Vietnamese people diligent, skilful and very creative: diplomat, educator

Sometimes I think that if I had not taken the responsibility of the Deputy Chairman of the National Assembly’s Foreign Affairs Committee and worked as a diplomat, I would have been a headmaster of a university.

I have been nurturing the project o­n running a university for seven or eight years, before I was appointed to work as the Ambassador in Brussels, Belgium.

I always think that the biggest strength of Vietnam is the Vietnamese people. Every foreigner I meet says they have good impressions about the Vietnamese nation.

I also think that in order to develop our country, we need to develop education and training, I mean the human resource plays the decisive role in developing the country.

Westerners always praise Vietnamese people for their diligence and dynamism, but they don’t think that Vietnamese people are creative. I want to prove that Vietnamese people can also become very creative, if they are encouraged and when they have favorable conditions. Honestly speaking, I put a high expectation o­n the creativity of Vietnamese youth.

As far as I know, you are preparing intensively for your project o­n setting up Tri Viet (Vietnamese Brainpower), in which will be the chairwoman of the founding committee. Will the university be set up in Vung Tau?

You may raise a question of why I don’t think of setting up the university in Hanoi or HCM City, the two biggest economic and political centres. I have to remind you that a lot of big universities in the world are not located in big cities.

We are the investor, whose localities call ‘beautiful girls’ that they want to attract. However, Hanoi and HCM City have successfully attracted many beautiful girls already.

Meanwhile, Ba Ria – Vung Tau has agreed to allocate us 55 ha of land for building a university. We cannot get such a big land plot in Hanoi or HCM City.

I cherish the hope that I can build a real university village, which includes entertainment complexes and verdure besides high buildings. This will be the place for students to relax and dream about a bright future.

Ba Ria – Vung Tau is near HCM City. In the near future, you can get to HCM City by car o­n the highway, by train or fly o­n the planes to take off from Long Thanh airport.

The university we plan will be the university of international standard. Therefore, I think that young people will enroll if they think they can good education quality there.

How many students will your university have?

I hope that we will have 8,000 students after 10 years of operation.

A lot of private run universities have been established recently, but not all of them have the standardized education quality, and students still prefer state owned universities to privately run o­nes. What would you say about this?

I think that it is the right policy to encourage investors to set up private run universities. However, investors should understand that they must not focus o­n making profit. There are many famous universities in the US, and they are very rich. However, most of the universities’ money is being used for expanding universities, upgrading training quality and expanding the scholarship fund, not for paying dividends to shareholders.

We should consider education as a kind of service, and students, as clients, will use the services of the universities that can provide high quality services.

Currently, universities do not take responsibility for the jobs of students when they graduate. However, I think that in the future, every university needs to have a division in charge of finding jobs for graduates.

One more question, not about education, but about diplomacy, the job familiar to you for the last many years. Could you please tell us what characteristics a diplomat needs to have?

In fact, the diplomacy nowadays is far different from 30 years ago. There are many ‘diplomacy channels’, from government to non-government channels, national assembly to associations.

Previously, you could still take the job of a diplomat even if you did not understand laws or economics. However, nowadays, you cannot become the good diplomat if you do not have this knowledge. A modern diplomat also needs to understand the culture of his own countries and of the world. Diplomacy always requires a passion; therefore, you cannot become a good diplomat if you are an unwilling diplomat. This will bring harm to your country.

Diplomats need to have a lot of virtue. However, the most important characteristic of a diplomat is the aptitude of politics, because diplomacy, in fact, is a kind of art.