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This commentary on the papers collected in this special issue identifies certain recurring themes from the papers and examines these in light of the urban transitions now being experienced by Vietnam and China, as elsewhere in Asia. These include: tensions in state-society relations as expressed in processes of periurbanization; the effects of the expansion of market relations in land and urban development; the persistence of the discursive categories traditional and modern in the analysis of periurbanization; and a consideration of what the periurban might imply vis-à-vis conventional notions of urban and rural, now and into the future. This discussion of recurring themes from the papers is prefaced by some reflections on how our choices of terminology may influence our theoretical understanding of a situation, event or condition. The specific question here is what is the difference between periurbanization and suburbanization, and it is argued that the distinction between the two may derive more from who is using the terms and the contexts within which they are situated than from specific denotative meanings of the words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities and their fringes are both symbolic and material, imbued with subjective meanings as well as objective physical attributes. In this paper, I show how the physical and social transformation of periurban space in Hồ Chí Minh City emerges from and also contributes to a dynamic interaction between symbolic understandings of space as well as material, political economic forces that transform space in concrete ways. On the symbolic level, I show how conceptions of "inside" versus "outside" as well as rural versus urban play into Vietnamese meaning systems that lend a sense of conceptual order and coherence to the larger organization of urban space. In rapidly urbanizing contexts like Hồ Chí Minh City, the periurban fringe is dynamic and ever-changing, and the political-economic forces of real- estate speculation, city planning and infrastructure development interact with Vietnamese notions of what an ideal city might look like. This paper shows how periurban spaces in different parts of Hồ Ch í Minh City can best be understood as spaces of "material symbolism," places where the material attributes of space, the political economy of development, and the symbolic meaning attributed to space all restructure each other in dialectical fashion. Just as symbolic meanings frame how residents perceive these emergent spaces, these same spaces also transform the symbolic meaning of Vietnamese cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the recent rise in land disputes in the rapidly urbanizing outskirts of Hanoi. It presents emerging social conflicts as resulting from a clash between the rules and practices of urbanization as devised and regulated locally by periurban people and the territorialization projects that municipal authorities and land developers try to impose on them. At the heart of these conflicts are expropriations of large tracts of periurban land by state-backed developers and the reforms of local institutions that facilitate this process. Using the case of a village recently annexed to the city, this paper examines how local people resort to contentious politics to resist this urban encroachment. The paper finds that groups of elderly villagers assumed a leading role in crafting and deploying acts and discourses of resistance, relying on state-promoted values to support their claim. It further suggests that, while periurban villagers acknowledge the necessity of integrating their locality into Hanoi's urban fabric and governance system, they rise up when this process threatens moral relationships inherited from the prerevolutionary and collectivization periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the dynamics of the restructuring of Vietnamese discourses on culture and the nation at large over the past half a century, in relation to the process of ritual revitalization in Vietnam since the early 1970s. It is a process culminating in the Vietnamese socialist state's official embrace of a broader range of past practices as part of Vietnam's cultural legacy. This recognition extends to the official discourse on the nation, culture and development. The paper suggests that this shift is rooted at least as much in the dialogic relation between the Vietnamese socialist state and local populations, as in the stronger integration of Vietnam into the global capitalist system. The analysis is based partly on field data on ritual revitalization from two northern Vietnamese communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last two decades, there has been a dramatic rise in international marriages in East and Southeast Asia. A large proportion of these have been between men from wealthier countries and women from poorer countries, many of which are mediated by commercial matchmaking agencies. Agencies that offer men instant marriages with Vietnamese women began to make an appearance in Malaysia in the early 2000s, following closely behind Singapore and Taiwan. In this paper, we use the concepts of objective centrality and social capital to examine three interfaces that marriage brokers in Malaysia have to bridge: the interface with male clients, with access to the supply of potential brides from Vietnam, and with the bureaucratic procedures of immigration and marriage registration. We present one story in greater depth to illustrate the sociability and social capital accumulation process of one Vietnamese bride as she works to establish relationships of trust with her husband and his family. As she makes the transition from marriage migrant to "good wife," she is able to access the social networks of her husband and his family to transform herself into a marriage broker, increasing her own autonomy and access to resources in the process. The surface observation that entering the commercial matchmaking industry does not require much economic capital conceals the considerable amount of social capital that is required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taiwanese-managed factories in Vietnam treat workers better than in China. This paper seeks to explain this unexpected phenomenon. Four factors are seen to contribute to this difference: the two country's household registration systems, the living arrangements of workers in these factories, the behavior of the two nations' trade unions and, crucially, the role played by the two governments. This comparative study concludes that intervention by the state is critical in improving labor conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]