Prompts Policy Tightening

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But among today's increasingly Internet-savvy and smartphone-using society, few people appear to be listening very carefully. "Nobody pays attention," said Le Thi Ngoc Anh, a 22-year-old business student from the outskirts of the capital. "I don't think the loudspeakers are effective, as there's so much noise around," she said. "I don't think any of my family members take notice." For others, the usually twice-daily announcements are not just an anachronism or a minor annoyance -- they're a source of persistent noise pollution. "They start the loudspeakers so early, so the whole street is woken up," tailor Tran Thi Bich told AFP, as she doled out steaming bowls of pumpkin and cassava soup for her daughter and husband. The 50-year-old, whose family home and shop is a stone's throw across the street from a loudspeaker, said it was "impossible" to get accustomed to its early morning pronouncements -- normally at around 6.30am. "I don't know what to do. Maybe it only happens to me, others may find it nothing to object about," she sighed.



Officials, however, were quick to defend the system. "Yes, it's old-fashioned because it's a rather poor country," said Pham Quoc Ban, director of the information and communication department at the Hanoi People's Committee, in an interview. "We have limited financial resources so we don't have money to knock on people's doors. We have tens of thousands of people in one community and most of them are ordinary workers, so how can we disseminate information to them?" Loudspeakers are not the only tools of the surveillance-heavy state: Vietnam is rife with plainclothes police, demonstrations are filmed, most sensitive court trials are closed to the public and authorities regularly tap telephones.



All newspapers, magazines and broadcasting media are linked to the state, with Vietnam ranking 165 out of 178 countries in a 2010 press freedom index by Reporters Without Borders, a media freedom campaign group. Pham Quoc Ban insisted the loudspeakers were local "communication tools" and did not form part of the country's mass media, with the announcements tailored to every town quarter or village across the country. "Other technical tools will take over eventually," he said. The official wistfully recalled the days when the city's female speaker was "a symbol of Hanoi" during wartime, saying: "People of my generation still remember her voice." While now irritating and irrelevant to some, others see the loudspeakers as a functional and ever-present soundtrack to their lives. "I like hearing it, not because I listen to it so much as I have got accustomed to it. So whenever I don't hear it, I miss it. It's rather fun," said street vendor Nguyen Kim Thanh, 51, as she nibbled a snack of snails.



For most visitors to the country, the speaker system is hardly comforting -- rather a dated symbol of a propagandist and paranoid regime.

"There's no real need for that kind of information anymore," said a Western analyst, who has lived in Vietnam for 15 years. "Why maintain the system, with wires everywhere? Maybe it's just a reminder that Big Brother is watching you."







Vietnam Outlook: Inflation Prompts Policy Tightening

By Marshall Carter, Moody’s 17 May 2011



Containing inflation is Vietnam’s biggest near-term hurdle. Monetary and fiscal tightening will keep GDP growth at around 6% in 2011.

The dong will be under pressure until macroeconomic fundamentals improve. Exports will gro
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thousands of children are living and working on the streets of Vietnam's cities. Michael Brosowski is trying to give many of them a chance at a brighter future. Through Brosowski's Blue Dragon Children's Foundation, more than 350 Vietnamese children have been given safe shelter and enrolled in school. The organization has a network of programs in cities throughout Vietnam, and it recently broadened its efforts to combat child trafficking. So far, it has rescued more than 100 trafficked children. Brosowski recently spoke with CNN about the struggles facing Vietnam's street children.



CNN: Who are Vietnam's street kids?

Michael Brosowski: When we were starting out back in 2002, the kids were pretty much all boys coming from rural areas. And they were coming to make a little bit of money to supplement the family income. Mom and dad can hardly afford money to send the rest of the kids to school, can't afford to get enough food on the table, so they think, well, you might as well go to Hanoi and work. These days, we're mostly coming across runaway children, and it's where kids are having some kind of family problem. Poverty is usually part of the problem, but it's not the only problem. Very often, there might be alcoholism, sometimes drug use. It might be that one of the parents has died and the remaining parent has remarried and then that new husband and wife couple don't want the kids from the previous marriage. So kids are ending up now on the streets of Hanoi more because they feel unwanted at home rather than coming here to earn money to support the family.



CNN: What dangers do the kids face on the streets in Vietnam?

Brosowski: The dangers now are much greater, and there are more of them than when we started out. There's a lot more gang activity on the streets and a lot more cases of trafficking. One reason that street kids here in Vietnam are mostly boys is that the families have this view that the girls should be somewhere safe and secure, but the boys are fine (and) they can wander around at will. In reality, they're not fine. In reality, the boys are facing gangs, they're facing arrest. And the longer they're out on the street, the worse habits they learn. There are gangs selling heroin, and heroin here is very cheap, widely accessible and a lot of people's job is to get young people hooked on it so that then they've got to start buying it. Meanwhile, the girls ... they're going to end up in positions that can very often be exploitative or abusive. So we've also got to think about how to protect the girls.

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