No country in the world is as experienced as Vietnam is in coping with China. Indeed, for Vietnamese, maintaining stable and minimally friendly relations with Beijing poses formidable and unremitting challenges. During waves of Chinese expansion, these challenges are doubly difficult. On one hand there is the need to deal with an aggressive neighbor in sensitive but self-respecting ways, without unduly compromising national sovereignty and interests. 

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than one in four lights up regularly in Vietnam. Vietnam's Health Education and Communication Center estimated that smoking kills 40,000 people each year and if no measure is taken, nearly 10 percent of the Vietnamese population will have died from smoking-related diseases by 2030. So forget bird flu, smoking is a bona fide epidemic.

Changing dynamics in the economy and politics in recent years have further highlighted the need for civil society development. Vietnam is now considered a middle-income country, resulting in international donors withdrawing aid from a number of development areas, and a decrease in official development assistance grants. As such, the country has entered the longest period of economic slowdown since Doi Moi. 

Vietnam specializes in irony. Its president, Truong Tan Sang, visited the White House this Thursday, where he was expected to request a lifting of the U.S. ban on lethal weapons sales to his country, while also seeking support for a bid to join the UN Human Rights Council. The irony? Besides trying to buy weapons from the United States, a country it defeated four decades ago, Hanoi also continues to trample on human rights.