The VOV proudly proclaims September 7, 1945 as the foundational date for Vietnamese public radio, when the Declaration of Independence was read out on wireless for the first time. Vietnamese technicians who had been trained by the French set up a station in Hanoi to support the Viet Minh’s independence coalition. In December 1946, the French seized control of Hanoi again and established a new station, Radio Hanoi, at Rue Richaud (now Quán Sứ street). In contrast to the exclusive European radio clubs of the 1920s and 1930s, Radio Hanoi hired a troupe of Vietnamese musicians and actors who performed live on air and at popular venues in the capital between 1948 and the early 1950s. Their programming of entertainment and news in several languages appealed to Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese alike. Meanwhile the Viet Minh resumed their broadcasts of anti-colonial rhetoric from a discrete mountain location, but they struggled to sustain the attention of their listeners. To reengage with the public and draw listeners away from Radio Hanoi, they began to program communist-themed entertainment (music, poetry, stories, and short plays) alongside political news and information. Chapter 2 draws on oral histories, archival records, and historical broadcasts to reconstruct the sonic ambience of this creative conflict. The research investigates how composers, musicians, singers, and voice actors at both stations battled to nurture a resilient and attentive radio listenership with attractive artistic outputs that were often imbued with implicit (Radio Hanoi) and explicit (Viet Minh Radio) political ideologies.
“Their accent is just too much”: Tracing the sonic color line in public radio production