Vietnam’s top leaders have resolved to become at least a middle-income country over the next five years, an about-face from abject poverty in the 1980s, by attracting more foreign investment in manufacturing. The Communist Party’s Central Committee wrapped up a plenary session October 8 held to chart macroeconomic goals, and a deputy planning minister said separately that Vietnamese people should earn around $5,000 per year on average by 2025, up from $2,750 now. Vietnam would reach that milestone — middle income or higher in World Bank terms — by extending 10-year-old economic reforms that now attract foreign investors to the country that’s seen as a manufacturing peer to world factory powerhouse China.  Their investment creates jobs and raises incomes among Vietnam’s 97 million people. Vietnam is now lower middle-income. FILE – Employees make their way to work at the Samsung factory in Thai Nguyen province, north of Hanoi, Vietnam, Oct. 13, 2016. (Reuters)The government is likely to stimulate new wealth by improving infrastructure and offering incentives to investors for production of high-value electronics. Prized investors today include Intel and Samsung Electronics. “What they did 10 years ago and of course since then is already delivering, so I don’t want to say they don’t need to do anything else, but they’re very much on track because of the policies already in place,” said Rajiv Biswas, senior regional economist with IHS Markit, a London-based analysis firm, in Singapore.”That’s a key message … their goal is to become an upper middle-income country,” he added. Wars, embargoes and waning support from the former Soviet Union left most Vietnamese people in poverty in the 1980s. The government’s opening, launched in 1986, started to bring investment.Sky Nguyen, 24, a former self-employed guide for foreign tourists in Ho Chi Minh City, got a job working as a real estate sales manager and expects it to pay. He’s selling parcels in a 900-hectare coastal resort complex where investors from Singapore and the Netherlands have already made commitments. “Real estate for the entire Vietnam isn’t going down,” Nguyen said. “It’s getting up a little bit, slowly.” FILE – A customs officer wearing a protective mask, amid the coronavirus outbreak, walks past an empty border gate with China’s Dong Xing town, in Quang Ninh province, Vietnam, Aug 14, 2020. (Reuters)Nguyen quit tourism after Vietnam closed its borders in March to stop imported COVID-19 cases, leaving hotels and guides with little business. The resort investors are banking on an eventual tourism rebound. Business shutdowns due to the pandemic have cost jobs worldwide and lowered consumer demand, a hit to Vietnam’s factories that make garments, shoes and furniture for export. The economy will grow at just 2% this year, according to an official target, down from 6% or more every year since 2012. The Planning and Investment Ministry, however, has set a 2021 growth target of 6% to 6.5%. Documents from the party plenum and other political meetings this month don’t offer a detailed roadmap to 2025, but analysts believe they focus on post-pandemic recovery in 2021 followed by steps to raise wealth by luring foreign-invested factories that make high-value goods such as smartphones. Vietnam has kept its coronavirus infection rate at a relatively low total of 1,148 cases. “They are confident that they are going to have a positive growth rate,” said Frederick Burke, Ho Chi Minh City-based partner with the law firm Baker McKenzie. “They’ve got the coronavirus more or less under control, but the next stage is the challenging one.” Government officials will build more roads and airports to keep investment coming, Biswas said.  FILE – Cars travel along a portion of a newly built expressway in Vinh Phuc province, which links Hanoi and the northern city of Lao Cai, Nov. 1, 2014. Vietnam expects to finish the road linking Hanoi to the southern Can Tho province by 2025. (AFP)By 2025, Vietnam is expected to finish its North-South Expressway, which will stretch from Hanoi in the north to the country’s southernmost Can Tho province, and the first phase of a new international airport that would take pressure off the one in urban Ho Chi Minh City, domestic news website VnExpress International reports. Manufacturers need quality infrastructure to ship in raw materials and ship out goods for export. Nearly 3,900 foreign investment projects were licensed last year with total registered capital of $362.5 billion, higher than Vietnam’s $260 billion GDP. To bring in more, the government will try to cut bureaucracy and local-level corruption, said Jack Nguyen, a partner at the business advisory firm Mazars in Ho Chi Minh City. Foreign chambers of commerce in Vietnam have urged the state to cut red tape, he said. “When you get to the lower-level officials there’s always going to be some sort of bureaucracy [and] petty corruption, but overall I think there’s a general desire from top government officials down just to try to make business for foreign investors as easy as possible,” he said. 
 
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A reported spike in U.S. military flights over the seas near China reflects Washington’s drive to understand and deter Chinese expansion in contested waters, analysts say.U.S. military surveillance planes flew off China’s coast 60 times in September, more than in July or August, according to Chinese state-backed research organization South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative’s website.When contacted by VOA, U.S. Army Maj. Randy Ready, a spokesperson for the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, would say only that flight frequency near China has been consistent over time.Most sorties flew over the South China Sea, the organization’s website says. Beijing contests sovereignty over that resource-rich, 3.5 million-square-kilometer sea with five other Asian governments, and U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo said in July that Washington would help other states resist Chinese expansion.U.S. air activity would back up Pompeo’s directive, said Sean King, vice president of the Park Strategies political consultancy in New York.Pompeo had called China’s actions at sea illegal, and any increase in flights this year “can be considered commensurate with the U.S. State Department’s July policy statement that specific PRC South China Sea claims are unlawful,” King said.American pilots probably feel an increased U.S. government concern about Chinese activity in the air and underwater, said Alexander Huang, strategic studies professor at Tamkang University in Taiwan.Pilots can track any Chinese submarines and “familiarize” themselves with the sea, Huang said. A particular point of interest, he said, would be the Luzon Strait, between Taiwan and the Philippines’ Luzon Island, because U.S. allies aren’t as strong at that South China Sea entry point as they are in the East China Sea, he said.’Exploitation, corruption and coercion’China alarmed other countries as it expanded in the sea from about 2010 through 2017 by landfilling tiny islets for military, civilian and resource exploitation purposes. It has more firepower than the other maritime claimants, including Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam.Pompeo accused China’s governing Communist Party earlier this month of “exploitation, corruption and coercion” in its treatment of other countries. Beijing points to historic usage records as support for its claim to about 90% of the South China Sea.Of the U.S. flights that the Chinese research organization says passed offshore in September, it reports that two-thirds went to the South China Sea. Some planes were disguised as Malaysian or Philippine aircraft, the organization’s October 12 report online says. The report says the U.S. planes were sent to “spy” on China.Ready did not comment on the number of September flights or their motive beyond saying that flight frequency had been consistent.China is paying attention to U.S. missions because it wants the United States to think it couldn’t win an air war with China, said Stephen Nagy, senior associate professor of politics and international studies at International Christian University in Tokyo. The United States has an advantage in combat and deployment experience, plus backup, if needed, from allies including Japan, South Korea and Australia, he said.Washington has to show its air power, Nagy said, because “I think China has tried to create the narrative that it can make any conflict with China extremely expensive for the United States.”American planes fly anywhere that it’s legal and continue their flights in Asia, Ready said.“While the scope of our operations varies based on the current operating environment, the U.S. has a persistent military presence and routinely operates throughout the Indo-Pacific, including the waters and airspace surrounding the East China Sea and the South China Sea,” he said.He called the air movement “a continued demonstration of our commitment to the region and our willingness to defend the freedoms enshrined in international law.”The command’s Twitter feed said in August that an MV-22B Tiltrotor aircraft was preparing to land on the USS New Orleans amphibious transport vessel. The mission promoted “interoperability with allies and partners” to “defend peace and stability” in a tract of ocean that includes the South China Sea.The U.S Navy’s P-8A Poseidon patrol planes, one type mentioned by the Chinese research organization, plays a “key role” in Asia, particularly on joint missions with other countries, the U.S. Naval Institute website said in 2018.Naval EP-3E Airborne Reconnaissance Integrated Electronic System II surveillance planes, another kind of aircraft cited by the Chinese organization, are the same type as one that China forced to land in 2001 as it flew just 130 kilometers offshore.Officials in Washington may see the September flights as routine, said Oh Ei Sun, senior fellow with the Singapore Institute of International Affairs.“What China would consider unusual might not be felt the same from the U.S. side,” he said.Southeast Asian countries that dispute China’s maritime claims “welcome” any increase in U.S. air movement, Oh added.Beijing will take no “actual action” against the U.S. surveillance planes aside from making statements, King forecast.
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Some members of the Uighur community abroad say China is now officially announcing the indictments or deaths of family members who vanished years ago in internment camps in the Xinjiang region. VOA recently talked to five of those diaspora Uighurs who said they were either directly contacted by Chinese officials or learned through foreign missions, U.N. working groups, or Chinese government press conferences that their loved ones were either jailed on dubious charges or died of illnesses at the so-called reeducation camps. Abdurehim Gheni, 44, a Uighur living in the Netherlands, told VOA he lost contact with his family in Xinjiang in 2017. He said a letter to the Dutch Foreign Ministry from the Chinese Embassy said that two of his brothers, a niece and two brothers-in-law had been sentenced to prison terms ranging from 3 to 16 years for crimes such as disturbing social order. The embassy said the rest of his family were “living normally in society,” a claim Gheni, a naturalized Dutch citizen, said is far from reassuring.  He has held one-man weekend demonstrations in Amsterdam since 2018 to protest the sudden disappearance of his family. He is not the only diaspora Uighur to receive news recently from the Chinese about missing family members.  The Chinese Embassy in Ankara told Nursiman Abdureshid, 32, that her parents and siblings had been imprisoned for “terrorism” after they disappeared in mid-2017. She believes the embassy contact was the result of the active advocacy she has led since February to secure the release of her family. ‘Training’ Abdureshid left Xinjiang for Turkey in 2015 to pursue a master’s degree and has not returned to the region. She said she learned from friends and distant relatives that her entire family had been taken to “training.” FILE – Nursiman Abdureshid holds pictures of her parents and two brothers, in Istanbul in May. (Photo courtesy: Nursiman Abdureshid)”After repeated tweets and public pleas, I finally got a phone call from the Chinese Embassy on July 15 telling me that my parents and two brothers were sentenced ranging from 13 to 16 years and 11 months in prison,” she told VOA, adding that the embassy urged her go back to Xinjiang and ask local authorities for more details about the charges. “For any Uighur, going back to China means interrogation, plus detention, upon arrival until proven innocent,” Abdureshid said. China rejects international accusations of the mass detention of over a million Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang and claims the Uighurs are sent to “vocational training centers” to be “deradicalized” and to learn new work skills.  Fatima Abdulghafur, a Uighur from Sydney, told VOA that her 67-year-old father disappeared in 2016. She learned later that he had been taken to internment camps. The 40-year-old permanent resident of Australia learned last month from the U.N.’s Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearance that her father died of “severe pneumonia and tuberculosis” in 2018. FILE – Ghopur Hapiz, back row 2nd right, and Fatima Abdulghafur, front row 2nd left, are seen in Kashgar city in Xinjiang in this undated photo. (Photo courtesy: Fatima Abdulghafur)”I suspect the cause of my father’s death was not simply from natural illness but from the unbearable torture in the camps,” she told VOA. Some rights groups say Uighurs being held in internment camps are exposed to torture and forced labor. Outside the camps, they are placed under strict control, where religious practices are prohibited. International inquiries China has repeatedly ignored calls from independent rights groups to investigate the alleged abuses, calling criticism by other countries an interference in its domestic affairs. Sean Roberts, a professor of international affairs at George Washington University, said China’s response to the U.N. inquiry is a signal that the country has become emboldened to use the international system selectively. “I would not be surprised to see additional responses to international inquiries of this type while the state continues to deny that it is violating the human rights of Uighurs, especially as China takes an increasingly prominent role in the U.N. Human Rights Council,” Roberts told VOA. Last week, China was elected to the U.N. Human Rights Council a week after 39 countries, including the United States, condemned Beijing for human rights abuses in Xinjiang. “We are gravely concerned about the existence of a large network of ‘political re-education’ camps, where credible reports indicate that over a million people have been arbitrarily detained,” German Ambassador Christoph Heusgen said on behalf of the 39 countries at the U.N committee. China’s spokesperson, Hua Chunying, called the reports a failed attempt to smear China. “A small number of external forces, out of ulterior motives, carry out interference in the name of human rights,” Hua said. China’s contradicting accusations Subi Mamat Yuksel, a 32-year-old Uighur American from Manassas, Virginia, believes her outspoken activism forced the Chinese government to announce the whereabouts of her missing father, Mamat Abdulla.  “I kept silent for almost three years, fearing that speaking up would endanger him,” she said. Her father, 72, was arrested before his planned trip to the U.S. in 2017. FILE – Subi Mamat Yuksel holds a photo of her father, Mamat Abdulla, in Virginia in April. (Photo courtesy: Subi Mamat Yuksel)Yuksel learned in 2019 that her father, a retired director of the Xinjiang Forestry Department, was accused of being “two-faced” and “colluded with separatist forces.” She said he was forced to write a letter from a detention camp asking her and her brother in the U.S. to return to China and apologize to the country. Xinjiang government spokesperson Elijan Anayt denied the claim and said Abdulla was sentenced to life in prison for bribery. “Her accusation was completely fabricated and aimed at misleading international opinion, to solicit support for her father and attack China’s policies on Xinjiang,” Anayt said in a news briefing in June. An Uighur woman from Europe, who asked VOA to conceal her identity to protect her family in Xinjiang, said she was surprised this year when a Chinese official from the Uighur region told her via video chat that one of her parents had been sentenced to a prison term of over 10 years, after having vanished for more than two years.”The official video-called me on WeChat and said that if I wanted my relatives to ‘lead normal lives,’ I’d better not publicize the imprisonment of my parent,” she said. 
 
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The United States has announced nearly $200 million in additional humanitarian assistance to Rohingya refugees who fled what the U.S. and others call ethnic cleansing in Rakhine State in Myanmar three years ago. VOA’s Diplomatic Correspondent Cindy Saine has more on Thursday’s global donor conference. 
Camera: Steve Sanford   Producer: Mary Cieslak
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