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Destinations known | In Vietnam’s Battle of the Metros, Chinese-led Hanoi project delivers an operational line as Japan’s Ho Chi Minh City system inches towards opening
- As construction of Vietnam’s Chinese-built Hanoi and Japanese-led Ho Chi Minh City metros continues, safety issues with the former have fed into stereotypes
- But at least it has a line running, unremarkably in the most positive sense. And safety issues haven’t deterred the many Hanoians who’ve already taken a ride
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There has been a development in the Chinese vs Japanese, Hanoi vs Ho Chi Minh City Battle of the Metros in Vietnam.
In July 2017, the South China Morning Post ran an article under the headline “Vietnam’s Tale of Two Metros …” that explained, “For the first time in their histories, Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi are both in the middle of desperately needed major metro-system projects that aim to transform their cities.
“Both are facing delays, but a series of high-profile accidents has already cast a larger shadow over the Chinese-led effort in the capital.
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“In contrast, the metro project led by Japanese conglomerates in Ho Chi Minh City has been accident-free. This feeds into long-standing assumptions in Vietnam about the perceived superiority of Japanese workmanship and engineering.”
Since then, the race to get an urban rail system up and running hasn’t been so much “tortoise and hare” as “tortoise and not-quite-so-slow tortoise”.
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