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Comment by spxneo | Hacker News Reader

lot to unpack here but what i been told by my vietnamese coworkers is that this is "vietnamese pig butchering" (not like the one you hear about involving Tether).

They let fraudsters (pigs) accumulate capital by any means. Then they butcher it for political and financial capital. Government looks like a hero and they are able to keep the lights on.

In China, this has been going on for a while (ex. evergrande, HNA, Silicon Valley Bank, Tether) and online sleuths have uncovered crypto projects/funding from China are also another "western pig butchering".

SBF, Do Kwon are similar to Truong My Lan in that they are also "useful pigs" with many smaller "pigs" below them pulling capital into a "jurisdiction tor network". Some pigs are on the spectrum and do not require greed as motivation, simply the fame and recognition from having created "something" for other pigs is enough.

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> They let fraudsters (pigs) accumulate capital by any means. Then they butcher it for political and financial capital. Government looks like a hero and they are able to keep the lights on.

Pretty much. This makes To Lam and Nguyen Phu Trong's faction look like saviors. Nguyen Phu Trong is too old to take the top seat, so this is basically paving the way to make To Lam the leader of VN by gaining public sympathy AND destroying any potential opposition from the Southern VCP and their affiliated oligarchs.

This is literally Xi's corruption crackdown in 2016 all over again, except Vietnam in the 2020s is nowhere near as rich as China was in the 2010s, so all this backstabbing bs has scared foreign investors away (even I backed out of funding an interesting VN product because of this - ik how China and India use the CCDI and ED, VN ain't worth that level of headache).

Are these northerners or southerners? Who are the "ruling elite" of Vietnam?

In South Korea, one particular region has produced 20 out of 22 presidents.

> ruling elite

There are 4 main factions:

Northern VCP - the original VCP founded by Ho Chi Minh, and ruled Hanoi since 1956. The current GenSec of the Vietnamese Politburo is from this faction and from that era.

Southern VCP - the more business minded and ethnic Chinese/Hoa cadre of the VCP. The last president and most of the purged cadre are from this group.

PAVN - the Vietnamese Army. they have been mollified by being given control of all the key sectors of the Vietnamese economy. Viettel (Vietnam's Telco) is owned by them and VinGroup's founder and CEO is the son of PAVN royalty

MPS - Vietnam's KGB. they hold the actual cards in Vietnam. whenever you go to any town, village, or city in Vietnam the biggest building is always the MPS building (even the local VCP's building is smaller).

The SCB chick was close with the Southern VCP faction, as was most of the leadership in Vietnam from 2012ish-2022. Due to the COVID slowdown and public anger against corruption, the Northern VCP decided to step in and cut the oligarchs and business minded types back to the ground. The PAVN kept out of this fray because they're making a lot of money, and the MPS backed the Northern faction.

i would definitely watch netflix series on this, its fascinating!

Kdramas, JDramas, CDramas, Turkish Dramas, Indian OTTs, and HBO Eastern Europe (Umbre, Aranyélet) touch these kind of themes a lot.

It's a common problem in developing and newly developed countries

> MPS - Vietnam's KGB. they hold the actual cards in Vietnam. whenever you go to any town, village, or city in Vietnam the biggest building is always the MPS building (even the local VCP's building is smaller)

I noticed this when visiting.

Go through a smaller town and you'll see old beat up buildings from decades ago, beat to crap roads or just unpaved, a bunch of small stores and restaurants, then suddenly a massive property (10-20x the side of a typical home lot) with a massive parking lot, fancy imaculate building that looks like it's pressure washed every morning and look up and it's the MPS.

You can pretty clearly see who has the money.

The region in question (Gyeongsang-do, split into two provinces in modern South Korean administration) was also the home ground of the Kingdom of Silla, which was arguably the first polity that unified the Korean peninsula, almost 1400 years ago. It shows how sticky these things can be.

Silla (East, Gyeongsangdo) destroyed Baekje (West, Jeollado) forcing migration en masse to Japan around mid 6th century then they finished off the militarily superior Goguryeo (North Korea) with the help of Tang (China) to create a single state for the first time. immediately started attacking Tang to reclaim old borders

Election results from yesterday reflect regionalism. Gyeongsang-do always votes conservative right, pro-US, pro-economy and Jeolla-do always votes socialist left, pro-China/NK/Russia with a leader who was a former defence lawyer for organized crime groups including his gangbanger nephew who murdered his girlfriend and her mother after a slight. He's next in line to be the president.

Korea has had 13 presidents. Out of those, the first 2 weren't from 경상도, 김대중 wasn't from there either and neither is the current president. 박근혜 moved out of the region to Seoul when she was 1 year old so hardly "produced" by the region. That makes for 8 out of 13, still a majority but nothing like 20 out of 22.

When I see pig butchering I thought of Cambodia/Myanmar. Mostly doing telephone/electronic scams while also kidnapping people to work for them and sell underperforming employees to human traffickers.

Who's "they" in this context?

This sounds wildly conspiratorial:

If governments don't crack down on corruption, they are enabling corruption.

If they do crack down on corruption, they are "pig butchering".

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