Professor Stephen B. Young, JD
Global Executive Director
The Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism
Political denunciations continue to spread, despite Directive No. 07 and even the Party leader’s public advocacy of intellectual openness. If this divisiveness is merely the spontaneous personal extremism of a few unsettled, reactionary, Vietnamese “Red Guards,” why have they been able to make one attach after another without being restrained? Who is helping them? Is there a mastermind with an agenda for Vietnam behind them?
The Roman patriot Marcus Tullius Cicero taught us to always ask: “Cui bono?” – who benefits?
The Vietnamese people will not benefit from accusations and intimidation; they will not benefit from economic stagnation or for falling behind other countries in technology and AI
But who might benefit when the descendants of Lac Long Quan and Au Cu are subjected to a seemingly endless war of one against another?
One thousand years slaves to Chinese thieves
One hundred years under French domination
Twenty years this war day after day
Our Mothers’ legacy – a forest of dried bones
Our Mothers’ legacy – a mountainous graveyard
– Trinh Cong Son
1. When a Book Becomes a Battlefield
The denunciations starting with criticism of the book Conversations with Thanh (Chuyện với Thanh) have ceased to be a literary controversy. They have become a testing of the balance of power within Vietnam’s political system. Beginning with several passages in the book, the attacks quickly expanded to encompass the author, the publisher, newspapers, writers and artists, as well as those suspected of having sponsored or protected the work.
Yet another “literary inquisition” has been opened—following dozens of similar cases in this long-suffering country. But books themselves do not appear to be the ultimate target of the protests. No; something more profoundly Vietnamese is under attack.
After Conversations with Thanh, the investigation of deviations spread to older works, competing interpretations of history and even officially recognized literary institutions. Nguyễn Quang Thiều, President of the Vietnam Writers’ Association, also became a target. The debate was no longer about whether this or that work was good or bad, or which facts were correct or incorrect. Instead, the accusers wanted to know which side the author supported and who was “standing behind” him.
This is the commonplace strategy of every political denunciation campaign: instead of refuting an idea, one criminalizes the author’s motives; instead of discussing the truth, one tests his loyalty. It’s a simple-minded use of ad hominem arguments – arguments which can prove nothing but which use words just to separate one from another.
Gustave Le Bon observed that building a civilization requires creative minds, while destroying one needs only an agitated crowd. Such a crowd need not fully understand what it claims to defend. It needs only be given an enemy, a slogan and the conviction that it embodies righteousness. This is the use of infantile emotions, not adult rationality.
Today’s Vietnamese “Red Guards” need neither red armbands nor copies of Mao’s Little Red Book. They use Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and politically guided forums. Yet their basic method remains unchanged from that Chinese precedent: remove a sentence from its context, attribute a political motive, invent a “traitor” and mobilize a crowd to execute that person’s reputation.
What is particularly striking is that this campaign has continued even after the Politburo issued Directive No. 07 to strengthen discipline, regulate public statements and curb manifestations of political arrogance within the system. One might have expected a Politburo directive would have been sufficient to make even the most extreme partisans retreat. Instead, the opposite appears to have occurred: new fronts in the denunciation campaign continue to be opened.
Who, then, has given Vietnam’s new “Red Guards” such confidence—and such arrogance?
2. When Even the Party Leader Is Being Muzzled
General Secretary and President Tô Lâm has repeatedly spoken of liberal education, science and technology, intellectual renewal and a new “era of national resurgence.” Yet while he speaks of openness, Vietnam’s intellectual space is being constricted. While he calls for renewal, works offering interpretations of history different from the official narrative are subjected to public denunciation.
This disobedience can no longer be dismissed as a handful of isolated . It suggests that there may be forces openly obstructing—or even muzzling—the messages of the Party’s own leader.
If the participants in these campaigns were merely a few hundred self-mobilized “red bulls”—Vietnamese slang for aggressive online ultra-nationalists—they would hardly be able to open one front after another, drawing in newspapers, mass organizations, and patronage networks without encountering a decisive institutional response. It would be even harder to explain why Directive No. 07 has failed to halt this “red tide.”
Who stands behind them? Who gives them direction, provides their platforms and guarantees their political safety? Why do they believe they have the authority to pass judgment on official institutions, senior cadres and established writers and artists? And why has a General Secretary and President who has accumulated power to a degree rarely seen in modern Vietnam been unable—or unwilling—to make them stop?
The very necessity of asking these questions suggests that Tô Lâm’s power is less than it appears.
He may control many offices, but that does not necessarily mean that he can master all the differing networks of power embedded within his regime. These networks of individuals have developed over many decades, incorporating members of the propaganda apparatus, military, police, mass organizations, politically connected businesses and foreign relationships, collegial networks which do not appear on any official organization chart.
Nor can one exclude the possibility that Tô Lâm once sought to use conservative tendencies within the regime to eliminate rivals and consolidate his own power. Once released from their restraints, however, these factions may have developed a momentum of their own, eventually even seeking to limit even the agenda which the General Secretary claims as his own, adopted in order to bring the Vietnamese people into a ‘new era”.
3. Who Benefits When stilled waters are Stirred Up?
In every political crisis, the most important question is not merely who started it, but who benefits from it.
The Vietnamese people certainly do not. While society is drawn into bitter arguments over a sentence in a book, the problems affecting daily life are pushed out of the public debate: economic hardship, exhausted businesses, a stagnant property sector, unemployment, the deteriorating quality of education and healthcare, fines exceeding the financial capacity of many families and an administrative apparatus that, despite being streamlined, has in some places become even more burdensome.
Writers and artists do not benefit either. A society in which every author must wonder which sentence might be extracted and used as evidence against him cannot produce great works. If an artist cannot speak the truth, he can at least refuse to participate in telling lies. In an atmosphere of political denunciation, however, even silence can be interpreted as a political position.
In the long run, the regime itself does not benefit. When loyalty replaces competence, informing replaces criticism and the crowd replaces the rule of law, the system loses its ability to correct its own mistakes. The “bacteria” described by Le Bon as eating away at a civilization cannot infect a healthy organism; they flourish only after such a communal body has been weakened from within.
But an external power that wants Vietnam to remain unstable, incapable of meaningful reform and unable to build a new national consensus, would benefit enormously from divisiveness which Vietnamese would impose on themselves.
Such a power would not need to create every denunciation campaign directly. It would need only to exploit existing divisions, magnify fears and resentments, encourage those discomfited by change and encourage such factions to believe that each is rightly fighting to save the status quo which they esteem or which protects them.
A country consumed by fighting a “spiritualized” civil war will lack the intellectual capacity to look outward and towards the future. A nation that continues to argue over the victors and the vanquished of half a century ago will find it difficult to formulate a strategy for the next half-century. And a leadership forced constantly to contain internal conflicts will struggle to pursue a genuinely independent foreign policy.
There is no need to name that external power. One need only look at the compass and ask: Who has always preferred a Vietnam that does not collapse, but remains neither strong enough nor sufficiently united to escape its orbit?
Three historical events deserve attention.
First, according to my Father who was there as a senior American diplomat, in 1954 at the Geneva Conference on ending France’s colonial war in Indochina, the decision to divide Vietnam into two potentially warring states was proposed by Beijing and then accepted by Paris.
Second, according to my friends, colleagues of South Vietnamese Ambassador Nguyen Van Kieu in Taipei, in early 1975, as North Vietnamese troops were advancing south towards Saigon, Ambassador Kieu forward to his brother, South Vietnam’s President Nguyen Van Thieu a proposal from Beijing. Beijing promised that, if Thieu should terminate South Vietnam’s alliance with the United States, China would then come to the defense of South Vietnam and oppose Hanoi’s invasion. Thieu refused the offer.
Third, also in 1975, on April 30, according to scholar George J. Veith, retired French Major General Paul Vanuxem met South Vietnamese President Dương Văn Minh at Independence Palace and urged him to hold out for at least another twenty-four hours, publicly break with the United States and seek Chinese protection. According to several witnesses present at the meeting, Vanuxem suggested that China would pressure Hanoi to accept a ceasefire and might intervene militarily.
Veith also cites former South Vietnamese diplomat Nguyễn Xuân Phong, who claimed that Beijing’s proposed “muscle” would consist initially of two Chinese airborne divisions landing at Biên Hòa under the cover of a French-led international force.
(“China and the Fall of South Vietnam: The Last Great Secret of the Vietnam War,” published by the Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program on February 9, 2022)
4. Two Faces of a Single Strategy
The unexplained sinking of the Vietnamese flagged boat Khôi Nguyên 18 near Fiery Cross Reef in the South China Sea offers a revealing example of a bifurcated strategy.
In a humanitarian intervention, Chinese naval personnel rapidly rescued most of the Vietnamese crew. This service demonstrated that China was truly a great power capable of reaching the scene most rapidly and maintaining a permanent presence around Fiery Cross Reef.
This display of “kindness” towards Vietnamese in distress contrasts with China’s conduct toward the Philippines: the use of water cannons, dangerous collisions, the obstruction of resupply missions and intimidation of Filipino fishermen. These two forms of conduct may appear inconsistent, but they might be two faces of a single strategy of projecting power to achieve political ends.
The Philippines openly aligns itself with the United States and protests China’s coercive behavior towards its territories in the South China Sea; it must therefore be disciplined by China. On the other hand, China bestows on Vietnam simultaneous applications of courtship and enticement, but also intimidation, because Beijing does not want to push Hanoi completely into Washington’s embrace.
One country is shown the price to be imposed for disobedience. The other is reminded of the supposed benefits of remaining subordinate to China’s influence. In Vietnam’s case the proffered blandishments are made available to Vietnamese who might be tempted to take advantage of them.
5. Two Spearheads and an Invisible Hand
In the present conflict, the propaganda apparatus and some admirers of military leaders such as Lieutenant General Hoang Kien and Major General Nguyen Thanh Tuan have emerged as the two most visible spearheads promoting systemic destabilization in Vietnam
The propaganda apparatus claims a form of social capital – the authority to define orthodoxy: which account of history is correct, who qualifies as a patriot, which works are “deviant” and which ideas carry the danger of “self-evolution.” Elements of veterans’ organizations possess a different form of symbolic capital: moral credit for suffering the sacrifices of war and the political legitimacy that comes with victory.
When these two sources of cultural power combine, an innocuous literary debate can immediately be transformed into a political prosecution. The questions quickly become no longer wherein a work may be right or wrong, but to which faction does the author belongs, whether he has insulted the past, and who authorized the work to appear.
There is no public evidence proving that these forces are receiving direct instructions from abroad. But strategic influence does not necessarily operate through overt contractual commitments. It can travel abroad, carried by ties of ideological affinity, personal relationships, drawn in by factional interests and the instinct for self-preservation among those who fear losing their status if the country reforms.
The invisible hand behind the campaign need not control every piece on the chessboard of protests. It need only ensure that the competition works in its favor.
The propaganda apparatus defends its monopoly over truth. The ultra-nationalist groups defend an interpretation of history that sustains their political status. The “red bulls” discover a sense of power through denunciation. Political factions use literary inquisitions to identify and eliminate their opponents.
Their motives may differ, but the consequences converge: society is divided, reform is obstructed, Tô Lâm is kept in a state of continual political confrontation and Vietnam remains caged within an ideological orbit embracing some of its people but originating abroad.
6. One Directive No. 07 Is Still Not Enough
Directive No. 07 may regulate public statements, restore discipline and temporarily silence certain individuals. But an administrative directive cannot cure dysfunctions bred by the structure of power itself.
To end political arrogance of some over others, monopoly over what is true must first be abandoned. To prevent denunciation campaigns, the right to debate must be protected. To neutralize external influence, Vietnam must build transparent institutions in which no factional network can invoke patriotism to silence others.
The most dangerous hand is not necessarily one openly reaching in from outside. More dangerous is the hand that, out of public view, has found other hands inside the country willing to act on its behalf.
When that happens, an order to foment dissent does not need to cross a border; a campaign does not need to carry a foreign name; and Vietnamese citizens can still invoke patriotism while helping others keep their own country trapped forever in a stagnant waters.
It appears that one Directive No. 07 is still not enough.
But how many more directives will this nation need before it realizes that the problem lies not only with those stirring up a froth, but also with the stagnant pond that has long given them personal peace and prosperity?
And how much longer must this nation continue to suffer such damnation?