The 10th municipal Party Congress for the 2015-2020 tenure had set the target to build and develop Ho Chi Minh City as a modern-looking and civilized city of the whole country. However, how to push this goal to be gained? In order to answer for the question, Sai Gon Giai Phong (SGGP) Newspaper's special issue interviewed some outstanding doctors and enterprises.
1. Dr. Tran Thanh Long, President of the Ho Chi Minh City Sponsoring Association for Poor-Patients shared: “The city needs to develop featured cultural values”
Ho Chi Minh City is known as the country's leading financial and cultural hub for social charity movements and unfortunate people caring in the whole country. These meaningful movements not only have been creating both positive achievements for the society but also proving the nation’s civilized values and promoting the traditional values, helping each other to overcome difficult times.
Humanities and sentiment attachment are the typical cultural values of the city's citizens whose are being adopted at the 10th municipal Party Congress.
It could be said that more and more outstanding examples have been discovered and honored through charity works and movements towards communities in the previous years contributing create civilized society being full of humanities, and highlight the humanism, new cultural value representing Vietnamese people’s character being responsible for communities, humanities.
In life, every one will have different characters such as funny, optimistic, easy going, carefree, helpful, kind, merciful, selfish, rapacious, ruthless and others. However, they could close up to complete a dream about a better life, a brighter future and a society in peace, prosperity and development via charity activities.
2. Dr. Lam Thieu Quan, a member of the municipal People's Council: “Developing the civilized city by knowledge resources”
People have suffered serious flooding, traffic jams, air pollution and others which are social barriers for building Ho Chi Minh City to be a modern-looking & civilized-sentimental one following the 10th municipal Party Congress’s target.
The city’s authority has received many initiatives of citizens in order to overcome the restrictions. Nevertheless, it’s a pity that these opinions have not been noticed profoundly contributing to overcome the shortcomings in the previous time,.
Although the city has a high number of intellectuals, experts and professors, science researchers but they have not been created favorable conditions to offer their suggestions and solutions to the city leader.
It is time to optimize utilization of knowledge resources, contributing to find the effective solutions in building a modern and civilized city. The city leaders should spend more time meeting intellectuals, experts, professors...to receive precious ideas and opinions, suggestions to solve the remarkable solutions.
When solving the problems concerning directly with the citizens, the management agencies and authorities of all level should keep in touch and feedback on press weekly to reflect the practical request from citizens. These summarizations should be popularized widespread the citizens to catch up with and to have basics to evaluate the responsibilities of management agencies and authorities.
The important thing is innovation of the thought and finding out solutions to deal with the current difficulties, if that, the city will be able to become a leading modern and civilized city.
3. Mr. Dang Van Khoa, a member of the Central Fatherland Front Committee of Vietnam
Building and developing Ho Chi Minh City as a modern-civilized-sentimental one is not only the target of the 10th municipal Party Congress for the 2015-2020 period but also a long-term goal of the party committee, city leaders and local people. The essence thing to meet the target is the consensus of the society. Each policy, plan and measure has had to base on unanimity in people mind which would motivate the city development.
Besides, the city leaders should listen to the opinions of political and social organizations of Vietnamese Fatherland front and other associations.
Vietnamese would like to dedicate their knowledge resources in building the country at the same time receiving the feedback and comment from the leaders about their ideas and opinions. Consensus is the bridge between leaders and people to build the country and make it get more progresses.
4. Jonathan Hanh Nguyen, an overseas Vietnamese enterprise said:
“The objective of building a modern city contains many meanings. The initial basic one is a city without society's vices. If we do not control the drug issues, this will trigger another vice such as robbery, burglar which would cause negative effect to foreign tourists.
Urban civilization should be more focused on. To make the city clean, local people should be raised awareness of not littering or hustling. I have ever visited some cities in France and Italy being small without traffic jam. It could be said that the infrastructure in combination with the consciousness of people play an important part of building a modern city.
Beside that, the financial sector is very important. Ho Chi Minh City should have measures and solutions for upgrading the life quality of local people. The finance, tax, banking issues must be transparent. When building a modern city, we should think of the risk of real estate, stock exchange and finance bubbles which would trigger many implications as following.
Regional links is one of the best initiatives. Ho Chi Minh City is a place of services, offices, shopping malls. However, exports issue should be developed to create jobs and improve local enterprises' business operation. In order to have a break through as cities in South East Asia, Ho Chi Minh City should set up networking, regional links with neighboring provinces to promote exports, high-tech investments...
I am Vietnamese-Filipino living in Vietnam for more than 30 years and I have witnessed many changes in the city. I hope that the city will be more dynamic.
Vietnam has joined in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), therefore, we should act to make the country develop!
5. Dr. Dinh Phuong Duy, Vice director of the Ho Chi Minh City Personnel Training Academy
From a survey from researches showed that more than 40 percent people in Ho Chi Minh City think they are living in the city instead of being local resident. Many of them are immigrants and some have been living in Ho Chi Minh City for decades. Therefore, they have not had 100 percent of pride, efforts and awareness of contributing for a better city.
However, in recent years, the city dwellers have had more and more consciousness for traffic, queuing in public and environment. There also are some people having domino-effect thinking such as not disposing of garbage in right place or riding on the walkways for pedestrians. These acts are just in their mind.
Local people should have awareness of behaving as deserving as a resident and the city leaders should popularize the projects of culture, the beauty of city-dweller, infrastructures, construction to attract the participation from local people in developing projects to create efficiencies and in contributing o build the modern-looking and civilized city.
