For
the past five weeks, the Vietnamese public has debated the implications of a
shootout between a family of fish farmers and a police posse that was sent to
dispossess them in the Haiphong city's still-rural Tien Lang district.
The event has underscored a widespread belief
that a flawed land tenure system leaves farmers at the mercy of greedy and
corrupt local Communist Party officials.
The media's coverage of the incident doubtless
encouraged Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung to wade into the controversy. After a
three-hour meeting, Dung's principal assistant, chief cabinet secretary Vu Duc
Dam, emerged to tell reporters that several layers of culpable officials - not
the fish farmers - would be punished and that a serious new effort would be
made to fix the land law.
Before detailing those high level decisions,
however, Dam said he had a special message for Vietnam's media. The prime
minister had asked him to express his appreciation for the role reporters
played during the crisis and hoped that the media would continue its good work
in "serving the nation" and "orienting public opinion".
The press had "provided plenty of timely
reports covering many aspects of the incident, analysis from various
perspectives and in a major way helped central government agencies to see the
matter clearly and proceed to deal with it in an appropriate way", Dam
said.
This unusual top-level commendation was
well-earned. After the Tien Lang ruckus, reporters with Vietnam's national
newspapers kept the story boiling, digging up facts that remarkably eluded
Haiphong city officials responsible for oversight of district and village
affairs. Within days of the shootout, the press had discredited the district
government's version of events by quoting local villagers who described the
farmer involved in the shootout, Vuon, as a bold visionary and upstanding
citizen.
Reporters also relayed villagers' anger when
officials said, untruthfully, that "Vuon's neighbors" had
spontaneously decided to punish him by wrecking his family's homes and stealing
a large load of market-ready fish and shrimp. Other reporters tracked down
local fish farmers who recounted how they had tried and failed to reach an
accommodation with the village officials intent on repossessing their farms,
and how the district officials had reneged on an agreement reached in a
court-supervised arbitration process.
Enterprising reporters persuaded a bulldozer
operator to recount how, for the dong equivalent of US$70, he had been hired by
village leaders to level the three houses on Vuon's fish farm. Vietnam's
newspapers also drummed up a blizzard of op-eds (often by retired senior
officials) that itemized procedural and legal faults in the local officials'
campaign to reclaim the land leased to Vuon and other fish farmers, analyzed a
rising tide of land law complaints, and propagated the notion that if left unfixed
the Tien Lang incident could presage rural upheaval on a national scale.
The quality of the news-gathering and sting of
the editorials supported blogger accounts that the central government did not
intervene or give guidance to the media on how to cover the Tien Lang incident.
Global newswires regularly dismiss Vietnamese newspapers as
"state-controlled media", a convenient tag that falls way short in
accurately describing what is a complex relationship. Although still subject to
state "guidance", Vietnam's sanctioned press has become a more
autonomous force over the past decade and is arguably Vietnam's leading
"civil society" institution.
There are currently several hundred newspapers
in circulation, all licensed to publish under the nominal sponsorship of
provinces, state-controlled organizations and central government agencies. To
be sure, most are just house organs. As many as three dozen, however, write for
a general audience and are distributed throughout Vietnam. These papers compete
fiercely for news and regularly earn a profit from advertising and paid
circulation.
In addition to print and online newspapers,
there is an unsanctioned press, including blogs of all sorts, that publish from
offshore servers and out of reach of state censors. Some blogs are quite
professional and make a serious effort to present objective reports and
commentary on issues of the day; others - as elsewhere in the world - are just
a venue for vitriolic rants.
Vietnam's sanctioned and unsanctioned press
are in a dynamic relationship. Quite a few state mainstream reporters moonlight
as bloggers; many more certainly read and react regularly to blogs. A major
difference between bloggers and those who work for the sanctioned media is that
twice as many bloggers are currently in prison for their writings - six versus
three - according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a global press
freedom advocacy group.
Media
as morality
This correspondent worked as a copy editor for
the online English language edition of a Vietnamese newspaper generally thought
to reflect the views of the ruling Communist Party's liberal wing. For the
"English page", stories harvested from the mother paper and other
leading dailies were translated and posted to the website.
The managing editor and publisher trooped off
to a meeting with the Ministry of Information and the Party's Central
Propaganda and Education Committee every Tuesday where they and their peers
from other papers were alerted to "sensitive issues". Periodically
the paper expressed unorthodox opinions and sometimes these drew an admonition
at the weekly meeting or, on graver occasions, a reprimand conveyed directly
and in private.
Editorial no-go zones included the internal
activities and debates of the party; stories that questioned the correctness of
central government policy, the party line or the benevolence of top central
officials; calls for political pluralism and allusions to "color
revolutions" in formerly communist countries; rousing the masses against
China; any suggestion of inherent differences between Vietnamese in the north
and south of the country; or implying that problems at lower levels were
expressions of a systemic disorder rather than the consequence of peripheral
failures to follow the policies and guidance of the center.
Those off-limits topics notwithstanding,
Vietnam's leading newspapers are by no means docile instruments of the party
and state. To maintain their readerships, they aggressively pursue scandals,
investigate "social evils" and champion the downtrodden. Corruption
of all kinds, at least at a local level, is also fair game. Moral themes are
regular fare in Vietnam's daily papers and are usually more social commentary
than pro-Party propaganda.
For instance, one paper may feature a series
on the hard lives of young women working long hours in export-geared factories,
who scrimp to send half of their meager pay home to their families. Another may
expose racketeers who deploy teams of child beggars in the big cities. Yet
another could wring pathos from the struggle of a disabled young man from a
rural village to earn a university degree. Titillating counterpoint is provided
by reportage on the "aimless lives" and depraved conspicuous
consumption of the children of the nation's nouveau riche.
These are stories of a society that is
struggling to understand and deal with the complexities of rapid modernization
and economic development. Social phenomena long familiar in the West are
reported as though they were just discovered in Vietnam - including a recent
bemused account of Vietnamese 20-somethings who prefer to explore the back
country by motorcycle on weekends rather than putting in a couple more days at
the office. Yet the lens through which these accounts are refracted is not
Western; the perspective is Confucian, a philosophy that exalts
"appropriate behavior".
Vietnam's newspapers have become important
political players because Hanoi's capacity to supervise lower levels of
government and state-owned enterprises has failed to keep pace with the growing
complexity of the country's economy and society. Perceptibly over the past
decade, the party and government leaders have relied increasingly on the
national media to provide them with timely intelligence on what is happening at
the local level, information that it cannot count on receiving from local
administrative or party structures. For this reason, newspapers and magazines
are generally not answerable to any but central authorities.
That said, newspapers' relationship with Hanoi
is not trouble-free. In 2006, with the apparent approval of top leaders, the
mainstream press energetically pursued a story of malfeasance that reached into
top levels of the Ministry of Transport, and were applauded for doing so.
Subsequently, however, two journalists who
refused to reveal their sources to police were arrested, tried and sentenced to
prison terms for "abusing democratic freedoms" and propagating
"false information". The consequence, many felt at the time, was a
marked reduction in reporters' zeal to uncover scandal.
Nonetheless, as the recent Tien Lang story
unfolded, political leaders once again relied on journalists to ferret out the
facts and mirror public opinion. Perhaps more vigorously than ever, Vietnam's
national press was again speaking truth to power. Media reporting daringly
shaped a consensus that if the state and Party do not take resolute and
effective action to subdue corruption and bully-boy behavior by village
officials across the country, they run the risk of losing the loyalty of the
rural population.
That dire message seems to have resonated with
Vietnam's leaders, who are said to consider "renovation" of the lower
ranks of the party "a matter of life and death for the regime". If a
sweeping housecleaning is indeed their aim, the public debate over the Tien
Lang shootout that played out in Vietnam's daily papers has clearly
strengthened their hand and in the process reinvigorated the country's
whistle-blowing reporters.
David Brown
Asia Times
David Brown is a retired American diplomat who
writes on contemporary Vietnam.
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