Word: minh
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...REVIEWING STANDS ARE UP; THE COMMEMORATIVE billboards are in place along the parade route and Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, is bracing for the 20th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Network stars and war correspondents such as Dan Rather and Peter Arnett will be reporting from the roof of the old U.S. embassy and the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Veterans' groups and congressional fact-finding delegations are swarming over the country. Instead of simply reliving the war, though, the visitors are discovering the new Vietnam, where rooftop satellite dishes and joint-venture hotels signal the emergence...
Nowhere is that problem more evident than in the country's attitude toward Ho Chi Minh City. Many southern revolutionaries who helped win the war felt cheated in the years following 1975, when Hanoi's hard-line communists almost fatally "reorganized" much of old Saigon's industrial and commercial base. Now the city is in the heat of a spectacular comeback. A third of both Vietnam's gdp and its central-government revenues come from Ho Chi Minh City's textile factories, shrimp-processing plants and other businesses. The city is a commercial and banking center, as well...
...Minh City enjoys considerable administrative autonomy, but important decisions about its economy are still made in the North. The central government takes 80% of the city's annual tax revenues. Officials from Hanoi are assigned the top jobs at local state-owned factories and trading firms. Even the bulk of the city's electricity comes from the Hoa Binh Dam, 930 miles to the north. "The government can satisfy some demands, not all," says Peoples Council president Pham Tran Truc. "For example, we are not satisfied with the electricity supply . " At which point the lights in his office flicker...
...With reporting by William Dowell/Ho Chi Minh City and Tim Larimer/Hanoi
FRANK GIBNEY'S FIRST VISION OF Vietnam was postapocalyptic. "The ghosts of the war were everywhere," he recalls of his trip in March 1984. "The piles of Huey chopper parts at Tan Son Nhut airport, the musty bar of the Caravelle Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City. In Hanoi rats scurried through the hotel; the water was cold." There was an air of huddled secrecy. "You couldn't get a straight answer out of anyone. The people who could articulate the state of affairs were diplomats, themselves grasping at bits of information...