Chinese CDs sales annoy Vietnam

Chinese CDs sales annoy Vietnam

HANOI (AFP): Vietnamese officials are warning of new "cultural pollutants" sweeping the country, propagating reactionary and indecent thoughts among the young.

But the source of this contamination is not the western countries that Hanoi's cultural commissars often blame for a variety of ills. Instead, its communist neighbor China, the world's largest producer of pirate compact and laser discs.

In recent months, stalls selling CDs from artists as varied as U.S. grunge band Nirvana to Richard Clayderman, a pop pianist who has won particular favor among the Vietnamese, have sprung up across Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

Discs smuggled in across the Chinese border cost only US$2, affordable for Vietnamese who have been splurging on motorbikes and electronics goods as the country emerges from long years of austerity.

"Compact and laser discs containing reactionary or indecent material such as indecent Playboy erotic movies can be purchased across the country," complained the Saigon Giai Phong newspaper in a recent article.

Vietnam is not the first to complain about Chinese-made CDs. The United States has threatened to keep Beijing out of the World Trade Organization unless it closes 26 factories producing CDs, laser discs and CD-ROM computer discs.

U.S. officials say the factories can produce 75 million units annually, most of which are exported to Southeast Asia, and has said China faces trade penalties unless it ends a trade that costs the United States $1 billion a year.

But for Vietnam, the issue is less about intellectual property rights -- a concept only recently acknowledged here -- than about the government's increasingly desperate attempts to keep out what it sees as unsavory influences.

"This market is posing a real threat that demands immediate action if the government wants to strengthen itself on the ideology and culture front," the official newspaper warned.

Too late

Authorities may be too late. Saccharine-sweet love songs by overseas Vietnamese have left revolutionary anthems in the dust, while the bumping and grinding of bikini-clad women is a popular video alternative to the stale fare on state television.

Market forces unleashed here in 1987 are spreading foreign culture at an unstoppable pace, with fierce competition between CD traders keeping prices rock bottom.

"Our profits are very low because of the strong competition between retailers and the cost of imported goods from China," said Hung, who works in a shop on Hai Ba Trung Street, Hanoi's electronics center, where more than 100 shops vie for customers. CDs cost retailers just one dollar, while those who smuggle goods across the border get about five percent of their value, traders say.

Bribes clear the goods quickly through customs to avoid the 30 percent tax on discs, which are also supposed to be approved by the Minister of Culture and Information but rarely are.

The goods are part of the growing cross-border trade with China, which is officially put at around $500 million a year, although smuggling may mean the real figure is much higher.

Hanoi has signed several agreements with Beijing to regulate the trade, most recently during a visit last week by Chinese President Jiang Zemin, but implementation has been weak and Vietnam has found itself powerless next to its neighbor's exporting muscle.

The government's diktats regularly go unenforced in the independent-minded border provinces, but new regulations or crackdowns on pirated goods in China often have the effect of sending new waves of traders across the border.

A recent ban on satellite dishes in China sent prices plummeting in Vietnam as thousands were shipped across the border to be snapped up by a population increasingly eager for entertainment.