Chasing the Tigers: A Portrait of the New Vietnam - Hardcover

Hiebert, Murray

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1568361394 ISBN 13: 9781568361390

Publisher: Kodansha USA Inc, 1996

Synopsis

At a time when the United States and Vietnam are establishing new ties, Chasing the Tigers offers key insights into the realities of today's Vietnam. Drawing on his ten-plus years of reporting from Hanoi for the Far Eastern Economic Review, Murray Hiebert employs in-depth interviews with Vietnamese businessmen, civil servants, factory workers, and farmers to paint a multifaceted portrait of this emerging nation.
Hiebert deftly dramatizes the country's successes, especially in light industry and agriculture, but also highlights its weaknesses, including a shortage of well-trained managers, inadequate infrastructure, and legal obstacles to foreign investment. He also traces the recent historical background that has led Vietnam to where it is today.
Most importantly, Chasing the Tigers discusses Vietnam's current trend toward doi moi (an open economy and society). Hiebert examines the impact of economic liberalization on Vietnamese society and on the authoritarian regime, providing readers with important information on how to deal with all sectors of the country, including business, agriculture, and government.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

A straightforward reportorial look at Vietnam today, focusing on the nation's recent economic reforms and their impact on the lives of everyday Vietnamese. Canadian foreign correspondent Hiebert headed the Far Eastern Economic Review's Hanoi bureau from 1990 to '94. This book is his summation of the vast changes he saw. In readable journalistic prose, peppered with many interviews and anecdotes, Hiebert reports on virtually every aspect of Vietnam's society and politics. The focus, though, is on the economy and the prospects that Vietnam will join the other Asian economic success stories, the so-called ``tigers'': Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and Hong Kong. Hiebert predicts that Vietnam will ``blossom into a tiger in the long run,'' because of its ``energy and determination, the Confucian emphasis on education and thrift, as well as the hard work of millions of youthful entrepreneurs, farmers, and workers.'' Hiebert also offers brief but meaty assessments of the status of Vietnam's environmental problems, rural poverty, sexual mores, family structure, health care, education, religion, and women's rights and analyzes the nation's foreign relations with China, Cambodia, and the US. Hiebert portrays Vietnam in a generally favorable light--it ``may not be paradise, but at least the government is off the backs of the people,'' he says. But he is no cheerleader, pointing to Vietnam's press censorship, still-strong secret police, and other human rights abuses. To his credit, Hiebert sticks to his subject and, unlike other recent journalistic chroniclers of Vietnam, does not include superfluous, unenlightening accounts of the American war. Hiebert clearly shows that Vietnam, while still not a democracy, has liberalized its economy and opened its society significantly since the oppressive, doctrinaire Marxist rule of 197586. (16 pages photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

Vietnam's communist rulers embraced free-market economics in 1986, dismantling farm cooperatives and encouraging private investment. Hiebert, a reporter for Far Eastern Economic Review, is guardedly confident that Vietnam-still one of the world's poorest countries-will become the next Asian economic success story, joining "tigers" like Hong Kong and South Korea. He traveled extensively in Vietnam between 1990 and 1994, interviewing entrepreneurs, bankers, peasants, novelists, factory workers, and he limns a hardworking, resourceful people with a remarkable capacity to overcome barriers of all kinds. Although farmers are producing record harvests, industrial managers and workers resist efforts at privatization, and Hiebert identifies key problems-entrenched unemployment, malnutrition, crumbling transportation infrastructure, declining education and health services, massive smuggling-that the nation will have to address. He offers penetrating observations on the revival of traditional religion, the sharp rise in divorce, crime and corruption, the limited new freedoms enjoyed by writers, artists and critics of the regime. This valuable report supplies a more optimistic assessment than Mitch Epstein's somber photoessay, Vietnam: A Book of Changes (Forecasts, Oct. 7). Photos.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Kodansha USA Inc
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 1568361394
• ISBN 13: 9781568361390
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 258