Ding dong dung, wake up Vietnam

We do: Couples have their wedding photos taken at a street in Hanoi. Communist Party members are neither allowed to hold luxurious weddings nor hold them at luxury venues. —EPA

I WAS back in Hanoi in early October after a long absence. Change is all over, reflecting the impact of breakneck growth. It so happens my re-visit coincided with the Vietnam Communist Party's (VCP) 175-member central committee (CC) meeting, preoccupied with two main issues: the political future of its Prime Minister (PM) Nguyen Ten Dung, and what to do with recent financial scandals amid slackening of its once red-hot economy in the face of its depreciating dong. Word around Hanoi was that Dung, generally regarded as a pro-West liberal, was under immense pressure to convince his CC colleagues that he deserves a second chance to put the nation back on a firm footing and get the economy on to high-gear once again.

Dung is a survivor. A former governor of the State Bank (Vietnam's central bank), Dung is a street smart politician, having fought with Vietcong guerrillas against the United States, and who once served as the nation's public security chief. He was first appointed PM in 2006 and charged with continuing economic reforms that pushed the war-torn backwater nation into a promising emerging economy. In 2007, he steered the nation into World Trade Organisation, which triggered a new wave of foreign direct investment inflows. Unfortunately, the nation was caught in an inflationary spiral (reaching a high of 23% in August 2011) and that drove the government to tighten policies, slow growth and force a series of devaluations of the dong. Dung stood for re-election to the CC and political bureau, the nation's top policy making body, and was re-appointed PM for a second term in May 2011. He survived it all despite the damaging Political Report and Socio-Economic Report containing “criticism and self-criticism, as part of the party's rectification campaign” against poor economic management; both of which were nevertheless approved at the 11th Party National Congress in January 2011.