Vietnam learns to live in China’s shadow
Four decades on, China’s 1979 border war is officially ‘forgotten’ in Hanoi.
Turning east
By most accounts, the past few years have been anni horribiles for human rights and democracy in Southeast Asia.
What a High-Level Sacking in Vietnam Reveals About Communist Party Rifts
Vietnam’s campaign against corruption notched a significant victory earlier this month with the removal of a top Politburo official for “very serious mistakes and violations” while he was chair of PetroVietnam, the state-owned oil and gas company. But analysts say that there is a more complicated story behind the rare Politburo sacking—just the fourth in...
Communist Hard-Liners Ascendant in Vietnam, Despite TPP Membership
PHNOM PENH—Conservative forces have strengthened their grip in Vietnam after the ruling Communist Party, late last month, elected its incumbent general-secretary to a second five-year term in the country’s top political office.
Vietnam: Forty Years Later
Forty years after the war, it is the ideals of the former South Vietnam that appear ascendant.
Vietnamese refugees face deportation
MORE than 10 Montagnard asylum seekers will be deported to Vietnam after the government closes a United Nations-administered refugee centre at the end of the month, officials said yesterday, prompting an outcry from local and international rights groups.
War correspondents reminisce
Today marks 40 years since the Vietnamese communists rolled into Saigon, forcing the US to beat a hasy retreat from their embattled South Vietnamese client state. The occasion threw up its fair share of iconic images (see right), including the extraordinary sight of a North Vietnamese T-54 tank smashing open the gates of the city’s...
Under the gaze of the Divine Eye
Phnom Penh’s small Caodai temple, the Cambodian outpost of a curious southern Vietnamese religious sect, continues to attract local converts, attracted by its all-inclusive religious doctrine
TPHCM Phat Trien!
Since China’s economic rise, the ironies of ‘market socialism’ have become something of a staple of international journalism. Indeed, the story of socialism yielding to neoliberal economics can be sketched in sharp, simple contrasts: Mao and Motorola; Deng and Disney; Tiananmen and Toyota. But despite all of this — and all irony aside — I...
Reading Saigon
I’m sitting in my hotel off Bui Vien Street in central Saigon, exhausted from the early start and aching in the legs from today’s walk. I’m stealing wireless, achingly slow, from somewhere nearby; and my Windows taskbar is in a state of constant excitement, informing me, every few seconds, of connections granted and denied. My...
