Party down: Vietnam’s Communist leaders meet

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Schooling in America remains pretty patchy. Mostly, schools have been shut, but even where they aren't, there are plenty of empty seats. Our education correspondent explains why and warns of the damage that may already be done. And this month marks a century since the birth of Patricia Highsmith, the author of works such as "The Talented Mr. Ripley." We try, mostly in vain, to separate Highsmith's own demons from those of the dark characters she conjured. First up, though, Once every 5 years, with much pomp and pageantry, Vietnam's communist leadership convenes in a national party congress. The 13th one began in the capital, Hanoi, this week. The expectation is that there will be a raft of rubber stamp policies and new party leaders. Despite the country's relatively low COVID numbers and positive economic performance, the party's position outside the National Conference Center is weaker than it seems.

At the National Party Congress, they discuss issues confronting Vietnam. They set policy and they elect the Central Committee, the Politburo, and the four top jobs.

Charlie McCann is our Southeast Asia correspondent.

Among them, the most powerful job in the country, that of the party secretary general.

And what's the overall tone at the Congress this time around?

Pretty self-congratulatory. The party's had a good year. They've handled the pandemic pretty well. They've had just over 1,500 cases and fewer than 50 deaths. And the economy actually grew by 3%. But there's still a lot of disquiet in the party and indeed in the public.

Disquiet in the party in the form of some kind of opposition?

There's no organized opposition. Nobody's going to supplant the Communist Party anytime soon. And ever since the 1980s, when the country embarked on the transition from a centrally planned economy to a market one, the party has staked its legitimacy on rising incomes, on its ability to increase prosperity. And it's done that. Over 4 decades, Vietnam has transformed from one of the poorest countries in the world to a middle-income manufacturing powerhouse. But if you look beyond those headline figures, there are causes for concern. The economy has been growing at about 7% for the last several years, and the economy needs to reach that level of growth to keep the labor market healthy. It's not clear that it can do so, however. At the same time as you have this depressed economic growth, inequality is rising and social mobility is declining.

Okay, that's about formal opposition parties, but you mentioned disquiet among the public as well. I mean, what's happening there?

Well, the Vietnamese can't express their discontent through politics because opposition parties are banned, but informal criticism is growing. There are a lot of Vietnamese social media users, about 65 million out of a total population of 100 million, according to We Are Social, a British firm. As the level of education has improved in the country, And more and more people have access to the internet. They've been exposed to values that are antithetical to the communist paradise that the regime is trying to build. These are values like democracy and human rights, and they can express those views on social media.

And so it's that disquiet then in the public that's causing the disquiet in the party. I mean, how is the— how's the party dealt with that, that space for criticism?

Harshly. They have cracked down over the past In the past 5 years, they've arrested 280 people for, quote, "anti-state activities." That's up from 68 in the previous 5-year period. They've instructed the state-run press to scrub phrases like "civil society" and "human rights" from their pages. And in the months leading up to the National Congress, this crackdown has intensified. Earlier this month, they sentenced 3 freelance journalists who are famous for criticizing the government to between 11 and 15 years in prison. It's a lot easier to shoot off an angry tweet or Facebook post than it is to organize in Vietnam, where protest is technically illegal. But actually, there have been a lot of protests, you know, in real life over the last several years. So in 2018, for instance, tens of thousands of Vietnamese took to the streets because they were angry about a proposed law that they were worried would allow Chinese companies to lease special economic zones for up to 99 years. There's a lot of anti-Chinese sentiment in Vietnam because there's a lot of concern that the Chinese are infringing on their sovereignty. And the protests were so violent and angry— there were clashes between the police and protesters— that the government eventually abandoned this law.

So a good pandemic response and the economic growth that comes with that somewhat offset by this discontent. What else is on party leaders' minds?

Ironically, trade is going to be a worry as well. And I say ironically because trade is a massive driver of economic growth. It is through trade that Vietnam has been able to transform itself into this manufacturing powerhouse. And yet at the same time, it gives its export markets leverage over the government. So for instance, in order to get the EU to agree to a free trade deal last year, Vietnam had to agree to abolish force labor and allow for the creation of independent labor unions, which was a massive concession.

But surely concerns such as that aren't limited to the EU?

By no means. The party officials have to think very carefully about their relations with both China, its biggest trade partner, and the US, its biggest export market. The Trump administration came down really hard on Vietnam. They labeled it a currency manipulator late last year, and Trump has described Vietnam as, quote, almost the single worst abuser of everybody for that reason. So the party will be very keen to rebuild the relationship with the Biden administration. But at the same time, it can't be seen to cozy up too closely to the US for fear of offending China, with whom it has an incredibly important relationship. You know, it shares an ideology, it shares a long land border, and they have an important trade relationship. You know, China is its largest source of materials and equipment for Vietnam's manufacturing industry. So that— it's a tricky balancing act required of party officials to get that relationship right. So whoever emerges from the Congress as Secretary-General, there won't be much time for celebrating. He's going to have a lengthy to-do list.

Charlie, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

Mimi is 15. She's very much a typical teenager. She loves school. She's extremely social, loves being around people.

Annelie Jefferson from Seattle is the mother of Mimi, who, like many other children in America, hasn't been at school since March.

It got to a point where she was getting so frustrated that she would just scream, and then she would start to bite herself.

Life without in-person learning Remote learning has been particularly hard on Mimi, who suffers from Angelman syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes severe physical and learning disabilities. Mimi is nonverbal and can't operate a computer.

We've seen a lot of physical regression. She uses a walker to get around. She walked at school in the corridors and in the hallways, and she covered quite a distance. And it's not a situation where I can say, "Okay, let's go and walk around the block or something." She's not going to be forced into physical activity if there's not really a reason for it. And regarding the academic skills, it's a whole year that she's missing.

Annelie says that home learning was becoming counterproductive.

I just decided, you know what, this is not worth it for the amount of stress it causes, not only to her but to the rest of the family, and she's not really gaining anything. So we actually stopped any form of online participation in November.

Hopes of a return to lessons for those children who've been stuck at home may have been lifted recently by President Joe Biden. In one of his first executive orders upon taking office last week, he promised to throw the strength of the federal government behind an effort to reopen schools by April. But it's going to take more than an infusion of federal funds to get kids back into the classroom.

It's now 9 or 10 months since America's classrooms first closed, yet less than half of children in America are being offered any kind of in-person schooling.

Mark Johnson is our education correspondent.

Even where in-person schooling is available, many parents are choosing to keep their children at home. So in some urban districts, for example, we're seeing only 20 to 40% of children take up the offer of in-person schooling when it's being made available to them.

And how does that all compare with other parts of the rich world?

Well, it compares very poorly. So almost all European countries have fully opened their school systems for at least some period since lockdowns first And during the autumn, we saw France, Belgium, Switzerland keep schools open even while they weathered national infection rates that were some way above any that America has yet recorded. Pupils in some parts of Europe have had to return to periods of remote learning. So schools in Britain, for example, have not reopened after the Christmas break. But in general, these kinds of shutdowns have only happened after authorities have exhausted all the other means at their disposal of controlling rising hospital admissions.

And what do you think the reason is for that difference with America?

Well, there's an important difference in who is actually making the decisions about whether schools should or should not reopen. So in Europe, these decisions, they fall largely to national or regional governments. But in America, the power has generally been devolved to officials in each of its 14,000 school districts. So that makes it more difficult to have a joined-up infection-fighting strategy where you make sure that schools are the very last things that you close and the very first things you open when contemplating lockdowns. Lockdowns. These districts in America have had to negotiate with unions and with parents, and some of them are coming to conclusions about reopening that don't look especially well-reasoned. So we've got research, for example, from Brown University, which shows that local infection rates made little difference to whether schools opened or stayed closed at the end of the summer. In fact, the main factor was local politics. So areas that lean Republican were much more likely to reopen, those that lean Democrat were much more likely to stay shut. The same research also found that schools were much more likely to stay shut in places that had strong teachers' unions.

So given all of that having gone on at a local level, could anything have been done at a federal level to help in emergency times?

I think a lack of trust in federal leadership is one big reason why we are where we are. So during the summer, President Trump did push for schools to reopen.

Indefinite school closures will inflict lasting harm to our nation's children. We must follow the science and get students safely back to school while protecting children, teachers, staff, and family. We have to remember that there's another side.

The problem is that not many people believed that he'd grappled with the science or even necessarily that he had kids' best interests at heart. So all this has probably contributed to a situation where local decision makers, teachers, and parents have retreated to partisan positions or, or are making decisions about school reopening based on their gut.

And how much will that change now that America has a new administration? What should President Biden do to help kids get back to school?

In his first days, he has done some of the right things. So he says he wants most schools open within his first 100 days, and he gave school reopening a mention in his inauguration speech.

We can right wrongs. We can put people to work in good jobs. We can teach our children in safe schools. We can overcome the deadly virus.

He's promising to find a lot more money to help schools reopen. That will be especially helpful in run-down urban districts that find it much harder than others to put in place basic measures like masking, ventilation, air filtration. But I think he could be making better use of his bully pulpit to be reiterating the harm that's being done as a result of school closures and underlining the urgency of the situation. It's not as if European classrooms are all stunningly spacious and highly funded. It's more that there's been a more thoughtful debate in those countries about weighing the risks and the benefits of getting back to school.

And about those harms, and we've talked on the show before about the impact that closures ultimately have on students in the longer run, are we seeing any evidence of that already in America?

Oh, absolutely. So it's not just lost learning, although that's, you know, very serious. It's also lost opportunities in life. So there's been a 29% fall in the number of low-income high schoolers that are going straight from school to university. That's just one example of the problems we're seeing now. And that's in part because teachers aren't around to encourage them to take up those chances. And of course, welfare is a huge worry. There's been steep declines, something between 20% and 40%, in reports of child abuse in several states during the pandemic, in part because teachers aren't around to keep an eye on vulnerable kids. I mean, there's a lot going on in America right now, and there's been a lot going on for months, but I can't help but think that when we look back at this period a few years from now, the fact that the world's richest country was only able to get a minority of its children into classrooms for 9 months to a year, I think we'll look back on that with a certain sense of shame.

Thanks very much for joining us, Mark.

Thank you.

Part of the schooling debate in America has hinged on trust. Trust that is also at the heart of the country's vaccination push. This week, Checks and Balance, our sister show on American politics, takes a look at how past health crises and nefarious experiments influence how trusting Americans are when it comes to healthcare. Look for Checks and Balance from your preferred podcast purveyor. Sometimes it can be a challenge to establish where an author ends and their fiction begins. Take the thriller writer Patricia Highsmith, who was known for her dark, calculating, and frequently cruel characters and character.

Every single thing Highsmith ever wrote or wrote about herself is indicative of who she was.

Joan Shenkar is a biographer of Highsmith, who was born 100 years ago this month.

She could not have one idea without having its opposite. So everything in her books is contradicted, and she presents a really complex reality.

Books like The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train.

She was born 9 days after her mother divorced her father. So she was born into a contradiction, and it allowed her always to say that she was born out of wedlock but still legitimate. And that is Highsmith. There's always an aura of some kind of illegitimacy hanging around her.

Reading her novels and watching the many film adaptations offer insights into her complex psyche.

What's fascinating about Patricia Highsmith's work is murder was central, but they're not mysteries. You always know who the killer is.

Emily Bobrow writes about culture for The Economist.

She was most interested in the psychology around killing, around murder. She was more interested in whether someone felt guilt, or even more intriguingly, if they didn't. And the thrill ends up being not piecing together a crime, but siding with the criminal. Most famously, Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley, who is basically a psychopath, but you end up rooting for him.

And so what do you see in her life, in her biography, that might lend itself to that kind of interest in the dark corners of psychology?

Oh yeah, she was fascinatingly difficult, very prickly, and her stories regularly portray love as this fragile illusion, and the marriages tend to border on farce. She clearly has very little faith in monogamy or in matrimony. There's little question that all of this came from personal experience. Her mother often would say it was funny that her daughter liked the smell of turpentine because that was what she drank when she tried to abort her. And Patricia Highsmith once explained in an interview that most murders take place within the family. You mustn't forget that. It's hardly a coincidence that in Strangers on a Train, her first novel published when she was 29, hinges on a man's desire to kill his father, and Tom Ripley is an orphan. And most of her heroes are loners.

And what about the romantic end of her life, if she preferred solitude and saw love as an illusion?

Oh, sure. So what's interesting about her is she preferred men in every way but in bed. She was a fairly voracious lesbian, but she didn't seem to have much respect for women. She once said, "I don't see women as leaving the house." This was in 1984. She complained that feminists were always complaining about something. You know, it's then fascinating that she is actually the author of the very first lesbian story that had a happy ending. "The Price of Salt," which was made into a film several years ago as "Carol," which was a very good film. It doesn't feature murder, and it's actually quite romantic. She published it under a pseudonym. It's held up as really a beautiful, important book, and yet she had a lot of shame about being a lesbian, and she insisted that she couldn't be be in a relationship living with someone regularly because it undermined her creativity.

It sounds like she didn't much care for people, even herself, in a way.

Yeah, it's fair to say that she was not only misanthropic, but she was also fairly odious. She nursed some prejudices. She was racist. She was fiercely anti-Semitic. She believed that the Holocaust didn't go far enough. In fact. She was a really complicated woman, and she lashed out at others, but was often fairly uncomfortable within herself.

So why then has her work, the legend around her, been so enduring, do you think?

Well, she captures something really unsettling about the human condition, and so her books don't age out of that. They're not associated with a time and place. There's something timeless about what she's investigating. Her heroes are lonely, lonely and immoral and painfully self-conscious, perhaps like Highsmith herself. And she understood that the crux of life for all of us is to try to figure out how to bridge the gulf between ourselves and others, and also that that often feels impossible.

Emily, thanks very much for joining us.

Yes, of course. Thank you.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts, and you can subscribe to The Economist at economist.com/intelligenceoffer. The link is in the show notes. See you back here tomorrow.