Word: vietnams
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Factory 420 made airplane engines for the North in the Vietnam War. To raise consciences, and collective guilt, the factory brandished a photo of a young pilot who had been killed in a crash of a plane assembled there. The film interweaves the political overview - of a city institution being torn down to be replaced by commercial and residential buildings - with personal anecdotes that are poignant and charming. One woman recalls being at her parent's home with seven siblings, saying, "It was like an elephant living in the stomach of a sparrow...
...classic case of shooting the messenger. On May 12, government security officers showed up at two of Vietnam's most popular newspapers. They searched the offices and when they were done they led away two prominent Vietnamese journalists. Both were well known for their coverage of an embezzlement and bribery scandal that brought down a top government minister and put several people behind bars. Now Nguyen Van Hai and Nguyen Viet Chien are in jail themselves, ironically on charges similar to those filed against the officials they investigated: "the abuse of power for personal gain...
...allegations lodged against the journalists are vague. But the real crime they committed was crossing an ever-shifting line of what the country's media can and cannot report, says Shawn McHale, a professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University who is in Vietnam on a Fulbright-Hays fellowship. Vietnam's economy has been growing rapidly for the last several years as the authoritarian government gradually embraces free-market reforms. Institutions like the press would like to see a similar lifting of controls and have increasingly been pushing the limits of government tolerance...
That's not to say the press is blameless. Several senior journalists have raised questions about the ethics and reporting standards of Vietnam's fledgling media. Veteran journalist Huy Duc condemned the arrest of his colleagues, but also noted in his popular blog that the careers of at least two officials in the Communist Party were damaged because of unfounded allegations raised by the press in their PMU18 coverage. "A lot of information printed in newspapers at the time had been made up," Duc claimed, adding that reporters were used by party sources to destroy their political opponents. Duc blamed...
...information. That's unlikely to happen. At best, the arrests will encourage reporters to "be more careful to double-check sources and do adequate attribution," says Phu of the Saigon Times. At worst, the incident will discourage media coverage of corruption scandals in the future-which won't help Vietnam's leaders in their anti-graft campaign. McHale calls corruption a "cancer" that threatens to eat away at the country's economic gains. "Billions of dollars of FDI (foreign direct investment) is going to go away" if the problem is not attacked and corrupt officials remain unexposed, McHale says. "There...