When we looked out the window of the plane we remembered our flight’s descent nearly 20 years ago when we saw Vietnamese in their distinctive conical hats (Non La) working the rice fields. On our trip to Vietnam last week we saw office buildings, factories and fancy townhouses and apartment buildings. Vietnam has changed tremendously since our first trip. But heck it’s changed a lot in the last year since we were there last. It is easy to feel nothing has changed when hanging in your usual stomping grounds. Likely your house and your yard, the people you see on a daily basis seem unchanged due to the drudge of familiarity, though in fact if you peer closely you’ll see all sorts of changes—the trees are taller, the dwarf mondo grass ravaged by the neighborhood rabbits, the smile lines around your friend’s eyes slightly deeper.
But view a place once a year, especially a young, vibrant, growing one like Vietnam, and the changes will seem like a teenager who has dyed their hair, become an Olympic weight lifter, radically changed their whole clothing style. Yes, we were in Vietnam last week for meetings and to help lead a group of students on a Follow the Supply Chain Study Abroad program (all hail to our sponsors who made it possible to only charge the students $500 ensuring participants as diverse as our country: Lynden International and the University of Washington. Contact me if you would like to sponsor next year’s trip). So this week we concentrate on the land we’ve been calling for four years now one of the world’s six most important countries, including explaining why Vietnam should make you optimistic, wondering why Hong Hoang was arrested and seeing how China responded to Vietnam and the U.S. announcing closer cooperation. It’s this week’s International Need to Know, the dragon fruit of international information, the fresh spring rolls of global data, always avoiding the misinformation of Durian fruit.
Without further ado, here’s what you need to know.
Vietnam Encourages Optimism
While we slurped our noodles and drank our Saigon Beer the American woman across from us at dinner said she didn’t want to have kids because the future was so dire. This has always seemed a strange opinion to us given all the data showing how the world is mostly on a 150-year winning streak (data we often share in this space). But it seemed especially odd for her to express pessimism about the future while in Vietnam, a place that has improved tremendously over the last 20 years, a country where 70 percent of the population is under the age of 30 and so brimming with energy and enthusiasm. Of course, Vietnamese are also having fewer children so perhaps the American woman telling us she did not want to bring kids into this world is not alone in her fears for the coming years. There are many reasons why someone may not want to have kids but Vietnam’s continued success is living proof against the one offered by our dinner partner.
Why Was Hong Hoang Arrested?
The question continually circles our mind and came up in a number of conversations we had while in Vietnam last week. Hong Hoang was the founder and head of Change, an environmental organization and someone we got to know last year. We reported on her arrest a few months ago, one of a number of environmental activists Vietnam’s government has jailed over the last year. Vietnam is a communist one-party state so freedom of speech is not one of its hallmarks*. But Hong and the other activists were not fighting for human rights or calling for the overthrow of the government. They were working to protect the environment, sometimes working with the government to do so. Why then are they considered a threat? One person posited to us that perhaps a faction of the government is against these activities and demanded her arrest. Maybe so. But it all gives us pause about where Vietnam is headed in the future (worried but not pessimistic). As we wrote in Challenging China, Vietnam could follow the model of South Korea and Taiwan and democratize as it continues to develop economically. Or it could follow China’s dark path—become more repressive even as it continues to try to grow its economy. Trying to predict which path Vietnam will take has us again asking, why was Hong Hoang arrested?*Nonetheless Vietnam remains a far freer place than China. We can access any website there and people are more able to speak their mind, though less so than a year ago
China Corner: China Responds
Looming over Vietnam like a bad smell is China. It came up in many of our meetings during the trip, including China’s economic leverage, influence and the interest of supply chains diversifying out of China. The day we left Vietnam, Biden arrived (for reasons too complicated to go into here, we are never allowed in a foreign country at the same time). Many agreements were announced during Biden’s quick trip, including economic. Inevitably China was going to make some sort of response, and as Asia News reports, it did: “hundreds of lorries carrying bananas, durians and dragon fruits from Vietnam bound for China were held up at the border, ostensibly for quality checks, Vietnamese authorities said.” China is Vietnam’s largest destination for agricultural exports. Vietnam is not alone in suffering from such tactics by China, which likes to exert its economic leverage. Bethaney Allen’s recent book, “Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World” goes into detail about China doing this. China’s use of its leverage is self-defeating—it is one of the reasons companies are diversifying out of China and countries are instituting policies to encourage such diversification. Ooo-ooh that smell.
