Peaceful Evolution Angst

By ROGER COHEN
NYT

HO CHI MINH CITY, VIETNAM — The Vietnamese Communist Party, like its fraternal party in China, has identified the No. 1 threat it faces. The looming danger is called “peaceful evolution.”

That may sound like the weatherman warning of the menace of clear, sunlit skies. But the architects of Market-Leninism, who have delivered fast-growth capitalism to one-party Asian states, are in earnest. The nightmares they have are not about revolutionary upheaval, but the drip, drip, drip of liberal democracy.

Twenty years after Tiananmen Square, revolt is dormant and students docile from Beijing to Hanoi. They’ve bought into development over democracy for the foreseeable future. They may want more freedom, but not to the point that they will confront the system, as the Tiananmen generation did.

“The major task for China now is development,” a Peking University ecology major named Song Chao told my colleague Sharon LaFraniere. That’s the mood here in Vietnam, too, where moving up from motorbikes to cars is more likely to occupy the next generation than pushing for multiparty democracy.

(More here.)