Day: August 7, 2022

Authorities in Hanoi announced recently that the once-ubiquitous loudspeakers, a staple of government news and propaganda, relics of the past and left to disrepair in the early 2000s, would be reinstalled.

The late July announcement caught everyone by surprise and has been met with derision. But it speaks volumes about the Communist regime, its insecurities, and the pathways to power.

A simpler time

For a government which has touted a high-tech future for Vietnam under its “National Strategy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” the Orwellian monotone does not seem to be a sophisticated way of communication.

Why a media anachronism in a time when people have alternative sources of information across multiple platforms on their smartphones?

On the simplest level, it’s just that, an attempt by the Party to harken back to a time when the state easily monopolized the information environment.

According to international watchdogs, Vietnam has one of the most repressive media environments in the world. Reporters Without Borders ranks it 174. The Committee to Protect Journalists documented 23 arrested journalists in 2021. Freedom House rated its internet freedom at 22 out of 100 – just above worst-ranked Iran, Myanmar and Cuba.

Yet despite the concerted efforts to police and censor the internet, the media landscape is more open than one would expect. Vietnam’s internet is not behind a firewall, and there are 76 million Facebook users in Vietnam. Authorities can only focus on the key nodes and influencers.

The Vietnamese government’s cyber security law, adopted in 2019, potentially compels data localization from the big tech companies, though policy disputes between the Ministry of Public Security and the economic ministries have meant that it’s not been fully implemented. Nonetheless, according to data reported by Vietnamese authorities, foreign social media firms complied with around 90 percent of government requests to take down media across social media platforms.

Hanoi is demanding and getting more corporate compliance in dealing with “malicious content.” And yet, for many in the Vietnam Communist Party (VCP), the media landscape is still too permissive.

A pervasive sense of insecurity

The re-installation of the loudspeakers also reflects a deep insecurity on the part of the government. And it has much to be insecure about.

The VCP’s claim to legitimacy is based on two things: nationalism and economic performance. Recently both have been in called into question due to endemic corruption that has reached the highest levels of government.

Despite unflinching Chinese pressure and excessive maritime claims against Vietnam’s national sovereignty, the Coast Guard is mired in corruption. The commander and his predecessor were both sentenced to 17 years in prison for using state assets to protect oil smugglers. The party expelled two other major generals, and disciplined five other major generals and two lieutenant generals.

The government will have a very attentive public to respond to the next time the Coast Guard is caught flat-footed against Chinese incursions. Corruption undermines combat readiness.

Two other corruption scandals, both involving the until-then stellar COVID-19 response by the previous government, have hit the senior-most leadership and called into question the prime minister’s management. 

A scandal over repatriation flights for Vietnamese nationals brought down a deputy foreign minister and a former deputy head of immigration at the Ministry of Public Security, among others. 

The Viet A testing scandal felled two members of the elite VCP Central Committee, a former minister of health, and senior members of the vaunted Vietnam People’s Army. To date, the party has investigated over 21 people.

Corruption is endemic in Vietnam. And yet these corruption scandals seem all the more concerning than those over the past five to six years when senior officials weaponized police and the prosecutorial service to take down political rivals and their patronage networks.

The VCP knows it has a legitimacy crisis. The government recently acknowledged that in 2021 there were 3,725 corruption investigations and criminal proceedings, three times the number in 2020.

For an economy stuck between central planning and the market, with soft property rights, where the state controls key inputs such as land and capital, not to mention permits and licenses, there is no shortage of opportunities for graft. But where corruption was once seen as the cost of doing business, it is now viewed as predatory and hindering economic growth.

Pathways to power

But the decision to reinstall the loudspeakers also says something about the pathways to power in Vietnamese politics. The decision was a local one, made by the Hanoi Party Committee. The Hanoi Party chief is a key position and is often held by a member of the elite Politburo, and always a member of the Central Committee.

The Hanoi Party Committee has been in turmoil, following the Viet A corruption scandal that saw its chief, Chu Ngoc Anh, expelled from the party and put on trial. The new Party chief is trying to curry favor, while his new deputy is clearly being groomed for greater things.

For ambitious Party cadres, keeping clean right now is necessary, but insufficient. General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong continues to make counter-corruption his highest priority. But advancement will require those added flourishes, such as loudspeakers extolling the good works of the Party.

Someone, somewhere, actually thought that this was a good idea. While loudspeakers blaring state media, party edicts, and propaganda may not be heard over the cacophony of Hanoi’s congested streets, they will be heard in the corridors of power.

Zachary Abuza is a professor at the National War College in Washington and an adjunct at Georgetown University. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of the U.S. Department of Defense, the National War College, Georgetown University or RFA.

The Chinese military continued joint air-naval exercises on Sunday, simulating attacks on Taiwan, the Taiwanese defense ministry said.

It was the last day of drills held as an angry response to U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island.

At the same time, the U.S. sent another warship to the east of Taiwan, expanding its presence in the area.

Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense said it detected “multiple Chinese aircraft, ships and drones operating around the Taiwan Strait,” on Sunday morning, apparently simulating attacks on Taiwan’s main island.

The ministry is “closely monitoring the situation,” it said in a brief statement, vowing to “respond accordingly.”

Meanwhile data provided by the ship tracking website Marine Traffic show that a U.S. Navy Missile Range Instrumentation Ship, the USNS Howard O. Lorenzen (T-AGM-25), has been deployed and is now operating in the waters east of Taiwan. 

The ship, operated by the Military Sealift Command, is a missile-tracking vessel, equipped with the latest active electronically scanned array radar system to support the launching and tracking of missiles and rockets.

The vessel was dispatched from Yokosuka base in Japan on Aug. 3, showing the emphasis the U.S. Navy places on monitoring China’s missile activities.

On Aug. 4, the Chinese military launched 11 Dongfeng ballistic missiles into the northern, southern and eastern waters surrounding Taiwan. Five are believed to have landed inside Japan’s exclusive economic zone and four flew over Taipei.

China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) also fired long-range rockets at some of Taiwan’s outlying islands on the same afternoon, the Taiwanese defense ministry said.

Taiwan called the Chinese military drills “irresponsible” and “highly provocative.” 

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered the Navy’s only forward-deployed aircraft carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan, to remain on station on Aug. 4 to monitor the situation in the area.

‘Resolute response’

China announced the four-day drills on Tuesday evening when Pelosi landed in Taipei for a brief but highly symbolic stopover.

She is the highest ranking U.S. official to visit the island in 25 years.

Beijing has repeatedly condemned the visit as a “grave violation” of China’s sovereignty and integrity, and threatened the “strongest countermeasures.”

The drills appeared to have ended at noon on Sunday without the appearance of a Chinese aircraft carrier and submarine as previously reported in Chinese and Taiwanese media.

“The waves are big enough this week and all parties, including China, would see the need to start to cool off, and take stock of the crisis,” said Collin Koh, a Singapore-based regional military expert.

China on Friday released a set of eight “countermeasures” in response to the Pelosi visit, freezing collaboration on three sets of military dialogues with the U.S., as well as talks on the climate crisis, repatriation of illegal immigrants, counter-narcotics and legal assistance in criminal matters.

The defense talks included meetings between Chinese and U.S. military commanders and bilateral efforts to coordinate air and sea operations to prevent misunderstandings and clashes by warships operating at close range. Their suspension may increase the risk of miscalculation and confrontation, analysts said.

Before this, China also suspended imports of a number of Taiwanese products including natural sand, fish and fruit.

“I don’t expect Beijing to withdraw the import ban on Taiwanese products any time soon. In fact, this ban is likely to persist much longer,” said Koh from the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

The new normal?

“To impress upon how Beijing views the severity of this crisis, we would expect it to continue to suspend the climate and military dialogue mechanisms until, as it demanded, Washington ‘rectifies’ the wrong of proceeding with the Pelosi visit,” Koh said.

“All in all, the status quo in the Taiwan Strait is likely to see some change,” he added.

During the four days of military exercises, Chinese military aircraft and ships crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait on multiple occasions and analysts say the line that serves as the de facto maritime border between Taiwan and China’s mainland “will likely exist merely in name” in the near future.

By “squeezing the median line,” the PLA intends to make its encroachments on Taiwan’s air space and waters routine, therefore making the Taiwan Strait its Chinese inner sea,” said Shen Ming-Shih, acting deputy chief executive officer at Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a government think-tank.

China has repeatedly rejected accusations of changing the status quo in the Taiwan Strait. Its top diplomat Wang Yi said on Friday: “Taiwan has never been a country.”

“There is only one China, and both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one country. This has been the status quo of Taiwan since ancient times,” the Chinese Foreign Minister said.

Military scholar Collin Koh said he believes the PLA is “starting to “normalize” its activities including drills east of the median line, adding to the pressure it has already exerted on Taiwan with its regular sorties into the island’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ). 

An ADIZ is an area where civilian aircraft are tracked and identified before entering further into a country’s airspace.

“China might conduct more intense or more radical actions,” said Jyh-Shyang Sheu, a Taiwanese military expert.

“But the reactions of the Taiwanese people showed that the coercion doesn’t work well, although they conducted different activities at the same time, such as missile exercises, cyber attacks, fake news campaigns and so on,” Sheu said.