armed with revolutionary ideas and thought.”¹⁴

Nowhere in the entire discourse are students allowed to critically assess the CPV’s vision, nor are they encouraged to express personal views on political matters, let alone political participation. On the contrary, students are instructed to submit to the revolutionary leaders. A cliché advice that teachers, school managers, and police often give to students is that “as students, you should focus on your study. All problems shall be taken care of by the Party and the state” (Da co dang va nha nuoc lo).¹⁵ Students are taught to know their role versus the CPV’s role, with the former narrowly defined and submissive, while the latter is overarching and leading. The job of the youth is prescribed to contribute their best to the predetermined cause, to maintain the defined tradition, and to advance the selected goal. In the frank words of an interviewee, a chair of the Department of Political Science and Marx, Lenin and Ho Chi Minh Thought, the mission of political ideology training is not necessarily to make people believe in socialism, but “to keep those down here [i.e., students and teachers] stable, so the above [i.e., the leaders] is hands-free to do what they want.”¹⁶

At the organizational level, the enforcement of ideological correctness requires administrators to carry out preemptive measures. As public security officers’ power often supersedes that of school administrators when it comes to questioning someone’s ideology or political loyalty, most schools are quite aware that they are watched. Below are two texts, one issued by a public university and the other by a private university. The first text was an email sent by the department head of a top public university in Ho Chi Minh City to all faculty in June 2018. During this time, there were street protests against the government’s plan to establish special economic zones suspected of being reserved for Chinese companies, with possible leases for as long as 99 years:

The second text was a confidential letter issued by a private university in Ho Chi Minh City, in preparation for the Independence Day ceremony on 2 September 2018. The letter directed the entire school to “prevent and terminate effectively any acts by staff, workers, and especially students, to participate in any protests.” It also called for

School administrators, public and private alike, often have to conduct self-policing practices, though they might have different incentives for doing so. While public school administrators have to worry about their positions, which are appointed by the government, their counterparts in private schools do not want their business being closed down by the government for political reasons. In both cases, school administrators acted proactively in the role of the regime’s ideological enforcers.

The cult of Ho Chi Minh perhaps was one of the most successful political projects that the CPV orchestrated. The cult is facilitated around a rhetoric that “all Vietnamese people are descendants of Ho Chi Minh.”¹⁹ Thus, the political-emotional repertoire enacts the affective ties between citizens and the regime. The regime uses multiple tactics to make their citizens love and worship their leaders, while citizens in turn embrace such practices. Students are both co-opted and manipulated under the ideology line, which makes this process a hard co-optation.

The “love” toward Ho Chi Minh, the CPV, and its heroes is cultivated in citizens from their childhood. In the collection of 50 of the best children’s songs of the 20th century, which are repeatedly taught and sung in nursery and elementary schools, more than one-fifth are about Ho Chi Minh and another one-fifth are about the CPV and its junior heroes.²⁰ Generations of Vietnamese people’s childhood memories are filled with song lyrics like “Who loves the children more than Uncle Ho Chi Minh does” or “I am a bamboo sprout and I am growing up in the revolution. [I am] so happy to be under the protection of the vanguard Party [that] shines like sunlight.” In any given school day, it’s not uncommon to find children at kindergartens and elementary schools being taught to sing “last night I dreamt [that I met] Uncle Ho” or read “five teachings by Uncle Ho.” Public meetings to tell stories about “Uncle Ho” are organized annually at all school levels and public offices. In the repertoire designed for the youth, the Communist Party is linked to glory and enlightenment, whereas Ho Chi Minh is paired with kindness and greatness. All in all, the regime has exhaustively exploited the cult of Ho Chi Minh to boost its popularity.

Psychologists found a strong relationship between personality attributes of nursery school children and their political views 20 years later (Block & Block, 2006).The power of emotion also has long been highlighted in political science literature. Affective emotions such as love, hate, respect, and trust can boost commitment to a group or cause (Goodwin et al. in Snow et al., 2004). At the cognitive level, people tend to have more trust toward those we have positive affective emotions (Jasper 1997). Moreover, basic affective commitments “need not be conscious to influence our actions and beliefs” (Goodwin et al. in Snow et al., 2004, p. 421). This helps us understand a student like La in the story below, whose mixed social background might lead us to expect him to have a mixed idea about Ho Chi Minh. Yet, La is not much different from any typical student under a socialist public school, who learns that Ho Chi Minh is nothing short of greatness.

La belongs to the fourth generation of an intellectual and revolutionary family. His grandfather wrote a science textbook that is still used today in high school. A street in Ho Chi Minh City is named after one of his granduncles. The family also has an in-law who was charged with a counter-revolutionary crime and was imprisoned. La’s house, which is worth many million US dollars at the present value, was seized by the Hanoi government to “serve the public’s interest.”

Like La, many students grew up learning to love Ho Chi Minh, the socialist cause, and the CPV. The affective ties in the CPV’s political-emotional repertoire coat words such as “Uncle Ho” and “our party” with a relational and reverential taste. Young students are stripped of the ability to feel “alright” to name those subjects objectively. This matters a great deal when it comes to any attempt to revise the centrality of Ho Chi Minh in social life. Dr. Mai, a literature lecturer, shared the observation below from a past lecture:

Far from being surprised, we should expect to observe such response, given the fact that it is a requirement in the general education program, stipulated by the Ministry of Education, that children from grade 5 are taught about “the great sacrifice that Ho Chi Minh had made to the country,” to respect and to feel indebted to him.²²

Another important aspect of the cult of the leader takes place in the practice of replacing professional standards with his words. Hanoi Medical University, the first modern college of the country, provides an example of the deep “integration” of the cult of Ho Chi Minh into professional traditions. As a part of a medical school’s tradition, the students in Hanoi Medical University used to read the Hippocratic oath. But after the communist takeover in 1954, instead of their great healing gods and teachers in the medical field, the students called on Ho Chi Minh when making an oath to hold their ethical standards. The oath starts with “Under the national flag, under the portrait of Chairman Ho Chi Minh” (VOV, 2016). The students’ commitment to their professional career, again, is governed by the regime’s political ideology. What we see on the stage are the best students who had worked through training challenges to deserve being under Ho Chi Minh’s portrait, the regime’s symbol. Graduates from professional training are said to be honored to stand below the regime’s symbol. Professional standards are subsumed under the leader’s wisdom. In essence, the CPV co-opted young citizens with expertise into its Ho Chi Minh cult. The next section provides more details about this strategy.

Since the early 2000s, the CPV has established a new unit level called “student party cells,” whose tasks are recruiting and managing membership in universities. Students with outstanding academic records are listed and nominated by these cells to be party members. These students would first be invited to talk with the representatives of the party cell, then go through a series of lectures designed for candidates. After writing reports showing how they found the party’s ideology truly scientific and revolutionary, about half of the candidates would be shortlisted. Those who make it to the final round would take the oath to swear being loyal to the CPV for their entire lifetime. One may assume that students desire party membership for practical career interest, but this does not explain why many students in natural science and technology fields, who are often highly demanded in the job market, want to join the CPV. The story below sheds some light on this question.

Tu was a sophomore when she was admitted into the CPV. Now an engineer for a giant technology company in the US, Tu recalled: “I can imagine that if a student refused a party representative’s invitation to join, he or she would be blacklisted. Consequently, regardless of academic performance, it would be difficult for him or her to proceed through the rest of the program, let alone asking for recommendations for a scholarship or anything.” The fear is real. Although the nomination is made to look like a privilege, it is actually a hard co-optation tactic that is rooted in an asymmetry of power. “They got my GPA report, nominated me, and made me take the oath to be loyal to the Party.…The political lectures were really boring, but what could I have done?” said Tu. Membership recruitment in this case was clearly a mixed tactic that local party cells deployed: making membership an honor and selecting candidates while giving no space for discussion about the willingness of the selected. Those students selected for membership would end up with mixed feelings too: on the one hand they appreciated the recognition while, on the other hand, they were confused and feared punishment.

Students do not have real freedom over the choice of whether or not to join a collective, as illustrated in the following story. Nam, then a student at Hanoi University of Agriculture, refused to pay that fee because he did not want to be a member of the Communist Youth League. As no formal law exists to force one to pay the Communist Youth League membership fee, Nam stayed as he wished for several months, until one day when he was asked to step out of a class when a teacher heard his story:

Nam told me his story with a mocking tone. He was later blamed by teachers and other students for having “bad” attitudes such as disrespecting teachers, breaking the collective’s harmony, and harming the school’s reputation. He finally left the school without graduating.²³ To be exact, Nam was never officially expelled from the school. He was coerced to “choose” to leave. The punishment sent a clear signal to other students that noncompliance would result in a bad outcome.

The analysis of the education system and the stories above demonstrate the organizational power to infuse political ideology into school life and to normalize it into basic principles and norms that govern students. As such, the CPV’s strategy in the making of the submissive and loyal youth contains both elements of coercion and co-optation. The cult of Ho Chi Minh and the replacement of professional standards by Ho’s words cultivate affective bonds between young citizens and the regime’s symbol. The recruitment of party membership elicits loyalty and warns students that deviating behavior will be punished. Students are constrained to behave within a limited range of permissible space and activities. They are at the same time manipulated to “choose” to love their state leaders and to “decide” to follow their steps. In short, the education system under the CPV continues to mobilize the youth to “raise new generations of loyal fighters for the cause” and to “harness youth to the nation’s agenda” (Dror, 2018, pp. 13–14).

Thus far, I have argued that the post-communist regime utilizes ideology as a critical tool for disciplining the youth, that is, raising submissive and loyal young citizens. To further illustrate how ideology can be used to maintain social order, the discussion now turns to the way the regime deployed ideology on teachers as a way to maintain a self-disciplining system. This section draws largely from my in-depth interviews with college lecturers, researchers, and education activists. Stories and observations are firsthand experiences of the interviewees. None of them shared any wholehearted belief about the CPV’s ideology. What they strongly believed in is possible severe consequences that may result from violating the CPV’s ideological principles. In practice, the ideology becomes a kind of informal, yet primary, law to enforce power compliance.

In 2010, Nha Thuyen successfully defended her master’s thesis in literature at Hanoi National University of Education with the highest possible score. The research subject was a collection of poems written by a group of poets named “Mo Mieng” [Open Mouths]. The poems contain slang and satirical criticisms of the communist regime. Three years after the thesis had been passed, it was harshly denounced in Ho Chi Minh City Literature Weekly in May 2013, to be followed shortly by People’s Daily and People’s Army Daily. The Party’s Central Department of Propaganda and the Vietnam Writers’ Association denounced in professional conferences, newspapers, and official letters not only the author but also the academic committee who passed her. The critics claimed that Nha Thuyen’s topic was a “dirty subject,” that she “glorified a dirty culture in the name of science,” and that her views “contradicted with healthy perspectives of the public” (Khe 2013). Finally, the university withdrew its approval of the thesis and canceled Nha Thuyen’s degree. The author and her adviser lost their jobs.

The case is widely considered as a clear political intervention into academia in the present time, a replay of the “Nhan van giai pham” (NVGP) affair of the late 1950s, “the most significant movement of domestic political protest in the history of the [communist] Vietnam” (Zinoman, 2016, p. 188).²⁴ Although Nha Thuyen was not comparable to NVGP in terms of punishment, the relative magnitudes of social impact of the two events were somewhat equivalent. In both cases, the state attacked the subjects for their views expressed on paper. Subjects were charged with having “thoughts” (tu tuong) that were, or were interpreted as, not aligned with the CPV’s policies. On the basis of ideological correctness, NVGP members 60 years ago suffered from detention and other forms of punishment; in 2014 Nha Thuyen lost her degree and her job, then retreated from a promising writing career.

The case of Nha Thuyen provoked some intellectuals to calln for social justice and academic freedom in an open letter, but the resistance did not last for long. On the contrary, the incident nudged multiple individuals in one general direction toward compliance. Mr. Vinh, who was a history teacher at the same college when the incident occurred, recalled: “My department gave a clear direction to everyone that it will not tolerate any attempts that go across the boundary.” A lecturer in a southern university recalled: “Our department was told not to do or support research on Nguyen Huy Thiep or Pham Thi Hoai, but more on Ho Chi Minh and To Huu instead.”²⁵ A master’s student proposed to her adviser to study about the Vietnamese-Cambodian conflict in the late 1970s, but was advised to stay away from such a “sensitive issue.” A professor, who co-chaired a thesis committee in another university, had to request the research office of that university to take out the words “Nguyen Huy Thiep” from his mentee’s registered research title. The organizers of a seminar on postmodern literature at the Vietnam Institute of Literature immediately canceled their seminar, in which some overseas Vietnamese researchers were invited as presenters.²⁶

What we observed in Nha Thuyen’s case and the reactions of academics and universities is that once the state started to draw a line on someone, such a gesture sent immediate warning signals to many others, who would respond defensively to abstain themselves from taking any potential ideological wrongness. In this case, the message for everyone was that any academic work can face retrospective investigation due to political concerns. This awareness activated the mode of self-policing and self-censorship among academia, teachers, and students alike. One interviewee concluded:

When asked about the political boundaries that constrain their intellectual freedom, all interviewees referred to general taboo topics like political pluralism, multi-party system, and dark secrets in the private lives of the CPV’s leaders. But they admitted that those were very broadly defined. There was no clear set of rules about what can be said and what not. But everything seems to be included in those general categories. The academics know that they should be very careful, but it is never clear to them where the boundaries are, to whom the rules apply, or to what extent their resistance is tolerated. On top of that, colleges are often targets of cultural police. It comes as no surprise when police visit school administrators to give general warnings about potential political ideological deviation. They might invite some teachers out for coffee to “talk among brothers” or to offer “sincere advice” without any formal warrants. These techniques trigger self-censorship mechanisms, where each subject shall draw their own safety zone, which should be quite distant from their best guess of the “true” boundaries. To many teachers, the safety zone might be absolutely no discussion about politics. Others would feel that the censored circles allow them to only vaguely mention some political and social problems. Still others limit political criticisms to their close groups.

An example is the case of Dr. Toan, who was questioned for her post on the department’s blog. The blog was meant to be a place for the professional exchanges of thoughts and ideas.

There was no law or regulation being cited in this talk as Dr. Toan violated none. Instead, the opinion of “elderly revolutionary cadres” was referred to. Also, there was no official meeting. The public security officials used a “friendly approach” to Dr. Toan rather than coercion. As they might have anticipated, Dr. Toan stopped taking care of the blog.

Oftentimes, censorship may occur publicly without much surprise from all participants. Dr. Tan, a lecturer in a university in Ho Chi Minh City, experienced such public censor on the advice he gave to a student:

In fact, the book had been translated and published earlier by a registered publishing house in Vietnam, which means that it was no longer banned by the central authority. Many teachers, however, tend to lean more to the conservative side to be politically safe. Thus, books and artworks that were once banned will remain politically sensitive to many faculty members for a long time. This story and those above offer evidence of self-policing mechanisms at the micro level. They exhibit how political ideology provides a basis on which the system can be self-operated, even in the absence of a direct check from the top down. The actors did not necessarily carry out these actions on the basis of explicit directions from their supervisors. Rather, individuals could act defensively in response to their perceived threats. In other words, these experiences demonstrate how ideological principles can infiltrate local organizations and individuals to effectively constrain behavior, cultivate social conformity, and elicit self-policing mechanisms. Schools, organized under the post-communist regime as mass organizations, are not the only places for the transmission of knowledge, but probably more importantly, are also designed to facilitate social control and mobilize popular support.

The stories above show how ideology exerts coercive power where the laws don’t reach. They exemplify how ideology was weaponized against citizens in an intellectual battle, where the CPV apparatus denounced an academic work and its author for “ideological wrongness.” In particular, the stories fleshed out the way individuals altered their behavior toward ideological self-policing and self-censorship as they received the state’s coercive signals. If a student or a teacher attempts to express their political discontent in public, they will be quickly noticed by other students and teachers, who are tasked to report to the higher authorities. When some teachers are fired or publicly criticized on state media, as in the case of Nha Thuyen, others decide for themselves to withdraw from doing political “sensitive” research. When visited by a security official for a “brotherly talk,” an academic might well conclude that the trouble was not worth her time, as the case of Dr. Toan showed.

Psychologists have laid out a helpful explanation for why people may choose to support the authority in restricting their own freedom based on the social conformity–autonomy dimension. Accordingly, those who value social conformity over individual autonomy tend to be strong supporters of the government, hence want to protect society from deviants. Where a person may choose to place himself between conformation and autonomy dimension depends on his level of perceived threat (Feldman, 2003). Threat signaling, or power signaling in authoritarian regimes, as theorized by political scientists, can be sent through democratic-like institutions such as elections or courts (Gandhi & Przeworski, 2007; Gandhi & Lust-Okar, 2009; Solomon, 2007; Brancati, 2014). In addition to the institutional channel, this section provides evidence of how ideology can be used as a power signaling tool. The enforcement of a particular case of ideological correction can serve as a warning signal, which in turn can shape individuals toward conformity.

This article has examined the relationship between the practice of ideology and authoritarian resilience, providing the context of strict political organizational control on the higher education system in Vietnam. Extant literature mainly posits that authoritarian regimes maintain their durability on the basis of economic performance and party system institutionalization. I contribute a finding on how the state can effectively deploy ideology instrumentally and provide a tightly controlled organizational structure in a higher education environment to help lengthen its durability. In contrast to the assumption that ideology is irrelevant for explaining authoritarian resilience, I show how and why ideological factors are significant in signaling the regime’s political power and legitimacy and shaping academics and students’ behavior, despite being less apparent than previously seen in the closed socialist society. The power of ideological tools in post-totalitarian Vietnam is not in its formal name, nor in its eloquent appeal as it was in the past. Rather, practical strategies make ideology still a powerful means for authoritarian consolidation.

The CPV deploys a set of organizational strategies that includes organizing students into party-coordinated collectives, placing surveillance networks at schools, imposing mandatory curricula, evaluating students based on political criteria, and triggering schools to self-discipline. Ideological exploitation strategies used to discipline the youth and suppress academics include facilitating the cult of Ho Chi Minh, hard co-opting in party membership, and imposing academic purges and self-censorship. In that context, ideological correctness serves as an informal law to suppress academic freedom and to catalyze a self-disciplining system. The personal stories and experiences revealed in this article provide a possible mechanism of how a regime’s threat signals alter the behavior of teachers and trigger their self-censored attitude. Also, evidence at the local unit level presented above suggests that the fear of being ideologically wrong pushes school administrators to adopt self-policing practices.³⁰

The article has two important implications for research on authoritarian resilience. First, we should not downplay the power of political ideology in the post-communist era. In fact, as evidently shown above, authoritarian regimes may still effectively exploit political ideology in combination with organizational strategy to sustain power. I hence propose a more nuanced view of the role of ideology in authoritarian regimes: one that is strategically used and functionally interpreted, as opposed to a static defined set of theories or some official claims by the power holders. While we peruse policy documents to gain a systematic understanding of a regime’s ideology, we might risk losing too much of the dynamic of their ideological project. A closer look at how ideology is instrumentally used for the survival of the regime at a local level will benefit our understanding. Furthermore, as the article shows support for the signaling theory, it also suggests that authoritarian regimes do rationally embrace the use of ideology rather than carrying it as a legacy. Second, the analysis yields an implication that mass organizations can act effectively to consolidate authoritarian regimes at a deeper level than patronage distribution as conventionally seen. Political ideology that is embedded in organizational disciplines of mass organizations can facilitate social control and mobilize popular support by manipulating individuals’ compliance and conformity.

I would like to express my deep gratitude to Professor Tuong Vu for his patient guidance and helpful critiques of this manuscript.

Published online: December 1, 2022