Introduction
One can credibly say that democracy and politics in contemporary Vietnam go hand in hand. Such a claim, however is likely to be incredulous a reader of international press coverage to about the country today. Even in scholarly literature. the two words "democracy and "Vietnam are rarely paired. Nevertheless, democracy as a concept, aspiration, and form of government has figured in the country's political evolution from its struggle against French colonial rule in the first half of the twentieth century until debates today about its future
Broadly speaking, there have been two contentious conceptions of democracy in Vietnam democracy as a type of society versus democracy as type of government The next section of this chapter explains both and then focuses on the second, called procedural democracy, because it is far more controversial in the country's current political debates. The Vietnamese government was founded on and has espoused procedural democratic principles, but it falls well short of practicing them. Increasingly in recent years ,Vietnamese critics and opponents of the government have pushed to make procedural democracy a reality. The chances of that happening is then analyzed. I conclude that Vietnam's political system is not likely to change soon to a procedural democracy.