Ao Dai, The Freedom Index, And An Election Goes Uninterested In Vietnam

Why are so few paying attention to this country’s grand affairs, such as our upcoming general election on May 23, 2021?

Maybe the op-ed article written in Vietnamese by Huynh Minh Triet that was previously published in the Luat Khoa Magazine on March 17, 2021, would offer us some perspectives on this question? The translation was done by Hoai Huong.

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In March 2021, with the most crucial election in Vietnam about to start in two months which should be the event that attracts the most public attention in the country, what has sparked controversy was a Japanese adult movie and a freedom-ranking list of a foreign organization.

Freedom House, an international non-governmental organization, on March 5 categorized Vietnam as a country that has neither political freedom nor internet freedom. The online Vietnamese population immediately rushed to the Freedom House Facebook page, scolding it both in English and Vietnamese. Even the postings on this account that were irrelevant to Vietnam also came under fire.

Furthermore, on March 10, Japan released a soft porn movie in which the main actress, who wore a Vietnamese ao dai, was a young girl of Vietnamese origin. Again, the online population in Vietnam vehemently protested, expressing their hurt feelings because the movie humiliated them. The press quickly gathered the most impressive comments to prove that the national superiority complex had been hurt.

Wow, if only our national affairs captured public attention in the same way as Japanese sex movies or the Freedom House rankings!

Vietnam is currently undergoing the tense process where our general election on May 23 has the utmost important responsibility to select our National Assembly’s deputies who will represent all of us. Nevertheless, such a significant event received virtually no considerable discussion on social media.

On March 9, Tran Quoc Khanh, an independent candidate, was arbitrarily arrested. His news was covered superficially in newspapers and mentioned on just a few Facebook accounts of interested individuals. Word of the arrest came and went unnoticed among the online population.

Aren’t the Vietnamese interested in elections?

No, they are. But just not with their own country’s elections.

The Vietnamese were one of the peoples around the world most enthusiastic about the US presidential election in 2020, and their fondness for Donald Trump might have contributed to this phenomenon.

Vietnamese people created all kinds of news channels to support Trump and made all kinds of projections and comments about the US election on social media platforms. We grew openly hostile to one another and even humiliated one another because we supported different candidates in the US presidential election. Worse still, following the election, the Vietnamese online population rushed the US Embassy Facebook account to express frustration over the failure of their idol Trump.

In Vietnam’s elections, however, things were different. No relationships turned sour when the VCP arranged for Nguyen Phu Trong to seize power again. There were no vehement protests or objections when candidates who were not Vietnamese Communist Party members were detained or had their names crossed off the list.

However, we discussed US voting laws with great passion and many of us cursed “the damn Democratic Party” for allegedly wanting to ease restrictions so that illegal immigrants could vote. Many shouted with joy when Trump criticized voting via postal services as he claimed this would lead to cheating. In fact, however, many of us have never seen a ballot box in Vietnam.

Is it true that a political system in which the people can only vote for candidates recommended by the Party is so perfect that we do not care about domestic elections?

No, definitely not.

Are we so insensitive to our responsibilities, while having surplus energy for trivial matters that are not even related to Vietnam?

Probably.

But there may be another reason: that is because we are scared.

The widespread fear from the land reform campaign (in North Vietnam in the early 1950s) has not actually subsided. Fears have now been heightened by the 2018 Cyber Security Law – an identical copy of China’s. Under this new law, all that we speak up about or write about on social media platforms can be used as a pretext for the authorities to harass and arrest us.

Few of us dare to confront the authorities because we are all afraid of being murdered in a police station, upon which the government will claim that we have “committed suicide due to a guilty conscience,” as it has stated during Vietnam’s review under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in March 2019 to rationalize the unusually high number of people who died unexplained in police stations.

Thus, in the face of events really close to us and of great importance, we remain silent and “project” our depression onto safer events such as Japanese adult films and the freedom rankings of an organization thousands of miles away.

Now, let’s take a look at a neighboring country, Myanmar. At the time I wrote this article, 150 people had been killed while taking part in demonstrations to protest against the military coup that overthrew the democratically-elected government led by Aung San Sui Kyi. For the Burmese, the ballot is their life. For us Vietnamese, how many of us can’t be bothered to even think about the weight our ballot can carry?

Freedom is not free. The Myanmar people are declaring with dignity that they are ready to pay an exorbitant price to have freedom.

We may feel free to criticize the Freedom House rankings, but this does not render us freer.

So, how can we change this? I have not come up with an answer yet. But if most of us keep staying silent for our own sake, and then throw our bursting surplus energies into things which are trivial or less important – and also less risky – to preserve the self-respect of a cowardly collective consciousness, then we will never find the answer.