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Corruption (tham nhũng) getting around the law (luâ . t).The most general term for corruption (tham nhũng) in Vietnamese combines two words, avarice and harassment. Although the term's precise etymology is not accurately known, the pairing suggests an origin in Buddhist philosophy, which identi es desire, along with hatred and delusion, as one of the three main causes of suffering. 1 Greed is, after all, a manifestation of desire, an affective state that inevitably returns to torment its victim no matter how many times it is fed. This perhaps explains why acts of corruption are closely linked to eating in Vietnam: corrupt of cials are said to eat bribes (ăn hối lộ) or, more bluntly, to eat money (ăn tiền) itself. In this regard, corrupt of cials are not unlike the hungry ghosts that haunt the popular imagination. Both are insatiable; moreover, the failure to feed them similarly invites their malicious interference in one's affairs.But these metaphysical associations, while they reveal why corruption is positions : . / -

This article examines the counter-accounting methods one NGO, EarthRights International (ERI), uses to make Myanmar's notoriously opaque energy sector more transparent. ERI's methodological approach relies heavily on the identification of "invisible data," which do not appear in the statistics that governments and foreign energy companies release concerning their joint ventures. However, the data leave patterned traces in other statistical financial data. ERI asserts that it is possible to reconstruct joint venture balance sheets by comparing these traces against what the principles have not disclosed, such as with the controversial Yadana pipeline and the precedent-setting human rights lawsuit connected to it. The choices that ERI made illustrate how financial "facts" are fashioned rather than found, and that technical decisions regarding who does the counting, what gets counted, and what is disclosed to whom are profoundly political in nature. Such decisions also foreground key limitations of NGO-led revenue transparency projects, especially in resource-rich countries. Greater data disclosure does not necessarily result in increased transparency. Rather, the proliferation of structured and unstructured data sources (information that is organized and readily searchable versus information that is not) often leads to greater disagreement among key stakeholders regarding the relevance, neutrality, intelligibility, and verifiability of the numbers available for audit.

The conflicts shaping territorial claims and counter-claims to overlapping areas of the South China Sea threatens to significantly damage Sino-Vietnamese relations, destabilize regional security arrangements, and alter the geopolitical status quo. The governments of both countries routinely invoke historical documents, commission scientific studies, and cite legal principles to justify their competing claims in the maritime region and the resources contained therein. The role different types of energy infrastructure play in the state-level disputes have received little attention, however. This essay addresses this oversight. In it, I foreground the complex ways not yet built infrastructure affect Sino-Vietnamese relations as well as our theoretical understanding of "the state", especially with regard to Vietnam. Not yet built infrastructure refers to more than the assemblage of things that will be built in the future to power the economy, such as oil rigs, natural gas pipelines, and refineries. The concept also includes the ideological positions that presuppose the materialization of blueprint plans in physical form, i.e., the broader goals such infrastructure is meant to achieve. Towards this end, the article focuses on how state actors and their proxies conceptualize the likely impacts not yet built infrastructure will have upon their respective interests once construction is completed. The case study highlights how the need for energy security strengthens national security at some moments, weakens it at others, and both at still others.

Bùi Minh Quốc left for the border in late 2001. His clandestine trip, which took nearly a month to complete on a 50cc Honda Cub motorcycle, retraced the perimeter of Việt Bắc, the name for the mountainous region that stretches across ten provinces in northeastern Vietnam. Quốc, a poet of considerable repute, documented the highpoints of the ride in verse. But the region’s rugged beauty, which holds a prominent place in official histories of the anti-colonial struggle against the French and those who collaborated with them, was not the real reason for his quest. Nor was the region’s more recent reincarnation as a socialist battleground during the Third Indochina War with the People’s Republic of China, a conflict that killed and wounded an estimated one hundred thousand people in the space of a month. Instead, Quốc’s self-appointed task was to find the current location of “Kilometer Zero” (Cấy số không) along the Sino-Vietnamese border—a difficult proposition since it appears nowhere on official maps of the country. Nonetheless, the toponym is commonly used to refer to the precise spot in Lạng Sơn Province where National Highway 1A, the only paved road to traverse the entire length of Vietnam, begins its long journey south.