ABSTRACT
In the first half of the 1990s – after 1992, but before 1996 – Vietnam was surrounded by an air of collective euphoria on the part of foreign businesspeople, analysts and academics. The achievement of a trade surplus and a debt agreement with the Paris Club in 1992, France’s President Mitterrand’s visit in 1993, and normalisation of relations with the US in 1995, all contributed to a new mood of hope. Vietnam was declared the ‘Next Asian Tiger’. Foreign investment poured in, economic growth rates soared, and for a period Vietnam could do no wrong; yet this mood did not last long. By 1996, unhappy foreign investors were swapping tales of double-crossing joint venture partners, infuriating red tape, and crippling levels of corruption. Economic growth and foreign investment approvals began to slow in 1996, well before the effects of the Asian financial crisis began to be felt in 1998-9.1 The run-up to the Eighth Communist Party Congress in June 1996 provided an obvious occasion for rethinking. Susan Boyd, then Australian ambassador to Vietnam, spoke of the Eighth Party Congress as having given the ‘forces of control a renewed mandate’, suggesting that foreign businesses and others were ‘suffering increased harrassment’ as a result (Boyd 1997: 142). The change in sentiment was also reflected in popular writings about the country. Shadows and Wind, a 1998 book by a former Agence France Presse Hanoi correspondent, epitomises the new ‘cynical’ view of Vietnam (Templer 1998). It provides a sharp contrast with the more ebullient Chasing the Tigers, a book published just two years earlier by another journalist with chapter headings such as ‘Asia’s Youngest Tiger Roars’ and ‘Vietnam Awakes’ (Hiebert 1996).
