American newspaper covers Viet Nam's competitive advantages

Washington (VNA) - The Washington Times has published an advertism describing Viet Nam as having many competitive advantages to become one of the world's export processing centres.

The paper quoted the first American Ambassador to Viet Nam Pete Peterson as saying Viet Nam is competing with India and other regional countries to become one of the world's major computer component suppliers.

The chief executive officer and founder of British Atlas Industries Company said he prefers Vietnamese workers as they are honest and less likely to change jobs.-Enditem

Surprise ... Surprise ...Mr. Pete Peterson, Mr. Globalist/Free Trader/CFR-Elitest loves and promotes desperate and fearful Communist slaves/laborers working in his 3rd World factories ... producing everything now from the hi-tech to the junky stuff, all brought back here to be sold tariff-free to what's left of the American Middle Class.

Hmmmm?? You say biz is good stripping what's left of the equity out of the Good 'ol USA huh Pete ??

Oh BTW ... if you happen to stumble across any of those old POW's we left behind that are still alive these days, maybe you could negotiate to get them a job in one of your slave-mills.

I'm sure that would be a real treat, you know, just to beat the tedium of being chained to some wall in some dark jungle cave for life,... you P O S.

They are no longer slave laborers. They work willingly because they like to eat and to make their lives better. That notion has long been reprehensible in America where reliance on government to provide everything is the norm for a large and powerful faction. The government in Viet Nam gave up on collective farming and government farming 15 yearsa ago or so because they could not feed the people and got out of the business altogether. I know that is an uncharacteristic attitude for communists but it is, nevertheless, the case.

In the last 2 years private property, which had been de facto recognized for some time was institutionalized and private property in land is safer for the owner in Viet Nam now than it is in the US. The remaining government enterprises are inefficient and uncompetitive with the private economy and are dying. The more the US penalizes Viet Nam for its free enterprise by restricting purchase of its free market products, the more time will elapse before Viet Nam enters the ranks of the no longer "cheap labor" countries like Japan and Korea.

As for POWS, there are not likely any aleive now. Kerry and McCain ended Congressional scrutiny and the Communists have most probably ended any possibility of any POWs surfacing again. Any alive are probably in China. Some died in the USSR and maybe in the CIS shortly after the disintegration of the USSR. At any rate, that generation of "leaders" in Viet Nam is passing and their successors are communists to the extent that they want to keep their jobs. The more able of them are discovering that they can live better as businessmen than as functionaries and are building business on the side or instead.

The communist bosses are still communists at the core and are quite nonplussed by the rapid conversion to Christianity and continued reluctance to integrate of the Moi groups and there is much old time repression of those people . At this point the US can do a lot more good by encouraging free enterprise and quid pro quo defense offers to the rulers who want the US to guarantee Viet Nam against China. Isolating the Vietnamese people because we would rather keep inefficient uses of capital in the US to comfortably slow our own economy is shortsighted. It is foolish to maintain our own socialist tendencies like subsidizing labor intensive jobs and wasting resources by doing and making things that can be done elsewhere cheaper in order to avoid using our capital to create jobs that more productive (efficient).

He is some reality. Hanoi is still like during the war. Drab, dill, totally communist.

In the South, nobody calls Saigon Ho Chi Mhin City. It's either HCMC or Saigon. It's also just like the old day, with people in bight clothes, 50 and 90 cc scooters everywhere. Tens of thousands of small capitalistic shops are every where. People are rather happy. Govt is officially communist, but you see little real influence anywhere.

There is a great little woodcrafting shop in Saigon. I deal with them regularly. Run by an old ARVN Di Ui, you can order from him on the 'net!

I was there last year, spent a few weeks in a poor officially repressed Catholic small town near Cam Ranh and you could see the entrepreneurial spirit flaming brightly. I heard many, including bo doi (police/soldiers) talk about the Veecee- the communists. Veecee is the word and it is spoken only with contempt. Americans may not be seen as walking on water but they don't get wet when it rains. People say they want to go to America where people can work hard and keep the money they earn.

Agreed that opening trade is the only way to improve conditions in VN. It's the one area where I disagree with the hardcore Vietnamese-American political types, who maintain a long-running feud with Hanoi.

I was there for a few months last fall, and prosperity is increasing. There's a BMW/Mercedes dealership in Saigon these days, and I did spot several Beemers on the streets. There are about twice the number of Honda Dreams (90cc motorcycles) as there had been in 1998, and a whole new class of upper-end motorcycles that run $5,000 and up. Construction at the micro and macro level was everywhere. My wife's brother-in-law is now building his third hotel in Saigon.

There are many companies in Saigon doing software development globally, and actually their toughest market is the U.S. because of the mistaken impressions that Americans retain about VN. But they are doing software for Japan, Korea, France, England, etc.

Despite the war, IMHO Saigon is the most cosmopolitan and livable city ion all of SE Asia. Ironically it's retained its charm because of the war, and hopefully we won't see a repeat of the precipitous out-of-control development of the 1990's. The Saigon City Council is now in the process of having owners hack off the illegal top floors of their "rocket hotels", which is good since they tend to collapse.

It's true that most in the South don't call Saigon "Ho Chi Minh City" except to define the larger sprawling municipal entity (e.g., it's like New York City and Manhattan).

I haven't been to Hanoi since 1998, and back then they were still playing commie propaganda on the streets at 7AM. Big loudspeakers on every streetcorner and spewing xenophobic nonsense ("Don't talk to the foreigners you see on the streets, they have AIDS.") The loudspeakers in Saigon were ripped down many many years ago, the people couldn't stand listening to it (ironically, even the transplants from the North hated it).

There's little doubt that Hanoi is absolutely evil in persecuting freedoms of religion and speech. But they do not respond well to being pummled on the head about it, but the carrot and stick seems to be moving them in a better direction.

What Hanoi is fundamentally responsive to is money.

I've spent some time in China, and there, the constitution provides that the Communist Party has a leading role in society and is thus superior to any law. It may choose to enact and conform behavior to legislation and regulations, but that would only be a policy decision that law would encourage correct behavior of the populace. I'm curious as to whether the current Vietnam party and government have made the leap to where the Communist Party is always and everywhere subject to the law because it is the law, or if the Party is still superior to the law.

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