The 2018 Vietnam protests, June 10 Events, or Protests against the Special Zone Act and the Cybersecurity Law (Vietnamese: Biểu tình phản đối Luật đặc khu kinh tế và Luật An ninh mạng), are a series of both violent and nonviolent protests that erupted across Vietnam in June 2018, chiefly in response to two drafted pieces of legislation: the Special Zone Act and the Cybersecurity Law.
The Special Zone Act (also known as the Special Zones Law or the Special Economic Zones Law) proposes the opening of three special economic zones (SEZs) across Vietnam, where foreign investors would be allowed to lease land for up to 99 years. Despite no specific mention of China within the lines of the bill, many Vietnamese feared that the SEZs would be dominated by China, leading to worries about the loss of national sovereignty. On 9 June 2018, the Vietnamese authorities eventually yielded under enormous public pressure and postponed voting on the law indefinitely. This is considered the most serious riot in Vietnam since the 2014 riots.
The Cybersecurity Law seeks to give the government full authority to strictly police the Internet, scrutinize personal information, censor online discussion, and punish or even jail online dissidents. It has been described as “largely a copy-and-paste version” of the Chinese Cybersecurity Law that commenced a year prior. The National Assembly of Vietnam passed the law on 12 June 2018 despite local and international opposition and it has been in effect since 1 January 2019.
Context
Protest culture in Vietnam
To mainstream media and many nongovernmental organizations, Vietnam is often perceived as harsh and uncompromising regarding the right to freedom of assembly. Reports from Human Rights Watch and the US State Department depict the ruling Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) as extremely illiberal and unforgiving of political dissent of any kind. Freedom House’s report on Vietnam in 2020 scores the country at 1 out of 4 for freedom of assembly, specifically citing the arrests and convictions as a result of the 2018 protests as the reason for its score, and 0 out of 4 for freedom for nongovernmental organizations and trade unions or similar professional organizations. Amnesty International also reports harassment, assault, prosecution, torture, and executions towards pro-democracy activists, independent journalists, authors, and publishers in its Vietnam 2020 review. According to Human Rights Watch, in April 2018 the chief judge in Hanoi sentenced political activists to 7 to 12 years of imprisonment each under Article 79 of the Criminal Code for political activism.
Scholars and observers of Vietnam, however, have a different outlook. Many agree that the country has actually been exercising a responsive-repressive strategy since the 1990s, taking certain measures to show its responsiveness and tolerance to criticism from its citizens and exercising repression only as a last resort. Political scientist and Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University Ben Kerkvliet found that Vietnamese citizens “frequently and publicly” spoke out in criticism of their living and working conditions, most often through thousands of strikes, occasionally with thousands of participants each. His 2019 book Speaking Out in Vietnam: public political criticism in a communist party-ruled nation showed how government officials were in reality often sympathetic to workers’ demands, accommodating to concerns with land confiscation, and even to some extent tolerating calls for democratization that threatened the ideology of the regime. Some regime critics were not detained at all; many were confined for brief periods but never imprisoned; those who were convicted faced shorter lengths of imprisonment compared to past decisive crackdowns and repressions.
Past anti-China protests in Vietnam
Although public demonstrations are not common in Vietnam, anti-China protests has occurred on numerous occasions and are met with a balance of responsiveness and repression by the state, albeit with extra caution given the addition of an external party – China, no less – into the state-society relationship in Vietnam.