%0 Journal Article
%T Actively cautious:  Industrialization and rural livelihood choices in contemporary northern Vietnam
%A Lam Minh Chau
%J South East Asia Research
%@ 2043-6874
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/0967828X17752415
%X This article uses the case of a northern Vietnamese village to explore how rural households in Asia have negotiated both the opportunities and challenges of marketization and capitalist industrial modernity. I focus on the Vietnamese state¡¯s push to marketize village livelihoods by means of mass establishment of industrial parks comprising largely Foreign Direct Investment factories in the countryside. The state expects young villagers to abandon low-value agricultural livelihoods and treat factory work as their only livelihood strategy and the lifetime warranty of their well-being. Yet while young villagers have been responsive to new opportunities of industrial employment, they have all treated factory work in ways very different from what the state expects: merely as one of their household¡¯s diverse portfolio of livelihood options. I argue that villagers have handled the encounter with industrial modernity in ways rarely documented in the literature on marketization in rural Asia: as ¡®actively cautious¡¯ decision-makers, who actively pursue industrial employment to improve their family¡¯s living standards, and carefully maintain a portfolio of livelihood strategies to protect the family¡¯s well-being from the many insecurities of the industrial workplace
%K Industrialization
%K livelihood
%K rural
%K uncertainty
%K Vietnam
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0967828X17752415