Doing business in the new Vietnam.

• Author: Howell, Llewellyn D.
• Position: Column

"Your Indochina no longer exists. It is dead," a girl tells her adoptive French mother in the film "Indochine." The Indochina of the 1930s - Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos - was at the incipient stage of yet another revolution to throw out the foreign trespassers and make one more attempt to build a Vietnam for the Vietnamese. The soul of the real Indochina finally expired in flames in 1954.

Several new Vietnams have arisen from those colonial ashes. One was the Vietnam of conflict and war that lasted for more than 20 years after the departure of French colonial power. Another was an austere and retributive totalitarian state, focused strongly on cleansing itself of the foreign influences that had determined its destiny for hundreds of years. Those two Vietnams have shaped American thinking much more than the thousands of years of history that formed the underlying context for any of the Vietnams that have come in recent decades or will arise in the 21st century.

Now, those Vietnams are dead as well. That they exist no more is evident to anyone who walks the streets not only of Ho Chi Minh City, but also Hanoi in 1994.

By 1986, 11 years after closure was reached on the last of the foreign-dominated governments of South Vietnam, the Vietnamese government began implementing measures to alter radically the direction the economy had taken under a rigid Marxist philosophy. Almost overnight, vibrant entrepreneurial activity reappeared throughout the nation, although much more strongly in the south. Investment and property laws quickly began changing and messages of welcome were communicated to foreign investors throughout the world.

Vietnam and the Vietnamese government have recognized the need for an interrelationship with that world of foreign influence they so strongly fought for so many years. They also have reflected a confidence and sense of independence that probably has not existed in Vietnam since before the coming of the French. Once the door to the outside was opened, it was not just a crack, but nearly all the way. With the 1994 lifting of the U.S. embargo of Vietnam, it might be argued that now the door has been taken off its hinges.

While there has been a surge of U.S. firms into the Vietnam market since the lifting of the embargo, much remains to be done for American companies to capture a substantial share of either the investment opportunities or the sales market. While U.S. businesses were forced to sit on the sidelines during the...