Evolution in Post-war Vietnam

In the late 1960s, if you stood near the French colonial cathedral in Saigon, you could see American shells exploding mid-air and their parachute flares floating down to the ground. The dead white light they cast lit up the jungly marshes just across the river. These defensive measures were punctuated by the periodic thump of random shellfire into the darkness surrounding the US army outposts.

Thirty years on and you have to pinch yourself at the transformation. The marshes are fast disappearing, pumped out by a steel forest of cranes and engineering equipment hired by South Korean, Taiwanese and Hong Kong development companies. The area where the Viet Cong fired their rockets is now a rapidly expanding executive housing estate, decked out in the sort of pastel colours favoured in Florida coastal resorts. The concrete blocks are fronted by neat lawns and ornamental lakes with neo-classical statues.

Traffic thunders past on its way to the Mekong Delta, and a mile away a new bridge takes shape across the Saigon River, with Vietnamese engineers precariously balanced on steel girders as ships slip by below them. Fluttering from one bridge is Vietnam's red flag with a yellow star, but nearby there is a real estate sign and a pizza parlour. Saigon South, as this vast development is called, is designed for middle-class Vietnamese such as Communist Party officials with a decent income, or managers in the growing private sector - along with foreign businessmen back in Vietnam after the last recession.

Earlier attempts at economic reform in Vietnam have come to grief, usually because of resistance from the revolutionary generation, but this time the scale of the changes is so vast it will be difficult to block them. Perhaps the best gauge of economic health in a country held back for far too long is the number of motorcycles in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. There could easily be as many as seven million - a sort of anarchic cavalry, with each machine often carrying a complete family of four sandwiched between handlebars and rear wheel. The motorbikes are a sign that money is trickling through society, even in the habitually frugal north - and a pointer, perhaps, as to how the Communist Party is striving to stay ahead of public expectations.

Today the Politburo has endorsed the path to economic reform blazed by the nation's giant neighbour, China. The Politburo now takes a pragmatic attitude towards America, once its nemesis but now Vietnam's biggest trading partner. In the Mekong Delta town of Ben Tre, where Graham Greene probably conceived part of his IndoChina masterpiece, The Quiet American, I ran into a group of US non-governmental advisers looking at the rice export industry. Near the same town 35 years ago I recall a spine-chilling night in an American encampment, listening, over many cold beers, to CIA and military personnel discussing gruesome counter-terror measures. Now the delta is at peace, and even the Americans are back, albeit in small numbers. That's a wonder in itself after the horrors of war.

Adapted from BBC World Service news, April 2005

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