Word: hanoi
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...latest lightning rod for anti-Chinese sentiment is Hanoi's plan to allow subsidiaries of the Aluminum Corporation of China (Chinalco) to mine bauxite ore in Vietnam's Central Highlands. Bauxite is a key ingredient in aluminum, which China needs to fuel its construction industry. Vietnam has an estimated eight billion tons of high-quality bauxite, the third-largest reserves in the world. The environmental cost of extracting the mineral, however, can be high. Strip mining is efficient, but scars the land and bauxite processing releases a toxic red sludge that can seep into water supplies if not adequately contained...
...backlash playing out around the country is unusual considering that Vietnam is a relatively efficient authoritarian state where dissent is rarely tolerated. In two recent incidents, motorcycle riders pulled over by police set their own bikes alight rather than let them be impounded. Last month, a car dragged a Hanoi policeman 15 feet before racing off. An angry crowd seeing a cop roughing up a driver in the southern province of Dong Nai used bricks to smash the officer?s motorcycle...
...Tran Cong Tien tells it, he was mad as hell and he wasn't going to take it anymore. Pulled over by a Hanoi traffic cop a few weeks ago for driving in the wrong direction down a one-way street, he says he tried to be reasonable. Tien claims the $6 bribe offered was more than fair, but the officer wanted more to ignore the traffic violation. Words between the two escalated. Insults flew. And then Tien snapped. "I grabbed his neck and pushed hard," he says. "I have never dared challenge the police. I'm fed up with...
...doing well and incomes were doubling every few years. That's no longer the case. People being squeezed by the economic downturn are increasingly frustrated by the nation's enduring corruption, says Trinh Hoa Binh, head of environment and health at the government-run Institute of Sociology in Hanoi. Officials are maintaining their special privileges while the economic position of ordinary Vietnamese is becoming more precarious. They are incensed, he says, that corrupt officials are rarely punished for taking bribes...
...jobs continue to vanish and inflation eats away at wages, it is not going to be as easy to placate those who are being hit the hardest when police attempt to extort them for petty cash. "The police are even more corrupt than they were before," Hanoi taxi driver Nguyen Van Cuong says bitterly. "In one day, I can be stopped several times." And where 100,000 dong, or about $6, might have been enough a few years ago, now nothing less than 200,000 will do. "It means some days I work for nothing, as they take everything...