Author: Hai
Hong Nguyen, University of Queensland
EastAsiaForum January 12th, 2013
China’s recent aggression in the South China Sea has
provoked civic protests in the two largest cities of Vietnam.
Participating in these protests were nationally
well-known personalities, scholars, young people and students. In successive
meetings with their Chinese counterparts, Vietnamese officials have agreed that
they would not allow this sort of protest to affect bilateral relationships.
This agreement meant that protests would be suppressed even by force, and it
seems Vietnamese authorities have kept their word. The break-up by police
forces of the civic protests has placed the communist government in the strange
position of crushing a demonstration in support of Vietnamese claims.
Protests in any form and for whatever reason have never
been accepted by the communist government. The Communist Party fears that these
sorts of protests could lead to a larger anti-communist social movement like the Arab Spring,
threatening the survival of authoritarianism in the country. It justified the
suppression of protests by saying that hostile forces took advantage of them to
incite violence and aimed to overthrow the government. But Professor Tuong Lai
and Le Hieu Dang reject those allegations.
Tuong Lai and Le Hieu Dang, both individually and in
cooperation with others, issued statements, which have been widely circulated
on social media networks, denouncing what they called violent breaches of
citizens’ human rights and freedoms by the police. They requested an
investigation by the authorities to find out who ordered the suppression of the
protests and why. Their requests have yet to be met by the authorities.
This is not the first time anti-China protests have taken
place in Vietnam — similar protests have occurred since 2007. In 2011,
anti-China nationalism in Vietnam grew when Chinese maritime surveillance ships
intentionally cut the cables of a Vietnamese vessel conducting seismic surveys
in waters claimed by Vietnam. The protests this time were launched after a
similar incident — state-run oil and gas company PetroVietnam accused Chinese
fishing boats of cutting the cables of one of the its vessels, again operating
in the Vietnamese waters. Last year, a group of Vietnamese established a
football team wearing ‘No-U’ T-shirts to protest China’s self-proclaimed
cow-tongue line in the South China Sea. The team has regularly organised
so-called ‘No-U’ football matches.
Anti-Chinese protests have placed the Communist Party in a dilemma. On the one
hand the Communist Party has said that a peaceful region and stable environment
is essential for Vietnam’s development. Indeed, economic growth has been the
only way for the party to maintain and consolidate its legitimacy amid public
distrust, which continues to build due to economic crises and rampant
corruption. The party understands that a confrontation with China would not be
good for its development policy. That is why in direct communication with China
on the South China Sea the Vietnamese government tends to use less incendiary
rhetoric than the Philippines government, for example.
On the other hand, the Communist Party’s domestic legitimacy
is being challenged by its constituents, who disagree with its response to
China’s relentless encroachment on land, islets and sea areas claimed by
Vietnam. The party always says that it has no other interests other than those
of the nation and the people. In an article published by most state-run
newspapers, President Truong Tan Sang had to reaffirm that the Communist Party
‘is not selling the country’ — that it is not trading off its interests with
the people’s. But it is hard for the Communist Party to win the trust of the
people and reassure the public of its attitudes toward China when anti-China
protests continue to be broken-up, anti-China demonstrators are still arrested
and detained or violently harassed, and when the president, in another article,
denounces a public figure as ‘bringing snakes home to bite domestic
chickens’.
The Communist Party is no doubt in a dilemma in dealing
with Vietnam’s territorial disputes with China. To get itself out, the party
must make a choice between standing on the same side as the people or on the
opposite.
Hai Hong Nguyen is a doctoral candidate at the School of
Political Science and International Studies, the University of Queensland.
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