Once again, capitalism rears its ugly head to improve the lives of many.
“I feel lucky that I was born a long time after 1975,” said Tue Nghi, who at 22 has her own company that buys, refurbishes and sells homes. From a childhood of poverty and misfortune, Ms. Tue Nghi parlayed a small trading company into a thriving business, and now owns four cars and numerous houses.
New money is everywhere in Saigon, the former capital of South Vietnam, because all the old money fled or was stripped away when the Communist North won the war.
In the early years of a unified Vietnam, the government pursued disastrous experiments with collectivized farms and bans on private enterprise. The country’s leaders changed course around the time the Soviet Union collapsed, embracing the market economy, a pillar of the very system they had fought to defeat.
Since then, Saigon, a freewheeling bastion of capitalism before 1975, has returned to its roots with vigor.
Ralf Matthaes, a Canadian who arrived in Vietnam in 1993, remembers streets filled with “nothing but bicycles.” “If you saw a car you would actually stop and stare at it,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/21/w...-its-soul-in-a-voracious-capitalism.html?_r=0
This will make NJ's head explode.... Globalization is good? Oh my.
Indeed, the shell of a Communist command economy remains: The state-owned companies that make up around one-quarter of the economy have large debts and are not very efficient. The private sector and foreign companies are what keeps the economy buzzing.
More than 200,000 migrants a year flock to Ho Chi Minh City from other parts of Vietnam. The city counts eight million registered residents, but estimates of the total population reach 12 million.
Rags-to-riches stories are everywhere.
“I feel lucky that I was born a long time after 1975,” said Tue Nghi, who at 22 has her own company that buys, refurbishes and sells homes. From a childhood of poverty and misfortune, Ms. Tue Nghi parlayed a small trading company into a thriving business, and now owns four cars and numerous houses.
New money is everywhere in Saigon, the former capital of South Vietnam, because all the old money fled or was stripped away when the Communist North won the war.
In the early years of a unified Vietnam, the government pursued disastrous experiments with collectivized farms and bans on private enterprise. The country’s leaders changed course around the time the Soviet Union collapsed, embracing the market economy, a pillar of the very system they had fought to defeat.
Since then, Saigon, a freewheeling bastion of capitalism before 1975, has returned to its roots with vigor.
Ralf Matthaes, a Canadian who arrived in Vietnam in 1993, remembers streets filled with “nothing but bicycles.” “If you saw a car you would actually stop and stare at it,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/21/w...-its-soul-in-a-voracious-capitalism.html?_r=0
This will make NJ's head explode.... Globalization is good? Oh my.
Indeed, the shell of a Communist command economy remains: The state-owned companies that make up around one-quarter of the economy have large debts and are not very efficient. The private sector and foreign companies are what keeps the economy buzzing.
More than 200,000 migrants a year flock to Ho Chi Minh City from other parts of Vietnam. The city counts eight million registered residents, but estimates of the total population reach 12 million.
Rags-to-riches stories are everywhere.
