Asia | The internet in Vietnam

If a tree falls…

…online, will the Communist Party hear anything?

|HANOI

SAPLINGS have sprouted on several streets in Hanoi, Vietnam’s leafy capital. They are puny replacements for at least 500 grand old trees that were uprooted last month without public consultation. The clearance was supposed to be the first phase of a city-government project to replace 6,700 mature specimens. But it spawned outrage on Facebook in a campaign which gathered 20,000 supporters in 24 hours, some of whom speculated that officials were motivated by the chance of selling the valuable timber. Three days later, on March 19th, the city’s leader, Nguyen The Thao, put the cutting on hold. He later suspended scores of officials and commissioned an investigation, due to be completed in a few days.

Such U-turns are rare in one-party Vietnam. Yet the tree-felling controversy is among several recent cases in which online criticism has prompted back-pedalling by the government. Last year a plan to build a cable car near a UN-recognised world-heritage site was also stalled by Facebook critics. In January Nguyen Tan Dung, Vietnam’s prime minister, told senior members of the Communist Party that it was “impossible” to block social media, and that the government should make more effort to put out “correct” information through them.

Vietnam’s 40m internet-users live in one of the better-connected countries in South-East Asia. Around 45% of Vietnamese are online (roughly the same proportion as in China). In the region, only Malaysia and Singapore have higher penetration rates. The use of social media has leapt—by two-fifths in the past year alone, according to one estimate.

Vietnam patrols the internet with a relatively light touch. In China both Twitter and Facebook are banned by censors. In Vietnam Twitter is accessible though not commonly used. Facebook is the country’s most-visited website, ahead of Google’s search engine. Attempts to block it have been sporadic and half-hearted. Yet this does not mean there is free speech online. The party controls dissent by using vaguely-written laws—recently strengthened—to imprison bloggers and to impose fines on outspoken users of social media. Freedom House, an American NGO, says Vietnam is among the ten worst abusers of internet freedom—worse than Saudi Arabia, though better than China.

Vietnam has nowhere near enough money or expertise to build a web-blocking system as overbearing as China’s so-called Great Firewall. Officials want to encourage internet use because they hope it will help boost innovation and economic growth. Party insiders are themselves making use of anonymous blogs and other social media to lobby for their own interests—particularly as factions jostle in advance of a change in leadership expected next year.

Vietnamese officials have “stopped seeing social media as evil”, argues Dang Hoang Giang at the Centre for Community Support Development Studies, a consulting firm in Hanoi. But he doubts that recent responses to mass online criticism mark the dawn of a more open politics. The campaigns are loosely organised, he explains, and the tree fiasco highlights a disturbing trend of increasingly brazen profiteering by local party officials.

Moreover, Vietnam’s information ministry is continuing to sharpen its censorship laws by rolling out “circulars” detailing how authorities should interpret the vague edicts on its statute books. A draft of one of them, released on April 13th, would require internet firms such as Facebook and Google to remove unwanted content and hand over information about rabble-rousers. According to Reporters without Borders, a Paris-based watchdog, at least 30 netizens are in jail.

The repercussions from the tree-felling debacle are starting to look depressingly familiar. Vietnamese journalists have been ordered off the beat. Academics in Hanoi, who at first talked to the press, have been told to shut up. And a memo issued by a Communist Party ward committee warns that “bad people” are exploiting outrage over tree-cutting to “undermine social order”. Plainclothes agents have attended a handful of events organised by the campaigners, including a lakeside “tree hug” that attracted hundreds of people (pictured above).

Duong Ngoc Tra, a nature lover who helped stop the tree-felling, says that she does not consider herself political. “We just want to showcase our love for Hanoi, and our concern,” she says. Last month Ms Tra delivered a letter to the city government, with 22,000 signatures, saying just that. No one replied.

This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline "If a tree falls…"

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