Western pop music in Vietnam: from “social evil” to status symbol

My latest post for the Financial Times' Beyond Brics blog:

Throaty song-writing legend Bob Dylan and 90s teen favourites the Backstreet Boys might not have much in common as far as most music fans are concerned.

But both are playing big gigs in Vietnam over the next few weeks as music promoters test out the appetite for expensive, international standard entertainment.

Communist Vietnam has opened up rapidly over the last twenty years and Western pop music has been off the list of “social evils” for some time. But the live music market remains relatively undeveloped and only a handful of international artists have played in Vietnam thus far.

In a country where many would count themselves lucky to earn $100 a month, you might wonder who will be willing to pay $50-$120 for a ticket to the Dylan and Backstreet Boys gigs. But that’s well within the reach of status-conscious urbanites, who have been splashing out on iPhones, fancy cars and sleek scooters for a number of years.

Read the rest of this blog post over at the FT's Beyond Brics, which is free to all comers.

Enforced hibernation

Posting will be light to non-existent for the next few weeks as I've just found out that the Singapore government has refused to renew my work visa.

The Ministry of Manpower has refused to give me any reason for this decision.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Information has rejected my application to cover the upcoming APEC summit for The Daily Telegraph, the UK's best-selling serious daily newspaper. They have also given me no explanation.

Having been in Singapore for a year, I now need to leave the city-state within a month and am reassessing my options with urgency. I plan to continue working in Southeast Asia.

Any offers of employment or freelance journalistic safe haven as well as messages of support or general abuse can be sent to me at theasiafile@gmail.com.

I'd like to thank all my readers and assure you that I will be back blogging with a vengeance once my involuntary departure is complete.

I'll also have more to say on my predicament at a later date.

At least I've now got some time to re-read the novels of Franz Kafka and George Orwell.

Quote of the week

"If you want to do journalism, don’t do it in Singapore."

The sage advice of a Singaporean journalism professor (yes they do exist) to Lin Junjie, an eager student hack at Nanyang Technological University.

Hossan Leong: Singapore’s latter-day court jester

Though it’s hard to believe, there are some places in Singapore where people openly mock their rulers, who retain strict controls over the media and have shown a tendency to use the libel law against those who do them down.



On Saturday, I watched Singaporean comic Hossan Leong gently poking fun at Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew and his family and briefly mocking the government’s economic and racial policies and the failure to prevent terrorist Mas Selamat from escaping last year.

In the West, such ribbing would be considered tame in the extreme. But in Singapore, this was pushing the boundaries of political humour about as far as they can go or at least as far as most people are willing to push them.

The vast majority of Hossan Leong’s performance, which was set up as a spoof chat show, was decidedly non-political. But, still, he was only allowed to get away with breaking such taboos because of two reasons:

1. He was performing in a theatre – While the government censors take a very strict view of what can be shown/written about in the mass media, they are much more relaxed about a medium that plays to a limited and largely elite audience. Only 615 people can fit in to the National Library Drama Centre, where Leong’s show was playing, so at best fewer than 10,000 will be get to see it during this ten-day run. More importantly, most theatre-goers come from the upper echelons of the middle class and the government is more relaxed about allowing this narrow elite a bit more personal freedom.

2. The political humour was interspersed by copious amounts of cross-dressing, stupid songs and all-round pantomime silliness. Thus any hard message behind the political humour was diluted and deliberately deprived of any semblance of legitimacy.

To put it another way, Leong is adopting the role played by court jesters in England during the Middle Ages.

While the people were forbidden from speaking ill of the monarchy – sometimes on pain of death – the jesters were allowed free reign to mock and parody because it was accepted that anything they said was “in jest” and that they were merely the court fool.

Singapore's hidden heartland - a story you can't read in the Lion City

I've written an extended piece on the joys of Singapore's little-known farming hinterlands in the October edition of the soon-to-be-closed Far Eastern Economic Review.

But, in a Kafkaesque twist, FEER says it is unable to send me a copy of my own story because of the restrictions enforced by the Singapore government on foreign publications in 2006 after FEER was accused of "engaging in domestic politics" by the government.

Meanwhile, in the letters pages of this week's edition of The Economist, Singapore's high commissioner in London insists that FEER is not and has never been banned in Singapore.

Michael Eng Cheng Teo says that FEER "voluntarily discontinued circulating in Singapore" after refusing to comply with the requirement to put up a security bond [of S$200,000] and appoint a representative in Singapore upon whom legal notice could be served.

Anyway - here's a taster of the story:

The car weaves along the winding country lane, cutting a narrow path through the lush tropical vegetation. As well as the occasional dog ambling sleepily down the roadside, we pass farm after farm producing everything from vegetables to goat’s milk and even crocodiles. We reach the summit of a short incline from where the gently-undulating landscape stretches out in front of us, punctuated only by farm buildings and electricity pylons.

Briefly, it’s almost possible to imagine that I’m in one of Asia’s expansive agricultural heartlands such as Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands or Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. But the frequent road signs warning people away from state land and urging trespassers not to enter “protected areas” at risk of being shot give the plot away.

Welcome to Singapore’s last remaining slice of rural life: the Kranji countryside. The Southeast Asian city-state may be better known for its banks, shopping malls and sprawling public housing estates but here, in the northwestern corner of the island, Singapore’s hardy farmers struggle on, producing 18,000 tons of vegetables, 47 million chickens, millions of eggs and 5,000 tons of fish each year.

“There’s no PAP up here—we’re not prim and proper,” quips Ivy Singh-Lim, president of the Kranji Countryside Association (KCA), as she pokes fun at Singapore’s ruling People’s Action Party, which has maintained a tight and, critics say, stifling grip on power since Britain granted self-rule in 1959.

“Singapore should not try to become a global city because we will bloody implode,” she continues. “We need to put aside our progress and prosperity model and look at Singapore as a country with a hinterland.”

“Back in the 1960s, all of our chickens, eggs, pigs and fish and 40% of our vegetables were grown locally,” Ms. Singh-Lim laments. “But the land here was neglected and this place almost became a lost valley because of the focus on urbanization.”

Ms. Singh-Lim believes that Singapore lost much of its “kampong spirit” as villages and farms were bulldozed and their residents moved into the towering government apartments that now house more than 80% of the population. But, as the 60-year-old sips a whiskey on the rocks at 3:30 in the afternoon in the café that adjoins Bollywood Veggies, her farm, she insists that Singapore’s countryside can still offer “solace to a weary soul.”

Photo courtesy of Flickr user pixculture.

UN fund kowtows to China press restrictions

The Common Fund for Commodities is a little-known inter-governmental financial organisation, set up under the auspices of the United Nations to help fund the exploitation of commodities from bananas to bamboo in developing countries.

The Common Fund is holding a big international conference in China later this month on "the importance of commodities in economic development of Asian countries and on the role the Common Fund can play in assisting countries in the region to make full use of their commodity-related potential".

As part of the Common Fund's drive to reach out and explain its work to the wider world, it initially announced that it would sponsor journalists to cover the conference, paying either for their flight to China or hotel costs.

I was one of the few who contacted the Common Fund about this opportunity and they seemed keen to get me to come along, promising to set up interviews with all the head honchos so that their work could be better understood.

However, having submitted all the necessary registration documents, I was surprised to receive the following email yesterday from Charles Jama in the Common Fund's communications department in Amsterdam:

I regret to inform you that we have reconsidered the media sponsorship program for the China meeting and will not be extending the offer to journalists NOT based or credentialled by the Press Bureau in the MoFA in Beijing.

The call for journalists to apply for sponsorship on the Common Fund's homepage was removed yesterday.

When I asked Guy Sneyers, the chief operating officer of the Common Fund, if he wanted to provide an official explanation for this sudden change of heart, he replied with a one-word answer: "no".

It is very disappointing (if not entirely surprising) to see an inter-governmental organisation with 107 member states that was set up under the UN framework caving in to Chinese press controls in such a meak fashion.

Without any proper explanation from the Common Fund, I can only guess at the reasons for their rapid about-turn. It was quite possibly simply because they could not be bothered to deal with the voluminous paperwork and bureaucracy necessary to procure a visa for a visiting journalist in China.

If that's the case, they are playing straight into the hands of the Chinese government which, like other authoritarian regimes, makes it very complicated for journalists to get visas precisely because they want to put foreign reporters off coming in the first place.

So that's Chinese censorship 1, UN 0.