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The Rt Hon Sir Geoffry Howe QC MP Foreign and Commonwealth Office LONDON
BRITISH EMBASSY
HANOI
30 January 1989
Sir
I have the honour to report that 1988 proved to be an interesting and eventful year, judged by the modest standards pertaining locally. Vietnam is emerging cautiously from its shell. It is now not difficult to foresee a time when it will present to us, and more particularly to its neighbours, a very different set of challenges to those they and we are used to.
2. The process of perestroika and glasnost has continued, as last year, cautiously. It has clearly been the choice of the leaders to carry people with them rather than to blast their way through passivity and downright opposition: the observance of an Asian tradition which sits oddly with the daring and panache which the Vietnamese have shown on the battlefied.
3. The Prime Minister, Pham Hung, died in March, having been in office long enough only to give the lie to his reputation as a political neanderthal. He proved an able administrator
and an amiable little cove. He was succeeded temporarily by Vo Van Kiet, a reputed reformist with a Ho Chi Minh City background and experience of economics of a sort from his time. as Chairman of the State Planning Commission. He did not last. There were soon rumours of indecisiveness and even of corruption. In short order, Do Muoi, the faceless number 5 in the Politbureau was elected Prime Minister. In something of a re-run of the Pham Hung story, Do Muoi is now emerging as a tough administrator with a lively enquiring mind. But he, like all his colleagues in the upper echelons, is woefully short of formal education or, more importantly, of the sort of experience necessary to steer Vietnam along the chosen course of reform and liberalisation.
4.
However, despite all the words about liberalisation of the economy, entrepreneurship, incentives, business accounting and removal of subsidies, by the Spring it looked as if the economy was sliding into inanition, if not anarchy. The prognosis for the main harvest in Jure was so bad that appeals began to be made early for pesticides, fertilisers and grain from the international community. The appeals were ill thought out, disproportionate to the actual needs, Vietnam's ability to absorb aid and to the international community's ability to provide. In the event, there was no widespread famine and that harvest and the intermediate one which followed a few months /later
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