Vietnam's Blogosphere

In Vietnam about a quarter of the population is on the Internet. This is a quite impressive statistic: their connectivity is noticeably superior to most other countries in the so-called Developing World. But that is not what impressed me the most, but the use that the Vietnamese are giving to this technology. The government puts much less effort to control access and contents that are divulged through the Internet than other Socialist countries like, say, China. Thus, the Web has become in an instrument for people to exercise their freedom of speech, which is otherwise restricted in the country (although, again, not to the extent of other countries with similar systems).

Not so long ago a lawyer, relatively well known in the Saigon intellectual circles, was charged with sedition and arrested in a very public, well-orchestrated operation. He had been calling for some political changes in the country and questioning the authority of the party for some time, but it looks as if he went a little too far (in terms of the Vietnamese regime level of tolerance) by establishing international connections to support his cause and, above all, by writing an alternative constitution for the country that he used to promote his ideas of change. When we mentioned this news over lunch to a Vietnamese colleague of us, he just commented: “It will be interesting to see how the blogging community reacts…. He wouldn’t have dared to do something as risky if he was not counting on public support….”

It turns out that the blogging community is one of the most influential mechanisms to which independent opinions are expressed in the country. Thousands of blogs, being updated daily from pretty much every point of Vietnam’s geography are the most open, autonomous, and effective means through which information and opinions on the daily happenings are exchanged. Issues like corruption, poor government practices, sports (I love Asia, they really follow soccer!) (what’s wrong with the US!?), and so on are broadly discussed. The most influential bloggers are middle age journalists that have access to more information than the common citizen. They get to say on the web some of the things that you don’t read on the papers or see on TV. However, they still write much less than what they know: they seem to understand better than our hero of the previous paragraph (the apocryphal constitution’s author) that this system can be pushed just up to a certain limit…