Blogging for Freedom in Vietnam By Emily Parker (New Yorker magazine)

Oil-rig protesters outside the Chinese Embassy in Hanoi, on May 11th. Photograph by Chris Brummitt/AP.
 

A few years before his arrest, in 2012, I exchanged e-mails with the Vietnamese blogger Le Quoc Quan, a Hanoi-based lawyer who first started blogging in 2005. He told me that his first post, just a sentence long, read: “Oh my fatherland of Vietnam, I want to say something to you!”
While working on my book about Internet dissent in the Communist and post-Communist world, I interviewed bloggers in China, Cuba, and Russia who, like Quan, wanted to tell stories that did not appear in the state-controlled media.

Quan, whose blogging career started in a small shop that repaired computers and sold pirated software, wrote about a variety of topics, including corruption, anti-China demonstrations, and the arrest of the prominent human-rights lawyer Le Cong Dinh. In 2012, not long after publishing an article that criticized a draft of Vietnam’s constitution, Quan was arrested for tax evasion in a case that was widely viewed as politically motivated. He was sentenced to thirty months in prison, where he remains today.

Last month, the popular Vietnamese blogger Nguyen Huu Vinh and his assistant Nguyen Thi Minh Thuy were both arrested for abuses of “democratic freedoms.” Human Rights Watch called the arrests a “cynical and chilling move.”

These cases have painted a bleak picture of Internet freedom in Vietnam, a country that blocks Web sites and surveils netizens. The Internet came to Vietnam in the nineteen-nineties, and use of it has grown at a rapid pace ever since. According to figures from 2013, more than one in four Vietnamese said that they had used the Internet in the past week. The Vietnamese government, in response, has tried to rein in dissent by enacting laws that restrict online content, but authorities cannot entirely control the spread of information.

Ngo Nhat Dang, a Hanoi-based independent journalist, told me that it’s easy to get around the censorship laws. People “use word of mouth to spread knowledge about circumvention, so when one gets blocked others simply come in to help,” he said.

The Vietnamese government has also intermittently blocked Facebook, which, according to some estimates, has over twenty-two million users in Vietnam. Despite relatively weak controls, Vietnamese authorities do not seem ready to let the social media site run completely free. The Communist Party, in particular, is worried about freedom of assembly and Facebook’s power to spur collective action.

That fear has been borne out in recent months, as Facebook has played an important role in anti-China protests. In May, China’s deployment of an oil rig in the disputed waters of the South China Sea sparked large demonstrations in Vietnam. The government tolerated the protests at first but cracked down once demonstrators turned violent, destroying factories and leading to several deaths and many more injuries.

“Blogs and social media played a determining role in organizing the protests,” the blogger JB Nguyen Huu Vinh told me. Because information is censored and the media is tightly controlled by the state, blogs and social media are the only way “to instantly disseminate protest information and announcements to the netizen community.” When the banned opposition party, Viet Tan, posted the time and place of an anti-China protest on Facebook, the update got over thirty-five thousand likes. Another Viet Tan post that read “Our fatherland is threatened, don’t be apathetic” received two hundred and fifty thousand. Some of these came from outside of Vietnam, of course, but Viet Tan representatives believe that most came from inside; they say some ninety per cent of their nearly one hundred and seventy thousand Facebook followers come from inside the country.

Social media in Vietnam is not only limited to the organizing of large-scale protests. It also helps ordinary people press for accountability from officials. Vietnamese activists told me about an incident, in 2011, when a plainclothes police officer stepped on a protestor’s head at a demonstration. Someone captured the moment on video, which spread on the Internet. The officer was reportedly suspended. Activists have pointed to this incident to highlight the power of social media in Vietnam.
In countries where officials control the narrative, the Internet can also help to promote transparency. In a chapter on Vietnam in the book “State Power 2.0,” Catherine McKinley and Anya Schiffrin describe an incident, in 2012, when police and private security guards were to clear around one thousand farmers from their land to make way for a luxury housing development. Media coverage of the clearance was banned, but the story was live-blogged. The following day, news organizations, having been “pushed to cover the issue by readers who had learned of it online,” began to write editorials related to government corruption over land issues. “In Vietnam, you can’t have independent organizations,” Duy Hoang, a Viet Tan representative, told me. Now, people “have an active civil society online.”

Dissenters are emboldened by the knowledge that they are not fighting alone. Ngo Nhat Dang, an independent journalist, said, “You know that if you get arrested, there is a network of people who will take care of your family, who will visit you in prison, and that makes people feel loved and less scared.” Dang said that crackdowns on writers aren’t new. The difference is that now, if something bad happens to you, your online following will know about it.

Will social media create a Vietnamese Spring? Not necessarily. The Internet on its own will not bring democracy to Vietnam—or anywhere else, for that matter—but we shouldn’t underestimate its power to transform the lives of ordinary Vietnamese. The online activists I spoke to had a startling faith in the avenues of communication that have been opened up to them through the Internet.

Some have said that the recent arrests of bloggers are likely to make people angrier, and may inspire new online voices of dissent. As the now imprisoned Quan said, a few years before his arrest: “In an open society, people feel free to blog. In a blocked society, we blog to be freer.”

Emily Parker, a fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of “Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices from the Internet Underground.”