Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party is not looking back on a
good year. The country’s economy is in trouble; the authoritarian leadership is
split; and what appear to be rival Communist Party factions, seeking to rouse
the dissenting voices of social media for their own ends, have unleashed a wave
of online protests that has become increasingly difficult to contain.
Over the last year, blogs purporting to feature insider dirt
on Vietnam’s ruling elite have caused an avalanche of criticism against those
close to Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung. One blog, Quanlambao (Officials Doing
Journalism), appeared in the spring, publishing allegations of murky ties
between big business and members of the Prime Minister’s family. Quanlambao
alleged, for example, that the Prime Minister’s 34-year-old daughter Nguyen
Thanh Phuong, an investment manager with a Swiss university degree, was bidding
for contracts with disgraced tycoon Nguyen Duc Kien, who was arrested on
corruption charges in August. Phuong vehemently denies any impropriety, and the
attacks have been so virulent that Tuong Vu, associate professor of political
science at the University of Oregon, speculates they must have been “launched
by a faction or some interests who want the Prime Minister to go away.”
By September, the Prime Minister had had enough of
Quanlambao and signed an administrative order No. 7169, instructing officials
to clamp down on the publication of such blogs and, paradoxically, not to read
them in the firstplace. A month later, Quanlambao had gone quiet, but its
brazen style had already inspired journalists to establish other anonymous
blogs featuring stories that they could not report on in government-controlled
media. “Rival factions in the party have tried to use online blogs to counter
other factions,” says Vu. “But now the blogosphere has gone out of the control
of the government.”
According to Carlyle A. Thayer, emeritus professor of
political science at the University of New South Wales in Canberra and a
longtime Vietnam watcher, the new blogs have set “the house on fire and are
being read by everyone.” Danlambao (People Doing Journalism) is one of the most
popular blogs. It notched up half a million page views on Sept. 12 — the day of
the Prime Minister’s antiblogging decree — according to an open letter by its
anonymous editorial team. “Our contributors include not only independent
newsgatherers and freelancers, but also reporters from mainstream media and
informants from within the government,” the letter said. Danlambao, along with
similar blogs like Cau Nhat Tan and Xuandienhannom, has covered dissident
trials, forced relocations, official waste and graft, the country’s struggling
real estatemarket and Vietnam’s territorial disputes with China.
The world of social media is also becoming a forum for
dissent. Facebook is booming in the Southeast Asian nation. Almost a million
Vietnamese joined the network each month over the past half-year, making
Vietnam the country with the highest growth rate in Facebook users globally,
according to the social-media analysts at Socialbakers. Over the year, the
total number of users, who are mostly young, urban and educated, doubled to 10
million — a ninth of the population — prompting some of the country’s most
outspoken journalists to move from blogging to publishing on Facebook. One of
these is San Truong, better known as Huy Duc, who is currently a Nieman fellow
at Harvard University. He has some 5,000 friends and 13,000 followers on
Facebook, where he regularly publishes articles commenting on the latest
conflicts between the Prime Minister and political rival President Truong Tan
Sang. “People like me won’t have to go back to official media as long as we can
debate online,” he says.
Poor economic performance has exacerbated social
dissatisfaction. The country fell from 112th in 2011 to 123rd place this year
in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index. High-profile
corruption has dominated the news throughout the year and made appearances in
popular culture too. The hit television series Dan Troi (Heaven’s Altar)
portrayed the lives of a corrupt provincial party secretary, a businessman and
a corruption TV station director, bribing their way up to higher positions and
greater wealth — a fictional tale that seemed all too real to many Vietnamese.
In April, Pham Thanh Binh, chief executive of state-owned Vinashin, was
sentenced to 20 years in prison for bringing the country’s largest shipbuilding
company to the brink of bankruptcy. In August, Nguyen Duc Kien, a banking and
soccer tycoon, was arrested for “illegal business.” Weeks later, police in
neighboring Cambodia arrested Duong Chi Dung, chairman of Vietnam’s largest
shipping line Vinalines, who went on the run after the company defaulted on
more than $2 billion in debt, according to official media reports.
Prime Minister Dung has meanwhile been overseeing a period
of high inflation, with consumer prices up 9.4% on average every month this
year compared with last, according to official figures. Government economic
strategy, heavily reliant on propping up large state-owned companies, seems to
be flagging. On Dec. 24, the country’s General Statistics Office reported the
lowest economic-growth rate in 13 years — the lowest among its Southeast Asian
neighbors. Foreign investment pledges fell by 14% this year, Moody’s has
downgraded the country’s government bonds (citing “a high degree of
macroeconomic instability”), and the country’s benchmark VN Index was Asia’s
worst performing stock index last year.
To be sure, while Vietnam’s woes are providing plenty of
material for dissenting voices, dissenters don’t have a free pass just yet. On
Nov. 20, a court upheld a six-year prison sentence against soldier turned
blogger Dinh Dang Dinh, aprominent democracy advocate. The decision came two
months after three leading representatives of the dissident group Free
Journalists Club were convicted of “conducting propaganda against the state.”
The most prominent of them, blogger Nguyen Van Hai, also known as Dieu Cay, was
sentenced to 12 years in prison and 5 years of house arrest. Fellow blogger Ta
Phong Tan was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 5 years of house arrest. Tan’s
mother died after setting herself on fire in July to protest her daughter’s
detention.
Despite these setbacks, a culture of protest is growing. For
now, nationalist demonstrations against neighboring China’s investments in
Vietnam and its territorial claims in the South China Sea outnumber protests
against official corruption or in favor of democracy. But the tendency is for
young nationalists to form united fronts with other dissenting groups,
including democracy activists. “You can see that the links have become
stronger,” says Vu. “Now they have started to link to farmers protesting
against land grabs, they have started to link to Christians who contest
government religious politics.” While many still believe that antigovernment
blogs are tolerated because their existence suits certain factions of the
Communist Party, it is safe to assume that the deepening of ties between
opposition groups was never the intention of any apparatchik — and that may
make 2013 an even more difficult year for the Vietnamese government than 2012.
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