Photos & Words

I have attended an interesting seminar about the Chinese experience in the transition to market economy with socialist characteristics. The aim of the seminar was to help Vietnamese scholars and researchers, who usually claim to be 10 years behind China in terms of social and economic development, to reflect on the challenges that the transition poses to Vietnam today.
One of the conclusions of the seminar is that Vietnam is committed to modernization and market economy and, at the same time, to preserve a Vietnamese social and political values and norms. The interesting question that follows from this conclusion is whether modernization and these Vietnamese values can go hand in hand or exclude each other.
There is clearly a tension between the idea of modernity linked to market economy and the values that drove the fight for independence in Vietnam. Looking at the streets of Hanoi the tension is clearly visible. Motorbikes have taken the place of bicycles; foreign cars have replaced the old Ladas; roads are busy; all kind of shops have opened; people walk with their Ipods; there is an energy which drives, among other things, also consumerism. A consumerism that on the one hand is the consequence/cause of rapid economic growth on the other increases the gap between well being in urban and rural areas and the general income gap between middle urban class and the farmers in rural areas.
This gap underlines the difficulty to secure the equity and equality that underlines the political ideology of the government with a fast growing economy. The seminar on China made it clear that the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 were a series of demonstrations led by students and intellectuals. The sons and daughters of the middle class which had grown out of the economic transition but lacked the connection to the political establishment and had therefore fewer opportunities to secure a good job and a larger share of the growing prosperity.
It is not yet clear to me what the Vietnamese character of modernization actually is and I am still learning about it. I hope that the lesson from China will help Vietnam to move along a different path and avoid a Tiananmen.

Every morning I put Olga on the back seat of my bicycle and bring her to the kindergarten which is just behind our block. I struggle with the traffic and get onto the gate of the school. Get Olga down form her seat, unfasten her helmet, unfasten mine. Get her on my lap and start to walk her to her class at the end of the corridor. Passing in front of the other classrooms we both watch the children inside. Mostly Vietnamese, some foreigner. Vietnamese teachers talking in English in this private school. At each door there is a poster or a drawing of an animal and every morning we make the rehearsal of the dog: bau! bau!, the cow: muu! muu!, the cat: miao! miao! and son on. We reach the classroom and her teacher, Miss Huong, comes to greet her: how are you Olga? How arte you today? You are good girls? Now after three months we are here on Hanoi, this morning ritual goes smoothly and Olga awards also a smile to miss Huong. It took time. Now she is picking up English, continues to improve her Finnish and keeps up with Italian. She got used to the new system of teaching and the new language quickly, but certainly it was not easy for her. I thin part of the reason why things are better is because of our morning ritual and those drawings that tell us good morning every day. Let’s see how it is tomorrow morning.

Today we went for a walk in front of the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum. A huge gray stone building that the Soviet Union offered to to Vietnam. We did not enter to see “uncle Ho” as they remember him here in Vietnam, but we walk on the huge cement-paved-parade-road-square that is in front of the mausoleum. The place is quite austere. Not a piece of paper on the ground. The green area on the side of the cement-paved road untouched, meaning that nobody steps on the green grass. However, despite this austere atmosphere many people gather in this place in the late afternoon (and I suspect in the early morning as well) to exercise: walk, run, walk backwards, stretch legs and harms, and so on. Particularly elderly people walking up and done the half kilometer road passing several times in front of the monument where Hi Chi Minh rests. No disrespect, not at all. Just the exercise needed to keep the body healthy that Ho Chi Minh advocated when he was president of the country.

Arnaldo in Hanoi. Today I attended a workshop where I heard something that made me think. It is now two months that I started my work here in Hanoi and I am still in the process of understanding the structure, currents, streams of my working environment. A work environment which, as the whole society, is under the influence of two main forces: State and Party. All this is new to me. To be in the mid of it, rather than an external observer. An observer from abroad. During today’s meeting one comment came from a Vietnamese participant concerning the exposition at Ha Noi ethnology museum on the life in Ha Noi during the transition period, after the American-Vietnamese war. He told about his feelings visiting that exposition, and the memories of that time. He said how unreal it seemed to him the hardship of that time, the challenges of the everyday life compared to today.
Vietnam has come a long way since then. And though there are still problems, transition and development are proceeding steadily. New challenges will come through development itself. Criticism from abroad tend to focus on the fact that this is still a one Party country, that freedom of speech is limited, and that the human right record can be improved. However, during the workshop I started to think about how development has taken place and poverty has been reduced and the careful moves by the government in order to avoid serious social conflicts along the process of transformation. The result is that looking back at 20-25 years ago the hardships of the past seems more distant then it actually is. This may show that the careful steps taken by the government have avoided the social costs that have emerged from the establishment of a casino economy in other socialist countries. My learning process continues…