Vientiane and Lao Society in Transformation: Field Observations on Social Change, Education, Buddhism, Historical Memory, and Urbanization, 1975–2011

This paper is an integrated English translation of two Japanese field reports by Eiji Murashima, originally published in 2003 and 2011. Rather than presenting the reports as separate translations, the English edition reorganizes them into a single chronological narrative while retaining the observations, interviews, numerical data, comparisons, interpretive remarks, and notes of the originals. The resulting record follows changes in Laos from the author’s first contacts with the country in the 1970s and repeated visits from 1988 onward through a return to Vientiane in February 2011. Drawing on repeated field observation, interviews, visits to schools and Buddhist institutions, and direct observation of urban life, the study traces the transformation of Vientiane and Lao society during and after the New Economic Mechanism. It describes the shift from the late-socialist conditions of the 1980s—marked by strong Soviet influence, limited mobility, deteriorated infrastructure, and bicycle-centered transport—to the rapid motorization, foreign investment, urban redevelopment, commercial advertising, and expanding use of the Lao national currency visible by 2011. It also records the growing influence of Thailand, China, Vietnam, Japan, and other external actors in education, investment, infrastructure, and everyday consumption. A central part of the paper examines education and social mobility. Based on school visits and interviews with scholarship applicants and university administrators in 2002, it documents teacher shortages, extremely low public-sector salaries, the expansion of private education, demand for English-language study, competitive university admission, overseas scholarships, and the role of the National University of Laos. A 2011 comparison between public schools in Vientiane and Udon Thani, northeastern Thailand, further illustrates the large disparity in educational facilities and public support across the Mekong while also highlighting differences in family life and neighborhood schooling. The paper also investigates the relationship between Buddhism and the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party. Interviews with senior monks, village officials, and laypeople show how Buddhist institutions continued to function within a socialist one-party system and how local party and administrative structures participated in the regulation of monastic life and ordination. The 2011 observations further examine revolutionary historical memory, museums, unexploded ordnance, the Anouvong monument, state-sponsored nationalism, Lao-language publishing, television, foreign investment, and monetary regulation. Taken together, the successive field observations reveal a distinctive combination of market transition, party rule, Buddhism, nationalism, foreign aid, educational aspiration, and social mobility in contemporary Laos.