Colourful Bac Ha fair

VietNamNet Bridge - Bac Ha fair opens every Sunday in Bac Ha district, the northern mountainous province of Lao Cai. The fair is known for its cultural identity of ethnic minority people.

The fair attracts not only domestic tourists but also many foreigners who come to look for colourful brocade, skirts of Mong ethnic minority people and specialities of the mountain region.

These Chinese tourists are looking at wooden and silver jewellery and other souvenirs

These brocade skirt made by Mong ethnic minority people are sold up to several Vietnamese million dong.

These brocade handbags are the favourite of many young city ladies

This kind of pig or called “lon man” is sold well here.

Rice wine is indispensable in Bac Ha fair.

At the end of the market is a place for trading cattle.

A foreign tourist stops a while before taking more photographs

After the fair, people normally have noodle full with fat meat and hot chilly.

Bac Ha fair attracts tourists with its wild and uncommercialised beauty but no one can assure that this identity will be preserved for next years.

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Making splash

VietNamNet Bridge - A private water puppetry troupe will, for the first time, present the traditional art at an international festival in Japan.

An art form unique to Vietnam that makes waves wherever it goes will reach the shores of Japan this week.

Two tons of equipment including dozens of puppets and even a pool had been shipped to Japan several weeks ago to present to Japanese audiences, especially children and the youth, authentic water puppetry performances.

Seventeen members of the Ho Chi Minh City-based Rong Vang (Golden Dragon) Water Puppet Theater will take part in the Kijimuna Festa 2009, a prestigious art festival for children and young audiences held in Tokyo and Okinawa.

The delegation, comprising of one producer, three directors, six musicians and seven actors, will present 18 performances spread over seven shows from July 20 to August 6.

Huynh Anh Tuan (photo), owner of the Golden Dragon theater, told the Tuoi Tre newspaper the performances will introduce Vietnamese customs, folk activities and daily life in rural areas. The dragon and phoenix dances, rearing of ducks, fishing and boat racing are some of the scenes that will be enacted.

Traditional music including cheo (northern folk opera) will accompany the performances, bringing to the audiences another fascinating, long-established folk art from Vietnam, Tuan said.

The shows will also feature the famous legend of King Le Loi (1385-1433) and the Sword Lake in Hanoi.

Legend has it that the king had been lent a magic sword by the Golden Turtle God to defeat the Chinese Ming invaders in the 14th century, and after he accomplished the task, he returned it to a turtle in the lake, giving it its name.

Happenstance

The Kijimuna Festa organizers, while making a survey of Southeast Asian traditional arts in November 2007, visited HCMC and were attracted by Golden Dragon’s performances, Tuan told media in a press briefing last week.

They invited the theater’s managers to attend last year’s event to learn about the festival, Tuan said.

“I’m very happy and proud to present Vietnam’s unique water puppetry to young Japanese audiences.

“I hope spectators will be amazed by the vivid wooden puppets and the technique of decorating them with lacquer,” he said.

Water puppetry has been showcased to foreign audiences many times but only through tours by state-owned troupes like the Central Water Puppet Theater and the Thang Long Water Puppet Theater.

Luck played a part in helping Golden Dragon break the tradition, Tuan said, as the festival organizers came to the theater’s performances by chance during their November trip.

The Japanese had also visited other theaters in Vietnam before selecting his, Tuan added.

“Maybe they liked the colorful and festive atmosphere of Golden Dragon’s shows.”

Kijimuna Festa is an annual art festival held in Okinawa in the summer, mainly to entertain children and young audiences and introduce them to different kinds of art forms including dramas, puppetry and music, as well as exhibitions and comics.

The festival is open to participants of all ages, from below 5 to 12 and above with a wide range of activities tailored for each age group.

Organizers also aim to promote cultural exchanges between nations with various seminars and workshops held during the event.

This year’s event will be held in Okinawa and Tokyo with 63 performances from 13 countries and territories including France, Australia, Taiwan, Cambodia, Vietnam and hosts Japan.

Tuan said he admired how Japan spent money and effort to introduce the younger generations to art.

“Japanese children are so blessed, being educated to appreciate beauty and art from a young age,” Tuan said.

“I think we need to learn that from Japan.”

Puppeteer of the show

Tuan has dedicated most of his art managing career to entertain young audiences and rescuing water puppetry from falling into oblivion in modern times.

The IDECAF Theater – a familiar venue for HCMC drama lovers established by Tuan in 1997 and located inside the Institute of Cultural Exchange with France – has dedicated much time to children’s plays and produced hits for the younger audience almost every summer.

“I love seeing young faces light up with joy at art works meant especially for them,” Tuan told Thanh Nien Daily in a recent interview.

He collaborated with the Cultural Labor Palace in opening up the Rong Vang Water Puppet Theater, Vietnam’s first private water puppet theater, at 55B Nguyen Thi Minh Khai St., Dist. 1, in 2007.

“Several water puppetry groups had been formed around the country, but they all ended in failure. Many, therefore, considered my decision to begin the theater risky and irrational.

“But I don’t fear difficulty. I love water puppetry and I believe it’s a traditional Vietnamese feature that must be preserved by all means.”

Since its opening, the theater has received some 200 visitors per night, half of which are foreign.

In Vietnam, traditional water puppetry was originally performed in rural villages in the Red River Delta some 1,000 years ago.

It was not until 1958 that water puppetry was first displayed in Hanoi and the first state-run puppetry group was established to serve public audiences in 1973.

Vietnamese water puppetry was introduced abroad for the first time in France in 1984. Since then, this original art has traveled to many places around the world including the US, Mexico, Korea and Japan.

VietNamNet/Thanh Nien

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Vietnamese researcher produces chipset tester

VietNamNet Bridge – A chipset which has not been tested is priced at $0.15. It is $350 after being tested successfully. Intel has said it will buy into the chipset tester designed by a researcher from the Sai Gon Technology University.

Le Phuoc Lam introduces the chip tester.

Le Phuoc Lam’s project named “Manufacturing chip testing equipment used in chip technology training” has been checked and taken over by the HCM City Department of Science and Technology.

Lam’s equipment includes hardware to receive orders from computers and perform the test, the wafer, the box to connect tested chipsets and the software to run it on computers.

Lam said that testing the chipset is one of the most important steps in producing chipsets, affecting the production costs of chipsets.

A chip that is not tested is priced $0.15. The price is $350/chipset after it is tested. In the world, there are chip testers serving the chipset manufacturing industry, priced at around $2 million, not chip testers for training. To hire a chip tester, the charge is $125,000 to 175,000 per hour.

Sai Gon Technology University’s vice director Le Hiep Tuyen said that they will invest more in this project to improve some functions and then manufacture the testers to serve chip technology training in Vietnam.

Intel Vietnam is willing to combine with the Sai Gon Technology University to develop this equipment. The firm will also buy testers to provide for some Vietnamese universities for training activities.

VietNamNet/Dat Viet

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University entrance exams to be marked by July 31

VietNamNet Bridge – Universities have said that they have sped up on marking exam papers in order to finish the work by the end of the month. It is expected that exam papers will see lower marks this year than last year.

Exam papers expected to see fewer marks

Deputy Minister of Education and Training Pham Vu Luan on July 17 paid a tour to universities in HCM City to supervise exam paper marking.

Representative from Saigon University said that this year proves to be the hardest year so far in terms of organising exams and marking exam papers. Some 33,000 students sat for the exams, which means there are 110,000 exam papers that need to be marked. The university said it began marking papers on July 15 and expects to complete the work by July 25.

The HCM City University of Education only began marking its 43,000 exam papers on July 17 and expects to finish the job within 10 days.

The noteworthy thing is that many universities have predicted that exam papers this year will see lower marks than last year.

An university said that it had just marked two papers it chose at random, and both the papers were below average for literature.

Other universities have reported low marks for mathematics.

According to Nguyen Tien Dung, Head of the Training Division under the HCM City University of Technical Education, no exam paper has got 10 for mathematics. There are a big proportion of papers that are below average in mathematics but there has been no zero.

Lam Truong Thoai, Head of the Training Division under the HCM City National University, has also predicted that marks for mathematics will be lower than in 2008, while having reported a high percentage of below average papers, including a zero. There has been no paper with a 10; the highest so far is 9.75.

Difficult to find teachers to mark exams

Universities have complained that the fee to mark exams is unexpectedly high this year.

The HCM City Open University, for example, pays 6,000 dong per paper, while the HCM City University of Education pays 8,000 and non-state universities pay up to 10,000 dong.

Universities have had to invite teachers from high schools to mark exam papers as well in order to meet the required pace.

Required marks expected to be lower than last year’s

The Hanoi Medical University, University of Foreign Trade, University of Civil Engineering and Thang Long University have predicted that the required marks to get into the universities will be lower than last year’s.

In 2008, the Hanoi Medical University was the one which set the highest required marks (28.5 for three subjects). However, the university’s President Nguyen Duc Hinh said that as the exam questions this year were more challenging than last year’s, the required marks are expected to be lower.

The Hanoi Foreign Trade University last year required students to have 28 marks to be enrolled in the university. The required marks may be the same or 0.5-1 mark lower than the last year’s level, according to Head of Training Division Le Thi Thu Thuy.

VietNamNet/VNE, DT, TP

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HCMC employers funnel insurance money into their own pockets

10:23' 22/07/2009 (GMT+7)

A worker collects his social insurance compensation at an insurance agency in Ho Chi Minh City. VietNamNet Bridge - Thousands of workers in Ho Chi Minh City are working without health and social insurance policies as employers illegally pocket chunks of their salaries meant to pay for mandatory insurance. The city’s Social Insurance Agency, which is also in charge of health insurance, told Thanh Nien Monday it was filing a lawsuit against more than 40 businesses for neglecting to pay more than VND200 million (US$11,230) each in insurance fees. The agency reported they had failed to collect a total of VND62 billion ($3.48 million) of health and social insurance fees from nearly 200 companies that had ignored payment. In Vietnam, workers pay 3 percent of their salary each for both health and social insurance policies and employers are required to deduct the money from salaries to pay the insurance agency directly. Agency director Cao Van Sang said the companies in the lawsuit had ignored payment although they had signed a commitment to pay the fees after several inspections and collection efforts by the agency. This lawsuit includes the highest number of companies the agency has ever filed suit against since its first case in late 2007, the agency reported. Nguyen Dang Tien, head of the agency’s inspection section, said the agency had rejected negotiation efforts as the companies had been using talks to delay payment, he said. He said several companies had requested negotiations as a way to extend payment deadlines, adding that nearly all the firms had blamed salary hikes and the global recession for the delays. The agency also rejected offers by some of the companies to pay just parts of their fees, he said. Tien also said many companies were aware of the lawsuit but had continued pocketing the insurance fees collected from workers without paying a single dong to the insurance agency. He said besides losses to the state budget, the lack of payments also meant that workers would not be entitled to their rightful benefits, especially when they fall ill or get injured. Lax rules “Regulations have not deterred, but only encouraged violations,” said Dang Quang Dieu, deputy head of the Law and Policy Bureau under the Vietnam General Confederation of Labor. He said the actions taken to enforce the payment rules were too lax. “The measures are inadequate: the maximum fine of some dozens of millions of dong is issued against those who ignored billions of dong in insurance fees.” He said health and social insurance violations would have serious and long-term negative consequences on workers. Stricter penalties, including criminal charges, were needed as a deterrent, he said. Nguyen Van Tien, chief inspector of the Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs, also said that many violating companies had agreed to pay the fines without paying the insurance fees. “Some showed their business’ bank account figure to prove they had no money,” he said. “But they have other bank accounts to deposit money and we were unable to inspect those.” VietNamNet/Thanh Nien

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Credit tightening will not affect stock market

VietNamNet Bridge – Information about banks tightening loans for securities investments would have raised concerns that this would negatively influence the stock market – if the information had been released one year go. However, this is not the situation at this moment.

Information about banks tightening loans for securities investments would have raised concerns that this would negatively influence the stock market – if the information had been released one year go. However, this is not the situation at this moment

In principle, the tightening of credit means that investors will not have as much money to make securities investments. Therefore, it is understandable why people are worried that the tightened credit will affect the stock market.

The State Bank of Vietnam has sent documents to commercial banks, asking them to reserve capital for production and business, while limiting credit for consumption, real estate and securities investments.

In fact, the stock market has been influenced by the credit tightening policy for the last month, when the State Bank of Vietnam announced it would inspect banks’ credit activities. This was considered a move that heralded the policy on tightening credit to fund securities investments.

Since the move, banks have been controlling their loaning for securities investments, stopping providing loans and checking outstanding loans. Dau tu chung khoan reporters found out that there is still ‘room’ at securities companies to loan to securities investments. Most borrowers have sold stocks to pay debts back to banks. Other investors, fearing risks, dare not borrow money for investments at this moment.

The activities of loaning and borrowing money to inject in securities investments at this moment are not as hot as they were one month ago, when securities companies’ loan limits had nearly run out. At that time, short-term investors rushed to borrow money just for two weeks to make surfing investments.

Experts believe that the credit tightening will not affect the stock market because investors themselves are cautious when borrowing money at this moment. Currently, investors only borrow money for several days to make payments. For example, when restructuring their investment portfolios, investors want to purchase some share items but they still cannot sell other items to get money, so they borrow money from banks to make payments.

However, experts still believe that the tightening of credit will affect investors.

Investors understand that the State Bank of Vietnam is tightening credit because it wants to keep control over the stock market and does not want to see the stock market develop too hotly.

Experts have applauded the policy on tightening credit for securities investments, saying that it is a good policy for the market now.

As banks will reserve capital to fund production and business, listed companies in particular and businesses in general will benefit from the loans.

The State Bank of Vietnam has slashed the interest rate for compulsory reserves of commercial banks at the State Bank, a move that should be seen as a method to encourage money to be put into circulation.

VietNamNet/DTCK

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Australian Trade Minister to visit Vietnam

VietNamNet Bridge - Australian Minister for Trade Simon Crean (photo) will visit Vietnam on July 23-26 to enhance trade and economic ties, the Australian Embassy announced on July 20.

In Hanoi, Crean will co-chair the 8th Joint Trade and Economic Cooperation Committee (JTECC) with the Vietnamese Minister of Planning and Investment Vo Hong Phuc on July 24. The meeting will discuss key sectors in the two countries’ bilateral relationship: education and training, infrastructure and environmental management, financial services, energy, oil and gas, and agribusiness.

“As we progress towards implementation of the ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement, I look forward to discussing its practical contribution to the bilateral trade and investment relationship with Vietnam,” Crean said.

The Australian Trade Minister will be accompanied to Vietnam by a business delegation, and will also visit Ho Chi Minh City on July 25-26. He is scheduled to visit two companies in Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province, which is next to the city.

The ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement (AANZFTA), which was signed in February this year in Thailand, is the largest FTA Australia has concluded, according to Mr. Graeme Swift, Australian Consul General in Ho Chi Minh City.

By the time the agreement was signed, Australia had recognized Vietnam’s market economy status. The decision to grant this status was made in the context of the AANZFTA negotiations. The recognition means that, in any future anti-dumping investigations by Australia in relation to imports from Vietnam, Vietnam will be subject to the same assessment process as other WTO members.

It is expected that AANZFTA will enter into force no later than January 2010, once a number of AANZFTA parties have completed their national ratification processes. Vietnam has not ratified it yet.

Once in force, the FTA will reduce or eliminate tariffs across a region that is home to 600 million people, with an estimated GDP of US$2.7 trillion.

Australia and Vietnam stand to gain from the agreement across many sectors, including exports of agricultural products, industrial goods and services.

Under the agreement, almost 90 per cent of tariff lines covering 96 percent of Australia’s trade with Vietnam will be tariff-free by 2020.

Two-way trade between Australia and Vietnam grew an average of 22 per cent a year over the last five years, reaching A$8 billion in 2007-08, according to the Australian Consulate General. Two-way trade services in 2007-08 totaled A$1.05 billion.

VietNamNet/SGGP

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