The Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) will be a notable event of the coming autumn. There is no doubt that for four days it will firmly occupy a place in the international top agenda. The Economic Forum, to be held in Vladivostok from 5-8 September, sees several dozen countries – including the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – applying to participate.
When economists talk about Vietnam, they often use the term “miracle” which is not an economic term at all. The country made remarkable progress in the 1990s and early 2000s. The takeoff began with the transition to a market economy (under the strict control of the Communist Party). In just ten years, Vietnam has moved from 56th to 32nd place in the world “league table of ranks” in terms of GDP, and the country is not going to rest on its laurels. The Vietnamese are second to the Chinese in terms of growth dynamics on the planet. Every year the economy of this country of nearly 100 million people marks an increase of six to seven per cent.
In Russia there is a special attitude to the Vietnamese. The elder generation remembers well the long and bloody war of the Vietnamese people against the American invaders. The people of the Soviet Union perceived the war as a kind of echo of the Great Patriotic War, so they never missed a report from the front. They worried when they read about the Americans burning the country with napalm, poisoning it with chemical warfare agents, and massacring entire villages for their assistance to the partisans.
The Vietnamese courage to stand up to the best-equipped army in the world was of particular respect. Lacking modern weapons, proper equipment and regular supplies, the Vietnamese eventually forced the US army to flee in panic, shamefully abandoning their allies. The liberation “jungle war” was costly to the freedom-loving Vietnamese, reportedly costing up to a million lives.
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