Kill One to Warn One Hundred: The Politics of Press Censorship in Vietnam

Abstract

Recent literature on “soft authoritarianism” has called into question the extent to which policy, rather than personality and patronage, sets the direction of elite politics in the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV). This strand of thinking argues that the state’s direction toward “reform” is not as coherent as commonly believed, a relevant model for examining the role of the state-owned print and online press as an arm of Vietnam’s post-communist marketization project. It argues that Party leaders, facing a breakdown of consensus across the spectrum of political and business elites, are using the press in an attempt to manage a growing number of voices in the political system, but that reporting on many political and corruption scandals has simply become unmanageable for state leaders. Under this paradigm, policy debates between “reformers” and “conservatives” in Vietnam fall short of explaining press censorship. This semidemocratic concept of the media’s role opens up room for a wider understanding of civil society under transitional regimes in Asia. This paper draws on twenty-nine interviews with Vietnamese journalists, editors, media executives, Vietnamese and foreign journalism trainers, and government officials from 2010 to 2011, as well as an analysis of press coverage and internal newsroom documents.