OpinionHow Vietnam has borrowed from China’s online censorship playbook

Vietnam is keeping close tabs on public online discourse as it seeks to tap into social media-fuelled nationalism

But it also tolerated online backlash against Jackie Chan over the South China Sea and anger over Singapore PM Lee Hsien Loong’s Khmer Rouge comments

4-MIN READ4-MIN

A man reads the news on his laptop in a coffee shop in Hanoi. About two thirds of Vietnam’s 97 million people are online and authorities are increasingly fixated on gauging public sentiment online. Photo: AFP

Published: 5:31pm, 14 Sep 2020Updated: 9:16pm, 14 Sep 2020

Last week, a restaurant in Quebec, Canada, ate humble pie and promised to make changes to “vulgar and degrading puns” in its name and menu that many Vietnamese considered offensive to their culture.

In November last year, an online backlash declared Hong Kong-born film star Jackie Chan persona non grata in Vietnam. The rationale? Chan was accused of having spoken in support of China’s controversial nine-dash line, a demarcation that includes large swathes of the South China Sea. Vietnam has vehemently objected to such claims.

Only a month earlier, Vietnamese netizens spotted that Abominable , a film co-produced by DreamWorks and the Shanghai-based Pearl Studio, had a map that showed the nine-dash line, and quickly shared screenshots on social media. The film was pulled out of Vietnamese cinemas. This also led to the subsequent demotion of a senior Vietnamese official who was held accountable for allowing the release under her watch.

In June 2019, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s tribute to the late Thai premier General Prem Tinsulanonda contained the words “invasion” and “occupation” to refer to Vietnam’s actions to oust the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s, language that Vietnam and Cambodia said was tantamount to support for the genocidal regime of Pol Pot. This sparked a diplomatic crisis not seen in years between Singapore and its two Southeast Asian neighbours.

A wave of social media-fuelled nationalism has turned increasingly potent in the online sphere, leading the Vietnamese authorities to become acutely sensitive to and even accommodating of it. As it has turned out, such successive waves of online nationalism have galvanised all parties concerned – including the authorities – into taking action and making amends. This level of responsiveness is quite remarkable for Vietnam, a country that is believed to have followed in the Chinese footsteps to control the internet.

Granted, governments of all types – freer and those less free – have sought to tap into nationalism to boost their legitimacy. But responsiveness and legitimacy are particularly crucial to the resilience of authoritarian regimes, especially one on the verge of a leadership transition like Vietnam.

In a country where around two thirds of a population of 97 million are online and where Facebook boasts around 47 million active accounts to advertisers, the Vietnamese authorities have become increasingly fixated on gauging public sentiment online.

In November 2018, Vietnam set up a web-monitoring unit capable of scanning up to 100 million news items per day for “false information”. In 2016, the country also deployed a 10,000-strong cyber unit called Force 47 tasked with maintaining a “healthy” internet environment.