W.Minh Tuan
Anti-corruption must go hand in hand with high salaries of “Preserving Integrity”.
Our Party and State of Vietnam are very strict in fighting corruption. Arrests of corrupt officials, trials, and imprisonment of corrupt people are receiving a lot of attention from domestic and foreign public opinion, and most of these cases are supportive and welcomed. By mass people.
“No restricted areas” is a slogan welcomed and supported by the people in the fight against corruption in Vietnam.
Just like in the US, some people want to put former US President Trump on trial in court, with the slogan “No one above the law“.
But with the current salary level in Vietnam, it is difficult to say there is no corruption and not to accept envelopes.
In the past, our ancestors had a “Bao Liem salary”-“High salary to ensure the integrity“, meaning a high salary enough to live happily for civil servants, mandarins, district officials, provincial officials, and commune officials, so corruption in ancient times was a not much problem that we hardly hear it.
During the Nguyen Dynasty, mandarins had salaries enough to support a family of hundreds of people, and had about 50 service and security staff sent by the court, the court paid salaries for these 50 people, and had a villa in many places, they had large fields and gardens, so during the Nguyen Dynasty we hardly heard about corruption by high-ranking court officials.
In Vietnam’s neighbor Singapore, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, when he first took office in around the 1960s, had a very good opinion about the salaries of Singapore Government officials.
He roughly said:
-“Think of the Government as a business. The director of a large Singapore company has a salary of about 10 million Singapore dollars a year. Singapore has about 600 large enterprises.
So the Prime Minister of Singapore, the owner of about 600 of those businesses, must have a salary as high as the owners of those businesses, or even higher, to ensure a clean, free State of Singapore from corruption, while attracting talented people to the State apparatus.”
With that bold viewpoint, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew created a salary project for Singapore Government officials, and asked the Singapore National Assembly to vote for it.
As a result, the Singapore National Assembly voted to approve the salary of Singapore State officials. The Prime Minister has a salary of about 2 million Singapore dollars a year (about 1.5 million USD), about 150,000 USD/ 1 month, highest in the world.
Recently, the Singapore Government of Mr. Lee Kuan Yew’s son, Lee Hsien Loong, reduced the Prime Minister’s salary to about 1.2 million Singapore dollars a year, and the Ministers also reduced it accordingly, about 800,000 Singapore dollars a year (about 600,000 US dollars), still among the highest in the world.
The US President’s salary is about 50,000 USD/month, 600,000 USD/year, only equal to the salary of a Minister in Singapore.
The salary of the Japanese Prime Minister is about 24,000 USD/month, about 300,000 USD per year. The salaries of Japanese Ministers and Japanese National Assembly Members are nearly equal, about 16,000 USD/month, about 200,000 USD/year.
However, corruption in Japan, the US and even Singapore still sometimes occurs.
So with the current salary in Vietnam, the State President and General Secretary are about 30 million VND, about 1,500 USD, Ministers, Deputy Ministers, Provincial Presidents, Provincial and City Party Secretaries, are only about 20 million VND/1 month, then fighting corruption is really difficult, and arresting officials who receive envelopes of several billion dong is also very pitiful for those arrested officials.
Accepting hundreds of billions of VN dong in envelopes is a crime to be arrested and tried is good.
But to only receive a few billion dong but also be arrested and imprisoned is truly pitiful.
In addition, we should also learn from our ancestors, saying “Earning merit to atone for sins”.
In Vietnam’s history, there have been many cases where people who made mistakes were not punished, but were allowed to “redeem their sins”, and as a result, they saved the country from danger.
That was the case of General Tran Khanh Du, during the Tran Dynasty.
General Tran Khanh Du was born on March 13, 1240, died on April 23, 1340, at the age of 100 years old. He was a member of the Tran dynasty, was adopted by King Tran, and was given the title of marquis, and was very trusted and loved by the king.
During the first war against the Yuan army, in 1257-1258, when he was 18 years old, he bravely led the army to attack the Yuan army, creating a positive momentum for the Tran army to counterattack the Yuan army and won
Yuan army at the battle of Dong Bo Dau, in Ba Dinh district, Hanoi today.
During the third war against the Yuan army, in 1287-1288, he was appointed by King Tran as a general guarding the Van Don border gate, Quang Ninh.
The Yuan army had invaded our country twice before, the first time, in 1257-1258, and the second time, in 1284-1285, but both failed because of the Tran Dynasty’s empty house strategy, no food left, so they lose.
This time, the third time, the Yuan army learned from the experience of losing the previous two times, so they prepared food boats very carefully, allowing a large group of food ships to enter our country through the gate of Van Don, Quang Ninh.
A powerful army followed to protect the food fleet.
At first, when the Yuan army’s food boat arrived at Don Son, General Tran Khanh Du sent 30 warships to block and attack, but lost, because the Yuan army following to protect the food boat was very powerful, outnumbering our army.
Emperor Tran Thanh Tong learned that Tran Khanh Du had lost the battle, so he immediately sent a lieutenant envoy to Quang Ninh to arrest him and bring him to the capital for punishment.
Tran Khanh Du calmly told the lieutenant envoy as follows:
“Using military methods to judge, I accept my guilt. But please beg for a few more days, I will make atonement for my sins, and then it will not be too late to return to the capital to face the axe and hammer.”
The lieutenant ambassador was a knowledgeable, benevolent man who understood very well the strategic talent of General Tran Khanh Du, and understood the principle of “working hard to atone for sins”, especially understanding that the country was in dire straits, during the war, but ” during the war beheading talented generals” would only make the hearts of the army and people uneasy, with unpredictable consequences, so the lieutenant governor agreed to let Tran Khanh Du “make atonement for his sins“, not arrest him and send him back to the capital.
If the lieutenant envoy was a mechanical, stupid person who only knew how to blindly execute the above orders and let Tran Khanh Du be arrested and brought back to the capital to punish him, then today it is very possible that our country of Vietnam is just a Northern states only.
General Tran Khanh Du sent a reconnaissance to check on the situation of the Yuan army, and discovered that the great Yuan army, after defeating our army, subjectively sent the boat ahead, thinking that the Dai Viet army had lost the battle and did not need to be on guard.
The Yuan army’s fighting fleet boats moved fast ahead to Thang Long, leaving behind a slowly food ships moving to Thang Long.
General Tran Khanh Du took advantage of the Yuan army’s serious loophole, “victory leads to arrogance, subjective disregard for the enemy”, so Tran Khanh Du collected his remaining army, a few hundred warships, and secretly raided and attacked the Yuan army’s food fleet at Van Don.
The Nguyen army’s food fleet was defeated, partly because of a storm, partly because the food boats were heavy and slow with heavy food loaded, unable to move as quickly and maneuverably as hundreds of small boats of the Dai Viet army, so they lost heavily.
Later, the History of the Nguyen Dynasty recorded as follows:
“Truong Van Ho’s boat from the 12th lunar month of last year arrived at Don Son, encountered 30 Giao Chi boats, Van Ho attacked them, both sides killed equally. Arriving at Luc Thuy Duong, there were many more enemy boats, aiming to be impossible to resist, and the boats were too heavy to move, so the rice all sank into the sea, arriving at Quynh Chau”.
The Yuan army entered Thang Long and was blocked and attacked right from the city gate, because the Dai Viet army, following the direction of General Tran Hung Dao, this time did not vacate Thang Long citadel like the previous two times, but proactively blocked and attacked the army right at the gate of Thang Long.
General Tran Khanh Du was very smart, releasing a few hundred prisoners of Yuan captured by the Tran Khanh Du army in Van Don, and let them running back to Thang Long to report the defeat, causing the Yuan army in Thang Long to panic, because they heard the news of defeated battle, and heard that there was no more food left.
So the Yuan army had only one way: to flee from Thang Long, follow the land route back to the Chinese country, ending the third war of invasion of Vietnam.
Thanks to General Tran Khanh Du’s clever way of releasing Nguyen prisoners to inform themself of the defeat, the Nguyen army was defeated, and the Tran army no longer needed to fight hard.
King Tran, after the victory over the Yuan army, did not “pick up the dirt”, did not mention General Tran Khanh Du’s mistake of temporarily losing the previous battle, but also awarded more benefits to General Tran Khanh Du.
King Tran was not only humane to General Tran Khanh Du, allowing him to “Redeem his sins”, but also humane to all the Vietnamese people who had made the mistake of surrendering to the Yuan invaders when the Yuan army was still powerful.
After defeating the Yuan army for the third time, when considering merit and punishment, there were many reports presented to King Tran, denouncing those who surrendered to the Yuan invaders.
King Tran ordered all of those memorials reports to be burned, and did not punish anyone, except for 3 Ba Diem villages near present-day Hanoi.
All of 3 villages surrendered to the enemy and were slightly punished and forced to do community service like build dikes, build roads.
Vietnamese history records that there were several large boxes containing these denunciations were burn out.
King Tran said the general idea that everyone makes mistakes, now the country is at peace, don’t bring up old stories, so that the people’s hearts can be united, all hatred will be gone.
The humanitarian story of the Tran Dynasty in Vietnam, “making merits to atone for sins”, not handling people’s mistakes in a rigid way, has shown that MERCY is the wisest and most effective way to deal with them best, not just “arrest and beheading” will get good results.
Whom that intentionally do wrong, intentionally defraud, take money, and are corrupt must be strictly punished, such as the arrest of former police general Do Huu Ca in Hai Phong in the year 2022, committing intentional fraud, receiving 30 billion VN dong money to run off a sentence, that’s right, the people support it.
Or deal with Minister of Foreign Affairs Pham Binh Minh, who is bureaucratic and does not strictly manage Ministry of Foreign Affairs staff, allowing corruption and theft of visa money in Vietnamese Embassies to persist for many years.
But dealing with other high-ranking officials, like Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam, who are high-ranking officials just because he want to have vaccines brought back to cure the people, does not fully understand the complexity of vaccine speculators.
If General Tran Khanh Du is resurrected today, with his crimes of defeat, adultery, and trading for money, he must have been sentenced to rot in prison, then how Vietnam can have the famous Van Don victory in Vietnam?
Handling violations by “splitting hair into four” will only have the opposite result.
President Ho Chi Minh, in the early days of building the country, abolished the Ministry of Justice, because he believed that the “justice and separation of powers” of the Western judiciary was contrary to Vietnam’s culture of respect for people.
Vietnam’s Ministry of Justice was only re-established after 1975.
Rabbi Alexandre de Rhode in the 1600s, more than 400 hundred years ago, when he came to Vietnam, Cochinchina, highly praised the family justice system of Vietnam, the family leader stood up to explain and resolve and handle all family disputes without having to go to Court.
Rabbi Alexandre de Rhode commented that if France had the same family-based way of handling family disputes, France would have reduced by two-thirds the number of complex lawsuits in court, which justice would still maintained, but human love is not damaged.
Our country of Vietnam has a very progressive law, the Hong Duc Code, made during the Le Dynasty, in the year 1490, directed by King Le Thanh Tong to draft, combining both criminal and civil laws into one, wonderful, so good, so wonderfully progressive, so wonderfully fair, that Harvard University in the US has translated it into English for Harvard students to study and research.
If our country of Vietnam had the courage to research and apply part of the content of this Hong Duc Law to our current Criminal Law and Civil Law system in Vietnam, it would be great.
For example, the Hong Duc Law stipulates that children and grandchildren who mistreat their parents or grandparents will be exiled to a remote island to do hard labor for several years.
Should our country of Vietnam now also restore this law of the Hong Duc Law, to preserve social morality?
President Ho Chi Minh once appointed King Bao Dai as Advisor Vinh Thuy, rather than brutally executing him by firing squad like the Russians had the entire family of Tsar Romanov been shot in 1917.
President Ho Chi Minh used many officials of the old royal court such as lawyer Phan Anh, Mr. Huynh Thuc Khang, and professor Nguyen Van Huyen.,,,
The humanitarian tradition hits those who run away, does not hit those who run back, loves people as if love themself, those who commit serious crimes, intentionally, are severely punished, and those who commit minor crimes, unintentionally, are given “Merits atone for sins”, is the ancient culture of the Vietnamese people.
We should try to maintain a humane culture, to “make atonement for our sins”.///