As you probably know, Vietnam followed a similar population policy to China’s draconian one. But this is where the similarities end.
In 1980, China rolled out its one-child policy and began its three and a half decade reign of terror over its citizens’ reproductive lives. Vietnam followed suit in 1988 when the Party began to implement a detailed two-child policy. This in contrast to previous half-hearted attempts at population control and, it can be said, with direct references to the Chinese policy. Fines, forced sterilisations and abortions as well as administrative punishments for party members were all borrowed from the experience of the northern neighbor.
However, Vietnam never managed to achieve China’s “success” owing to a variety of factors. Perhaps the most obvious difference is that a two-child policy is still more humane than a one-child regime since it grants a sibling to the firstborn. Also, Vietnamese officials never had the power and organizational capability to implement the policy with zeal, especially in the rural areas, where party and government reach is weak. Compare this to the CCP, where the Party has managed to stretch its influence into every village, and had ruthless enforcers of the policy patrolling every household.
Moreover, Vietnam’s policies were always far more flexible than the Chinese ones. In 1993, many of the actual fines and punishments for ordinary folks violating the birth policy were relaxed. Between 2003 and 2008, thanks to a Constitutional amendment which mentioned the granting of reproductive freedoms, ordinary non-Party member Vietnamese people enjoyed de facto reproductive liberty. Birth quotas were in practice only applied for Communist Party members, many of whom resented the limit themselves and found ways around it.
In 2009, in what can only be called an error in judgement, the Vietnamese decided to enforce the implementation of the two-child policy after concerns that a birth rate bump was increasing the “population burden”. Yet in practice it remained filled with loopholes, particularly as the Vietnamese Communists became aware of the threat of an ageing population and demographic winter far sooner than the Chinese. By the time the Chinese moved to a two-child policy in 2015, the Vietnamese were already thinking of scrapping limits altogether.
The turning point for Vietnam was probably in October 2017, when Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong issued Resolution 21, following the 6thPlenary Session of the 12thCentral Committee of the Vietnamese Communist Party (yep, it’s a mouthful of a name for a meeting). Resolution 21 practically ended the two-child policy. Couples (including Party members) would not be punished or fined for having a third child and above, and low birth rate areas such as Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) would now actively encourage couples to have at least two children.
Vietnam’s TFR dropped to around 6 in the 1960s, to 1.99 in 2011, but, partly thanks to friendlier birth policies it bounced back somewhat to the near-replacement 2.09 in 2016 and was 2.05 in 2018. This, mind you, is the Confucian world/Sinosphere’s best birth rate report card. Every other nation from South Korea’s 0.98 to Taiwan’s 1.1 to North Korea’s 1.89 all fall shy of Vietnam’s fertility.
Chart and table of the Vietnam fertility rate from 1950 to 2020. United Nations projections are also included through the year 2100.
The current fertility rate for Vietnam in 2020 is 2.041births per woman, a 0.39% declinefrom 2019.
The fertility rate for Vietnam in 2019 was 2.049births per woman, a 0.34% declinefrom 2018.
The fertility rate for Vietnam in 2018 was 2.056births per woman, a 0.93% increasefrom 2017.
The fertility rate for Vietnam in 2017 was 2.037births per woman, a 0.94% increasefrom 2016.
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