Vietnam’s Shrinking Public Space
Security Ministry increasingly in charge
By: David Brown
Just after midday on June 1, 60-year-old Trương Huy San suddenly vanished. He had left home on his way to a meeting of “Saturday Coffee,” an informal discussion group in his hometown, Hanoi. It is widely believed he was stopped by plainclothes police and has since been held incommunicado.
Among Vietnam’s ‘serious’ bloggers, those who comment thoughtfully on national affairs, none is held in higher regard than San, who uses the pen name Huy Đức and has 350,000 followers on Facebook. Judging from posts to offshore journals Luật Khoa (‘Legal Study’) and Tiếng Dân (‘The People’s Voice’) up to June 4, admirers are still at a loss to explain Đưc’s detention. But their high regard appears not to have mattered when he veered too close to the flame recently by arguing that a climate of fear can hold back a nation.
Huy Đức was a brilliant reporter until his press card was revoked a decade ago. He’s also the author of Bên Thắng Cuộc (The Winning Side), a frank retrospective published in the US that chronicles the postwar years when the Hanoi regime struggled to incorporate a sullen southern population into the “party/state.” Four days after Đức’s disappearance, Vietnamese cyberspace is full of tributes; a common theme is consternation that a writer so even-handed and insightful might have been specifically targeted by the Ministry of Public Security (MPS).
Perhaps only coincidentally, the public security ministry has been very prominent lately. General Tô Lâm, its head since 2016 and a senior deputy minister for six years before that, has been chosen to serve as Vietnam’s new state president. He will take the place of a politburo colleague whose removal from office General Lâm is said to have engineered. Indeed, as a number of sources (including Asia Sentinel on May 23) have concluded, Lâm seems to have deployed data that has blighted the hopes of at least four others who aspired to take over leadership of Vietnam’s ruling – and only -- party at its 14th Congress some 19 months from now.
What is particularly concerning, meantime, is plenty of evidence that Lâm has also used his time at the helm of MPS to build it into a fearsome scourge of miscreants. That, of course, includes those who would misappropriate public assets or take kickbacks from construction firms questing for lucrative contracts. But that’s only the beginning. If you’re an official, it’s gotten harder and harder to know what’s OK and what’s not; the only certainty is that MPS has a damning file on you.
Close observers of Vietnam have noted a pronounced drift toward “securitization” during Nguyễn Phú Trọng’s 13 years at the helm of Vietnam’s Communist Party. Wikipedia explains securitization as “the process of state actors transforming subjects from regular political issues into matters of ’security’,… an existential threat [that] legitimates extraordinary measures to contain it.”
(Readers wishing to dive deeply into this concept should refer to Mark Sidel’s persuasive and unsettling discussion of the Public Security Ministry-led securitization of Vietnamese institutions, published in January 2023 by Asia Sentinel.)
Retrospectively, 2015 is seen as the turning point. That’s the year that Nguyễn Phú Trọng repulsed two-term Prime Minister Nguyễn Tấn Dũng’s attempt to supplant him as General Secretary of the CPV. Dũng was a dynamic executive who winked at substantial corruption within government ranks, apparently seeing it as the grease that allowed the wheels of economic growth to turn smoothly. When he lost a climactic central committee vote just before the party’s 12th Congress, Dũng was “permitted to retire.” Trọng then had a free hand to implement his own vision of a Vietnam where progress depends on purging cadre found not to have adhered strictly to Marxist-Leninist doctrine and socialist morality.
Looking backward from 2024, it’s clear that Trọng’s vision empowered MPS to play an outsized role in CPV internal affairs.
Đinh Thê Vinh, an independent journalist writing in the offshore journal Luật Khoa (Legal Studies), notes that during Tô Lam’s eight-year tenure as minister, layers of mid-level MPS staff were eliminated and, at the same time, the number of “boots on the ground” was doubled to 1.5 million officers performing a wide variety of police functions. “Particularly at MPS,” Vinh continues, “downsizing had a special political meaning, because this is a ministry with huge power, size and a host of functions,” including internal security, intelligence, criminal investigation, prisons, and much more.
Author-journalist Bill Hayton, an associate fellow with the Asia-Pacific Program at the Chatham House think tank in London, commented in a May 9 brief that a salient feature of recent turmoil within the party – in particular the anti-corruption campaign – is that internal fissures are becoming more obvious. “The vanquished are being allowed to retire quietly, so long as they cede power to their rivals. What we are seeing is a takeover. The winners of this power struggle are the hardliners: the police generals and the dogmatic Leninists, [people] more focused on regime survival than further liberalization.”
Nguyễn Khắc Giang, in a commentary published by a Singapore think tank in May, 2023, emphasized that “MPS, often regarded as the enforcer of the anti-corruption campaign, has been immensely empowered. The 2018 revamp of the police force, intended to consolidate the police establishment, has led to a higher concentration of power in the hands of the minister of public security. At the same time, the MPS budget has seen a steady increase…”
Huy Đức’s own commentary on these matters, two posts to his Facebook account just before his arrest, are being widely cited as a possible reason for his arrest. They are more original than the Vinh, Hayton, and Giang clips above, but no less thought-provoking.
In “A Nation Cannot Develop in a Climate of Fear,” posted on May 27, Huy Đức argued that local police personnel should report to local officials, not to upper echelons of MPS, and that the power to investigate should be separated from the power to punish. “The local authorities should have the power to recruit these police officers, appoint them, and use them in accordance with the budget and special character of a locality. Areas where security is good [because the economy is developing and the people believe in the authorities] can have a police force that’s thoroughly effective.”
In a second post a day later, titled “Various Connected Thoughts,” Huy Đức described General Secretary Trọng as a man of uncommon morality whose only answer to endemic corruption has been endless purges and ever more opaque policy-making by Party committees.
“Don’t fear losing the role of the party,” Đức concluded. “A good party is one that guarantees a legal system that can distribute justice, not one that thrusts itself into a matter whenever it wishes. Leaders shouldn’t strive to protect the special power of the police.”
David Brown is a former US diplomat with wide experience in Vietnam and is a regular contributor to Asia Sentinel