North Viet Nam: How the Cooky Crumbles

The Communist government of North Viet Nam is nervously looking toward the south. There, the Communist guerrillas are doing as well as ever, having extended their hold on the Mekong delta and the high plateau of South Viet Nam. But last week U.S.-supplied aircraft were dropping fiery chemicals to burn off jungle foliage from guerrilla hiding places along the Laos border. U.S. military advisers were training South Vietnamese battalions, and plans were under way to increase the South Viet Nam army from 170,000 men to 200.000.

The Red rulers of North Viet Nam had economic worries as well as military ones. True to form, Radio Hanoi trumpeted that things were getting better and better, told endlessly about workers “overfulfilling” their production quotas. The new slogan for 1962 had the old dialectical ring: “Fulfill all targets from the very outset—the first day, the first month, the first quarter!”

But beneath the slogans and the cheers ran a thin line of complaint that some workers and peasants were not toeing their Marx. In Hanoi last week a party official admitted that the big China-Viet Nam Friendship agricultural cooperative had worked only 160 full days last year, and that this lackadaisical record was typical of the other cooperatives, which include 90% of North Viet Nam’s peasant families. Even North Viet Nam’s boss. “Uncle” Ho Chi Minh, joined in the complaints.

A party newspaper denounced the activities of Mrs. Toan and Mrs. Hoa. a pair of resourceful peddlers who operate a portable Woolworth’s on one of Hanoi’s main streets. One morning, a Red reporter had visited all the state trade stores with out finding a single fountain pen. He then watched while Mrs. Toan and Mrs. Hoa sold dozens of fountain pens in less than an hour, in addition to razor blades, moth balls, nylon stockings, shoelaces, buttons and aspirin tablets—all in short supply at the state stores.

Hostility to the state’s trade monopoly extends deep into the countryside. Theoretically, all farm produce should be marketed through the state, but huge amounts of rice, pork and corn are being diverted from official channels. A state inspector noticed a strange fragrance in the air as he entered the village of Me Tri. Following his nose, he discovered that almost every villager was engaged in baking com —a lightly toasted cooky made of unripe, glutinous rice. Me Tri had developed so flourishing an illegal cooky business that the villagers were even buying rice grain from other cooperatives. Red sleuths found that villagers were also slaughtering pigs for private sale, making moonshine from corn, and illegal noodles from rice.

To deal with the situation, the party summoned an “important conference” at Hanoi to help strengthen the ”state plan” and stamp out free enterprise, denounced as “a legacy from colonial times.”