Conversations on Vietnam Development
South China Morning Post – 20-3-2025
Vietnam is stepping up inspections of a line of children’s toys over concerns that imagery on the face of one product resembles a map China uses to stake its claim to disputed areas in the South China Sea. The investigation was launched after local media reported that a version of widely sold Baby Three toys, many of which are made in China, featured a design that was viewed as similar to Beijing’s maritime map.
November 30, 2023
This story is part of As Equals, CNN’s ongoing series on gender inequality. For information about how As Equals is funded and more, check out our FAQ.
Climate change acts as a threat multiplier, finding existing injustices and amplifying them. Women and girls already grapple with gender inequality, but when extreme weather devastates a community, the UN found that inequalities worsen: Intimate partner violence spikes, girls are pulled from school, daughters are married early, and women and girls forced from their homes face a higher risk of sexual exploitation and trafficking.
“When we look at who’s affected worse, who’s on the frontlines of the climate crisis, it’s primarily women — women in poor and vulnerable countries,” Selwin Hart, UN Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Climate Action and Just Transition, told CNN. “And unfortunately, our policies or strategies are really not geared to address this challenge.”
To explore the complex links between gender and climate change, CNN worked with seven women photojournalists who spent time with women and girls in seven countries across the Global South to document the challenges they face.
This visual project gives a snapshot of the myriad ways the human-induced climate crisis is upending their lives, but also shows how they are fighting back. Every image shows both struggle and survival, the battle to live a decent life in a swiftly changing climate.
The Center for Girls’ Education runs a series of programs in Nigeria to help girls stay in school. One in every five of the world’s children who are out of school is in Nigeria, according to UNICEF, and it is girls who are impacted the most.
Photographs by Taiwo Aina for CNN
More than 10 million children between 5 and 14 years old are absent from classrooms across Nigeria, according to UNICEF. For girls, the statistics are even bleaker: In states in the northeast and northwest of the country, fewer than half attend school.
This education crisis is the result of a tangle of factors, including poverty, geography and gender discrimination, the UN agency adds. But against the backdrop of these individual factors is the broader context of the climate crisis.
Nigeria is growing hotter and dryer, and extreme weather such as flash floods and landslides are becoming fiercer and more frequent. Climate disasters can make schools inaccessible and classrooms unsafe. Communities struggling to cope with extreme weather sometimes turn to their children to help or to earn extra money to support the family. And girls, whose attendance at school is already discouraged in some communities, are often most affected.
For every additional year the average girl attends school, her country’s resilience to climate disasters can be expected to improve by 3.2 points on an index that measures vulnerability to climate-related disasters, according to estimates from the Brookings Institution.
There are efforts to support girls’ education and equip them with the resources to cope with a fast-changing climate. The Center for Girls’ Education in the northern Nigerian city of Zaria runs programs to help girls stay in school and offers training on how to cope with the impacts of extreme weather.
“I feel when we give the girls education on climate change, how to mitigate it, it will go a long way in helping the girls in how to support themselves in times of difficulties, and even help them prepare for it,” said Habiba Mohammed, director of the Center for Girls’ Education.
Asiya Sa’idu, 17
Tiếp tục đọc “How the climate crisis fuels gender inequality”Vietnam and China, the two largest markets for traditional medicine (TM) that uses wild plants and animals, announced a new partnership in January to adopt practices that protect wildlife while preserving the countries’ cultural heritage.
The first-of-its-kind agreement involved leading TM associations from Vietnam and China — the Vietnam Oriental Traditional Medicine Association (VOTMA) and the China Association of Traditional Chinese Medicine (CATCM) — along with researchers, policymakers and pharmaceutical leaders. TRAFFIC, an international NGO monitoring illegal wildlife trade, facilitated it.
The partnership aims to explore “several sustainable practices to make traditional medicine more conservation-friendly,” said TRAFFIC Vietnam director Trinh Nguyen in a statement to Mongabay. She said these include encouraging practitioners to switch to legal, sustainable and cultivated plant-based alternatives, and eliminating illegal wildlife ingredients in prescriptions.
Historical TM practices in the two countries have incorporated wildlife-derived ingredients, including those from threatened species, such as tiger bones, pangolin scales, rhino horns and bear bile. While many such ingredients are legal to trade inside China, the wildlife parts are often sourced from other countries to meet domestic demand. Many of the threatened species are, however, listed on CITES Appendix I, making the international trade in their parts illegal. As TM becomes popular globally, conservationists worry about its impact on wildlife.
Tiếp tục đọc “Vietnam and China partner on wildlife-friendly traditional medicine practices”
themekongeye.com By Anton L. Delgado 20 January 2025 at 10:54
ILLUSTRATION: Sunhee Park / Dialogue Earth
On Sơn Island in Viet Nam’s Mekong Delta, Le Trung Tin scatters fish feed into his ponds, where dozens of snakehead fish leap through the surface in synchronized bursts. “I taught them how to do that,” he says proudly, tossing another handful of feed at his fish.
The scene looks idyllic, but Le’s fish farm is a reluctant response to an escalating crisis. For decades, he made his living fishing the Hậu River, a distributary of the Mekong. But in recent years, plastic waste clogged his nets and strangled the fish. “I had no choice but to stop,” he says. “Everything was tangled – trash, nets, even the fish themselves. It was hopeless.”
Now, Le relies on enclosed ponds using filtered water to keep his fish alive. “I built this ecological environment free of plastic waste, chemical spills and [protected it from] extreme weather,” he says.
https://player.vimeo.com/video/1037846174?dnt=1&app_id=122963VIDEO: Anton L. Delgado/Dialogue Earth
Le’s experience reflects the wider challenges facing the Mekong. Stretching over 4,300 kilometres from the Tibetan Plateau to the South China Sea, the river supports nearly 70 million people and some of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems. Yet, it is one of the most plastic-polluted rivers in the world and among the 10 rivers in Asia that carry the vast majority of plastic to the sea. The Mekong dumps – by some estimates – tens of thousands of tonnes each year into the ocean, with plastic waste accumulating along its banks, tributaries and lakes.
Plastic enters the Mekong in myriad ways – agricultural runoff, unregulated dumping and a flood of single-use packaging from upstream countries like China and Myanmar. It accumulates in hotspots like Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia and the wetlands of Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, where this plastic waste threatens biodiversity, food security and human health.
In 2024, the world was around 1.5°C warmer than it was in pre-industrial times.1 You can see this in the chart below, which shows average warming relative to average temperatures from 1861 to 1890.2
Temperatures, as defined by “climate”, are based on temperatures over longer periods of time — typically 20-to-30-year averages — rather than single-year data points. But even when based on longer-term averages, the world has still warmed by around 1.3°C.3
But you’ll also notice, in the chart, that temperatures haven’t increased linearly. There are spikes and dips along the long-run trend.
Many of these short-term fluctuations are caused by “ENSO” — the El Niño-Southern Oscillation — a natural climate cycle caused by changes in wind patterns and sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean.
While it’s caused by patterns in the Pacific Ocean and most strongly affects countries in the tropics, it also impacts global temperatures and climate.
There are two key phases of this cycle: the La Niña phase, which tends to cause cooler global temperatures, and the El Niño phase, which brings hotter conditions. The world cycles between El Niño and La Niña phases every two to seven years.4 There are also “neutral” periods between these phases where the world is not in either extreme.
The zig-zag trend of global temperatures becomes understandable when you are taking the phases of the ENSO cycles into account. In the chart below, we see the data on global temperatures5, but the line is now colored by the ENSO phase at that time.6
The El Niño (warm phase) is shown in orange and red, and the La Niña (cold phase) is shown in blue.
You can see that temperatures often reach a short-term peak during warm El Niño years before falling back slightly as the world moves into La Niña years, shown in blue.
theconversation.com Published: March 12, 2025 5.03pm GMT
Myanmar has struggled with civil war, military rule and widespread poverty for much of the past seven decades. But the country’s youth have never faced threats to their survival and future as severe as today.
The military coup of February 2021 shattered the hopes of many young people in Myanmar who had envisioned a better and more stable future under their democratically elected leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.
As brutal crackdowns on peaceful protests unfolded, thousands of young people fled to the jungles to take up arms. Hundreds of thousands more joined the civil disobedience movement, abandoning their studies to protest military rule through demonstrations and strikes.
Myanmar’s armed opposition has made significant gains over the past year, seizing vast territories from the military – though the latter still controls major cities like Naypyidaw, Yangon, and Mandalay.
Amid the surging violence, young people in Myanmar are finding themselves even more deprived of opportunities and increasingly forced into submission.
In February 2024, Myanmar’s junta declared mandatory military service for men aged 18 to 35 and women aged 18 to 27. Those who do not comply face up to five years in prison.
Tiếp tục đọc “Myanmar’s military rule is crippling hope for young people like never before”
Families of victims, human rights groups call for ‘expeditious surrender and transfer of custody’ of Duterte to the ICC.
By Ted Regencia Published On 11 Mar 202511 Mar 2025
Manila, Philippines – Almost three years after leaving the presidency, former President Rodrigo Duterte has been arrested by Philippine authorities in Manila, upon the request of the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague, which is investigating allegations of “crimes against humanity” committed during his six years in power.
Duterte was immediately taken into police custody on Tuesday at the Manila international airport following his arrival from Hong Kong, in a move hailed by human rights groups as “a critical step for accountability in the Philippines”.
Tiếp tục đọc “Why has the Philippines arrested ex-President Duterte on ICC warrant?”
February 24 – March 2, 2025 Stimson Mekong Monitor
Significant releases from China’s large dams push river to higher-than-normal levels.
Sustained large releases from China’s Xiaowan and Nuozhadu Dams are causing the river to run at levels 1-2 meters higher than normal along the Thai-Lao border. The two graphs illustrate the sudden spike in river level occurring during the last days of February, corresponding to about 900 million cubic meters of water releases from China’s dams. Under normal dry season conditions, the river level does not spike in a manner seen on the graphs. At this time of year, the river level should gradually decrease over the next six weeks. Sudden spikes in river level, particularly those which run for sustained periods at higher levels, can be devastating for the river’s ecological processes and for the communities who depend on the river.
Fulcrum.sg Published 3 Mar 2025 Mirza Sadaqat Huda
Trump’s rent-seeking foreign policy pertaining to energy and critical minerals will force Southeast Asian countries to do what they least desire: making a choice between China and the US.
The Trump administration’s insular and rent-seeking foreign policy will significantly alter the geopolitics of energy transition in Southeast Asia. This will manifest in two ways. First, the potential cessation of US involvement in the region’s energy sector will heighten fears of China’s dominance in energy infrastructure projects — including the ASEAN Power Grid (APG). Second, Trump’s intentions of using critical minerals as a bargaining chip for providing military assistance, if applied to the ASEAN region, will impact the regional vision for sustainable mineral development.
The shutting down of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an important player in the energy sector, will intensify existing fears of China’s dominance in electricity transmission and generation. As shown in Table 1, China provided approximately US$534 million in aid to the region’s energy sector in 2022, accounting for more than a quarter of the total share. Comparatively, the US provided only US$23.7 million, or 1 per cent of total energy-related aid to Southeast Asia. In addition, the China Southern Power Grid Company and State Grid Corporation of China own and operate significant portions of the national grids in Laos and the Philippines, respectively.
China Leads in Energy Aid
Table 1 Energy-related aid to Southeast Asia 2022 (excerpt) (USD, in %)
| Donor | Amount | Contribution |
| China | 534 million | 26 |
| ADB | 368 million | 18 |
| Germany | 274 million | 13 |
| Canada | 231 million | 11 |
| South Korea | 211 million | 10 |
| Japan | 167 million | 8 |
| World Bank | 90.0 million | 4 |
| EU Institutions | 42.3 million | 2 |
| France | 42.2 million | 2 |
| AIIB | 34.8 million | 2 |
| United States | 23.7 million | 1 |
The table is modified from Lowy Institute’s (2024) Southeast Asia Aid Map.
Tiếp tục đọc “Impact of Trump 2.0 on Southeast Asia’s Energy Geopolitics”
Mekong eyes – 16 December 2024 at 9:27 (Updated on 16 December 2024 at 15:40)
The country’s improved railway connectivity facilitates fruit exports to China but has also sparked a boom in foreign-owned banana and durian farms, leading to forest clearance
The report was produced with support from the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network (RIN) and Internews’ Earth Journalism Network as part of the “Ground Truths” collaborative reporting project on soils.
ATTAPEU, LAOS — The new high-speed railway has enabled faster fruit exports from Laos to China, attracting more investment in large-scale plantations. However, this growth has come at the cost of deforestation.
Bananas and the “king of tropical fruit” – durians – are very popular in China, but they typically ripen within a few days of harvesting.
However, that problem was resolved with the launch of the Laos-China Railway in 2021, which has enabled landlocked Laos to deliver its fruit quickly to China’s 1.4 billion consumers.
Tiếp tục đọc “Fruits of spoil: Laos’ forests disappearing as fruit farms flourish (2 parts)”
VNE – Chủ nhật, 2/3/2025, 00:00 (GMT+7)
Năm 2025, tuyến cao tốc Bắc Nam phía Đông dài 2.063 km sẽ hoàn thành; sau năm 2030 tuyến Bắc Nam phía Tây dài 1.205 km được xây dựng, nâng tổng số lên 8.400 km cao tốc trên cả nước.
Hoàng Khánh – Đoàn Loan
South China Morning Post – 28-2-2025
The Tokyo government is set to introduce a four-day work week for its employees starting in April 2025, following a similar move made by Singapore in December. Governments and companies in Asia have generally been slower than their Western counterparts in taking steps to adopt a healthy work-life balance. For decades, Japan’s work culture has been synonymous with gruelling hours and self-sacrifice. Is Tokyo’s introduction of a four-day work week the start of a shift away from a culture of overwork in Japan and across the region, or is it just a pipe dream for Asia?
Al Jazeera English – 27-2-2025
China is experiencing a prolonged economic slowdown, which has led to a youth unemployment crisis.
In 2023, the rate of 16 to 24-year-olds unable to find jobs reached a record high of 21.3 percent.
Following the release of those figures, the government suspended reporting before revising its methodology to exclude university students.
According to the latest figures, the rate is now 15.7 percent. Young people say they are having to settle for low-paying jobs, if they can find one at all.
101 East follows young jobseekers as they navigate China’s challenging labour market.
Good morning. We’re covering a new report about religion in America.
 |
| In Cumberland, Md. Maggie Shannon for The New York Times |
By Lauren Jackson – I’m working on a project about belief.
As religion in America declined, experts administered last rites.
Churches were approaching “their twilight hour” as attendance fell, The Brookings Institution wrote in 2011. In his 2023 book, “Losing Our Religion,” the evangelical preacher Russell Moore asked: “Can American Christianity survive?”
The answer appears to be yes. People have stopped leaving churches en masse, according to a new study released this morning by Pew Research. America’s secularization is on pause for now, likely because of the pandemic and the country’s stubborn spirituality. Most Americans — 92 percent of adults — say they hold one or more spiritual beliefs that Pew asked about:
Tiếp tục đọc “US – One nation, under God”
Wikipedia – Heaven & Earth is a 1993 American biographical war drama film written and directed by Oliver Stone, and starring Tommy Lee Jones, Haing S. Ngor, Joan Chen, and Hiep Thi Le. It is the third and final film in Stone’s Vietnam War trilogy, following Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989).
The film was based on the books When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and Child of War, Woman of Peace, both authored by Le Ly Hayslip about her experiences during and after the Vietnam War. It received mixed reviews and performed poorly at the box office. Tiếp tục đọc “Heaven & Earth (1993)”
CVD 
