Vietnam's nationalist bloggers

Getting it off your chest

Sep 10th 2009 | HANOI

From The Economist print edition

A crackdown on online patriotism

IN A country as fiercely patriotic as Vietnam, you would expect the government to cheer a plan by citizens to distribute T-shirts bearing nationalistic slogans. However, the T-shirts in question carried messages of hostility towards China, Vietnam’s biggest trading partner. Worse, their pedlars were popular and sometimes critical bloggers.

Two well-known bloggers and an online reporter have been detained after the police uncovered an apparent attempt to print T-shirts opposing Chinese investment in a controversial new bauxite-mining project in Vietnam’s Central Highlands and casting doubt on China’s claims to disputed islands in the South China Sea.

The trio, who had all written critically about Vietnam-China relations on the internet, were detained on suspicion of “abusing democratic freedoms” to undermine the state. By the middle of this week Bui Thanh Hieu, a blogger who used the pen name Nguoi Buon Gio (“Wind Trader”), and Pham Doan Trang, a journalist who works for VietnamNet, a news site, had been freed without charge after several days in detention. Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh, who blogged as Me Nam (“Mother Mushroom”), was still in custody.

These are the latest arrests in a continuing crackdown against bloggers and journalists. Ahead of a congress of the ruling Communist Party in 2011, when the country’s top three political posts will be up for grabs, the government is keen to rein in more outspoken commentators. Last December it imposed new restrictions on bloggers, making it illegal for them to publish under a pseudonym or to write about politics. Policing these rules will be hard.

More than 21m people, a quarter of the population, use the internet, according to government figures. Estimates of the number producing blogs range from a low of 1m to as many as 4m. The vast majority are personal diarists, not sociopolitical activists, but the spectacular growth of blogs and the difficulty of regulating them make the government, used to exercising total control of the media, twitchy.

Bloggers who have found themselves in the dock include some who have exposed government corruption or made negative remarks about the former Soviet Union. But the government seems particularly anxious about criticism of China.

Many Vietnamese remain hostile to their northern neighbour, after 1,000 years of imperial domination and a bloody border war in 1979. But the country runs a large trade deficit with China and needs its investment more than ever. This explains the government’s eagerness to push ahead with the Chinese bauxite-mining project, despite widespread criticism from scientists and generals (as well as bloggers). They have questioned Chinese companies’ environmental records and expressed their fears for national security.

International press-freedom groups, which often rank Vietnam alongside China and Myanmar as among the riskiest countries for bloggers, have condemned the latest arrests. Foreign diplomats fear that the clampdown will harm the fight against corruption. The new rules may cow bloggers, and journalists may be too scared to cover anything even vaguely risky—the law is unclear about what they can and cannot report.

But not everyone is deterred. “They only ever go after the big fish,” says one young Hanoi blogger, who has also openly criticised China many times. Besides, he adds, the government may be shooting itself in the foot. When bloggers are arrested, their readership usually takes off.

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The stigma of wealth in China

Original sin

Sep 3rd 2009 | HONG KONG

From The Economist print edition

China debates whether its richest citizens earned their fortunes fairly

MOST Chinese assume it is something of a mixed blessing to appear in the annual rankings of China’s wealthiest citizens published by Forbes magazine. Early this year a novel with the title “The curse of Forbes” was syndicated in a Chinese magazine before being published as a book. Anyone on the list, its protagonist warns, is “dead meat”. The rankings are widely known as “pig-killing lists”—a reference to the fate the authorities are thought to have in mind for those who appear on them. In a review of the book, Forbes reflects on the fact that many people on its Chinese lists have indeed been detained or arrested, and asks whether “anyone in China is safe from the curse”.

The answer, new research suggests, is yes. Rupert Hoogewerf, the author of Forbes’s first Chinese list, which appeared ten years ago, and now publisher of a competing version called the Hurun Rich List, looked at what has happened to the 1,300-odd people who have featured in it. Two await trial, ten are currently under investigation, seven have been investigated but not convicted, seven have fled China, and six have died (including two suicides and one murder). Eighteen have ended up in jail, which may sound like quite a toll, but amounts to less than 2% of the names on the list—not so outlandish a proportion, Mr Hoogewerf argues.

Nonetheless, many still wonder whether wealth in China is inextricably tied to crime and corruption, the “original sins” that are thought to have underpinned the rise of many of the country’s most lucrative ventures. That question was the subject of a 20-page article published last week in Kan Tian Xia (“View the world”), a magazine based in Beijing, which cited Mr Hoogewerf’s findings. Mr Hoogewerf himself points out that many of the crimes committed by China’s tycoons date back to an earlier era, when credit was harder to obtain and corporate governance cruder (see table). New wealth, particularly in areas where venture capital plays a big part, such as technology, is subject to closer scrutiny these days. He maintains that the stigma associated with wealth in the past, sometimes deservedly, has lifted in recent years.

But China’s tycoons continue to get into trouble. Shortly before “The curse of Forbes” appeared, it emerged that Huang Guangyu (also known as Wong Kwong Yu), a retailing magnate who was first on Hurun’s list last year and second on Forbes’s, had disappeared. He was subsequently reported to have been detained in a wide-ranging bribery probe. In June the mayor of Shenzhen, a big city near Hong Kong, was detained in what was thought to be the same probe. On August 31st Hopson Development, a property firm, revealed that for the past six months it had been unable to account for its own chairman, Chu Mang Yee (140th on the Forbes list, and tenth on Hurun’s), although the link to the probe, if any, is unclear.

The majority of people who have posted comments on other websites about the Kan Tian Xia article seem suspicious of successful businessmen. Tellingly, the government’s internet censors have let these comments proliferate, suggesting that it takes a similar view. One blogger argued that the vast majority of those on rich lists had escaped jail simply because they had bribed officials to stay out of it. “Even our children know you cannot succeed without dirtying your hands,” another added. A third had an even grimmer view: “Remember that any enterprise that is big will, eventually, become the government’s property.” It is not always the tycoons who are the crooks.

Sự chúc dữ của Của Cải, hay là lời nguyền của Forbes.