In the last 2 years private property, which had been de facto recognized for some time was institutionalized and private property in land is safer for the owner in Viet Nam now than it is in the US. The remaining government enterprises are inefficient and uncompetitive with the private economy and are dying. The more the US penalizes Viet Nam for its free enterprise by restricting purchase of its free market products, the more time will elapse before Viet Nam enters the ranks of the no longer "cheap labor" countries like Japan and Korea.
As for POWS, there are not likely any aleive now. Kerry and McCain ended Congressional scrutiny and the Communists have most probably ended any possibility of any POWs surfacing again. Any alive are probably in China. Some died in the USSR and maybe in the CIS shortly after the disintegration of the USSR. At any rate, that generation of "leaders" in Viet Nam is passing and their successors are communists to the extent that they want to keep their jobs. The more able of them are discovering that they can live better as businessmen than as functionaries and are building business on the side or instead.
The communist bosses are still communists at the core and are quite nonplussed by the rapid conversion to Christianity and continued reluctance to integrate of the Moi groups and there is much old time repression of those people . At this point the US can do a lot more good by encouraging free enterprise and quid pro quo defense offers to the rulers who want the US to guarantee Viet Nam against China. Isolating the Vietnamese people because we would rather keep inefficient uses of capital in the US to comfortably slow our own economy is shortsighted. It is foolish to maintain our own socialist tendencies like subsidizing labor intensive jobs and wasting resources by doing and making things that can be done elsewhere cheaper in order to avoid using our capital to create jobs that more productive (efficient).
http://www.vietnam-art-craft.com/
Great folks
Agreed that opening trade is the only way to improve conditions in VN. It's the one area where I disagree with the hardcore Vietnamese-American political types, who maintain a long-running feud with Hanoi.
I was there for a few months last fall, and prosperity is increasing. There's a BMW/Mercedes dealership in Saigon these days, and I did spot several Beemers on the streets. There are about twice the number of Honda Dreams (90cc motorcycles) as there had been in 1998, and a whole new class of upper-end motorcycles that run $5,000 and up. Construction at the micro and macro level was everywhere. My wife's brother-in-law is now building his third hotel in Saigon.
There are many companies in Saigon doing software development globally, and actually their toughest market is the U.S. because of the mistaken impressions that Americans retain about VN. But they are doing software for Japan, Korea, France, England, etc.
Despite the war, IMHO Saigon is the most cosmopolitan and livable city ion all of SE Asia. Ironically it's retained its charm because of the war, and hopefully we won't see a repeat of the precipitous out-of-control development of the 1990's. The Saigon City Council is now in the process of having owners hack off the illegal top floors of their "rocket hotels", which is good since they tend to collapse.
It's true that most in the South don't call Saigon "Ho Chi Minh City" except to define the larger sprawling municipal entity (e.g., it's like New York City and Manhattan).
I haven't been to Hanoi since 1998, and back then they were still playing commie propaganda on the streets at 7AM. Big loudspeakers on every streetcorner and spewing xenophobic nonsense ("Don't talk to the foreigners you see on the streets, they have AIDS.") The loudspeakers in Saigon were ripped down many many years ago, the people couldn't stand listening to it (ironically, even the transplants from the North hated it).
There's little doubt that Hanoi is absolutely evil in persecuting freedoms of religion and speech. But they do not respond well to being pummled on the head about it, but the carrot and stick seems to be moving them in a better direction.
What Hanoi is fundamentally responsive to is money.
I've spent some time in China, and there, the constitution provides that the Communist Party has a leading role in society and is thus superior to any law. It may choose to enact and conform behavior to legislation and regulations, but that would only be a policy decision that law would encourage correct behavior of the populace. I'm curious as to whether the current Vietnam party and government have made the leap to where the Communist Party is always and everywhere subject to the law because it is the law, or if the Party is still superior to the law.