We can now cross Vietnam off the list of where you can’t find a Starbucks. In February, Starbucks opened its first store in Ho Chi Minh City. Vietnam just became number 62 in terms of countries Starbucks is operating in and number 12 in terms of Starbucks’ operation in the Asia Pacific region. By some [...]
Editor’s Note: This article has been translated and published in the BBC-Vietnamese. Huy Duc has described his book as “a true history of Vietnam,” of which has earned praises for being an “honest book” with fresh insights that no scholars interested in the reunification era Vietnam can ignore. Before assessing Huy Duc’s The Winning Side, let [...]
In every national Census since 1880, immigrants by a considerable margin have been more likely to start their own businesses than their native-born peers. This certainly has been a key factor not only to the success of the U.S. economy but also to the expansion of immigrant communities. Indeed, as Asian immigrants have become the [...]
Editor’s Note: This article has been translated and published in the BBC-Vietnamese. While I was in Vietnam last June, I read a BBC article on why Ho Chi Minh’s legacy still lives on in Vietnam. Like a typical academic, I made a mental note to respond to the article’s conclusion: “ For Vietnamese, whatever their [...]
Vietnam has been a buzzworthy frontier market, neither developed nor emerging but whose stability and integrity have significantly improved over the years. So much so that Vietnam has become one of the most exciting and promising of the 45 so-called frontier markets in the world. By definition, Vietnam’s frontier market is characterized as both high [...]
Long S. Le, GlobalVietDiaspora
As they watched the so-called Arab Springs sweeping through the Middle East last year, toppling governments in autocratic states once seen as immune from popular discontent, leaders in Asian countries with one-party political systems naturally asked, could it happen to us? Communist Party leaders in Vietnam were among them.
Le Quynh, BBC-Vietnamese
Four researchers on Vietnam talk to the BBC about their views on Vietnam’s politics and whether the country will embrace democratization. The focus of exchange between the BBC and the four researchers is British scholar Martin Gainsborough’s recent paper, published by Journal of Democracy (April 2012 issue).
Lê Hải, Polish Academy of Science
Đây là một loạt các cuộc phỏng vấn giới trí thức Việt Nam từ khắp nơi trên thế giới và trong nhiều lãnh vực khoa học khác nhau xoay quanh cùng một chủ đề có thể tóm gọn lại thành một câu hỏi mở: “Việt Nam là gì?” Người được phỏng vấn tự hiểu câu hỏi và trình bày câu trả lời theo hệ thống kiến thức hay trải nghiệm của mình. Người phỏng vấn đặt câu hỏi để làm rõ ý trong câu trả lời trước hoặc nhằm sắp đặt quan điểm đó trong hệ thống kiến thức và trải nghiệm chung. Khách mời kỳ này là GS Nguyễn Quỳnh từ Hoa Kỳ. Là triết gia với luận văn tiến sĩ về Wittgenstein, ông còn đi sâu vào mỹ học không chỉ với thêm một luận văn tiến sĩ về lịch sử mỹ thuật mà bản thân cũng là họa sĩ.
Long S. Le, GlobalVietDiaspora
On June 17 of this year, students at RMIT Vietnam’s Saigon South Campus organized a workshop on “Social Entrepreneurship in Vietnam: People, Ideas and Perspectives.” The workshop, co-sponsored by RMIT International University Vietnam and Bauer Global Studies at the University of Houston, aimed to gain insights on how to build and promote sustainable social ventures/enterprises in Vietnam.
Long S. Le, GlobalVietDiaspora
It is estimated that there are about 3.75 million Viet Kieu (Vietnamese living abroad) in more than 100 countries and territories. However, the attempt to report sizable populations of Vietnamese around the globe is subjective and involves errors. Notwithstanding, such attempt is to update reports on overseas Vietnamese communities that can be used by community groups and other scholars.
Yuk Wah Chan, City University of Hong Kong
Since 2008, the Vietnamese in Hong Kong have been able to attend religious services at two Buddhist centers. While a number of studies within refugee literature have shown refugee experiences in a negative light and argued that religion provides a permanent ‘home’ for refugee migrants and helps them cope with post-exilic trauma and emotional distress, this report argues for the opposite. Rather than needing religion to placate unsettled refugee memories and psychological turmoil, the Vietnamese turn to religion to achieve a higher sense of life fulfillment and cope with daily vicissitudes.
Lê Hải, Polish Academy of Science
The hyphen in the constructed word “nation-state” represents the legitimacy that can be in crisis under certain phenomena (Sutherland 2008). This article is an attempt in making sense of the latest anti-Chinese demonstrations in Saigon, Hanoi, and other cities in terms of an expression emerging from the negotiations of national identity. Two main actors, the mass and the government, began a discourse (Foucault 1969) that may have changed the symbolic structure of power in the society of Vietnam already.
Mark A. Ashwill, Capstone Vietnam
Among the growing number of US universities and colleges that have acknowledged Vietnam as a promising market for student recruitment, online and in-country education, and training programs (among other activities), most are well-intentioned and accredited. Others, however, see a golden opportunity to reap substantial profits from a market that has rosy long-term prospects. The bittersweet fact is that the United States exports some of the world’s best and worst higher education.
Carl L. Bankston III, Tulane University
Under what conditions do relatively closed, tightly knit social relations provide benefits for people? When do these kinds of relations shut people off from access to opportunities in the larger society? This is one of the central issues in the literature on social networks and social capital and one of the most important problems for the study of immigrant adaptation.
Long S. Le, GlobalVietDiaspora
Using the concept of social capital, anti-communism can be seen as a divisive factor and a unifying factor, while the concept of social movement shows that persistent and change are parcel to anti-communism. Importantly, exploratory surveys by the author seem to underscore the need to account for the fact that anticommunism can still be a unifying force and whose identity can still be reproduced by individuals or sub-groups (including younger Vietnamese Americans) acting in context in addressing the need of Vietnamese Americans.
Long S. Le, GlobalVietDiaspora
The newer ‘miracle’ economies of Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand (known together as ‘MIT’) demonstrate that other countries with no development for over a generation might well be able to create Confucius, Islamic and Buddhist forms of modernity.
Will Vietnam’s state capitalism evolve and follow the trajectory of the MIT countries? Or will communist Vietnam continue its revolutionary path using ‘state capitalism’ to maximise its chances of survival?
Long S. Le, GlobalVietDiaspora
Because there is no one “youth,” which youth (those in Hà Nôi or Hồ Chí Minh City (HCMC), the professional middle class youth, or study-abroad youth) are likely to develop a political identity with those of the current political leadership that transcends the country’s socialist past? If Vietnamese youth are still apolitical, as some claim, what economic system—predominately a capitalist economy or a socialist system—is more likely to win their support?
Long S. Le, GlobalVietDiaspora
It has been said that Vietnamese farmers are the foundation of the country’s political economy. When reforms in the mid-1950s to redistribute land to poor peasants were reversed, farmers went to the battlefield. When the collective farm system was dismantled in the mid-1980s and land was allocated back to farmers, they worked to drive the country’s export-led growth.
Long S. Le, GlobalVietDiaspora
The term “Amerasian” was coined by Pearl S. Buck in 1964, referring to Korean children fathered by American servicemen during the Korean War. The term today has come to apply to the more than 2 million displaced mixed-race children born in such countries as the Philippines, Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Long S. Le, GlobalVietDiaspora
While the U.S. began to study the lessons of and going beyond the Vietnam War, the initial wave of refugees — about 130,000, of which many were members of the former South Vietnamese government and military armed forces — began to reconstruct their new home as “Little Saigon.”
Long S. Le, GlobalVietDiaspora
Non-communist Vietnamese were fully aware of the failures of the French colonists to give their country full benefits of a modern civilization on the one hand, but also recognized their dependency on the West to revitalize the country’s traditions and institutions on the other. That is, non-communist Vietnamese found a refuge through western culture where a balance between the individual’s ambitions and that of state authority was possible, and where it was possible to create a cultural hybrid between the East and West.
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