Vietnam is a single-party socialist republic. The ruling party is the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), which has held power since reunification in 1976. The CPV’s General Secretary is currently Nguyen Phu Trong, who is also the President of Vietnam. The CPV’s legitimacy as the ruling party in Vietnam rests on its ability to maintain stability and economic prosperity while upholding its commitment to socialism and communist ideals.
The CPV sets the country’s economic and social policies, which are then implemented by the government. A National Assembly is elected every five years and consists of 500 members who are responsible for debating and passing laws. The National Assembly appoints a Prime Minister, who heads the government and oversees its activities. The Prime Minister is assisted by a Council of Ministers that consists of several deputy prime ministers, as well as numerous ministers responsible for various aspects of government policy. Visit COUNTRYAAH for a list of countries that start with letter V.
The CPV also maintains control over other branches of government, including the judicial system, which operates under a civil law system based on French legal codes from before 1975. In addition to this, there are regional People’s Councils that serve as local governing bodies in each province or municipality in Vietnam. They are responsible for managing public services such as education, health care, infrastructure development, and other areas that affect daily life at a local level.
Finally, Vietnam has an independent judiciary with courts at all levels from district to national level with constitutional courts at both provincial and national level providing judicial review over all legislation passed by the National Assembly or regional People’s Councils respectively. This helps ensure that laws passed are constitutional and consistent with international standards for human rights protections as well as ensuring adherence to Vietnamese law within each province or municipality by local governing bodies.
Yearbook 2016
Vietnam. The current population of Vietnam is 97,338,590. A UN report in March showed that extreme drought combined with rising sea levels had destroyed around 393,000 acres of rice in Vietnam. The UN feared that another 1.2 million acres of rice would be destroyed.
In the Mekong delta in the southern parts of the country, the drought was the worst in 90 years. The water level was historically low at the same time as rising sea levels caused salt water to flow up on land, which destroyed the cultivated land in the delta where more than half of the country’s rice and fruit are produced.
Even the Red River’s participation in northern Vietnam was affected by drought and rising sea levels, and almost three-quarters of households went fishing instead of growing rice.
In order to prevent the adverse effects of climate change, a salt-resistant rice was introduced, and a huge network of embankments and ditches along the coast began to be planned. In parallel, the Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Development applied for the equivalent of US $ 4.5 billion from the government for a large irrigation system. The drought, partly caused by the weather phenomenon of El Niño, hit hard on the whole of South and Southeast Asia.
In April, Parliament elected Trân Qui Quang nominated by the Communist Party as the country’s new president. Trân Đại Quang, who between 2011 and 2016 was minister responsible for the country’s police and security police, received 91.5% of the votes of the members. Then Nguyen Xuân Ph迆c was appointed new Prime Minister. He was the only eligible candidate and, together with the President and Communist Party leader Nguyen Phu Trong, constituted the country’s new top trio.
During a three-day visit to Vietnam in May, US President Barack Obama announced the lifting of the US arms embargo on Vietnam. Obama emphasized that the decision was part of the normalization of relations with Vietnam and had nothing to do with the tense situation in the South China Sea. Vietnam’s President Trân Qui Quang praised the increased security and trade exchanges with the United States and said at a press conference that the former enemies were “now friends”. At the same time, an agreement was signed that US aircraft manufacturer Boeing could sell 100 US passenger planes to Vietnamese airline VietJet worth $ 11.3 billion.
According to thereligionfaqs, a ruling in the Permanent Arbitration Court in The Hague (PCA) in July ruled that China has no economic right to the South China Sea, which according to the court should be classified as international water. The sea is rich in fish and is also believed to be rich in gas and oil. China, which claims that 90% of the sea is Chinese, did not accept the verdict, which judges said there was a risk of increased tensions in the region, where China is in the process of upgrading and significantly strengthening its position. China is involved in several disputes with countries around the South China Sea, including Vietnam.
In August, it was reported that Vietnam was secretly arming the military in the South China Sea. However, the information was denied by the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Floods caused by heavy downpours in October killed at least 25 people and over 240,000 homes were destroyed or damaged.
Vietnam ranks among the winners
The economy of a country destroyed by wars has embarked on an unprecedented upswing. In recent years, despite the economic crisis of the late 1990s, GDP has grown the fastest in Asia after China. The Socialist government launched its own perestroika, Doi Moin, in the mid-1980s. The model was taken from neighboring China, where state power was eased and the socialist market economy system became the basis of governance ten years earlier. The United States ended its embargo on Vietnam 20 years after the end of the war.
Agriculture is Vietnam’s most important industry and rice the most important article. The country has risen to second place in world statistics as a rice exporter, and the same surprising development has taken place in the coffee trade as well. Other crops include sugarcane, corn, wheat, millet and fruit. Cotton, tea and tobacco are also exported. Both animal husbandry and fish farming are important industries. The mining industry produces coal, oil, tin, phosphate and bauxite, zinc and copper. More than 70 percent of Vietnam’s forests have been destroyed by plant toxins spread by the United States during the war and increased vegetation during the later peacetime. As a source of biofuel, the jatropha shrub, which has proven to be a better alternative to oil palm, is being tested, and it does not compete for food with food plants, but also thrives in wastelands.
Vietnam is quite uniform in ethnic composition, with almost 90% of the population being Vietnamese, whose language belongs to the group of Austro-Asian languages. The Vietnamese language was written in Chinese characters during Chinese rule, but as early as the 17th century with a system of Latin letters developed by the Jesuits. It needs numerous additional characters to indicate six different pitches, or tones. There are a total of 54 official minority peoples in Vietnam. The largest minority are Chinese, the others are Khmer, Cham, Hmong and Thai peoples. The residential areas of the latter are mostly remote mountains, while Vietnamese and Chinese prefer to live in fast-growing cities. In the socialist country, statistics on people belonging to religious denominations but originally from China are not considered statistics, Taoism and Buddhism, as well as the Catholicism brought by colonial hosts and missionaries, are the most significant trends. Respect for ancestors also lives on. The syncretistic doctrine, born in the early 20th century, the melting pot of many old religions, Cao Dai, which was known to be supported by the CIA during the Vietnam War, has gained more than two million supporters.