For
the past five weeks, the Vietnamese public has
debated the implications of a shootout between a
family of fish farmers and a police posse that was
sent to dispossess them in the Haiphong city's
still-rural Tien Lang district. The event has
underscored a widespread belief that a flawed land
tenure system leaves farmers at the mercy of
greedy and corrupt local Communist Party
officials.
The media's coverage of the
incident doubtless encouraged Prime Minister
Nguyen Tan Dung to wade into the controversy.
After a three-hour meeting, Dung's principal
assistant, chief cabinet secretary Vu Duc Dam,
emerged to tell reporters that several layers of
culpable officials - not the fish farmers - would be
punished and that a
serious new effort would be made to fix the land
law.
Before detailing those high level
decisions, however, Dam said he had a special
message for Vietnam's media. The prime minister
had asked him to express his appreciation for the
role reporters played during the crisis and hoped
that the media would continue its good work in
"serving the nation" and "orienting public
opinion". The press had "provided plenty of
timely reports covering many aspects of the
incident, analysis from various perspectives and
in a major way helped central government agencies
to see the matter clearly and proceed to deal with
it in an appropriate way", Dam said.
This
unusual top-level commendation was well-earned.
After the Tien Lang ruckus, reporters with
Vietnam's national newspapers kept the story
boiling, digging up facts that remarkably eluded
Haiphong city officials responsible for oversight
of district and village affairs. Within days of
the shootout, the press had discredited the
district government's version of events by quoting
local villagers who described the farmer involved
in the shootout, Vuon, as a bold visionary and
upstanding citizen.
Reporters also relayed
villagers' anger when officials said,
untruthfully, that "Vuon's neighbors" had
spontaneously decided to punish him by wrecking
his family's homes and stealing a large load of
market-ready fish and shrimp. Other reporters
tracked down local fish farmers who recounted how
they had tried and failed to reach an
accommodation with the village officials intent on
repossessing their farms, and how the district
officials had reneged on an agreement reached in a
court-supervised arbitration process.
Enterprising reporters persuaded a
bulldozer operator to recount how, for the dong
equivalent of US$70, he had been hired by village
leaders to level the three houses on Vuon's fish
farm. Vietnam's newspapers also drummed up a
blizzard of op-eds (often by retired senior
officials) that itemized procedural and legal
faults in the local officials' campaign to reclaim
the land leased to Vuon and other fish farmers,
analyzed a rising tide of land law complaints, and
propagated the notion that if left unfixed the
Tien Lang incident could presage rural upheaval on
a national scale.
The quality of the
news-gathering and sting of the editorials
supported blogger accounts that the central
government did not intervene or give guidance to
the media on how to cover the Tien Lang incident.
Global newswires regularly dismiss Vietnamese
newspapers as "state-controlled media", a
convenient tag that falls way short in accurately
describing what is a complex relationship.
Although still subject to state "guidance",
Vietnam's sanctioned press has become a more
autonomous force over the past decade and is
arguably Vietnam's leading "civil society"
institution.
There are currently several
hundred newspapers in circulation, all licensed to
publish under the nominal sponsorship of
provinces, state-controlled organizations and
central government agencies. To be sure, most are
just house organs. As many as three dozen,
however, write for a general audience and are
distributed throughout Vietnam. These papers
compete fiercely for news and regularly earn a
profit from advertising and paid circulation.
In addition to print and online
newspapers, there is an unsanctioned press,
including blogs of all sorts, that publish from
offshore servers and out of reach of state
censors. Some blogs are quite professional and
make a serious effort to present objective reports
and commentary on issues of the day; others - as
elsewhere in the world - are just a venue for
vitriolic rants.
Vietnam's sanctioned and
unsanctioned press are in a dynamic relationship.
Quite a few state mainstream reporters moonlight
as bloggers; many more certainly read and react
regularly to blogs. A major difference between
bloggers and those who work for the sanctioned
media is that twice as many bloggers are currently
in prison for their writings - six versus three -
according to the Committee to Protect Journalists,
a global press freedom advocacy group.
Media as morality This
correspondent worked as a copy editor for the
online English language edition of a Vietnamese
newspaper generally thought to reflect the views
of the ruling Communist Party's liberal wing. For
the "English page", stories harvested from the
mother paper and other leading dailies were
translated and posted to the website.
The
managing editor and publisher trooped off to a
meeting with the Ministry of Information and the
Party's Central Propaganda and Education Committee
every Tuesday where they and their peers from
other papers were alerted to "sensitive issues".
Periodically the paper expressed unorthodox
opinions and sometimes these drew an admonition at
the weekly meeting or, on graver occasions, a
reprimand conveyed directly and in private.
Editorial no-go zones included the internal
activities and debates of the party; stories that
questioned the correctness of central government
policy, the party line or the benevolence of top
central officials; calls for political pluralism
and allusions to "color revolutions" in formerly
communist countries; rousing the masses against
China; any suggestion of inherent differences
between Vietnamese in the north and south of the
country; or implying that problems at lower levels
were expressions of a systemic disorder rather
than the consequence of peripheral failures to
follow the policies and guidance of the center.
Those off-limits topics notwithstanding,
Vietnam's leading newspapers are by no means
docile instruments of the party and state. To
maintain their readerships, they aggressively
pursue scandals, investigate "social evils" and
champion the downtrodden. Corruption of all kinds,
at least at a local level, is also fair game.
Moral themes are regular fare in Vietnam's daily
papers and are usually more social commentary than
pro-Party propaganda.
For instance, one
paper may feature a series on the hard lives of
young women working long hours in export-geared
factories, who scrimp to send half of their meager
pay home to their families. Another may expose
racketeers who deploy teams of child beggars in
the big cities. Yet another could wring pathos
from the struggle of a disabled young man from a
rural village to earn a university degree.
Titillating counterpoint is provided by reportage
on the "aimless lives" and depraved conspicuous
consumption of the children of the nation's
nouveau riche.
These are stories of a
society that is struggling to understand and deal
with the complexities of rapid modernization and
economic development. Social phenomena long
familiar in the West are reported as though they
were just discovered in Vietnam - including a
recent bemused account of Vietnamese 20-somethings
who prefer to explore the back country by
motorcycle on weekends rather than putting in a
couple more days at the office. Yet the lens
through which these accounts are refracted is not
Western; the perspective is Confucian, a
philosophy that exalts "appropriate behavior".
Vietnam's newspapers have become important
political players because Hanoi's capacity to
supervise lower levels of government and
state-owned enterprises has failed to keep pace
with the growing complexity of the country's
economy and society. Perceptibly over the past
decade, the party and government leaders have
relied increasingly on the national media to
provide them with timely intelligence on what is
happening at the local level, information that it
cannot count on receiving from local
administrative or party structures. For this
reason, newspapers and magazines are generally not
answerable to any but central authorities.
That said, newspapers' relationship with
Hanoi is not trouble-free. In 2006, with the
apparent approval of top leaders, the mainstream
press energetically pursued a story of malfeasance
that reached into top levels of the Ministry of
Transport, and were applauded for doing so.
Subsequently, however, two journalists who
refused to reveal their sources to police were
arrested, tried and sentenced to prison terms for
"abusing democratic freedoms" and propagating
"false information". The consequence, many felt at
the time, was a marked reduction in reporters'
zeal to uncover scandal.
Nonetheless, as
the recent Tien Lang story unfolded, political
leaders once again relied on journalists to ferret
out the facts and mirror public opinion. Perhaps
more vigorously than ever, Vietnam's national
press was again speaking truth to power. Media
reporting daringly shaped a consensus that if the
state and Party do not take resolute and effective
action to subdue corruption and bully-boy behavior
by village officials across the country, they run
the risk of losing the loyalty of the rural
population.
That dire message seems to
have resonated with Vietnam's leaders, who are
said to consider "renovation" of the lower ranks
of the party "a matter of life and death for the
regime". If a sweeping housecleaning is indeed
their aim, the public debate over the Tien Lang
shootout that played out in Vietnam's daily papers
has clearly strengthened their hand and in the
process reinvigorated the country's
whistle-blowing reporters.
David
Brown is a retired American diplomat who
writes on contemporary Vietnam. He may be reached
at nworbd@gmail.com.
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