Chasing the Tigers: A Portrait of the New Vietnam

Vietnam's communist rulers embraced free-market economics in 1986, dismantling farm cooperatives and encouraging private investment. Hiebert, a reporter for Far Eastern Economic Review, is guardedly confident that Vietnam-still one of the world's poorest countries-will become the next Asian economic success story, joining ""tigers"" like Hong Kong and South Korea. He traveled extensively in Vietnam between 1990 and 1994, interviewing entrepreneurs, bankers, peasants, novelists, factory workers, and he limns a hardworking, resourceful people with a remarkable capacity to overcome barriers of all kinds. Although farmers are producing record harvests, industrial managers and workers resist efforts at privatization, and Hiebert identifies key problems-entrenched unemployment, malnutrition, crumbling transportation infrastructure, declining education and health services, massive smuggling-that the nation will have to address. He offers penetrating observations on the revival of traditional religion, the sharp rise in divorce, crime and corruption, the limited new freedoms enjoyed by writers, artists and critics of the regime. This valuable report supplies a more optimistic assessment than Mitch Epstein's somber photoessay, Vietnam: A Book of Changes (Forecasts, Oct. 7). Photos. (Nov.)