Vietnam’s cultural industry: lack of money, abundance of conflicts

LookAtVietnam – Experts and government officials reviewed the situation and discussed solutions for the cultural industry in Vietnam at a seminar in Hanoi last weekend.

The concept of “cultural industry” is still unclear in Vietnam (Photo: Models on the catwalk of the Dep Fashion Show – the most prestigious fashion event in Vietnam).

Dr. Nguyen Danh Nga, chief of the Planning – Finance Department, said: “The cultural industry contributed US$46 billion to Canada’s gross domestic product (GDP) and employed 600,000 workers in 2007. In Japan, total revenue from the Doremon cartoon (TV broadcasting rights, cartoon, souvenirs and others) was $2 billion in 2007.”

Nga cited these statistics to make a comparison to Vietnam’s situation, where there are no official statistics about revenue and profit from cultural business.

In Vietnam, there is no policy, statistics nor even the concept of “cultural industry”, experts said.

In this context, the seminar attracted speakers who have worked in the cultural market for many years and actively worked to have a dynamic and effective policy to create a real cultural industry for Vietnam.

Sad facts

Dr. Nga said that the movie industry in Vietnam produces around ten big-screen films a year but only one of them is accepted by the market.

“The country has 129 drama and art troupes, including 12 managed by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism,” Nha said. “These troupes receive investment of 100 billion dong a year from the state budget but they only spend around 10 billion dong on their art works and the remaining is for facilities, salary, and other paper work.”

According to Nga, these troupes can arrange up to 2-3 works per year and total ticket revenue never exceeds 30 billion per year, equivalent to a small part of private art troupes.

Truong Nhuan, deputy director of the Tuoi Tre (Youth) Theatre, said that a medium-scale private company like Son Lam in Hanoi earns more than 100 billion for organising shows.

“In Vietnam’s total product structure, cultural and sports activities accounted for only 0.55 percent of the total value in 1995 and 0.44 percent in 2008,” said Nguyen Lam Tuan Anh from the Institute of Culture and Arts, quoting General Statistics Office data.

Dr. Pham Viet Long, former chief of the office of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, said: “Annually, I and Mr. Nga have to go to the Finance Ministry to ask for funding for making films, organising exhibitions and marketing Vietnamese culture… Once we ‘ask’, we are naturally quickly found to be at fault in some way.

“It is because we have only a vague understanding of cultural business, let alone a cultural industry. And because we cannot guarantee specific profit from cultural business, so they don’t want to invest in the cultural business,” he said.

Contradictions

In the first stage to define the concept of the cultural industry in Vietnam, “Vietnam’s basic difficulty is not only the lack of money but the existence of many contradictions,” said Dr. Nga.

He pointed out some contradictions, for instance the contradiction between abstract cultural values with the specific market effectiveness, the one between the urgency of cultural development with the backward awareness of many people of the cultural industry, the contradiction between the quick growth of cultural consumption with the backwardness of the cultural production mode, the contradiction between the urgency of the cultural industry and the incompetent legal system, among others.

Researchers and policy makers agreed that to develop the cultural industry in Vietnam, the country has to change its conceptions of this new area.

“We have to change the thinking that the cultural sector as a non-profit industry,” said Dr. Nga.

He proposed the creation of a suitable system of policies for the cultural industry.

Dr. Pham Viet Long said that Vietnam should learn from countries which have strongly developed cultural industries. “In the US, the government has added spending in cultural activities as production costs and exempts taxes for cultural activities,” he said.

“In Vietnam, we should begin from rejecting the ask-give mechanism of funding for cultural activities. We have to design a mechanism to urge investment in cultural activities to earn high profit,” he added.

VietNamNet/Tuoi Tre

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