Grass-Roots Democracy: History and Context

Abstract

This chapter aims to provide an overview of GRD development in Vietnam. It focuses on the historical roots of GRD in Vietnam’s culture, its genesis in the context of economic reform, and its status within the CPV’s broader view of democracy. It is argued that, in evaluating Vietnamese GRD, historical, and cultural characteristics, social problems during Ɖối Mới and political regime characteristics of Vietnam must be taken into account. This means any scholarly attempt that conceptualizes GRD in a way that ignores these characteristics or contrasts it with liberal democratic model characteristics, would fail to explain why the regime has not been democratically transformed and why the CPV did not face the same problems their counterparts in the former Soviet Union or Eastern European countries had during the third wave of democratization (Huntington 1991[a], 1991[b], 2009).