Fast forward to February 2011;

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ral Hanoi. Although the city’s outer districts have been transformed by successive waves of construction, the government has licensed few large developments in the densely populated but still charming city centre. That has put a big premium on the available plots of land. Economists have consistently warned that prices are spiralling out of control, with annual rental yields as low as one or two per cent. But the flood of people buying in the hope of capital appreciation has not abated.



The local government has ordered Mr Dinh and his family to sell their property to T&T. But he insists that the development is illegal and that they will not be forced from their once-elegant but now faded home. Mr Dinh claims that security guards working for the developers are trying to intimidate him by playing loud music all day and lighting smoky fires. Tran Hong Son, vice-chairman of T&T, denies the allegation. “The guards are bored so they play music loudly and I can’t control them,” he says. He accuses Mr Dinh of trying to hold the project to ransom.



Mr Dinh and his family will be evicted says Lam Quoc Hung, vice-chairman of the local people’s committee – as councils are known in Vietnam – though no date has been set. He warned that if they are forced out, they will have to make do with the minimum statutory compensation, which would be about 10bn dong in this case.





Vietnam: Between tradition and modernity

By Nick Ahlmark, Aljazeera



Back in the mid-1990s I was on a gap year before university and had somehow ended up in mid-West America. Wandering through a neighbourhood in La Crosse, Wisconsin, I saw groups of women in brightly-coloured dresses tending to corn crops in their front gardens and washing their clothes in large buckets on their porches. In one of America's whitest states, this Asian community stood out. I turned to my American friend and asked who these people were? "Oh, they're the Hmong," he replied.

Further questioning revealed that the Hmong are a race of four million people spread out across southern China, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Burma. The Hmong of La Crosse are part of the about 180,000 strong refugee community in the US. The Hmong had fought for the Americans against the communists in Vietnam and Laos during the 1960s and 1970s and thus the US had taken in a significant number of Hmong asylum seekers after the Vietnam War. What struck me on that sunny day in Wisconsin was how this community were dutifully sticking to their traditions. They were even stashing their garden crops in hand woven baskets, all this despite having been in one of the most modern countries on the planet for the best part of 20 years.

Fast forward to February 2011; myself and fellow filmmaker Nicole Precel find ourselves in Chi Ca Commune, a cluster of villages in Xin Man district, part of Ha Giang province in northern Vietnam, the poorest province in the country. We are here to make a film which will become the eighth
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The economy also has to cope with a large foreign debt, which the government says is equal to 42.2 per cent of gross domestic product. Speaking to the media in Hanoi late last month, however, the International Monetary Fund's Cephas Lumina noted that this figure did not necessarily include all borrowings by state-owned enterprises. Troubled shipbuilding firm Vinsahin is of particular concern. Last July, the Vietnamese authorities announced that the company had racked up debts totalling US $4.4 billion.



Officials also say that they want to reduce the budget deficit from around 6 per cent of GDP last year to less than 5 per cent this year. Evidence of the determination with which this goal is being pursued is the fact that fuel prices were raised for the second consecutive month in March despite the risk of stoking inflation. The stability of the banking sector is yet another concern. According to a recent ADB report, the rapid increase in the domestic credit stock, about US $100 billion during 2007-10, has raised questions about the asset quality of local banks. Vietnamese banks are also heavily exposed to real estate and state-owned enterprises, many of which are believed to be in financial difficulty. In what appears to be a move to improve the management of local banks as well as shore up their financial positions, the Prime Minister recently instructed the central bank to consider increasing the cap on foreign bank ownership for a single strategic investor from 15 per cent to 20 per cent.

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