HO CHI MINH CITY, VIETNAM — The Vietnamese Communist Party, like its fraternal party in China, has identified the No. 1 threat it faces. The looming danger is called “peaceful evolution.”
That may sound like the weatherman warning of the menace of clear, sunlit skies. But the architects of Market-Leninism, who have delivered fast-growth capitalism to one-party Asian states, are in earnest. The nightmares they have are not about revolutionary upheaval, but the drip, drip, drip of liberal d