Private cash saves Lenin's Park
HANOI - What would Comrade Lenin say ?
The park which everyone in Vietnam's capital, Hanoi, associates with his name is being revitalised, courtesy of some of the world's biggest multi-national corporations.
Uber-capitalists such as Ford, Microsoft and now Unilever are all helping to return the park - once a beacon of enlightened socialist urban development. - to its former glory.
The story of the Park mirrors that of Vietnam's transformation from socialism through economic liberalisation and now into the country's own model of state-led free-enterprise.
More play, more powder
Hanoi is a city of three million people - but one with very few public spaces where children can play safely.
But now, thanks to a washing powder promotion campaign, Hanoi has what it describes as its first "international standard" playpark.
Tran Vu Hoai, head of PR for Unilever Vietnam, says the company has paid for the whole cost of installing the swings and slides in order to encourage Vietnamese children to enjoy active play.
The playpark, together with another one like it in Ho Chi Minh City in the south, cost $125,000.
In total Unilever are spending over $3 million over five years building school playgrounds. In effect, the firm is subsidising the government's education budget.
"It's the first time we've done anything on this scale in Vietnam," Mr Hoai says. "We want to put something back."
But he agrees that the benefits for the company are obvious. Apart from good PR, more active play means more dirty clothes and more washing powder sales.
Urban haven
As things currently stand, spending time in Hanoi's parks can be a charmless experience.
Very few allow children to walk on the grass, and most play areas in the city are built on concrete.
The zoo is interesting only to fans of mangy and demented animals and almost nowhere in Hanoi is safe from speeding motorbikes.
Lenin Park was an oasis in the madness. It used to be a swamp but - according to the legend - in 1958 Ho Chi Minh, the founder of modern Vietnam, decided to turn it into a place for the city to treasure.
With huge labour the park, originally dubbed Unification Park, arose from the mud and was formally opened on 30 May 1961.
When it was finished, Hanoians flocked there to do morning exercises around the lake and couples went chastely courting amid the beautiful green trees.
They came even during the American bombing campaign of the 1960s and 70s - although admittedly they had to pick their way between batteries of surface-to-air missiles.
It was in 1980 that Vietnam's then hard-line communist rulers renamed the park Lenin Park, in tribute to the founder of the Soviet Union.
But by then Vietnam was languishing under the legacy of war and an American economic embargo and, as with so many other pieces of grand socialist engineering, the park started to crumble for lack of a decent maintenance budget.
By 1986, with the economy in crisis, the Communist Party was taking its first steps towards economic reform and around the same time, Lenin Park got some new, home-made, fairground attractions - charging small sums to cover their costs.
Two decades later, they are still there, still charging small sums: 5,000 dong (30 US cents) a ride.
Going to waste
But it wasn't enough. Lenin Park continued to decline, and became a favourite haunt for drug addicts - much to the annoyance of its other users.
"The government haven't spent any money on this park since I was a child," Pham Du Trinh told me as she pushed a child on a newly-installed swing.
"They should have invested in this place a long time ago."
The Hanoi City Department of Transport and Public Works has other priorities, though, such as trying to keep this congested city moving, and the park never got the money it needed.
Vietnam's "socialist-orientated market economy" has led to a number of experiments in the park.
Sega opened a games arcade in 1998 but pulled out a year and half later without making any money.
This prompted a battle for the parks' soul between conservatives who wanted to preserve it - even though its total monthly budget was just $35 - and modernisers who wanted it filled with the bright lights of capitalism.
Change of venue
Finally, a change of management in 2000 led to a search for a middle way.
The following year Ford, Microsoft and New York Life Insurance sponsored a car track to teach children road safety.
Still, the park fought off further attempts by outsiders to turn it into a Disneyland for Hanoi.
The reformers won a small victory in 2003 when the Hanoi People's Committee, the city municipality, voted to change the name of the park back to Unification Park.
As a compromise, Lenin's name and statue were moved to another park closer to the centre of the city.
But no-one in Hanoi calls this other park "Lenin Park". Ask any taxi driver to take you to "Cong Vien Le-Nin", and you'll still end up at the original one.
New direction
Whatever name it carried, and despite the new-found corporate interest, the park still had a terrible reputation for being a "shooting gallery" for heroin addicts and a dangerous place after dark.
Gradually, though, the management have turned it around. New investment has repaired the park and turned it into a place where families again go. For instance, since December 2004 it has boasted new benches - sponsored by Saigon Commercial Bank.
In November 2005, the People's Committee turned the park into an independently-managed company, albeit one which they still own.
The highlight so far has been this summer's opening of the Unilever-sponsored playground. According to says the park management company's director, Nguyen Trung Kien, this kind of co-operation with business is the key to the future of the park.
"We are trying to create a cultural park which serves community activities, mainly focusing on teenagers," he says. "In the future, we will have more joint ventures to develop the Park in line with the requirements of the City authority."
On the swings
So Lenin Park reflects both Vietnam's recent economic history and also its future, in which the Communist Party will try to pursue its "third way": a form of state-led capitalism in which economic growth is harnessed to promote social development.
The future is never certain.
In the meantime, though, Hanoi's children have finally got some decent swings.
And as far as the parents bringing their children to the park are concerned, the new arrangement seems absolutely fine.
"I think a foreign company doing this is better," says Pham Viet Dung.
"If the Hanoi People's Committee could have done it, they would have done it already. They can't come up with innovative ideas quickly enough."
By Bill Hayton - BBC News - December 17, 2006.
|