BANGKOK – Earlier this month, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung in Vietnam said that his nation must hit 7 percent economic growth in the second half of this year to meet its full-year target of 6.5pc.
His remark reminded me of two things. One was an article just days earlier in The New York Times about false claims and shameless boosterism.
It related how the American company making Keds brand canvas shoes with rubber soles, first introduced in 1917, claimed they were so comfortable and quiet you could “sneak” up on your boyfriend – and hence were the first shoes called “sneakers”.
Minimal research by The New York Times reporter, however, showed that the name sneakers had been in use for similar footwear since 1887.
The article also noted that the Haggar clothing company claimed it invented the term “slacks” in the 1940s for its casual trousers, which were to be worn during “slack time”.
Yet a simple dictionary check showed that the term slacks
had been used in this context almost a century earlier.
Of course, it’s not only unscrupulous companies seeking to
embellish the pedigree of their products that engage in such
shenanigans. Many governments do the same.
Which brings me to the second thing Dung’s comment reminded me about. It was a claim, fed to me soon after I arrived in Hanoi as the bureau chief for The Straits Times of Singapore in 2006, that Vietnam was the new Asian Tiger – so much so that it had “the second fastest-growing economy in Asia after China”.
This mantra was regurgitated in articles about Vietnam, and in official government statements, and it peppered lunch chitchat and the banter at diplomatic receptions.
It was so universally accepted that I took it to be true. Then one day, an article in the business section of The Straits Times revealed that Singapore’s GDP growth for 2006 was 8.4pc.
I was stunned. Vietnam’s growth rate at that time was 8.2pc. So how could it be the second fastest in Asia after China, if even highly-developed Singapore had a faster rate?
A check of World Bank and IMF figures soon revealed that Vietnam’s growth rate was below that of China, Myanmar, Cambodia, Singapore, Laos and India. Yet the Keds-like canard continued to be repeated, as it is to this day, appearing in articles by foreign correspondents and even spouted in speeches by visiting Singapore leaders.
But then, like other regional governments, Singapore itself, despite a somewhat exaggerated reputation for rectitude, is not averse to making similar false claims.
Consider the notion, oft-repeated, especially at election time, that in its British colonial days, Singapore was a backward settlement of shacks in a mosquito-ridden swamp with no natural resources.
Then, hey presto, Lee Kuan Yew led his People’s Action Party to power in 1959 and transformed the place into the gleaming, ultra-efficient metropolis it is today.
It’s a good line, almost as sneaky and spurious as the one about Keds or Vietnam’s growth rate.
Actually, Singapore was highly developed long before Lee and the PAP took over. Indeed, called “Gibraltar of the East”, it was the real crown jewel of the British Empire.
Winston Churchill himself wrote that during the Second World War, “the worst disaster” of all was not Dunkirk or Dieppe or the blitz of London, it was the fall of Singapore in 1942. Look at photos of the victorious Japanese marching through Fullerton Square between the elegant colonnaded buildings that look like Regent Street in London.
Some swamp, some shacks.
This latterday PAP hyperbole does not alter the fact that Singapore developed fantastically well under Lee and has become a successful city state.
But it does reconfirm that when we are fed official guff, as we were on May 6 when it was announced that despite economic downturns due to the global financial crisis, trade between Cambodia and Vietnam rose 30pc last year and is up 127pc this year, we must treat it with caution.
Indeed, whenever leading politicians make similar high falutin’ claims, it pays to check them out, for it’s a good bet that they are speaking through the backside of their slacks.
Roger Mitton is The Myanmar Times’ regional correspondent for Southeast Asia and is based in Bangkok.
in the first place, who ask you the believe??