Loudspeakers also piped propaganda into the Hanoi prison holding John McCain, a young US Navy pilot whose plane was shot down in 1967 by a Soviet-made surface-to-air missile.

On a visit to the city 33 years later, McCain, then a US senator, said he remembered listening to daily broadcasts by Trinh Thi Ngo, a soft-spoken radio announcer known to Americans as Hanoi Hannah, on loudspeakers that hung from the ceiling of his cellblock.

“She’s a marvellous entertainer,” he said. “I’m surprised she didn’t get to Hollywood.”

For decades after North Vietnam won the war in 1975, officials used loudspeakers to broadcast party propaganda, patriotic music and municipal announcements. In the early postwar years, most Vietnamese families were poor and did not own televisions, so the broadcasts were an effective way to reach them, Chinh Duong, an architect and political analyst, said in an interview.

The broadcasts continued even as Vietnam grew wealthier and wired to the internet. For decades, they started at 6.30am and 4.30pm sharp and opened with a polite greeting to “ladies and gentlemen”.

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By the turn of this century, there were about 900,000 loudspeakers across Vietnam, Mares wrote at the time, and the broadcasts had come to symbolise the party’s failure to “generate revolutionary fervour”.

Yet, the Communist Party still controlled the type of news, ideas and information reaching its citizens, “blocking criticism of the regime and critical debate about its policies and performance,” he added. “In this sense, the morning loudspeaker ritual is a daily reminder that the party’s power still reaches deep into society.”

Loudspeakers still operate in about one-third of Vietnam’s 63 provinces and major cities. But over time, they have come to seem anachronistic to younger generations of Vietnamese, who get much of their information through Facebook and other social media platforms.

In a 2017 survey organised by Hanoi’s city government, 90 per cent of respondents said they thought the city’s loudspeaker network should be abolished. City officials said that year that although the speakers would stay, they would be used only for emergencies.

“If the loudspeakers are no longer effective, then I strongly suggest we scrap them,” said Hanoi’s mayor at the time, Nguyen Duc Chung, who was removed from his post in June in a corruption scandal. “They have fulfilled their mission.”

Although the loudspeakers made a cameo during the early phase of the coronavirus pandemic, when officials used them to distribute real-time updates and fight medical misinformation, they have otherwise been dormant.

But this year, Hanoi’s city government approved a communication strategy that includes a plan to revive regular broadcasts and expand the loudspeaker network by 2025. It is unclear exactly when the speakers will crackle to life, and officials have not provided much of a rationale for the plan. Some analysts say it is an effort at social control by the city government.

After a public outcry, a spokesperson for the Department of Communications and Information told reporters last month that the broadcasts would happen just twice a day and only on weekdays.

Many Hanoians are still annoyed by the plan, though. Vietnam’s state-run news media has acknowledged that critics see it as “backward and inappropriate”.

In Vietnam’s grim postwar years, an era of food shortages and rationing, waking up to a cheerful patriotic song on a public loudspeaker was a nice way to take one’s mind off hardship, said Pham Ngan, 52, a museum curator.

Ngan said that loudspeakers could still occasionally be used for important announcements, but that it makes no sense for them to broadcast news and other information that people can easily find on their cellphone screens. “The reality in this day and age — being in the middle of a big, capital city — makes that clearly unnecessary,” she said.

Dan Doan, 19, a college student in Hanoi, described the loudspeakers as an “extremely obsolete technology.”

“Just imagine: You’re trying to sleep, and your house is next to the speaker,” she said. “What would you do? Personally, I wanted to throw rocks to shut it up.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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