The Asia File by Ben Bland
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US defence secretary Robert Gates gets a military welcome in Hanoi
By Ben Bland Oct 14, 2010While traveling around Hanoi with US defence secretary Robert Gates’ entourage on Monday, I took the following video of the Vietnamese army welcoming him to a meeting at the Ministry of National Defence with his Vietnamese counterpart, General Phung Quang Thanh. It was quite something to see Vietnamese soldiers playing the Star-Spangled Banner and to
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A low key protest by banned group in Hanoi
By Ben Bland Oct 10, 2010UPDATE – Monday 08:00 – Viet Tan says that the Australian Vietnamese woman mentioned below, who seemed to be leading the protest, was arrested on Sunday evening. I have no independent confirmation of this. There is now a DPA story on the arrest. Yesterday, I observed a protest in Hanoi by the banned Viet Tan group
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The universality of terrible customer service
By Ben Bland Oct 09, 2010I have been scouting around Hanoi for my first smartphone and have been very disappointed with the level of customer service. Given that most of these phones sell for more than the average monthly wage, it ought to take some pretty good sales advice to convince people to part with their hard-earned cash. But not a
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Asian casinos: What’s in a name?
By Ben Bland Oct 08, 2010Across Asia, from Japan to Vietnam via Taiwan and Singapore, governments are experimenting with the legalisation of casinos in order to tap into the massive pent-up demand for gambling in the region. But with many of Asia’s governments professing some form of socially conservative credentials, the legalisation and promotion of casino gambling is, to put it mildly,
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Government takes on Facebook in Vietnam
By Ben Bland Oct 05, 2010The Wall Street Journal has an interesting story today about the Vietnamese government’s attempt to launch a sanitised alternative to Facebook, which has been blocked on and off here since the end of last year. The site, called go.vn, failed to capture the imagination of Vietnam’s tech-savvy youth with initial articles about Ho Chi Minh and other
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Leading Yale professor opposes Singapore tie-up
By Ben Bland Sep 30, 2010Having written extensively about the limits on academic freedom in Singapore, I was rather surprised to see that Yale was in talks with the National University of Singapore about setting up a “liberal arts college” in the restrictive city state. Especially as the UK’s Warwick University abandoned an earlier proposal to set up a university
