Interesting article in TIME magazine about VN

[AnHai Doan <anhai@cs.washington.edu>]

Friends, the following article in the last week int' edition of TIME
reports rising nationalistic trends in VN. Remember the recent discussion
on VNSA about national pride? Also the article about General Le Kha Phieu
entering the spotlight?

[One or two sentences have been omitted to be postable on VNSA.]

APRIL 14, 1997 VOL. 149 NO. 15
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

ASIA

NO HELP WANTED

Xenophobia and a wounded sense of national pride are prompting Vietnam's
authorities to try to go it alone--in business, culture and sports

BY TIM LARIMER/HO CHI MINH CITY
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fed up with its anemic football team, Vietnam in 1995 swallowed a bit of
national pride and imported an experienced foreign coach. Karl Weigang, a
German who had been a coach and trainer in Africa and Asia, as well as in
South Vietnam in the 1960s, produced a near-miracle. Just seven months after
he arrived, his charges took a silver medal at the 1995 Southeast Asian
Games. To players and fans, the 61-year-old Weigang was a national hero. To
the country's football federation, however, he was a problem. Federation
officials began doing their best to discredit him. Weigang was merely an
adviser, fans were told, and players were ordered to take their cues not
from him but from his Vietnamese assistants, who gave conflicting
instructions. "He wasn't Vietnamese, that was all," says a Ho Chi Minh City
sportswriter. "They were embarrassed that a foreigner was getting all the
credit."

The football pitch is not the only place where Vietnam is tightening up
these days. The government has been imposing a number of nationalistic
measures in a campaign of "Vietnamization" spanning the cultural, political
and economic landscapes. A decade ago, the country began adopting, slowly,
elements of a market economy, ending years of isolation from the West and
from its Asian neighbors. By 1995, Vietnam had forged diplomatic relations
with its former enemy, the United States, had joined asean, the regional
pact originally formed as a bulwark against communism, and had opened its
doors to foreign investors. Streets once void of commerce and traffic now
hum with mercantilism and motorcyclists. Citizens cut off from the world now
tap into cnn on inexpensive satellite dishes attached to their roofs with
bamboo poles. gdp growth has topped 8% annually for five years running. "The
last two years, there has been an outside-oriented political agenda," says
Bradley Babson, the World Bank's representative in Hanoi. "Now they are
focusing inward on domestic politics."

What accounts for the shift? Unease over some of the undesirable
side-effects of nascent capitalism, for the most part: drug use, crime,
prostitution and corruption are all thought to be on the rise. As recent
investigations of state-owned enterprises have alleged, bribery and
financial abuse are snaking their way into the echelons of the ruling
Communist Party. The director of a Party-owned company was sentenced to
death last week on corruption charges after the company racked up $50
million in losses. President Le Duc Anh, 76, lashed out at greed and
selfishness in an address to the National Assembly last week: "In the words
of our great leader President Ho Chi Minh, individualism is the enemy of the
cause of socialism. We cannot allow selfish individual interests to
interfere with the interests of the community."

The President was making his first live appearance since suffering a brain
hemorrhage last November. His frail condition, and the advanced age of many
of Vietnam's senior leaders, have created an atmosphere of political
uncertainty that is fanning the nationalistic flames. As contenders vie for
the top positions, there has been pressure on them, and their subordinates,
to display vigilance against any threat to the Communists' hold on power.
"Everyone is competing to show how macho he is, how tough he is against
foreign influences," says a western diplomat. At the same time, supporters
of economic reform are being challenged by those who want to maintain state
control. Says Babson: "It's a Shakespearean struggle between people of two
understandings of how to deal with the world. One way is opening up. The
other way is to control information."

People are reminded: you cannot do things your own way. You have to do
them the communist way."

Or, at least, the Vietnamese way. "Vietnamization" was tried before. That
was the name of Richard Nixon's "secret plan" to end the Vietnam War by
disengaging and turning the south's struggle over to the locals. It didn't
work. Now, the victors in that war are adopting their own brand of
going-it-alone. This month, police said they would begin confiscating
satellite dishes, which all but a few Vietnamese are barred from owning as
the government attempts to control the reception of foreign broadcasting.
Access to the Internet is still tightly restricted; a committee is due to
start meeting this month to figure out how to put limits on cyberspace. Late
last month, authorities pulled the plug on Ho Chi Minh City's only cybernet
cafes, which had offered E-mail links. The country's newspapers, meanwhile,
have been urged to push a nationalist agenda and ordered not to print
negative news. Problems in the banking sector, for example, are banned from
coverage. Journalists who wrote too aggressively about corruption have been
purged from their publications; articles considered "soft" on the U.S. are
pulled. Writers, artists and filmmakers have been under pressure to define
"Vietnamese" culture and apply it to their work. Some attempts at such
vigilance have been silly. In March, plans to shoot scenes for a James Bond
movie in Vietnam were scrapped, even after the Ministry of Culture and
Information had given its approval. The official explanation was a lack of
technical expertise in Vietnam. But sources said the real reason was
ideological: authorities objected because 007 has spent the better part of
three decades outsmarting communist agents.

Does all of this mean Vietnam is anti-foreign? "It is not anything like
xenophobia," a Foreign Ministry official insists. Perhaps not, but the
difference is subtle. A recent decree limits the tenure of most foreigners
working in Vietnam to three years. And Vietnamese who have married
foreigners have been told they cannot work for state-owned enterprises,
which still dominate the economy. Leaders have said they will set up
Communist Party cells inside all ventures: state-owned, private and foreign
alike.

If there's a hesitancy in embracing outsiders, it is ingrained in the older
generation who now rule the country. Vietnam's history is dominated by
successions of military heroes repelling Chinese invaders, and the trend
continued in the 20th century with battles against Japanese occupiers,
French colonialists and American interlopers. As recently as 1979, China and
Vietnam clashed in a border war, and in 1988 their gunships sparred briefly
over the Trung Sa Islands, a disputed collection of rocks in the South China
Sea also known as the Spratlys. Conflicts with Vietnam's neighbor to the
north erupted again last month, when a Chinese oil rig began drilling for
gas in another disputed area, about 65 nautical miles off Vietnam's coast.
The two countries are set to meet this week over the flare-up, but not
before Vietnam used the incident as supporting evidence for its patriotic
appeals.

"Is this nationalism or is this a fear of being taken advantage of?" asks
Eugene Matthews, an American business consultant with long experience in
Vietnam. Years of isolation make Vietnam nervous of outsiders' motives and
fearful that foreigners more experienced in the world of finance will take
advantage of them. "They're afraid if the foreigner is making money, they
are getting cheated," says Matthews. Some of the blame lies with
ill-conceived foreign projects. A proposed resort at the central port city
of Danang by an American investor group fell apart when the consortium
couldn't come up with the capital. Other projects have had trouble getting
financing, as well. Such failures make Vietnamese understandably cautious.
"Some of the nationalistic talk, I think, is a face-saving measure when a
big project fails," says Babson. What worries investors is that concern over
preserving a national identity will interfere with steps needed to boost the
economy, like redrafting business laws to match practices elsewhere.
Authorities are reluctant to let foreigners own things--whether land or
shares in a state-owned company--and foreign banks are unable to issue loans
because the government is afraid that if a borrower defaults, the foreign
bank will take over anything that was put up as collateral. "They really
don't want to put assets in the control of foreigners, if they can help it,"
says Babson.

Vietnam's independent streak extends to major development projects. The
state-owned oil company, for example, has asserted that it will control
exclusive rights to explore offshore to the depth of 70 meters, in effect
blocking foreign companies from drilling anywhere but in the riskiest and
most treacherous areas in deeper waters. And the do-it-ourselves approach
has been applied to the expansion of Hanoi's Noi Bai Airport, where
proposals from foreign companies were tendered and then rejected as
authorities decided to do the work themselves. A similar plan has been
proposed for Ho Chi Minh City's Tan Son Nhat Airport. And earlier this year,
Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet announced an ambitious--and technically
difficult--project to build a national highway along what was the Ho Chi
Minh Trail using volunteer labor. "They need something to rally the people,"
says Matthews.

National pride emerges in unexpected places, even outside the government's
orchestrated efforts at Vietnamization. Tran Viet Trung is a well-educated
son of early Communist revolutionaries. His father was jailed by French
colonialists after supporting worker uprisings in the 1920s and '30s. Trung,
39, shows proper Confucian respect for his parents and those of their
generation who fought for Vietnam's independence. Yet he is quick to adopt
capitalist methods in the state-owned paintbrush factory he runs, with the
help of its primary customer, a Canadian company. "There are some things our
workers do not do well," Trung acknowledges. He reveals a more nationalistic
bent, however, in another arena. Trung practices a form of martial arts
called Wing Tsun in Chinese. A decade ago, however, Trung decided Vietnam
needed its own martial arts form, so he invented Dong Sinh Nhu Quyen, a
modified, softer version of Wing Tsun. "I thought we should not just copy
something that is Chinese," Trung says. "I wanted to create something
Vietnamese, for the Vietnamese people."

It's hard to gauge how deeply the official xenophobia extends. The push to
Vietnamize reflects, in part, an aging leadership's struggle to remain
relevant. "They want to preserve political stability more than anything
else," says Babson. Nationalism, which united people during two long,
exhausting and costly wars this century, doesn't come so naturally to people
today, especially those under 25, who make up half the country's population.
The one thing that does unite people is the soccer team. When Vietnam's
squad finished second in the 1995 Southeast Asian games, northerners and
southerners alike took to the streets in Ho Chi Minh City in a rare incident
of spontaneous national celebration. Now Vietnam will get a chance to see
how they do without their German coach. Weigang quit his post and left the
country last week. Vietnam has a World Cup qualifying match next month.
-----------------------------------------------------