Tâm tư và nỗi lo lắng của một bạn du sinh VN

Advices and help needed on a political matter!

11/03/2011

Firstly, I am a Vietnamese overseas student studying my senior year of high school in New Zealand. I know you guys probably don't care about what happens in my country now or in the future, but I'd really appreciate just a few opinions, or even advices, on this matter that has been worrying me a lot for the last days.

In the next few months there are bound to be major political upheavals in Vietnam, similar to what happened in the USSR in 1991. This is mainly due to economic failure, stemming from the dangerously low foreign-exchange reserves.

I used to think that all these rumours about the alarming economic dangers are just a hoax, until yesterday, when the government decreed a ban on black market currency trade -- that is, you have to make your trade of US dollar and gold through the state banks; unauthorized activities will be heavily fined. Shortly afterwards, police confiscated US$400,000 from one person for illegal USD trading activities.

The law is an implication that the government is so desperate for foreign currencies, they can make laws to “officially” steal gold and foreign reserves from its citizens. To put this in perspective, in the near future as people are legally forced to deposit their USD and gold into banks, banks will have to print a large amount of local currency in exchange for this domestic influx of USD and gold. This inevitably leads to massive hyperinflation.

The only way to tackle out-of-control hyperinflation is to impose large-scale currency change, something the Vietnamese government already did in 1986, and the German government did in 1923. If you guys took World history at school, during this period of hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic, all of people’s savings were lost when the new currency was introduced.

Similarly, my parents' assets and savings will probably just disappear with the old, useless currency, while before that all of their useful savings in USD and gold have been seized by the government. Precisely, large-scale currency exchange is just a fancy, ambiguous and misleading phrase for "massive stealing of people's savings by the government".

There has always been widespread smouldering resentment towards the Communist Party amongst Vietnamese society, and such schemes as large-scale currency change – or systematic stealing and impoverishment by the state -- will spark that resentment into fury and violence. Chaos and turbulence will be unavoidable, probably worse than that in Libya (remember Tiananmen?). The outcomes are hard to predict, but chances are if the Chinese CP is still there, the Vietnamese CP won't go down, even if they have to resort to brutal crackdown on protests. Vietnam might go back to the centrally-planned, food-rationing, poverty-stricken economy of the 1980's, and life then will be just like it is now in North Korea or Cuba.

Sorry if I've been detailing too much on a local situation that probably doesn’t affect you much. So straight to the points -- my main worries now are, if my parents become unable to support me for next year's tuition fee, and if there are major political upheavals that make living conditions in Vietnam extremely harsh and unpleasant, or even dangerous to return to, what will happen to me then?

Or to put everything in perspective, if one day South Korea suddenly falls to North Korea and Kim Jong Il’s rule, what will happen to the Korean overseas students? Will they be obliged to go back after their visa expires, or can they apply for political asylum for such happenings in their home country?

Honestly I think the latter scenario is quite unlikely, since right now there are tens of thousands of Vietnamese students like me staying here. It's hard for the NZ government to suddenly accept us all.

Thank you guys for taking your time to read my story, I'm looking forward to your opinions on the matter.