April 27th Newshour featured Viet entrepreneurs coming back to Vietnam :
a. to set up shop
b. start an NGO and
c. work for the Clinton’s Initiatives.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/jan-june10/vietnam_04-27.html
We found in it our own Victor Luu (Software), Andrew Lam (writer), a coffee-house artist and an NGO dedicate.
The piece provided balanced perspectives to the extent that there is a conspicuous absence of white folks.
It’s as if Spike Lee were filming Denzel Washington in South Central during the LA riot.
You can change “China” for every “Vietnam” word that appears, and the segment still holds (except for the historical film about 1975) i.e. poverty reduction, rural and urban uneven development pace etc…
Victor was careful to stay out of politics. He runs a tight shop in HCMC which has just been through the ripple effect of this Recession.
Point taken: lots of brain gain (including PhD trained from the former Soviet bloc).
The other point made in a Hanoi interview was that the younger generation Viet Kieu are now discovering more of Vietnam (thanks to reunification) than their parents, who had stayed mostly in and around Saigon during the war.
The final episode addressed women trafficking prevention: don’t speak to strangers.
Clarity begins at home.
Andrew Lam, however, noticed a “spiritual” vacuum, which according to him, did help Vietnam withstand successive invasions by the Chinese, the French and the Americans.
He forgot to mention that there had competed forces trying to fill that vacuum, especially since the time of Vietnam joining WTO.
(see my other blog on “Luxury brand beachhead Vietnam”).
The vacuum, or social-economic gap, is widened as more students graduated without a job.
Vietnam is heading right for a trap (Middle-Income Trap), with mismatched talent-opportunity pairing.
Its advantage: young workforce. To lift the economy, that gap of job market and consumer market needs to be bridged.
Then we will see another Singapore or Taiwan right here in Vietnam.
PBS I am sure has more stories than it could fit in one hour: Goldman Sachs testimonies in Congress, Financial regulation proposal, Greece pulling the Dow down,
Catholic church crisis and apology etc..
So I am grateful to see an under-covered story like this one get air time. Someday, maybe the Nguyen foundation will underwrite a small part of the Newshour, just like the Carnegie Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation etc.. You’ll never know. Clarity begins right here at home, in this case, the United States, our home away from home.
Thang Nguyen 555 