Word: viet
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...Viet Nam is also suffering the effects of a sudden withdrawal of aid by China last June, and is growing steadily more apprehensive as relations with Peking continue to degenerate. Last week, the mutual dislike blossomed into outright violence at the so-called Friendship border gate between the two countries, located 100 miles northeast of Hanoi. Hanoi claimed that two Vietnamese were killed and 25 others wounded, while Peking charged that four Chinese had died and "dozens" were seriously injured...
...forthcoming were the Vietnamese that the U.S. delegation, which had allotted plenty of time for arguing, soon had little to do but see the sights. Trouble was that in the new Viet Nam the sights were not what they used to be. "Hanoi is now a faded dowager of a city," cabled TIME Hong Kong Correspondent Richard Bernstein, who accompanied the Congressmen on their tour. "The old elegance and grace are still there in the wide, tree-lined boulevards and the colonial-era buildings, but the place is badly in need of some paint, some renewal, some energy. The city...
There is more bustle in the South, particularly in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). Motorcycles and motor scooters still crowd the streets, and there are such remaining signs of "bourgeois decadence" as beauty parlors and blue jeans. But the U.S. embassy building now houses Viet Nam's state petroleum agency; the enormous former U.S. AID compound is headquarters for Saigonese trade-union organizations. The notoriously sinful La Vie en Rose bar has been subdivided into small meeting halls. Night life in general has been thoroughly quelled by the rectitudinous Communists...
...shops are tightly shuttered. The Chinese have been particularly hard hit by a government crackdown on private enterprise that began in March. Most larger businesses were taken over by the government, and thousands of Chinese have fled the country or are waiting, miserably and without shelter, at the Viet Nam-China border for the chance to get out. An estimated 8,000 refugees?Chinese and non-Chinese?have found their way to Hong Kong alone since the fall of Saigon. Another 10,000 or so have made it to France...
...sign of the seriousness with which the regime treats its problems. Another sign is the unabashed pitch for U.S. aid. After three decades of continuous fighting, the Vietnamese are tired of struggle?and of what it has brought them. It is perhaps the final irony of the Viet Nam War that Hanoi, having persevered over its former enemies, now looks to Washington for help in achieving its socialist Utopia...