A Year of Dynamism and Delays
More of the same for 2023?
Good afternoon! Welcome to the last subscriber-only edition of the Vietnam Weekly for 2022. If you haven’t already signed up, you can do so below to receive future exclusive articles and access all previous pieces for US$5/month or US$50/year.
I’ll also mention again the new chat function in the Substack app (both iOS and Android), which I’m still figuring out but hope to use more frequently next year, especially as Twitter - my main platform for sharing the newsletter and news about Vietnam - becomes more unpleasant.
I had planned for this feature to be another update on the anti-corruption campaign and its many strands. Instead, it’s a big-picture reflection on the past year with a quick look ahead to what 2023 may bring.
Covering an entire year for a country is a fool’s errand, but for this exercise, I started by looking back through all of my newsletter titles from 2022. Let’s go from there while digging into a handful of themes that emerged over the last 12 months.
The waning pandemic days
January and February feel like they took place in an alternate universe. COVID-19 still dominated headlines (and the newsletter) as the Omicron strain exploded across the country after Tet.
But this time, there was no panic: almost everyone was vaccinated, and Vietnam never looked back from its October 2021 reopening after the harsh lockdown across the south (which saved many lives but was economically ruinous).
Now, it’s almost as if the pandemic never even happened.