Asia Sentinel
False hope of help from Trump
Jan 21
By: David Brown
By almost any measure, 2020 was a calamitous year for Vietnam's democracy movement. Already reduced by the Hanoi regime's increasingly efficient repression, now it was transfixed by Donald Trump's battle for a second term. Trump, it was said, would defend Vietnam against China. Oddly but somehow understandably, a majority of those who doubt the nation's single-party dictatorship came to view the American president as their hope for a brighter future.
Disillusionment with Vietnam's current regime, even despair, is understandable. Controls on what may be said don't sit all that well on a nation that's been opening to the global economy and sending its brightest abroad to study for a quarter century. Vietnam's democracy movement is, or at least it was, a loosely-organized network of citizens who have not hesitated to call out the regime. The movement was empowered by the Internet, which for roughly a decade enabled dissident speech to be heard by Vietnam's citizens despite the regime's censorship of domestic media.