HANOI - Faced with rising
economic weakness and growing political discord
inside Vitenam's ruling Communist Party,
Vietnamese authorities have recently cracked down
with a vengeance on perceived anti-state
sentiments. The harsh sentencing in early January
of a group of bloggers and activists marked the
latest oppression in a widening crackdown on
dissident voices spreading over the Internet.
Independent bloggers have highlighted
issues seldom mentioned in the state-controlled
mainstream media, including rising
tensions with China in the
South China Sea, state-sponsored abuses and land
grabbing, rampant high-level corruption, and other
perceived as sensitive economic and political
issues. Despite the fast growing number of
Internet users and surging social network
activity, there is still a state-enforced
disconnect between real and virtual life in
Vietnam.
However, it is a disconnect
authorites are clearly struggling to maintain.
Perceived by many Vietnamese as more secure than
other on-line platforms, Facebook has seen a
recent surge in usage, with more than 5 million
new subscribers added in the last six months.
Despite being subjected to an unofficial technical
block since 2009, Facebook users now openly
express their views on the delicate South China
Sea dispute in on-line groups and fan pages such
as "Truong Sa" and "Hoang Sa Vietnamese Mother
Earth".
The anti-China "87 million
signatures protesting China's invading sea
territories of Vietnam" Facebook page, on which
China is referred to as "ChiNazi" and outgoing
president Hu Jintao and new leader Xi Jinping are
captioned in pictures as the "Pirates of Asia",
has almost 20,000 fans. Another page known as
"Vietnam Military Power", which glorifies
Vietnam's weaponry and military firepower, has
more than 4,000 fans.
The less-populist
HoangSa.org fan page, which provides thoughtful
analysis on the geopolitical implications of
recent meetings, forums and workshops and
developments like the current standoff between
Japan and China over the contested Senkaku/Diaoyu
islands, has drawn over 13,000 fans. All of the
highly viewed Web pages have a strong
nationalistic bent, underscoring grassroots
sentiment towards Vietnam's historical claims to
the Paracel and Spratly island chains.
Those sentiments have coalesced into
recent anti-China street protests, including most
recently a rally in December attended by hundreds
of Vietnamese activists. As with past oppression,
police authorities at first allowed the protests
to proceed before cracking down and making
arrests. Previous anti-China protests, all of
which were eventually suppressed by police forces,
are known to have been organized online, including
over Facebook.
This cat-and-mouse game
shows that Vietnamese activists are only
marginally free to express their national devotion
and nationalistic antagonism vis-a-vis China.
There have been frequent reports in recent years
of Chinese diplomats pressuring Vietnamese
authorities to suppress rising anti-China
sentiment, both on the streets and on the Web.
While the Chinese embassy in Hanoi and other
interests in Vietnam are easily fortified against
protestors, it is proving more difficult for
authorities to control strong anti-China
sentiments exploding across Vietnam's blogosphere.
The uneven and seemingly arbitrary
official response has raised questions about
whether some groups within the Communist Party are
willing to allow anti-China sentiments expressed
through on-line social networks to deflect
attention from their own shortcomings. Others
wonder whether authorities have allowed the
on-line content and comments to gain insights into
dissident networks that apart from their
opposition to China are also critical of the
ruling Communist Party.
In 2011, China and
Vietnam reaffirmed their commitment to deal with
the South China Sea dispute "through negotiations
and peaceful friendly consultations" and "to
prevent words and actions that would be
detrimental to the friendship and mutual trust
between the peoples of the two countries". While
Vietnam's independent blogosphere has taken hard
aim at Beijing's recent assertive actions in the
South China Sea, China's legions of nationalistic
bloggers have returned fire at Vietnam's similarly
perceived as ambitious territorial claims.
For Vietnam's estimated 31 million
Internet users, representing 35% of the population
with some 73% of them under the age of 35, it is
routine to skirt government imposed blocks on
popular social network platforms and dissident Web
sites. Many bloggers who bash China are also
critical of the Communist Party-dominated
government led by Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung.
The premier has responded in kind: in a speech
broadcast on state television last September, Dung
called on responsible officials to investigate and
punish bloggers who publish anti-regime materials.
Dung, whose personal Facebook page has
more than 139,000 fans, singled out three
particular critical blogs, namely Dan Lam Bao,
Quan Lam Bao, and Bien Dong. The high level threat
is believed to have boosted the popularity and
readership of all three anonymously maintained
blogs. Dan Lam Bao, a collective blog of citizen
journalists, revealed that its site registered a
record 32,000 hits in the hour immediately
following Dung's televised announcement.
Factional infighting Tuong Vu,
associate professor of political science at the
University of Oregon, speculated in a Time
magazine article that the blogs must have been
"launched by a faction or some interests who want
the prime minister to go away". A party faction
led by President Truong Tan San is known to be at
loggerheads with Dung, an internal power struggle
that threatens to break out into the open as the
economy stumbles and on-line dissent against the
one-party system grows. Dan Lam Bao, which has
posted several sensitive internal government
documents, avows to have no links to government.
"There is someone in a high position who
protects this kind of information. Few articles
and attacks from this kind of blog lack
documentation and are partly founded on rumors
while other analysis or theses are interesting and
well documented," commented a Communist Party
member who spoke to Asia Times Online on condition
of anonymity. He said that such personal attacks
and speculation "cannot do anything else but
exacerbate a political battle that we do not need
in this particular historical period".
Comments and commentaries posted on the
Web on government corruption, rising income
inequality and other sensitive political and
economic not covered in the local mainstream media
have elicited sharp official responses. Government
authorities have long prioritized maximizing
economic growth, as job creation and rising living
standards have been viewed as important
determinants of political and social stability,
over political reforms.
However, "there
are good reasons to believe that Vietnamese
citizens are increasingly worried about the
quality of growth and not just its quantity," said
a survey conducted by the Government Inspectorate
and the World Bank as part of an anti-corruption
diagnostic study. Due to government censorship,
that debate is happening mainly online.
With a government push to increase
Internet penetration, nearly every coffee shop,
restaurant or public space in Hanoi and Ho Chi
Minh City is covered by an Internet or mobile 3G
connection. In the less-developed and poorer
central highlands region and northern mountains,
while still lacking entirely reliable connections,
the Internet is widely available with the rising
accessibility of Web-enabled smart phones.
According to the General Statistics Office
(GSO), in the first month of 2012 the number of
new phone subscribers reached 832,200, up 15.4%
from the same period the previous year. At the end
of January 2012, Vietnam had more than 118.5
million mobile phone subscribers, representing a
more than 100% penetration rate of the country's
90 million or so residents.
To counter the
threat from rising connectivity, authorities are
seeking to put even stronger controls on the
Internet. Last year, the Ministry of Information
and Communication introduced a draft decree on the
"Management, Provision, Use of Internet Services
and Information Content Online" which among other
things would force foreign content and Internet
service providers to cooperate with Vietnamese
officials by removing content deemed as illegal
and housing their data centers inside the country.
The still-pending decree would also
introduce stricter penalties against posting
critical content and impose restrictions against
maintaining a pseudonymous or anonymous identity
on-line. The controversial decree aims broadly to
prevent "undermining the grand unity of all
people, undermining the fine customs and
traditions of the nation and abusing the provision
and use of the Internet and information"." If
implemented, the decree would further fortify the
already severe potential penalties for
disseminating "propaganda" against the state, a
vague charge that authorities have used to put a
growing number of bloggers behind bars.
International human rights and journalists
groups have strongly criticized the escalating
crackdown. On December 16, authorities prohibited
blogger Huynh Trong Hieu from traveling to the
United States to receive a Human Rights Watch's
Hellman/Hammett award for bravery in the face of
persecution on behalf of his father, Huynh Ngoc
Tuan, and sister, Huynh Thuc Vy, and confiscated
his passport. With at least 14 journalists
imprisoned, "Vietnam is Asia's second-worst jailer
of the press, trailing only China", according to
the New York-based Committee to Protect
Journalists.
There are certain subtle
indications that the government is reacting to
some of the criticism. For instance, senior
economist Pham Chi Lan has been allowed to
criticize political decisions in both the local
and international media, where she is frequently
quoted giving advice on how to improve the
country's economic direction. Party members and
legislators, meanwhile, now openly discuss in the
local media the need to reform the application of
land laws, admitting that the problem of state
land acqusitions has to be solved with "fairness".
Moreover, damning admissions made by
officials about government corruption during
public speeches have been reported by the
state-controlled media. Tran Huy Sang, director of
the Hanoi Department of Home Affairs, recently
said that it was common to bribe to get coveted
civil servant jobs, with some paying as much as
100 million dong (US$4,800) just to take
recruitment exams, according to news provider
Vietnam Bridge.
These open-and-close
contradictions keep reporters and bloggers in the
dark about the limits of free speech. "Being a
journalist here is not easy. Pressure from the
boss is high and at the moment they seem more
interested in sales declines and trying to
understand how to exploit the Internet," said a
young journalist who requested anonymity.
"Sometimes I ask myself why I decided to do this
job and why I should focus on sensitive issues if
the risk is losing the job or, even worse, to be
prosecuted".
Roberto Tofani is a
freelance journalist and analyst covering
Southeast Asia. He is also the co-founder of
PlanetNext (www.planetnext.net), an association of
journalists committed to the concept of
"information for change".
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