More than 200 mostly young people gathered outside the Vietnamese embassy in London to protest against Vietnam’s ruling communist party, demanding the release of all prisoners of conscience and calling for democratic reforms.
What was interesting about this protest that I attended in December 2023 was the age of the protesters. They were mostly young people who had grown up in Vietnam, and this was the first protest many had ever participated in, having only left the country a few years ago.
Back in Vietnam, there is almost no space to challenge communist rule and values. These citizens grew up in a nation where TV, radio and education were heavily censored by the authorities and there was limited access to international media. Critical voices were stifled, so most people understandably don’t get involved in politics.
This changes when younger people move abroad, as I have learned during my ongoing research with recent immigrants to the UK. With access to independent, more critical news sources, wider discussions and alternative opinions, migrants tell me that they feel emboldened to question what they have been taught and to learn about widespread human rights abuses or corruption scandals back home.
Unlike an earlier generation of Vietnamese migrants (known as “the boat people”) who fled communist rule decades ago, this group is new to protesting.
The demonstration I attended was organized by the Viet Tan Reform Party, which the Vietnamese government labels a terrorist group. Particularly striking was the yellow flag of the former Republic of South Vietnam. Vietnam’s current government deems display of this flag as a form of sedition.
Another banner laments that it’s been 50 years since China occupied the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea, territory that is also claimed by Vietnam.
Labor movement
Since the 1990s Vietnam’s government has increasingly encouraged young people to move abroad. From the state’s perspective, labor export programs have two main advantages:
First, they ameliorate chronic levels of high youth unemployment, especially in areas of Vietnam that have received little economic investment. The emigration of discontented young people can also act as a safety valve to avert popular protest in authoritarian regimes.
Second, migrant remittances back to Vietnam constitute a crucial and reliable source of revenue – over US$10 billion per year, making it among the world’s top 10 remittance-receiving countries.
Rising inflation in Vietnam makes foreign currency even more valuable, increasing the attractiveness of labor migration for people in low-paid jobs.
The number of people wanting to depart vastly exceeds the availability of regularized migration opportunities through approved labor export agreements. Thus, over the past 20 years, Vietnamese migrants have increasingly resorted to irregular transnational journeys in the hopes of finding work and transforming the lives of their families back home. Europe has emerged as a popular destination due to the strength of the euro and the pound.
Officially, Vietnamese authorities denounce irregular migration, but in practice brokers and agencies continue to operate and expand with local authorities often turning a blind eye or even being actively involved.
A new generation
For decades, criticism of the Vietnamese government was spearheaded by Vietnam’s “boat people,” who had fled their home country in the 1970s-80s after the Vietnamese Communist Party defeated US forces and “reunified” the country. The trauma of their desperate escapes and resentment towards communism runs deep in these diasporas.
The US hosts by far the largest Vietnamese diaspora from this period, and it is highly critical of Vietnam’s Communist Party while being quite influential in the US.
A representative of Viet Tan’s much smaller UK chapter explained to me how the first generation of protesters has been declining in number with aging. However, this trend of decline has recently been reversed by the significant influx of recent arrivals in the UK.
Members of the long-term, established old guard and their descendants now call the UK their home and do not expect to move back to Vietnam, giving them a degree of security as they criticize the Vietnamese government.
More recent migrants, on the other hand, still have friends and family back home, and most of them want to return at some point. The stakes are higher for them. One protester told me of his fear that police guards would be waiting for him at Hanoi airport. So with the increasing numbers of participants at such events, protestors send an all-too-rare message that Vietnamese authorities must be held to account.
On April 29, another anti-communist embassy protest in London attracted similar numbers. What is clear is that large swaths of Vietnamese people continue to emigrate in the hope of a better life, but sometimes in moving away, they see their home country in a completely different light.
Seb Rumsby is a Leverhulme early career fellow of the University of Birmingham.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Never read such rubbish! Virtually everything he says about Vietnam is wrong! In any case, why do these westerners have to poke their noses into everyone else’s affairs?