"Socialist economic crime" is a pliant legal concept used to target thieves, prostitutes, counterrevolutionaries, and others seen as a threat to socialism.In Vietnam, socialist economic crime came into use in the 1970s, when the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, having taken over the south, found itself grappling with a socio-economic system it could not control. The party leadership then took to devising an ad hoc criminal code to secure property for the state, moving with great haste to shore up the socialist economy and put an end to all free enterprise. Soon enough, economic crime discourse would merge with a strain of “romantic anticapitalism”—a belief that the arts could re-enchant the prosaic, sinful world of capitalism. The two discourses would take republican-era culture as its chief object of critique. Each in its own way prolonged the sentiment that commercialism had desacralized Vietnamese culture. Each spurred on the campaign to take South Vietnamese cultural artifacts out of circulation so as to break the capitalist-criminal mentality. This presentation will first explain how the party-state brought socialist economic crime to Vietnam, what forms it took, and how it shaped the thinking of bureaucrats and commoners. It will then turn to Bảo Ninh’s Nỗi Buồn Chiến Tranh [The Sorrow of War] to analyze how Vietnamese fiction aligns, or breaks with the letter of the law.
