Transcript: Conflicted Citizenship in Vietnam

Opening jingle

This is the Nordic Asia Podcast

00:00:03

Linh Phương Lê

Welcome to the Nordic Asia podcast. A collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region. My name is Linh Phương Lê, a doctoral researcher at the Institute for Media Studies, KU Leuven University in Belgium. Welcome to our podcast today. We have Mirjam Le and Franziska Nicolaisen. Mirjam is a Ph.D. candidate in Southeast Asian Studies, while Franziska works as a research assistant for the chair of Development Politics. These two wonderful academics we have with us today share a few things in common. They both teach and work at the University of Passau in Germany and research on social issues in Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam. Mirjam and Franziska, thank you so much for joining us today.

00:01:02

Franziska Nicolaisen

Thank you for having us. We are really looking forward to the podcast and joining you today.

00:01:06

Linh Phương Lê

Recently, you published a chapter in an edited book about citizenship in Vietnam. Would you mind giving our listeners a quick overview of the work?

Mirjam Le

Yes, sure. Thank you. So the idea for this work started with an edited book on citizenship by Berenschot, Schulte Nordholt and Bakker. So the contributions in this book discussed citizenship from a Southeast Asian perspective, and they used examples from Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia and Malaysia. But they didn't use Vietnam as an example. And as we have been working on Vietnam before, we thought the framework in this book might also be useful for Vietnam. And we start our work in a chapter by looking at everyday practices of state-society conflicts like land rights and worker's rights, and the conflict with China and environmental protests. In these conflicts, we find that citizenship is continuously negotiated, and we argue that citizenship is imagined as a cooperative partnership between state and citizens to build a civilized society together. And this partnership demands support for the nation building project, as citizens are called to provide legitimacy to the state. And at the same time, it also provides a means to demand accountability and regime responsiveness, as seen in the case of these protests where local people regularly criticize the state and demanded their rights to be respected. So we have this sort of double function as a means of accountability and of means of affirmation of the state. And this, we argue, creates a dynamic process of negotiation, of the relationship between citizen and state. So we go further in saying that these negotiations are still rooted in a cooperative approach reaffirming this state. So they are still using state symbols and not challenging the political system directly and still demanding the state's help and support. And we also argue that they are localized and exclusive and they seldom engage people at the national level. So we find that this leads to a fragmentation where there is little cross some class solidarity between different groups of society. We thus speak of a fragmented citizenship and we argue that this cooperative, exclusive, fragmented and localized form of citizenship results in a conflicted citizenship, which is characterized by ambivalent loyalties and often expressed through conflict. And finally, we also found, looking at these different social movements, that in recent protests, the citizenship moved towards a more inclusive citizenship where people got engaged beyond their direct peer group. For example, in the case of the marine life disaster in 2016.

00:04:06

Linh Phương Lê

Wow. Very impressive work. And Vietnam is absolutely a very, very interesting case study. It is developing very fast at the moment and its economic growth hasn't slowed down in recent years, according to World Bank and especially even during the COVID 19 pandemic. But I do know that the transparency in the legal system and how to voice grievance among the common people does not necessarily grow at the same rate. So what this contradiction, the reason that compelled you both to conduct the research? Or is it something else that compelled you to do so?

Franziska Nicolaisen

I would say yes. These contradictions between the political, economic success of the growing global role and so on, on the one hand, and it's very ambiguous, political regime is part of the motivation to look into especially state-society relations more in depth and kind of motivating our work. But I think especially as kind of from our European perspective, as European research on Vietnam, we also think that Vietnam is often painted very one dimensional, especially even concerning the political regime and the state-society relations. We talk about the Vietnam War, which is mostly from a US/American perspective. Then Vietnam is described as authoritarian and socialist without really having kind of a meaning to these terms. And then recently we have this old success story of Vietnam has all these economic growth. It's very successfully, but there's not much beyond this kind of terms. So that is one side. But when you look at Vietnam in depth, you see that it's a country with a very long and complex history. And a lot of this history has an influence on the realities we find right now in the 21st century. And when you, for example, take the term authoritarian, which is often addressed to Vietnam, for example, in the context of the corona pandemic, what does it really mean? We don't really have an understanding of what does it mean in the context of Vietnam. It's easy to say that oh, the state is repressive. These are very simple terms. And so we think there's a very big difference between the existing images in media and in the political discourse in the West on Vietnam. And at the same time, there is kind of practices and on this state-society relations, which produce realities, which are not really represented in these images. So we would say that state-society relations in Vietnam are more complicated and ambiguous than what we see in the media, for example. And we want to try to understand what does it really mean for the people in the country to live in an authoritarian state. And do think that the people in Vietnam do not exist in a vacuum. They are not passive. They have agency even existing in a certain political or legal system like the authoritarian whatever socialist country in Vietnam. Common people still make decisions. They still develop strategies in everyday life to deal with what's happening, what's going on around them. And I think that is the biggest specific point of our work when we try to put everything together.

00:07:04

Linh Phương Lê

Wow. I love how you use the common daily lives of the people as a motivation for your work. Because I really think is how academia can relate to the common people's lives, especially in a in a state like in Vietnam. Just quickly, about your work. In your work, you mentioned about the notion of citizenship in Western practice and also in the Vietnamese context. Can you tell us more about these two practices and how the concept differs from each other?

Franziska Nicolaisen

Yes, we can try and hope to make it understandable because it's kind of a difficult conceptialisation. The difference of citizenship is kind of rooted in the difference between image and practice of the state. I think it's a very other picture of a useful concept for Vietnam. On one hand, images is what the state projects to be and practice is what happens in the everyday life and then society-society action and in the Western context, at least in Europe. So I would go from Europe now. Image and practice are often very close, so there is little space of maneuvering for people in everyday life. When we engage with the state and rules and practices are fixed and we know what to expect as we want something, we know where to go, what to demand, what kind of form to fill in. And roles are clearly defined and our expectation to want to state what he should do and he should deliver certain things and have to hold the state accountable. And this is often based on a formal written code. And so I would say citizenship in a Western context, going away from all the theoretical framing, it's very formalized, often, it's right based and it's independent of a personal context. So that's what Europe, I would say for Europe, and I'm not discussing North America right now. In Vietnam, these images of the state and the practices we find can differ widely. They can be very close in certain cases, but they can be very different in others. On one hand, they are said society relations are formalized, but they can be in practice very informal. And we can find a difference between the formal idealized version of citizenship, what we call it before the cooperative citizenship and the practice of citizenship in everyday life, which we then call a conflicted citizenship. So what we said before, in the context of cooperative citizenship, the state and social actors work together to build this modern, civilized citizenship, and the citizens are morally obliged to support the state and its nation building project. So and those who cannot support these efforts, they are often cast aside where marginalized or morally criticized. We could see this, for example, during the Corona pandemic once again. The personal rights are not based on a written code, but they are kind of derived from obligations toward the nation and what we do and the practice of. So they can, even if you formally are citizens, my tricks in the case of ethnic minorities, you often in practice these written acceptance of your right cannot be found in practice. On the positive side, the cooperative approach can lead to a larger community or larger solidarity in the community. We could see this with the corona respond in the first year where the call to cooperative citizenship were very broadly found and people were kind of trying to support each other. For example, also during community efforts to support marginalized or plural families. But beyond this idealized form of citizenship there a second level, the practice level which we call conflict citizenship and their personal relations, local protests, social media plays a very strong role in how to define the relationship with the state. So at this level, the state is at the same time challenged. We can find that rights are negotiated. They are not fixed, they are negotiated and the people are really reaffirming the state. And this can be a very positive space because it provides more space of maneuvering. People can adapt modular interests to their needs. It can be very positive oriented towards reform. And we see this in all these conflicts that people demanded more transparency, better environmental protection, respect for land rights and so on. It's not really against the system in itself. It can have negative impacts, for example, for minorities and people who go against like democracy activists which go against the system and not only demand reforms, well then a kind of like pushed out of the system and not really listened to. So I would say the citizenship is also based on this separation between images and and practices. And one of the biggest problems for people is that the expectations for citizens are not fixed. They can shift and so state-society relations, citizenship in itself is located in a kind of a gray zone which make the position of citizens in the state more vulnerable. A very good example for this vulnerability is of the work of journalists. They can write all kinds of stuff. They can criticize the state, for example, when it's about land rights. But the moment they cross an invisible line, they don't know beforehand, the state says like, No, not further. You step beyond this line and then you get problems, you know, sweatshop or whatever happens afterwards. So this kind of shifting - so citizenship is not fixed. The expectations are not fixed contrary to what is find in the West. And I think they are much more rooted in practices and everyday negotiations than they are in the West in our contexts. And I think that's just how it is.

00:12:27

Linh Phương Lê

That is a very interesting take on the citizenship in Vietnam. And we know that Vietnam is a very particular case of a socialist communist state, but it has a market oriented economy. In your research, you also explored how the people negotiate their rights with not only the state, but also other stakeholders such as the open developers through different channels and means. Can you elaborate on that and also give some more concrete examples to our listeners who might or might not be familiar with the recent events in the country.

Mirjam Le

One of the more recent and larger conflicts that we mention in the paper is the 2016 marine life disaster. So what happened was in 2016, the Taiwanese company Formosa, which was located in Ha Tinh Province in central Vietnam, they dumped their untreated industrial wastewater into the ocean, which caused pollution, and a lot of fish were killed, which ruined the livelihood of local fishermen especially. And this actually led to large scale online and offline protests. And the opposition was very widespread. Interestingly, also across different groups of society, for example, local farmers and fishers protested, but the urban middle class and academics in the main urban centres protested as well. So they were different petitions and workshops to actually engage the state. So not only go into confrontation, but also engage the state and start a discourse. And also this was one of the main conflicts that social media really played a role in organizing and mobilizing people. So it was a very visible protest both in the press and the online media and also on the ground. And interestingly, the visibility also in the Taiwanese press, I have to say, led to the Vietnamese state actually recognizing the responsibility of Formosa and demanding compensation to be paid. So while online debates are often curtailed and especially prominent activists, so well-known names are stopped from attending protests or are arrested in cases, public pressure and online visibility has in the past led the Vietnamese government to meet some of the public demands and actually implement policy changes. So that was also the case with the special economic zones by China. So this marine life disaster conflict is one example of the different actors and strategies and narratives that we have identified as common denominators and recent social movements in Vietnam, or better as categories under which these can be discussed and analyzed. So we found two possible groups that often take part in these social movements, which is, one, the urban middle class and educated elites, and then also the marginalized working class, local farmers and workers. So these are the main two groups that we identified. And then the narratives. So this marine life disaster is one example for a social movement that actually combined different kinds of narratives. So it started as a narrative of local livelihoods, of environment, of pollution, but also of foreign companies. How do they all behave, conduct themselves in Vietnam? And then it went to broader notions like national identity, corruption, social justice. So this actually combined different notions. Also sustainability, for example. And this really mobilized across different groups in society. So we found that to be the case in several different movements that we looked at. And one of the main narratives in recent years is the whole Vietnam-China relation that is very complex and has been used widely both by the state and by society to mobilize and negotiate with the state also. And we also found that most protests actually stay peaceful or aim to stay peaceful. And they try to use legal means to voice dissent, especially the ones that had more positive outcomes were the ones that actually try to engage the state without alienating it.

00:16:42

Linh Phương Lê

But we do see that all of these protest started online, like the people first come together online and then it just spiraling out. In nowaday terms, we say that it goes viral. Then once it goes viral, and then there's more and more fragments of the society join in and then hence the offline visibility that resulted in protests on the streets, which is very uncommon in Vietnam, actually. Because in Vietnam, protest is something - for our listeners who are not familiar with Vietnam - protest is something that Vietnamese people just don't get to do that often. We would like to do it more, but we don't get to do it that often. So I do see that social media plays a very significant role in the protests in Vietnam lately, but using social media to mobilize people to come together for the same course requires a lot of strategy, navigation and all sorts of resources. So this means that some fragment of the society have access and some don't. What can you tell our listeners about the division that social media created in the context of citizenship creating or maintaining in Vietnam?

Mirjam Le

So yeah, as you just mentioned, obviously social media has played an important role and does play an important role in organizing protests. And creating visibility through online content, especially using images that were taken during protests and events on the ground. However, we actually argue that social media can increase the fragmentation of society, or, as you put it, the divisions in society. So we think this happens in two ways. So first, there are access barriers, like a lack of access to technology, for example, due to financial resources, a language barrier also. So when it comes to discussions and information that is available in English, especially when it includes the diaspora, for example, and also the issue of lack of knowledge of how to use social media or how to maybe even create an account. And then, as is the case for many local people, for farmers, for factory workers, for street vendors, there's also an issue of time, a lack of time. I mean, they are all working a lot of hours and maybe do not have time to create online content and take part in discussions. So this is one way in which it creates division or even makes a division that is already there, a fragmentation more visible. And the second way in which social media can increase fragmentation, as we put it in our paper, is through the appropriation of grievances. So what we mean by that is that grievances concerning a certain group of society. So, for example, the livelihoods of local fishermen. In the case of the Formosa protests are appropriated by young urban middle class to further their own agenda, maybe, which might not be the same as local people. So we argue that there can be a disconnect between these very localized issues that are based in the ground regarding the environment, for example, and which we also argue are already embedded in an existing discourse and also existing personal networks. And then there's this disconnect between the way these are presented and appropriated in social media. So while a lot of them do start a lot of protests, protest movements start to gain visibility in online media, we think that they are always grounded in local issues, local discourses, local narratives, which are then translated into online space. And obviously, when talking about cyberspace in Vietnam, there are other limitations that should be mentioned. So in our paper, we drew on the work of Mike Douglas, who has written extensively on civil societies in Asia. And according to him, cyberspace can only be a civic space when it is completely autonomous and unregulated. And this is not the case in Vietnam, especially since the new cybersecurity law, which I think was passed in 2018 but came into effect in 2019, especially since then, the government has extensive powers to monitor information and conduct cybersecurity checks online, as has been the case with other government policies. However, and as we have mentioned before about this not formalized form of citizenship, maybe there is also a lack of clarity regarding this law. And some people even say there's a lack of implementation because it is not very clear what the exact regulations are, for example. So social media definitely increases the reach or the scope of certain grievances, but it also is characterized by certain issues like these surveillance and also problems of misinformation or what we call fake news. And finding this also this issue that social media makes activists like certain people, very visible. So this can increase support because it personalizes conflict, but it also potentially increases state scrutiny. So we argue that social media is just one of the tools for state society negotiations and that public space and pre-existing local networks still play a very important role in creating visibility and gathering support for social movements in Vietnam.

00:21:46

Linh Phương Lê

I suppose the research has a lot of depth to it, and I'd love to explore more with you both, but our time is limited, so I am going to put out my final question for today. I know this is a little bit on the speculative side, but how do you place Vietnam in the Southeast Asia context in terms of civil society growth, especially after the new cybersecurity law came into effect in 2018?

Franziska Nicolaisen

I mean, it's interesting because when I started my studies, civil society in Vietnam was kind of like is there a civil society in Vietnam? Can we use this term? So I think it's once again a term that we need to look at it from a local context and a Vietnamese context and asking what does it mean? like not just taking it now and don't go into this discussion. I think generally over the last couple of years, it was not really great for civil society in all the Southeast Asian countries. So for the last five years, maybe we had kind of this democratic reckoning and like something coming up and being very happy, the election of Malaysia and Myanmar. So in most countries we can observe a turn towards a more restrictive political climate. We have this in Myanmar. We can see this in Thailand and Malaysia and Cambodia, the Philippines. And I would say Vietnam is not really an exception. Oh, I mean, it didn't really have this Democratic opening, but we can see a quite restrictive political framework emerging in recent years, or increasing the restrictive policies and this law in 2018, 19. And we had a lot of during the winter, there was a lot of persecution for political activists, journalists and so on. So there is a strong political push back at the moment against every kind of democratic opening against the civil society. For example, we had the land conflict two years ago which turned really violent between police and local land rights activists, which got persecuted then and got very harsh sentences and courts and was kind of really hard because they took the police as hostages. It was a kind of extreme case. But I think also the answer of the state was kind of extreme and no one really knows what happened there. I also think the current pandemic plays a strong factor in increasing the restrictive environment in Vietnam. On one hand, we have this mentioning of a corporate citizenship with moral obligations to other nations, which is often also used to really push down on people who don't cooperate. We have people signing some kind of letters ready to take responsibility if they don't get vaccinated and someone else gets infected. So when they are responsible for these infections, for example, so this kind of risk really pushing down people. Also, we have the lockdowns that are reducing public space and face to face interactions. And all of this increases the pressure when people demand accountability of their rights. There's not much space left, and we can already see some political shifts to what a more conservative economic policy and people are more an account orientation, more of industrialization, less environmental policies, because there's kind of no space for public protests against these policies. So right now, I would say Vietnam's civil society has quite some challenges to address, and hopefully very soon it will be able to do this. I mean, one interesting point I think we can say is if we go beyond this civil society against the state, we can see that we saw a lot of public support and social activism towards more social issues in Vietnam in the recent years, at least the last year, where people donated to funds for poorer families who had a lot of problems due to Corona giving funds for low income families. So I think civil society as a social engagement which goes beyond this focus on the state is thriving and it has some opportunities and risks. A lot of this going on, which is great from a community perspective, from a solidarity perspective. And I think this is something we should also look into. And then what I think is interesting, like mostly based on my own interaction with young Vietnamese in recent years that we have kind of a political awakening in a younger generation which is often located in cities and which has a very global outlook, very interactive. The Internet, they travel, they go and study abroad. They often speak English very well. They have a very different outlook at their future and aspirations and kind of different hopes from previous generations maybe. And I think they want to engage the government on their own terms. They have their own demands, ambitious, which are not necessarily based on what comes from the outside, and they are kind of critical of the government, but at the same time, very proud of the achievements of Vietnam. And I think what's great, like they like what Vietnam was doing, they are proud of it, but they're also critical at the same time. So it is a shift in the younger generation in their relationship with the state. We can find similar processes in other countries when we take this emerging milk tea alliance and this time on Hong Kong, Thailand, we have a protest movement in Thailand. We have the protest movement in Myanmar, also in Malaysia, which is also often rooted in a younger generation and sometimes wondering, I mean, that is very speculative, as if part of why Vietnam’s government is kind of more repressive right now is because it's seeing what's happening in these other countries with a more established protest movement. And they're kind of afraid that it will come to Vietnam and would want to, like preemptively close everything down. So generally, civil society is a little bit at a crossroad right now in its development. And what we mean by this not really having much meaning. So I would say we have these kind of two opposing forces in Vietnam right now, where you have the state who tries to stabilize its hold on power, its system. And on the other hand, we have an increasingly well educated global young generation with its own aspirations. And this is not always congruent or like doesn't always like what the state does. And these two forces, a group, are kind of struggling with each other. And the state is depending on the civil engagement of these local people of this young generation to invest. You can see it's also when we engage with the diaspora. For we want the investment, we want the support, but they are also afraid of these people. And I think which give this younger generation a very unique position on what we do with it in the long term. But it's also putting a big question mark on what's going on next. Because who will win out of these two groups?

00:28:03

Linh Phương Lê

Absolutely wonderful insight. I really, really do appreciate your efforts of diving into such an important and timely topics like these about Vietnam. Thank you both so very much for joining us today.

00:28:18

Mirjam Le

Thank you as well for giving us the opportunity to speak. Our chapter just came out, so we're very excited about it. And yeah, we're very open for feedback and questions and further discussions on this topic.

00:28:29

Linh Phương Lê

And now, for our listeners who want to know more about Miriam and Franziska’s research and other updated scholarship about Vietnam, you can find the newly edited book named Vietnam at the Vanguard: New Perspectives across Time, Space and Community on the Springer website and in the description of this podcast. The chapter from Miriam and Francesca is titled Conflict Citizenship in Vietnam: Between Grassroots Mobilization and State Repression. My name is Linh Phương Lê. Thank you for joining the Nordic Asia Podcast showcasing Nordic collaboration in Studying Asia