The State, demographic change and the family in Northern Vietnam 1945-1995

Abstract

The thesis attempts to isolate ways in which the political and economic changes wrought by the northern Vietnamese state between 1945 and 1995 have influenced trends in northern Vietnamese mortality and fertility over the same period. The thesis also attempts to show how the demographic trends, and political and economic changes, have influenced the demography of northern Vietnamese families-in particular the demography of succession and of co-residence. Between 1945 and the early 1980s the northern Vietnamese state pursued a communist development strategy while fighting major wars. The economic institutions introduced by the government were subverted on a large scale and were highly inefficient. Nevertheless, from about the 1950s, mass campaigns and a system of locally-funded rural health centres brought about a rapid decline in mortality. Fertility began to decline slowly in the 1960s. Reasons for the decline included reduced infant mortality, wartime disruption, rising education costs, and, in the cities, the introduction of old-age support schemes. War deaths only partly undid the effects of the mortality decline and sustained high fertility, so that the population continued to grow rapidly, and the mean number of surviving children per woman reached historically unprecedented levels. During the 1980s, the Vietnamese state began to abandon its communist development strategy, in response to successive economic crises and to spontaneous grass roots innovations. Economic reform disrupted the health system, which had already been weakened through lack of investment; mortality nevertheless declined slightly through the 1980s. The fertility decline continued, hastened by economic expansion and the government's birth control program. Northern Vietnam's demographic trends have meant that unprecedentedly high proportions of families have been able to conform to northern Vietnam’s patrilineal succession rules. Demographic change has thus undermined the government's attempt to propagate new succession rules less biased against women. In contrast, and despite perceptions to the contrary, household size and structure have not changed markedly between 1945 and 1995. The relative stability in co-residence patterns has been a result of offsetting effects between mortality decline, fertility decline,and government policy. Show more