Hanoi Emerges From Heart of Darkness

Even now, in the dreary days of winter, this Communist capital of 3 million people moves with a sense of purpose that is unmistakable: This is the springtime of Hanoi’s renaissance, and the city is so alive with energy you can almost taste the commerce in the air.

Nothing and no one is idle. Along the banks of downtown lakes, residents by the thousands gather before sunrise to exercise, and by breakfast the streets are filling with bicycles and the symbol of the emerging middle class--Honda Super Cub scooters--moving in free-form chaos, as though everyone is in a mighty rush to turn the “dark years” of the 1970s and ‘80s into the golden decade of the ‘90s.

From shoeshine boys who hawk copies of Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American”--a prophetic 1955 novel about the perils of foreign involvement in Vietnam--to shopkeepers on Hai Ba Trung Street, whose TVs and appliances are piled ceiling-high, to entrepreneurs with cellular phones at the Metropole Hotel, all of Hanoi is caught up in the giddy expectations of opportunity created by the introduction of a free-market economy and the end of the U.S. trade embargo.

“Ten years ago, I had to queue for hours for a handful of rice,” said economist Do Duc Dinh. “Now, anything I need is in the stores, from refrigerators to rice. Everything’s better, and I’m convinced Vietnam is on the point of takeoff.”

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It was, in fact, only a few years ago that Hanoi’s streets were empty save for bicycles and a few Russian trucks. The country’s rice production was falling, and Vietnam was facing starvation. The stately Metropole--now renovated and offering live music in each of its four restaurants--had fallen into such rat-infested disrepair you could see the floor above through holes in the ceiling. The only stores were run by the state, and they were mostly empty except for the rations of rice that Dinh stood in line for.

But even in those bleak days, even as Singapore and Bangkok, Thailand, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, were being transformed into 21st century cities, Hanoi stood its ground and, because of circumstance as much as anything, never lost its character. It endures today as Asia’s loveliest capital, a crime-free city of tree-lined boulevards, sidewalk cafes, low French architecture and streets kept spotless by women with bamboo brooms.

If bustling, money-driven Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) is New York, Hanoi is Boston. It is smaller and more refined than its sister city, a 21-hour train ride to the south. The arts flourish here, and who your family is counts more than what your salary is. Ho Chi Minh City has glitz; Hanoi, style. Battered by war, invaded, occupied, colonized over the course of a thousand years, Hanoi is a city whose people move with the confidence of being victors, time and again, against more powerful outsiders.

In Bat Trang, a village just across the Red River from Hanoi, Le Van Cam, one of Vietnam’s most widely known ceramic artists, sat in his small office sipping tea from a thermos, his shelves piled high with pottery that he and his sons made. On the dirt road outside, crates of vases and bowls were headed for city stores.

Cam, 67, wears a hearing aid and a black beret and walks with a cane. He lost his left leg fighting the French in 1954 and saw both his sons go off to war--one as a teen to fight the Americans in 1968, the other to fight the Chinese in 1979.

“The wars are behind us now, and for the first time in my life, ordinary people have the chance to prosper,” said Cam, who was chairman of the local pottery cooperative until the system was dismantled by the government’s doi moi open-door economic policies of 1986.

“You give people incentives and they are going to produce more. I have no doubts about this. As a cooperative we were very poor. Now I have 10 people working for me. I have this new house and a new bicycle. I just bought the television and the refrigerator.”

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Although many Americans may still think of Vietnam as a war instead of a country and Hanoi as the enemy capital, the conflict that took the lives of more than a million of Thu’s fellow Vietnamese seems, strangely, to have become a brief chapter of history, set aside, if not forgotten, in Hanoi. Scant physical evidence remains as a reminder.

The bridge over the Red River, destroyed by U.S. bombers, has been rebuilt, and Kham Thien Street, turned into rubble in 1972 by giant B-52s, again teems with cyclists and pedestrians and youths who sing on corners. The “Hanoi Hilton,” a former colonial prison where American POWs were kept, has been razed to make way for a luxury high-rise development.

Except for the Army Museum’s wreckage of a B-52 shot down during the “resistance against American imperialists,” about the only reminder left of the wartime American connection is the Zippo lighters, sold in souvenir shops, that are engraved with GI mottoes. Says one: “Chu Lai 1971-72. You’ve never really lived until you’ve nearly died.”

“For a long time, when I was still thinking about the war, I hated the Americans,” said Le Van Chien, a government driver who lugged war supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail for five years and was wounded in an air raid. “But little by little, I got over those bad feelings. I have met many Americans who come to Hanoi now--some of them have ridden in my car like you--and they are here to help us, and I consider them my friends.”

Wary U.S. tourists and business people visiting Hanoi for the first time are often surprised to be accepted here with genuine warmth. But the war lingers in the American psyche far more than it does in that of Vietnam, the world’s 13th most populous nation with 75 million people, nearly half of whom weren’t even born when Saigon fell to (or was liberated by, depending on one’s point of view) Communist soldiers from the North in April 1975.

Wandering the bustling street bazaars of Hanoi and hearing officials talk about the possibility of a Vietnam stock exchange, it is difficult to believe this is the country that tried to destroy capitalism in 1978. But one March morning that year, truckloads of soldiers and volunteers wearing red armbands descended on Ho Chi Minh City, searching houses and shops to inventory goods to be confiscated by the government. Two weeks later, the South’s currency was abolished, wiping out the assets of the rich.

The “dark years” had arrived with vengeance: A million refugees fled their homeland; 200,000 were sent off to re-education camps, some to remain for 17 years; the state-run economy led to the impoverishment of what already was a dirt-poor country; the invasion of Cambodia in 1978 sealed Vietnam’s political isolation in a region where neighboring economies were booming.

Not until the near-famine of the mid-1980s did the Vietnamese government accept that it had only two choices: perish or prosper. And to achieve the latter, to begin the long journey to catch up with Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea, it would have to alter course and nurture the elements that had fueled Southeast Asia’s engine: foreign investment and trade.

Since doi moi went into effect a decade ago, Vietnam has cut its annual inflation rate from 680% to less than 5%. Growth is averaging a steady 9% a year. The budget deficit is low. What Vietnam did, in effect, was to free a people who are natural entrepreneurs. When, for instance, the government banned firecrackers to celebrate Tet in 1995, considering them a safety hazard and a waste of resources, merchants recorded the sound of exploding pyrotechnics and began selling the tapes.

“This is a country that truly wants to develop,” said Bradley Babson, the resident World Bank representative in Hanoi. “It isn’t a case of outsiders coming in and deciding Vietnam needs to develop. Vietnam itself is responsible for what you see happening.”

Vietnam remains one of the world’s poorest countries, with 80% of its population living in rural areas. Less than 15% of its roads are paved, and only 14 of 53 provinces contribute to the national budget, meaning the others are subsidized by the state. Only now is Vietnam instituting laws to deal with issues like bankruptcy, mortgages and lending rates--things that didn’t exist in the country’s state economy.

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“Some foreign investors have gotten discouraged,” said a Western businessman. “They just can’t figure out how to penetrate the system. The bureaucratic red tape, corruption, lack of laws, the difficulty getting decisions--it makes doing business very tough. But so much is changing so fast, I think you have to cut Vietnam a little rope. Certainly no one doubts Vietnam’s seriousness or commitment to where the country wants to go.”

Although Vietnam’s Communist government is one of the world’s last, the National Assembly increasingly resembles a parliament, debating issues and sometimes rejecting ministerial appointments made by the Communist Party.

Some degree of pluralism is even growing within the Communist Party apparatus. Example: In April the party took the unprecedented step of releasing the draft of its political report two months before the party congress and soliciting comment on it.

What most encourages Western economists is that the legitimacy of Vietnam’s government is not based on ideology or a cult of personality leadership. Instead, its authenticity is rooted in the country’s economic revival, and if the government continues to be a shareholder in the country’s development, Vietnam’s obsession to catch up with its prosperous neighbors could, economists believe, be realized in a generation’s time.