How Vietnam's path will change is still uncertain
This is the second of two parts of a "Report to readers" on a 10-day trip to Vietnam and Cambodia I recently undertook with other U.S. and European journalists as part of a program sponsored by the German Marshall Fund ( www.gmfus.org). Below are some impressions from my all-too-brief stay in Vietnam, along with answers - to the best of my ability - to readers' questions.
"Please don't come back as some lackey shill espousing the wonders of this worker's paradise," Chronicle Two Cents reader Scott Abramson warned me in an e-mail before I left.
To set Abramson's mind at least partly at rest, I found the notion that Vietnam even pretends to be a worker's paradise, 22 years after the end of the "American war," has long since been swept into the dustbin of history. "You cannot avoid the gap between rich and poor," said Va Xuan Hong, a parliamentary member of the ruling Communist Party, in an interview at his office in Hanoi. "C'est la vie."
And when Vietnamese officials and local business executives talk of deliverance, they refer not to North Vietnamese troops marching into what was then Saigon as U.S. helicopters hauled huddled refugees off the U.S. Embassy rooftop, but, in almost awestruck tones, to the country's accession in January to the World Trade Organization. And it is along the capitalist road - with the late Ho Chi Minh looking down approvingly, we were assured - that Vietnam has become the next "Asian tiger."
The signs are everywhere, at least in the big cities: Ho Chi Minh City's spanking new international airport, which puts New Delhi's airport, for example, to utter shame; smart young Vietnamese women wearing the latest Japanese fashions; $5,000 Piaggio motor scooters selling like hotcakes; a blizzard of boutiques and art galleries (cubist as well as traditional, and not exactly cheap); a Burberry's in downtown Hanoi; not to mention one-bedroom apartments selling for $100,000, if you're lucky,
Barely a day goes by without a foreign head of state accompanied by high-powered economic teams stopping by. This year, $13 billion worth of foreign direct investment poured in. An additional $50 billion worth of applications are being processed. Intel invested $1 billion last year. Vietnam, according to the agenda of a heavyweight venture capital conference in Silicon Valley last week, is "considered the most exciting investment alternative to China." Among those already there: Texas Pacific Equity Fund.
Back to Abramson's skepticism, however. There are numerous dissidents rotting in Vietnamese jails, including a Vietnamese American from Sacramento. They are there because, I was told, talk of multiparty democracy "crosses a black line."
And although I experienced little sense of heavy-handedness - interviews were on the record, government officials were cheery, overt police presence in Hanoi was less apparent than in, say, San Francisco - the government knew who we were seeing. Significantly, the one group of people that did not open up much, especially on politics, was local journalists.
For the time being, we were told, political democracy remains within the confines of the ruling party, where differences over the pace of reform and the need to preserve social protections are regularly thrashed out. Besides, in looking around, we were further informed, the Vietnamese are not too impressed with the way democracy is being practiced elsewhere. "We're all for improvements in democratic processes," said Pham Gia Khim, 57, the country's foreign minister, in an interview in Hanoi. "But economic reform must happen prior to political reform."
While that may come as small comfort to those in jail, I confess to experiencing a great openness among most of the people I met, plus the youth, style (65 percent of the population is under 30) and sheer aliveness of the place. I also sensed similarities with India, which I visited two years earlier, in terms of the countries' dynamism and potential, and the sobering obstacles they have yet to overcome - inadequate education; even worse infrastructure; poor, sometimes corrupt "governance;" HIV/AIDS; and so forth.
"We are integrating into the world," said Pham. "We are totally altering the face of our country." That the Vietnamese appear to enthusiastically embrace that path may have something to do with the fact, as one former government official put it, that "few societies have sacrificed so much for so long."
Whether Vietnam's alteration occurs repressively, like China and Russia, or, more openly, like the former dictatorship of South Korea, is, presumably, a question for its people to decide.
But one thing I was told time and time again is that the Vietnamese do not like to be told what to do.
By Andrew S. Ross - The San Francisco Chronicle - December 16, 2007.
Some economic engines that are driving Vietnam
"Vietnam is one of the most compelling growth stories in the world."
- John Engle, managing director of Singapore's Blackhorse Asset Management, announcing a $400 million Vietnam investment fund last month
In addition to being the second-biggest source of Nikes (75 million pairs in 2006), Vietnam is the world's largest exporter of cashews, the second-largest exporter of rice and coffee, and the fifth-largest shipbuilder. It also has a healthy share of higher-end garment production (Van Heusen, Perry Ellis, for example). Assuming the nation is able to address major shortcomings in areas such as skilled labor and management, roads, ports, electricity, education and agriculture, it looks to do even better, along with advances in tourism, airlines, steel and oil (in which San Ramon's Chevron is a major player).
Two areas especially worth noting:
High tech. Vietnam boasts more than 18 million Internet subscribers, with cheap, if not always the smoothest Internet access, mostly in the cities. It is already getting some of the outsourcing action - from India, among others - but to bring more of its citizens into the high-tech age, the government, with the assistance of Intel and Microsoft, plans to subsidize some of Vietnam's estimated 280,000 small private companies and 2.7 million family businesses with laptops and PCs. That is bound to please Hewlett Packard, which has been in Vietnam since 1996, cranking out PCs and printers via local subcontractors, and has seen its business double over last year, according to the head of HP's Southeast Asia division. Last October, more HP inkjet printers started rolling off the line at a new factory - expandable to 120,000 square feet - in the Saigon Hi-Tech Park in Ho Chi Minh City. Meanwhile, Taiwan's Foxconn is building a giant "electronic city" north of Hanoi, set to employ 300,000 people.
Then there's "Line 6" at one of Nike's subcontracted factories, which employs 20,000 people outside Ho Chi Minh City, and incidentally serves as Nike's R&D world headquarters. The specialized production line is being used to perfect, on a much larger basis than currently exists, the digitally driven evolution of retailing, labeled "mass individual customization" in some quarters. My 10-year-old daughter, say, designs her own Nike online, clicks, and her design shows up on a terminal halfway around the world, where the desired shoe is manufactured and shipped directly to her door, or at least nearest Nike store. I haven't told her about it yet.
"Viet Kieus." Attracted by the growing economy, increasing numbers of the Vietnamese diaspora (an estimated 6 million Vietnamese live abroad, including more than 500,000 in California), are returning home with their skills and capital to open small and medium-size businesses - boutiques, online music services, bars, restaurants, office equipment franchises. Others are applying their Western know-how at Vietnamese corporations and local companies. "I have friends working in architecture, banking, oil, real estate - all from the U.S. or France," said Nguyen Qui Duc, founder of KQED radio's now defunct "Pacific Time," who returned last year from San Francisco to live full-time in Hanoi. The Hanoi government is well aware of the Viet Kieus' potential and, I was told, is working on a plan to grant them dual citizenship.
By Andrew S. Ross - The San Francisco Chronicle - December 16, 2007.
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