Belarus Wants Out

There is a bitter irony at the heart of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea. Putin’s short-term victory is already coming at the expense of his most cherished long-term strategy -- the creation of a Eurasian Union, a trade union linking Russia and its closest neighbors. In other words, as the invasion expands Russian territory, it will diminish Russian influence in the very places he’d like to increase it. One need only look to Belarus, which is already beginning to hedge against its alliance with Moscow, to see why.

Fanciful as it might sound, the Eurasian Union was never idle talk for Putin. It was meant to serve as a genuine alternative to the West for the countries bordering Russia, including those on Europe’s eastern frontier. For now, only Belarus and Kazakhstan have volunteered to be part of the formal January 2015 launch. But Putin has been closely eyeing other countries in the region, particularly those that have been targeted by the EU’s Eastern Partnership program, which was designed to foster closer ties between the EU and Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has exposed the strategic ambiguity of Putin’s project. Russia liked to emphasize that the Eurasian Union would serve as an equal partnership among its member states and a vehicle for each to better pursue its political and economic interests. But Moscow’s interests suddenly seem much more expansive than they did just a few months ago. Putin has justified his Crimean gambit with a vast but vaguely defined “responsibility to protect” doctrine. No one knows whether Putin now intends to back up the doctrine with military force, or even whom he aims to protect: ethnic Russians, Russian speakers, or any people at all that Russia thinks might need help.

Russia’s partners are understandably spooked. Early in the Ukraine crisis, when pro-Western protesters were camping out in Kiev, Aleksandr Lukashenko, Belarus’ president, seemed happy to see Russia encourage the Ukrainian regime to crack down. Like Putin, he had no desire to see Ukraine’s fellow Slavs in Russia or Belarus copying the slogans and tactics of the Ukrainian protestors. (Lukashenko is still scarred by the demonstrations that followed the controversial 2010 elections, in which he won a fourth term in office.) But Russia’s military intervention in Crimea was a very different matter. Lukashenko pointedly refused to send observers to Crimea’s March 15 referendum. He has also defied Moscow by saying that he will work with the new pro-Western government in Kiev (which Putin has described as “illegitimate”).

There are good reasons for Belarus to feel threatened. It does not have any single enclave with a majority ethnic-Russian population like Crimea, although approximately eight percent of the population in eastern Belarus is ethnically Russian. But Russia is the dominant language across all of Belarus. According to Putin’s reasoning for seizing Crimea, even Belarus could one day be a target of Russian pressure. (It’s similarly plausible, if not even more likely, that Russia would stage an intervention in Kazakhstan’s Russian-speaking north.)

Even if it is unlikely that Russia would invade Belarus anytime soon, Lukashenko does have reason to worry about the consequences of joining Putin’s Eurasian Union. For one, Lukashenko may already sense that the Eurasian Union won’t be the economic boon for Belarus that he had once imagined. Although he may have hoped that it would provide an open market for cheap Belarusian goods, its precursor, the Customs Union, has so far underscored that Belarusian goods have difficulties competing in a free market, even with goods produced in Russia or Kazakhstan.

Further, even as Russia talks of creating a mutually beneficial partnership, it has been trying to weaken the states around itself. Ukraine is not the only such example. Georgia and especially Moldova have come under pressure as they try to tie up their EU Agreements in 2014. The last thing that Lukashenko wants is to become another weak leader challenged by domestic revolt, often fomented by Russia, who then becomes dependent on Russia to survive -- as Yanukovych would have become if he had not overreacted to the protests in Kiev and been forced to flee, or as Serzh Sargsyan has already become in Armenia. Even worse, Lukashenko knows he could end up as a tin-pot dictator of a mini-state, like Yevgeny Shevchuk, the president of Transnistria, or Sergei Aksyonov, the new prime minister of Crimea.

Above all, Lukashenko wants to avoid having to make a decision between Russia and the West. He has always been happy to be Russia’s ally, but only as the leader of a strong, independent state capable of steering its own course. The key to his staying power -- he has led Belarus for nearly 20 years -- has been his ability to make the case, to his audience at home as well as in Russia, that he holds some bargaining power with the Kremlin. Belarus benefits greatly from Moscow’s assistance in the form of cheap oil and gas, and other Russian subsidies and scams that are estimated to add over 15 percent to Belarusian GDP. But, in exchange for that help, Lukashenko has provided services. He has made money for Russian oligarchs in transit trade through Belarus, supported Putin’s historical revisionism about the Soviet Union, and put down any hint of civil unrest that could spread to Russia. He suggests that no other Belarusian leader would be capable of doing the same.

Lukashenko’s economic model also depends on good relations with countries in the European Union. Belarus can’t afford to lose its trade relations with Latvia and Lithuania, for example. But Russia’s aggression in Ukraine -- and Putin’s suggestion that the competition in the region is zero-sum -- is now threatening to put those relationships in jeopardy. With a massive ethnic Russian minority population of its own, Latvia in particular understandably feels threatened by Putin’s Crimean gambit. Putin may not worry about worsening trade ties with the Baltic states, but Lukashenko must.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea could also have other costs for Belarus. In order to keep Crimea afloat, Russia will have to make substantial investments in transportation, water, and gas infrastructure. The money used for those investments will not be available for further Belarusian subsidies. If Russia’s invasion leads Europe to change its energy policy, that will also have a negative impact on Belarus. The Belarusian economy depends largely on its status as a transit hub for Russian oil heading toward the EU. Belarus’ biggest single source of income is its sale of refined petroleum produced from subsidized Russian crude. Sanctions on Russian oil, or increased oil production elsewhere that reduced oil prices, would hit Minsk hard.

It should not be surprising that Lukashenko has been demonstrably edging away from Putin in recent weeks. Belarus has started hinting that it wants better relations with the EU, agreeing in February to participate in visa negotiations with Brussels. But any shifts toward the EU are going to be a gradual process; Lukashenko is still a dictator, after all, who has little interest in meeting Europe’s democratic standards. For now, Lukashenko is inside the Russian tent looking out. And he is not about to head for the door just yet. But ever since Putin’s aggressive takeover of Crimea, Lukashenko has been more anxiously looking toward the exits. 

Russia cannot afford to gain Crimea while losing more post-Soviet friends. Yet that is precisely what its behavior will do in the longer run. Countries like Belarus and Kazakhstan may eventually be obliged to recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea -- if and when Russia absorbs the territory, they will have no choice. But those countries’ current silence speaks volumes about their present worries and future plans. 

The Bird Lord Speaks: Why We Should Believe In 'Flappy Bird' Creator Dong Nguyen

Dong Nguyen has emerged from the shadows, and amazingly, he chose to speak with Forbes’ Lan Anh Nguyen exclusively. It’s his first interview since announcing he was taking down his #1 selling game Flappy Bird, and then promptly following through on the promise a day later.

I highly suggest you check out Nguyen’s interview here, where he managed to discuss a few of the more pressing issues we’ve all been wondering about. I had the honor of crafting a few of these questions myself and sending them over to Vietnam. Why exactly would he do this? What is going through the mind of a man who shuts down a game supposedly bringing in $50,000 in revenue daily?

Even with these new answers, Nguyen remains something of a mystery. His dual reasoning for taking Flappy Bird down was that players were getting too addicted to it, which he deems harmful, and that he was getting too much unwanted attention for the game. Despite the money, Nguyen says that his “life has not been as comfortable as I was before.”

Through these latest comments, Nguyen comes across as a simple man who means what he says. It really doesn’t feel like this was all a giant marketing stunt to increase sales of the game, and I do believe he thinks he was doing a good thing for the general public by deleting perhaps an overly addicting game. He says it’s not coming back, and it’s for the best. I would agree.

Despite attracting newfound mountains of attention with all the deletion drama this weekend, Nguyen says he feels liberated by the death of Flappy Bird, and he will continue to focus on developing other games. He already has a few other top selling ones in the app store, but promises he won’t delete them unless they also become too addicting.

Once again, all of this comes down to whether or not you believe Nguyen’s self-stated motivations. To me, he comes across as something of a gentle eccentric. He’s not fleeing from success completely as some seem to think, he’s just doing what he wants with a game he designed. It’s an incredibly unusual circumstance because even small companies that hit it big with games are still teams. Nguyen’s .GAME studio is literally one man, and if he decides enough is enough for one of his games, that’s it. He can wipe it off the map if he feels like it.

I also believe Nguyen’s claim that this wasn’t motivated by any legal threats. Nintendo just wouldn’t have a case against him based on the warp pipe art alone, and the creator of 2011′s Piou Piou said he wouldn’t pursue any legal action, just like Nguyen said in this interview he won’t go after his own clones. I do believe that Nguyen’s game is in fact some degree of a clone itself, and that should be pointed out, but with that said, the man never deserved to be directly harassed, insulted or threatened. I saw a litany of death threats leveled against the man by idiots on Twitter this weekend, and I can understand how that could affect someone deeply.

I think this interview cements what I suspected since this saga started. Dong Nguyen did indeed have a simple life before all this, and hasn’t quite figured out how to adjust to all this newfound fame. It’s certainly not expected behavior to erase the very thing that’s made you a household name in the video game world, and brought you millions of dollars, but I don’t think the events of this weekend had any sinister motivations behind them.

But also, Nguyen isn’t a martyr. He’s not picking up his toys and going home, nor has he “walked away from a fortune” per se. Flappy Bird already netted him a hefty amount of cash to be sure, and already installed copies are likely still bringing in loads of revenue daily. He’s still developing games and already has many that are popular at present. He is, and will continue to be, very successful in the app market, this unheard of deletion decision aside.

My hope for Nguyen is that he learns to adjust to his newfound celebrity, and shrugs off his vile critics while embracing constructive feedback. I hope his other new games are clearly original to avoid further accusations of cloning. I hope he continues to be an inspiration to his countrymen, and really, anyone who not only wants to make it big, but do so on their own terms.

Though I can’t prove it’s true, I want to believe someone can place the good of the public and peace of mind over money. Therefore, I believe in Dong Nguyen.

Exclusive: Flappy Bird Creator Dong Nguyen Says App 'Gone Forever' Because It Was 'An Addictive Product'

The mysterious developer of the world’s most popular free app, who drew global attention this past weekend with his sudden decision to remove it, tells Forbes that Flappy Bird is dead. Permanently.

“Flappy Bird was designed to play in a few minutes when you are relaxed,” says Dong Nguyen, in an exclusive interview, his first since he pulled the plug on the app. “But it happened to become an addictive product. I think it has become a problem. To solve that problem, it’s best to take down Flappy Bird. It’s gone forever.”

In killing Flappy Bird for what he maintains are altruistic reasons, Nguyen is walking away from a jackpot. An article in the Verge last week estimated his daily take from in-app advertising at $50,000. Nguyen declined to confirm that number. “I don’t know the exact figure, but I do know it’s a lot.”

The circumstances surrounding the interview, conducted in Vietnamese, were as much of a soap opera as his public ruminations about whether to take down the app. The interview with Forbes took place in a hotel in Hanoi, with a strict condition that Forbes not reveal Nguyen’s face. It was delayed several hours, in part because Nguyen had a sudden meeting with Vietnam’s deputy prime minister Vu Duc Dam – a remarkable turn of events for someone unknown a week ago. Nguyen says his parents didn’t even know that Flappy Bird existed, much less his role in it, until media coverage spun out of control in the past few days.

The 29-year-old, who sports a close-cropped haircut, appeared stressed. He smoked several cigarettes over the course of the 45-minute interview, and doodled monkey heads on a pad of paper.

Flappy Bird was released for free on May 24, 2013 first for iOS with little fanfare by a Vietnam-based developer called .GEARS. Nguyen says he coded the game over two or three days. The game mechanics were simple yet irritatingly difficult. Tapping on your smartphone screen, players navigated a pixilated bird through narrow corridors of green pipes that looked suspiciously like the pipes found in Nintendo ’s Super Mario Bros.—something that Nguyen says that was coincidental. (He also denied reports that Nintendo had sent him a legal threat, or that it had anything to do with him killing the app.) Striking any surface resulted in instant death. Your chance of death multiplied exponentially with each gate you passed.

Nguyen has several other top app store games, including Super Ball Juggling and Shuriken Block, which are currently #6 and #18 on the iOS store, respectively. Nguyen says that he has no plans to remove those games, which he termed “harmless.” If he thought users were getting addicted, however, he said he would not hesitate to also take them down.

In mulling whether to pull Flappy Bird, Nguyen said that it was guilt – atop the fact that “my life has not been as comfortable as I was before” – that motivated him. “I couldn’t sleep,” he said. He added that his conscience is relieved; he spent the past few days, Internet-free, catching up on slumber.

“I don’t think it’s a mistake,” he says. “I have thought it through.”

We haven’t heard the last of Nguyen. He says he will continue to develop games. “After the success of Flappy Bird, I feel more confident, and I have freedom to do what I want to do.”

And Flappy Bird addicts should have nothing to worry about, as there are certainly no shortages of Flappy Bird replacements. Clones have stormed the App store with names like Flappy Plane, Flappy Whale, Flappy Penguin and Flappy Angry Bird. Nguyen said he probably won’t take legal action against any copycats. “I have tried playing Ironpants,” he added. “It’s a good game.”

When asked if there’s anything he wanted to tell disappointed users of the authentic Flappy Bird, Nguyen was concise: “Thank you very much for playing my game.”

Being there

HUNDREDS of thousands lined the streets of Vietnam’s capital on October 13th as Li Keqiang, China’s prime minister, arrived for a three-day visit. They were not there for him, though. It was a state funeral for Vo Nguyen Giap, a legendary general, second only to Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam’s pantheon of national heroes. Indeed, many Vietnamese found the timing of Mr Li’s arrival rather offensive and thought that he should have postponed it to avoid intruding on their grief. “Disrespectful” and “arrogant” were two adjectives used. “Typical” was another.

Unperturbed, Mr Li (pictured above, left) was able to portray his meeting with his Vietnamese counterpart, Nguyen Tan Dung (above, right), as a “breakthrough”. It capped a fortnight of high-level Chinese diplomacy in South-East Asia, intended to repair ties frayed in recent years by China’s extensive and disputed territorial claims in the South China Sea.

Xi Jinping, China’s president and leader of the Communist Party, visited Indonesia, Malaysia and the summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum (APEC). Mr Li attended a summit in Brunei with leaders of the ten-member Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and went on to Thailand. That Barack Obama was due at both APEC and ASEAN, but withdrew because of the budget stand-off in Washington, gave the Chinese leaders’ tours even more prominence.

Vietnam is the ASEAN country where suspicion of China is strongest. After centuries of animosity and a brief, bloody war in 1979, a territorial dispute still simmers, the most extensive of the four China has with ASEAN members in the South China Sea (the others being Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines). Not only do both China and Vietnam claim the Spratly Islands to the south, but Vietnam regards itself as having been illegitimately evicted from the Paracel islands to the north, when China seized them in 1974 from the dying regime of the former South Vietnam. Confrontations over fishing and oil and gas exploration are frequent.

Yet in June, during a visit to China by Vietnam’s president, Truong Tan Sang, the two countries signed a new “strategic partnership”. China is Vietnam’s largest trading partner—not even counting a flourishing illegal trade over the border—as it is for ASEAN as a whole. Mr Li’s breakthrough was to go further in parking the territorial dispute so that it does not get in the way of other business. He even agreed to a “maritime co-operation” work group.

In China, this helped smother unpleasant memories of 2010, when, at a meeting in Hanoi, Hillary Clinton, America’s secretary of state at the time, waded into the South China Sea dispute, declaring an American “national interest” in it. China blames American interference for emboldening Vietnam and the Philippines to stand up to it over the sea. Now China Daily, an official newspaper, has quoted a Chinese analyst: “Hanoi has already realised that it is unrealistic to count on Washington to give public support to its claims on some islands.”

That analysis is a stretch. But Mr Li’s tour, like Mr Xi’s, was a reminder of how big a regional power China has become, and of how absent Mr Obama was. Everywhere they displayed their economic clout. In Thailand, for example, Mr Li delighted the government by offering help in two areas of self-inflicted economic harm, by agreeing to buy more rice and rubber. Mr Xi had already floated the idea of a Chinese-led “Asian infrastructure bank” to help meet one of the region’s most pressing needs. In Brunei, Mr Li had earlier proposed a new treaty with ASEAN, to realise his vision of a “diamond decade” in its relations with China.

Not that alluring

If this was a charm offensive, however, one ASEAN country still gets the offence without the charm. China is incensed that the Philippines is challenging its ill-explained, expansive claim in the South China Sea at the international tribunal of the United Nations’ law of the sea. It suits China to try to isolate the Philippines. Vietnamese scholars, however, say their government is fully aware of this—and has not ruled out joining the Philippines’ legal action.

A few weeks of diplomatic activity have not changed the fundamental reality—that South-East Asia looks to China as its main trading partner and America as the prime guarantor of its security. They have, however, heightened a perception that power in the region is shifting. A commentary in the Jakarta Post, an English-language newspaper in Indonesia, argued bluntly that “it is China, not the United States, who is the leader of the Asia-Pacific region in the 21st century.” Pointing to Mr Obama’s no-show and the government shutdown, it concluded that his “much touted ‘pivot’ to Asia feels more like a pirouette with an overemphasis on military engagement.”

The Chinese press is happy to foster the impression of a power shift, taking the argument beyond South-East Asia. Its official news agency, Xinhua, published a commentary calling for a “de-Americanised world”. It argued that, with the possibility of a sovereign default by the superpower, “such alarming days when the destinies of others are in the hands of a hypocritical nation have to be terminated.”

That notion attracts some sympathy in South-East Asia but few would want an American-led international order to give way to one dominated by China. Some Vietnamese officials thought the criticism of the timing of Mr Li’s visit to Hanoi was unfair. After all, he was there in time to offer condolences at a time of national grief. But it is not just in Vietnam that many are prepared to think the worst of Chinese motives.

General Giap

Vo Nguyen Giap, who drove both the French and the Americans out of Vietnam, died on October 4th, aged 102

AFTER his great victory at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, which pushed the French colonial power to the peace table in Geneva, Vo Nguyen Giap (above, top left) took a tour of the battlefield. The red earth was dark with enemy blood. Cartridges, barbed wire and fragments of shells lay all over it; unburied corpses were busy with yellow flies. In one of the artillery posts the mess of papers on the floor included a letter from the defending general to his wife. General Giap, once a history teacher, thought it would be worth preserving in the records of a free Vietnam.

This victory had been a long time in the making. The French had fortified the valley, in north-west Tonkin on the border with Laos, so he had taken his troops into the mountains that encircled it. The French thought the hills impassable: craggy, forested, foggy, riddled with caves. General Giap recalled the words of his hero Bonaparte, whose battle plans he was sketching out with chalk when he was still at the Lycée in Hue: “If a goat can get through, so can a man; if a man can get through, so can a battalion.” Slowly, stealthily, in single file, 55,000 men took up positions there, supplied by 260,000 coolies with baskets, 20,000 bicycles and 11,800 bamboo rafts. Artillery was carried up in sections. From this eyrie, trenches and tunnels were dug down until they almost touched the French. The enemy never stood a chance.

Here were Bonaparte’s maxims again: audace, surprise. A dash, too, of Lawrence of Arabia, whose “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” General Giap was seldom without. And plenty of Mao Zedong, whose three-stage doctrine of warfare (guerrilla tactics, stalemate, offensive warfare) he had fully absorbed during his brief exile in China, for communist activity, in the early 1940s.

The key to all his victories, as Mao advised, was his people’s army. The French might be professionals straight out of Saint-Cyr, but they did not know what they were fighting for. The Americans who came in later—when Vietnam had been divided and an anti-communist regime had been set up in the South—might bomb his forces from B-52s and poison them with defoliants, but the GIs did not want to be there. His men, by contrast, were fighting to free their own land. From the start, in 1944, he had drilled his tiny musket-and-flintlock resistance army in the ideology of the struggle, setting up propaganda units to indoctrinate peasants in their villages. The result was a guerrilla force that could live off the land, could disappear into it (as along the labyrinthine Ho Chi Minh trail that supplied, through jungle paths and tunnels, communist fighters in the South from the North) and was prepared, with infinite patience, to distract and harry the enemy until he gave in. This was fighting à la vietnamienne. It took the general 30 years, from Vietnam’s declaration of independence from France in 1945 to the fall of Saigon, the southern capital, in 1975, to make his vision reality.

A volcano under snow

Not that he was a populist, exactly. His father had been a lettré, a local scholar, as well as a farmer; he himself had a law degree. He was dapper, reviewing his troops in a white suit, trilby and club tie; even in a mountain cave, diminutive and smiling, he looked fresh as a flower. He wrote poetry, and his French was impeccable. The French, though, could see through that to the hatred that burned beneath, ever since the deaths of both his father and his first wife, after brutal torture, in French prisons. They called him “a volcano under snow”.

Nonetheless, he made an improbable soldier. He had no training, and would never have become a military commander, he said, if Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Vietminh forces and later of North Vietnam, had not decided it for him. He first met Ho (above, top right) in China, realised they had been to the same school, and idolised him, from his tufty beard to his white rubber sandals. He called him “Uncle”; Ho called him “beautiful as a girl”.

In government, where he was in charge of “revolutionary order” as well as the troops, the political and military progress of the revolution were strictly co-ordinated. Both Dien Bien Phu and the multi-target Tet offensive of 1968 (which he still masterminded, though he was in eastern Europe at the time) were meant to inflict massive demoralisation on the enemy, and to turn the French and American people against the war itself. In both battles the Vietnamese too took huge casualties, which he did not dwell on. He was proud, hot-tempered, blustered into a number of unnecessary pitched battles—but won his two wars, just the same, demonstrating irresistibly to the rest of the colonised world that a backward peasant country could defeat a great colonial power.

After Ho’s death in 1969 he lost influence, and envious colleagues pushed him aside. Some said he was an indifferent communist; he disliked the hardline clique that ran the country, and in old age publicly attacked the party for corruption and bauxite-mining. He remained a huge hero in Vietnam, whose re-emergence as a united and prospering country gave him great joy. Revolutionary work, he wrote once, was largely foresight: knowing not just what the enemy might do tomorrow but also how, in future, the world was going to change. On the bloody field of Dien Bien Phu, he saw that with absolute clarity.

Blowing in the trade winds

BY SOME measures, Vietnam’s economy is moving at a brisk clip. The double-digit inflation that prevailed in 2011 has subsided, and exports of textiles and electronics are booming. Foreign direct investment is up by 36% year-on-year, according to Fitch, a ratings agency.

Yet GDP growth is rumbling along slowly: just 5% last year, the slowest pace since 1999. The trouble stems in large part from the ruling Communist Party’s failure to discipline state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and clean up the bad debts lurking in the banks. As in neighbouring China, party bigwigs and their chums are loth to tamper with a status quo that serves their interests well.

Yet the government’s legitimacy hinges on making life better for the country’s 90m people. In recent months, officials have started to plan substantial economic reforms. Encouraging signs include an April resolution by the party’s Politburo that made economic integration its top priority, and recent debates among Vietnamese lawmakers over how to “equitise”, or partially privatise, SOEs. Nguyen Tan Dung, the prime minister, also pledged in September to treat the country’s 1,300 SOEs like private companies and raise from 30% to 49% the share in any local bank that foreign investors may own.

One Western diplomat says the question now isn’t whether real reform will happen, but how fast. If that is true, the pace of change may depend on the fine print of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a planned American-led free-trade agreement among a dozen countries. TPP would, among other things, require its members to curb the excesses of SOEs.

TPP’s focus on SOEs has provided political cover for reform-minded Vietnamese legislators to pursue their agenda, says Phung Duc Tung, an economist. Just how far they will get is an open question, but Mr Tung thinks privatising most SOEs would boost the economy and lay the foundations for a better corporate tax base.

SOEs, which account for 40% of economic output, are dangerously entwined with state-run banks—the same lenders that financed the SOEs’ high-risk expansion into property during the boom that accompanied Vietnam’s 2007 accession to the WTO. The failure of some of those investments forced a downgrade of Vietnam’s sovereign debt and left the property market in tatters.

Today the SOEs are actively “restructuring”, says the state-controlled press. No one expects a repeat of their massive credit binges. Yet the SOEs remain inefficient; some are so saddled with debts that they cannot afford to pay their employees.

None of this bodes well for the hundreds of thousands of young people wading into Vietnam’s anaemic job market, much less those who are fed up with corruption and rising inequality. Combined with widespread frustration over education, health-care and land-tenure policies, such issues could some day fuel an explosion of social unrest.

Meanwhile, American trade negotiators are itching to close the TPP negotiations. The attraction for Vietnam is better access to the American market for some of its labour-intensive industries such as clothes and shoes. But the American ambassador to Vietnam, David Shear, has said the country needs to show “demonstrable progress” on human rights to help kindle support for TPP in America. In this respect it did not help that Vietnam this month jailed Le Quoc Quan, a human-rights lawyer, on spurious charges of tax evasion. In spite of that, it is likely both sides will sign the agreement some time next year.

Across the party wall

IF THE following pressing themes remind you of China, spare a thought for Vietnam: a debate over the constitution; efforts to curb the privileges of state-owned enterprises; fury over official corruption; poorly compensated land-grabs; new restrictions on online dissent; a recognition that further economic reform is not just desirable but essential; and, in politics, evidence of fierce factional struggles among high leaders.

China and Vietnam have two of the few Communist Parties still in power, so it is hardly surprising that they face many of the same problems. What might alarm them most, however, is the shortage of obvious solutions. Both parties scheduled meetings of their central committees this autumn. Both plenums were seen in advance as important in the evolution of national reforms. China’s plenum is due next month. Vietnam’s has come and gone, producing few apparent signs of new thinking. The Communist Party of Vietnam seems in more of a pickle.

High on the Vietnamese communists’ agenda were proposed changes to the country’s constitution. The current version, adopted in 1992 and last tweaked in 2001, no longer reflects the more open economy and society that Vietnam has become. A revised draft was distributed for public reaction early this year. The result was startling: more than 26m comments were received. Many were not ones the party wanted to hear.

Three clauses in particular attracted attention. Liberals hoped the constitution might guarantee an independent judiciary. At present it promises that the state “shall unceasingly strengthen socialist legality”. Some had also hoped for a change to Article Four, which enshrines the role of the Communist Party as “the force leading the state and society” in a one-party system. And third, many people argued that Article 19, which declares that “the state economic sector shall play the leading role in the national economy”, is both obsolete and damaging. Vietnam is suffering from the effects of a debt crisis brought on partly by the profligacy of its state-owned enterprises. Economic growth of around 5% a year is too slow to provide jobs for a young population, and the economy is unlikely to do much better next year.

Cleaning up the state sector, perhaps by privatising the profitable bits (brewers, for example) and trimming the loss-makers (most of the rest), is a prerequisite for returning to faster growth. It may also be essential if Vietnam succeeds in joining an American-led free-trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But dismantling the “state economic sector” is terrifying for many. Not only are officials corrupt beneficiaries of business links. The system also helps to justify single-party rule.

After the plenum, committees will continue tinkering with the constitution’s wording. But it seems clear that much will be dodged. Vietnam will still be saddled with a charter that barely recognises the profound transformation it underwent with doi moi (“renovation”) in 1986, let alone the rapid changes since.

China’s example is not much help here, even though it too has been debating its constitution. The crucial difference is that, in China, the party’s critics want it simply to respect the present constitution. That document promises equality, freedoms of speech, assembly and religion, and an independent judiciary, all of which the Communist Party ignores. Even the party’s leading role is mentioned only in the preamble rather than in the body of the document. So recent months have seen China’s official press rail against “constitutionalism”—ie, the outrageous notion that the constitution should be respected—as the latest way in which the West is seeking to undermine the country by sneaking in dangerously subversive liberal notions.

Article Four would be less of an issue in Vietnam if the party were not held in such disrespect. Partly this is a consequence of the economic mismanagement of recent years. Partly it reflects disgust with official corruption, seen as pervasive, especially at the very heart of government. This is one reason why, in a vote in the spring in the National Assembly, which shows more gumption than China’s equivalent parliament, nearly one-third of members expressed low confidence in the prime minister, Nguyen Tan Dung. Anger at a corrupt government also explains why Doan Van Vuon, a northern fish farmer jailed for five years in April, became a folk hero. His crime was to defend his land, with homemade guns and explosives, when officials came to confiscate it. Land-grabs are a common cause of protest in China, too, and reforms to the land-ownership system that fosters the abuses could (or, rather, should) be one of the big decisions announced at its party plenum.

Take me to your leader

In China, too, those who stand up are often lionised through social media. In Vietnam, as in China, a crackdown has taken place this year on vocal online dissent, with dozens locked up and new limits to online discourse. In Vietnam only “personal information”, and not news articles, may be exchanged online. This seems to be a doomed attempt to reclaim the monopoly on sources of mass information that the party enjoyed before the internet arrived. Even if the crackdown were enforceable, it would be too late to extinguish the cynicism about party and government that is smouldering in Vietnam, as in China.

That cynicism is fuelled by the perception that party leaders are less interested in the national good than in protecting their own power from attacks by envious rivals. In China the downfall of Bo Xilai, an ambitious provincial leader, drew rare, public attention to the bareknuckle fights in elite politics. In Vietnam Mr Dung, the prime minister, seems the target of a campaign by more conservative party leaders, such as President Truong Tan Sang. The difference is that in China, factional struggle has produced a clear winner in Xi Jinping, the party leader. Part of Vietnam’s problem is that nobody seems sure who is really in charge.

The great decompression

FEW countries have done better than South Korea over the past half-century. Within the span of a single working life, its economy has grown 17-fold, its government has evolved from an austere dictatorship into a rowdy democracy, and its culture, once scarred by censorship, now beguiles the world with its music, soap operas and cinema. Scholars enthuse about the speed and precocity of its “compressed development”.

The only people unimpressed by South Korea’s accomplishments may be South Koreans themselves. As our special report notes, the prosperity they enjoy has not relieved the competitive pressure they endure. To them, the country’s development is compressed in a different way. Its success is confined to a few big employers and industries. The country’s manufacturers are more impressive than its service firms, although these now generate most jobs. And in manufacturing its big, family-owned conglomerates (the chaebol) do far better than their small, hard-pressed suppliers.

Unsurprisingly, ambitious young South Koreans crave employment in the thriving bits of the economy. Medicine, law, finance and government remain popular, but the chaebol now take the cream. Like the civil service and the professions, Samsung, Hyundai and their peers tend to hire people straight from the best universities, with little chance of entry later in life. This creates a double bottleneck in the labour market. There are only a few appealing employers to choose from, and only one realistic chance to join them. So youngsters spend ages padding out their CVs and prepping for exams—especially for the test taken at 18 which determines your university.

This seems like a small thing, and many Western countries would kill to have South Korea’s problem: it is hard to imagine British or American parents fretting that their teenagers work too hard. South Korea comes at or near the top of most international comparisons of reading, maths and science. But there are costs. A lot of effort goes into costly credentialism, rather than deep learning. The system excludes late-developing talent: blossom at 25, and it’s too late. And in the very long term it means a smaller country. The expense of educating children for the test is one reason why South Korean women give birth to so few of them. With the lowest fertility rate in the OECD rich-country club, South Korea’s greying threatens to be as rapid as its growth.

The indirect cure for education fever

Other education-obsessed countries in Asia face a version of the same problem. In the past South Korea’s government tried to help parents by banning out-of-class tutoring. (The president of Seoul National University had to resign after letting his own child dodge the ban.) But such pedagogical prohibition is illiberal, and was anyway ruled unconstitutional in 2000. The answer lies not in the schools but in the overall economy—and in creating a more open labour market where more firms are interested in hiring people later.

The government should do three things. First, scrap regulations that divide the jobs market into permanent employees, paid more than they are worth, and temporary workers, paid less. Second, it should encourage more firms, including foreign ones, into industries now dominated by the chaebol, expanding the range of alternative employers. And third, it should push the chaebol to expand into services, which they have diplomatically refrained from doing. Retailing, tourism, local transport: all these need some chaebol clout and efficiency.

South Korea has astonished the world with its compressed development. For the benefit of hard-pressed parents and hard-working youths, it needs a bout of decompression.

Guest post: TPP is a remedy but of a different kind

High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights. http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2013/10/10/guest-post-tpp-is-a-remedy-but-of-a-different-kind/#ixzz2hOnThjy6

By Nguyen Van Phu of the Saigon Economic Times

Activists in Vietnam fight tenaciously for many things. They’ve advocated land ownership for farmers, equal footing for the state-owned and private sectors and the suspension of a costly bauxite project that is neither financially viable nor environmentally friendly. And yet, they have never raised their voices against the dark sides of free trade agreements as have their peers in other developing countries.

Granted, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a comprehensive free trade agreement that Vietnam is negotiating with 11 other countries including the US, will bring Vietnam some obvious benefits. However, these activists also understand very well the negative aspects of joining this “high standard” trade agreement at a time when their country is at the bottom of the global value chain. They know that local farmers will be exposed to new competition with their richer and heavily-subsidised counterparts; that Vietnam will get stuck with low-wage, environmentally costly labour-intensive industries like textiles and garments where local manufacturers can’t move beyond subcontracting jobs; and, most of all, that stricter intellectual property rights will likely translate into more expensive drugs for the Vietnamese people.

Not only have Vietnam’s liberals kept their mouths shut about these issues, they have tried to sell the TPP to the people as something inevitable, a remedy for all economic woes.

The reason is simple: these liberals want to use the requirements imposed by the TPP on its members as leverage on the government to implement much-needed reforms. They hope that once within the TPP framework, Vietnam’s government will have no option but to abide by transparency in policy-making, cease giving preferential treatment to state-owned companies, open government procurement to the private sector and pay more attention to environmental requirements… In short, do those things that their government is supposed to do but does not.

These omissions are seen especially in the case of Vietnamese workers’ well-being. Vietnam is a “socialist” country where workers are supposed to be the leading political and economic force. Ironically, however, it is the “capitalist” US that is putting pressure on Vietnam to protect workers’ interests by setting up independent labour unions. It is exactly such TPP requirements that induce many Vietnamese liberals to give their strong support to joining the trade agreement.

Among the requirements that the US will impose in return for greater access to its market, especially for Vietnamese textiles and footwear, is better treatment of workers. In a stark reality check, US Representative George Miller, a Democrat from California, has written to US Trade Representative Michael Froman questioning whether Vietnam can comply with its TPP commitments because, Miller wrote, there is evidence that export industry workers in Vietnam are “routinely denied basic labor standards.”

Froman’s written reply is also to the point: “By including Vietnam in the TPP negotiations, we have [a] mechanism to improve adherence to labor rights and working conditions in Vietnam that would not exist otherwise.”

The proposed TPP text would apply the International Labour Organization’s principles of freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining, as well as the elimination of all forms of forced labour, child labour and gender discrimination.

People may ask if Vietnamese workers aren’t protected by their government and point to an extensive network of labour unions. The sad fact, however, is that the labour unions are mostly for show. They are used as instrument of state control, and union representatives are more like officials than workers’ representatives. They are normally the ones who prevent workers from going on a strike, rather than organizing it.

A recent scandal involving four public utilities companies in Ho Chi Minh City is so far the strongest evidence of this collusion. The directors of these state-owned companies draw salaries ranging from $100,000 to $130,000 annually in a country where the per capita income is just $1,500. How could they pay themselves such high salaries? They resorted to the very basic trick of “exploiting” their own workers: instead of signing on workers as full-time employees who would enjoy full wages and benefits, they hired them as seasonal workers who were paid as little as $250 to $350 a month.

Arguably, if the workers had an independent labour union, such a scandal would not have happened. If the labour union representatives at these companies did not receive perks from the directors, they would not keep their mouths shut as they did in this case.

Such scandals make people in Vietnam wonder if it is a blessing in disguise that the US seems to be really pushing for better working conditions. Foreign investors, including those from the US, seem to like the way labour unions in Vietnam operate now. The Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry, which represents domestic enterprises, has complained that “Vietnam is not ready for such high requirements on labour standards and implementation, which would increase costs for entrepreneurs, risk workers’ unemployment, and have high implementation costs.”

So whether liberals in Vietnam should regard the TPP as a remedy or just an irony, or even a double irony, remains to be seen.

Nguyen Van Phu is the Managing Editor of Thoi Bao Kinh Te Sai Gon (Saigon Economic Times)

Vietnam's 'Red Napoleon' Vo Nguyen Giap dies, aged 102

(Reuters) - Vo Nguyen Giap, the self-taught Vietnamese general who masterminded the defeats of France and the United States to become one of the 20th century's most notable military commanders, died on Friday. He was 102.

The victories of the "Red Napoleon" over vastly better equipped Western armies helped to usher the end of European colonialism worldwide and to entrench communist rule in Vietnam.

Short and slightly built, Giap was a legend in Vietnam, with a standing second only to that of revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh. To historians, he was a general who ranked with giants such as Montgomery, Rommel and MacArthur.

Critics saw him as ruthless: willing to accept immense losses among his own forces. His defenders said his strategic ability and astute tactics won wars against enemies whose resources dwarfed those of a peasant army.

"Surrender" is not a word in my vocabulary, he once said. In Giap's words, any army fighting for freedom "had the creative energy to achieve things its adversary can never expect or imagine."

The Vietnamese humiliation of the French army at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 not only doomed the world's second largest colonial empire, it helped bring an end to colonialism worldwide.

Two decades later, Giap forced the retreat of the even bigger military machine of the United States from what was then South Vietnam, starting 38 years of communist rule over the country that are unbroken to this day.

LAST SURVIVOR

Giap had been the last survivor of Vietnam's generation of revolutionary leaders.

For leftist and other insurgents worldwide, his textbooks on guerrilla warfare were required reading.

Giap died of natural causes after several years in a Hanoi military hospital. Family members and a hospital source confirmed his death. It was not expected to be formally announced until Saturday.

Born in central Vietnam on August 25, 1911, Giap was the son of a peasant scholar and at 18 he was imprisoned by French rulers for communist activities.

He was later freed and gained a law degree at Hanoi University. To the end, his appearance was always more that of the scholar and teacher that he had first set out to be.

Giap helped organise resistance to Japanese occupation during World War Two. When the French returned to their colonies in Indochina after the war, Giap fought them too.

Millions of Vietnamese were killed in the wars and Giap's foes said his effectiveness had been down to his readiness to sustain such human losses.

HUGE LOSSES

"Any American commander who took the same vast losses as General Giap would have been sacked overnight," his old enemy, the late U.S. General William C. Westmoreland, was quoted as saying in a 1983 book.

Giap's response to such accusations, according to Vietnam War correspondent Joseph L. Galloway, was that "I would have gladly sent 5 million or 10 million if that is what it took to rid our country of the foreigners; to gain our freedom."

Giap is nonetheless known to have opposed some costly military decisions, including the move in 1968 to delay the withdrawal of forces from impossible to defend positions in South Vietnam during the Tet Offensive, which became a turning point in the war.

After the U.S. defeat and 1975 retreat from Saigon - renamed Ho Chi Minh city - came another war with a superpower. When neigbouring China invaded in 1978, Giap helped organise the defense, driving back the Chinese with heavy losses.

Then his political and military influence started to wane.

Some members of the establishment resented him and he was replaced as defense minister in 1980 and dropped from the all-powerful politburo two years later.

The old warrior mellowed.

He switched from revolutionary rhetoric to preaching peace. Before retiring, Giap headed state committees that oversaw development of science and technology and family planning.

Giap's first wife died in a French jail in 1943. He remarried, having three daughters and two sons, one named Vo Dien Bien after the location of the French defeat.

In a 2004 interview with Reuters at his spacious colonial-era villa, Giap recalled that on a visit to the United Nations in Geneva, he was handed a book to sign.

"I wrote...and signed Vo Nguyen Giap, General of Peace."

(Writing by Martin Petty; Editing by Matthew Tostevin)