Everything is now at stake, and our two colleagues are the ones who are running up to save the last ticket to get on the train of a new era for our country. And the best honor of their sacrifices is not to see them as the victim, but the new leaders of our movement. And we should fall in line and give necessary support to our last generation of true democrats of our country, and the Rally for Democracy and Pluralism – the institution where they belong to. From this moment on, the democracy movement in Vietnam might have new names and faces, and probably the ones that matter to us.
From brokenness to strength and power
On the 19th of March night, the texting app rang dry, and I woke up to the news of the detention of Khang, the friend who has been fighting alongside me and our colleagues through the years. I clutched the mattress and turned on the desk light to skim through every word that came up in the news. And for a moment’s notice, I realised he had been charged under Article 109 of plotting against the government. Khang, aged 28 was the second young member of the Rally for Democracy and Pluralism (RDP) who was detained by the regime. The first one was Duc, aged 29, who was charged under Article 117 for spreading anti-government content. Some people who vaguely knew of my association with RDP asked me what had happened to them, perhaps out of curiosity, but also distant empathy with our causes and the incidents we encountered. Some even texted to express their surprise having for the first time learned about the strange names and faces they could not recall having ever heard in the pro-democracy movement. But little did they know that these men would be celebrating their 10th year of political activism in prison despite their age. Democratic activism has been something that is made for their entire early formative years. They saw their early 18s getting mobilised for the movement, growing up, and thriving even without one’s notice.
They are no strangers to the ones who know them, but they represent a distinct pathway (or a subset) of political activism, little known, yet about to go mainstream in the years to come. I think it is the best chance now, and I would not have found a better time than now to let the public know who we are, what we are fighting for, and why it matters.
Post-war young democrats and the complex legacy of division
We have been the generation born some 20 years after the end of the Civil War which was on and off in our country for three decades. They would have said the Civil War (or Vietnam’s War in American English vocabulary, or the War against American Imperialism to the Communist winners’ language) broke out in 1954. Nope, it had occurred way sooner than that, starting from the 1940s when the country saw the nationalists and the communists fighting along this line. The communists were quick to see their nationalists (members of the National Parties) as foes rather than friends, and they launched a campaign for political purges and persecutions. The culmination of this ideological clash was the year when the Communists took power in 1945 under the masquerade of Viet Minh. They promised a broad-church coalition in the public but deployed menace and purges behind the scenes. We did not know how many nationalists fell victim to these persecutions, but hundreds of thousands disappeared and their political organisations were disbanded, with some fleeing the South during the mid-50s. It showed the scale and magnitude of this ideological clash. The early communists were also hell-bent on class war struggle, and they also saw the Landlords as their ideological enemies to be purged and eliminated. This thinking led nearly 200,000 landlords or those who were identified as “class oppressors” to be executed between 1953 and 1956 without any courts or legal access; no justice has been served but the exhibitions of angry mobs and crowd violence. And the war that broke out in 1954 was just a continuation of the existing divides which moved away from Nationalists vs Communists, and class struggle to a war of partition (North-South).
The Civil War was more bitter and violent at each stage, claiming the souls of millions of civilians, and how it ended still matters to us our Vietnamese patriots today. Nothing has been settled down with agreements to end this war, or even some sort of “we agree to disagree, but let’s end all this”, the war ran its course to a vaguely defined national union as the World was on the onset of a new geopolitical era. We heard enough of the boat people generation, their journeys to migrate to the US and further afield, and the acrimonies and agonies experienced along the way. These experiences of pain have made them feel alienated and distanced from the Vietnamese nation, and that’s where national reconciliation has failed. National Reconciliation is a beautifully constructed idea, and the majority of Vietnamese people might feel and see this way, as they aspire to it and feel the need to have it, but we never can make it happen as a nation. Of course, the divide lines that cut deep in our nation are not merely those between the North and the South, those and around the boat people tragedies, the legacy of divisions happens to be more complicated than that and deep-seated in our history, like a multi-faceted cub that is so difficult to disentangle. We also see it in our religions, and ethnicities, within friends and families, and divisions have plagued our social fabrics like viruses.
Continuity needed to fight for democracy and pluralism
Years on, we realise that the older generation is about to pass, people who will carry with them the memories of the Civil War or the events that followed will be few and far between. The Communists hope to whitewash this legacy with time, and all the pains and bitterness, and they could flout their responsibility in all that. Nonetheless, the past divides simply evolved into other forms of division or exhaustion. We are not bitterly divided by hate and scorn, but it doesn’t mean we can come together on the big issues and agree on every tiniest issue. If we don’t let the right lesson from our past guide us, it will ruin us even with the absence of our vivid memories and recounting of historical events. We’ll see our people struggle to come up with the same answer to the question of what it means to be Vietnamese, we don’t feel like living in the shared space of solidarity, and we don’t breathe the same air of a Vietnamese dream. Our Vietnamese compatriots just do not know why we lack consensus and a common understanding. So why does the study of historical truth (not fiction) matter to us and our future generation? Because the truthful historical memories informed us with the right lessons and came with them the right political philosophy.
I’ve taken the readers all the way through a lane of historical memories with my tardy explanations because it matters in the understanding of Khang and Duc’s stories. They stepped out from the post-war generation who should have carried with them no memories of the War, but they chose to learn from the history and the legacy of division to adopt National Reconciliation as their principal political philosophy. Seeing the lack of consensus within the democracy movement and in wider civil society, they understand without putting national reconciliation to the fore, our nation would never learn, and an authoritarian regime would be replaced by another. In other words, it would not make much sense to fight for democratisation in the Vietnamese context without the spirit of national reconciliation.
In our internal discussions, we often refer to ourselves as the last generation of political activists in Vietnam, because the whitewashing and discontinuity of conceived memories will cause the younger generation to stay aloof from politics or stop fighting for the future of our country. They might continue fighting for single-issue political causes that speak to their daily life as a humanistic response to social injustices, but they would not be able to write up to a national story to the statutes and scale needed for systematic political change, without the conceived collective memories and values passed on by their predecessors. But our two colleagues align themselves with the Rally for Democracy and Pluralism, a political organisation that has a legacy of national reconciliation rooted in the memories, and experiences encountered by their early leaders. They managed to build up these values among younger members, thus making the struggle for democracy and pluralism still relevant in the transitional social context in Vietnam. It has been our greatest success that is not for all to recognise.
I still recounted a conversation I had with my friends about Cambodia’ former prime minister, Hunsen, and how his rule of brutality faced up to almost little-to-nothing resistance from the Millennials and Gen Z. The answer provided is those young citizens have had no collective memories of the past, and most prognosed Hunsen’s rule as much better than the massacres under Khmer Rouge; and the toppling of Hunsen, if ever feasible, would lead to another vexed question of what comes next which no political force in the country would be able to answer. The successors would not be driven into political activism without the memories conceived by their predecessors and without an understanding of how an alternative future would be imagined. The Rally for Democracy and Pluralism has in our culture a continuity of memories. Khang, Duc, and I inherited this treasure and we put it into our political activism. But in another sense, we chose to be distanced from the legacy of division by not siding with any sides in history. We denounce violence as a way to resolve ideological clashes and divisions, as it has been a mistake that has left our nation in complete tatters and destruction, the soul of our nation completely broken, and our people impoverished. That’s why we followed the path of political struggle through non-violent means.
And non-violence serves our country and peoples and their best interests. The unjust detention of Duc and Khang was not substantiated by any legitimate justifications, nothing but purely arbitrary will of the authoritarian rulers. But by accident, this has brought to the publicity the names and faces, and a fresh idea of how democracy should be fought.
The fight for democracy as a national dialogue
But why has the fight for democracy and pluralism been so desperately long? Or have been even halfway through, even? In my native language, I hardly see it as a “fight” which constructs a sense of a combat or having two opponents (or more). It is to me a national dialogue in which our democrats will grab any chance to make a convincing case for democracy, sometimes a few people would have come to listen, sometimes even no one, but we believed there would be a moment when our nation as the whole will come to listen to “the case for democracy and pluralism”, because democracy and pluralism are projected as the future of our country that must come, while the communist regime will be thrown into the dustbin of the past, and showing failures to stay relevant any longer. Yes, this dialogue would take years and decades for democracy and pluralism to be won over in the hearts and minds of people, but it would be the most inclusive and convincing victory we’ve ever had, for all not a few. And we believe the political victory guided by National Reconciliation will unleash a healthy sense of patriotism driven by the kind of suppressive nationalism promoted by the Communist Regime. Against this backdrop, we position our fight for democracy and pluralism as a struggle to rescue our nation from a dark future that might be foreseeable without pluralistic democracy and national reconciliation; rather than merely for the right to exercise our individual freedoms such as free speech or democratic rights (as some English-language articles I read described). The sense of our political struggle goes deeper than just scratching on the surface. By merging democracy and rights with patriotism, we are leading the way for a new way of political activism that can resonate with the ordinary Vietnamese people, which might be new as of now, but will become mainstream in the years to come. And we are fortunate to have Khang and Duc as our leading examples.
We as the internationalists
I appear to have the sound of the nationalists, and so do my colleagues I’m speaking on behalf of, but we are internationalists in our own rights. Before the detention of Khang, we had lots of exchanges about climate change during the past months and how it would be devastating for Vietnam, and we were aware about our country’s vulnerabilities to climate change and the global crises we have to deal with. We’ve been critical of the regime’s kleptocracy which led to environmental degradation, and formulated non-sense growth which is outweighed by the cost for environmental restoration. And we believe any future leading government in Vietnam should make good on international commitments to Climate Change. Fighting for democracy and pluralism in Vietnam, we also aligned ourselves with the Fourth Wave of Democracy and put our country in our own geopolitical contexts and what the implications on democratisation globally and at home. Our solidarity went out to the nations and territories still being dragged back by the dictators and autocrats. We see friends and allies in the international community who are also fighting for democracy and human rights as universally cherished values, and we’re not alone in this. We are not confused with identifying who our friends and allies are, because we know where we are standing on the international stage.
Vietnam in a dire crisis of the future.
Vietnam is on the cusp of an all-out economic crisis which is not reflected in the doctored figures provided by the government, but in the dining tables of the workers, and the confidence of the domestic customers. We all start to feel the pinch. We know the communist party failed in leadership. The late party chief promised to take on graft and corruption which spawned during the tenure of Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung. But during Mr. Trong’s stewardship, corruption took to another peak with the Van Thinh Phan and SCB scandals coming to public knowledge. The government planned to bail out SCB on a package equal to 5% of the National GDP and years to pay off the debt, which would have been spent on our education and health care or the country’s necessary infrastructure. They miserably failed on what they purported to fight for. And with the real estate sector accounting for 20% of the national GDP is showing signs of extreme crisis, it might have repercussions on the bankers. The current leaders (To Lam and Pham Minh Chinh) are proposing a set of economic plans in a bid to spur growth ranging from high-speed railways, rare earth mining, the establishment of SEZs, and de-regulations to attract more FDIs. But most of the plans are unrealistic, reckless, and lacking foresight as analyzed in my previous articles (in Vietnamese). But what they are trying to rescue is GDP growth on paper, falling short of addressing the crisis of the future, which our country is facing. Our Vietnamese compatriots are less likely to believe in the Vietnamese dream because they don’t have a fair portion of this dream. On the economic side, the growth has been for very few who benefit from the unjust system of wealth and opportunity distribution, leaving out the majority of our population. Even the state news admitted that access to housing is less affordable and less viable for millions of people in our metropolitan cities. And on the political side, our people are left out of the decision-making process which is only for a few narrow-minded guys in the political commissar. As power is monopolized, the intelligence and resources we need to build back our country remain tightly locked. In this context, Duc and Khang (and Rally for Democracy and Pluralism) are emerging as a political force that provide a much-needed key to unleashing the energy and resources for our national re-construction; for we are able to put on top of our society the right-value philosophies, and politics; and we are competent to lead the politics of change to bring about modernity and innovations in Vietnam. Organizing the country into federalism through decentralisation, and giving more autonomy to the local government is one; and an economic model driven by the private sector, innovation, and entrepreneurialism with the generated wealth used to sustain social solidarity (social equality), and building a true definition of happiness and pride in our nation is another agenda we are pursuing. And during the crisis, the people (the communist leaders and rank-and-file included) will finally gather around our dialogue and listen to our right words. And with the executive abuses exercised by party chief To Lam, his technocratic proclivity, and inclinations to shift the regime to personal dictatorship from partisan autocracy, it is clear that his grand plan is involved with political cleansing, and more chaos, and uncertainties; pit against our Rally for Democracy and Pluralism’s agenda, which is a democratic transition with national reconciliation, and taking all voices of our nation into account. Clearly, our democratic agenda shines the brightest in the darkness of authoritarianism and it needs the wider support to be propelled.
We don’t know what the future will hold, and we have no illusions that the communist governors will spare us free. Perhaps, we will join our colleagues in the kangaroo courts and with false charges. But few words communicated directly to the communist leaders: we will not give in this fight because our country’s future matters. We will continue fighting, leading political opinions, showing our imaginaries, and exemplifying the spirit of national reconciliation in the face of political suppression. We still have the hearts and minds to be won over, and we believe our people’s hearts are not petrified yet. We can win over the very members in communist party because we don’t have any dividing line in this fight. This fight must continue.
New names and faces that matter
Why do we have to throw our support behind Khang and Duc? Because they are standing on the frontline now as the last generation of democrats with the continuity of our nation’s collective memories, and their strong characters and faith in democracy. They are raising our stakes and possibilities to win. Our future kids might not fight and believe the same way they do. The make-and-break moment is waiting down the line, and their imprisonment only highlights the urgency of our mission: without democracy and national reconciliation to bring our country back from the wreckage, our country would be heading to a period of social decline and a state of failure with a future generation who completely lose the hope and faith in our nation. We will face the enormity of exhaustion and fatigue that we never get over. Fighting for political change in a failed state is much harder than now. With democracy, our nation will revive. With a few decades of right governance and politics, we will secure our position in the world of a new era with initial achievements and shared pride. Everything is now at stake, and our two colleagues are the ones who are running up to save the last ticket to get on the train of a new era for our country. And the best honour of their sacrifices is not to see them as the victim, but the new leaders of our movement. And we should fall in line and give necessary support to our last generation of true democrats of our country, and the Rally for Democracy and Pluralism – the institution where they belong to. From this moment on, the democracy movement in Vietnam might have new names and faces, and probably the ones that matter to us.
Chu Tuấn Anh
(23/03/2025)
