This article examines recent developments in English language education in Vietnam, contextualising them within contemporary sociopolitical and cultural discourses. It begins by tracing the historical emergence and evolution of English in Vietnam before examining its role in the education system. The article then critically discusses Project 2020, Vietnam's largest language education initiative, and its profound impact on the country's language education landscape. Finally, it presents three notable trends significantly shaped by Project 2020: the increasing prevalence of IELTS preparation, the rise of second-career language teachers, and the emergence of communities of practice for English teachers.

This article draws on fieldwork among patients pursuing healing using macrobiotic diets at a Buddhist temple clinic not far from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. It examines the (re-)emergence of macrobiotic diets as a movement for “nurturing life” (duõng sinh) in modeern Vietnam. By examining the use of macrobiotic diets among this temple's patients and followers, the article unravels popular discourses of food and health, and their intertwining relationships with conceptions of chronic diseases in contemporary Vietnamese society. The popularity of this temple as an alternative therapeutic centre for people with chronic conditions also sheds light on notions of illness, healing processes, and religious beliefs. The rise of macrobiotics as an alternative diet and lifestyle reveals people's uncertainties and mistrust amid many prevalent problems in contemporary Vietnam, such as food safety concerns. Altogether, “nurturing life” activities offer strategies for individuals to adapt to a rapidly changing social context.

The papers in this special issue have highlighted new perspectives on food charity activities, as well as notions of food and ethics in contemporary Vietnam. As Vietnam is rapidly changing, food-related activities are dynamic phenomena that reflect the social, moral, and economic changes unfolding in society. However, ethnographic research on food culture in Vietnam published in English has been scarce. This epilogue provides a few exploratory insights into interesting social phenomena in recent years that exemplify the shifting landscape of cuisine and food ethics in modern Vietnam.

On October 26, 1967, John McCain (1936-2018), the naval aviator who later became a US Senator from Arizona was shot down while flying over Hanoi, Vietnam. McCain then became a war prisoner for five and a half years until his release in March 1973. Where McCain was captured became the site of a memorial, depicting a soldier kneeling with two arms raised in surrender. Originally intended to celebrate the Vietnamese victory, the memorial later turned into a symbol of McCain's relationship with Vietnam and the US's relationship to the country. McCain himself visited, as well as recent US leaders, including President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Upon McCain's passing, both Vietnamese people and American expats brought flowers to the memorial to pay their respects. This commentary discusses how the memorial became an instrument of diplomacy, serving the present rhetoric of friendship the US has fostered with Vietnam and demonstrating both peoples' desires for an amiable future. By honouring the memorial, the Americans and the Vietnamese have engaged in what we argue is strategic remembering, reconfiguring the meaning of a war artifact and making it not only a testament to the past but also a marker of renewed reality in the present.

This study explores the preparation of food for charitable distribution by Buddhists in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) (Vietnam). Most of those involved in cooking for charity are women. This article shows that HCMC women perceive cooking for charity as an extension of household cooking. Food charity transforms the household duty of cooking into a charitable practice that benefits the wider society. Vietnamese media focuses on this feminine aspect of food charity, portraying it as an act of kindness that increases communal solidarity during adversities such as the Covid-19 pandemic, similar to women's kitchen work in sustaining their families.

In this article, I use Emile Durkheim’s theory of “social facts” to examine Buddhist charity movements in Vietnam. Durkheim defines social facts as the beliefs and customs required to belong in a community. I use Durkheim's theory to analyze how volunteer groups develop Buddhist cosmologies with distinct social facts about human subjectivity, ethics, and karma. My study traces how social facts cause different programming outcomes like decisions to serve meat-based or vegetarian meals among food charities. My findings are significant among studies of religious humanitarianism for suggesting that grassroots movements spread through heterogeneous values and cosmologies, even within a shared tradition.

At the White House Festival of the Arts in 1965, the American novelist John Hersey read excerpts from his noted non-fiction work Hiroshima (1946) as an act of protest against President Lyndon Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam War. As Hersey linked Harry Truman's bombing of Hiroshima and Johnson's bombing of Vietnam within the same spectrum of American military interventions in Asia, he earned the ire of the First Family and raised questions about freedom of speech in the White House itself. Drawing on archival documents in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and the Library of Congress, this article argues that Hersey's literary protest revealed how the premises of cultural freedom that lay at the heart of Cold War American liberalism stirred far more controversy in practice than their placid articulation in theory would have ever suggested.

This introduction to the special issue on food charity, religion, and care in Vietnam compares grassroots philanthropy in Vietnam with broader trends toward religious humanitarianism happening across Asia. The co-editors of the special issue examine why food charity has become popular in urban areas like Ho Chi Minh City by exploring how food holds spiritual, moral significance for both donors and recipients. This survey illuminates how grassroots philanthropy in Vietnam can offer a comparative study for spirituality, ethics, and food practices across Asia, as well as religious humanitarianism globally.

Spatial analysis and disease mapping have the potential to enhance understanding of tuberculosis (TB) dynamics, whose spatial dynamics may be complicated by the mix of short and long-range transmission and long latency periods. TB notifications in Nam Dinh Province for individuals aged 15 and older from 2013 to 2022 were analyzed with a variety of spatio-temporal methods. The study commenced with an analysis of spatial autocorrelation to identify clustering patterns, followed by the evaluation of several candidate Bayesian spatio-temporal models. These models varied from simple assessments of spatial heterogeneity to more complex configurations incorporating covariates and interactions. The findings highlighted a peak in the TB notification rate in 2017, with 98 cases per 100,000 population, followed by a sharp decline in 2021. Significant spatial autocorrelation at the commune level was detected over most of the 10-year period. The Bayesian model that best balanced goodness-of-fit and complexity indicated that TB trends were associated with poverty: each percentage point increase in the proportion of poor households was associated with a 1.3% increase in TB notifications, emphasizing a significant socioeconomic factor in TB transmission dynamics. The integration of local socioeconomic data with spatio-temporal analysis could further enhance our understanding of TB epidemiology.

This article explores Vietnam’s distinctive approach to data privacy regulation and its implications for the established understandings of privacy law. While global data privacy regulations are premised on individual freedom and integrity of information flows, the recent Vietnamese Decree 13/2023/NĐ-CP on Personal Data Protection (herein PDPD) prioritise state oversight and centralised control over information flows to safeguard collective interests and cyberspace security. The fresh regulatory logic puts data privacy under the regulation of government agencies and moves the privacy law arena even further away from the already distant judicial power. This prompts an exploration of the nuances underlying the ways regulators and the regulated communities understand data privacy regulation. The article draws on social constructionist accounts of regulation and discourse analysis to explore the epistemic interaction between regulators and those subject to regulation during the PDPD’s drafting period. The process is highlighted by the dynamics between actors within a complex semantic network established by the state’s policy initiatives, where tacit assumptions and normative beliefs direct the way actors in various communities favour one type of thinking about data privacy regulation over another. The findings suggest that reforms to privacy laws may not result in “more privacy” to individuals and that divergences in global privacy regulation may not be easily explained by drawing merely from cultural and institutional variances.

How does the public support a coalition in which pro-democracy advocates and policy-based protesters join forces in street protests? When policy-based and pro-democracy groups protest together, they create a collective action frame that includes a policy component and a democracy component. In this article, I develop the frame salience theory, arguing that support for a policy–democracy protest coalition depends on which component of the joint frame is perceived to be more dominant. I argue that in authoritarian regimes, the policy component typically dominates the coalition because it is more accessible and available to the public. This perception shifts public support for the alliance towards the baseline level of support for the policy movement. In other words, public support for the alliance defaults to the baseline level of support for the policy movement. I find evidence for my argument using a survey experiment administered to 1,209 Vietnamese respondents. This article highlights a dilemma pro-democracy groups face: joining policy-based movements may boost support, but sustaining democracy after the protest becomes challenging.

In the past decade, the Vietnamese lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and other sexual orientations and gender identities (LGBT+) movement has succeeded in repositioning this population from the stigmatising label of “social evils” to a more positive social representation. Despite the limited space for civil society in this authoritarian environment, Vietnamese activists and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have effectively changed public attitudes, improved visibility, and gained legal recognition for this marginalised community. This study uses qualitative data from interviews with twelve activists and fieldwork observations to explain how activist strategies in this setting align with the “service delivery” function of civil society. By examining how activists have addressed healthcare and education deficits, I demonstrate that activism in authoritarian regimes can be effective when it assists instead of challenges the government. The findings contribute to scholarship on global queer activism by demonstrating how a service delivery approach can achieve social change, highlighting the role of NGOs and international development in this process. Additionally, the findings expose existing challenges that hinder these activists’ efforts, showing how funding dependency and inadequate legal recognition can significantly limit the creativity and autonomy of grassroots activist groups.

One specimen of tropical shad was caught from the Giang Thanh River, Kien Giang province, Vietnam in a survey on 16 October 2022. We identified the specimen as the hilsa shad, Tenualosa ilisha Hamilton, 1822 using morphological analysis, and further validated by its cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) sequence. The specimen was 418 mm long, 1428 g in weight, with a head length of 29.0% and pectoral fin length of 31.1% of its standard length. Notably, the presence of 34 scutes, a higher gill raker count and a caudal fin length within the moderate range for Tenualosa species distinguished it from T. macrura, T. toli and T. reevesii. The COI sequence of the sample matched closely to the T. ilisha. The results confirm that T. ilisha still endures Vietnamese water, where it was thought to be extinct. Climate change and Indo-Pacific Ocean currents may introduce expansion of distribution area of the T. ilisha. Further studies on distribution of the T. ilisha and other Tenualosa species and their dynamics are needed.

This article presents a comparison of two Vietnamese Buddhist monks who travelled to and spent time in South Asia in the 1950s. The first, Thích Tố Liên (1903–1977), travelled to Calcutta and then on to Sri Lanka in May 1950 to participate in the First General Conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists. Though his encounter was relatively brief, it left a lasting impression. Tố Liên returned as an ardent advocate for the World Fellowship and for an internationalist view of Buddhism more generally. The second, Thích Minh Chàu (1918–2012), had a very different encounter with Sri Lanka and India. He spent most of the 1950s studying Pali manuscripts and earning his doctoral degree from the Nalanda Institute (then a part of the University of Bihar, now Nalanda University). During this time, he became an important popularizer of contemporary Indian ideas. While in South Asia, he contributed many articles to Buddhist journals back in Vietnam. He recounted his pilgrimage to major Buddhist sites, considered the contemporary influence of Buddhism in India, and analysed the works of everyone from Tagore to the Dalai Lama. This article will compare the South Asian experiences of these two Vietnamese Buddhist monks and analyse their impact on Buddhist unification and the Vietnamese Buddhist movement in the 1960s.