The results show that the pandemic’s broad social and economic impact has adversely affected population health well beyond those directly suffering from COVID-19. Study participants with chronic conditions faced significant challenges in managing their symptoms during the pandemic. They experienced a loss of income and difficulties in accessing healthcare or medications, with the resulting delayed and foregone care leading to uncertain longer-term effects. For a nontrivial portion of participants, these factors are associated with the worsening of diabetes symptoms. The threat is twofold among people living in rural populations with limited access, availability, and affordability of healthcare services.

A Global Health Priority

The unintended adverse consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on chronic disease care may also further aggravate inequality in health outcomes. “If the trend continues and no immediate actions are taken to mitigate pandemic impacts,” Eggleston and her colleagues caution, then “the Asia-Pacific region will struggle to achieve the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 3.4 to reduce premature mortality from non-communicable diseases by a third relative to 2015 levels and to promote mental health and wellbeing.”

Addressing the pandemic’s unintended negative social and economic impacts on chronic disease care is a global health priority, determine the researchers. They propose several measures to help provide timely care for people with chronic conditions in resource-constrained settings. These include implementing innovations in healthcare delivery models to improve the adoption of healthy lifestyle changes and self-management of chronic disease and mild COVID-19 symptoms, increasing investment in interventions to provide social and economic support to disadvantaged populations, and strengthening primary healthcare infrastructure and support of healthcare providers.

The study was supported in part by funding from Shorenstein APARC’s faculty research award, Stanford King Center for Global Development, and a seed grant from the Stanford Center for Asian Health Research and Education.

My summer internship experience at the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI) was remote due to the pandemic. It was nonetheless a memorable experience as I got to explore cybersecurity issues around Southeast Asia. ASPI is a think-tank under the umbrella of the Asia Society family, which aims to explain the diversity of Asia to the United States and the complexity of the United States to Asia. It heightens understanding between the two regions and tackles major policy challenges confronting the Asia-Pacific in security, prosperity, and sustainability by providing solution-oriented recommendations and ideas for such challenges.

At Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI), I delved into policies and developments around the data privacy issue in Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Singapore. I learned how these countries bring up policies and collaborate bilaterally, regionally, and globally to tackle problems around cybersecurity. My summer internship experience also enriched my knowledge and understanding of the world.

Working at ASPI

The internship started in June 2021, around the end of the spring quarter, and continued through the end of summer. There were a total of four interns in the Washington D.C. office. I mainly worked with a small team of three - Elina, my supervisor, Chris, my co-intern, and I - which focused on cybersecurity issues.

My supervisor, Elina Noor, an inspiring expert in cyberspace, especially in the Southeast Asia region, led the team with great insights and leadership. Along with my co-intern, Chris, we spent the entire three months working on a project that studies Ethical Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data for Inclusive Development in Southeast Asia. The project itself is expected to continue for a year, and we were in the early stages of the project. 

As a security research intern, I collected data and assisted the research. Additionally, I focused on building-up fundamental understanding of the project - determining the stages of development each country is in, how they respond to the global trend and issues, and what criteria need to be included in analyzing the different characteristics of each country, considering both the local context and the global trend. In the next nine months, the project will survey countries’ positions on these issues, assess the importance and impact of the topic, and highlight the significance of engaging in international developments. I am excited for the final product to come forth, a collaborative work of all people involved in this project.

Other responsibilities also came along the way. I had the opportunity to find the correlation between the South China Sea dispute and cyber incidents between the countries claiming sovereignty over the region. These incidents are ambiguous to identify, and the attribution is not always clear. It was also challenging to make a data set from scratch as it was a whole new experience. However, I managed to conclude that cyber incidents spiked around the time of the major disputes around the South China Sea. No secret that the Global Economy class taught by Professor Aturupane from Fall 2020-21 helped me make sense of the data set and read graphs!

The interns in the New York and Washington D.C. office took turns doing daily press scans, following up with news from the Northeast to the Middle East. It was amazing to learn how Asia, as one big continent, held such a diverse set of news and events occurring each day. I also accumulated lists of people in congress, embassies, and the government to share the op-eds from ASPI. Most of these administrative works were done as a team effort, and I met a larger ASPI family through the experience.

Ending My Internship

Working at ASPI was a rewarding way to spend my summer. I owe special thanks to Elina and Chris, who were incredibly supportive and made me feel like I was making a significant contribution to the institution. I was also rewarded with knowledge and insights into new topics in Asia and its relations with the world, mainly focusing on the U.S. It provided great insight into the developments of cybersecurity issues and data privacy around Southeast Asian countries. It was a fantastic opportunity to apply what I learned at Stanford to real-world policy problems. I thoroughly enjoyed my internship this summer and feel ready to embark on new challenges that will come forth in my career path.

Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Hanoi on Tuesday, August 24, as part of a high-stakes visit to Southeast Asia this week that aims to bolster economic and security ties with U.S. partners in Singapore and Vietnam. Ms. Harris is the first U.S. Vice President to visit Vietnam.

Vietnamese online newspaper VnExpress spoke with APARC Southeast Asia Program Director Donald K. Emmerson about the significance of Harris’ visit. The following is an expanded version of the interview.  

VnExpress: What does the visit mean to the United States, to Vietnam, and to the U.S.-Vietnam relationship?

Emmerson: U.S.-Vietnam relations have steadily and markedly improved in recent years, especially in the security realm. A case in point is the recent visit of the U.S. secretary of defense. The first-ever visit to Hanoi by a sitting American vice-president, Kamala Harris, is meant to further strengthen U.S.-Vietnam relations. Their importance will be underscored by Kamala Harris’s status in the U.S. government, second only to President Biden’s. Their scope will be advanced by the prominence of nonmilitary topics on her agenda.

The two governments have agreed to call their relations “comprehensive.” By attending to economic and social cooperation as well as security matters, the visit will better illustrate that inclusive label. It is even possible that the United States and Vietnam could, in the not too distant future, upgrade their relationship by calling it not only “comprehensive” but “strategic” as well.

VnExpress: In Hanoi, Harris will launch the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention regional office in Southeast Asia. Why did the United States choose Vietnam for the CDC regional office? And what is your assessment of the Vietnam-U.S. medical cooperation, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Emmerson: In the realm of health, Vietnam offers a record of achievement and challenge. Based on official statistics, Vietnam appears to have countered the virus more effectively than most Asian countries. Yet it still needs to deal more thoroughly with the consumption of wildlife sold in wet markets where future viruses can bridge the gap from animals to people. COVID-19, which began in neighboring China, has killed nearly 4.5 million people worldwide and worsened the lives of almost everyone on the planet. A regional office of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Vietnam could reduce the threat of future pandemics while helping to strengthen health systems and policies throughout Southeast Asia.  

VnExpress: What do you think about Vietnam's role in the region and in the world?

Emmerson: Nearly five decades have passed since the end of Vietnam’s successful “Resistance War against America” in 1975 and the failure of China’s invasion of Vietnam in 1979. The challenge for Vietnam going forward will be to maintain the resilience and autonomy that it has earned at such a high cost in lost lives. Kamala Harris’s visit can contribute to that goal. If and as inter-state peace continues to prevail in East Asia, one can also hope that Vietnam’s leaders will feel less threatened and thus possibly less obliged to curtail the rights and freedoms of their own people.  

As for Vietnam’s role in the region (and, indirectly, the world), one priority could be for Hanoi to coordinate its policies on the South China Sea with those of other Southeast Asian claimant states and possibly with other states who use the sea and also oppose China’s campaign to control its waters.

1. Can you give us an overview of your research and the topics you’re investigating?

My research addresses the following question: Why are some authoritarian regimes more responsive to social unrest than others? While it might seem counterintuitive to think of authoritarian regimes in this light, repression and responsiveness often occur in tandem under authoritarian rule. Centered on a comparison between Vietnam and China, I document the steps that each has taken to address social discontent fueled by pervasive government seizures of rural land. In response to societal input between 2003 and 2017, Vietnam enacted comprehensive and programmatic reforms to reduce the permissible scope for government land expropriation whereas those enacted by China were relatively marginal and piecemeal. At the subnational level, this difference has had important implications for land rights and the security of villagers in both countries. In summary, despite their many similarities, the manner and degree of their responsiveness have varied. My research then traces the historical origins that undergird the political development and institutional character of Vietnam and China’s divergent responsiveness to social unrest. 

2. How did you first become interested in these topics?

My interest in the repressive-responsive character of authoritarian regimes stems from my preoccupation with questions of political legitimacy, societal resistance, and institutional dynamics in authoritarian contexts. One particular experience that stoked my interest was my visit to Wukan, Guangdong in 2016. Wukan was once hailed as an emblematic case of grassroots democracy and accommodation by the Chinese state, when villagers’ outcries against the local government’s seizure of their land resulted in the re-election of the village committee in 2012. Yet, when I visited in 2016, villagers expressed that nothing had changed, and that “everything that could be done has already been done.” This experience led me to question what responsiveness means in authoritarian contexts.

3. During the last year, the world has changed significantly because of the pandemic and fluctuating politics in many nations. Have these changing global situations given you any new insights into your research?

The pandemic has underscored the need for a nuanced and contextual understanding of democracies and non-democracies. For instance, the variation in state responses to COVID-19 suggests that there is no clear correlation between responsiveness or the effectiveness of government responses to COVID-19 and regime types. Consider Vietnam’s proactive approach and success at containing the pandemic as opposed to the US. Other recent developments such as the crackdowns on pro-democracy protests in Thailand and mass protests against the recent military coup in Myanmar showcase how quickly state responsiveness to social demands can erode, even in multi-party states.

4. What has your experience as one of our Shorenstein Fellows been like during this unusual period of time when we haven’t physically been together at APARC?

My fellowship has been remote, and I have therefore needed to be much more proactive to stay as engaged as possible. I have consulted with my mentor often over Zoom, and reached out to other scholars for their feedback and advice on my research. I have also especially appreciated the chance to participate in the China Social Science Workshop, where I've shared my work and learned from other presenters. Other postdoctoral fellows at APARC and I have also gotten together virtually to exchange stories and to share our experiences from this unusual year.  

5. What are some of the things you've done during this past year to give yourself a break from work and have some fun?

Due to the pandemic, I have been living back home to Austin, Texas, since March of last year. The last time that I was home for this long must have been after I graduated from college. So, for the first time in a long time, I've planted tomatoes, eggplants, and sunflowers in our garden, and I've really enjoyed watching them bloom and ripen. With everything growing, it feels like I've spent most of my break in our backyard defending our flowers, fruits, and vegetables from squirrels and bunnies! But luckily I also have our two dogs, Wishie and Sushi, to help me!

6. As the state of the pandemic changes and things in academia and our communities, what are some things you are looking forward to both professionally and personally?

I'm certainly looking forward to having conferences in person again! I'm also still not sure when it will be possible and safe for me to visit Asia again, especially Vietnam and China, but I have missed these places. I'm also learning Khmer this summer, and I'm excited to eventually visit Cambodia to pursue my research there.

We often think of language as a democratic field, but it is not quite the common property of its speakers, argues Jeffrey Weng, APARC’s 2020-21 postdoctoral fellow on contemporary Asia. Rather, language is a skill that must be learned, says Weng, and it creates social divisions as much as it bridges divides. 

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What has shaped your interest and research into the study of language and linguistic dissemination?

As a first-grade student in the early 1990s attending Chinese school in central New Jersey on Saturday mornings, I learned how to write my first complete sentence in the language: “I am an overseas Chinese.” Now, this was a curious sentence to teach to a class full of American-born children of Taiwanese parents, and it’s a reminder that language is never a neutral conveyor of meaning. Language cannot but be freighted with social, cultural, and political import, a lesson reinforced in my high-school Spanish classes, in which I made my first forays into literature in a foreign language: stories by the great writers of Spain and Latin America not only spoke a wholly different language, but they told wholly different stories from those of their British and American counterparts.

Linguistic difference also is a signal of individual and social difference: my childhood visits with family in Taiwan opened my ears to a cacophonous Babel in the media and on the streets—though we spoke Mandarin at home, whenever we went out, people speaking Taiwanese were everywhere to be seen and heard. This was further amplified when I visited mainland China for the first time in my early 20s. Beijing, the supposed wellspring of the nation’s language, was bewildering—I could not understand much of the unselfconscious speech of the locals. And traveling several hundred miles in any direction would only deepen my incomprehension. And yet, on the radio and on TV, during formal events and on university campuses, there was always Mandarin to clear the way. I wanted to learn more about how this language situation came to be. For me, studying the social, cultural, and political nature of language is a way to a deeper understanding of how people are united and divided in vastly different contexts across the globe.

As you’ve looked deeper into how language shapes society and society shapes language, what is something surprising you’ve come to realize about that relationship?

People often see language as the ultimate democratic field when it comes to cultural practice. No matter how much you might tell people not to split their infinitives or end their sentences with prepositions, popular practice will always win the day. Or so we English speakers think. Ever since Merriam-Webster came out with its infamously descriptivist Third New International Dictionary in 1961, Anglophone language nerds have fought over whether dictionaries should be “prescriptive”—that is, rule-setting—or “descriptive”—reflective of popular usage. But really, these are two sides of the same coin. We take it for granted that privately-owned publishers of dictionaries spell out the supposed norms of our language. Not only that, we even think this ought to be the case. French is the usual counterexample: when government language authorities in Quebec or Paris try to stem the Anglophone tide, we think it absurd that so-called authorities would ever try to rule over something so fundamentally unruly as language.

In my research, however, I learned how fundamentally invented Mandarin as a language is—from its highly artificial pronunciation to the way its orthography has been stabilized. There used to be a lot of variability in how characters were written and how they could be used, much like English spelling before the 18th century. Mandarin, both spoken and written, was standardized only in the 1920s to facilitate mass literacy and national cohesion. So linguistic change might often follow and reflect social change, but the process can also operate in reverse—a government can change language in hopes of facilitating social change.

In your latest journal publication, you argue that language nationalization in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam between 1870-1950 was a state-led, top-down process directed at remaking society rather than the more traditional view of diffusion through trade, economics, and cultural exchange. Why is this an important distinction to make?

Again, we often see language as a democratic field, the common property of its speakers, but it isn’t really. Sociolinguists are often quick to remind us that linguistic differences reflect class differences—“proper” language is that of “educated” speakers. But language is a skill, and skills must be learned. Some people can learn skills more easily than others, whether through natural ability or, more importantly, the life circumstances they were born into. Rich people can more easily get a good education. Educational disparities are now part and parcel of today’s broader debates about inequality. But the very fact that we think this is a problem is a product of developments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Before then, broad swaths of humanity were totally illiterate and had no chance at being educated, and most people did not think this was a problem. In Europe, the language of the Church and academia, even to some extent in Protestant areas, was Latin until the 18th century. Local vernaculars had gradually developed as independent media of communication in government chancelleries and popular literature since the Middle Ages, but they did not really gain ascendancy until the age of print-capitalism and nationalism in the 18th and 19th centuries. Marxian-influenced scholars have therefore concluded that the rise of national languages coincided with the rise of the bourgeoisie, whose own languages became those of the nations they constructed.

In France, for example, while revolutionaries in the 1790s advocated the use of Parisian French to unify a country divided by hundreds of local forms of speech, into the mid-19th century, even journeying 50 miles outside Paris found travelers having trouble making themselves understood to the locals. It took more than a century for French to gain a foothold in most of the country. Asia, too, was a polyglot patchwork for millennia, unified at the top by an arcane language much like Latin—Classical Chinese. This situation became politically untenable in the 19th century as European imperialism encroached on traditional sovereignties in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. In order to counter the foreign threat, governments sought to strengthen their societies by educating their populations, which required making it easier to learn how to read and write. While standard languages have been described by historians and sociolinguists as “artificial” for less-privileged learners, Asia’s standard languages were artificial even to their bourgeois inventors.

Our understanding of the present is invariably colored by our interpretation of the past: if we understand a national language to be a bourgeois imposition that diffused via economic development, then we more easily see its continued imposition as a perpetuation of class prejudices. If on the other hand, we see an invented national language as a tool for bridging regional divisions and expanding economic opportunity for our children, then we feel much more positively about the spread of such languages. Both interpretations can be true at the same time, but we must remember that one is inseparable from the other.

Do you see any parallels between how language nationalization has occurred in the past to how language and society are shaping one another in the present?

The number of “standard” Mandarin speakers in the early 1930s could be counted on one hand. Today, it’s the world’s largest language by a number of “native” speakers. Though it began as an elite nationalizing project that was largely ignored by the masses of people in China, Mandarin is now more often seen as a hegemonic threat to local languages and cultures. Language can thus bridge divides, but also create new divisions. People in China are often ambivalent about the pace of change these days. When I visited cousins in rural Fujian during the Lunar New Year a few years ago, I noticed that all my nieces and nephews spoke Mandarin in almost all situations, to their parents, and especially to one another. Only my grandparents’ generation used the local Fuqing dialect as a matter of course. My parents’ generation spoke dialect to their parents, but a mix of Mandarin and dialect to their children—the cousins of my generation, who were able to speak the dialect, but were more comfortable speaking Mandarin among themselves and to their children. One of my young nieces who’d grown up in Beijing, where her parents had moved for work, even had a perfect Beijing accent. In a span of three generations, migration due to expanded opportunity had wrought enormous change in language habits. Much had been gained, but also much had been lost.

How has your time at APARC as one of our Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellows aided your research project?

It’s certainly been a strange year to be a postdoc, given how we’ve all been operating remotely. Nevertheless, life and work have continued, and we’ve all been able to find new ways of building community and getting things done. I’ve personally benefited from the access to the vast academic resources of Stanford—library access, even online alone, is a lifeline to any researcher. Moreover, I’ve had the opportunity to chat on Zoom with Stanford faculty about research and connect with my fellow postdocs to support one another as we figure out how to move forward in our careers in these challenging times.

With your recent appointment as an assistant professor at National Taiwan University in Taipei, how do you anticipate your research interests growing and developing given the tension between Taiwan and China?

I am gratified to begin my academic career in a place of such diversity and openness as Taiwan. Language and identity are constant sites of contention in Taiwan's politics, and I look forward to expanding my on-the-ground understanding of these issues as I begin teaching in the sociology department at National Taiwan University. It is nothing short of miraculous that democracy has flourished at such an intersection of empires, colonialism, repressions, and struggles. And it is unsettling to see that flourishing takes place in such a precarious geopolitical location. NTU's sociology department is at the forefront of understanding all of these vital issues as we barrel forward into an ever more uncertain future.

This week in Hanoi, the city’s streets are lined with Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party flags and posters to promote the 13th Party Congress, the most important political event in the state. Held every five years, the weeklong congress meets to approve future policy and help select Vietnam’s highest-level leaders. This time, the announcement of the next leadership team will determine key questions that will have major implications for the evolution of the role of the state’s legislative body, the Vietnam National Assembly (VNA), says Paul Schuler, APARC’s former Lee Kong Chian fellow on Southeast Asia and former Shorenstein postdoctoral fellow.

Schuler, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Arizona’s School of Government and Public Policy, is an expert on politics in Vietnam and the author of the new book United Front: Projecting Solidarity through Deliberation in Vietnam’s Single-Party Legislature (Stanford University Press, in its monograph series with APARC). In this volume, Schuler examines the past and present functioning of the VNA. Applying a diverse range of social science methods on a wealth of original data, his findings shed light on the role of institutions in Vietnam as well as in authoritarian regimes more broadly.

Here, Schuler explains how the electoral process works in Vietnam’s one-party system, discusses the ways in which the VNA differs from the conventional image of single-party legislatures, and offers insights into how the 13th Party Congress currently underway is poised to shape Vietnam’s future.

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Your book explores why Vietnam, a single-party state, has well-developed electoral and legislative institutions. How is the state’s legislative body, the Vietnam National Assembly, organized and how has it evolved in recent years?

Schuler: Vietnam’s electoral and legislative institutions are some of the most open and active in the communist world. Unlike China, Cuba, and North Korea, as well as most former communist countries in Eastern Europe, Vietnam allows direct elections for National Assembly candidates with more candidates than seats available. Additionally, the legislature allows public debate, including televised queries of high-ranking government officials, including the prime minister.

In terms of its evolution, the legislature has gradually become more professionalized and active since the Doi moi economic opening in 1986 largely to deal with the increased legal complexity required to integrate with the global economy. The electoral process, however, has not changed as much, meaning that the party exerts tremendous control over who is nominated to participate in the elections. The control over the election process is key, because this gives the party a key lever it can use to moderate debate in the legislature. 

How does the electoral process work in a one-party system like Vietnam’s and what does your research reveal about Vietnamese voting behavior?

Schuler: Vietnam’s electoral system is somewhat unique compared to other communist regimes, past and present. Cuba, for example, allows direct elections for its legislature, but only one candidate is allowed to compete for each seat. China’s National People’s Congress elections are indirect, with lower-level legislatures essentially choosing the candidates for the national level. In Vietnam, by contrast, more candidates are allowed than seats. Furthermore, some non-party members are allowed to compete in these direct elections.

Despite this relative openness, the elections are limited in important ways. First, local election committees retain veto power over who gets to run. This means that while in the past few elections, some independent voices have tried to run, they have been barred from competing. Second, there are strict limits on campaigning. Candidate lists are only finalized a few weeks before the elections, and candidates are not allowed to reach out to voters independently and draw contrasts between themselves and their opponents. They are only allowed to campaign in a handful of party-controlled events with a limited number of attendees.

This has several implications for voting behavior. Because of the vetting process, voters may perceive the candidates as indistinguishable. Furthermore, even where there might be differences between the candidates, voters have little opportunity to learn about these differences. Hence, voters have low levels of awareness of their candidates and representatives and are forced to rely on observable cues such as gender, age, or party membership when voting. Interestingly, voters actually prefer party member candidates to independents. Other research I have done with Professor Edmund Malesky suggests that this is because voters at least have some information about the ideological orientation of party member candidates and because they presume these candidates will have better access to government resources.

According to your research, what is the primary role of the VNA? How do your findings differ from the conventional wisdom about legislative institutions under authoritarian rule?

Schuler: Recent research challenges the conventional image of single-party legislatures as rubber stamps, suggesting that legislatures can provide some constraints on leaders in these regimes and provide regime leaders with information about citizen preferences. In terms of the VNA, I don’t find evidence that its main role is to constrain the party. Furthermore, it rarely provides information that the party doesn’t already have through other channels. Instead, the role of the VNA, since 1986, has been to take some of the increasing lawmaking burden that resulted from opening Vietnam’s economy from the party and the government. VNA participation lends legitimacy to these laws.

How, then, do we explain cases where the legislature appears active and critical? For example, how do we explain the case in 2010 where a delegate challenged the prime minister to a vote of no confidence? More recently, ahead of the current party congress, how do we explain a delegate challenging a deputy prime minister to explain the government’s delayed investigation of a company’s producing fraudulent fertilizer? I suggest these incidences are best seen as efforts by party leaders to restrain government officials through the VNA. This, in turn, reflects a key difference between Vietnam and other communist regimes, which is the relative balance of power between the prime minister and general secretary. Given this greater separation, the party has greater use for the VNA to challenge the government than the Chinese party leadership does.

The 13th National Congress of the Vietnamese Communist Party is taking place this week. What are its expected outcomes and how will they shape Vietnam’s future?

Schuler: The Party Congress is the most important national political event in Vietnam, as this is when the top-ranking positions for the next five years are selected. The announcement of the next leadership team will answer three key questions that will have implications for the evolution of the role of the VNA. First, will Nguyen Phu Trong continue as general secretary? If he does, this will likely mean the continuation of Vietnam’s anticorruption campaign. Just as important, it will also contravene an important norm, which is a two-term limit for the general secretary. While age exceptions have been made in the past, the term limit exception could set a precedent for future leaders to remain in power.

Second, will the presidency once again be separate from the general secretary position? Unlike China and other communist nations, in Vietnam, the presidency has traditionally been held by separate officials. This has contributed to an overall more balanced distribution of power in the Politburo than in other contexts, where the general secretary is a far more powerful position. This separation ended with the death of Tran Dai Quang in 2018, when Trong was appointed to replace him. If the position is once again handed to a different leader, this signals that the party will remain committed to some degree of power sharing at the top.

Third, to what degree will the party move to merge state and party functions? Consistent with the decision to merge the positions of the general secretary and president, one of the contenders for power in the Politburo, Pham Minh Chinh, experimented during his leadership of Quang Ninh province with merging party and state positions at the local level. Vietnam has also reestablished party committees, such as the Central Economic Committee, which could exert more direct control over the government. An important question, therefore, is whether the party continues its policy of merging party and government positions and bolstering party policymaking organs.

The answers to these last two questions have particular importance for the VNA. Given that the party uses the VNA to ensure the government is following its direction, if the party bolsters its own direct control mechanisms, either by empowering party committees or merging party and state positions, this could render legislative institutions increasingly superfluous. We could thus see a less visible legislature, and one focused mainly on ironing out technical details of legislation rather than playing a visible role in challenging the government.