Whenever -- if ever -- the U.S. vacates Iraq, within a short time
frame, conditions there will prompt Americans to ask, "Did our troops
die in vain?" "Did my son/daughter/husband/wife die for nothing?"
Well, that question is becoming apropros regarding our misguided and
lost war in Vietnam.
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"Why Were We in Vietnam?"
By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, July 9, 2008; A15
Doing business in China is beginning to cost real money. Not that
Chinese workers are buying second homes or anything like that: Their
average wage is still a little short of a dollar an hour. But so many
Chinese have now left their villages for the factories that the once
bottomless pool of new young workers is beginning to run dry, and the
wages of assembly-line employees are rising 10 percent a year.
Worse yet, new labor laws are making it harder for employers to cheat
their workers out of their wages and benefits. Many American
businesses that do their manufacturing in China had warned against
those laws; the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai had flatly
opposed them. But the good old days of Maoist labor discipline, when
the government could send tens of millions of skilled workers down to
the farms to be toughened up and periodically tortured, are gone.
Mao's heirs, though not above a touch of torture here and there just
to keep the system humming along, are concerned, as he was not, with
achieving social harmony, even if that means compelling employers to
sign, and honor, contracts with their employees.
Confronted with such appalling squi****ness, what's a good, cost-
cutting American business to do? Many are fleeing south of the border
-- not our border (Mexico costs way too much) but China's.
They're bound for Vietnam.
According to a re****t by Keith Bradsher in the New York Times last
month, such multinational companies as Canon (the printer and copier
maker) and Hanesbrands (the North Carolina-based underwear empire) are
expanding or building factories in Hanoi, where they churn out
products for Wal-Mart and other American retailers. Foreign direct
investment in Vietnam increased 136 percent between 2006 and 2007,
while it increased just 14 percent in China.
The reason for the move south is straightforward: Vietnamese factory
workers make about a quarter of what their Chinese counterparts earn.
But why Vietnam and not, say, Thailand, where labor is similarly
cheap?
Vietnam's edge, it seems, is political. "Communism means more
stability," Laurence Shu, the chief financial officer of Shanghai-
based Texhong, one of the world's leading manufacturers of cotton
fabrics, told Bradsher. This view, Bradsher re****ts, is common among
Asian executives and some American executives, too, though they have
the presence of mind never to say so on the record. After all,
Vietnam, like China, outlaws independent unions. Absent free speech
and free elections, no radical ****fts in the government's economic
policies are likely to be sprung upon unsuspecting American
businesses.
Now, far be it from me to begrudge the Vietnamese their moment in the
sun before global capital finds them too costly and moves on to
Bangladesh and Somalia. But didn't we fight a war to keep Vietnam from
going communist? Something like 58,000 American deaths, right? And now
American business actually prefers investing in communist Vietnam
over, say, the more or less democratic Philippines? In all likelihood,
it would prefer investing in communist Vietnam to investing in a more
chaotic, less disciplined democratic Vietnam, if such existed.
Let's imagine, just as an exercise, that we're trying to explain this
to those 58,000 Americans and their loved ones. We could argue that by
investing in communist countries, we're pu****ng them toward democracy.
But everything we know about China suggests that, in reality, such
investments merely make authoritarian regimes stronger. We could argue
that what we're really doing is bringing communist nations into the
world capitalist system. Then again, the effect of bringing into the
global labor pool hundreds of millions of low-wage workers -- people
whose wages are held in check by both capital mobility and communist
repression -- is to hold down wages in democratic nations with
advanced economies and with no national strategy to preserve and
expand good jobs at home (i.e., in the United States).
Or we could argue that our onetime opposition to communism was noble
and all that but that, unburdened by the illusions of the past,
American business, backed by the American government, has realized
that the problem with communism wasn't that it was undemocratic but
that it was anti-capitalist. And that once communism was integrated
into a world capitalist system, its antipathy toward democracy not
only wouldn't be a bad thing but would actually be good. That is
clearly the political logic that underpins our involvement with China.
It's a little dicier to say this about our growing involvement with
Vietnam, since all those Americans whose names are on that wall on the
Mall probably didn't realize how compatible with global American
enterprise Vietnamese communism would turn out to be or how the cause
of democracy would turn out to have been of no real im****tance at all.
I guess a note from the American establishment to those men and women
with their names on the Wall would be in order. Something like: Say,
guys -- sorry 'bout that!
meyersonh@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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