At a trendy cafe in the smart Saigon Center shopping mall, a place where the nouveau riche go to see and be seen, Nguyen Ngoc Quang recalls the moment he fell foul of the darker side of Vietnam’s much-lauded economic miracle. Men hired by the security police, he says, knocked him to the ground and drove over him with a motorbike. The message to the political dissident and online activist was blunt: stop or else.
However, the former designer, 49, whose face is scarred from the September attack, is unbowed.
“I won’t back down,” he said. “The government is trying to stop us because we are telling the truth. The people have been lied to for so many years.”
Nguyen, who recently completed a three-year jail sentence for dissent, is part of a growing, vocal group of Vietnamese who are challenging the authority of the Communist party, which has ruled the country since reunification in 1975 and does not permit political opposition. On blogs and social networking sites, activists have attracted a growing audience by writing about human rights abuses, corruption and restrictions on speech.
However, as the authorities prepare to kick off the Communist party national congress, a decisive planning session that will set the country’s course and leadership for the next five years, the government has sought to reassert its authority by cracking down on critics such as Nguyen.
In the past year, dozens of dissidents have been arrested and imprisoned, and numerous others have been harassed and monitored by the police. In a confidential diplomatic cable from its embassy in Hanoi, the US ambassador last year spoke of “the excessive use of violence” in putting down one protest, which he said was “troublesome and indicative of a larger GVN [government of Vietnam] crackdown on human rights in the run-up to the January 2011 party congress.”
As the leadership prepares to address a number of domestic concerns at the congress, including a poorly performing economy and public criticism of Vietnam’s growing economic ties with its traditional rival China, tensions have risen. On Wednesday, police in the central city of Hue roughed up a US diplomat who was attempting to visit Nguyen Van Ly, a dissident Catholic priest who is under house arrest after being released from prison for health reasons. The authorities are also blocking Facebook, a key networking tool for activists.
“The Communist party wants to silence any criticism or unrest before its most important meeting,” said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “Crackdowns on peaceful government critics are nothing new in Vietnam, but right now we are seeing a dramatic spike in repression.”
Reviving faith in Vietnam’s economy, which has begun to falter after years of growth, will be high on the party’s agenda. Last week, a report by PwC predicted that Vietnam would be the world’s 14th-biggest economy by 2050, a giddy ascent for a country that experienced near-famine as recently as the mid-1980s. Evidence of this economic miracle is everywhere in Ho Chi Minh City, with its skyscrapers, including the 68-story Bitexco Tower that was opened in October, and boulevards clogged with motorbikes and cars.
The turnaround owes much to Vietnam’s Doi Moi policy of change and renovation, launched in the 1990s, which gradually deregulated the economy while maintaining strict political control, much as happened in China.
However, the problems are mounting. Double-digit inflation is disproportionately affecting the poor. Rapid development has evicted farmers from their land. There have been a growing number of strikes in the country’s export-driven factories and worries about industrial pollution.
Moreover, despite the leadership’s public commitments to accelerate reform of the centrally planned economy, the state-run sector continues to receive significant subsidies despite its poor performance.
Vinashin, a shipbuilder that is one of the largest state-run entities in the country, has come to epitomize government mismanagement of the economy. The company is on the verge of bankruptcy with debts of US$4.5 billion, but is still being kept afloat.
The week-long congress is expected to be dominated by internal party rivalries as two competing factions jostle for control of the leadership, according to Carl Thayer, a Vietnam expert at the Australian Defence Force Academy. Party conservatives, who look to China as a model, fear the continued liberalization of the country and are probably directing the crackdown against dissidents as a warning to party reformers, Thayer said. Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, the country’s most powerful politician, is likely to be granted another five-year term.
In 2008, the Vietnamese government granted a land concession to a Chinese firm for a multibillion-dollar bauxite mine in central Vietnam. Pro-democracy activists attracted unprecedented support among urban elites and within the party — including independence hero General Vo Nguyen Giap — with criticism of the mine and China’s growing assertiveness in the South China Sea, which contains potentially resource-rich islands claimed by both countries.
The US, which under US President Barack Obama’s administration has sought to reassert itself in south-east Asia as a regional counterweight to China, sensed an opportunity. US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited Hanoi twice last year, and during her visit in July she said the US had a “national interest” in freedom of navigation in the South China Sea.
Communist party conservatives, backed into a corner by the furor over the China issue, have sought to silence the debate by blocking and hacking Web sites and arresting anti-China bloggers.
Despite these hazards, urban intellectuals are continuing to join the ranks of the activists.
Nguyen Thu Tram, 33, recently became involved in the Club of Free Journalists, a loose collection of amateur reporters who post stories about everyday injustices in their cities and offer an alternative to the heavily censored state-run press. Nguyen had to separate herself from her family out of fear of endangering them, and she says she is regularly interrogated by the security police.
“I insist on going out and talking to people and reporting on what is happening in their lives, but using the Internet is not a safe thing to do in Vietnam,” she said.
Saudi Arabian largesse is flooding Egypt’s cultural scene, but the reception is mixed. Some welcome new “cooperation” between two regional powerhouses, while others fear a hostile takeover by Riyadh. In Cairo, historically the cultural capital of the Arab world, Egyptian Minister of Culture Nevine al-Kilany recently hosted Saudi Arabian General Entertainment Authority chairman Turki al-Sheikh. The deep-pocketed al-Sheikh has emerged as a Medici-like patron for Egypt’s cultural elite, courted by Cairo’s top talent to produce a slew of forthcoming films. A new three-way agreement between al-Sheikh, Kilany and United Media Services — a multi-media conglomerate linked to state intelligence that owns much of
The US and other countries should take concrete steps to confront the threats from Beijing to avoid war, US Representative Mario Diaz-Balart said in an interview with Voice of America on March 13. The US should use “every diplomatic economic tool at our disposal to treat China as what it is... to avoid war,” Diaz-Balart said. Giving an example of what the US could do, he said that it has to be more aggressive in its military sales to Taiwan. Actions by cross-party US lawmakers in the past few years such as meeting with Taiwanese officials in Washington and Taipei, and
The Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan has no official diplomatic allies in the EU. With the exception of the Vatican, it has no official allies in Europe at all. This does not prevent the ROC — Taiwan — from having close relations with EU member states and other European countries. The exact nature of the relationship does bear revisiting, if only to clarify what is a very complicated and sensitive idea, the details of which leave considerable room for misunderstanding, misrepresentation and disagreement. Only this week, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) received members of the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations
Denmark’s “one China” policy more and more resembles Beijing’s “one China” principle. At least, this is how things appear. In recent interactions with the Danish state, such as applying for residency permits, a Taiwanese’s nationality would be listed as “China.” That designation occurs for a Taiwanese student coming to Denmark or a Danish citizen arriving in Denmark with, for example, their Taiwanese partner. Details of this were published on Sunday in an article in the Danish daily Berlingske written by Alexander Sjoberg and Tobias Reinwald. The pretext for this new practice is that Denmark does not recognize Taiwan as a state under