A Most Difficult Year
2024 can't be a repeat
Good morning! Hello to all new readers, and welcome to the latest edition of the Vietnam Weekly, written by Ho Chi Minh City-based reporter Mike Tatarski. Today’s newsletter is a retrospective on 2023, with a few predictions for 2024, and is exclusively for paying subscribers. If you haven’t already, you can upgrade to receive all future exclusive posts and access the full archive dating back to mid-2018 for US$5/month or US$50/year.
On to the news.
Sometimes I worry that this newsletter is overly negative - in fact, a few people have said as much.
But looking back on the year, I don’t think that’s the case. Even state media has been unusually blunt at times, and across recent conversations with a wide range of Vietnam watchers, there’s no doubt that the vibes are bad. Living in Ho Chi Minh City doesn’t help this outlook given the particularly pressing challenges it faces and the glaring urban development failures compounding these challenges.
To my knowledge this has been Vietnam’s most difficult year in at least a decade, and perhaps significantly longer (setting aside the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021).
Worryingly, I re-read my concluding summary for 2022 and was struck by how little has changed.
In that post, titled ‘A Year of Dynamism and Delays,’ I wrote: “I’ve had a lot of recent conversations with diplomats, businesspeople, analysts, and ordinary people full of frustration and pessimism about the short term.”
If, at the end of 2024, I can insert my sentence above about bad vibes without any changes, we may be looking at more than just a bump in the road of Vietnam’s ongoing development.