Sad Days for Vietnam

It has been a sad time for Vietnamese civil society since the Formosa disaster and the protests that followed it in 2016. There has been an increasingly harsh crackdown on dissent and those who dared to defy the regime’s violation of human rights and authoritarian governance. Mother Mushroom was sent into exile in 2018; prominent journalist and activist Pham Doan Trang was arrested in 2020 and is currently awaiting trial; Nguyen Thuy Hanh, who had been running a private charity fund to support the families of prisoners of conscience, was also arrested a year later; and an entire family who had fought in land disputes against the government were also imprisoned. The list goes on.

As a political scientist, I try to observe and make sense of the patterns of these arrests. My thoughts are often centered around “red capitalists” who are behind land-grab cases, intra-Party politics and its effect on activists, or the need of the authoritarian regime to reinforce its rule by using fear.