Activism in Vietnam: Political Practice and Cognitive Resistance

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Activism in Vietnam

Political Practice and Cognitive Resistance

A thesis submitted to The University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities

2020

Anh-Susann Pham Thi

School of Social Sciences Sociology Department The University of Manchester

Table of Contents Abstract ...... 4 Declaration ...... 5 Copyright Statement ...... 5 Acknowledgements ...... 6 Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 7 1.1 Purpose of the Thesis ...... 10 1.2 Research Question and Key Argument ...... 11 1.3 Structure of the Thesis ...... 12 Chapter 2: Literature Review ...... 15 2.1 Social Movements in Vietnam ...... 15 2.1 Southern Social Movements and Southern Theory ...... 24 2.2 Cognitive Approaches in Social Movement Studies ...... 28 2.3 Conclusion ...... 36 Chapter 3: Theoretical Framework ...... 39 3.1 A Decolonial-Marxist Perspective as a Guiding Theoretical Framework 39 3.1.1 Capitalist Totality and Ideological State Apparatuses ...... 40 3.1.2 Epistemological Coloniality ...... 45 3.1.3 Interlacing Northern and Southern Epistemologies...... 52 3.2 Terminologies, Definitions and Relations ...... 54 3.2.1 Social Movements and Resistance ‘in itself’ and ‘for itself’...... 55 3.2.2 Subjugated Knowledges and Cognitive Resistance ...... 59 3.3 A Morphological Approach to Cognitive Resistance ...... 63 3.3.1 Morphology of Political Concepts...... 64 3.3.2 Morphological Approach Adapted ...... 67 3.4 Summary ...... 70 Chapter 4: Methodology ...... 72 4.1 Principles and Ethics of Critical Ethnography ...... 73 4.2 Data Collection and Data Analysis ...... 75 4.3 The Researcher’s Positionality ...... 83 Chapter 5: Research Context ...... 86 5.1 The Shift Towards a ‘Socialist-Oriented’ Market Economy ...... 86 5.2 Channelling and Alienating Political Participation ...... 94 5.3 Conclusion ...... 97 Chapter 6: The Making of Dissidents ...... 99 6.1 Criminalising Activism ...... 100 6.2 Embodying Experiences of Repression ...... 107

6.3 Collectivity without Identity ...... 116 Chapter 7 Online-Activism: A Networked Democracy Movement ...... 124 7.1 Political Practice of Online Activism ...... 126 7.1.1 Online Petitions ...... 127 7.1.2 Social Media and Citizen Journalism ...... 131 7.1.3 The Networked Civil Society Approach ...... 137 7.2 Cognitive Resistance and the Ideology of Western Democracy ...... 143 7.2.1 Core Concept: Political Participation ...... 144 7.2.2 Adjacent Concepts: Multiparty system ...... 149 7.2.3 Peripheral Concept: Anti-China Nationalism ...... 153 7.3 Conclusion ...... 158 Chapter 8 Rights-based Resistance: Labour and Peasant Activism ...... 161 8.1 Political Practice of Rights-based Resistance ...... 162 8.1.1 Underground Labour Activism, Trade Unions and Legal Knowledge ...... 163 8.1.2 Peasant Resistance against Land Dispossession ...... 170 8.2 Cognitive Resistance and the Law’s Ideological Apparatus ...... 177 8.2.1 Core Concept: Rule of Law ...... 179 8.2.2 Adjacent Concept: Self-determination ...... 181 8.2.3 Peripheral Concept: State Responsibility ...... 186 8.3 Conclusion ...... 189 Chapter 9 Catholic Politics: A Case for Environmental Justice ...... 192 9.1 Political Practice of Catholic Activists ...... 194 9.1.1 The Church as a Political Space for Knowledge Production...... 195 9.1.2 Class-Action Lawsuits in Solidarity with the Poor ...... 200 9.1.3 Against and from within the Prison System ...... 203 9.2 Cognitive Resistance and the Church’s Ideological Apparatus ...... 207 9.2.1 Core Concept: Justice and Truth ...... 209 9.2.2 Adjacent Concept: Love for one’s Country ...... 214 9.2.3 Peripheral Concept: Anti-Communism ...... 218 9.3 Conclusion ...... 222 Chapter 10: Conclusions ...... 225 10.1 Researching Activism in Vietnam ...... 226 10.1.1 Towards a decolonial-Marxist framework ...... 229 10.1.2 Cognitive Resistance and the Spatiality of Ideological Systems ...... 231 10.1.3 No End to Cognitive Resistance ...... 235 References ...... 238 Appendix ...... 266 Participant Information Sheet ...... 266 List of Interview Participants...... 269 Sample Extract of an Interview Transcription...... 273

Word Count: 82.746

Abstract

This thesis is the first ethnographic attempt to study contemporary dissident activism in Vietnam. As a country that became known and keeps being remembered as a war-torn postcolony by the West, Vietnam has managed to lift itself from one of the poorest to one of the fastest growing market economies in Southeast Asia. Yet, while holding on to the legacy of a communist-led liberation movement, the present-day Communist-Party (CPV) itself became subject to political challenges from below. In fact, dissident voices critical of the government’s malgovernance over social, economic and environmental issues have mushroomed across regions, classes and generations. Based on 52 interviews with activists and numerous informal conversations with citizens conducted over a period of 11 months across Vietnam, this thesis interrogates distinct political practices and political ideas of Vietnamese dissidents. In doing so, it explores different anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian practices including online activism for democratic change (Chapter 7), rights-based resistance of workers and peasants (Chapter 8) and religious politics against environmental and social injustices (Chapter 9). What these practices have in common is the disclosure of politically ‘subjugated knowledges’ (see Foucault 1976). On the way to exploring these subjugated knowledges, this research has revealed how anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian practices of Vietnamese activists are motivated by a set of contradictory political ideas and concepts including nationalism, anti-communism, statism, legal ideology, liberal democracy and Catholicism displaying the continuous hegemony of Westerncentric epistemologies in non-Western societies. Understanding this dissonance between political practices and political ideas lies at the heart of this study. By drawing on a decolonial-Marxist theoretical framework, I situate this dissonance between practices and ideas within the system of ‘capitalist totality’, ‘ideological state apparatuses’ and ‘epistemological coloniality’. This thesis suggests a distinction between resistance ‘in itself’ and resistance ‘for itself’. I conceptualise that resistance ‘in itself’ is concerned with political practices that are mostly reactive to immediate moments of state repression (state-society relations), while resistance ‘for itself’ centres on actively trespassing on the spatiality of ideological systems and ideological state apparatuses via capitalism, coloniality, nationalism and state institutions such as the judiciary (capital-epistemology relations). Thus, the trespassing on ideological systems and apparatuses hinges on a process I call ‘cognitive resistance’ by which activists re-contest political concepts from dominant ideologies and re-insert them into new ideational structures. In other words, cognitive resistance gives new meaning to political concepts. Overall, this thesis argues against the idealization of resistance in Southern social movements but, instead, calls for a better understanding of the embeddedness of social movements within local and global structures shaped by capitalism, state authoritarianism and epistemological coloniality alike.

Declaration

No portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning.

Copyright Statement i. The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis) owns certain copyright or related rights in it (the “Copyright”) and she has given The University of Manchester certain rights to use such Copyright, including for administrative purposes. ii. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts and whether in hard or electronic copy, may be made only in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) and regulations issued under it or, where appropriate, in accordance with licensing agreements which the University has from time to time. This page must form part of any such copies made. iii. The ownership of certain Copyright, patents, designs, trademarks and other intellectual property (the “Intellectual Property”) and any reproductions of copyright works in the thesis, for example graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use without the prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions. iv. Further information on the conditions under which disclosure, publication and commercialisation of this thesis, the Copyright and any Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions described in it may take place is available in the University IP Policy (see http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/DocuInfo.aspx?DocID=24420 ), in any relevant Thesis restriction declarations deposited in the University Library, The University Library’s regulations (see http://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/about/regulations/ ) and in The University’s policy on Presentation of Theses.

Acknowledgements

Completing this thesis would not have been possible without the support of my supervisors, my research participants, my family and friends. First, I wish to express my gratitude to my supervisors, Dr Simin Fadaee and Dr Kevin Gillan, who not only supported, advised and understood me, but who trained me to think and write clearly and find a way to make complexities and contradictions comprehensible. I am particularly thankful for your challenging questions, your knowledge and your numerous comments which most of the time expressed my thoughts better than I was ever able to formulate in the three years. I cannot thank you enough. My research participants in Vietnam, the dissidents, activists and the ordinary women and men equally deserve my utmost gratitude. I thank you for your kindness, for sharing your stories with me and for trusting my good intentions. I wish I could mention many of you by name, but political sensitivity does not allow for it. I am also grateful for my parents who tried everything to liberate me from the hardship of everyday life and extended family responsibilities so that I could focus on my studies. You and many of my friends, Palina Lissitsyna, Alexus Davis, Dr Asan Bacak, Mervete Bobaj, Florence Buschmann, Maryam Kirchmann, Lilia Becker, Martin Greenwood and Dr Necla Acik stimulated my intellectual journey (and laziness). Without you, my life would feel stagnant. Dr Jörg Wischermann, Prof Angie Ngoc Tran and Dr Joe Buckley deserve special mentioning as they continue to support, encourage and believe in my work. I pay respect to your knowledge, academic accuracy and inspiring discipline. Finally, I thank the University of Manchester and the sociology department for supporting and funding this research. With this scholarship, I was offered the opportunity to start an academic career, a privilege that I acknowledged every moment of the last three years.

Chapter 1: Introduction

As sociology has long been dominated by Eurocentric theories, so have social movement theories failed to incorporate the complexities and particularities of the Global Southern experience. Despite the overall emancipatory nature of most empirical cases of social movements and their theories, the focus has historically been placed on geographically Western areas (Fadaee 2016:1-3). In reaction to the persistent dominance of Eurocentric, or more precisely, Westerncentric social theories and the lack of concepts that incorporate Southern complexities, an increasing number of scholars from Western and non-Western countries have devoted their attention to Southern social movements (Bayat 2010; Fadaee 2016; Nilsen and Motta 2011) and Southern epistemologies (Bhambra 2014; Comaroff and Comaroff 2012; Connell et al. 2017; Santos 2016). However, both scholarly inquiries have developed rather independently, which resulted in a disconnection of the study of Southern social movements from the study of Southern epistemologies (see Fadaee 2016:11). There are, however, also powerful moments in which Global Southern politics and theories reconnect with those of the Global North. In recent years, a surge of decolonial movements spread over continents and took a great leap towards decentring the West as the epicentre of modernity, scientific knowledge and critical theory. In fact, decolonial movements and literature are actively incorporating Southern practices and concepts into its Northern counterparts with and from a Global Southern standpoint. There is, however, the everlasting pendulum that swings either in favour of the universalist or the cultural relativist worldview. Engaging with the non-Western ‘other’ or ‘us’ (according to one’s standpoint) resulted in the binary logic of antagonistic categories that is particularly characteristic of the post- and decolonial discourse and the studies of Southern social movements (see Hanafi 2020). Accordingly, the Global South is oftentimes caricatured as the bearer of subaltern agency, where the emancipation of the oppressed and the valuation of the communal over the individual prevail, and anti- neoliberal and almost Communist/Socialist-like attitudes flourish. By contrast, the Global North is associated with capitalism and colonialism, the driver of inequality,

racism and the source of Western domination over the non-Western ‘other’ (see Hanafi 2020:5). The overemphasis on difference side-lines the importance of seeing the common and conceals how authoritarian politics is causing authoritarian attitudes in both the Global North and the Global South. Therefore, it is important to look not only for emancipatory resistance and collective actions as distinct of either the North or the South but to explore the contradictions and paradoxes that surround and interfere with the hopes for a decolonial and anti-capitalist future on the global level. In doing so, the geopolitical position of the Global South and its historically shaped identity cannot be viewed as stand-alone indicators for a social movement’s emancipatory and liberating force. Therefore, by interrogating distinct political practices and the development of political ideas, I hope to be able to move toward a ‘thin’ definition of resistance that approaches the empirical phenomenon without importing a pre-supposed political evaluation on the basis of geopolitics. For this task, in Chapter 3, I elucidate a theoretical distinction between ‘resistance in itself’ and ‘resistance for itself’. As extant studies have shown, ethnographic research is one of the most insightful ways to access the multi-layered, the hidden and the ordinary. Seeking to understand how activism is politically and ideologically composed, this thesis is the first comprehensive ethnographic attempt to explore activism in contemporary Vietnam, a place that has been closely entangled with the history of Western imperialism and colonialism and yet, culturally and politically so alien that an outsider’s eye struggles to make sense of the prevailing ideological and structural contradictions. In this thesis, I illustrate how a particular group of Vietnamese activists (also referred to as dissidents) experience their lived realities, challenge socio-economic structures and imagine political transformations in relation to capitalist and socialist ideologies. Not surprisingly, Vietnamese dissidents solve the ideological and socio-political equation differently than described above: here, the Global South and Communism are perceived as authoritarian and conservative, while the Western world and capitalism are perceived as democratic and liberating. Vietnamese dissidents publicly disagree with the communist-led government, its doctrines and policies, for which they are considered outright anti-communists. The

state media also denounces them as ‘reactionaries’, ‘terrorists’ or ‘agitators who aim to overthrow the state’ (Chapter 6). Yet, by looking at concrete political practices and ideas that manifest in different struggles, I show that Vietnamese dissidents are, in fact, against oppression, forced dispossession, exploitation, ideological indoctrination, corruption and injustice. They demand democratic participation and representation, the implementation of human and civil rights, freedom of expression and critical, non-ideological education. Hence, they are part and parcel of anti-capitalist struggles. However, while their political practices are of emancipatory potential, they also revive political ideas that are contradictory and conservative such as anti-Communism, nationalism, statism and liberal democracy. This thesis is based on the Althusserian premise that ideas and ideologies are, in the last instance, grounded in the concrete material conditions of a given time and space. According to Althusser (1971, 2014), ideas and ideologies not only define a subject’s ultimate social practice, but social practice itself is embedded in and regulated by the material existence of an ideological apparatus. As distinct from the practices of resistance, I refer to the ideational realm of social movements as ‘cognitive resistance’ (see Chapter 3) and develop the argument that political ideas and concepts (i.e., ways to make sense of the social and political world) are formulated in dialectical relation to embodied experiences of state repression, surveillance, exploitation and dispossession. What I call ‘cognitive resistance’ denotes the activists’ ideational process that motivates distinct political practices. And although this thesis finds that political practices and political ideas are complex and paradoxical, it also finds that their architecture is configured in such a way that gives these contradictions a certain logic. The importance of context reveals that practices and ideas are relative to where they are encountered, what is adjacent to them, and how they are perceived. Drawing on a decolonial-Marxist theoretical framework, the general approach of this study is to first grasp the context and material conditions that shape the environment of activism in Vietnam (Chapter 5 and 6). The main subject of this thesis is twofold: It first interrogates concrete political practices that disclose - what Foucault called - ‘subjugated knowledges’ (first half of chapters 7 to 9) and second,

it explores the political ideas that motivate, yet partially contradict, those political practices (second half of chapters 7 to 9).

1.1 Purpose of the Thesis

This thesis seeks to contribute empirically and theoretically to the current debates on Southern social movements in general, and political activism in Vietnam in particular. The critique of Westerncentrism in social movement studies emphasises that Southern movements have not been sufficiently included in theory building. Therefore, the first research gap concerns the empirical investigation of contemporary political activism in Vietnam. In general, there is very little known about who these Vietnamese activists (or dissidents) really are. Although public discourse about Vietnamese dissidents is fairly exhaustive, most of it is ideologically determined by state-run media and offers little space for independent sociological inquiry. My aim is to find out who these people are, why they gather together and what conditions make them willing to sacrifice their physical freedom. As Foucault (1976:136) puts it: “We should listen to these people, not to our century-old little love song for ‘socialism’. […] And above all, let us not ask them, if they are still and despite everything, ‘communists’, as if that were the condition for our consenting to listen to them”. Unfortunately, the political left and current scholarly literature on Vietnam have failed to problematize the wide-ranging ideological problems caused by ‘actually existing Socialisms’. Therefore, evoking Erik Olin Wright’s last book How to be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century? this thesis situates Wright’s question into the local context of Vietnam and the global context of capitalism and coloniality; and asks: How to be an Anti-capitalist in ‘actually existing socialism’? As a second purpose, this thesis breaks with the hitherto fragmentation of social movement theory and takes as a premise that seemingly disparate struggles should be analysed as part of a whole, that is, the struggle against ‘capitalist totality’ (Webber 2019). In view of this, this study provides a critical account of how political practices and political ideas manifest in relation to global capitalism and epistemological coloniality. Through engaging with the local and the concrete,

while frequently returning to the global and the abstract I aim at connecting the empirical (the subjective-individual) to the theoretical (the objective-structural). The third and probably most obvious purpose of this study is to question the dichotomy of Northern and Southern epistemologies. I show how anti-capitalist practices in Vietnam are accompanied by political ideas that facilitate the integration of Western epistemologies into non-Western contexts. I argue that like any other individual member of a society, movement actors, dissidents or activists are not exempt from the political, economic and ideological realm of hegemonic powers. In doing so, this thesis discloses not only agency and the urge for emancipation and critical thinking, but also how capitalist-colonial epistemologies can be reproduced by the subaltern, ultimately hindering the process of emancipation that one seeks to accelerate.1 Hence, the final purpose of this study is to engage with the complexity and normativity of epistemology and cognition in movement formation by exploring the various configurations of seemingly contradictory political concepts.

1.2 Research Question and Key Argument

Based on field research conducted in both urban and rural areas in North, Central and South Vietnam, this research analyses concrete political practices and ideas of dissident activists and asks to what extent these practices and ideas are informed by a capitalist-colonial world order. The research aims to explore the characteristics of contemporary activism in Vietnam and focuses on political practices and ideas in relation to Vietnam’s political-economic context. In conducting that exploration, I answered the following research questions: (1) What forms of political practices exist in the context of Vietnam’s present-day socialist-oriented market economy? (2) What political ideas motivate activists’ political practices? and (3) How can

1 Even the most dedicated scholars and promoters of Southern voices have to be cautious with normative knowledges, which - at worst - ends up patronising the ‘Global Southerner’ and promoting a new form of Third world fundamentalism. Cooper and Morrell (2014:2) make a strong statement: “Unless we are aware of our tools and concepts and the politics to which they are linked, we will invariably reproduce old forms of oppressive power and new orthodoxies.”. In this thesis, I attempt to avoid this by focussing on the contradictions and dissonances of political practices and ideas in social movements.

these political practices and ideas be explained with regard to authoritarian states, global capitalist structures and dominant ideologies? As this thesis develops, I will explore how activists connect their struggles against authoritarianism, labour exploitation, land grabbing and environmental pollution to ideas around democracy, the rule of law and Catholic theology. At the heart of this thesis lies the attempt to lay bare the common grounds, complexities and dissonances between political practices and underlying political ideas. With this, I unveil a mode of ‘epistemological normativity’ as expressive of coloniality and immanent to the capitalist world order. One of the main contentions of this thesis is that an analytical distinction between the ‘practice of resistance’ and ‘cognitive resistance’; and resistance ‘in itself’ and resistance ‘for itself’ is needed in order to grasp social movements in formation. In other words, social movements are formative processes that allow for dialectal learning informed by past experiences, real-time practices and ideas concerned with an alternative future. I interpret different political practices and respective cognitive processes as contextual, embodied through experiences of physical repression and embedded in the ideological conflict between socialism and capitalism. It centres on the interweaving of material and ideational activity and ultimately affirms that social movements can only make their own history under circumstances they have not chosen themselves (Cox and Nilsen 2014:26, 30).

1.3 Structure of the Thesis

Chapter 1 introduced the subject matter and outlined the main argument and objectives of this study. The remainder of this thesis is structured as follows: In Chapter 2, I provide a brief literature review. Situating the study within three bodies of literature: ‘social movements in Vietnam’, ‘Southern social movements’ and ‘cognitive approaches in social movement theories’ which allows me to formulate the research gaps that this thesis wants to address. In Chapter 3, I will outline the theoretical framework that underpins my analysis. This includes a decolonial-Marxist approach particularly focussing on the concepts ‘capitalist totality’, ‘ideological state apparatuses’ and ‘epistemological coloniality’. It further provides definitions of resistance, subjugated knowledge and

embodied cognition. As a conceptual contribution, this chapter introduces the distinction between ‘resistance in itself’, ‘resistance for itself’ and ‘cognitive resistance’, before suggesting an adapted morphological approach to the understanding of cognitive resistance. Chapter 4 is the methodology chapter that elaborates my research design. Here, I will reflect upon my positionality as a Western-educated and second- generation Vietnamese migrant. Furthermore, I go into more detail of critical ethnography and describe the challenges I had to face during and after my fieldwork. Finally, I critically assess the limits of qualitative research and the scope and method of data collection. Chapter 5 provides the research context and focusses on the country’s socio-economic and socio-political environment. It starts with explaining the role of Vietnam’s shift from central planning towards a ‘socialist-oriented market- economy’ for the state’s relative political hegemony, followed by outlining the state’s strategy to channel and alienate political participation from ‘below’ through Communist Party-controlled mass organisations. Both developments illustrate the general, yet particular, background of Vietnam as a site of political contestation. Chapter 6, The Making of Dissidents is the first of the four empirical chapters and centres on the state’s repressive apparatus that criminalises political activism. This chapter considers activists in authoritarian contexts as producers of knowledge ‘from below’ who focus on the dissemination of political ideas. As Vietnamese activists embody the conditions of state repression, surveillance, police harassment as well as the informalisation of labour and life, this chapter also evinces that activists refuse a coherent identity. The three subsequent empirical chapters explore how three distinct political practices are accompanied by distinct political thought processes. This includes online activism for democratic change; the circulation of legal knowledge as political tool for the powerless; and the return of religion and the Church in the production of knowledge. Each of the three empirical chapters starts with exploring concrete practices of political resistance and thereby identifies them as internally related and connected parts of a whole. Each chapter continues with exploring the

underlying political ideas of activists and locates the traces that display a hegemony of Westerncentric ideologies. Chapter 7, Online Activism: A Networked Democracy Movement starts with following the footprints of the activists introduced in Chapter 6. It explores how the spaces of online activism became a resource for knowledge production and dissemination. Vietnamese democracy activists formulate ideas around political participation, a multi-party system and anti-China nationalism as ideational background for democratic change. I will show that activists narrow themselves to an unquestioned ideal of Western models of liberal democracy that is perceived as the political adversary to Communism. Chapter 8, Rights-based Resistance: Labour and Peasant Activism discusses how labour and peasant activists centre on the practice of rights-based resistance in order to disclose and disseminate subjugated legal knowledge. It also shows that rights-based resisters embrace a set of political concepts comprising the rule of law, self-determination and state responsibility which reflects their subordination to the law’s ideological apparatus. In the last empirical chapter, Chapter 9, Catholic Politics: A Case for Environmental Justice, I show how the political practice of progressive Catholic activists involves issues around environmental justice, political prisoners and the poor. In doing so, Catholic activists embrace political concepts including justice and truth, a particular kind of nationalism as well as anti-Communism. I demonstrate that Catholic activists combine anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian political practices with anti-communist and nationalist ideas. In Chapter 10, the Conclusion, I assess the core contributions of this study and reflect on the key arguments and limitations of this thesis.

Chapter 2: Literature Review

Three bodies of literature are relevant to this study. The first body examines existing studies on social movements in Vietnam. The second part reviews the work on Southern social movements and the third part explores cognitive approaches in social movement studies. Reviewing the three bodies of literature reveals three research gaps that are relevant to this thesis: First, studies on social movements in Vietnam have explored different struggles separately and at the same time elevated the analysis of state-society relations (meso-level). Consequently, existing studies failed to consider the connectedness of struggles as well as to acknowledge the impact of capital(ism) on state-society relations as well as on activists’ lived experiences (micro-macro level). Second, the theories of Southern social movements have emphasised that seemingly passive or heavily repressed communities and populations do, in fact, resist and find their own, mostly hidden, ways to participate politically and make sense of global southern realities independent of Eurocentric models of explanation. While it seems convincing to argue that Southern movements embody Southern epistemologies and produce new kinds of activist knowledges that shape the imagination of future, it remains unclear how these knowledges are constituted and structured (questions of ontology). In light of this, the third body of literature is concerned with the cognitive level of social movements and the conceptualisation of activist knowledges. A cursory look at the literature reveals that activist knowledges are predominantly praised for their emancipatory character (except right-wing movements) and seldom conceived as being embedded in wider capitalist-colonial structures, hegemonic ideological systems and specific state-society relations.

2.1 Social Movements in Vietnam

On Dissidents and Public Criticism Kerkvliet’s (2019) Speaking Out in Vietnam: Public Political Criticism in a Communist Party-Ruled Nation is the first encompassing study that dealt with the landscape of contemporary protest and activism in Vietnam. It is a widely welcomed and long-awaited contribution to the research area and will greatly

inform this thesis. Kerkvliet examines different forms of public criticism related to four seemingly disconnected struggles over labour, land, nationalism/national pride and democratisation. Other themes like corruption and anti-China sentiments also run through his analysis. His work relies on an extensive data set comprising more than six hundred written accounts in Vietnamese blog sites, hundreds of newspaper articles, recordings, video clips, reports, social media posts and other online and archival material. In addition, he draws on observations and conversations with activists that he collected over the years. His work represents voices of workers, Vietnamese Communist Party (CPV) officials, intellectuals and democracy activists and covers a time period that spans from the mid-1990s until 2015. Kerkvliet makes the argument that Vietnam experienced an increase in public political criticism since the 1990s which state authorities have handled in various ways ranging from toleration to responsiveness to repression. The latter transpires in concrete physical actions including police intimidation, confinement and the conviction of activists to lengthy prison terms (Kerkvliet 2014:101, further details in Chapter 6). His meticulous research is rich in empirical details and information of the years, however, falls short of theoretical contributions and fails to identify more general lessons about political contention in Vietnam beyond the empirical details of each thematic struggle not least because he hesitates to draw connections (or cannot find sufficient evidence) between the four different themes of protest. The lack of drawing interconnections as well as the contextualisation into global capitalist and historical structures are the main gap also to be found in other studies on social movements in Vietnam, which makes it difficult to compare and theorise Vietnamese social movements with other cases of the Global South or Western societies.

Civil Society Paradigm A common approach in the research area draws on the concept of civil society and moves on the basis of state-society relations in order to understand politics from below (Kerkvliet, Heng, and Koh 2003; Kerkvliet, Nguyen, and Bach 2008; Thayer 2008, 2009a; Tran Thi Thu Trang 2009; Waibel, Ehlert, and Feuer 2014; Wells- Dang 2014, 2010, 2012c, 2012b, 2012a; Wischermann 2010, 2011, 2013;

Wischermann, Bui, and Dang 2016). Against Western assumptions that civic organisations and associational activism are indispensable steps towards democratisation, Wischermann’s studies (2010, 2013, 2016) suggest that, while Vietnamese civic organisations (such as Communist mass organisations) declare support for democracy, they are at the same time made to maintain the authoritarian rule of the one-Party state through intra-organisational structures and internal decision-making processes. The role of civic or mass organisations for purposes of state legitimation will be further elaborated in Chapter 5. Yet, despite the limits of Vietnamese civic organisations to achieve democratic change, Wischermann (2011) shows that their activities still affect recognizable political changes especially in functional areas of governance. In view of this, Wells-Dang calls for the re-conceptualisation of civil society in non-democratic societies and suggests to consider it as “a process of cross-sectoral networking, rather than a set of autonomous organisations” and “a political process of collective action and alliance-building” that includes both individual activists and organisation (Wells- Dang 2012: 2, 24, 32). These informal civil society networks provide channels for negotiations, conflicts and interpersonal connections with state authorities. Contributions that employ the civil society paradigm generally stress that state-society relations are dynamic and permit spaces for public criticism not least because the state apparatus cannot penetrate all sections of life. The degree of toleration, however, depends on the subject of criticism. While dissenting “particular government policies and programs or particular non-senior officials” might be more tolerable, criticism of top national leaders or the entire governmental and political system itself is suppressed quickly (Kerkvliet 2014:102). Accordingly, protests by peasants and workers against malgovernance are more likely to be tolerated than open opposition by “middle class or well-educated urbanites” (ibid.). The civil society paradigm is a valuable lens to explore forms of civic engagement in state-society relations and paved the way for studying non-aligned dissident activism in a way that allows the researcher to avoid direct confrontations with the state and its institutions. The civil society paradigm, however, shows weaknesses in analysing capital-society and capital-state relations: Two spheres that would

provide valuable insights into the macro-level constraints and opportunities for social movements and states in capitalist societies alike (see Chapter 3).

The Networked Social Movement Approach Social media has played a decisive role in Vietnamese activism and is a topic discussed by several authors (Bui 2016; Kurfürst 2015; Morris-Jung 2013, 2015; Wells-Dang 2012). Wells-Dang’s (2012b) work on civil society networks was one of the earliest to point out that much of the personal interconnections between independent civil society actors was enabled through new internet-based technologies. Tools for media advocacy involved blogs, chats, magazines, e-mail list servers and aimed at the purpose to reach both state authorities and leverage public opinions. A particular focus on the new oppositional coalition emerged around the bauxite mining controversy in 2009, a highly controversial public debate over government plans to mine bauxite in the upland regions of Vietnam’s Central Highlands. Jason Morris-Jung (2013) examined that in the bauxite mining controversy, the Internet became the main public forum for debates, through which alternative sources of information were provided and circulated, enabling public critical commentary and political discussion. Internet-based civic engagement gave birth to new forms of protest and was soon referred to as “citizen journalism” (Morris-Jung 2013:51). Examples like the bauxite controversy or Bloc 8406 (see Chapter 7) symbolise the strength of internet-based networks that connected scientists, technocrats, domestic reporters, NGOs, artists, retired officials, activist bloggers, government officials, religious leaders and overseas Vietnamese with one another (ibid.). The raising number of online petitions played a particular role in identifying these new and growing networks of political opposition. Online petitions addressed a variety of issues including demands for democratisation, revision of the 1992 Constitution and the release of political prisoners (Thayer 2009:18; Morris-Jung 2015:404; see Chapter 7). Despite the internet’s crucial role in providing spaces for political participation, Sandra Kurfürst argued that the cyber community is only partially connected. Hence, a “networked social movement” as conceptualised by Manuel Castells (2012) is yet to be formed (Kurfürst 2015:124). Although online communication practices can be observed in a range of collective

actions covering land protests, labour strikes, opposition to bauxite mining and anti- China demonstrations, it is crucial that actors are able to switch, connect and include networks that have been previously “marginalised in the offline world” (Kurfürst 2015:128). In this thesis, I show that the connection of different struggles has indeed happened in the period following Kurfürst’s research. However, as both Kurfürst (2015) and Thiem Hai Bui (2016) have stressed, the increase of online political discussions also reproduces existing power differentials and, in fact, led to the legitimation of anti-democratic legal regulations. As a result, measures to further restrict the freedom of expression and information via online censorship are enforced (see Chapter 6). The ‘networked social movement’ concept provides a tool to empirically trace the connections between different social actors. Yet, a lack of visibility of personal online connections does not infer that struggles are disconnected or compartmentalised. In this thesis, I will show how the connectivity of struggles is not only created by the virtual or interpersonal network of individual activists (Chapter 7) but is produced by the structures of capitalism itself (Chapter 8 and 9).

Peasant Resistance Drawing on James Scott’s (1985) notion of everyday resistance, Kerkvliet (2005, 2009) explores that peasant resistance against collectivisation processes during the 1960s and 70s have rarely been open or organized, but became most articulate on the everyday and micro-level. Everyday peasant resistance included the manipulation of crops, records of working hours in the cooperative, deceiving the officials, ‘hiding’ land from the authorities, sneaky contracts with authorities or siphoning off grain from collective harvests to private stores. Kerkvliet convincingly demonstrates that everyday behaviour at odds with policies indeed affected the course of the political system. Other approaches commonly used to make sense of peasant struggle in Vietnam incorporate O’Brien and Li’s (2006) concept of rightful resistance (Gillespie 2014; Kerkvliet 2014b; Labbé 2011; Steur and Das 2009; Tran Thi Thu Trang 2009) and focused on the local level and state- society relations of peasant resistance (Hy 2005; Kerkvliet 2005; Labbé 2011, 2015;

Tran Thi Thu Trang 2009; see Chapter 8).

Another popular framework that supports the argument of dynamic state- society relations in the context of peasant struggles is the notion of grassroots democracy. Similar to Wells-Dang, who coined the term rice-roots democracy (2010), Hai Hong Nguyen (2016) shows that the CPV undertook a number of rural (top-down) political reforms including the implementation of democratic regulations at the commune level. In 1997 this regulation became known as the ‘grass-roots democracy’ reform (GRD). The aim of GRD, however, was not to foster the people’s participation, but rather to ease “the causes of unrest, restore stability, and renew the CPV’s legitimacy and capacity to govern in rural areas” (Nguyen 2016:2). Nonetheless, it enabled peasants to apply GRD mechanisms with regard to city planning, land clearance for construction resettlement, and administrative reform (Nguyen 2016:3). Through examining three case studies in three provinces (Thai Binh, Hung Yuen and Da Nang) he evaluated the failures and successes of the reform and concluded that GRD “created a mutually empowering mechanism for both the party-state and the peasantry” (2016:183-4). Yet, the continuing existence of discontent, resistance and protests as will be reported in this thesis demonstrates that GRD is not sufficient to solve all ills, as it does not allow for criticism against the state and its capitalist relations (see Chapter 8, p. 179, fn 60).

Environmental Protests Scholars also dealt with Vietnam’s environmental movement. Focussing on the state-society relation, Kurfürst (2016) and Ngoc Anh Vu (2017) have engaged with the protests and campaigns that called for the protection of 6700 old trees in Hanoi that were announced to be cut down and sparked public outcry by activists and citizens (Vu 2017:1205). Resembling previous studies, Vu (2017) argued that environmental activism has opened up a new arena of contestation for civil society action, but more importantly, she notes that the nature of the ‘6700 Trees Movement’ was “far more political than meets the eye” (2017:1205). In fact, the apolitical façade of environmental movements is underpinned by regime critical commentary (see Chapter 9). A similar argument was made in O’Rourke’s (2004) ethnography, in which she analysed state, company and community responses to

environmental pollution. As communities vary in their internal cohesion and external resources, different mobilizing strategies resulted in different degrees of effectiveness and accordingly influenced how local officials responded to community demands. Based on a comparative analysis of six case studies that involved state-owned chemical plants, a Nike shoe factory, a Taiwanese textile plant, and a state-owned pulp and paper mill, she points to the challenges of balancing economic development and environmental protection, and thus, looked beyond state-society relations. O’Rourke emphasises how the relation of joint ventures, transnational companies and state-owned companies complicate the measures for environmental protection. Picking up on the analytical level of capital- labour and capital-society relations, O’Rourke is able to see that new opportunities for an alignment between communities, workers and state officials against foreign companies were created. Furthermore, she found that community members reframed environmental problems as health, accountability and moral issues, and in doing so, quoted Communist Party policies to put forward their demands. She observes that "some community members also appear to be angered by contradictions between socialist ideology and current realities of market economics” (O’Rourke 2004:97). O’Rourke concludes that it is indeed difficult to determine whether people truly believe the rhetoric of the Communist Party, or whether they simply use it against the government for strategic purposes. She touches on the underexplored ideological realm that resonates with forms of civic engagement in Vietnam. The political realm as well as the ideological bedrock of environmental movements is a topic that became even more visible in the case of a marine life disaster that caused an estimated 115 tonnes of dead fish due to the release of toxic chemicals by the steel plan Formosa in 2016 (see Vasavakul 2019, and Chapter 9 this thesis).2

2 Formosa Ha Tinh Steel is a subsidiary of Taiwan’s Formosa Plastics Group and one of Taiwan’s biggest conglomerates. Formosa admitted responsibility for pumping untreated industrial wastewater into the ocean causing a toxic chemical spill in Vietnam’s waters. Initially, the Formosa Plastics Group planned to construct the steel plant in Taiwan in 2004, however, the Environmental Impact Assessment Committee cautioned that the investment project would have a negative impact on the environment. As a consequence, the Formosa Plastics group set up the steel plant in Vietnam (Fan, Chiu, and Mabon 2020:5).

Organised Labour Resistance Labour resistance is one of the more accessible research areas, not least because industrial action should be tolerated and to a certain degree accommodated in a Communist party-state (Do and Van den Broek 2013). Scholars commend that Vietnam recorded 978 wildcat strikes between 1995 and 2005, followed by the 2006 strike wave with 140,000 workers demanding wage increase distributed throughout 150 strikes (Anner, M., Liu 2016; Anner 2018; Clarke, Lee, and Chi 2007; Do and Van den Broek 2013; Kerkvliet 2011; Siu and Chan 2015; Suhong 2011; Tran 2013). It is also praised that between 2006 and 2011 Vietnam witnessed, and thus tolerated, more labour strikes than any other Asian country despite its flourishing economy (Siu and Chan 2015:71). Reaching its peak in 2011, the total number of official strikes counted 857 incidents. Moreover, collective work stoppages, lodging complaints and petitions against the management are common forms of organised labour resistance in Vietnam (Nguyen 2019:1). Labour resistance comes with a variety of demands related to wages, social insurance, unfair treatment by employers, or generally deprived working conditions (Beresford and Nyland 1998; Kerkvliet 2011; Nguyen 2019; Tran 2007a, 2015). Yet, claims regarding changes of state laws and national policies are rather uncommon (Tran 2007, 2013). While Siu and Chan (2015) have analysed some macroeconomic factors that contributed to the raising number of strikes, Kerkvliet (2011) shows how meso- level factors including low pay, long working hours, abusive management and wages being in arrears, particularly in foreign-run enterprises like Taiwanese and South Korean firms, have been the major reasons for workers’ industrial actions. Further to this, Angie Ngoc Tran (2007a) addresses more global and systemic causes and argued against the exploitative nature of the global production chain. Others have devoted much of their research to the failures and successes of the Vietnamese trade union federation (VGCL) to adequately assist the workers’ in their demands (Clarke et al. 2007). Interestingly enough, Sui and Chan (2015:78) show that in comparison to Chinese workers, Vietnamese workers had a ‘very high

human rights awareness’ and reported in a 2007 survey that 85% felt that the trade union represents their interests, despite the union’s weaknesses (compared to 10% in their Chinese counterparts). This contradicts the perception of underground labour activists who participated in this study (see Chapter 8). Moreover, previous research has focused on organised labour that is typically confined to the immediate factory spaces and the surrounding workplace areas. Unlike these semi-tolerated industrial actions, other forms of independent labour resistance have been subjected to much harsher mechanisms of state control, discipline and physical repression. However, underground and independent labour activists who advocate for labour rights outside of the enterprise level are heavily repressed. Yet, in order to complement the state-society approaches employed in the above-mentioned studies, an analysis of the continuous waves of industrial action as well as underground labour resistance in relation to capital-labour relations is of particular importance (Chan 2011:8; Siu and Chan 2015:80).3 In Chapter 9, this thesis offers an insight into underground labour activism.

Summarizing the first body of literature: Researchers concerned with social movements in Vietnam have generally studied different social challenges separately, while existing research has focused on state-society relations (meso- level) and tend to lack sufficient consideration of both epistemological (micro- level) and capital-society relations (macro-level). Consequently, the ideational realm of movement actors linked to a detailed account of state surveillance and repression as well as an understanding of the role of capital(ism) is an underexplored field. Against these tendencies, more general attempts to theorise Southern social movements have called for an approach that puts the intersectional and interconnected features of movements at the centre of analysis and acknowledges forms of resistance that are specific to non-democratic and authoritarian societies. These insights greatly inform my analysis and will be reviewed in the following section.

3 Joseph Buckley’s unpublished PhD thesis: “The relationship between changing working conditions and forms of labour activism in southern Vietnam's garment and textile industry” also investigates the relationship between capital and labour in Vietnam.

2.2 Southern Social Movements and Southern Theory

Over the last decade, scholarly research on Southern social movements became more common in the social sciences and spurred an interest in theorising the complexity and specificity of social movements in non-Western societies (Bayat 2000; Bringel and Domingues 2015; Comaroff and Comaroff 2012; Fadaee 2016, 2017; Nilsen and Motta 2011; Santos 2003, 2018a; Thompson and Tapscott 2010). The theorising of Southern social movement draws on a vast number of case studies, edited volumes and ethnographies on social movements in Latin America (Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998; Escobar and Alvarez 1992), the MENA region (Bayat 2010; Beinin and Vairel 2013; Fadaee 2012), South Asia (Fadaee 2019; Omvedt 1993), Africa (Mamdani and Wamba-dia-Wanda 1995) and Southeast Asia (Boudreau 2004; Caouette and S. Turner 2009; Ford 2013; Ong 2010; Scott 1985), to reference only a few. Emerging non-Western theories not only focus on Southern social movements but on Southern epistemology as well as decolonial and global sociology in general (Bhambra 2014; Bhambra and Santos 2017; Connell 2007; Hanafi 2020). This section will review some of the major contributions of Southern social movement theories that address the general theoretical gaps reflected in the abovementioned studies conducted on Vietnam. Starting with the contributions by Fadaee, a better understanding of Southern social movements would include a systematic engagement with the diversity of regime types, state-society relations, the specificities of historical contexts and the intersectionalities of oppression (Fadaee 2016). Many analytical tools and paradigms, such as the ‘political opportunity structures’, ‘civil society paradigm’ or the distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ social movements have been theorised by studies conducted in and about liberal democracies and thus, fail to fully grasp the dynamics of authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes. The importance of engaging with different regime types, their state-society relations and thus, the respective state reactions against protests in Global Southern countries would break with the antagonism of liberal democracies and non-democracies, or of democratic and authoritarian states

(Hanafi 2020). For the case of Vietnam, this task will be undertaken in Chapter 5 and 6 in this thesis. The historical context of the Global South binds together the countries’ colonial past, the continuing power and economic relations between postcolonies and former colonial powers and their dependency on present-day Western capitalist states. Through acknowledging the significance of historical contexts, the researcher is able to address the situatedness of social movements, their forms, demands and identities. As Fadaee emphasises, while many parts of the Global South are remembered for their anti-colonial struggles of the time, it is today’s emergence of new grievances and new actors that characterise the ways of doing ‘politics from below’ in respective regions (Fadaee 2016:9). These new dynamics and features, however, are not merely issues of new identities, but are oftentimes in relation to demands for democratisation and the ousting of corrupted and authoritarian governments, while material issues remain major points of contestation (Fadaee 2016:10). Further to this, Ford’s (2009) research has shown that cross-class coalitions and a certain flexibility of movement actors to connect materialist with post- materialist issues are central features to be looked out for. As mentioned above, the connectedness of struggles is a subject that Manuel Castells (2015) captures with the framework of ‘networked social movements’. Accordingly, he conceptualises social movements in the internet age and describes how new technologies such as social media gave birth to new ways of connecting movements across countries, regions, cultures as well as in divergent economic and political conditions (Castells 2015:222). The internet is considered not only a facilitator of communication but a space that shapes new autonomy, bears the potential of reclaiming power and advancing social change. Yet, he emphasises, online activism is not to be considered a substitute for offline collective action but requires the direct engagement with institutionalised powers. His ideas around a ‘networked social movement’ sparked criticism among scholars for being deterministic regarding the political potential of technology (Fuchs 2012) and not having sufficiently considered the impact of state surveillance and digital divide (Levy 2016). The impact of surveillance in social media including Facebook is indeed becoming a

hindrance to political activism (see Chapter 6). Nonetheless, Castells’ conceptualisation offers a valuable lens to a better understanding of social movements in authoritarian contexts and will be utilized in Chapter 7. With more emphasis on the forms and the tactics of social contestation, scholars like Asef Bayat and James Scott transcended the common and rather rigid Eurocentric definitions of social movements by introducing the concepts of ‘everyday forms of resistance’ (Scott 1985), ‘social nonmovements’ and ‘quiet encroachment’ (Bayat 2010). What these concepts have in common is the appreciation for the covert, the hidden and the non-collective. They are also non- hierarchical, leaderless and rarely guided by ideologies. Unlike collective actors who engage in direct action in order to demand or achieve immediate social changes, everyday forms of resistance are tactics employed to achieve social changes by subtle, hidden and covert forms of resistance. In his famous ethnographic work ‘Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance’, Scott (1985:xvi) exemplified how villagers pursue everyday forms of resistance by tactics of “foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage”. These everyday forms of resistance have since been applied predominantly in peasant research and redefined in urban contexts. ‘Quiet encroachment’ and ‘social nonmovements’ are two concepts theorised by Asef Bayat (2010:46) from the observations he made in large cities of the Middle East. He describes quiet encroachment as the “silent, protracted but pervasive advancement of the ordinary people on the propertied, powerful, or the public in order to survive and improve their lives”. Bayat refers to collective actions of noncollective actors such as the urban dispossessed, unemployed and informalized who seek a foothold in the informal sector, the poor who unlawfully acquire lands and shelters, the women who reclaim self-empowerment through engaging in neighbourhood activities or the youth who aspires a decent life. These practices are dispersed over time and space, but at the same time they are shared by a large number of ordinary people. Unlike Scott’s notion of everyday resistance, of which the analytical focus is put on the forms of resistance and the agency of the ordinary, ‘quiet encroachment’ moves beyond the ease of the everyday, but

surreptitiously and incrementally ‘encroaches’ on the sphere of the state by targeting immediate concerns oftentimes through new ways of lawbreaking (Bayat 1997). Although everyday forms of resistance and the quiet encroachment of social nonmovements can indeed influence policy changes and generate and prepare for large-scale social movements to topple authoritarian regimes, Hanafi (2015) remarks that nonmovements (and by implication: everyday resistance) seem to be incapable of shaping the transition towards democracy and of providing a political alternative accordingly. Thus, concepts like quiet encroachment, everyday politics or other forms of small-scale resistance (Lilja and Vinthagen 2018) tend to “overtheorize the social and undertheorize the political” (Hanafi 2015:473). Hence, neither everyday resistance nor ‘quiet encroachment’ of nonmovements are stand- alone concepts for researching the agents of social change. Rather, they can be considered as forms of action that complement organised resistance of collective actors. Finally, a crucial contribution to the understanding of the epistemological realm of Southern social movements and how they can act as counterhegemonic actors has been made by Boaventura de Sousa Santos and the works that have followed since then (e.g. Choudry and Kapoor 2010:3; Motta and Esteves 2014; della Porta 2016:768). Santos’ Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (2018) and The End of Cognitive Empire (2018) are two of his well- known works in which he challenges the Western-centric epistemological basis that has legitimised the hitherto hegemonic forms of knowing and living. By epistemologies of the South, he refers to “a set of inquiries into the construction and validation of knowledge born in struggle, of ways of knowing developed by social groups as part of their resistance against the systematic injustices and oppressions caused by capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy” (Santos 2014:x). Santos calls for an anti-hegemonic “ecology of knowledges” that revives diverse and alternative forms of knowing. This requires a process of “cognitive decolonization” that also entails the unveiling of Eurocentric roots in the social sciences (Santos 2018:107- 8). By determining the absences of Southern epistemologies, engaging with radical self-reflection and critical pedagogies à la Freire, Gandhi, Fals Borda and others, a

bottom-up theorising of knowledge can be made possible (Santos 2018:114). Overall, Santos argues that the practices of anti-imperial Southern movements constitute the basis for counterhegemonic learning and knowledges. However, despite making the convincing case that alternative knowledges are generated in struggles and from a Global Southern standpoint, it remains unclear how we exactly arrive at these knowledges, both in terms of methodology as well as in terms of political practice and ultimately, whether knowledges that are generated in struggle are still subjected to or even reproduce hegemonic ideologies. These questions are addressed in the literature reviewed in the subsequent section.

2.3 Cognitive Approaches in Social Movement Studies

Previously subsumed under the field of critical theory, social movement studies became an academic field on its own, yet, an “increasingly self-referential sub- discipline” (Cox and Flesher Fominaya 2009:14). Since then, different social movement theories helped to explain the structural processes of movements, identifying strategies and tactics of collective actions but also causes and effects of mobilisation. Against the largely structural orientations of collective behaviour theories (Lofland 2017; McAdam 1982; Smelser 1963; Turner and Killian 1987), resource mobilisation theory (Gamson 1975; McCarthy and Zald 1977; Tilly 1978), and political process theory (Tilly 1964, 1981; McAdam 1982; Tarrow 1989, 1998) social movement theorists headed towards a ‘cultural turn’ (Goodwin and Jasper 1999, 2004; Johnston and Klandermans 1995; Polletta 2004) and examined movements’ micro-level by looking at identity, emotions and affect (Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta 2001; Jasper 2014; Melucci 1989, 1996; Polletta and Jasper 2001), ideology (Laraña, Johnston, and Gusfield 1994; Melucci 1996) and framing processes of or within movements (Benford and David 2000; Snow and Benford 1988). Yet, the relationship between social movements and the ideational realm has never been rendered unacknowledged but rather diverted into different streams in the social sciences. By now, the literature on social movements and knowledge, ideas and beliefs is extensive within which different approaches and interpretations

have developed over time. Against the hitherto common academic approach that considered social movements as objects of knowledge to be researched, scholars have called for an approach that studies movements as knowledge producers in their own right and therefore, as subjects of knowledge production (Casas-Cortés, Osterweil, and Powell 2008; Chesters 2012; Choudry 2015; Cox 2014b; Cox and Flesher Fominaya 2009; Eyerman and Jamison 1991). As a result, numerous case studies covered the diversity of learning processes, the politics of knowledge production and the subjugation of activist knowledges in various countries and contexts (Choudry and Kapoor 2010; Choudry and Vally 2018). They developed the premise that movements are evolving processes and thus in continuous formation and development. Scholars recognize that collective action itself constitutes “a fundamental determinant of human knowledge” (Eyerman and Jamison 1991:48-9) and can even act as “laboratories of social and political innovation” (della Porta and Pavan 2017). Hence, scholars agree upon the fact that movements constitute spaces of knowledge production that are in a dialectical relationship with the political practice and the lived realities of the people. In these spaces, activists generate diverse knowledges concerned with agency, critique of the status quo and possibilities for social change (Melucci 1989; Casas-Cortés et al. 2008; Chesters 2012; Gillan 2008; Choudry et al. 2010, 2015). In view of this, della Porta and Pavan (2017:297-8) make the case for studying knowledge practices in social movements as particularly important in times of crisis, as it is here that old structures can be challenged and new epistemologies, systems of ideas, theories and strategies envisaged. Moreover, Marxist thinkers refer to movement participants and activist intellectuals as labourers who engage not only in organising but also in theorizing and education (Barker and Cox 2001; Cox 2014). In most of these studies, however, activist knowledge is perceived as outright emancipatory, counterhegemonic4 and disconnected from wider ideologies that are grounded in structural and material conditions. As a consequence, analytical questions of how to arrive at concrete structures of knowledges or ideas,

4 Literature on social movements and the production of knowledge also commonly refers back to Gramsci’s thoughts around “organic intellectuals” and “traditional intellectuals” (1971) and what his followers conceptualised as counterhegemonic thinking.

what makes knowledge tangible, how to conceptualise knowledge and how it is produced, that is, their causes and interactions with wider societal structures have seldom been problematised within social movement studies (Santos, Nunes, and Meneses 2008:xxi). Furthermore, as all knowledges interact with hegemonic power relations such as capitalist ideology, racism, patriarchy and recolonization, scholars have cautioned against the romanticising of social movements. In fact, movements and their knowledges such as Marxism or environmentalism are subjected to academic co-optation and commodification (Cox 2014b), whilst other forms of civic engagement (e.g. NGOization5) support and reify free market ideology, right-wing nationalism, homophobia, racism or religious and other forms of fundamentalism (Choudry 2015). Others have dealt with the ontological and epistemological dimension of knowledge with regard to social movements in a way that recognises movements’ capacities to imagine and develop political alternatives and theories about how to actualise these imagined possibilities (Chesters 2012:147). As a result, different kinds of activist knowledges have been produced around specific issues including strategic or tacit knowledges (Wainwright 1994), environmental knowledges (Escobar 1998; Hall 2009; Jamison 2010; Powell 2006), bottom-up democracy (Conway 2006; Polletta 2002), pedagogy (Horton and Freire 1990; Mayo 1999; Motta and Esteves 2014), counter-hegemonic globalisation (Santos 2003) and Southern knowledges (Santos 2018; Santos, Nunes, and Meneses 2007). What these distinct activist knowledges have in common is their political importance in the production of critical subjectivities.

Knowledge Production as Cognitive Praxis One of the most prominent works that cover the relation of social movements and knowledge production has been developed by Eyerman and Jamison (1991). Influenced by the works of Alberto Melucci (1989), who views social movements as symbolic action by which collective identities are created, Eyerman and Jamison

5 Countering the argument of activist co-optation by NGOs, Glasius and Ishkanian’s (2014) study discusses the potentials of what they call ‘surreptitious symbiosis’, by which they mean a way of sustained activism that is based on collaboration with rather than co-optation by NGOs. Their research is based on data obtained from Athens, Cairo, London and Yerevan.

perceived movements as ‘cognitive praxis’ and defined them as the collective endeavour to reconceive society by producing knowledge collectively. In addition, ‘cognitive practice’ is understood as the central element to a movement’s identity formation. Based on the premise that social reality is shaped by historical context, and therefore, the development of knowledge is influenced by social relations, Eyerman and Jamison emphasised the role of social movements in consciousness- raising. Accordingly, movements disseminate scientific knowledge through the production of discourse and thus, make scientific knowledge available to the general public. However, different kinds of activist knowledge as mentioned above fall short in their analysis. Later works explored how movements facilitate discussion and dialogue beyond the scientific/academic realm and between different modes of knowing through claiming and creating new spaces that interrogate and destabilise existing hierarchies and boundaries between hegemonic and scientific/expert knowledges and activist knowledges (Esteves 2008; Casas-Cortés et al. 2008; Cox 2014; della Porta and Pavan 2017:302). In fact, as many movement participants engage in knowledge production while holding positions as precarious researchers (Cox 2014b), they actively engage in reflexive intellectual work, produce theories and conduct case study research. Scholar-activist Aziz Choudry (2015), for instance, has published extensively on the role of knowledge and learning in struggle and contestation. His work is concerned with processes of strategic learning in which he distinguishes between formal, informal and non-formal learning. He emphasises that it is the experience of everyday resistance, the learning from tensions and contradictions in struggles, but also the histories of previous struggles that constitute the vital resources for political change. In a rather technical manner, Eyerman and Jamison conceptualise cognitive praxis along three main dimensions: the ‘cosmological’ (a movement’s vision of the world), the ‘technological’ (concerns technical scientific knowledge) and the ‘organisational’ dimension (the strategies and tactics). Similarly, della Porta and Pavan (2017:300) emphasise that movements form collective spaces of knowledge production in which they create ‘repertoires of knowledge practices’ defined as:

the set of practices that foster the coordination of disconnected, local, and highly personal experiences and rationalities within a shared cognitive system able to provide movements and their supporters with a common orientation for making claims and acting collectively to produce social, political, and cultural changes.

With this, they map out how ‘repertoires of knowledge production’ translate into practices. Drawing on Eyerman and Jamison’s three dimensions, they specify that movements produce knowledge about the collective self (i.e. self-reflection and how to build identity), knowledge about the action network (i.e. how to construct strategic actions and collaborations) and knowledge of (political) alternatives (i.e. developing a critique of and an alternative to the status quo).6 Similarly, Casas Cortés et al. (2008:21) speak of knowledge-practices as a crucial component of social movement practices, whereby “knowledges take the form of studies, ideas, narratives, and ideologies, but also theories, expertise, as well as political analysis and critical understandings of particular contexts”. This broad understanding of knowledge is problematic, which is reflected in Conway’s statement that “the knowledges and agencies needed to change the world do not yet exist in fully developed and easily identifiable forms, but in the micro-processes of social movements…they are being incubated” (Conway 2004:239). Conway’s note makes it all the more important to insist on a clear conceptualisation and analytic distinction between knowledges, ideas and ideology, without necessarily implying valuation or authority of one form of ‘thought unit’ over the other. Nonetheless, these works provide the essential ethical premises and basic terminologies that enable further empirical and theoretical research on the relationship between social movements and knowledge production. Especially the works of activist-scholars generate strong cases of intervention with existing hierarchies between academic and activist knowledges. Many of the above- mentioned scholars have conceptualised different dimensions and particular types of activist knowledge as well as highlighted the general role of knowledge with

6 Della Porta and Pavan’s conceptualisation of ‘repertoires of knowledge practices’ resemble Snow et al.’s (1986) conceptualisation of interpretative frames, which combine a diagnosis of a social problem, a prognosis of a solution and an identity claim about the affected constituency.

regard to wider societal developments. However, they leave open the fundamental methodological questions that concern the epistemological and ontological logic of knowledge if used as an analytical concept, thus making it difficult to employ the idea of activist knowledge without further inquiry into the theories of knowledge. Rather, knowledge is used interchangeably with ideas and epistemologies. Hence, what really constitutes knowledge in social movements remains somewhat unclear.

Activist Ideas and Belief Structures Finally, an important approach to grasp the ontological components of the ideational realm of movements has been proposed by Gillan (2008). Seeking to understand the “structures of belief” of movements, he proposes the analytical construct of ‘orientational frames’ as a reconceptualization of the interpretative framing approach. Accordingly, orientational frames identify “a worldview that may be utilized by social movement participants to create understanding of significant events and processes of which they are aware, to justify particular responses to them and to envision alternative arrangements” (Gillan 2008:254). Since classical frame analysis, such as collective action frames, focuses on the process of strategic framing rather than the ideational content, Gillan argues that “neither demands nor actions can be fully understood without reference to the wider belief structures within which those elements are embedded” (2008:247). Accordingly, he defines the orientational frame as both a cultural product and an analytical tool that offers a change in the level of analysis from the individual micro-level (the beliefs and values of individual movement actors) to the collective meso-level (the ideas that all members of a group agree upon) and a change of level of abstraction (the structure and interconnection of ideas). Despite ideational diversity among individuals and groups, it is possible to abstract connections between ideas with which to capture the belief structures that inform activists’ understandings of the political world, beliefs and values (2008:253, 261). It is the implied meanings, connections, tensions and contradictions of these sets of ideas that make the component parts of an orientational frame (2008:254). In order to identify the particular structure of orientational frames, Gillan adopts a morphological approach to ideology as proposed by Freeden (1996). However,

orientational frames are distinct from general ideologies in that they are action- oriented, capture the creation of new ideas as well as the uncertainty of ideas. Following Gillan’s and Freeden’s morphological approach to conceptualising the ontological structure and interconnections between ideas will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 3.3.7

Activist knowledges as Material and Embodied Experiences The study of knowledge in movement closely examined the particular characteristics of activist knowledge as distinct from scientific knowledge. One of the particularities is that activist knowledges are recognized for being embodied and situated, that is, embedded in lived and place-based experiences (Casas-Cortés et al. 2008; Haraway 1991; Varela 1999). Therefore, Casas-Cortés et al. (2008:43) consider them as a counterpart to “universalizing and generalizing political theories of the past – mostly of a Marxist bent – that had little ability to take place-based or circumstantial specificities into account”. Accordingly, place-based knowledges offer different answers that cannot be provided by conventional academic and scientific modes of knowledges. To Cortes et al. knowledge production is material and situated in the lived experiences, which they consider as contrary to universal and structural perspectives. This antagonism is supported by many ‘body theorists’ or by the accounts of ‘embodied’ and ‘corporeal sociology’ in general (Haraway 1991; Howson and Inglis 2001; Ignatow 2007; Shilling 2001). In view of this, sociologists moved away from the abstractions of theoretical and social-structural accounts of the body and instead prioritized the body and its lived experiences as the ‘ground’ of experience and knowledge (Howson and Inglis 2001:298, 312). In this regard, the body is repositioned as a site of knowledge, shaped - yet never determined - by social structure (Howson and Inglis 2001:302). These accounts

7 While Gillan’s orientational frames are a useful methodological approach to identify structures and interconnections of ideas from within a movement’s political cultural context, it would greatly benefit from an understanding of the political culture exterior to a movement as grounded in the material reality of activists’ lives and practices and the political context defined by the structures of the state in a capitalist society. Accordingly, I elaborate in Chapter 3.1.1. that this thesis considers activists’ ideas, ideologies as well as political cultures as rooted in the material conditions of a given social formation. In other words, in this thesis I prioritise the analysis of structural conditions over a ‘movement-centric’ analytical method. .

refuse to conjoin social structures and embodied experiences as they are conceived of as “two mutually incompatible sets of assumptions” and thus, misjudge the value of structural explanations altogether (Howson and Inglis 2001:315).8 By contrast, other - mostly feminist and Marxist oriented - scholars recognise that although knowledges are produced outside of institutions and are embedded in local, place-based experiences, they are also systematic, that is, they are situated in the material conditions and social relations of classed, raced and gendered structures (Bustamante, Jashnani, and Stoudt 2018, 2019; Cox 2014a:52; Pitts-Taylor 2016; della Porta and Pavan 2017:302; Williamson 2011). The case for greater mediation between the social-structural and the embodied is now being widely articulated. For example, race-critical social psychologists show that local and global structures of political repression, dispossession, domestic and racial violence “penetrate individual and collective bodies and minds, cutting across policy and ideology and accumulating materially and affectively over time and space” (Bustamante, Jashnani, Stoudt 2018:1). In fact, these studies affirm that the “body as a site of vertical processes affects cognition and embodiment” (see Foglia and Wilson 2013; Roberts 2013), yet, the body as a site of “horizontal processes create[s] circuits” shares embodied, spatial, psychological, social, ideological, political and material consequences that are indivisible from the former (Bustamante et al. 2018:5). Similarly, feminist and queer writings about domestic and structural violence deal with related cognitive decline and thus, argue that ‘bodies’ are not just subjugated to, but also take part in relations of power such as class (Pitts-Taylor 2016:9). And in a Bourdieusian manner, other sociologists have argued that class structures are not reproduced symbolically but also through physical practice and embodied cognition (Wacquant 2015). In other words, by acknowledging that material embodied processes and social structures are interwoven, it becomes visible that state violence cuts through

8 Scholars argued against various tendencies in the cognitive sciences that have embraced a purely biological and naturalist approach that ignores social factors, but also against standpoints of other who defended an anti-naturalist and anti-cognitive, that is purely social and cultural analysis. Bourdieu’s notion of habitus conjoins corporeal practices with structural accounts of sociology. The habitus concept shows that the body is not merely acted on by society, but that the body itself can reproduce or change social-structural conditions. Therefore, Bourdieu’s thinking bridges structural accounts with action and individual agency.

an individual’s mental cognition and embodiment, but in fact, spreads horizontally across communities. Bustamante et al. (2018:3) explain that individual experiences of state repression are cumulate and inform cognitive processes which are structurally imposed on vulnerable communities. The embodied experiences of arrests, policing, long-term prison sentences and the atmosphere of constant surveillance “inform one’s becoming in lived space and time” (ibid.). Hence, approaches of cognitive sociology that consider embodied cognition and lived experiences as interwoven with structural modes of capitalism such as state repression and structural violence overcome the chasm between structure and cognition (or agency and affect). For neither places and cultures, nor embodied experiences and social practices are purely particular and unique, they need to be analysed as materially real and embodied as well as structurally shaped by the social relations of capitalism, colonialism and structural violence (see further details in Chapter 3.2). Extant studies have largely focused on ‘knowledge’ for and within movements, that is, knowledge that concerns the practices and processes of collective action (Barker and Cox 2001:4). It shifted towards reading ‘activist knowledge’ as the subject of analysis, thereby, treating activist knowledge not as a means to an end – the end of social transformation – but as an end in itself. In doing so, activist knowledges and their underlying political ideas have been disconnected from dominant ideologies, global capitalist-colonial structures and specific state- society relations, but instead, considered as relatively autonomous and shielded by the spaces and political cultures of a social movement. In other words, current sociological accounts lack consideration of how activist knowledges and ideas too are affected by and subjected to wider social structures and hegemonic ideological systems such as capitalism, racism, colonialism and nationalism.

2.4 Conclusion

Due to the current tendency in the social sciences to study labour movements, social movements and general forms of civic activism separately, extant research on social movements in Vietnam too has failed to acknowledge the connectedness of seemingly disconnected socio-political struggles. In view of this, this thesis aims at

examining the concatenation of different themes that are portrayed as disconnected in the existing literature such as Kerkvliet’s (2019) monography. Moreover, the overview revealed a typical focus on state-society relations (meso-level) and a lack of sufficient consideration of both epistemology (micro-level) and capital relations (macro-level). Consequently, understanding the epistemological and cognitive realm of movement actors in relation to capitalist-colonial ideology and linked to the embodiment of state repression is an underexplored field. Therefore, the ethnographic data presented in this thesis will not only complement the empirical insights of extant literature but engage in theoretical discussions with regard to the structural and epistemological level (i.e. capital-epistemology relations) of social movements. Owing to the contributions of the literature on Southern social movements and Southern epistemologies, this thesis is equipped with a perspective that goes beyond Eurocentric models of explanation. A Global Southern standpoint offers a way of understanding forms of resistance and activist knowledge that is untypical for non-democratic societies or insufficiently considered in Euro-American social movements literature. Yet, it tends to overtheorize the power of the non-collective, emancipatory and ordinary, while it underestimates the non-democratic that penetrates all spheres of social and political life including the spaces of activism. The literature around Southern epistemologies, in particular, overemphasises the role of spatial particularity and identity, thereby ignoring questions concerning the form, structure and content that give analytical substance to Southern epistemologies. Thus, this thesis seeks to provide a balanced standpoint on Southern movements that acknowledges both emancipation and stagnation and proposes an approach to conceptualise (Southern) activist knowledges systematically and contextually. Therefore, reviewing the literature on cognitive praxis of social movements has shown that the undifferentiated and interchangeable use of the term ‘knowledge’, ‘ideas’, ‘epistemology’ and ‘cognition’ led to an analytical imprecision, which in turn, makes it difficult to fully grasp the limits and characteristics of knowledge and its ontological components. It is beyond the scope of this thesis to suggest a conceptualisation of activist knowledge, but it makes a

modest attempt to understand how knowledge is produced and disclosed in authoritarian contexts and how different political concepts are configured within this context (see morphological approach to cognitive resistance in Chapter 3). What is more, numerous studies have shown interest in different kinds of activist knowledge that gave rise to emancipatory functions for and democratic processes within movements. And yet, while activist knowledges are rightfully conceived as forces that counter a given system and actively contribute to the shaping of future, they are also products of a given time and space and hence, are subjected to hegemonic ideological systems including capitalism, coloniality and nationalism. Being greatly informed by the perception that activist knowledges are processes of material embodied cognition interwoven with social structures of violence and state repression, this thesis contributes to a better understanding of how both lived realities and macro-structures influence the cognitive level of activists.

Chapter 3: Theoretical Framework

This chapter introduces the theoretical and methodological framework applied in this thesis and develops a decolonial-Marxist approach to explore the different practices and the cognitive level of social movements in Vietnam. This chapter is structured as follows: the first section develops the decolonial-Marxist theoretical framework and draws on three key concepts that shall guide the analysis of this study: capitalist totality, ideological state apparatus and epistemological coloniality. The second section reviews relevant working definitions and outlines the relations between subjugated knowledges, embodied cognition, power and resistance. Moreover, it suggests a distinction between resistance ‘in itself’ and ‘for itself’, followed by a conceptualisation of ‘cognitive resistance’. Finally, I work out the tangibility and form of ‘cognitive resistance’ (questions of ontology) by drawing on an adapted morphological approach that understands political thought as a configuration of core, adjacent and peripheral concepts.

3.1 A Decolonial-Marxist Perspective as a Guiding Theoretical Framework

Social movement studies are increasingly criticised for its fragmentation of subject matter (Barker et al. 2013; Webber 2019:10). A division of intellectual labour fragmented social movements into labour struggles, peasant uprisings, revolutions, ‘new social movements’ and everyday resistance into separate fields of scholarly inquiry. European and American-based social movement studies generated extensive but disconnected and isolated bodies of theory, while studies of Southern/non-Western movements were granted only little space to contribute to the grounding of social movement theories. Critique against the continuous Eurocentric/Westerncentric lens within the discipline is increasingly acknowledged and counterbalanced (e.g. see Bayat 2010; Fadaee 2016, 2019; Nilsen and Motta 2011). Building on the previous chapter (the literature review), this part sets the general theoretical framework with which the identified research gaps will be

explored. I first introduce the Marxist notions of “capitalist totality”9 (Webber 2019) and “ideological state apparatuses” (Althusser 1971) and add to it a decolonial perspective. This sets the ground for my further analysis.

3.1.1 Capitalist Totality and Ideological State Apparatuses Marxist tradition “insist[s] on the primacy of processes over things, on transformation over stasis, on praxis over theory, on the complex relation of parts to wholes over structural determinism, and on contradiction over self-consistency” (Barker et al. 2013:22). In other words: Marxism is a way of viewing the social world as a whole, while seeing the connectedness of its internal relations and the processes and changes in constant movement. Marxism considers social relations as a totality, but one that is structured by contradictions (Krinsky 2013:121).10 This is what makes its analytical application a matter of complexity and abstraction. Marxism, however, operates not only on a level of abstraction, but derives its theory from the concrete, the material, the lived experiences and historical struggles. A Marxist approach to social movement analysis commits itself to the view that history is “articulated in conflicts which encompass the totality of society and in turn define that totality” (Cox and Nilsen 2014:55). In other words, a Marxist analysis seeks to disclose the connectedness of apparently disparate struggles. Colin Barker formulated: “The centrality of ‘class struggle’ does not make ‘economic’ questions somehow ‘more important’. Struggles against oppression – whether based on nationality, ethnicity, religion, gender, skill, or sexuality – are not distinct from or opposed to class struggle but are mutually interdependent parts of the social

9 I am grateful for Dr Joseph Buckley who introduced me to Webber’s understanding of ‘capitalist totality’. 10 I am aware that the legitimacy and relevancy of the totality concept has been a subject of scrutiny mostly in post-structural and postcolonial theories. Postcolonial scholars criticize anti-colonial Marxists for reproducing Eurocentric discourse (and Marx as a Eurocentric thinker). The debate culminated in a discussion between Vivek Chibber and the subaltern studies group (see The Debate on Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital), in which the former argued for capitalism’s universalizing nature and the latter against it, insisting on the fundamental differences of capitalism once travelled to the peripheries (Murthy 2017:217). My intention in the thesis is not to resolve this particular debate, which would require a different kind of empirical analysis. Rather, as expressed throughout this chapter I use the concept of capitalist totality as a broader guiding framework for interpreting a specific set of political practices and ideas. The utility of that framework will be demonstrated throughout the thesis.

movement against capitalism as a totality” (Barker 2013:54). Therefore, the notion of capitalist totality implies that struggles over environmental protection, workers exploitation, peasant dispossession, natural resources, identity, culture and democracy can indeed be analysed as connected. Accordingly, Marxist scholars define a social movement as an “amalgam of political parties, trade unions, clubs of various sorts, exile organisations, underground organisations, newspapers, enrolling and representing the serried ranks of the exploited and oppressed” (Barker et al. 2013:23). It was Marxists too, who argued against the misperception of the working class as a homogeneous mass. Instead, Marx and Engels stressed the role of the proletariat as a unique and emancipatory force within the totality of ‘the social movement’ that bears the potential to lead a revolutionary transformation. However, its emancipatory path is not a linear process, but one with diversion, disruptions and at times, even stagnation. Only the experiences within struggles, with successes and defeats, can it learn to translate its potential into actual social power (Barker et al. 2013:23). Marx wrote:

Working-class revolutions . . . constantly criticise themselves, they continually interrupt their own course, return to what has apparently already been achieved to start it from scratch again. Cruelly and thoroughly, they mock the shortcomings, weaknesses and pitiful nature of their first attempts; they seem to throw their opponent down, only for him to draw new strength from the earth and rise up once more against them, yet more gigantic than ever (Marx 1984:5–6 cited in Barker et al. 2013:23).

In a similar vein, Jefferey R. Webber emphasises the importance of grasping the totality of capitalism and anti-capitalist struggles: “Class struggle, broadly understood, is not reducible to the workplace. Rather, unrest associated with labour occurs in the workplace, the labour market, the community, and in national and international politics” (Webber 2019:8). Centring on ‘totality’ allows for a method of “moving from the abstract to the concrete” (Webber 2019:9). Not only can the concept of totality help to overcome this fragmentation of social movement theories, but it can “inform activists’ strategies and tactics with regard to connecting

existing commonalities, and forging new ones, across seemingly disparate local or sectional conflicts” (Webber 2019:10). In his seminal works, Alain Touraine has invoked the concept of ‘totality’ to define the cultural stakes over which a movement and its opponent are in conflict, or as Cox and Nilsen interpret it, to recognise that the social totality is both the product and the object of struggles (2014:83). In order for a movement to raise its capacity for “historicity”11 it needs to integrate its identity (I), its opponents (O) and the totality of what is at stakes (T) (Touraine 1981:81). The strong relations and interactions between the three dimensions (I-O-T) is what Touraine puts at the center of his analysis. While Touraine’s notion of totality focuses on the movement’s integration into cultural and societal relations, Webber’s application of totality moves on the ‘outer trajectory’ of capitalist relations. Keeping in mind both analytical dimensions, the totality of social movements shall here be understood in a double relation: directed at a movement’s internal integration and interaction (I-O-T) and a movement’s interconnected, multi-layered and stratified complexity of political themes that reflect the struggles against ‘capitalist totality’. Capturing movements and struggles in their non-linear and uneven processes and their relation of parts to the whole is a central feature of this study. Another characteristic of dialectical totality is the notion of contradiction. As described earlier, a dialectical approach studies the changes and movements in social relations and does so in an abstraction to time and space (Krinsky 2013:109). Given the level of abstraction, contradictions occur as a central feature of dialectical totality, and thus, are also essential to the understanding that knowledge itself is a social construction based on the dynamics of social relations. Krinsky (2013:109) states: “Marxist analysis is tethered to praxis and its development. This makes it centrally concerned with learning and consciousness”. Similarly, Laurence Cox considers social movements as learning processes that are fragile in their interaction with the environment: the various socio-political, religious, cultural and industrial contexts across time and space. Therefore, processes of learning and knowledge production require time, as particularly in social movements they are subjected to

11 By ‘historicity’ Touraine describes the way in which society produces and reproduces itself. Accordingly, social movements seek to have a place in history making.

isolation, fragmentation, unevenness and non-linear development. This is why we call them ‘movements’.

Ideological State Apparatuses Neo-Marxists, such as Nicos Poulantzas have reworked classical criteria of class determination (bourgeoisie, proletariat, middle-class) and stressed the necessity for bringing “ideological and political domination and subordination” into class analysis (Poulantzas 1978). As a post-Althusserian, Poulantzas theorises ideologies (and politics) as relatively autonomous from class, which Ellen Meiksins Wood views as the forerunner of neo-Marxist theorising that, in fact, led to the ultimate retreat from the notion of ‘class’ (Woods 1986). In view of this, and to avoid bewildering myself with internal Marxist debates, I chose to return to Louis Althusser’s seminal work on apparatus theory in which he distinguishes between the repressive state apparatuses (RSA) and the ideological state apparatuses (ISA).12 Accordingly, the repressive state apparatus includes governmental institutions, the army, police, judiciary and prisons, while ISAs consist of religious institutions such as Churches, schools, the legal system (also RSA), enterprises and their trade unions, political Parties, and the press, media13 and culture, universities and educational institutions in which ideologies are diffused and also families in which labour power is reproduced (Althusser 1995 [2019]:54-55). He considered both ISAs and RSAs as institutional instruments of the capitalist state that, in the last instance, aims at the regulation of the reproduction of the relations of

12 Unlike neo-Marxists like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Poulantzas adopted Althusser’s notion of ISAs which considers various ideological institutions (Church, media, trade unions, judiciary) as functional to the dominant class and thus, to the state apparatus. 13 It is worth noting that Althusser reduces the role of media and press to its functionality in the ideological state apparatus that serves the reproduction of relations of production and through which people are exposed to nationalism, liberalism, chauvinism etc. Similarly, Stuart Hall emphasised that mass media “has served as a support for the reproduction of a dominant ideological discursive field” (1988:88). Given the technological constraints of the time, it is not surprising that both authors emphasise the role of media as a tool to reproduce hegemonic ideology. However, the expanded access to internet as well as the emancipatory and liberatory potential of social media and numerous alternative media channels, leads us to acknowledge that activists craft independent online spaces that constitute important tools of counter-hegemonic forces (see Castells 2015; Chapter 2). This thesis considers both the ideological critique of mass media as well as the new spaces of media in which hegemonic ideologies can be challenged.

production. Of particular interest for this thesis are the ideological functions of three apparatuses: the press and media, the judiciary and the religious institutions. In Althusser’s view, ideologies are material: “Ideology ‘functions’ at its most concrete level, the level of individual ‘subjects’: that is, people as they exist in their concrete individuality, in their work, daily lives, acts, commitments, hesitations, doubts, and sense of what is most immediately self-evident” (Althusser 1971:176). In other words, ideologies reach the individual at the level of their ideas and acts (Althusser 1971:177). The subject does not develop ideas independent of institutional practices, instead - resembling Gramsci’s notion of hegemony – the subject finds itself voluntarily subordinated to the ideological apparatus in which certain ideas are developed. To Althusser, ideologies are situated in the materiality of practices (Althusser 1971:76). Put differently, religious, moral, legal ideologies etc. are a “determinate representation of the world”, that is, a way to make sense of the world that represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence, and in the last instance, to the relations of production (Althusser 1971:184). Althusser distinguishes between ideas and ideologies. "Ideology does not exist in ideas”, by which he means that deducing ideology to ideas became an ideological representation of ideology itself (Althusser 1971:185). Instead, ideas have disappeared as they became endowed with an ideal or spiritual existence (Althusser 1971:187). Ideas, in fact, govern ideologies and their discourses (Althusser 1971:156), and have no ideal or spiritual existence, but a material existence (ibid.). In other words, ideas are embedded in and regulated by the material existence (i.e. institutionalised practices) of the ideological apparatus (Althusser 1971:186). In this thesis, I do not perceive ‘ideas’ as a mere conglomerate of thought units that ultimately make up an ideology, but from an Althusserian perspective, I consider ‘ideas’ as having a material existence and interact with the embodied experiences of state repression and constraint (see embodied cognition, section 3.2.2). It takes as a premise that practices and ideas are shaped and reshaped in interaction with RSAs and ISAs. These practices and ideas can also be the source of counterposing hegemonic and dominant RSAs and ISAs of the ruling classes. As

Althusser concludes, ideas as much as ideologies “are not ‘born’ in the ISAs but they develop from the conditions of existence, their practices, their experiences of struggle, etc.” (Althusser 1971:272).

3.1.2 Epistemological Coloniality As this study will show, capitalist totality is experienced differently not only in different geopolitical spaces, but also in a regions’ dissimilar urban and rural areas. The capitalist system itself is rooted in a structure that throughout history has manifested itself in particular forms and intensities of exploitation relative to its location. As a consequence, capitalism in Europe and America behaves differently compared to capitalism in Global Southern or postcolonial countries. The decolonial school has made a crucial contribution to the understanding of continuous colonial hierarchies within an increasingly globalised and capitalised world. Here, coloniality is understood as the epistemological logic behind colonialism that negates or excludes difference. Because this study places particular emphasis on the cognitive processes of Southern social movements, I add a decolonial perspective to a Marxist understanding of social movements.

Coloniality and the Capitalist World Order Based on the arguments put forward by world-system analysts Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi and Raúl Prebisch, decolonial theorists posited that today’s world order and its model of power presupposes an element of coloniality (Quijano 2000:533). Today’s world order corresponds with two historical processes that constituted the West (first North America, then Western Europe) as the initial space-time of the new model of power. These two processes included the idea of “difference in race” and “the structure of control of labour and its resources and products” (Quijano 2000:534). Both processes legitimised the classification of the world’s population into the ‘modern and civilised’ and the ‘inferior and uncivilised’. It was a new structure of social relations that was organised around capital and the world market (see Quijano and Wallerstein 1992). Under global capitalism, “race and the division of labour remained structurally linked and mutually reinforcing” (Quijano 2000:536), in a way that a racial division

of labour continued to be the system’s mode of operation. It is well known that the global control of labour along racial lines was “constitutively colonial” (Quijano 2000:539) and allowed the core capitalist countries (the West, i.e. North America and Western Europe) to determine the geographic distribution of labour and capital in the periphery, the non-West. Therefore, as Quijano formulates, global capitalism is colonial and Eurocentered (Quijano 2000:539). Against this background, the decolonial school theorised what came to be known as ‘coloniality of power’ by which they conceptualised the ongoing structure of domination and dependency of former colonial powers over former colonised countries, a structural dependency that is rooted in the history of capitalism and colonialism. The expansion of global capitalism and its power based on coloniality had cognitive implications. Walter Mignolo, one of the influential scholars of the decolonial school, writes: “The expansion of Western capitalism implied the expansion of Western epistemology in all its ramifications, from the instrumental reason that went along with capitalism and the industrial revolution, to the theories of the state, to the criticism of both capitalism and the state” (Mignolo 2002:59). He criticised coloniality as the ongoing dependencies that structure and rank all spheres of life, particularly the ontological and epistemological spheres. The product was an epistemological “colonial difference” (Mignolo 2018:361). In other words, the history of global capitalism runs parallel to the history of Western epistemological dominance (or Eurocentrism), reflecting the current relationship of capitalism and Western epistemology. Accordingly, this thesis considers resistance against Western epistemology as an integral component of the struggle against ‘capitalist totality’.

Epistemological Coloniality In the aftermath of World War II, Western colonial powers were forced to withdraw their administrations from their colonies. In the attempt to rewrite history, many former colonial powers engaged in new forms of discourse and knowledge production subsumed under strategies of ‘development’, ‘modernisation’ and ‘democratisation’, which again travelled in a one-way street to the former colonies. On the downside, former colonies themselves were reluctant to criticise the

epistemological power relations between the ‘emancipated West’ and the ‘to-be- modernised periphery’. Instead, many post-colonies embraced Western epistemologies and followed Eurocentric discourses of liberalism (Wallerstein 1991, 1995). On that base, they constructed ideologies of “national identity”, “national development”, and “national sovereignty” (Grosfoguel 2011:17-8). By this, an illusion of “independence, development and progress” began to be constructed (ibid.). Put differently, the enduring coloniality of power even after formal decolonialisation was not sufficiently reflected on either side. The Western worldview, with all its complexities and values, myths and amnesia, has equipped Southern epistemologies in a way that keeps them locked in the frame of Western modernity and Western civilization stripping off the countries’ opportunities to develop its intelligentsia on a base of dialogue and collegiality. These knowledges reproduced the epistemological dominance of the West and inferiorised the rest without any military or administrative intervention. Accordingly, the epistemological consequence of the colonial difference has enormous impacts on religion, education, economy, culture and politics, allowing for global social constructions to develop what was “assumed to have universal value across time and space” (Mignolo 2002:69). Anibal Quijano (2000) conceived of epistemological coloniality as follows:

After the colonization of America and the expansion of European colonialism to the rest of the world, the subsequent constitution of Europe as a new id-entity needed the elaboration of a Eurocentric perspective of knowledge, a theoretical perspective on the idea of race as a naturalization of colonial relations between Europeans and non- Europeans. Historically, this meant a new way of legitimizing the already old ideas and practices of relations of superiority/inferiority between dominant and dominated (2000:534-35).

Southern knowledges are caught within the ‘coloniality of power’, causing the privileged states of Western concepts over Southern ways of theorizing. Southern knowledges are rendered inaudible on the global level and marginalized at the local level. Western discourses, cosmologies and worldviews have dominated the history of modernity, while other perspectives have been subjugated or merely ignored.

Western worldviews are articulated in universal concepts through which to defend the colonial-capitalist world order. In other words, epistemological colonial differences are not just a case of monopolised and competing worldviews, but they are essential to the coloniality of power and instrumental to the capitalist-colonial world order. For Quijano and Mignolo, epistemic dependency lies at the very heart of the coloniality of power. Mignolo emphasises that coming to terms with the “geopolitics of knowing” is, in fact, “essential to understanding the structural role of knowledge in the articulation of colonial differences and the power differential in all spheres of the world order” (Mignolo 2018:372). Yet, the complexity of its dimensions is yet to be sufficiently studied. In short, epistemological coloniality puts emphasis on the spatial organisation of power and knowledge which is essentially rooted in the history of capitalism and colonialism. It designates the epistemic location of the peripheries and with it, the diversity of epistemologies that ought to be rediscovered. For those who are marginalized in non-Western countries, many concepts and theories of the social and political sciences, philosophy and religion, are not applicable. As Mignolo writes:

It is crucial for the ethics, politics, and epistemology of the future to recognize that the totality of Western epistemology, from either the Right or the Left, is no longer valid for the entire planet (Mignolo 2008:252).

As literature on decolonising epistemology is manifold, the following section elaborates specific material that is pertinent for the analysis in this thesis. I focus on decolonial approaches that scrutinise the colonial projects of democracy, law and religion.

Epistemological Coloniality in Democracy, Law and Religion In recent years, scholars have increasingly pointed to the colonial character of democracy and as a result, advocated for the ‘decolonisation of democracy’. In view of this, Ferit Güven writes that “[…] a radical questioning of democracy, including the promise of an ideal democracy in the future is necessary, because democracy today functions as a global, political, and intellectual form of colonization” (Güven 2015:3). For Güven, the way democracy - as a political project - has been realised

is to be read as a tool of biopower to discipline the citizens and control political thinking “through a complex network of controlling and regulating mechanisms” (Güven 2015:16). Following Foucauldian analysis, Güven distinguishes between a democratic subject and a disciplined subject. While the former refers to the ideals of democracy, the latter is the constructed product we find in actually existing democracies (Güven 2015:10–11). Put differently, instead of educating democratic subjects (with a democratic way of being, debating and living), actually existing democracies construct subjects that are disciplined to the functioning of a political system (Güven 2015:8). In view of this, the promise of Western liberal democracy occupies the activists’ imagination and colonises the future thinking for any political alternative that goes beyond liberal democracy. Concrete practical problems that continue to put democracies under scrutiny include the undemocratic protection of democracies by means of physical violence against protesters, the enabling of racism, classism and all kinds of social inequalities and the military intervention and supply of weapons to non-Western countries all under the banner of democracy. Güven also stresses the problem of democracy as the rule of the majority, while no space is given for the negotiation of different opinions for the common citizen. Instead, we seem to be content with the idea of politicians negotiating on national television. Güven suggests that instead of accepting the rule of the majority, we should aim for the rule of the people (Güven 2015:10). In other words, a decolonial notion of democracy is embodied in a certain way of living rather than the existence of a political system only. Yet, before democracy became a political project, it was considered a rather “practical exertion of political will by the people” (Stockwell 2010:124). Dominant Western discourses, however, presented the idea of democracy as rooted in Western civilisation, whose values and practices ‘needed to be taught’ to the non-Western ‘other’ (Mentan 2015b 3-4). Yet, the alleged project of democracy developed into a resource for international political pressure. Thus, Tatah Mentan states that “it is the specific political practice of a few (ironically) self-appointed countries around the world, mostly in the North Atlantic, that have come to be defined as setting the tone and the parameters for what democracy is and is not” (Mentan 2015b:2). Although spreading the Western idea of democracy may have indeed advanced

liberation movements against dictatorial rule, it nevertheless failed to bring the peace and equality it promised. Instead, democratisation as a political project became a source of conflict (Mentan 2015b:144), and spreading democracy became a mechanism to make non-democratic countries economically dependent on the ‘democratic’ (i.e. core capitalist) countries. Further to this, the expansion of democracy is not the result of moral convictions, but the conviction of Western superiority as well as the need for a universal model of law that would be supportive of a particular type of capitalist society (see Mentan 2015:139). The universalisation of a pro-capitalist law and society gave rise to new hierarchies that excluded the non-West and non-democratic countries from democratic decision- making and political learning. Instead, non-Western countries continue to be treated as monolithic, static and frozen entities whose people needed to be rescued from their authoritarian governments. Thereby, postcolonial societies, including Vietnam, witnessed the instrumentality of colonial and modern law, with which the basis for capitalist ideology and global coloniality was established and legitimized. It was only in modern and colonial history that legal concepts like state accountability, violations of human rights, workers’ rights, private property and terrorism dominated our minds.14 In fact, this epistemological dominance of Western legal thinking and their political institutions survived the official decolonization of the Third World (Saeed 2019:104). As Raza Saeed argues, the influence of colonialism runs much deeper than the mere law, but “it laid the foundation on which the socio-legal architecture stands and the normative struggles take place” (Saeed 2019:108). In other words, understanding the colonial inheritance of the socio-legal architecture is crucial in order to understand how coloniality of power continues to impose epistemic and cognitive normativity by the very means of law. Yet, Saeed suggests looking through the lens of coloniality in law, rather than coloniality of law, by which he stresses that although colonialism radically transformed the logics and rationalities of the existing legal system, the nexus between law and coloniality is not indestructible. Instead, he appeals to the

14 In Vietnam, the idea of a nation-state and nationhood goes back to pre-colonial times. Different expressions of nationhood/nation-state manifested during the rule of kingdoms, via imperial officials (mandarins) and peasant or communal collectives. Thus, the idea of a nation-state is not product of Western colonial domination (Fforde and de Vylder 2018).

emancipatory potential of law as an approach to decolonize legal imaginations in particular and epistemic decoloniality in general (Saeed 2019:113, 129). As law itself continues to be a battlefield of epistemological coloniality, so does European Christianity (and all other conquering world religions).

Throughout the history of colonialism, European Christianity and its civilising mission became a vehicle for justifying imperialism. A purely colonial interpretation views Christianity as a system of Western superiority that perpetuates colonial hierarchies not only through its global capitalist structures (see Poole 2010; Vaidyanathan 2019), but particularly through missionizing the infidel, unenlightened and uncivilised Southern ‘other’. Against this, post-/decolonial theologians and scholars, including David Joy and Joseph Duggan (2012), have increasingly engaged in perspectives that liberate Christianity in the postcolonies “in which empire and colonialism continue in disguised fashion, but powerful and destructive nonetheless” (Forrester 2012:xii).15 Therefore, in order to deconstruct Western Christianity, theologians need to take into account “religious pluralism, political struggles, and inculturation” (Joy 2012:5) and centre on the diversity of social, cultural and political realities of the marginalised and poor who experience the dark side of coloniality and capitalism. Jakub Urbaniak, for instance, shows how Christianity played a subliminal, yet important, role in the 2015/16 ‘decolonise the university’ movement in South Africa and argues that “the processes of decolonisation and Africanisation – of emptying and filling the spaces – cannot be separated” (Urbaniak 2019:238). He makes the case for a project that views the relationship between decolonisation and Africanisation of Christianity as intertwined. Therefore, resources for “unlearning [Western] Christianity” and “learning it anew” (ibid.) he finds in the praxis of Black Theology of Liberation, with which to arrive at a decolonial African religiosity/Christianity. Another significant perspective of decolonising Christianity draws on the Latin American tradition of liberation theology, in which Jesus’s image was re-

15 Examples include the Palgrave Macmillan series on Postcolonialism and Religions edited by Joseph Duggan and Jayakiran Sebastian.

invigorated as that of a revolutionary figure, who sides with the poor and marginalised in the fight against injustice. Liberation theologians conflicted with the conservative Western Catholic Church, when they found inspiration in Marx(ist) writings, and thus, centred on liberation in terms of Christian thought and practice (Forrester 2012:xii). As liberation theologians started to actively engage in political struggles many were concerned with labour rights, political prisoners, the oppressed and indigenous people. Put differently, the decolonial turn of religion in general - and Christianity in particular - interrogates how theology adapts to the specific contexts of a given time and space. According to liberation theologians then, Christianity can be liberated from its colonial and imperial entanglement by centring on the liberation of the working poor and the marginalised. This way, Christian activists, liberation theologians and progressive religious politics would reclaim the Bible, the Church and Jesus for and from a post-/decolonial context.

3.1.3 Interlacing Northern and Southern Epistemologies The notion of epistemological coloniality that will be critically applied in this thesis does not essentialise Southern epistemologies as genuinely emancipatory. In fact, I am critical of representations of Southern struggles that depict them as caricatures of a revolutionary’s utopian hope and lack a fundamental analysis of the concrete social conditions of a given time and space. Precisely, as Grosfoguel emphasises, we are not only dealing with a global division of labour but with a capitalist-colonial world order that “makes subjects that are socially located in the oppressed side of the colonial difference, to think epistemically like the ones on the dominant positions” (Grosfoguel 2011:7). Grosfoguel criticizes that it is crucial to distinguish between the “epistemic location” and the “social location” of actors: “The fact that one is socially located in the oppressed side of power relations does not automatically mean that [they] are epistemically thinking from a subaltern epistemic location” (ibid.). For Grosfoguel, subaltern epistemic perspectives are knowledges ‘from below’. But not all knowledges ‘from below’ are elementally critical, emancipatory or systemically reflected upon. Rather, Grosfoguel refers to those types of knowledges that are

critical of hegemonic knowledges and therewith, able to produce a critical perspective on existing power relations. Similarly, Connell et al. state: “No society, whether formally colonized or not, is now outside the economic, political and cultural world created by European empire and the global neoliberal economy”(Connell et al. 2017:29). Accordingly, southern epistemologies exist and develop in strong relation with capitalist ideology. Southern epistemologies, too, are characterized by connections, tensions, differences and are constantly in movement. Therefore, Connell et al. ask: “Given these differences, multiplied across the continents, can we make any general claims about knowledge relations between Global North and South?” The authors warn against the risks of assuming a fixed global relation of dominance and subordination which would end up in the perception of binary categories of a homogenic North and South. Despite this, Connell et al. stress, “there is no contradiction between recognizing deep diversity, and recognizing structures of centrality and inequality in a world economy of knowledge. The crucial requirement is to see the issue historically” (Connell et al. 2017:32). In this spirit, Connell et al. argue for a sociological approach to knowledge that is informed both by postcolonial thought and Northern sociologies. In a similar vein, Cooper and Morrell demonstrate that although “knowledge cannot be generalised, […] it has been filtered predominantly through the lens of its colonial and postcolonial pasts and this makes some generalisations real.” Moreover, “there is a geopolitical and historical unity that continues to underpin it” (Cooper and Morrell 2014:1). Hence, this thesis takes the viewpoint that non-Western as much as Western epistemologies are characterized by the co-existence of emancipatory and conservative colonial knowledges. Syed Farid Alatas formulates:

Non-Western thought and cultural practices are to be seen as sources of theorizing, while at the same time Western knowledge is not to be rejected in toto. Here, there is an explicit claim that theories and concepts can be derived from the historical experiences and cultural practices of the various non-Western cultures (Alatas 2000:5).

For Alatas and other observers of alternative discourses, what is required is not the rejection of Western social sciences but the adoption of it in a more realistic

understanding that reflects particular geographic and historical contexts (Alatas 2000). In this way, a differentiated and nuanced approach to epistemological decoloniality would acknowledge that Westerncentric work has a lot to offer with regard to methodological and theoretical contributions. In other words, there is a fundamental difference between the critique of epistemological coloniality and anti-Westerncentrism, as the latter repudiates all Western ideas as non-applicable in ‘global-southern’ or postcolonial countries. Instead, the unnuanced rejection of Western ideas justifies cultural relativism and denounces all struggles for universal standards such as universal human rights and democracy. Thus, with a Marxist-decolonial approach, I seek to explore how Southern social actors encounter Western concepts and to what extent these signify the state of coloniality and capitalism. In short, the perceived realities of Vietnamese activists must not be decontextualized from the constraints imposed by the cognitive environment of global capitalism. With this framework, practices and ideas can neither be detached from nor reduced to the influence of Western capitalist domination. Rather, this thesis demonstrates that knowledges take form in relation to political practice, bearing the potential to rewrite Westerncentric ideas for progressive and liberating purposes.

3.2 Terminologies, Definitions and Relations

In this section, I lay out the terminological groundwork that will resurface throughout this thesis. Definitions of social movements, resistance, knowledge, embodiment and cognition as well as their relation to each other will be presented here. The first part outlines my understanding of social movements and explains why, in the rest of this thesis, I rather speak of ‘resistance’ rather than social movements. Based on this, I suggest a conceptual distinction between resistance ‘in itself’ and resistance ‘for itself’, by which I look at the process of trespassing on the spatiality of ideological systems and ideological state apparatuses such as capitalism, nationalism, rule of law, coloniality, patriarchy and racism. The second part brings in terminologies around knowledge and embodied cognition, with which I aim at the further conceptualisation of resistance ‘in itself’ and ‘for itself’. In the third part, I bring in the term ‘cognitive resistance’ that operationalises the cognitive

process of re-contesting political concepts taken from hegemonic ideological systems and re-inserting them in a different ideational structure.

3.2.1 Social Movements and Resistance ‘in itself’ and ‘for itself’ From a Marxist perspective, a social movement is a “self-activating class” which represents the discontent and political potential for social change from a position relative to their class composition and should not be considered as an unidentifiable mass (Eyerman and Jamison 1991:16). For a more recent and narrow definition of social movements, I refer to Alf Nilsen and Laurence Cox who defined social movements as “a process in which a specific social group develops a collective project of skilled activities centred on a rationality – a particular way of making sense of and relating to the social world – that tries to change or maintain a dominant structure of entrenched needs and capacities, in part or whole” (Nilsen and Cox 2013:65–66). Everyday practices of resistance can be a starting point, but “to become a movement, participants need to connect with other such practices by articulating something more abstract, a ‘local rationality’ that can be recognised by potential allies. Significantly, such processes unfold in conflict with the collective projects of other groups within a given social formation” (Nilsen and Cox 2013:66). Like other Marxist-oriented schools, the aforementioned definitions accentuated social movements as non-linear processes characterised by constant changes and transformations. Furthermore, as Nilsen and Cox point out, in order to transform the practices of everyday resistance into a social movement, there are certain features that have to be articulated. Coming from a materialist critique of Marxist analysis, Alan Touraine argues that social movements should not be perceived as “a truly analytic category” but as a “category of historical nature” by which he invokes parameters of time and spatiality (Touraine 2004:717). In other words, what a social movement is or is not depends on the type of society and changes accordingly, for instance, with the transition from the industrial to the post- industrial society; or countries with Communist leaders now operating within and in service of capitalist markets, and where Socialists turned into policemen and capitalists (Touraine 2007:120). Touraine also questions whether the notion of

social movements should be applied in a less flexible way and might need to be reserved for a social force that challenges domination in general rather than defending particular social interests (Touraine 2004:718). He formulates an important question that is also relevant to this thesis. Despite his concerns, Touraine concludes that studying society through the lens of social movements, even if flexible per definition, is more important than determining the different notions of social movements throughout history (Touraine 2004:725). And although the subject of this study can be considered a form and process of collective action that challenges the general structure of domination, and can thus, in the broadest sense, be perceived as a social movement, certain movement-internal characteristics (lack of coherence, unifying common identity or clear political agenda, or lack of WUNC display as conceptualised by Tilly 200816) rather than societal characteristics lead me to pre-empt that this thesis is not about a social movement in the narrow sense. Therefore, an alternative option to define the subject of this study is found in the notion of resistance. I define resistance, in its most abstract but elementary form, as expressed in any physical or psychological act that breaks or attempts to break with the dominant existing social, political and economic relations. Yet, in the narrow sense, any form of resistance can only materialise as a tactic, never as a strategy, because resistance cannot be the ultimate objective of a struggle. Rather, resistance focusses on the purpose of enacting and expressing critical thinking and is - at best - the means to achieve a certain kind of social or socio-political change. Therefore, the subject of this study is located somewhere in between the spaces of social movements as defined above, everyday forms of resistance (Scott 1985, 1990) and nonmovements (Bayat 2013). It is about the collective action of noncollective actors and their underground struggles that can ultimately lead to the formation of a large-scale social movement. In order to give the subject of this study a name, I will propose a different conceptualisation. Based on debates over the emancipatory nature of resistance and its relation to power, a distinction between resistance ‘in itself’ and resistance ‘for itself’ shall

16 WUNC: worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment. see, Tilly, C. (2008). Contentious performances. Cambridge University Press.

set the first conceptual distinction applied in the course of this thesis.17 The distinction between resistance in itself and resistance for itself is not primarily one of observed practices of contention. Instead, I look to the degree to which the ideas motivating collective action and political practice become system-transcending on the basis of their relationship with the ideological apparatuses of domination via capitalism, nationalism and coloniality. Drawing upon María Lugones’ (2003) vocabulary, I refer to this as the collective act of trespassing on the spatiality of ideological systems.18 In this thesis, I use the metaphor ‘trespassing on spatiality’ in order to describe the act of thinking beyond and liberating oneself from dominant ideological systems, which - although intertwining and mutually reinforcing – move through the spatiality of ideological state apparatuses and distinct socio- political geographies. Based on this, I provide an abbreviated definition of resistance in itself and for itself: while resistance in itself is exercised by individuals or groups as a political practice that is mostly reactive to immediate moments of repression, resistance for itself centres on actively trespassing on the spatiality of ideological systems and ideological state apparatuses with the aim to re-contest and ultimately liberate the self from hegemonic and constraining ways of knowing. We resist cognitively (see below: cognitive resistance), wherein political concepts from dominant ideological systems are re-contested and re-inserted into a new or different ideational structure (see section 3.3.2 on morphology adapted). This way, new and alternative meanings can be discovered and rediscovered. Precisely, resistance in itself asks: “What act of resistance enforces our demands?”, whereas resistance for itself asks: “What act of resistance enforces our demands and is

17 The expression ‘movement in itself’ is also used by Asef Bayat, who writes: “[t]hese everyday encroachments may be seen as representing a 'movement in itself', becoming a social movement per se only if and when the actors become conscious of their doings by articulating their aims, methods and justifications. However, should they come to assume this feature, they lose their quiet encroachment character. In other words, these desperate everyday practices exhibit distinct undertakings with their own particular logic and dynamics“ (Bayat 1997:57). 18 Lugones uses the phrase “trespassing against the spatiality and logic of oppression” by which she describes that although different forms of oppression are interlocked, they are nevertheless located in different spaces (Lugones 2003:11). This implies that noticing and moving against these interlocking of oppressions would lead to “a redrawing of the map, of the relationality of space” (ibid.:11). Put simply, Lugones argues that by trespassing against the spatiality of oppression, it becomes possible to move against social fragmentation and notice the interlocking of oppressions.

motivated by re-contesting political ideas from hegemonic ideological systems and ideological apparatuses?” Resistance in itself looks at state-society relations and is less conscious (or less explicit) about its entanglement with capital relations and ideological systems. Resistance for itself aims at trespassing on ideological systems and ideological apparatuses such as capitalism, nationalism, coloniality, state institutions and the judiciary. Resistance for itself is characterised by transforming and liberating both the structural-material and cognitive level, a relationship I refer to as capital-epistemology relation. This distinction is presupposed by two forms of knowledge: declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge. While declarative knowledge signifies a person’s ability of ‘knowing that’, procedural knowledge conveys ‘knowing how to’. For instance, ‘knowing that’ labour conditions are unjust, possibly leads to forms of resistance in itself, while ‘knowing how to’ presupposes a person’s or group’s commitment to resistance for itself. For practice can be perceived as radical in some contexts and very common and unspectacular in others, the difference between resistance in itself and for itself is marked by the choice of political practice relative to context (time and space) as well as by the underlying cognitive act to trespass on the spatiality of ideological systems. Thus, both forms of resistance in itself and for itself are political in nature and can be witnessed in classical means of collective action such as protest, marches and demonstrations. Yet, in so distinguishing between political practices and ideas, I contend that it is the political ideas that give substance to the chosen political practices. While these theoretical distinctions provide the ground for my analysis, we will naturally find blurred boundaries in the real world. Nevertheless, as a general tendency, I argue that the practice of resistance in itself is accompanied by political ideas that remain subordinate to the constraints of ideological systems and apparatuses via capitalism, coloniality, nationalism and state institutions such as the judiciary. In order to grasp the process of cognitive liberation (conceptualised as ‘cognitive resistance’, see below) that indicates whether we deal with resistance in itself or for itself, the following section first delves into existing definitions of knowledge and cognition.

3.2.2 Subjugated Knowledges and Cognitive Resistance Knowledge: A Social and Collective Product A sociological conception treats knowledge as socially and collectively constructed, rather than ‘justified’ or ‘true’ as it would be in the discourses of scientific knowledge (Adolf and Stehr 2014:12). Connell, Collyer, Maia and Morrell, however, state that knowledge “is not just an abstract social ‘construct’. It is specifically a social product, generated by and embodied in particular forms of work” (Connell et al. 2017:24). Others described knowledge/knowing as an activity that is dependent on human participation (Adolf and Stehr 2014:14). What these conceptualisations have in common is the aspect of collectivity in knowledge production. Accordingly, knowledge can neither be reduced to the individual or mental representations of memory, nor should it be viewed as the outcome of an individual’s intellectual work (Cox and Nilsen 2014:12). Instead, Connell et al. connect knowledge to any kind of work that has a local reality in the life of the people (Connell et al. 2017:24). For such work is considered a collective process in which knowledge formations come into existence, are sustained, applied and transformed, knowledge production itself must be considered a collective process that is located in a specific set of social practices and social relations. Similarly, Bruno Latour defined knowledge as an operation that produces objectivity through the practice of collective inquiry, while the only way to obtain objective knowledge is to engage in the world and ‘go with the flow’ of experiences (Latour 1987).19 All knowledges are relational, but this relationality is part of objectivity and, in this way, creates knowledge. Quite specifically, Rivett et al. consider the production of knowledge as inextricably linked to effective action (Rivett, Marsden, and Blake 2014:140). Put simply, knowledge is only really knowledge when it leads to effective actions. For example, activists become efficient users of social media or create new political communities by sharing historical and political analysis. They shift the terrain from

19 Latour distinguishes between truth and objective knowledge: “Objective knowledge is different from truth. Knowledge is one kind of truth, there are many others. But relationality is part of objectivity” (Universitetet i Bergen 2013). In a Latourian sense, then, knowledge is entangled in a network comprising different actors.

entertainment to political organising and knowledge dissemination. With regard to social movements, Eyerman and Jamison have defined knowledge as the worldview assumptions – ideas, topics, issues that movements create and members share and are concerned with (Eyerman and Jamison 1991:3). Similarly, Boaventura de Sousa Santos describes that “knowledges are selected, re-signified, and even reinvented in the very process of struggle mobilization” (Santos 2018:132).

Power and the Subjugation of Knowledge Foucault explored a thematic which he described as the “insurrection of subjugated knowledges” (Foucault 1976:81). By subjugated knowledges he referred to two things: the historical knowledges that have been silenced and the knowledges that have been disqualified. Foucault argued that it is the buried historical contents that allows us to rediscover the effects of struggles and conflicts that a system, with its dominating regimes of thought, has imposed on a society. Furthermore, Foucault understands subjugated knowledges as “a whole set knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naïve knowledge, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity” (Foucault 1976:82). These knowledges are socially disqualified, buried under what Foucault called the ‘regime of discourse’ (or ‘discursive regime’).20 It is through the governing of statements and the way in which they govern each other that determines how the relations of power are exercised. The discursive regime, therefore, is not just a question of language and meaning, but expresses the relation of power itself. Power organises and subjugates knowledge, while it is knowledge that can delimit or contain power. Disguised knowledges are “concerned with a historical knowledge of struggles” (Foucault 1976:83), they “owe its force only to the harshness with which it is opposed by everything surrounding it” (1976:82). It is, therefore, through these subjugated knowledges that criticism and critical discourses can be performed, and

20 These relations of power, Foucault analysed, “cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse. There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth […].” In fact, “we are subjugated to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth” (Foucault 1976:93).

autonomous knowledge be produced. Accordingly, I understand Foucault’s notion of subjugated knowledges as a multiplicity of disguised knowledges that can be rediscovered in the exercise of criticism and resistance against the effects of globalising discourses - the regime of discourse - and the hierarchies of knowledge that come with it (Foucault 1976:82-3).

Embodied Cognition and Structural Violence Bearing in mind Althusser who clarifies that “ideology does not exist in ideas” and that deducing ideology to ideas is an ideological representation of ideology itself (Althusser 1971:185), I draw on ‘embodied cognition theory’ which acknowledges the experiences of the body’s interaction with the environment - the subject’s situatedness - that shapes the mental processes of meaning-making, remembering, decision-making, reasoning and perceiving. Cognition itself is a term used to describe the particular process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience and the senses (OED) and traditionally referred to as the “mental processes such as attending, remembering, decision-making, reasoning, and perceiving” (Greene, Sandoval, and Bråten 2016:5). Put differently, “thinking is inseparable from the environments in which our bodies collect such information” (Cerulo 2019:82). Or in Vygotsky’s understanding, the ‘mind’ is a social relation rather than an individual property stored in the head (Vygotsky 1978 cited in Krinsky 2013:117). With regard to the process of acquiring knowledge in social movements, corporeal experiences of physical repression, distress due to surveillance and policing but also feelings of solidarity, community and collectivity constitute factors that shape an activist’s cognition. Therefore, activists’ knowledges and understandings of different concepts rest not only on the neural and mental processing, but also on these corporeal experiences and the socio- structural contexts in which they had that experience (see Cerulo 2019:82). As Pitts- Taylor described:

Embodiment can be understood as marked by inequality; affected by race, class, gender, and other patterns of social difference; enmeshed in suffering and violence, as easily as it can be viewed as a common thread that unites. Embodiment is not exactly the same for everyone…The

potential for conflict, misunderstanding, and violence should not be set aside, …but rather understood as part of embodied reality in contexts of persistent inequality (Pitts-Taylor 2016:92).

Embodied cognition theory also emphasises the different locations and social hierarchies in the social world, calling attention to “discrepancies and dissonances in how minded bodies and worlds fit together” (Cerulo 2019:88; Pitts-Taylor 2014). Following Bustamante et. al (2019) this thesis accounts for the structural, material, and ideological forces that shape the process of embodied cognition. This premise infers that, against a damage-centred narrative which presents an unidimensional subject (here: the political activist) as victimized and damaged, lived experiences of oppression and the processes of embodiment are complex, contradictory and sometimes even conducive to the reproduction of power structures (Bustamante et al. 2019:309). In so locating knowledge at the conjuncture of embodied cognition and social-structural contexts, I attend to the interlacing of knowledge with the structural violence of local state-society and global capital-society relations.

Cognitive Resistance Foucault argued that in order to analyse the mechanics of power, it is the daily struggles and grassroots formations where the nature of power becomes visible (Foucault 1976:116). In view of this, social movement scholars have argued for the importance of reading social movements as producers of knowledge and theory, rather than as mere rational operators that compete against the powerful (Cox and Nilsen 2014; Eyerman and Jamison 1991:85; Nilsen and Cox 2013:145). Eyerman and Jamison formulated that knowledge production or, as they put it, cognitive praxis in social movements can only be identified in formation, that is, cognitive praxis does not come readymade to a social movement but can only be understood while capturing it as a social process in the making (1991:60). Furthermore, as Cox and Nilsen note, from an epistemological realist perspective, “practical processes of experience, the discovery of needs, and the attempts to resolve problems” condition our way of knowing (2014:7). Hence, as much as social movements move from one socio-political pattern and historical conjuncture to another, so do ideas, thoughts and knowledges.

To capture this social process of knowledge production in formation, I introduce another terminology: Cognitive resistance. Cognitive resistance signifies the ideational process of re-contesting concepts taken from hegemonic ideological systems and is thus essential to developing from resistance in itself to for itself, i.e. to trespassing on the spatiality of ideological systems and apparatuses. In doing so, cognitive resistance interacts with material conditions and translates embodied experiences of repression and constraint (see embodied cognition theory) into a particular set of political concepts.

3.3 A Morphological Approach to Cognitive Resistance

Cognitive resistance is the process of re-contesting political concepts from hegemonic ideological systems. Yet, what does cognitive resistance look like? Where does it start and where does it end? How is this process organised? These questions relate to the field of epistemology, also referred to as the ‘theory of knowledge’. In order to analyse how cognitive resistance behaves, we have to understand first how cognitive connections are brought together, how ideas are constituted and how they are connected to other thought units (questions of ontology). So far, this chapter posited that ideology does not exist purely in ideas (Althusser 1971:185) and that knowledge cannot be reduced to the individual or mental representations of memory (Cox and Nilsen 2014:12), but that embodied experiences, that is, the subject’s and collective’s interaction with the environment such as structural violence shape our cognitive processes (Cerulo 2019:88; Pitts- Taylor 2014; Bustamante et al. 2019:309). Keeping this in mind, I borrow Michael Freeden’s morphological approach that provides a method to assess the subject’s ideational level through focusing on political concepts while avoiding a purely ideological representation of cognitive resistance.

3.3.1 Morphology of Political Concepts Freeden pays particular attention to ideologies and conceptualises them as patterned clusters and configurations of political concepts. He suggests perceiving political concepts as spatially structured by a morphology of core, adjacent and peripheral components (Freeden 1994:157). These political concepts are the building blocks of political thought in general terms and attain meaning through “temporally accumulative traditions of discourse” and “spatially diverse cultural contexts” but also through their “particular structural position within a configuration of other political concepts” (Freeden 1993:140-41). Examples of political concepts are encapsulated in terms such as liberty, freedom, rights, democracy, equality, justice, power and nationhood. These political concepts are linguistic and cultural artefacts (Freeden 1994:146), or in other words, they are formulated in interaction and attached to meaning in relation to a given time and space/spatiality, that is, to where they are encountered, what is adjacent to them, and how they happen to be perceived. In this sense, the spatiality of ideologies and ideological state apparatuses articulates the relation between ideologies and power manifest in a particular space such as state institutions, political parties, mass organisations, Churches or factories. Freeden’s morphological approach shall be applied in this thesis but adapted to the specificity of cognitive resistance. Therefore, a brief explanation of how I consider cognitive resistance as trespassing on the spatiality of ideological systems and apparatuses shall be elaborated in the following.

Cognitive resistance and the re-contesting and re-inserting of concepts From a functional perspective, ideologies are a set of political ideas, beliefs, attitudes but also practices and plans of action (Freeden 1998:749–50). From a morphological perspective, ideologies are groupings or a set of political concepts that are configured and shared over time and space (ibid.). What exactly makes an established or distinct ideology is a more complex question. From a morphological perspective, a distinct ideology would be characterized by a morphology of a restricted core that is attached to a narrower range of adjacent and peripheral political concepts (Freeden 1998:750). Freeden also stresses that in order to be an established or full ideology “the core concepts will have to be unique to itself alone

or will need to provide a comprehensive range of answers to political questions that societies generate” (Freeden 1998:750). How Freeden operationalises the spatial and structural configuration of political concepts into ideologies is useful. If ideologies can be defined as groupings of political concepts, and political concepts can be defined as a spatial configuration of core, adjacent and peripheral components, so, I suggest, cognitive resistance provides an analytical lens to grasp the process of re-contesting political concepts that – although located somewhere in between different ideologies – aim at the reconfiguration of hegemonic sets of political concepts that constitute these ideological systems and ideological apparatuses described earlier in this chapter. What distinguishes cognitive resistance from ideologies is the former’s interaction with political practice. The political concepts generated through cognitive resistance translate and organise activists’ embodied perceptions in relation to their political environments. Therefore, cognitive resistance is generated from and locked into the realm of resistance (political practice) and does not manifest as large-scale and comprehensive bodies of thought like socialism, capitalism or liberalism. Based on this, and my previous remark that resistance in itself re-contests concepts taken from dominant ideological systems, I conceptualise cognitive resistance as the actual process of reconfiguring core, adjacent and peripheral concepts and re-inserting them into a different ideational structure through which these ideas (groupings of concepts) are given new meaning. Therewith, cognitive resistance indicates the situatedness of activists towards dominant ideological systems and apparatuses, and thus, denotes the process of cognitive normativity and/or cognitive liberation.

The Configuration of Political Concepts: Core, Adjacent, Peripheral Components Political concepts are configured in a particular way and depending on how they are spatially arranged they mutually define or even contradict each other (more details later). The specific meaning that is attributed to each concept has developed historically, while their perceptions are shaped by cultural conventions and societal variations and limitations. Thus, meaning can be driven by analysis and observation

(e.g. history), by culture (e.g. social convention) and emotions (e.g. embodied cognition). Moreover, political concepts are relational in a double sense: a) in a morphological understanding they are relational with respect to each other within ideational constructs and b) they are related to the socio-historical context including the claims they make about necessary transformations of that context. In either case, cognitive resistance represents a sample of political concepts and ideas depending on what is at the disposal of a particular society (see Freeden 1994:141). Therefore, political concepts do not have a fixed meaning across time and space but depend on its acceptability and applicability within the wider public. Although these meanings are to a certain extent arbitrary, plural and undetermined, they have several advantages. First, they enable the construction of meaningful political worlds and the translation of the multiplicity of meanings into a singularity. In fact, political concepts are internally complex entities and organised in a certain way that attaches meaning to socio-political experiences, signifies political phenomena, and is holding together a set of connected ideas (Freeden 1994:141). But how are political concepts structured? How do they behave? Do they all share a common core? Freeden specifies the configuration of political concepts along two factors: First, they consist of an ineliminable component and second, a non-random (or quasi-arbitrary) collection of additional but limited number of components that are locked into the core (Freeden 1994:149). One might argue that political components themselves could be broken down into further, or even smaller, entities. This however, Freeden notes, is heuristically unmanageable and ontologically unnecessary (ibid.:147). Given this generalized pattern, the core concept is considered indispensable to the epistemological function of a thought entity and is thus an ineliminable component. Freeden reasons that “concepts are idea-artefacts that serve human convenience as ways of coming to terms with the world” and some of these idea- artefact become “centrally ineliminable anchors for different concepts” (ibid.:149). Arguably, this might be explained with embodied cognitive theory, according to which the way our body experiences certain phenomena shape the way our mind makes sense of the world. Yet, no thought entity – ideology, idea and knowledge - can be reduced to its ineliminable elements or narrowed down to a minimum

component. It needs further components to flesh out its meaning (ibid.:148). Without any additional components (adjacent and peripheral concepts) the core would otherwise remain “vacuous, devoid of content and meaning” (ibid.:150). The additional components - adjacent and peripheral concepts - are attached to the core concept. Like core concepts, additional concepts are likely to be historically and culturally dissimilar, non-universal and quasi-contingent. But unlike the indispensability of a core component, additional components are individually dispensable (ibid.:150). Take, for instance, ‘liberal democracy’ as a political thought entity. Given the particular characteristics of a societal context, the following configuration might be established: Freedom of speech and association, human rights and equality are situated as core concepts, while a multiparty electoral system and the right to vote are perceived as adjacent concepts and nationalism as peripheral concept. Unlike adjacent concepts (e.g. a multi-party system and the right to vote) that are dependent on core concepts (e.g. freedom of speech and human rights), core concepts are not dependent on a specific set of additional concepts. Adjacent concepts are attributes that give substance to the core, but are replaceable and contestable, while the core is indispensable to the functioning of the thought entity itself. Peripheral concepts contextualise the act of cognitive resistance within a cultural setting and overlap with other concepts. They can also raise tensions or are dysfunctional in a way that the entire thought unit loses legitimacy (see Freeden 1994:158). Freeden’s structure of political concepts will help to conceptualise and demarcate the process of cognitive resistance, and at the same time, it gives space to the multiplicity and indeterminism of political thought, acknowledges the absence and exclusion of concepts, as well as explores the replaceability and oscillation of concepts. Consequently, wherever we find connections there are disconnections and tensions that need to be acknowledged.

3.3.2 Morphological Approach Adapted On the Problems of Essential Contestability and Quasi-Contingency Freeden argues that within a given ideology such political concepts are de- contested, that is, the meaning of concepts is settled by their morphological

relations with other concepts mobilised by the ideology (Freeden 1994:156). Yet, like any societal construct, political concepts are embedded in an environment that inhabits a range of other closely related concepts. Against this background, Freeden points to a number of problems that arise with the morphological approach to define the ontology of a thought object. Two problems are of particular interest for the study at hand: The essential contestability of concepts and the quasi-contingency, that is, the tensions that emerge from unavoidable associations with other concepts. Drawing on Gallie’s notion of contestability of concepts, Freeden elaborates that political concepts “contain various rival descriptions of their component parts and are open to modification in the light of changing circumstances” (Freeden 1994:142). Freeden emphasises that these tensions are likely to occur due to the chains of associations we have in mind for certain concepts. For instance, authority is associated with power, or autonomy is closely related to liberty. While some concepts may overlap, partly belong to, or incorporate and reinforce each other, they are nevertheless shaped by the overarching structure of a society and its location in the global order. This study will explore how political concepts – that are either analytically driven or socio-culturally legitimised - compete over their positions during the formation of cognitive resistance. It is worth noting that competing political concepts can “override logical linkage” (Freeden 1994:154). Regardless of possible occurring tensions, the configuration of adjacent and peripheral concepts concretises the core concepts. The essential contestability and quasi-contingency are effects of the morphology of political concepts and thus, one of the reoccurring features in this study. To solve this analytical complication, Freeden suggests that political concepts have to include certain categories, such as ‘unit of analysis’, ‘notion of social structure’, ‘view of human nature’ etc (Freeden 1994:150). This way, the quasi-contingency of political concepts is constrained by the categories they occupy. This is the subject of the following section.

Morphological Analyses Adapted

Finally, we arrive at the questions that concern its practical applicability. Precisely, this section asks: How do we arrive at the choice of logically adjacent options? An adapted morphological approach suggests that core, adjacent and peripheral concepts occupy categories that respectively fulfil specific purposes. Despite the quasi-contingency of individual concepts, the categories they occupy are treated as rather stable. However, I will not adopt Freeden’s suggested categories such as ‘unit of analysis’, ‘notion of social structure’ and ‘view of human nature’. Rather, because cognitive resistance is an interaction of political practice and embodied experiences of resistance, I categorize core concepts as action-oriented; adjacent concepts as a pro-stance; while the periphery expresses an anti-stance and behaves antithetical to its adjacent concept. The core concept functions as a common point of reference and orientation, it is a guidance to political practice and the basis of a common political discourse. They are shared by all participants of a certain political practice. Adjacent concepts articulate the pro-stance and refer to imagined ideals and attach assertive values to the core. They specify the core and are driven by both analytical observation and the political culture of the wider environment. The peripheral concepts denote an anti-stance and a concrete political demand. Unlike the adjacent concept, the peripheral concept is not analytically driven, but mostly culturally defined and legitimised. We will see that a further emotional drive is added to it. Adjacency and periphery are in a dialectical relation with one another, they both are anchored in and function to concretise the core. Capturing the cognitive level – the formation of political concepts - emergent from political struggles, allows us to see cognitive resistance not simply as a reflection of activity in thought and speech. The adapted morphological approach suggested in this chapter paves the way to explore cognitive resistance as a distinct process of re-contesting concepts that eventually leads to trespassing on the spatiality of ideological systems and apparatuses. Yet, given the abstract level of Freeden’s conceptualisation, there are weaknesses in defining the spatiality of these given ideological systems. Therefore, this study takes into account not only the specific embodied cognitive environment of individual activists, but also the historically determined socio-economic structures of a given time and space.

3.4 Summary

This chapter introduced a decolonial-Marxist theoretical framework, working definitions and the morphological approach applied in this thesis. By drawing on three concepts taken from decolonial and Marxist theory – capitalist totality, ideological state apparatus and epistemological coloniality – the proposed framework allows for a multilevel analysis that acknowledges the entanglement of power dynamics across the macro, meso and micro levels. While the notion of ‘capitalist totality’ (Webber 2019) emphasises the connectedness of apparently disparate socio-political struggles against the totality of capitalism (macro level), the concepts of ‘repressive and ideological state apparatuses’ (Althusser 1971) helps to explain how state institutions and their psychosocial role in the dissemination and reinforcement of ideology (meso level) interlace with cognitive normativity described in the notion of ‘epistemological coloniality’ (micro level) (Quijano 2000, Mignolo 2002, Grosfoguel 2011). I paid particular attention to the decolonial critiques regarding democracy, law and religion which will be pertinent for the analysis in the chapters 7 to 9. Furthermore, I suggested a distinction between resistance in itself and for itself and developed the concept cognitive resistance. A distinction between resistance in itself and for itself helps to recognize the degree to which ideas that motivate political practice are system-transcending on the basis of their relationship with dominant ideological systems (via capitalism, nationalism, coloniality) and apparatuses (such as state institutions including the judiciary and the Church). While both resistance in itself and for itself can include anti-systemic practices, it is only resistance for itself that focuses on actively trespassing on the spatiality of ideological systems and ideological state apparatuses. This distinction will help to make sense of the tensions and contradictions between political practices and political ideas as illustrated in this thesis. Another important aspect raised in this chapter concerns Foucault’s notion of subjugated knowledges: knowledges that have been historically silenced and disqualified. Through rediscovering these subjugated knowledges, critical discourses can be performed and the hierarchies of knowledge (i.e. the regime of

discourse) contested (Foucault 1976:82-3). As will be shown throughout this thesis, rediscovering subjugated knowledges is essential for anti-systemic political practices. Furthermore, rediscovering subjugated knowledges as a particular form of knowledge production is understood as a collective process that can only be identified in formation (Eyerman and Jamison 1991:60). In order to capture this process of formation, I conceptualised cognitive resistance as the process of re-contesting and reconfiguring political concepts taken from dominant ideological systems and apparatuses. Responding to Althusser’s assessment that ideologies cannot be reduced to their mere existence in ideas (1971:185), the notion of cognitive resistance recognizes that ideas have a material existence and interact with the embodied experiences of repression and constraint. The complexity of cognitive resistance becomes particularly visible in the second parts of chapters 7 to 9, in which I exemplify that liberal democratic concepts can be re-contested and recombined with concepts taken from nationalist and Cold-War ideologies. Hence, cognitive resistance displays the situatedness of activists in relationship to dominant ideological systems and ideological state apparatuses.

Chapter 4: Methodology

This thesis was initially planned as a single case study aiming at the examination of different overt and covert political practices of Vietnamese activists. However, the constraints of fieldwork in Vietnam’s authoritarian context allowed only limited on-site observation of concrete practices such as meetings or protests. Moreover, activists themselves avoided to talk about their concrete practices in order to prevent jeopardizing confidentiality as well as group-related and personal safety. This led to the relative absence of data concerning political practices. Yet, against expectations, activists felt much safer to talk about their experiences of repression and political ideas that motivated their political activity. Thus, driven by the data generated under these constraints of fieldwork, this thesis developed into a broader investigation of sites of contestation and focused on activist ideas and ideologies rather than practices. As a consequence, this thesis developed into a rich account of single-sited critical ethnography that follows the traces of social conflict and the lives, practices and ideas of the actors involved in it. In doing so, this study seeks to re-inscribe social critique in ethnography (Noblit, Flores, and Murillo 2004), or as Burawoy (2009:xiv) puts it, it seeks to “forge a passage from common sense to social science”. While the purpose of a single case study is to isolate the event in order to grasp the richness of details as they are embedded in wider socio-economic and socio-political relations, a single-sited critical ethnography focuses on the implicit values of ethnographic inquiry in a certain space and time. In doing so, it incorporates reflexive inquiry of the researcher’s positionality and is inherently political in that it aims at disrupting tacit power relations. Unlike single case studies of social movements that can function as a lens for looking into multi-level societal dynamics, a single-sited critical ethnography seeks to contribute to the refining and testing of social theories by insisting on forging micro-macro connections and at the same time rejects naïve empiricism and naïve positivism (Burawoy 2009:xii). Ethnographies generally provide the basis for inductive analysis and are rooted in grounded theory. This study, however, is also greatly informed by theory and thus, embraces an inductive-deductive approach. As context, process and positionality

are significantly theory-laden, it is important to acknowledge the theoretical suppositions and frameworks that are necessary to make sense of our research sites (Burawoy 2009:204). The rest of this chapter describes the research methodology and research design of this study. It contains three sections: The first section outlines the principles and ethics of critical ethnography, the second reviews the process of data collection and data analysis and the third briefly touches upon the researcher’s positionality. The methodology and ethics of data collection and data analysis was determined by research guidelines in the authoritarian field (see Glasius et al. 2017). 4.1 Principles and Ethics of Critical Ethnography

There is this first question about how this study moves between reflections on the concrete social realities in authoritarian contexts for activists and academics alike, my own positionality as a Vietnamese-diasporic researcher and the most abstract set of Western-based theories and assumptions. Ethnography offers the tools and conditions for exploring research subjects that are generally vulnerable to misrepresentation, enables close interactions over longer time periods and reveals the hidden dynamics, environments and challenges research subjects have to face in their everyday lives. It is a holistic approach that puts emphasises on context but also leaves room for critical reflection on the researcher’s positionality. Therefore, this study takes as a premise that critical theory must be ‘performed’ in a way that acknowledges the values of diverse epistemologies and the researcher’s ethical responsibility to address certain injustices and resist processes of ‘domestication’ (Carspecken 1996; Madison 2005:14; Thomas 1993).21,22 One of the key assumptions of critical ethnographers is that social life is constructed in the context of power relations (Noblit et al. 2004:4). In view of this, critical ethnography equips me with a practical and ethical framework that resonates with my academic and personal integrity reflected in principles of ethical responsibility, positionality and self-reflection.

21 Critical ethnographers aim at making voices and experiences of marginalised subjects accessible. Domestication renders alternative forms of knowing and the advancement of emancipatory knowledge and discourses invisible or confined to the local. 22 Other classics on critical ethnographies: C Wright Mills (1959): The Sociological Imagination; Sol Tax (1964) Horizons of Anthropology.

One of the essential ethical principles that will be discussed throughout this chapter pertains to the researcher’s ‘do no harm’ principle (Bryman 2008; Wackenhut 2018). Field research in authoritarian contexts entails risks of physical harm and emotional stress of research participants and the researcher alike. Places where local security services and risks of personal or digital surveillance were high had to be avoided. Questions of how to ensure protection of identities and the information provided by research participants were meticulously planned and reflected upon after every interview. In addition to the ‘do no harm’ principle, ethical responsibility accounts for issues regarding informed consent and, equally important, the anonymity of sources that ensures security and confidentiality during and after the fieldwork (see section 4.2). It demands the greatest level of self-reflection and politics of positionality (see section 4.3), since the ultimate truth remains absent, social realities constructed, temporal and multiple, and power relations re-inscribed wherever critical ethnography seeks to reveal the underlying mechanisms of power and control, seeking to move from “what is” to “what could be” (Madison 2005:5). However, contrary to Madison (2005:14) who insists that critical ethnographers seek to “contribute to the production of emancipatory knowledge and discourses of social justice", or Jim Thomas (1993:4) who contends that critical ethnographers raise “their voice to speak to an audience on behalf of their subjects as a means of empowering them by giving more authority to the subjects’ voice”, this critical ethnography is not about the actual production of emancipatory knowledge and discourses, neither is it the call to action ‘on behalf’, but about grounding theoretical abstractions and critiques in these finely phrased knowledges ‘from below’ and the material reality in a given time and space. As the critique of women and people of colour have demonstrated: “Critique repeatedly appropriates the rights of representation even as it seeks to emancipate” (Noblit et al. 2004:2). Instead, I would neither separate my observation of the world from my participation, nor cancel out a certain degree of objectivity which would risk insulating the academic world from the people’s concrete reality. Acknowledging my positionality, privileges and biases is my personal ethical principle that will hopefully help me to demonstrate a reflexive relationship

between my ideas and those of my research participants. As a final note, I wish to state that what is most valuable for critical ethnography is the critique of the present, and in this case, the critique of political life in actually existing socialism in Vietnam.

4.2 Data Collection and Data Analysis

Ethnographic research includes three realms of data collection: interviews, observations and documents. The form of data it generates are: quotations, descriptions and excerpts of documents (see Gillan 2006:300). This thesis does not offer detailed narrative descriptions that are characteristic of anthropological ethnographies but, as a sociological analysis, it centres on facilitating the conversation between empirical data and theoretical concepts.

Data Collection: Interviews Like many ethnographic approaches, my fieldwork relied on snowball sampling and intermediaries to set up interviews. Over a period of 11 months from September 2018 until July 2019, I conducted 52 in-depth interviews with activists based in and around Ho Chi Minh City (South Vietnam), Hanoi (North Vietnam) and Nghe An/Ha Tinh (Central Vietnam). Historically, the three regions underwent distinct socio-economic and political phases that continue to shape present-day biographies and political views regarding France’s and U.S.’s colonial and imperial involvement in Vietnam. Interviews lasted from 50 minutes to an average of 2 hours, one interview lasted 4 hours. Among my interview participants, two were political refugees who I met and interviewed in Bangkok, Thailand. Out of these 52 people, 44 were actively involved in long-term political practice, the other 8 have either participated in a demonstration once or are relatives of political prisoners. Activists’ social and economic backgrounds are diverse, ranging from socially disadvantaged to more affluent family backgrounds. The majority of people with whom I was able to talk to identify themselves as activists from the ‘older generation’, that included the age ranging from 40 to 70. From the younger generation (around 30) I talked to 5 people. That imbalance, however, does not evince that there are fewer young people who are critical or politically active, but

merely shows that the network of younger and older networks of activists are not strongly connected. In addition, younger activists responded rather hesitantly to my interview requests, which made the research method of snowballing difficult to pursue. One of the reasons, so I was told, is that younger activists fear to be suspended from university and that public political criticism would hinder their careers. Some declined my interview requests and for this reason, I decided to focus on the ‘older generation’. The educational, political and ideological biographies of Vietnamese dissidents are diverse. Some participants had university degrees, others finished high school; some were affiliated with the Communist Party, others were proponents of the old Southern Republic and thus, self-declared anti-communists. Religious backgrounds ranged from Buddhists, Catholics and Evangelists; others were secular. Many converted to Catholicism in the course of their experiences in political activism (see Chapter 9). Vietnam connoisseurs would be interested in knowing whether my research participants were related to the Third Republic of Vietnam (abbr. DTVNCH, a claimed anti-communist government in exile headquartered in Orange County) or the banned Party Việt Tân (a network of anti- communists considered as terrorist organisation by the Vietnamese government). Except for 5 people who are members of Việt Tân (and self-critical about it), I could not identify any participants associated with DTVNCH. I designed semi-structured in-depth interviews, which guaranteed a level of consistency (Corbin and Strauss 2015). A main set of themes was planned to direct the interview outcomes towards answering my proposed research questions. However, research participants varied in their performativity as outspoken activists and many times turned the nature of the semi-structured interview into an open and unstructured narrative and lifeworld interview. Permitting a methodological shift is not an indicator for a failed research design, but highlights that flexibility is required to listen, adapt and interpret the interviewees’ way of responding to my questions (Kvale 2007; Mason 2002; Nairn, Jenny, and Smith 2005; Pratt, Sonenshein, and Feldman 2020). This way, they provided information that was significant and that felt natural to them. The length of the interviews also indicated that my interview partners felt confident and in fact, the performativity of activists’ storytelling

greatly informed and enriched my semi-structured agenda. In the semi-structured part, I queried how their everyday lives as activists looked like, what they are struggling for and how they organise their activities, what motivated them as political activists and whether they are members of organisations or groups. I also asked them how they make ends meet after being made redundant or after being released from prison. With particular emphasis, I asked what strategy they chose for their political actions, what difficulties they encountered and what they registered as successful tactics and what not. Based on the provided information, the subset of questions aimed at unpacking the ascribed meanings of certain concepts they have previously referred to and asked, for instance, what democracy meant to them, or how democracy and human rights related to the cause of labour struggles or anti-China standpoints. They disclosed the non-static, yet limited nature of political contention in authoritarian contexts, but also the heterogeneity and competitive character of political ideas. Following Morgenbesser and Weiss’ (2018:10) recommendation, building an informal team helped to “navigate the authoritarian landscape”. Accordingly, key intermediaries recruited my interview partners and were, in fact, the only link that ensured other informants would have enough trust to respond to my questions. They also closed the gap between me and my respondents and “curtailed suspicions about my motives and trustworthiness” (Morgenbesser and Weiss 2018:11). Although snowball sampling is a nonprobability technique, I noticed that my key intermediaries introduced me to new informants by using ‘judgement sampling’ among themselves. While convenient options for interviews were evaluated and avoided (usually on my behalf), I was introduced to key opinion leaders (KOL) that represented specific struggles, including struggles over land, labour, freedom of speech and press as well as environmental protection. In my informants’ opinions, political prisoners were generally considered as knowledgeable, reliable and trustworthy democracy activists. Welcoming my intermediaries’ attendance during interviews curtailed suspicions about sensitive interview questions. The occasional interjection of intermediaries helped to close certain gaps between open research questions and the vagueness or ‘hidden transcript’ of my respondents’ answers. Intermediaries also directed me towards certain aspects that I could not have known

or did not ask, indicating that they observed and studied me/my research as much as I observed them (Morgenbesser and Weiss 2018:3). In yet other interviews, they helped me to navigate through social hierarchies (Morgenbesser and Weiss 2018:11). As an unexperienced researcher of Vietnamese descendent who never lived in the country, it was obvious to many of my interlocutors that I was no insider or expert, and that the underground scene of Vietnamese activism was unchartered territory. In some cases, I consulted my intermediaries about the sensitivity of my interview questions. They advised me not to ask questions related to concrete tactics and practices in cases were the participant was newly released from prison or associated with a larger group. Especially in the latter case, responsibilities towards the group’s confidentiality were most important to the activists. In one case, the interviewee stated that it was a matter of time and historical research that all information is released since state and police archives will be accessible at some point in the country’s history. Even if these challenges (i.e. influences by my intermediaries and deviation in interview technique) side-lined my initial research design and agenda, it was worth preserving the organic development of a conversation and playing along with the social conventions and hierarchies. As a consequence, I chose not to interrupt the participant’s narrative, interjected only hesitantly or only when I was given a verbal or non-verbal sign to ask my next question. Many participants filled the space and time with content they thought would be important for me to know even without hearing all my questions. Where possible, I arranged follow-up meetings that were of informal nature, but which opened up a fairly private perspective on the activists’ lives and grievances. Hundreds of informal conversations with non- activists, academics and family members greatly informed my understanding of the general public opinion. Data saturation manifested when answers in interviews were repetitive and the method of snowball sampling closed the circle of the activist network. Most interview partners were comfortable with being recorded. A written form of consent and participation information sheet was prepared as required by University of Manchester standards, yet, signing a printed consent form raised concerns among my interlocutors, not least because their signature meant actual

evidence for their participation in my research, and thus their involvement in underground activism (see Morgenbesser and Weiss 2018:11; Wackenhut 2018). Providing my contact details ensured my flexibility and openness to any withdrawal of information. Verbal consent was given prior to the interview and reconfirmation afterwards. All voice recordings, typed-up notes and transcripts were stored on the end-to-end encrypted and password protected cloud server tresor.it and immediately deleted from my recording device. Contact information was stored, encrypted and password protected separately. To avoid potential identifiers, I assigned a five-digit respondent identifier to all digital transcripts. During the actual writing-up process, I pseudonymised all interviewees and avoided mentioning specific locations throughout the text. However, few names are followed by the symbol ‘*’ with which I indicate the real names of Vietnamese activist-authors, as I refer to identifiable and accessible publications. The trade-off between protecting sources (the participants and myself), maintaining confidentiality and anonymity, and expectations of academic transparency and replicability has been continuously encountered and acknowledged throughout this study (Morgenbesser and Weiss 2018:4).

Data Collection: Observation and Documentation The data recorded from observation includes different objects. Given the authoritarian setting and the lack of political opportunities, I neither participated nor observed demonstrations and protests on-site but followed the livestream recordings of protests whenever available. However, I focused on two aspects of observation that would serve my data collection: The sites of everyday life of activists, their housing conditions, choice of public spaces for meetings; and the physical signs of distress and verbal and non-verbal patterns of communication. Another particularly important site was a local Church in Central Vietnam, were I resided for several days. Church services and the witnessing of sermons that had a political character were particularly interesting. Given the authoritarian context, in which both the state and activists tend toward secrecy for reasons of protection (national and individual) (Morgenbesser and Weiss 2018:2), participants were at times evasive and cagey, which I interpreted as their inclination to utilise “hidden

transcripts” (Scott 1990). This reflected vulnerability, concerns over surveillance or at times mistrust towards my political positionality (see section 4.3). Observing and interpreting these communication and language patterns was extremely important to understand the context’s specificity of embodied cognition. And finally, the documentation I gathered over the time period included activist online newspapers, Facebook posts and livestreams, various YouTube videos and items from international news platforms, including BBC Vietnam, RFA and VOA, which regularly feature Vietnam’s activist voices and cover issues regarding political prisoners and state-critical protests. In addition, I paid attention to state-run publications that covered relevant themes. A more extensive documentation would need to include online petitions and activist blogs. The scope of this study did not allow for a systematic data collection of documents but chose a randomized approach that was defined by contingent factors (e.g. political events specific to that moment; writings that research participants shared with me).

Data Analysis How can something as confidential, abstract and immaterial as political practices and ideas be derived from my data? First, it is simply the verbal behaviour of research participants that presents certain political concepts as more important than others. Second, it is the subsequent scholarly abstraction that tries to bridge the empirical and theoretical gap in the hope of drawing a detailed and convincing picture. I used the NVivo 12 software to transcribe and initiate first steps of coding the interviews. I chose to translate simultaneously, instead of transcribing the recordings in Vietnamese language first. Simultaneous interpretation not only saved time but also allowed me to better grasp and remember the emotions verbalised in body language and beyond the spoken word. All translations in this study are my own unless otherwise indicated. The NVivo software proved to be an effective tool to store and manage the dataset. The initial phase of coding produced broad themes and indicated possible subthemes. However, the extraction of quotes out of the transcripts and the externalisation of them into separate folders isolated them from the crucial context in which the statements were made. I ended up repeatedly going

back to the full-text transcript to re-read the entire section (decoding the codes). It did not prove to be time efficient and influenced my confidence of how to interpret the quotes. As a consequence, I coded a large body of data manually, which allowed for in-built comments and references to other participants and themes within the document. Further to this, my analysis used four layers of coding. The first layer assigned keywords denoting the everyday life experiences as well as experiences or perceptions of repression or authoritarianism of activists. Here, codes were predominantly assigned to descriptions of surveillance, imprisonment and physical violence. The second layer assigned codes to the practices of resistance (i.e. tactics and forms of collective actions) that my interviewees recalled. Activists described the use of social media and the Internet, including online petitions, legal approaches, religious rituals but also demonstrations and protests. The third layer of coding denoted the socio-political self-positioning and identity-markers of participants. Accordingly, I assigned concrete themes such as labour, land and democracy, the environment and anti-China/anti-communism. Distinguishing between the three layers was particularly important to evince the multiplicity, overlaps of and contradictions between embodied experiences of repression, the choice of political practices and the shaping of political subjectivities. The fourth layer of coding aimed at filtering the underlying ideational concepts and their relation to lived, perceived and/or embodied experiences of life, political practice and subjectivity (layer 1 to 3). Accordingly, themes were assigned to keywords such as political participation, rule of law, justice/truth, multi-party system and nationalism which turned out to be the most insightful and puzzling fragments of my data. I interpret them as ‘political concepts’ in the course of this thesis. Furthermore, field notes of observation and general documents were stored in separate folders and manually linked to the transcripts in the commentary sections of each word document. Some documents such as newspaper articles and television broadcasts were saved. I also managed to record and save a few Facebook livestreams that would serve as examples. I did not manage to save blog entries and Facebook posts in a consistent manner. Consequently, the interviews constituted the central and guiding body during the process of data analysis, while observations

and extra documentations were utilised whenever required in order to provide alternative views that contrast or flesh out participants’ narratives.

Methodological Limitations Field research in authoritarian and hierarchically structured contexts comes with limitations that have certainly affected the dataset of this study. It is important to note that my method of observation lacked standardized criteria and consistency. I was not able to take part in or observe group meetings, protests or demonstrations and thus, had no access to observing overt or covert forms of resistance. Instead, I relied on the storytelling of my interlocutors. Therefore, my observations were limited to the precarious housing conditions of activists as well as their verbal and bodily markers such as facial expressions, change of tone and general performance, which gave me valuable insights into the material conditions and embodied cognition of dissidents. These are not generalisable but serve the narrative purposes of this thesis. It is also worth noting that I had no access to representatives of state institutions and dissident voices that are likely to exist within Party structures or institutions of higher education. Neither was I able to draw on the expertise of local academics to counterbalance activist narratives (because no local research has been conducted on this topic or the topic has been largely avoided in conversations with academics). Other limitations produced by the authoritarian context concern my limited access to the current generation of students which resulted in a demographic imbalance in my sample. Students might have a perception of the West that is distinctly different from the generation I interviewed, not least because they consume different international media. However, students who are critical of the CPV declined my interview requests and avoid public criticism out of fear of being suspended from university. Furthermore, the snowball sampling technique allowed only limited access to Cao Dai and Hoa Hao Buddhists, generating interviews with a few Hoa Hao Buddhists and one Cao Dai religious leader only. With the snowballing technique I did not arrive at data saturation with regards to Hoa Hao and Cao Dai Buddhists and thus, a deeper analysis of decolonial voices outside of the Catholic Church was not possible in this thesis.

4.3 The Researcher’s Positionality

In the attempt to further expand on the methodology of critical ethnography, Noblit et al. (2004:23) discussed the premise of self-critique by addressing aspects of positionality, reflexivity, objectification and representation within the field of what they termed ‘postcritical ethnography’. In its broadest terms, postcritical ethnography is not a single methodological approach, but a methodology that considers the plurality and flexibility of critical ethnographic approaches relative to the specific historical and political context. It is a method that helps me to represent the lived experiences and voices of activists and their perceptions on life and society. Postcritical ethnography acknowledges that we are bound up with a dilemma of objectivity. As a researchers’ positionality arises from the inescapable embeddedness of our work, Noblit et al. (2004:21) contend: “Positionality involves being explicit about the groups and interests the postcritical ethnographer wishes to serve as well as his or her biography. One’s race, gender, class, ideas and commitments are subject to exploration as part of the ethnography”. In fact, recalling theories of standpoint epistemology, I openly ground my experiences in my working class and migrant background, for this is the foundation of what I believe to be a reflexive (post)critical ethnography.23 Postcritical ethnographies avow that “the act of writing inscribes a critical interpretation that exists beyond the intentions of the author to de-objectify, de-reify, or demystify what is studied” (Noblit et al. 2004:22). However, since I have learned that social and political subjects are constantly moving as much as ‘new’ ideas, experiences and failures are arising out of ‘older’ ones, and thus, always display a phase of transition, ethnographies are more or less fair transient snapshots of our partial and positional interpretation at worst, and a transient snapshot of the oppressed and marginalised voices at best. Therefore, my ethical standpoint is to illustrate Vietnamese social realities and struggles as extensive as possible and as critical as warranted.

23 To Jürgen Habermas practicing critical theory involves seeing and representing social life ‘for the political purpose of overcoming social oppression, particularly forms that reflect advanced capitalism through the overt polemics of the researcher’ (Madison 2005:7). This resonates with the notion of “reflexive ethnography” or “postcritical ethnography” applied in this thesis.

However, the authoritarian research context and the patriarchal, hierarchical society have rendered myself likely to be scrutinised (Morgenbesser and Weiss 2018:4). In Vietnam, I learned how intense the clash of my Western education and socialisation with my ethnic background would be. Many interview partners were mostly surprised, some were sceptical. “Why is a young woman who is safe in Europe risking her personal security for a mere doctoral thesis?” they asked. In the aftermath, activists from the same network told me, generally quite amused: “They thought you were a spy”. Others immediately made sense of me as a young woman who “loves and sacrifices for her home country”. Yet, I have never considered Vietnam nor Germany (where I grew up) as my ‘home country’. One country I perceived as the place where my parents grew up and the other where I was socialised and that I knew best. Therefore, the ‘nationalisation’ and ‘patriotization’ of my person took me by surprise. Most of my interview partners read me as a “nationalist” and “anti-Communist”. For others, I was “the one who would write down the truth about Vietnamese dissidents” and at least two people believed I was a Communist Party informant. Marxists living in Vietnam, who couldn’t understand why I was researching dissidents, or so-called reactionaries and anti-communists, made sense of me as being “tricked into liberalism and conservatism”. The product was a multitude of identities that were not mine. I had to learn to manoeuvre around them. Sympathy, but also ‘professional outmanoeuvring’ and patience was what made my fieldwork possible. However, I never lied, but most of the time revealed that I owed large parts of my critical and analytical understanding from reading Marx and Engels’ original texts and learning from Marxist scholars. Most participants chose to ignore or not to commentate on my declaration. Like the Vietnamese activists that I researched, I also went through different stages of political activism in life. From everyday resistance to leftist groups and back to a low-key civil society approach, my perceptions never changed but adapted according to my lived realities. Changing conditions led to a change of political practices. It seems that all ideologies and political presuppositions originate in some sort of grievance, precarity, anger or instability, but also in hope and empathy. Writing up this thesis, I have not changed my initial political conviction. As I realised that my research findings bring out the best and the worst of expectations,

I decided to go for both, in the hope, that readers are willing to acknowledge a researcher’s responsibility for scientific rigor, aim for objectivity and honest reflectivity. I position myself in Marx’s approach of grasping the totality and facing material and political realities even if they don’t show what we want to see. I reject reductionist and ahistorical explanations of non-economic phenomena and the violent, patriarchal and racist wings of those who call themselves radical Marxist- Leninists. I follow Burawoy (and his teacher Jaap van Velsen) who postulates that ‘actually existing socialism’ has to be studied and scrutinized as much as we investigate ‘actually existing capitalism’ (Burawoy 2009:198). As a final note, this study addresses an academic audience and therefore cannot be considered public sociology. However, as Burawoy (2009:xviii) formulates: “by engaging with suffering and domination, hierarchy and inequality, ethnography calls attention to our accountability to a world beyond and thereby inevitably raises the spectre of public sociology. Hence, this study might be considered public sociology for scholar-activists in the West, but it might not be in the eyes of Vietnamese activists.

Chapter 5: Research Context

Since the early 2000s, especially since 2007/2008, protesters and intellectuals have raised public discontent with the current political system, mostly with reference to national sovereignty, land dispossession, environmental pollution and democracy. More recently, two nation-wide protest movements occurred in 2016 (protests against the marine life disaster caused by a steel factory in Central Vietnam; see Chapter 9) and 2018 (protests against Special Economic Zones and the Cyber Security law), with both being considered as the biggest protests since the end of war in 1975. With growing public suspicion over who it was that staged these protests, much attention was put on dissident activists or so-called reactionaries. But before we can analyse who these activists are and how they engage in collective action, a first contextualisation of the country’s socio-economic and socio-political environment is required. Interestingly, unlike regions spurred by the Arab Spring or the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, Vietnam’s political system remains remarkably stable. Reasons for its relative stability are threefold: (1) Vietnam’s shifting political economy from central planning to a ‘socialist-oriented’ market-economy, (2) the channelling of popular contention in CPV-controlled mass organisations and (3) the repressive apparatus against independent and dissident activists (more details in Chapter 6). These three factors provide the context of this thesis.24

5.1 The Shift Towards a ‘Socialist-Oriented’ Market Economy

One of the key historical dates of Vietnam’s history is the year 1945, which is remembered as the turning point at which the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) declared the country’s independence from French colonialism. Followed by a civil war between the DRV (also known as Communist North Vietnam that

24 The shift from central planning to a socialist-oriented market economy implies an ideological transition in the Vietnamese Communist forces, from the Viet Minh as anti-imperial liberator to a pragmatic Vietnamese Communist Party that accepts the state’s increasing level of integration (and subordination) into the capitalist market (see Greenfield 1994).

received support from the Soviet Union, China and other countries of the Socialist Bloc) and the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, also referred to as Capitalist South Vietnam backed by the USA and Western allies), it was only 30 years later in 1975 that marked the end of the American War and the collapse of the Southern capitalist regime. The country’s reunification of North and South Vietnam was subsequently declared under Ho Chi Minh, the prospective leader of a political system that is characterised by the rule of a single Party, the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV). Since then, the regime’s political stability and hence overall legitimacy has been sought from economic growth which led to the state’s expectation that the people will view as ‘good governance’ (Fforde 2017:47; Vasavakul 2019). And indeed, the result of the country’s economic performance is above average and one of the front runners according to ‘the East Asian miracle’ debate. With an average GDP growth rate at 6,25 percent from 2000 until 2018 and 6,9 percent in 2019, Vietnam also secured the general reduction of poverty, increase of life expectancy at birth and the decrease of unemployment rate.25 Vietnam is currently transitioning from one of the world’s poorest countries in the 1980s to ‘lower middle-income’ status (World Bank 2019). Reasons for its vast economic development included its gradual transition from central planning to market economy; a transition that was characterised by the decollectivization of land, rural diversification, the privatisation and reorganisation of state-owned-enterprises, new legislation for trade liberalization and industrial development, subsequent access to the global market and foreign capital. This transition, however, was not entirely state-run. In fact, peasants and workers were already subjected to exploitation and surplus extraction by the state under the system of central planning. In response to domestic economic difficulties and financial shocks due to cuts of Soviet aid in the 1970s, the U.S. trade embargo that ended only in 1994/1995, authorities’

25 Between 2002 and 2018, more than 45 million people were lifted out of poverty, with the poverty rate declining from 70% to below 6% (US$ 3.2/day PPP). At the same time, GDP per capita increased by 2.5 times (US$ 2,500 in 2018). See, The World Bank. 2020. “The World Bank in Vietnam”. Retrieved: December 01, 2020 (https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/vietnam/overview#1) and Trading Economics. undated. “Vietnam GDP Growth Rate”. Retrieved: December 01, 2020 (https://tradingeconomics.com/vietnam/gdp-growth).

mistreatment, corruption and extreme poverty, state enterprises urged for commercialisation and market liberalisation, while private households formed small businesses which created an informal parallel market (Fforde and de Vylder 2018; Freeman 1996). This ultimately drove the entire economy away from central planning and towards the awaiting market economy. It was a spontaneous “bottom- up” or endogenous drive of change that Fforde translated as “fence-breaking” [pha rao] (Fforde and de Vylder 2018; Fforde 2009:489). In 1986, at the Sixth Party Congress, Vietnamese policy makers introduced the Doi Moi reforms (Renovation Policy) which large fractions of the Party saw as an opportunity to change course and secure its hegemony as competent and powerful policy maker (Fforde and de Vylder 2018). With the Doi Moi reforms, the country’s political economy officially transitioned from central planning to market economy, which resulted in the present-day model of a ‘socialist-oriented market economy’. Allegedly, the long- term objective is the transition to full socialism and ultimately to communism (Gillespie 2006:64). At the same time, Vietnamese workers continue to have no control over the production process and technically no financial capacities to gain ownership over the means of production, while peasants are dispossessed from the agricultural land for dubious development projects (see Chapter 8). After all, Vietnam’s economy is not a textbook ‘free market’ economy but seems to be a ‘coordinated neoliberal market economy’ (Truong and Chris 2014:298).26 The politico-economic restructuring included the adherence to an authoritarian single- party regime (Malesky and London 2014:396), the conversion of agricultural land into projects of industrialization and urbanization (Nguyen Van Suu 2009:107), labour migration, gendered (semi-)proletarianization (Cerimele 2018), further exploitation of the already cheap labour force, an increase in inequality, processes of privatisation in the health and education sector (London 2008), the gradual transplantation and marginalisation of legal concepts (Do Hai 2016), high levels of corruption (Gainsborough 2010) and the severe repression of dissident voices. In

26 The authors employ Hall and Soskice’s (2001:8) definition according to which “in coordinated market economies, firms depend more heavily on non-market relationships […]. These non-market modes of coordination generally entail more extensive relation or incomplete contracting, network monitoring based on the exchange of private information inside networks, and more reliance on collaborative, as opposed to competitive, relations to build the competencies of the firm”.

addition, it focusses on the support of and incentives for foreign investors and export-oriented production (Fforde 2017:49; Malesky and London 2014:396), while military-owned fractions of capital, powerful state conglomerates, and managers of state enterprises and private businesses occupy crucial positions in the party-state apparatus. They, in fact, form the new bureaucratic bourgeoisie (Greenfield 1994:204). The Vietnamese Communist Party that used to be the hope for a progressive force is today commentated on rather pessimistically. Political economists have particularly criticised that the party-state was unable to support its state enterprises (SEs) - the crucial forces of a centrally planned economy - with investments it needed to catch up technologically and stay competitive (Beresford 2008; Masina 2006; Truong and Chris 2014:297). While the economy grew fast, labour productivity stayed relatively low and industrialisation lagged behind. As a consequence, foreign investors and the domestic non-state sector evolved into the dominating forces of Vietnam’s economy (Beresford 2008:221) and capitalism became the main driver of the country’s economic change (Fforde 2017:51). Yet, the system’s disequilibrium between free market reforms and socialist eulogy is identified as a source of political instability and an increase in authoritarianism against potential opponents. Mounting dissatisfaction among the general population addresses the party-state’s misconduct, corruption and policy failures, but as Fforde (2017:58) rightly notes: “For most Vietnamese, the market economy offers freedoms and opportunities that are well beyond anything they have experienced; so, it is not surprising that they report high levels of support for a market economy”. In the following section, I will explain in more detail what Vietnam’s shift towards a market economy meant for the peasantry and the working class.

Land Ownership and the Implications for Peasants Land ownership in Vietnam has little to do with socialism. Instead, the further integration into the global capitalist market required certain legal transplantations to regulate land ownership for the advancement of industrialisation (Do and Iyer 2008). The contemporary land tenure system is vague and divides land rights into three entities: ownership rights, control rights and use rights. The first category assigns ownership to the entire people. Officially, private ownership of land is not

permitted, as Vietnam’s Constitution (2013 amendments) stipulates that land is ‘owned by all the people and represented and uniformly managed by the State’. The second designates land that falls under the power of the state and the third categorizes the rights of individuals, households and organizations to acquire the right to use land. The 1993 Land Law allowed households to transfer, lease, exchange, inherit and mortgage their land-use rights, a policy reform that is typically referred to as land titling (through a registration system introduced by the colonial government) (Do and Iyer 2008:532). The land use rights are given for a limited period of time and can be revoked for purposes of economic development. This commodification of land (similar to the colonial market economy) invoked rich peasant accumulation, gave Communist Party officials and the state another opportunity to concentrate land, while the many other peasants lost their means of production and hence, their livelihoods (Akram-Lodhi 2005; Caouette and S. Turner 2009:171). Yet, it also allowed private entrepreneurs and businesses together with state institutions to turn hundreds of hectares of agricultural land into export-processing, industrial, high-tech and economic zones in a short period of time, for which they required forced land dispossession (Nguyen Van Suu 2009:108). Reducing fees for land rent and other administrative incentives for capital are a precondition to attract foreign investors. What David Harvey (2004, 2005) has called ‘accumulation by dispossession’ sets the current political scene for peasant resistance. Yet, land seizure is not accompanied by inadequate compensation only but by corruption acted out by local cadres, which is oftentimes addressed as the main problem, while larger systemic or state relations are less targeted by peasants (Caouette and S. Turner 2009; Mcelwee 2007; Tran Thi Thu 2004). For instance, from 1999 to 2001 in Dai Loc, a village in Bac Ninh province, hundreds of households lost their land use rights to a highway and industrial zone project and received unfair compensation. As a response, villagers obstructed the counting of votes on the day of the National Assembly Election (Nguyen Van Suu 2009:109). As a consequence of land dispossession and inadequate compensation, many peasants are rendered proletarianized or informalized, while others are forced to export their labour force to other regions.

Post-WTO Accession and the Implications for Labour The urge for economic growth implied the need for further integration into the global capitalist market. This, in turn, required both the improvement of the country’s role in the regional production network and the access to core capitalist markets like the United States and the European Union (Masina and Cerimele 2018:10). In 2007, Vietnam entered the WTO and eventually developed into one of the world’s largest exporter of garments to the U.S. American market and number two exporter of rice, while half of its exports are manufactured products. The initially modest influence of Western capital through the World Bank was soon to change its pattern.27 In fact, concessions to the WTO limited opportunities for the development of the national industry sector. Instead, FDI-led and export-oriented industrialisation have continued to grow and became the central feature of Vietnam’s economic strategy, while the development of the national industry remained weak (Masina and Cerimele 2018). Masina (2018:277) concludes: “The Vietnamese trade balance shows massive imports from Asia and subsequent exports of finished goods to the rich markets of North America and the European Union in a process that brings rather limited benefits to the Vietnamese economy”. As a result, Vietnam’s industrial development became dependent on foreign capital and on a cheap and well-disciplined labour force that is made willing to self- exploit under harsh working conditions (Masina and Cerimele 2018:11). It became increasingly evident that Vietnam’s commitment to free market ideology was a means to an end for its rapid growth strategy based on FDI-led, export-oriented production. In 2016, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung (in office from 2006 to 2016) and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim confirmed and strengthened their ideological partnership in a post-Washington Consensus manifesto titled: Vietnam

27 Vietnam’s capitalist pathway has certainly not been directed by domestic policy makers only. The World Bank started to operate in Vietnam in 1993, despite the fact that America’s embargo remained in place until 1994. Cling, Razafindrakoto and Roubaud (2013:8) defined “the World Bank as an institution which serves the interests of the US hegemony, by promoting its dominating ideology, which is neoliberalism”. Although access to the World Bank meant to be a watershed moment for Vietnam’s integration into the global market, the Bank’s financial influence remained modest and its policy advice flexible compared to other developing countries. Instead, the Bank saw its major contribution, and thus a better reputation for itself, in providing access to knowledge on development.

2035: Toward Prosperity, Creativity, Equity, and Democracy. In it, both parties reaffirmed their commitment to Vietnam’s further trade liberalisation. As Masina and Cerimele (2018:13) emphasise, Vietnam’s export-led development strategy with the objective to industrialize as fast as possible, relies “intrinsically on a labour regime highly exploitative of industrial labour” and on the interests of foreign capital. However, FDI-led, export-oriented manufacturing as a share of GDP declined after WTO accession, meaning that it does not contribute to the development of the domestic industry as it was hoped for and proclaimed by neoliberal orthodox theories (ibid.:14). On the contrary, what happened was a delocalisation of labour power, a process during which transnational corporations transfer operations with high labour costs to countries with low labour costs. This sharp global division of labour intensified as multinational corporations avoid the integration of local firms into their supply chains (or hinder them to enter). As a result, they continue to block international competition and secure the continuation of low-cost manufacturing. What increased, however, is the pressure on domestic firms to commit to bolder economic reforms and stay competitive as regional manufacturer. With the increasing pressure for further global integration into the capitalist market (especially since the mid-2000s) and an increase of FDI-investment and export-oriented industrialisation strategy, low labour costs, higher levels of labour precarisation and the curtailment of worker’s rights became the precondition for Vietnam’s economic growth. As numerous scholars have stressed continuously, part of a capitalist state’s political strategy is to impair, control and/or repress efforts to organised labour resistance (Amsden 1989:148; Chang 2013; Masina 2006:271). And indeed, the politico-economic transition from central planning to market economy continues to set the agenda anew and - as any capitalist system - it “suffers systematically from an inescapable tension between profitability and legitimacy” (Webber 2019:9). The need for rapid growth certainly puts Vietnam, a dependent industrialised state, in a stage of anxiety in which the fear of organised labour and socio-political resistance can only cumulate. Knowing this, the International Labour Organisation (ILO), international campaigns and INGOs have fiercely advocated for the improvement of workers’

rights in Vietnam and elsewhere. Under this kind of political pressure, concessions towards labour improvement were made not only prior to WTO accession. Vietnam also signed a bilateral trade agreement with the European Commission in 2015 and the lengthy discussed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in 2016, from which the U.S. administration under Donald Trump withdrew in 2017, forcing the remaining members to reorganise under the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). In the course of negotiating foreign trade agreements, proposals concerning amendments of the labour code became subject of public discussion. More recent negotiations over the EU-Vietnam trade and investment agreements (EUVFTA) required Vietnam to comply with the ILO standards. In June 2019, the National Assembly ratified Convention 98 of the ILO, which officially acknowledges workers’ rights to organize and collective bargaining (Tran 2016). Vietnam ratifies six out of eight ILO standards and the amendment of the labour code, which would allow for the formation of VGCL-independent trade unions starting in 2021. Freedom of assembly is one of the ILO standards Vietnam refuses to ratify which, among other vague formulations, has led analysts to raise doubts, as in practice, technical restrictions could be applied that render potential independent unions powerless or even illegal under the Criminal Code (Hutt 2019). Hence, the idea of VGCL independent trade unions must be taken with a grain of salt, as results and credibility are yet to be seen. The fundamental problem, according to Clarke, Lee and Chi’s (2007:562) diagnose, lies in the fact that:

Vietnam has sought to transplant a bureaucratic system for the regulation of industrial relations in a state-socialist system, based on rights embodied in government laws and decrees and Party instructions, into the emerging capitalist economy in which employers are no longer directly subordinate to the party-state apparatus, so that there is no longer any adequate mechanism to ensure that those laws, decrees and instructions are respected by employers.

With Vietnam’s development strategy that depends on FDI-led and export oriented manufacturing, the tolerance of labour strikes and human rights improvements will continue to be tested (Clarke et al. 2007:563), while global developments have shown that popular movements against capitalism and neoliberalism are only a

matter of time. Having outlined the country’s political economy, the following section provides a more nuanced picture of the socio-political context and examines how the emergence of autonomous social movements are curbed by the state apparatus by means of channelling and alienating political participation. Put differently, the subsequent section discusses the ideological state apparatus that concerns the topic at hand.

5.2 Channelling and Alienating Political Participation

Vietnam’s ideological state apparatus (see Althusser 1972, 2014; Chapter 3) is anchored in the idea of democratic centralism rather than the genuine democratic participation of workers and peasants. Democratic centralism is essential to extend and reproduce the CPV’s hegemony over the state and, at the same time, shield it from genuine public criticism concerning political legitimacy, labour exploitation, extractivism of natural resources and capital accumulation. However, as Beresford (2008:241) states: “Socialism is not simply a question of technical solutions to the provision of infrastructure, education, etc., or of providing a social safety net. It is mainly a question of empowerment”. Yet, working class empowerment is not encouraged under any market economy, including that of a ‘socialist-oriented’ market economy. As Greenfield (1994:229) noted cynically: Now that “the socialist project is dismantled […], the working class is free to engage in collective struggle against the new capitalist social order”. However, while some conditions for empowerment are channelled, others are simply emptied out. By looking at state-society relations, scholars have shown that certain civil society actors including actors within the state apparatus, NGOs and civic organisations are, indeed, ‘allowed’ to make significant yet limited contributions to political change (Kerkvliet 2014a; Vasavakul 2019; Wells-Dang 2010, 2012b; Wischermann 2011). For instance, civic participation is encouraged in mass organisations, such as the Women’s Union, Peasants’ Union, Trade Union, Youth Union, of which the Vietnam Fatherland Front (Mặt trận Tổ quốc Việt Nam, VFF), constitutes the umbrella organisation (Thayer 2009:3). These mass organisations, have a rather representative function, linking various sectors and groups to the Party apparatus and aim at the mobilisation of its members to carry out Party policies

(Tuong 2014:479–80). Equally important, however, is that they channel citizens’ concerns and criticism in a way that contains regime threatening attitudes (Kerkvliet 2001:247, 2003:9–10). Moreover, since 2010 citizens are literally ‘permitted’ (cho phép) to form and register civic organisations under specific conditions that are defined by the state in the Decree on Associations No. 45/2010/Nd-CP (Sidel 2008; Wischermann 2011). Issues concerning gender inequality, gender-related violence, health-related stigmatisation of AIDS/HIV patients or children with autism (#AK campaign 2020) and LGBTQ rights can be raised by civic organisations to an extend that even led to policy changes (Fforde 2008; Kerkvliet 2003:16; Vasavakul 2003:26–28; Wischermann 2011). Unlike the state’s accommodative stance towards channelled civic actions, Wischermann et al.’s (2021 forthcoming) recent study shows that state reactions vis-à-vis public protests are inconsistent and oftentimes a combination of repression and tolerance. For example, protests in different policy areas such as infrastructure, ecology, economy and social affairs like the health sector or education are met with different state reactions ranging from toleration and responsiveness, to ignorance and violent repression. The same counts for labour and peasant movements. As both the working class and peasants officially constitute the pillars of a socialist project, labour resistance in forms of industrial action and small-scale peasant movements are indeed somewhat tolerated.28 However, there are also cases of labour and peasant resistance that have been answered with state violence and long-term imprisonment (see Dong Tam case and independent labour activists in Chapter 8). One way of channelling organised labour is through the mechanisms of the only legally recognized trade union federation: the state-led Vietnam General Confederation of Labour (VGCL). Positions in trade unions on the enterprise level are oftentimes filled by the factory’s management personnel and controlled by the VGCL (Nguyen 2019:3). The VGCL abides by the agenda of the Communist Party

28 Another example of channelling and tolerating political participation from below is the implementation of Decree on Grassroots Democracy that was enacted in 1998. Although this decree is officially meant to enable the citizens to monitor the activities of local authorities and participate in local decision-making process, many people have either not yet heard of the decree or the decree is simply not used to truly engage with residents (Beresford 2005, 2008: 21; Vasavakul 2019: 62).

of Vietnam, that is, maintaining regime stability with its main objective “to channel workers’ grievances to the unions and identify and pre-empt the potential of underground labour activism” (Nguyen 2019:3,119, see Do Hai 2016). However, researchers have shown that the VGCL does respond to strikers’ concerns in one way or another. For instance, the VGCL provides opportunities for the enhancement of worker’s awareness about the labour law and allows for labour centred newspapers (Tran 2007b:445, 2007a:275–76). Another way of channeling labour organisation is through so-called ‘công đoàn cơ sở’, which is usually translated as ‘grassroots trade unions’ or the ‘base of the party-state apparat’ (Fforde 2011:168). However, it does not hold what it implies as these grassroots trade unions are not controlled by the workers, but by the management at enterprise levels. By employing misleading terminology, workers are alienated from the idea of any independent trade union. Understandably then, workers are questioning the credibility and impact of any ‘independent’ trade union as well. The VGCL trade union has, thus, alienated their own base: the working class (see Greenfield 1994). Despite the CPV’s attempt to channel popular contention through trade unions and mass organisations, numerous micro-strikes (work stoppages) and wildcat-strikes occur every year. As they are organised independently of the state- controlled VGCL, they are unauthorised and therefore, technically illegal. However, industrial action is tolerated by the state as they are increasingly connected to collective bargaining mechanisms and social dialogue (Do Hai 2016:322, 327). These forms of organised labour are typically confined to the specific local level, in this case, the immediate workplace area. The numerous reoccurring strikes and work stoppages testify that certain techniques of collective action are, in fact, tolerated and even accommodated by the party-state outside of official channels (Do and Van den Broek 2013). This, however, does not imply an active integration of genuine democratic participation. On the contrary, the involvement of rank-and-file worker leaders and strike organizers into the bargaining or representation mechanisms of trade unions (at least at enterprise level) is declared as unnecessary. Instead, “they are considered to be ‘bad elements’, who are insufficiently educated and lack the status required to negotiate effectively with employers” (Clarke et al. 2007:562).

So far, scholars agree upon the fact that the CPV channels political participation through forms of mass organisation, including trade unions which leave little room for independent bottom-up participation (Truong and Chris 2014:284). As a consequence, many workers and peasants might be alienated from their own political power, but they are certainly not alienated from their awareness of oppression and justice (see Beresford 2008:240; Tran 2013). Although working- class consciousness has proven to be powerful at moments (Tran 2013), class consciousness is also alleviated and seems to disappear at other times. In fact, many workers and activists have developed an attitude of cynicism and resentment towards the ideas of Marxism, which, understandably, is a challenge to undo. To talk about working-class power is something that Vietnamese workers, peasants and activists have learned by heart and are fed up with hearing it. Instead, Marxist or leftist language is even perceived as buying into CPV propaganda. To sum up what has been outlined so far: Neither are mass organisations, ‘permitted’ civic organisations and the VGCL trade union representing the real interests of the people or the workers, nor can they effectively negotiate human and labour rights (Clarke et al. 2007). And although ILO, international campaigns and international NGOs have fiercely advocated for the improvement of labour and human rights in Vietnam, mass organisations including the trade union give priority to the formation of global capital links and thus have turned into a facilitator of capital discipline and state control (see Greenfield 1994:225). For now, working class politics as fertilizer for collective action with revolutionary potential continues to be effectively contained, rendering an independent social movement in Vietnam unlikely. Furthermore, unlike the aforementioned tolerated and semi-tolerated ways of collective organisation, other forms of independent resistance have been subjected to much harsher mechanisms of state control, discipline and physical repression.

5.3 Conclusion

This chapter introduced Vietnam’s socio-political context and emphasised the account of stability that characterises the country’s environment of civic and political engagement. Since Vietnam’s struggle for national independence, the

country’s protest culture and political opposition has been reported as relatively calm, yet it never came to an end. In fact, Vietnam’s socio-political and economic stability is enabled by (1) the country’s further integration into the global capitalist market while holding on to an authoritarian single-party regime, (2) the state’s inclusion of civic participation channelled through state-run mass organisations, such as the Women’s Union, Peasants’ Union, Trade Union, Youth Union and the Fatherland Front, and as will be shown in Chapter 6, (3) the severe repression of activists by means of long-term imprisonment and political alienation. Against this background of ‘fabricated’ socio-political and economic stability as well as in response to state authoritarianism, different forms of dissident activism have emerged in more recent year. But before I explore these different forms of resistance, the next chapter first focuses on the social and political composition of Vietnamese dissidents.

Chapter 6: The Making of Dissidents

One might argue that with the general uplifting of the population into ‘lower middle-income’ status, the channelling function of mass organisations and the state’s relative tolerance towards wildcat strikes and small-scale peasant protests, policy makers aim to sustain political legitimacy without risking a crisis of profitability (Webber 2019:9). This equation, however, is increasingly challenged by critical commentators in general and dissident activists in particular. As illustrated in the previous chapter, the CPV is not an autonomous monolithic entity that represses all attempts of popular contention, but is, in one way or another, in dialogue with the society (Beresford 2008; Kerkvliet 2006, 2014a; Koh 2004; Sikor 2004; Vasavakul 2019; Wischermann 2011). Although permitting a certain degree of pluralism, the Party’s ideology of democratic centralism does not permit dissident opinions to be expressed publicly (Do Hai 2016:52). The Party statute emphasises the importance of centralism over democracy, as “the minority must yield to the majority, lower ranks must obey upper ranks, individuals must follow organisations, [and] Party organisations must submit to the Party Congress and the Central Committee” (Party Statue 2011, Art. 9.4. cited in Do Hai 2016:52). Therefore, critical thinking with regard to the legitimacy of the current political system, its party-state apparatus and the lack of human rights standards and democracy are on no account tolerated but considered a threat to regime stability. These issues are not channelled by the Party’s apparatus and therefore absent from public discussions and civic organisations. Critical thinking, however, does exist and moves in between the semi-tolerated and ‘uncontrollable’ spaces of life. The following section examines the socio-political condition of dissident activists in more detail. Vietnamese activists opted for a life that is subjected to conditions of repression and constraint, which I explore along three axes: The first axis pertains to the stigmatisation and criminalisation of activists as hostile and subversive forces (Chapter 6.1). The second axis sheds light on activists as producers of knowledge ‘from below’ (Chapter 6.2) and the third axis focuses on their political subjectivity characterised by a sense of collectivity without identity (Chapter 6.3). I begin with

sketching out the ‘regime of discourse’ (Foucault 1976) produced by state-run media as an ideological state apparatus, followed by a glimpse of public opinion and the conditions of a repressive state apparatus.

6.1 Criminalising Activism

State-led media as Ideological State Apparatus According to Raschke (1985:343): “A movement that is not reported in the media is a movement that does not exist”. Although his statement underestimates the power of non-mass media (i.e. media that is produced by movements themselves), he makes a compelling case (cited in Marchart 2013:196). In recent years, Vietnamese activists have attracted much public attention through their presence on social media, including Facebook and YouTube. Yet, they receive relatively little attention in the official state-owned media channels. Instead, the state-led discourses about activists are predominantly produced within the spaces of social media. Commentators make use of vulgar language and call out activists as reactionaries who deceive the legacy of Ho Chi Minh and the Communist revolution.29 As my limited grasp of social media content does not allow for the identification of these commentators, I can only assume that they represent the work of Party-loyal individuals and internet trolls working for Force 47, a cyber force run by the Ministry of Public Security which is believed to be approx. 10,000-men strong, to hack and censor social media content and arrest unruly social media users as they wish (Bemma 2020). State-led media barely publishes reports that investigate who these activists are and what they stand for. Instead, its ideological apparatus operates with subtle propaganda techniques, through which it produces a discourse that misrepresents rather than directly denounces activists. On 31st of July in 2018, VTV 1 (a national channel)

29 According to Corey Robin, the reactionaries’ imperative is “to press for conservatism in two rather different directions: first, to a critique and reconfiguration of the old regime; and second, to an absorption of the ideas and tactics of the very revolution or reform it opposes” (Robin 2011:43). It seeks to reconfigure the old and absorb the new through the creation of an ideologically driven movement of the masses. According Robin’s definition, “conservatism is a mediation on – and theoretical rendition of – the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back (Robin 2011:4).

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broadcasted its first episode of the program The Opposite (Đối diện) which was concerned with the effects of social media and online activism on citizens and the development of the country (VTV1 2018). The episode’s theme captioned The dark side of social media (Mặt trái của truyền thông xã hội) and led to an outcry among activists for its one-sided and propagandistic reporting. The episode lasted 38 minutes and began with explaining that social media platforms provide an opportunity for “inciting violence, spreading malicious information and distorting the facts”.30 They emphasised that these activities are illegal, that they are “breaking the law” and need to be challenged in order to contain the risk of people being “captivated” (cuốn theo) by the “ideologies of hostile or subversive forces”. They referred to protesters, activists, bloggers and news channels like RFA, VOA and BBC Vietnam and mentioned the diaspora organisation Viet Tan and individual activists like ‘Nguoi Buon Gio’ as reactionary forces who promote fake news about the Communist Party and the State. The episode showed photos of demonstrators holding signs (e.g. opposing factories, SEZs, the Cyber Security Law and China), broken shop windows and people throwing stones. The arson attacks on the fire brigade in Binh Thuan during the time of protests against SEZ in June 2018 as well as the demonstrations against the steel factory Formosa (that caused the massive marine life disaster in 2016; see Chapter 9) were particularly emphasised as incidents organised with the help of social media platforms. The general narrative of the show portrayed the common social media user as “victims” of fake news, while hostile and subversive forces (lực lượng thù địch) “abuse citizen’s grievances in order to call for protest and cause public disorder”. The victimisation of the broader public is a way to demarcate the ‘innocent us’ and the ‘guilty other’, ascribing to the latter the potency of mass-manipulation that needs to be countered. Accordingly, creating webpages, online petitions and online campaigns are perceived as strategies to manipulate and mobilise the people alluring them into mass-protests and demonstrations. It is also claimed that Facebook and YouTube allow for paid advertisement promoting fake and state-critical news and pages which call for demonstrations. The show consulted expert opinions, including

30 Original in Vietnamese language: “Kích động bạo lực, thông tin xấu độc, xuyên tạc bóp méo sự thật”.

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journalists and psychologists in order to produce a discourse that associates online activism with the purposive abuse of crowd psychology, mass agitation, violence and the misuse of people’s grievances. The protests against the steel factory Formosa that caused the marine life disaster in 2016 (henceforth: Formosa case; see Chapter 9), is raised as an example of how people’s legitimate grievances were abused to call for mass-mobilisation and protest on social media. The psychologists explained that fake news is oftentimes based on “real facts” but that they are taken out of the context and put into a narrative that serves “their [the activists’] self- interests”. What these self-interests are is not explained in the show. Pseudo-psychological or decontextualized and misappropriated psychological analysis is a typical tactic of state security and surveillance programmes to profile targets. Choudry formulates that “such psychological profiling tends to avoid political/social analysis of activists and dissenting ideas, and attempts to identify and categorise individual or group psychological factors, removed from social and political circumstances and seen through a pathologizing lens” (Choudry 2019b:11). Accordingly, the moderator of the Vietnamese TV show further stressed that so-called “key opinion leaders” (KOLs) are “not all bad people, but also not everyone is good either”, a tactic that seeks to divide people and political ideas into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (Choudry 2019b:11). The moderator acknowledges them as “talented writers, they can grasp the people’s psyche and are very intelligent”. Yet, many spontaneous and emotionally driven online writers “only want to seek public attention or earn money” by attracting a high number of viewers. They are “organised networks that attack individual politicians, organisations and companies”. As a result, differences of opinion are disrespected and distorted (a claim that manifests in Article 258 of the penal code: “abusing freedom and democracy to infringe upon the interests of the state”). Activists are depicted as reactionaries and hostile forces that are divisive, putting at risk national solidarity and spread distrust against the Communist Party as a legitimate leader. Instead, activists encourage the search “for negative news instead of positive news”, they “promote curiosity (nosiness)” and can “change a person’s awareness and thoughts”. Attributes that are associated with “disorientation and alienation that puts national unity and solidarity at risk”. Particularly online discussions on

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political issues, including national and foreign affairs “go beyond people’s knowledge and capabilities”. The programme repeatedly showed footage of priest Sang and priest Phuc (introduced in Chapter 9), a tactic to implicitly link Catholic priests to the notion of hostile and subversive forces. Framing mass-manipulation and mass-mobilisation by social media activism as a risk to national security and solidarity makes state surveillance and cyber security a matter of protection against a perceived enemy: the so-called reactionaries. This kind of propaganda (and counterpropaganda) strategies aim at the reduction of complexity. Possible ambivalences and complexities are eroded, and alternative perspectives channelled and contained. Moreover, the footage provided in the TV show does not comply with the narrative produced by the moderator but instead gives the viewer a face and the messages that are not verbalised. The aim is to intensify the level of directness and clarity of a message (see Marchart 2013:214). Targeting Party-internal fractions and ideologues, official state journals employ rather direct language. The National Defence Journal (Tạp chí Quốc Phòng toàn dân), for instance, writes:

Recent [...] “open letters”, “petitions” of some cadres and party members, including high-ranking ones, which express adverse opinions to the Party’s guidelines and policies and demand pluralism, civil society, depoliticization of the armed forces, the abandonment of the Article 4 in the Constitution, etc. These petitions are extremely dangerous because when political ideology of a number of cadres and party members is degraded or disoriented, the political system may be weakened, separated or even collapsed. […] hostile forces have drastically taken ideological sabotages against us. They try to deny and distort Marxism – Leninism, Ho Chi Minh’s thought, and the Party viewpoints and guidelines (LTG Dang 2016).

In a later section of this chapter (6.2 and 6.3), I will challenge this simplified representation of dissidents as a monolithic entity that employs illegal means of claims-making, wants to overthrow the state and acts for their sole self-interests. Instead, I argue, activists incorporate the complexity of political subjectivity and

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create a sense of collectivity that is detached from both the state’s ideological apparatus and from violent wings of political activism.

A Glimpse of Public Opinion During the hundreds of informal conversations with (non-activist) citizens in Vietnam, there was one aspect that transpired most dominantly: The simultaneous similarity and discrepancy between the narratives produced by state-led media and the narratives that dominate the general public. For instance, a Grab driver (Grab is a service and transportation app, similar to Uber) stated in an informal conversation with me:

The reactionaries are saboteurs and destroy everything. But actually, I agree with what they say. Much of what they say is true.

Not only did he reproduce the narrative of official media channels, but he simultaneously – although perhaps unconsciously - counters the first part of his statement revealing a discrepancy between the official narrative produced by state- owned media and the public opinion. This deviation transpired throughout the 11- months period of my data collection. I was advised several times not to ask too many questions: “They will call you a reactionary and your whole family will be dragged into it”, I was warned. And as much as I received this advice, I asked in response: “But what is a reactionary?”. Never have I received a satisfactory response. Yet, contrary to these quite reluctant conversations with neighbours and also family members, I had numerous conversations particularly with cab drivers who were surprisingly knowledgeable about individual activists, their political standpoints and acts of repression against them. For instance, on my way from the airport to Hanoi city, my cab driver asked me: “Do you know Pham Doan Trang?” (see Chapter 7), “Do you know what happened recently with the Vegetable Garden Vuon Rau Loc Hung” (see Chapter 9). “You should read this blog X and follow that Facebook page Y”. With the time, I realized that the Vietnamese public had a much diverse, albeit not very substantiated, perspective on who these dissident activists are.

Conditions of the Repressive State Apparatus

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Although scholars put emphasis on the state’s responsiveness in cases of protest and public criticism (Kerkvliet 2019), concrete conditions of repression against activists lack detailed scholarly examination. For instance, Nguyen Van Hoa, born 1995, was sentenced to 7 years in prison and 3 years of probation for capturing drone footage of the protest in front of a steel plant the caused massive marine pollution in Central Vietnam (Chapter 9). He was detained under Article 258 of the 1999 Penal Code for “abusing democratic freedoms to infringe upon the interests of the State and the rights and legitimate interests of organisations and citizens” and ultimately charged under Article 88: “Propaganda against the Socialist State”. Activist Hoang Duc Binh*, born 1983, livestreamed a march that local activists organised to submit a collective petition to the Court. He was sentenced to 14 years in prison with charges under Criminal Code Article 257 “resisting persons in the performance of their official duties”, Article 258. “Abusing democratic freedoms to infringe upon the interests of the State” and Article 143. “destroying or deliberately damaging property”.31 Other activists who were involved in the protests against the marine pollution included Nguyen Nam Phong* (2 years sentence) and Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh*, also known under her blogger pen name “Mother Mushroom” (10 years sentence). The crackdown on dissident voices is certainly not limited to single cases. Independent activists (mainly bloggers and independent journalists who rely on social media channels) are increasingly subjected to police harassment and long- term charges under Article 79 “activities aimed at overthrowing the government”, Article 88 “anti-state propaganda” and Article 258 “abusing the rights to freedom and democracy to threaten the interests of the state” of the 1999 Criminal Code. Another national security offense under the penal code is “disturbing social order” Article 245. Being charged under the aforementioned Articles 79 (Article 109 in the 2015 Criminal Code), 88 (Article 117), and 258 (Article 331) generally results in long-term prison sentences and thus, testifies that criticism against the state and its political system are suppressed and harshly penalised (see Kerkvliet 2014:102).

31 The databank ‘the88project’ sets up online profiles of political prisoners. See, The88project. undated. “Profile: Hoang Duc Binh”. Retrieved December 27, 2020 (https://the88project.org/profile/32/hoang-duc-binh/).

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Amnesty International’s Report on Human Rights reported 128 known prisoners of conscience in May 2019, a rise from 97 political prisoners in year 2018.32 Another database “The88project” provides a higher number based on the information they compiled counting 266 activists in prison and 178 activists at risk (status: April 2020) (Nguyen 2019).33 Similarly, Human Rights Watch stated that Vietnam’s human rights situation is deteriorating particularly with regards to freedom of expression. Bloggers who are perceived as threatening national security are sentenced to between 5 and 10 years.34 Pro-democracy activists are sentenced to higher prison terms. The 2019 Freedom House report ranks Vietnam as Not Free with a Global Freedom Score of 20/100 and an Internet Freedom Score of 24/100.35 The 2020 World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders ranks Vietnam 175 out of 180.36 Because freedom of assembly does not apply for spaces independent of the Communist Party, most activists rely on online communication. Vietnam’s cyber security law (together with a draft on new Special Economic Zones, SEZs) was proposed in mid-2018, which ignited nationwide protests in June 2018. Final decisions on new SEZs have been adjourned indefinitely, while the cyber security law was enacted in January 2019. This law amplified the military crackdown on dissident bloggers and critical commentators which, in fact, has been an unofficial governmental practice for years. Under the new cyber security law, tech giants including Facebook and Google are required to store user data on local servers, which opens access for ‘Force 47’ - a measure known as the weaponization of social media (Singer and Brooking 2018).

32 Amnesty International. 2019. “Viet Nam: Surge in number of prisoners of conscience, new research shows”. Retrieved June 20, 2019 (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/05/vietnam-surge-number-prisoners-conscience-new-research-shows/). 33 The88project. undated. “Database of persecuted activists in Vietnam”. Retrieved December 27, 2020 (https://the88project.org/database/). 34 Human Rights Watch. undated. “Vietnam. Events of 2016”. Retrieved December 27, 2020 (https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2017/country-chapters/vietnam) and Human Rights Watch. undated. “Vietnam. Events of 2017”. Retrieved December 27, 2020 (https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2018/country-chapters/vietnam). 35 Freedom House. undated. “Freedom in the World 2019: Vietnam”. Retrieved December 27, 2020 (https://freedomhouse.org/country/vietnam/freedom-world/2019). 36 Reporters Without Borders. undated. “Ranking 2020, World Press Freedom Index”. Retrieved December 27, 2020 (https://rsf.org/en/ranking).

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However, it is important to stress that not all activists and forms of public criticism are subjected to long-term imprisonment. Some activists reported that they were arrested several times, sometimes in intervals of a few weeks. In custody they are not allowed to give note to their families but, as most activists report, they are treated relatively respectfully. This indicates that governing through political repression is a matter of manifold techniques characterised by unpredictability and arbitrariness, which is perhaps the strongest technique of state repression to spread anxiety, paranoia and distress. Most importantly, however, it pre-empts a potential upsurge in new state-critical voices.

6.2 Embodying Experiences of Repression

Activist Kim (environment, civil society) from Hanoi explains:

They [the government] use many different tricks to damage the economic base of us activists, destroyed our businesses and use psychological and verbal violence [...]. Some activists had to seek refuge in other countries […]. Every activist in Vietnam, every person who has an oppositional voice, who has the mind and takes the steps towards a democratic, free, peaceful and justice Vietnam, all of them are psychologically and physically oppressed by the government.

The social composition of activists is manifold ranging from workers, peasants, fishermen, intellectuals to Catholic priests and students. Other professional backgrounds include lawyers, retired-state officials, poets, artists, journalists, entrepreneurs and Catholic priests. It goes without saying that the high risks of criminalisation and the illegality of independent civil society organisation offers little resources for political resistance. As a result, underground activist groups usually consist of not more than a handful of members. However, as will be shown throughout the chapters 7 to 9, activists and their struggles are well-connected and, in fact, form a political network. Many democracy activists used to work as journalists and lawyers before they chose to become full-time activists. Dao (human rights lawyer), Tran Hung Duy Thuc* (businessman and author), Nguyen Quang A* (scientist, entrepreneur,

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translator), Pham Doan Trang* (author, journalist) and Thien (author, blogger) are amongst the most prominent democracy activists at the time of writing. In activist circles they are also referred to as intellectuals (người trí thức). Pham Doan Trang is a democracy and human rights activist who has written a number of books including Politics for the Common People [masses] (Chính Trị Bình Dân) and Non- Violent Resistance (Phản Kháng Phi Bạo Lực), A Handbook for Families of Prisoners (Cảm Nang Nuôi Tù), Anh Ba Sàm and Politics of a Police State. She is also one of the voluntary editors of numerous activist-based online newspapers and blogs, including the English online newspaper theVietnamese.org and the Journal of Law (Luat Khoa Tap Chi).37 As an independent journalist she is Vietnam’s fiercest female advocate for democracy and human rights. Her horizon of activism is as broad as society itself. She covers issues from women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights, non-violent resistance, political prisoners to human rights and democracy, for which she received a number of international prizes including the 2019 Press Freedom Prize for Impact from Reporters Without Borders. Under economically, socially and politically precarious conditions, activists like Pham Doan Trang (henceforth: Trang), human rights lawyer like Dao, or independent journalists and bloggers like Thien seek to disclose and disseminate ‘subjugated knowledges’, promote critical thinking in order to alter public opinion and encourage democratic political participation (see Chapter 7). I refer to them as producers of knowledge ‘from below’ who seek to shape public opinion despite conditions of censorship. In liberal democracies, they would seek for professional positions - perhaps as freelance journalists, academics or human rights lawyers. Unlike in liberal democracies, the advancement of critical thinking and the dissemination of subjugated knowledges in Vietnam – both are criteria for democracy and political participation - are not considered a profession in any sense. Trang has no official publisher who would dare to publish her books. Instead, she relies on donations and an underground publisher who, like other

37 Sources of Websites: theVietnamese. Retrieved December 27, 2020 (https://www.thevietnamese.org) and Luat Khoa. Retrieved June 20, 2020 (https://www.luatkhoa.org). Luat Khoa is an online journal that focuses on political and legal issues in Vietnam.

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dissidents, is subjected to state surveillance and intimidation. Trang told me (and other activists confirmed) that most of the donations that Trang receives from her supporters go into the printing and shipping of books. Trang and fellow activists produce value (societal value) that is not exploited in a capitalist sense, yet she embodies the physical and emotional characteristics of a worker operating in a capitalist system. Similar experiences of repression are made by human rights lawyers Le Cong Dinh* and Dao. After both were released from prison, they were barred from exercising their jobs as lawyers. Forced into the informalisation of his labour force, Dinh continues to provide legal advice to families who suffered from land eviction (Dân Oan). Le Cong Dinh supported the priests and fishermen to draft the petitions against the steel plant Formosa that caused the massive marine pollution in 2016 (see Chapter 9) and collaborates with many other activists by bringing in the perspective of a lawyer. His work produces societal value for the marginalized strata of society. Originally coming from Hanoi, Trang decided to flee to another city in order to protect her family from police intimidation. Her personal documents have been confiscated a long time ago. Under pressure of foreign embassies and international human rights organisations, Trang was ultimately informed that she could come and pick up her documents. However, she refused to do so and said: “The ones who stole my papers, have to bring them back to me. I am not going to the thieves and ask them for what belongs to me and get humiliated in turn” (Interview Trang). Confiscating her ID documents is not only about humiliation and the ‘informalisation’ of citizenship, but it affects the everyday social life on many levels. Travelling without documents implies complications, while registering for a telephone number or change of residence is rendered formally impossible. In addition, she was followed and beaten up by the police many times and ended up in hospital with severe injuries. She suffers from long-lasting physical damages. Only by relying on her friends and her support network, she is able to change her place of residence on a regular base in order to hide from police surveillance and secure her books from confiscation. Trang relies on her friends, supporters and other activists to support her, both financially and mentally. What Trang experiences is an “impossibility of activity” (Thoburn 2016:370). Instead of

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accepting capital exploitation and succumbing to censorship, she opts for exhaustion, despair, anxiety and voluntary self-exploitation for the common good, which can be understood as “the extended exploitation of one’s own body and social relations required in order to remain active […]” (Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008:223). ‘Exploitation of the self’ is an attribute of many activists’ lives. Based on the logic of intensified work in the present to contribute to the shaping of future, causes a change in one’s relation to time and space. Trang’s main drive for her self-exploitation is her fear of the limited time remaining until she gets prosecuted or silenced in prison. Her working space is her hideout. Trang embodies the experiences of criminalisation and stigmatisation expressed in her vulnerability (physical attacks and surveillance), hyperactivity (constant availability to other activists), simultaneity (multiple investigative research projects), recombination (her crossing between different networks, struggles and space), restlessness (overwhelmed by activity and communication), unsettledness (continuous mobility) and affective exhaustion (emotional exploitation) only to mention a few characteristics (Tsianos and Papadopoulos 2006). Her fears of not having enough time became reality. Trang was arrested in October 2020 and is since held under custody. Dao (Chapter 7) is another prominent human rights lawyer and activist who speaks out against China’s maritime aggressions, demands democracy, human rights and participates in a number of grassroots organisations including a group of labour activists. When the chance to interview her opened up, she invited me to her home. She rents a cramped, mouldy and dark apartment in which she lives together with her husband (a physician and human rights activist), daughter and mother. She lives in a working-class area, not an area were Vietnamese lawyers and doctors usually reside (housing condition is a significant characteristic of a person’s class background and inseparable from social status). On the phone, lawyer Dao advised me to keep on my motorcycle equipment and the facemask until I would enter her home, because the building she lives in is regularly watched by state officials. I did what she advised and only revealed my face after she closed the door behind me. And indeed, I noticed the camera from her neighbours’ doors directing towards Dao’s apartment (other apartments were not equipped with cameras). She told me

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that she confronted her neighbours after she noticed the camera, who revealed to her that it was the police who installed the device. Dao accepts her condition, because she is used to it, she narrates. Yet, the lack of trust and solidarity, but also the fear and anxiety among the neighbourhood daunts her (Interview Dao). It is known that the state’s security and surveillance practices have disciplining effects on societies. Scholars emphasise how surveillance effects reshape the political subjectivity of activists and note that the normalisation of surveillance as part of everyday life is a method of counter-surveillance by which activist refuse to accept “the burden of private shame” (Choudry 2019a:7; Maira 2019). Surveillance of activists reshapes political subjectivity in class terms (Maira 2019:92). Lien and her husband, both had been political prisoners convicted for their protests against Chinese maritime aggression in the East Sea, were exposed to live under precarious conditions after they were released from prison. In order to secure a living for their new-born they build a house on semi-legal land, an area known as “Loc Hung Vegetable Garden” (Vuong Rau Loc Hung, see also Chapter 9). According to the residents, the six-hectare area of the Loc Hung Vegetable Garden belongs to the Catholic Church of Vietnam since 1954 and has been home to Catholic refugees and a number of activist who farm and live on the land (Quynh- Vi Tran 2019). The Catholic Church in the area also provided accommodation for invalids from the South Vietnamese Republic. The day I visited Lien and her husband was the day before residents were forcefully evicted from the area on January 8, 2019. The demolishment left 88 households without shelter. The state’s proclaimed reason was ‘wrongful and illegal occupation of the land’. Lien and her family lost their home to a bulldozering project that resembles the demolitions of Palestinian houses. Those state actions are “a way of targeting all those ‘economic, social and cultural’ connections that constitute one’s home” (Harker 2009 cited in Joronen 2019:14). Prominent figures like Nguyen Quang A* (Chapter 7) or retired police officer Dinh (Chapter 8), have also been harassed and physically attacked, yet their previous political affiliation with the Communist Party and class backgrounds provides them with the political and financial means to avoid the level of repression that other activists have to endure. Activists who are former CPV members or are

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retired state-officials are faced with public denunciation mostly exercised by their CPV comrades. Dinh, for instance, served 42,5 years as a police officer and has been a Party member for more than 50 years. After his retirement he became an active supporter of peasant resistance in Dong Tam (Chapter 8) and published online articles about the 2016 marine life disaster (see Chapter 9) and Chinese maritime aggressions. He reports to me that on “politically sensitive days” he receives occasional phone calls from other state-officials in which they “respectfully recommend him to stay at home” (Interview Dinh). However, these forms of micro-intimidations are not the main problem, he said. It is rather the pressure and intimidation that is put on the rest of the family or the alienation among family members what hinders most people from speaking out in public. Nguyen Quang A is another well-known figure in the Vietnamese blogger and dissident scene. His concerns involve the imprisonment of activists, land grabbing, corruption and foreign relations. He advocates for an independent civil society and was one of the founding members of the Civil Society Forum (Chapter 7). His social background is extensive. Not only is he the son of a family whose father died in the uprising against French colonialism, but he was also a high accomplishing student who was sent by the government to study in Hungary in 1965. He later received his doctoral degree in Electronics and Telecommunications and worked for the Vietnam Military Technical Institute. As entrepreneur he founded 3C Computer-Communications-Controller Company and co-founded VP Bank, the first private bank in Vietnam. In 2007, he and eight other researchers founded the independent Institute for Development Studies (IDS) which, due to political pressure, existed only for two years. Since then, he has largely contributed to the academic field as a translator of Western classics of political economy (including works of Thomas Friedman, Karl Popper, János Kornai, Friedrich Hayek) and created the open-access online Bookcase SOS2 (Tủ sách SOS2).38

38 The name SOS2 is an abbreviation for “Software of the Social System”, by which Nguyen Quang A refers to fundamental laws, policies, statutes, rules, practices and cultures, which shall not be manipulated or changed but only be implemented and performed. See, Tu sach SOS2. Retrieved June 20, 2020 (https://www.chungta.com/nd/tu-lieu-tra-cuu/tu_sach_sos2.html).

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Continuous physical attacks, public denunciation and the criminalisation of civil society projects are common features that constrain his political activities. Not only are democracy activists subjected to repression, but so are independent labour activists. The underground labour activists with whom I had the chance to talk to have endured lengthy prison terms. For instance, labour activist Nguyen Hoang Quoc Hung* endured nine years. Migrant labour and land activist Tran Thi Nga* was also sentenced to nine years, but under international pressure, Nga was released after three years and released into exile in the United States. Labour activist Huy was arrested several times and spent a total of 4,5 years in prison. I met labour activist Huy in Bangkok where he was granted political asylum. Now living in Bangkok, he supports Vietnamese political refugees. He told me that he used to be a construction worker himself, but shortly after being involved in underground labour activism, he had to halt his employment due to the intimidation and emotional pressure on the side of the management, which severely affected his financial situation. Being away from his family, he now makes a living through activist solidarity circles and occasional private donations. Nam is another underground labour activist based in Hanoi (Chapter 8). He was pressurized by the management to quit his job as accountant in an FDI-led Japanese factory. He is now occasionally driving ‘Grab bike’ and takes other jobs in the informal sector to make ends meet and provide for his wife and son. Labour activists have no mass base in the working class, but as will be explained in chapter 8, this is not because they chose to, but because labour activists want to avoid putting the workers at risk. Rather, labour activists see themselves also connected to the struggle for democracy and human rights (see Chapter 8). Thien is a prominent blogger and democracy activist, who advocates for the strengthening of an independent civil society. He also became a fierce critic of land grabbing and the marine disaster caused by the steel factory Formosa (Chapter 9). He writes about corruption cases and investment projects of state-owned and multinational conglomerates with particular focus on the city Da Nang. In a conversation with me, he describes the many incidences during which he was watched, followed and called into the police station. During his involvement in the anti-Formosa movement, he had to hide within the local Catholic Church, after he

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was notified that Father Lý* - who he was supposed to meet that day - was arrested by the police. Father Lý is a member of the democracy group Bloc 8406 (see Chapter 7) and has been sentences to 8 years in prison. Other Catholics, among them priest Sang and priest Phuc have played a major role in the organisation of collective actions against the toxic chemical spill caused by the steel factory Formosa in central Vietnam (Chapter 9). In conversation with me, priest Sang reports:

We [priests] face danger and oppression. The government seeks every possible opportunity to oppress people like me and other activists. I counted eight people who watch me and follow me every day. On specific days, political events, my phone doesn’t work, so that I can’t get in touch with anyone. The internet is cut off on these days too. Every time I go out, there are people following and watching me, they are keeping me under surveillance.

Surveillance is a technique of governing. It is everywhere and nowhere. I spoke with peasant activist Hanh in the corner of a relatively calm coffee place in Duong Noi (at the outskirts of Hanoi, North Vietnam). She is known for her involvement in peasant protest against land dispossession in Duong Noi (Chapter 8). On that day, I was joined by labour activist Nam and democracy activist Bach, not only because they introduced me to a number of peasant activists, but mostly because they were particularly concerned about my safety in the area. Only a few minutes after we started our conversation, both Nam and Bach noticed two young men entering the coffee place. They sat down on the two chairs at the entrance and did not engage in any conversation. Both seemed occupied looking at their smartphones. None of us had evidence that the two were plainclothes security forces (referred to as An Ninh in Vietnamese). In the beginning, Hanh conducted herself as fairly calm. As soon as she spotted the two suspiciously looking men, Hanh changed her performativity by adopting a loud voice and using provocative language. She insists that she does “not care about surveillance by national security forces.” In fact, they motivate her to speak even louder because “all she did was to speak the truth” she vindicates (Interview Hanh). This experience of changing performativity reoccurred in conversations with other activists and in other semi-

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public places. This performativity I identify as an expression of embodied repression and illustrates what Maira (2019:87) observed as a heightened sense of self-confidence and ‘subversive humour’ in climates of state surveillance. Many female activists emphasised that their encounters with the police and their living conditions in prison are as harsh as the experiences made by men. The atmosphere of gendered, patriarchal and traditional societies requires female activists to prove their strength and endurance with their male counterparts and mostly male security forces. Many peasant activists are women, which made the embodiment of fear and courage particularly expressive. Maira (2019:88-9) states: “This inversion of stigma of surveillance is perhaps also an affective or psychic strategy to deal with the anxiety of acknowledging oneself as an object of surveillance, by reclaiming the political agency of surveillance and reasserting the need to continue to engage in dissenting politics despite, and in some cases because of, the climate of repression”. Kieu is a leading figure of peasant resistance in and around Hanoi. Kieu grew up in the North of Vietnam. Unlike Hanh, she was not a peasant herself, but born into a family of high-ranked officials in the Communist Party since the subsidy period (1975-1986). She “used to be part of the Communist world”, she avows (Interview Kieu). Her family’s wealthy background, her higher education and her “love for Ho Chi Minh”, Kieu recalls, was shaped by witnessing U.S. bombs on the sky of North Vietnam. “I was taught to hate America. I was only in year 7 when people called for the Liberation of South Vietnam for the first time”. This is a quite common narrative to be found in Northern Vietnamese biographies. When I asked her what it was that made her become one of the most vocal activists against land dispossession she responds: “Wherever I see injustice, I will resist.” Due to her family’s internal discrepancies, she experienced conflicts in land disputes herself. She retells the effect it had on her when she went to the people’s bureau for the first time to file a complaint: “There, I met many other people, mostly peasants, who suffered from land grabbing, of course much worse than my case”. Kieu realised that the Vietnamese people face many cases of injustice of which she had never heard before. Through this encounter she started to volunteer with material help, providing rice and food for the victims of land dispossession. Her fierce and loud nature, but probably also her education and organising skills as a former

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businesswoman made her a leading activist. She ended up in prison, where she met Hien, another outspoken woman, peasant and mother of two (Chapter 8). Hien’s very conscious and cautious nature made it difficult for Kieu to connect to her prior to her imprisonment. “Hien was suspicious of me because of my financial status” (i.e. her class background), Kieu remembers. Yet, both ended up in the same prison sharing the same cell. They got to know each other and joined forces. Regardless of their previous socio-political and class background, none of these activists continue to have access or control over their previous privileges. Entering the world of political resistance results not only in indirect forms of repression through stigmatisation, state surveillance, social isolation from family and friends and the exclusion from the labour market (see next section), but also in direct ways of repressive governing through the demolition of houses, physical violence, humiliation and intimidation against both male and female activists. The physical experiences and afterpains of hunger strikes, intimidation by prison guards and other inmates as well as the restricted access to personal hygiene is what characterises their embodiment of repression and constraint.

6.3 Collectivity without Identity

Having explored the embodied experiences of repression, I now turn to the making and remaking of political subjectivity. Against the propensity to represent activists as subjects with a coherent collective identity, unified by a common standpoint and political practice, a different way of reading political subjectivity accounts for the complexity and multitude of individual and collective experiences, the irreducible differentiations and most importantly, the actual lack and refusal of a coherent identity (Thoburn 2016:367). This section considers Vietnamese activists a political minority that “experience[s] the interplay between the individual and the social, the personal and the political […]” entangled in the conflicting imperatives and constraints set by the majority standards (Thoburn 2016:368). I illustrate that Vietnamese activists refuse to have a coherent identity. For they are interlaced with concrete power structures, their social existence and subjectivity too is conditioned by the constraints of a repressive state apparatus operating in a capitalist society. They are conditioned by what Thoburn refers to as the “cramped space” – a

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condition of social existence which “contends that politics arises among those who lack and refuse coherent identity, in their encounter with the impasses, limits, or impossibilities of individual and collective subjectivity” (see Deleuze 1989:218; Deleuze and Guattari 1986:17 cited in Thoburn 2016:367). To assist my case, I also borrow from Italian Marxist autonomists who argue that political subjectivity is not produced from the position in the class structure, that is, subjectivity does not equal class position, but it is shaped along embodied experiences (Gill and Pratt 2008; Negri 2003; Papadopoulos et al. 2008). Indeed, the manifold embodied experiences of repression, the impossibility of autonomous political activity, “matched with the impossibility of doing nothing if life is to be lived” have shaped the political subjectivity of Vietnamese activists (Thoburn 2016:368). In other words, subjectivity is always relational and “mediated by the meanings” that people give to corporeal and emotional experiences, they are situated and “embodied ways of knowing” (Gill and Pratt 2008:19). Embodied experiences of repression under the conditions of ‘cramped space’ provides the ground for a sense of “collectivity without identity” (Thoburn 2016:377). The following pages reflect on two socio-political actions that illustrate the lack of a coherent identity and the plenitude of collectivity: The refusal of identity and the refusal of labour.

Refusal of Identity The climate of criminalisation, surveillance and political stigmatisation are subjects that concern all activists with whom I have spoken. Under these cramped social conditions, the meaning of the ‘political’ and the ‘social’ became a matter of self- conscious regulation and re-narration (Maira 2019:82). The term ‘reactionaries’ is commonly employed in state-led discourses to ascribe a malignant identity to political opponents. Democracy and peasant activist Kieu (Communist family background, Chapter 7) remembers:

Our society at that time had no alternative channels for news and information. I remember the time before the state authorities called me ‘reactionary’. That moment I realized that I always thought only ‘the

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others’ are reactionaries, but I never thought of myself [in terms of a reactionary] (Interview Kieu).

Conceiving ‘other people’ as reactionaries but not herself indicates her process of self-reflection. It displays her refusal to succumb to an identity that is ascribed to her by state discourse. One reason for the refusal is the ahistorical use of the term itself. The term ‘reactionary’ is void of meaning for most activists but considered as the state’s attempt to ascribe a retrograde political ideology to them. ‘Reactionary faction/traitors’ (bon phan dong) became a catchphrase and a way to delegitimise and denounce activists. I also see it as a way to reproduce the social and structural conditions of the cramped space that renders the multitude and complexity of activists obsolete, impossible to inhabit in a positive and coherent form (see Thoburn 2016:376). Instead, as illustrated in the TV show Doi Dien, the state-led discourse imposes a view of ‘reactionaries’ as a minority identity that is associated with criminal behaviour, state hostility and violence. Mai, a female labour activist (Chapter 8), notes:

Once you fight for democratic rights, you are related to politics. And once you are related to politics, you will be labelled as reactionary. […] We activists, and especially our group, was at some point denounced as terrorists and accused of using violent means (Interview Mai).

Activists distance themselves from violence, but some acknowledge that it exists among the activist scene. Blogger Ha My (Chapter 7) states:

I support all tactics of non-violence […]. Violent groups do exist, but no one knows who they are. They, for example, throw bombs into police stations. Their aim is to fight against the police, and I don't support this, but if I had the chance to talk to them, I would do so, because I want to learn and know why they choose this path. […] And to be honest, I think many of them are just normal people who are disillusioned with the government and angry. The people of our country, who don't really know much about our laws and our rights, they are easily drawn into these violent means of resistance. […] But those who know ways non-violent resistance, they need popular power, they have to write about their ideas and share what they know. This way at some point they will also reach

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those ones who sided with violent means. I think those people who use violent means, they don't have the knowledge about non-violent means.

Ha My’s refusal of a violent identity and her simultaneous understanding of violence as a reflection of the people’s embodied anger and powerlessness indicates her sense of collectivity despite the lack of a common identity. Another way of refusal is offered by songwriter Bach, who was sentenced to 6 years in prison for his political music. He was found guilty of conducting anti-state propaganda under Article 88 of the Criminal Code. As a former political prisoner, he not only refuses to consider political activism as a criminal activity but counters the state discourse: “I am proud to be a reactionary, because it stands for democracy and human rights”, he proclaims. In doing so, activists like Bach use the technique of counter-narrative to reclaim political subjectivity and to generate a sense of collectivity and solidarity among the politically stigmatised. James Jasper and Aidan McGarry call this the “stigmatised identity dilemma”, by which they describe how groups develop “around the same categories that they are trying to eliminate” and possibly convert the negative stigmas into positive ones (McGarry and Jasper 2015:6).39 At the same time, the cracking power relations are coming to light as the state negatively acknowledges the activists’ increasing influence on the public sphere. Bach’s attempt to counter the stigma of a ‘reactionary’ is, however, not shared by other activists. Rather, most activists sneer at the term ‘reactionary’ and choose to identify either as ‘dissidents’ (nguoi bat dong trinh kien) or most of the times merely as ‘activists’ (gioi dau tranh). Through refusing a stigmatised identity as ‘reactionaries’, activists shape and rehabilitate their political subjectivity as a collective without coherent identity. Instead, they refer to themselves simply and neutrally as ‘activists’ (gioi dau tranh). Interestingly enough, “gioi” is a term that can be translated as “circle”, “community”, “world” or “gender”. In my interviews, activists used the term “gioi” in combination with social groups. For example, “gioi cong nhan” (industrial workers), “gioi tri thuc” (intellectuals) and as already mentioned “gioi dau tranh” (activists). Yet, activists rarely use the term ‘class’ (giai

39 Using the example of Irish Republicans and the British state, McGarry and Jasper pointed out that the British state labelled the Irish Republicans as terrorists, while they viewed themselves as freedom fighters. The terrorist label attacked the Republicans on moral grounds and framed them as criminals.

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cap). I speculate that the term “gioi” functions as a replacement for the notion of class and has been combined with activist-specific language rather recently. This way, activists formulate a language that delineates a sense of collectivity without having to revert to Marxist/Communist jargon. Put simply, Vietnamese activists refrain from creating a coherent identity for themselves, not only because they are aware of their multitude of experiences and socio-political backgrounds, but also because they actively embrace the plurality and diversity of practices and ideas that are welcomed in the Vietnamese activist scene. However, despite the fairly divergent activist subgroups, they all refer to themselves collectively as “we activists”. In that sense, they don’t associate themselves with an ideology but rather with a set of different social and political actions and political ideas. This reminds of Jasper and McGarry who have demonstrated that identities “can be useful as a strong, unquestioned label for a group, but it is also a fiction that, in other circumstances, can be deconstructed” (McGarry and Jasper 2015:5). Accordingly, as Joshua Gamson formulates, “fixed identity categories are both the basis for oppression and the basis for political power” (Gamson 1995:391 cited in McGarry and Jasper 2015:6).

Refusal of Labour There is another central stigma that has not been explicitly mentioned so far, which refers to the prejudice that activists ‘seek public attention to make money’ by ways of donations from mostly overseas Vietnamese and democracy supporters or via YouTube and Facebook. Arguably, I have no evidence that supports this claim, yet labour activist Nam and others have reproduced this discourse:

Some members enter and leave [the labour activist group] in a very short time span. I call this the activist market. On this market we have two types: Those who really have skills and enthusiasm and those who don’t. Many people might be thinking ‘Yes, democracy is good’, but once they become active in the movement, they don't have enough enthusiasm and endurance. To be honest, many people who decide to enter the democracy movement, they actually just hope to receive some donations from supporters. Unfortunately, this is the reality.

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Nam makes an important note that points to the difference between refusal of labour and refusal of work. While international trade unionists and large sections of international labour movements have called for the right for work, less working hours or less alienated work, it is the refusal of labour that Autonomist Marxists consider as a political and potentially revolutionary act (Gill and Pratt 2008). While strike or work stoppages negate certain processes of capital production, the entire refusal of one’s labour and thus, the refusal of exploitation, negates the fundament of capital relations (Negri 1979:124). It also signals a particular form of political subjectivity and collectivity. As indicated above, many Vietnamese activists have been forced out of the labour market as a consequence of their political profile. Others purposefully chose to escape the “territorialisation of labour, state control and state ideology [that] constitutes a form of creative subversion capable of challenging and transforming the conditions of power” (Papadopoulos et al. 2008:56). In case of the latter, activists refuse to supply their labour force to the Vietnamese market, they escape labour exploitation and state control that would censor their writings. Moreover, they refuse to translate their social struggles into a set of demands channelled by the state apparatus (see Papadopoulos et al. 2008:60). Yet, against the stigmatisation of activists who ‘want to make money’, activists are anything but freeloaders. On the contrary, to put it in Nam’s words, “those who have enough skills and enthusiasm offer their work to the transformation of society” (Interview Nam). Instead, activists cultivate new ways of living and working that are certainly interlaced with capital relations, but that operate at the margins of the capitalist society. Activists change their senses, their ways of seeing and thinking, their everyday practices and experiences in interaction with the struggles of the oppressed, the poor, the marginalised and subjugated. Undoubtedly, political subjectivity is complex, yet the refusal of a coherent identity and of capitalist labour bears the potential to form a sense of cross-class and cross-regional collectivity. Thien commentates:

I remember that around five or six years ago, activists from the North and South of Vietnam have not been connected very much. Activists in

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the North were not even really connected to the intellectuals like Nguyen Quang A [intellectual based in Hanoi]. Only very loosely. The people in Dong Tam village for example are working with Dinh, a very committed activist, but also a retired police officer [and Communist Party member]. Who would have thought that the two sides could be working together? [laughter] (Interview Thien).

Indeed, I interviewed people who are still members of the Communist Party but who are collaborating with dissident activists involved in land, territorial and environmental issues. These Party-members raise criticism against the present-day Vietnamese Communist Party, for which they are publicly denounced as pursuing ‘self-evolution’ (SE) and ‘self-transformation’ (ST) (tu dien bien, tu chuyen hoa) by which they refer to a deviation from Marxist-Leninist-Ho Chi Minh ideology.40 However, as the ‘identity dilemma’ suggests, there is an upside to the absence of collective identity. Internal commitments, self-definition and political worldviews may differ to such a considerable extent that it becomes an obstacle to identify trustworthy members of a collective. In fact, some activists refer to fellow activists as ‘their new family’, while others experienced a sense of collectivity and trust throughout the times they spend in prison. The previous section examined how activists as a politically repressed minority seek to break down the social barriers of the ‘cramped space’. In doing so, they forged new social relations and interpersonal connections between a multitude of individual identities, which in turn, makes the sense of collectivity without a coherent identity conceivable. In what follows, I will reconstruct these social relations and explore how the ‘making of dissidents’ – i.e. the embodied

40 The National Defence Journal explains that “SE and ST are internal changes of each cadre [that] transform[s] them from a good person to a bad one. In the worst possibility, they may counter the Party, the State and the people [...] as a consequence of the severe sabotage of the hostile forces, [...] A number of cadres and party members become disoriented and sceptical about the leadership of the Party, the goals, ideal and the path to socialism in Vietnam” (LTG Dang 2016). See, Lieutenant General Dang Nam Dien. 2016. “Events and Comments. Preventing the ‘self-evolution’ and ‘selftransformation’ inside the Party”, in National Defence Journal. Retrieved December 27, 2020 (http://tapchiqptd.vn/en/events-and-comments/preventing-the-selfevolution-and- selftransformation-inside-the-party/9501.html).

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experiences of repression and constraint - translate into political practices and political ideas. In essence, the following three chapters follow what Marx and Engels (1845:47) described in the German Ideology:

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and human beings’ material intercourse, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, human beings’ mental intercourse, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour.

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Chapter 7 Online-Activism: A Networked Democracy Movement

Is there an overall theme that can be said to connect all dissidents? A common theme that is greater than the apparently isolated struggles? Activist Kieu says: “Yes, the struggle for democracy”. Kieu is the daughter of a former high ranked Communist Party official. Kieu was detained twice for participating in demonstrations against China’s territorial claims in the East Sea. After her release she became prominent for supporting dispossessed peasants and leading demonstrations against land grabbing. She regularly uses Facebook to livestream the demonstrations during which she publicly criticises the government’s authoritarian handle over land disputes. Without her livestreams, many peasant demonstrations would have passed unnoticed. Kieu also advocates for human rights and religious freedom. When I met her, she explained: “All these struggles are part of a larger movement: the movement for democratic change.” Like many other activists, she proclaims: “We need to fight against the Communist Party” (Interview Kieu). Another prominent democracy activist is Pham Doan Trang. She is the author of the book Politics for the common people (Chinh tri binh dan) which became a milestone in contemporary dissident literature. In it, Trang addresses the power of the people and calls for a politics ‘from below’. Trang received several international human rights awards and is currently one of the most prominent female voices in Vietnam’s activist scene. She also contributes to the environmental movement, was involved in investigating the Dong Tam case (Chapter 8), the Formosa case (Chapter 9) and numerous other social and political disputes. The connectedness of struggles exemplified by the two women’s political activism is the theme of the subsequent three chapters. This chapter puts particular emphasis on the practice of democracy activists and how those contribute to the discovering and dissemination of subjugated knowledges. We will see that Trang, Kieu and other democracy activists address a wide spectrum of socio-political concerns that, at first glance, seem to be disconnected from the demand for democratic change. However, tracing the connection of the apparently disconnected

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is the precondition for understanding the component as part of the totality (Webber 2019:10). Therefore, the first section of this chapter illustrates how democracy activists like Trang and Kieu make tactical use of the virtual spaces of social media and online blogs, thereby transforming them into political spaces that became indispensable for the unveiling of ‘subjugated knowledges’. The second section explores the political ideas that motivate their political practice and captures the process of ‘cognitive resistance’ of democracy activists. As highlighted in Chapter 2, Manuel Castells (2015:5, 315) has shown that networked social movements bear the potential to foster new forms of democracy41 and that the fundamental power struggle lies in the struggle over meanings, that is, the minds of the people. And indeed, as Foucault (1976) taught us, communication plays a crucial role in knowledge production and knowledge dissemination. Therefore, communication constitutes the means of power and control. In light of this, Castells (2015:6) argues that through the means of online “mass self- communication” networked social movements are enabled to manage and reconstruct the public sphere and, in fact, reclaim autonomy. Thus, online activism is considered a promising approach to “re-learn[ing] how to live together. In real democracy” (Castells 2015:316). What is not scrutinized in Castells’ work, however, is how the practices and ideas of democracy movements might as well be subjected to ideological state apparatuses and systems of epistemological coloniality (see Chapter 3 on ‘coloniality in democracy’). Therefore, how ‘real democracy’ may look like in concrete political terms is a question yet to be answered. To assess whether Vietnamese democracy activists find an answer to a decolonial (or particular Southern) idea of democracy, I will explore how different practices of online activism contribute to the rediscovering of subjugated knowledges. More precisely, I examine dominant political practices including ‘online petitioning’, ‘citizen journalism’ and a ‘networked civil society approach’, followed by an interrogation of democracy activists’ political ideas in the second

41 Networked social movements began to spread in Tunisia and Iceland and continued in different ways all over the world. On 15 October 2011, the global network of occupy movements mobilised several hundred thousand protesters across 951 cities in 82 countries under the banner “United for Global Change”. They demanded social justice and true democracy.

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section. The political concepts include ‘political participation’, ‘multiparty system’ and ‘anti-China nationalism’. In doing so, it finds that democracy activists maintain close interpersonal relationships with activists of other movements, signifying a connected struggle against ‘capitalist totality’ (Webber 2019). Yet, it also finds that the emerging political ideas are embedded in the ideological system of epistemological coloniality. The purpose of this chapter is to show how online networks became the crucial technique for activists to accommodate themselves within the existing global structures and carve out spaces in which subjugated knowledges can be produced and disseminated without activists being exposed to outright physical repression. However, this chapter also shows that the underlying ideas about democracy are ambiguous and in part contradictory. This substantiates how cognitive resistance is an embodied process that is in continuous interaction with ideological systems and ideological state apparatuses.

7.1 Political Practice of Online Activism

"Close your newspapers and stop watching TV" (Dissident singer Tuan Khanh*)42

In recent years, previously isolated groups and struggles around democracy, human rights, religious freedom and anti-China started to form a loosely connected network committed to the overall promotion of democratic change (Kurfürst 2015; Thayer 2009). Indeed, many activists I have spoken to described themselves as part of the “democracy movement” (phong trao dan chu) or interchangeably the “activist movement” (phong trao dau tranh), while at the same time they identified themselves as environmental activists, religious activists, political prisoners, labour and peasant activists or human rights defenders. Technically, so I learned, they form a network comprising mainly horizontal and leaderless groups as well as independent dissidents who employ internet-based channels such as blogs,

42 Tuan Khanh is a dissident singer who released his album Bụi Đường Ca Song on the Internet in 2007. He wrote the song Trai Tim Viet Nam (The Vietnamese Heart) in which he expressed his opposition to the Chinese actions in the East Sea.

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webpages, YouTube, Facebook groups and other means of online publication suitable for a fast or real-time dissemination of information (see Kerkvliet 2019:88). Jason Morris-Jung’s research, for instance, has shown that online petitions, a common technique applied by democracy activists, problematized very concrete issues such as “peasant rights to land, the leadership of the CPV, and struggles against foreign and especially Chinese domination” (Morris-Jung 2015:411). For this reason, Morris-Jung argues, the main points of reference for these “liberal democratic ideals are not international agreements or even universal ideals, but rather culturally and historically embedded experience” (Morris-Jung 2015:411- 12). This thesis corroborates that democracy activists indeed centre on different local problems such as politico-economic dependence on China and the lack of political transparency. But unlike Morris-Jung’s analysis, my research shows that activists also draw on idealised concepts of Western liberal democracies. The following section explores how online activism connected previously isolated struggles and how at this point an activist network was born: A network that collectively contributes to the disclosure and dissemination of subjugated knowledges. I identify ‘online petitions’, ‘citizen journalism through social media channels’ and ‘a networked civil society approach’ as the three main practices of online activism in Vietnam.

7.1.1 Online Petitions On 06 April 2006, a group of 116 people issued an Appeal for Freedom of Political Association (Thayer 2009:14). Two days later, on 8 April, 118 pro-democracy advocates issued the Declaration on Freedom and Democracy. These advocates formed the prominent coalition Bloc 8406 (named after the date of their founding declaration). Both documents were spread widely on the internet and ignited the contemporary wave of online activism for democratic change. Bloc 8406 demanded the complete replacement of the political system and worked out a four-phase proposal for the democratization of the country that included “the restoration of civil liberties, establishment of political parties, a new constitution and democratic elections for a representative National Assembly” (London 2013; Thayer 2009:15). They published the dissident magazine Freedom of Expression (Tu do ngon luan)

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that also circulated as online version. The usually short time window for independent dissident publishing lasted for seven months during which the members were able to produce 15 issues. Bloc 8406 was the first informal coalition that used the Internet to express political demands with considerable outreach (Kerkvliet 2019:89). The Declaration on Freedom and Democracy started with a number of 118 signatures but collected more than 1400 signatures later that year. Signers provided their names and locations; some indicated their occupations showing that most of them were peasants and teachers, followed by monks, priests and professionals from various backgrounds (Kerkvliet 2019:90; Thayer 2009:14). The number may not appear high, but the visibility and importance of the petition was unprecedented, not least because signers of the Declaration were beaten and harassed by plain-clothed police in the aftermath (Kerkvliet 2019:125). Other signers were arrested and tried which attests the political sensitivity of online petitions. At this point, the security apparatus took active measures to silence Bloc 8406 (Thayer 2009:16). In 2013, a group of 72 prominent intellectuals initiated the online Petition 72 that was ultimately signed by 15,000 supporters. The petition dealt with constitutional revisions and even suggested a draft for a new Constitution. It advocated for a society based on democracy, equality and the rule of law, the United Nations’ Declaration on Human Rights, the limitation of state propaganda and a halt to the state’s abuse of power (Morris-Jung 2015:409). Since then, launching online petitions and circulating open letters on the internet developed into an even stronger political statement. One of the decisive open letters was set up by 61 party members on 28 July 2014 in which they argued that “following an erroneous path to build a Soviet-style socialism” and “preserving a single-party totalitarian system that impedes freedom and democracy” was to be linked to the Vietnamese party- state’s unwillingness to counter China’s geopolitical dominance (Kerkvliet 2019:82). It also stated that the country must “abandon the mistaken path to building socialism”, set the country “firmly on the path of nation and democracy” and “create a state system of laws and real democracy” (Kerkvliet 2019:83). Other letters demanded the protection of freedom of expression, press, association and demonstration and even the peaceful transition from a “totalitarian system to

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democracy” (Kerkvliet 2019:83). And despite Article 25 of the revised 2014 Constitution reaffirms the freedom of speech and press, the right of access to information, the rights of assembly, the right of association and the right to demonstrate (Kurfürst 2015:1), it is in actual fact, the continuous state control and repression that dominates the activists’ lived realities. Dao, a Catholic lawyer specialised on international and economic law, made her first steps into political activism as a member of Bloc 8406. Dao became interested in international human rights and workers’ rights during her time as a law student (Interview 2019).43 Together with lawyer Nguyen Van Dai* (co-founder of Brotherhood for Democracy, Evangelic, former political prisoner) and other lawyers she organised human rights classes and advocated for democratic change via the Internet. Retelling her story to me, Dao remembered:

The first time I heard of Bloc 8406 was on BBC Vietnamese. After that I got in touch with lawyer Nguyen Van Dai. He came up with the idea to form a ‘group of lawyers for justice’ (hoi luat su vi cong ly). Working with lawyer Dai was always a partnership as equals. Although we were in his office and he is much more experienced than I was, there was no hierarchy, no leader and no executer. It was a very nice atmosphere, like being among friends. We soon formed a group of several lawyers. I may say we became a community of democracy activists. This was more than a decade ago. We had quite a lot of meetings and members, but it’s not comparable with today since we have access to social media. I would say 2005 was a milestone [for the democracy movement]. The Internet became accessible for the common citizen and especially the young people. Prior to the internet, people may have occasionally heard about democracy, but at this point it was in front of your eyes, just like Nguyen Van Dai’s office, it was right there across the street.

For Dao personally, access to the Internet was what connected her to other lawyers with common political interests and gave her the space to express her views. The group of lawyers made an active effort to break with social hierarchies in order to

43 Das was one of the recipient of the Human Rights Watch Hellman/Hammett Award.

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create a democratic culture of politics and activism, she described. Through this practical experience, knowledge of democratic organising and critical thinking can be set free. Moreover, as Castells (2015:315) emphasises, Internet access increases the potential to communicate with an international audience and build a larger network that could create new forms of democracy. This way, knowledge concerning democratic change was not only disseminated domestically but included many sections of the Vietnamese diaspora, particularly former political refugees and anti-Communists living in the United States. In November 2006, Dao along with 27 other democracy activists signed an open letter demanding democratic change which was sent to George W. Bush, who at that time attended the APEC meeting in Hanoi.44 Dao was overall grateful for the support provided by the American embassy:

The American embassy […] organized free conferences to teach us on immigration law and trade related issues. They organized everything for us, we only had to go there. One of the ambassadors asked me what it is that interested me most in the study of law. I said: human rights.

Her gratefulness attests her positive attitude towards the West and thus, her inclination towards liberal ideology of development through free market economy:

In the developed countries [United States and Western Europe], they have a sustainable and long-term strategy to develop their economy, one that is based on moral principles. We can learn from what already exists, from these great ideas. We don’t have to invent anything new [to develop the economy].

In 2007, she was sentenced to three years in prison and three years of house arrest under charges of “misinterpreting government policy on trade unions and labourers in Vietnam” and spreading propaganda against the State (Kerkvliet 2019:91). After Dao was released from prison in 2010, she continued with political activism and

44 APEC Vietnam 2006 was a series of political meetings with the 21 member economies of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation. In 2006, the APEC meetings was held in Vietnam and discussed the advancement of free trade agreements, investments and security issues.

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became a founding member of a group of labour activists based in Hanoi (Chapter 8). After all, Morris-Jung (2015:411) reasoned that petitions should be seen as “symbolic interventions on the political discourse and ideology”, rather than an attempt to directly influence State decision-making. However, as this section illustrates, online petitions and other forms of online activism prove to be an effective way to disseminate subjugated knowledges and to build a network domestically and internationally that could foster democratic change. In fact, online petitions have influenced certain outcomes on the political level (e.g. revision of the Constitution), even if these should be taken as exception rather than the rule.

7.1.2 Social Media and Citizen Journalism Online activism goes beyond the purpose of online petitioning and has developed into a means to coordinate protests, reclaim autonomy and reconstruct the public sphere (Castells 2015). In December 2007, online activism continued to be dominated by criticism against China’s aggressions in the East Sea (also known as South China Sea).45 After China’s maritime interventions resulted in the killings of 9 Vietnamese fishermen, with 8 others detained and 2 being wounded, anti-China activists used Yahoo Messenger and several blogs as the main sites to announce times, dates, reasons and code of conduct during protests (Kerkvliet 2019:67; Kurfürst 2012:60). According to Vietnamese dissidents, relieving Vietnam from political and economic dependency on China and ensuring the country’s national independence requires the country’s abandonment of its socialist political system and its replacement with democracy. Thus, activists and commentators underscore, the critique of China’s involvement in Vietnam’s economy and politics is directed against the Vietnamese party-state itself (see Kerkvliet 2019:68). The CPV’s open door policy for Chinese investors and the simultaneous suppression of Vietnamese protesters has been considered as evidence of the Vietnamese party-state compromising its citizens’ protection for the benefit of economic and political ties with China (Interview Lien; Dao, see Kerkvliet 2019, Morris Jung 2015:412).

45 For more information on the conflict in the East Sea, see Enrico Fels (2016) and Thanh Hai Do (2017).

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Lien (human rights defender, pro-democracy, former political prisoner) was one of the young critics who started to speak out against China in 2007 and participated in the 2008 demonstration in front of the Chinese embassy together with many students and younger people (Interview Lien, see also Do 2017:151). Initially, they called for protests on every Sunday, but the main protest site (the square in front of the Chinese embassy) was soon to be barricaded by security and police forces. Since then, the 2008 demonstrations are referred to as the initial spark of today’s democracy movement (Interview Lien). On the mission to self- investigate the case, Lien together with a student activist went to Thanh Hoa, the area where the 9 killed fishermen stemmed from. Lien remembers:

I started to ask questions. In 2005 I didn’t know anything about resistance or the [democracy] movement. I still loved Ho Chi Minh and the [Communist] Party and so on. It was much later that I realised I have to contribute at least something so that this country could change. That’s why I went to Thanh Hoa and searched for the truth. There was no social media, no groups and very little bloggers. I became one of the early bloggers in social media.

Back then, national newspapers rarely covered this case and until this day relations between China and Vietnam remain a sensitive topic that is subjected to censorship.46 Lien self-investigated the case of the fatal incident in the East Sea and conducted interviews with a number of relatives of the fishermen. She wrote a report and published her findings online in order to disclose what has been kept away from public discourse. Various online essays and appearances on diaspora radio channels in which she has discussed China’s maritime aggressions, government violations and presented her book about Vietnamese prison conditions made her a popular voice among Vietnamese dissidents. Many online activists who were vocal around 2007 have been imprisoned and fled into exile after release. Yet, a new generation of online activists continue in their very own way and carved out online spaces that were particularly focused on the rediscovering of silenced and

46 BaoVietnamNet was one of the few newspapers that wrote about this case and foreign minister even Le Dung publicly rejected the move by Chinese.

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disqualified knowledges concerned with political struggle, democracy and human rights (Foucault 1976:83). Between 2008 and 2010, new websites concerned with political activism and state-critical thinking emerged, among them Bauxite Vietnam, People Discuss (Dan Luan), Citizen Journalists (Dan Lam Bao), the Gossiper (Anh Ba Sam) (Kerkvliet 2019:91). In 2012-2014, an increasing number of households had access to Internet, with which the opportunities for public criticism and the circulation of unauthorized material expanded (Kurfürst 2012:60). During this time, Facebook pages became increasingly popular, among them Patriotic Diary (Nhat ky Yeu Nuoc), the blogs written by Nguyen Xuan Dien, Tran Tha Nga and Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh (Kerkvliet 2019:67). Nga and Quynh have been sentenced to 10 and 9 years in prison but were released earlier upon national and international pressure by democracy activists and human rights organisations and on the conditions that a third country would grant political asylum. Since 2019, both Quynh and Nga went to exile in the United States, now experiencing unmediated Western democracies themselves (more on this later). The CPV’s loyalty to China continues to occupy a central role in both online and offline discussions, which culminated in a range of online campaigns, such as We Want To Know (Chung Toi Muon Biet) in 2014. Anti-China/democracy activists demanded transparency and historical revision of what the two communist parties had agreed upon at the 1990 Chengdu conference.47,48 Nguyen Ha My (democracy, human rights defender, blogger) is one of the campaigners for We Want To Know (Chung Toi Muon Biet) and Freedom For Workers (Cong Nhan Tu Do). Both campaigns were launched by The Network of Vietnamese Bloggers (Mang Luoi Blogger Vietnam).49 Founded in 2013, the blogger network has

47 By anti-China/democracy activists I deliberately refer to democracy activists who center on the issue of China. There might be democracy activists who disagree with the harsh anti-China position, or chose to be silent on that topic, but I have no empirical data that would support my assumption. 48 Many activists refer to the 1990 secret summit in Chengdu during which Vietnamese and Chinese party leaders officially discussed the settlement to the Cambodian war. According to activists’ conspiracy theories, the CPV sold itself to the CCP giving China the long-term rights over Vietnam’s natural resources, such as oil, gas and bauxite. 49 Mang Luoi Blogger advocates for the protection of human rights, freedom, and democracy. They also declare that they are linked together through a wide community network, that respects the principles of pluralism and democracy, nonpartisan, non-profit.

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campaigned for issues around human rights, freedom of expression and the release of prisoners of conscience. Her group’s largest campaign We Are One went online in 2015 and attracted much attention. In it, they circulated information about universal human rights, democracy and demanded the release of political prisoners (Interview Ha My).50 Addressing both local and diaspora Vietnamese they called for 100,000 signatures of their online petition51, collective hunger strike, candle lightning and prayers, and called for the self-organisation of committees and delegations that would demand meetings with the embassies located in Vietnam and the United Nations Human Rights Council abroad. As a final step, they called for a demonstration during which all participants should be wearing white shirts. Another prominent blogger Anh Chi* (democracy, human rights) used to work in a publishing house before he became a full-time activist. His Facebook page had around 40,000 followers before his account was reported and ultimately shut down, while his YouTube videos continue to receive an average of 40,000- 50,000 views within 48 hours. Other online activists had more than 100,000 Facebook followers (see Tostevin 2017). However, since the cyber security law was enacted in January 2019 many dissident Facebook pages were increasingly reported by state forces, and the shut-down of online profiles was soon to follow. Like many other online activists, Anh Chi is a regular user of the Facebook livestream feature in which he speaks about both national and international politics:

I try to share what I know about the political systems in other countries including the Philippines, Zimbabwe etc. Although I am banned from travelling abroad, I find ways to educate myself and share my analysis online, on Facebook live and YouTube. Recently, I spoke about the

50 Call for online campaign: Mang Luoi Blogger Vietnam. 2015. “Lời kêu gọi tham gia Chiến Dịch Tranh Đấu cho Tự Do - Dân Chủ - Nhân Quyền 2015“. Retrieved September 02, 2020 (http://mangluoiblogger.blogspot.com/2015/03/loi-keu-goi-tham-gia-chien-dich-tranh.html). 51 The campaign was supported by 27 unregistered organisations (many of them introduced throughout this work) and 163 individuals, many of them prominent intellectuals. Among the organisations were: Bầu Bí Tương Thân, Bauxite Việt Nam, Dân Làm Báo, Diễn đàn Xã hội Dân sự, Hội Bảo Vệ Quyền Tự Do Tôn Giáo, Hội Phụ Nữ Nhân Quyền Việt Nam, Khối 8406, Lao Động Việt, Mạng Lưới Blogger Việt Nam, Nhà Xuất Bản Giấy Vụn, NO-U Sài Gòn, Phòng Công Lý Hoà Bình, Phong Trào Liên Đới Dân Oan, Hội Anh Em Dân Chủ.

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elections in Switzerland, Germany, USA and Zimbabwe and Thailand. I want the citizens to educate themselves.

The outreach of his videos goes beyond urban communities. Anh Chi retold a conversation he had with a person who approached him in public:

He was from the countryside and said: ‘I am always watching you on TV.’ I was confused, because I am labelled as reactionary, so why should I appear on TV, so I asked him. He said: ‘I am watching you at my neighbour’s house, he is always watching you.’ I slowly understood that people in the countryside are technologically catching up and some even have smart TVs and Internet access now. Instead of watching national TV they are watching activists on YouTube now. Because we are addressing the social problems of the people and the everyday problems. To sum up, the grassroots and underground movements of communication are a real threat to the state-controlled media. This is why they are so desperate to work with Facebook and Google now. But I think they will not be successful. Because one hand cannot hide the moon.

While independent activists use popular social media tools to communicate their messages and share news they consider as relevant, other activists organised into groups. These groups form alternative news channels with a specific outlook and agenda. CHTV (Chinh Hung TV), for instance, is a YouTube channel founded by Hung (Interview), which he operates together with four other democracy activists. CHTV specified on issues surrounding peasant dispossession, women, infrastructure/traffic and law for which they have launched different subchannels. While Hung covers issues on peasant dispossession, Ngai focussed on traffic and the injustices in prosecuting crimes, accidents and corruption that involved the traffic police. The subchannel on law was hosted a male activist; EVA TV, operated by two women, focused on issues surrounding “female issues”, i.e. family, children, health, inequality and everyday politics. Ngai explained that the law section of CHTV puts particular emphasis on Paragraph 2 of the Vietnamese Constitution, which is the paragraph that enshrines the principle of human rights. Members of CHTV use sources from national news, analyse and criticise how state-media journalists reported on certain issue and invite peasants and citizens for interviews

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to report on local or neighbourhood concerns that are otherwise silenced. Ngai emphasises the importance of the Constitution:

I soon realised that it is difficult to popularize all laws related to traffic. No one can memorize and understand hundreds of laws. So, the most important issue for people is to learn our fundamental rights as inscribed in Paragraph 2 of the Constitution, human rights, and Article 25, which is about the freedom of expression, freedom of press, freedom of information and the freedom of association. I communicate that this paragraph of the Constitution is the fundamental need for a broader understanding.

Initially, the CHTV team scheduled physical meetings once a week. After continuous harassment and members being detained, they restricted themselves to online meetings. Ngai split from the group because he preferred a “more direct” approach (truc dien) of political activism (Interview Ngai). The consensus of the CHTV group is to act on a ‘safe’ approach, that is, avoiding state-confrontational language in order not to alienate the audience and to counter the criminalisation and stigmatisation as state reactionaries or terrorists. By contrast, Ngai prefers a direct and state-confrontational approach, for which he decided to split from the CHTV group. For online activists it is the art of language that matters. Ngai’s solidarity with the group is still unconditional, he stressed, but he is convinced that more than one approach is necessary. He decided to become independent for a certain time until he finds strategically and tactically like-minded fellow activists who would like to form a new group with him. Ngai explains:

My language is direct and strong. For example, every day there are news about traffic accidents. I prefer to speak out directly and point to the injustices of prosecution. Party members and officials are treated like human beings in front of the law, while the poor people are treated like animals […] When I’m live streaming on Facebook, I get emotional. But talking from the heart is what people want and why people can identify with me. Knowing that the diaspora in the developed countries [he refers to the Vietnamese living in the United States and Europe], are supporting

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me as well, both materially as well as emotionally, is what keeps me going.

Concerns regarding whether to opt for a state-confrontational or a state- accommodating approach is an essential question in all social movement approaches. In authoritarian contexts like Vietnam, however, the line that determines what is state-confrontational, accommodating, circumventing or compromising is unclear. It seems that it is less of a tactical question rather than a matter of sensitivity of concrete subjugated knowledges that makes dissident activists being perceived as political and ideological threat. As the following section demonstrates, even an independent civil society approach can be perceived as such.

7.1.3 The Networked Civil Society Approach Founded in April 2013 by lawyer Nguyen Van Dai, the network Brotherhood for Democracy (Hoi Anh Em Dan Chu) attracted a significant number of democracy supporters within and outside the country. Many members of the network were Christians and received material support from Viet Tan, a ‘Democracy Party’ based in the United States which is criminalized as terrorist organization by the Vietnamese State.52 Brotherhood for Democracy used encrypted chatrooms mostly to discuss, connect or organize online learning classes (Interview Chinh). In 2015, Lawyer Dai and many other members of Brotherhood for Democracy were arrested and sentenced under Article 79 and 88 of the criminal law. Since then, the network has been formally decapitated, but democracy activists continue to identify with the name and the ideas that were born in this group. Like Lien, democracy activist Chinh still considers himself a member of Brotherhood for Democracy, despite the lack of any form of centralized organization, which is to avoid charges of misconduct and illegal assembly. Chinh, however, continues to educate his colleagues and friends on the idea and need for democracy. On a regular base he

52 Viet Tan is a network/organisation of Vietnamese living in the country and in the diaspora. Founded in 1982, many members are based in the U.S. upholding liberal democratic, conservative, nationalist and anti-Communist ideologies. The network demands democratic reforms in Vietnam but has been deemed terrorist organisation for carrying out violent attacks in the past. Many Vietnamese activists dissociate themselves from Viet Tan, others consider them as peaceful and an important organisation for Vietnam’s democracy movement.

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meets with a group of students who is eager to learn about the idea of democratic politics (Interview Chinh). By keeping a low-key profile, he was able to re-organize the first confidential online-class in 2019 after the years-long surge against the group members. One evening, for example, he invited a university Professor based in the United States (who stayed anonymous) to talk about different strategies of leadership in social movements. Less than 10 participants were invited based on personal relationship and trust in Chinh. In the same year (2013), prominent democracy activist Nguyen Quang A established the Civil Society Forum (Dien Dan Xa hoi Dan Su) consisting mainly of writers, poets, academics and lawyers. Some members were imprisoned shortly after they formed the group and were released only in 2019. The forum aimed at becoming a network that connects independent civil society groups. Nguyen Quang A explained that they first encouraged individuals to create interest groups (Interview). One of the group formations was named Independent Writers Association II (van doan doc lap or Hoa Nha Van Thu II). II because they distance themselves from the existing Writers Association linked to the CPV. Due to the limited range of activities, they later renamed the forum into the Independent Campaign Committee (Ban van dong van doan doc lap), consisting of 70-80 writers and poets. They subsequently launched a website, Van Viet, on which they published essays and facilitated debates around a number of influential literary contributions from the pre-1975 (pre-unification) era. Nguyen Quang A describes:

It was an open forum, not one that follows classical models. We were not organized vertically, but worked horizontally, completely transparent. We announced our goal, which was to contribute to the change of the current dictatorial system into a real democratic system by peaceful, legal and non-violent means (hoa binh, binh phap, on hoa). Nobody was the boss of nobody. In fact, every group could start its own project and discuss about the ideas that each group was concerned about most. And in the end, not everything needed to be discussed transparently. We were completely self-managed and autonomous, but most importantly we were organized horizontally.

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Access to the Internet has played a particularly influential role for Nguyen Quang A, who also was computer scientist and businessmen. In 1989/89 he became a founding member of the influential Vietnamese Association for Information Processing (Hoi Tin Hoc Vietnam). The association was a non-governmental body but had political leverage in the Communist Party. Particularly for the reason of political leverage, he stressed:

We were a business organisation that considered itself more of a social movement and that pushed access to the Internet for the wider society. The Internet revolution is as important as any advancement in infrastructure.

Nguyen Quang A’s conceptualisation of civil society is one that puts non- governmental agency at the centre. Hence, communist mass organisations, including youth organisations and women’s organisation as described in chapter 2, do not comply with his notion of independent political participation. Other activists endorse this viewpoint. Accordingly, in 2013, Dao (lawyer, Anti-China, democracy, worker’s rights and human rights) together with other activists established a civil society group Hoi Bau Bi Tuong Than aimed at the support of political prisoners and dispossessed peasants. The group solicits donations to political prisoners promising full transparency and access to their financial records for anyone who is interested. By providing open access to every single transaction of the donations (donators can provide pseudonyms, but the name of the recipient is open to the public, usually announced on Facebook) the group declares transparency as a strategic principle to protect themselves from political denunciation. Dao explains:

This transparency is a strategic choice itself, so the Communists can’t say that we misappropriated funds.

They also provide mental support for political prisoners and their families:

Political prisoners deserve to have a worthwhile life, an average life standard like any other person and that’s what we want to support. Many people who were released from prison fell into poverty, and hence, lost their political voices. This is so unfortunate (Interview Dao).

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Political prisoners rely on their supporters and lawyers to communicate their defences in Court, the injustices in prosecution they face, their hunger strikes, health conditions and letters written to family members. Facebook livestreams are also employed as monitoring device for prison visits and to organize vigils in front of police stations when activists are detained. The Facebook posts are usually reposted thousands of times (Wallace 2017). In 2016, online campaigning entered the arena of electoral politics. In that year, 24 independent candidates (i.e. no Party affiliation), among them many activists and celebrities, ran for the National Assembly. Nguyen Quang A, Nguyen Trang Nhung or Germany based singer Mai Khoi were among the better-known figures. While Mai Khoi does not consider herself a dissident, but her music encourages young people to get involved in civil society and politics. “I just want to make politics more public,” she said. Nguyen Trang Nhung is a businesswoman and activist in Ho Chi Minh City whose candidacy was declared a direct challenge to the party-state. In an interview to the New York Times she said: “We have a one- party regime; I would like to have a multiparty one” and “If we have many parties, we can choose which one makes things work better” (Ives 2016). In the same article, civil society advocate Nguyen Quang A was quoted as follows:

Vietnam had recently taken several major steps toward international integration, like joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an American-led trade deal reached in February that awaits congressional approval. Such a shift, he said, has created room for civil-society groups in Vietnam to operate.

Physical versions of campaigning are impossible for independent candidates. Instead, they rely on digital billboards, YouTube videos and the support of the social media community. These independent candidates promoted themselves on the base of a networked civil society approach. Thien (democracy, human rights, environment, civil society) is a prominent blogger and a key figure in the anti-Formosa movement (Chapter 9). Thien’s posts on Facebook cover his investigations on corruption related to corporate investments projects and everyday domestic politics. His Facebook posts receive several thousand ‘likes’. In a conversation with me he emphasizes:

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Citizens don’t believe in mainstream media anymore. They believe in social media instead. […] With the help of social media, we are able to compete with the government in terms of shaping public opinion. This is very important in politics. The government is able to produce an image of us with the entire media they own, an image that is very ugly, so much that we risk losing the trust of the wider population or community. Competing with the government in questions of media communication and information is essential for a base in the wider public.

During his stay in a Catholic Church in Central Vietnam Thien helped the villagers to find their voice in the case against the marine pollution caused by Formosa industry. He taught them how to conduct interviews with people, what questions to ask and how to produce footage to report on social media. The fishermen opened up Facebook accounts and used them as information and communication channels. He explains:

This was a very important step, because in those regions people are far from knowledgeable about using technological communication devices, very low-tech so to say. Central Vietnam, however, had many young people prior to the fish killings, so the effectiveness was very high and the learning process very positive and fast. So, this was the first tool of resistance to raise awareness.

What Thien describes is the power of online activism to reclaim agency and foster knowledge production, with which the reconstruction of an autonomous public sphere can be enhanced. What he describes is precisely what Foucault (1976) conceptualised as the struggle against the “regime of discourse”. Put differently, dissidents as well as common citizens became direct actors in producing a counternarrative to state-controlled media. They connect, self-publish and organize through social media and form networks across regions. Thien himself once posted a copy of his summons after being questioned by the police, which was reposted thousands of times. Publishing summons is part of activists’ online practice ever since, a strong symbol for how subjugated knowledges can be disclosed via social media.

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Trang and co-authors published a book together Learning Public Policy: The Case of Special Economic Zones (Hoc chinh sach cong qua chuyen dcc khu), in which they argued for the importance of understanding public policies. As mentioned earlier, Trang herself wrote a number of other books on political prisoners and non-violent resistance. Printed versions are produced by the Liberal Publishing House, an independent publisher established in February 2019 by a group of activists based in Ho Chi Minh City (Hutt 2020; Bemma 2020a). However, the distribution and sale of these books are organised online, mostly through directly contacting the authors on social media. Other activists produced audio versions of these book chapters and uploaded them on YouTube. Trang relies on a country-wide network to organize the clandestine distribution of her books and with it, a guide for critical thinking, since registered shipments are subject to State control and confiscation. Her social media account is thus, not only an essential channel for advertisement, sale and organisation, but also provides guidance on who might be a trusted customer. Indicators of trustworthiness include common Facebook friends, group affiliations, ‘liking’ political pages and posts on the timeline that indicate a critical standpoint towards the party-state. Since Trang has been arrested in October 2020, her Facebook account is managed by a befriended political activist who provides updates on the judicial proceedings of her case. To conclude this section: The practice of a networked online activism, has provided the democracy movement with new and autonomous spaces to disclose and disseminate silenced and disqualified knowledges concerning political activism, human rights and democratic change. They counteract the ‘regime of discourse’, i.e. the relations of power produced by the state (Foucault 1976:116). In doing so, online activists employ online “mass self-communication” (Castells 2015:6) to expose the abuse of state power and thus, scrutinize mostly state-society relations. These carved out spaces allowed for the practice of democracy activism and gave rise to a set of re-contested political concepts taken from dominant ideological systems. This will be discussed in the following section.

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7.2 Cognitive Resistance and the Ideology of Western Democracy

We have seen that democracy activists make use of social media and online networks to advocate for democratic change. But what do they mean when they speak of democracy? The more I asked about it, the more I was puzzled, yet I could say for certain that it was not the idea of democracy that a decolonial scholar would hope to find (see Güven 2015; Mentan 2015a). Vietnamese activists use the term democracy to express their demand for more political participation, in real terms but also in performative ways: In real terms as it is related to the imagination of a better future, a future that incorporates political participation and representation, and in performative ways as the term democracy developed into a concealer for anti-Chinese/anti-Communist nationalism. The following section identifies the key political concepts employed by democracy activists. I identify three political concepts as building blocks of Vietnam’s democracy activists: ‘political participation’ as the core concept (action-oriented), a ‘multi-party electoral system’ as adjacent concept (pro-stance), and ‘anti-China nationalism’ as the peripheral concept (anti-stance). Before I interrogate the ideational level of democracy activists, I briefly recapitulate the relevant arguments of the decolonial perspective in order to better situate what comes next. Central to Güven’s work is the argument that actually existing projects of democracy function as a tool of biopower that disciplines the citizen and controls political thinking (Güven 2015:10–11). Similarly, Mentan elucidates that instead of creating democratic ways of living, being and learning, democracy as a political project became a “source of conflict” and pressured many global Southern countries “into becoming liberal democracies and believing in western capitalist values” (Mentan 2015b:131, 139). Altogether, decolonial scholars urge for a decolonised understanding that liberates hegemonic conceptualisations of democracy from “Western cognitive imperialism” (Mentan 2015b). In view of this, the following section captures the process of re-contesting and re-configuring political concepts taken from hegemonic ideological systems in

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order to understand whether democracy activists perform resistance in itself or for itself. Therefore, it asks to what extent Vietnam’s democracy activists are epistemologically situated in the ideology of Western liberal democracy, and thus, possibly hindered to imagine a decolonial model of democratic being and living.

7.2.1 Core Concept: Political Participation Political participation is not the concrete expression used by activists to describe the core concept of democracy, but they refer to a range of terms including civil society, freedom of expression and freedom of association to argue that independent political participation is both the precondition for and the objective of a future democracy. Political participation as the core concept expresses the guiding principle that all democracy activists share. It occupies the position of the action- oriented connection point without which the adjacent and peripheral concept would not hold to the idea of democracy. When democracy blogger Anh Chi introduced himself and his political objectives, his straightforward and expressive manner of speaking indicated that this was not the first time he felt the need to defend himself:

My goal is not a coup attempt against the government or the overthrow of the Communist System. There are always many other factors that contribute to the constant change of a given system. We activists are one of these factors, we increase the temperature and force a reaction in the environment. However, I believe it will be the people in power themselves who will change the system, but for this, they need external influences, voices like ours. […] My goal is not to focus on how to bring this system to fall, but how to create a new system after that.

I heard many activists declaring that they never aimed for a coup, partly because they needed to distance themselves from the radical wings of anti-Communism, but also because they were convinced that an abrupt overthrow would be no guarantee for a transition towards democracy. Anh Chi’s statement conveys that democracy activists perceive themselves as legitimate political actors who participate in the construction of a democratic future.

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In a similar vein, Thien emphasizes that a “real democracy requires a powerful social movement, but given the current political atmosphere, keeping a low profile and focusing on strong interpersonal connections is the only reasonable practice” (Interview Thien). He goes at great length to map out what he considers as the three most important components of a democratic movement. Accordingly, a cross-class political leadership, a strongly developed civil society and the political participation of the masses constitute the essential ingredients. He expands on his framework and emphasises that a political leadership is supposed to set the political agenda and offer an alternative perspective on how to change and develop a new society that integrates all social classes (workers, peasants, students) across political sectors (businesses, domestic and foreign affairs, education and health system). The second component, the independent civil society, he considers as “particularly distinct from the political leadership”. This is an important attribute since formal civil society organizations need to be registered in order to be legal. As a result, these formal and registered civil society organisations become de facto umbrella and mass organisations of the Communist Party and are thus, state-controlled civil society organisations (see Chapter 5). According to Thien’s view, the role of independent, that is, unregistered civil society organisations would foster as system of checks and balances vis-à-vis state powers, allow for public criticism against individual policy makers, and promote awareness among the wider population. As a third and most important component he determines the “power of the masses”, for which he puts particular emphasis on the role of workers and students. Yet, Thien explains, the power of the masses reveals itself only with the ability to organize:

If the government would allow us to form independent groups, many student unions and trade unions would come to life. The political leadership [of a movement] may have a vision, but they don’t have the power. Only the masses have the power. The question then is: How to organize the masses? (Interview Thien).

His remarks display awareness of the need to forge solidarities across classes and across group interests as well as to formulate and exercise concrete political practices that focus on the organisation of these heterogeneous masses. It reminded

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me on labour activist Mai (see Chapter 8), who pointed out that the environmental movement against the steel factory Formosa (see Chapter 9) “carried a very distinct colour, that is, the colour of democracy” which is why she and her fellow labour activists got involved in the anti-Formosa movement and supported the Association of Fisherman in Central Vietnam (Hiep Hoi Ngu Dan Mien Trung) (Interview Mai). However, the group’s activities faded out a year later in 2017. Therefore, without a clear vision and without a progressive political agenda setting, “neither civil society nor spontaneous mass uprisings would endure for a long time. They have to have a clear vision of the future and a social contract that provides both parties [the State and the people] with societal responsibilities”, Thien states. Civil society is a way to organize this ‘social contract’, that is, the political participation and the responsibilities of both the government and the people. For civil society advocates like Thien and Nguyen Quang A, it is essential to organise the interests of the masses and to foster independent political participation across classes and groups to ensure democratic change. Their objective is to ultimately shift the distribution of political powers away from the political elite and towards independent civil society organizations. Returning to my interview with labour activist Mai, who in this extract hesitates to provide a definition of democracy, nonetheless indicates that political participation lies at the core of the labour resistance:

I define democracy as the right for workers to be their own masters, have the right to implement human rights, have the right to participate and decide over societal policy making, contribute to the advancement of society (thuc day cho xa hoi) and be respected in the society. If you want a more complicated definition or theory you should talk to the intellectuals, but for me it is as simple as that.

By “intellectuals” she refers to people like Nguyen Quang A, Thien and Pham Doan Trang, with whom she is politically connected despite their difference of approaches and opinions (see Chapter 8). When democracy activist Trang is not writing books, she uses her time to collect information, to visit former political prisoners and to give interviews to international newspapers or dissident radio channels. She calls for a liberal

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democracy based on four elements: an open and accountable government, civil society, free and fair elections and human rights. In her book Politics of a Police State she invokes Austin Ranney’s definition of democracy53 and writes: “In a democracy, it is crucial that every citizen can participate in the process of making collective decisions at their wish. Policy making is not the business of just ‘the Party and the State’ as communist propagandists usually put it” (Pham Doan 2019:36). Moreover, she writes that a growing civil society will give rise to major social movements that ultimately put pressure on the CPV to compromise and share its power. Although Trang is critical of the current practice of internet-based civil society organisations as “they are poorly organised and politically inexperienced”, she believes in their potential for prospective non-virtual civil society organisations once the freedom of expression and freedom of association is rightfully implemented by the State. She is convinced that civil societies are the “sources for non-communist candidates” that will run for offices in future democratic elections (Pham Doan 2019:62). Democracy and civil society activist Nguyen Quang A is also optimistic. He explains that the change towards “democracy in Vietnam needs only a few more steps to go” (Interview Nguyen Quang A). Since Vietnam’s economic base is already a capitalist base, the fundament for democracy is already established, he claims. The element that needed change is the political configuration of the State: the “dictatorial one-Party regime” that does not allow for political involvement independent of the Communist Party’s control (Interview Nguyen Quang A). Rather, political participation is determined by “access to information, freedom of expression and press, the freedom of association and the right to education that also allows for critical analysis of Marx, Ho Chi Minh and Mao” (Interview Nguyen Quang A). Especially Nguyen Quang A’s and Trang’s definitions of democracy display the activists’ inclination towards liberal democracies (see Mentan 2015b:131).

53 According to Austin Ranney’s definition, democracy is a form of government organization that complies with the principles of popular sovereignty, political equality, popular consultation, majority rule (Ranney 2001).

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However, unlike the ideas of liberal democracy outlined above, democracy activist Kieu’s definition is strikingly different:

In this society only the people who work for the state are valuable. In the school you learn what they - the teachers, public workers - want you to learn. But out there, in the streets, knowledge is very diverse and plentiful. Only when you go out, you will have lived a full and honest life. You may fall, but you will stand up again and will learn things that only a few people may be able to understand. And all this starts in your family. I was accused of being stubborn and difficult by my family, but this actually, this is democracy.

Pausing at these different understandings of democracy and invoking the decolonial-Marxist framework (Chapter 3), we can see that all activists are aware of the State’s ideological apparatuses, but that only Kieu emphasises the value and importance of perceiving democracy as an everyday life experience. However, these actual experiences of democratic practice and alternative ways of democratic being, arguing and negotiating seem to be missing not only within society at large, but also within the democracy movement. When Trang (2018:15) gave me her book Politics for the Common People, I skimmed her preface that ended with:

Because I myself suffer from poor political knowledge with little experience of living in a democracy, I must admit that the knowledge in this book is simply what I collected from a variety of sources, though in a more systematic way than the Internet. Any error or mistake you may find in this book is mine, not anyone else’s.

Her statement is not just a humble remark, but - like Kieu’s comment - points to a fundamental problem: the lack of actual democratic practices and experiences, experiences that should be the foundation of all modern societies but have been stripped off by the countries’ authoritarian context as well as liberal democracy’s colonial project to discipline the citizen and control political thinking (Güven 2015:10–11). It illustrates what Mentan highlights: “[t]he conditions that favour democracy depend for their emergence largely upon the political skills of a given society” (Mentan 2015b:142). Yet, the continuation of colonial hierarchies in

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general and the hierarchies of knowledge in particular, led to the internalisation of an inferiority complex of the Global Southerner (Mentan 2015b:97).

7.2.2 Adjacent Concepts: Multiparty system Trang does not believe in direct democracy. She is aware that “direct democracy is the purest form of democracy” in which no mediation by political parties but the regular participation by all members of a community would be required. Equal access to information and knowledge would be the result of direct democracy, she writes. However, Trang (2019:32) objects promptly, “direct democracy is too ideal to be applicable in today’s world”. Instead, she considers representative democracies “more practical” as they provide a “better division of labour” with the elected politicians carrying the responsibility for state governance (ibid.). She also avows that representational democracy is, in fact, “less democratic than direct democracy” because the rule of the majority entails the disaffection of the minority (Pham Doan 2019:33). Moreover, she mentions that a multiparty system does not necessarily lead to a democracy, yet, “a single party system is definitely leading to a dictatorship” (Pham Doan 2019:42). Despite being aware of the deficiencies of representative democracies, Trang is confident that a multiparty system is the logical approach to foster political participation and ultimately to arrive at a democratic system. Hence, the concept of a multiparty political system occupies an adjacent position relative to the core concept and functions as an attribute to specify the meaning of political participation. In other words, the idea of the multiparty political system is anchored in the core concept of political participation. It also concretises the pro-stance of democracy activists and embodies the notion of diversity, multiplicity and equal political representation across social classes and group interests. On this matter, democracy lawyer Dao is even more absolute compared to Trang. Dao can’t imagine a democracy without a multiparty system. “A society without a multiparty system cannot be democratic” she stressed several times (Interview Dao). Dao is frustrated about other democracy activists who neither lay claim to the implementation of a multiparty system nor define communism as a form of dictatorship. For example, she is well connected to environmental justice

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activists who also consider themselves as pro-democracy activists, but, as she reiterates, “they are not coming out publicly to declare that the reason for our political problems is the dictatorship itself, the one-party rule, and that only a multiparty system can bring democracy” (Interview Dao). Regardless of her incomprehension over this, she continues to be supportive of civil society groups that advocate for the freedom of association, a free press and environmental protection. Similarly, Kieu emphasised the need for an oppositional party:

Oppositional parties would provide the opportunity for people to express their own political agenda and to be open about everything. They need to be very strong in every aspect, intellectually, communicative etc. The goal would be to fight against the Communist Party, and ultimately to defeat the [Communist] Party.

When Ha My (democracy, The Network of Vietnamese Bloggers) started to actively research and write for different online blogs, she eventually concluded that changing an authoritarian one-party system needed a multiplicity of political parties and the people’s right to vote. She is particularly concerned about the working class that needs not only an independent trade union and legal education but also a political party that would represent working-class interests (more on this in Chapter 8). “Bringing workers into politics is a complex issue”, she worries, as workers cannot catch up with the education that is needed in order to compete with other parties:

Workers don’t have time to rest, they work at least 10 hours a day and don't have time and energy to advocate for societal issues. If they have any time left, they will use the time to relief their stress a bit. They don't have time to study (Interview Ha My).

Ha My points to the fact that studying labour rights, popularizing respective ideas among the working class and achieving immediate effects with regard to the improvement of working conditions is indeed challenging. At the same time, it shows that defining the long-term goals in the interest of the entire working class is a difficult task for democracy activists to do justice to.

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The lack of democratic experience is crucial. For this reason, some democracy activists seek guidance in currently available Western models of democracy, while others are adamant about Vietnamese democracy as it was practiced in the Republic of Vietnam (Vietnam Cong Hoa), the official State of South Vietnam from 1955 to 1975. Labour activist Huy (Chapter 8) is a passionate defender of the Republic of Vietnam, of which the symbol – a yellow flag with three horizontal red stripes – became the signifier of reactionary and anti- communist forces, but also re-aligned its meaning as a symbol of Vietnam’s democracy movement.54 Huy explains that “the children of Vietnam Cong Hoa”, like himself, “do not seek to go back in history” but that they want to remind the Vietnamese people of better times with a democratic Constitution, the rightful implementation of civil rights and greater freedom of religion (mostly to the advantage of Catholics, while Buddhist were subject to harsh State repression). In present-day Vietnam, any portrayal that does not comply with the narrative of the RVN as ‘capitalist allies’, ‘reactionaries’ or ‘anti-Communists’ means to delegitimise the leadership of the current Communist Party. Hence, Huy’s reference is his attempt to counteract the “regime of discourse” and to rediscover those subjugated knowledges that are “concerned with a historical knowledge of struggles” (Foucault 1976:83, 116). However, the symbolic reference to the yellow flag became a divisive issue among pro-democracy activists in Vietnam. Many activists who grew up in the northern part of Vietnam, including Pham Doan Trang and Thien, have no biographical link to the Republic, and therefore, do not identify democracy with the RVN. In fact, Pham Doan Trang was criticized by some of her readers and followers for not mentioning the yellow flag in her books and general writings (Interview Pham Doan Trang). Blogger Anh Chi, who also grew up in the north of Vietnam, declares that he is an activist “by virtue of his values and not a representative figure

54 South Vietnam (RVN) was a member of the Western Bloc during the Cold War, backed by the United States of America. In the course of the American War and the Vietnamese liberation struggle that ended in favour of Vietnamese Communist forces, many South Vietnamese anti-Communists became refugees and were granted asylum in America. Since then, subsequent generations of Vietnamese refugees disavow the legitimacy of the Communist political leadership.

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of any flag”. He disassociates himself from the people who are “fighting in the name of the flag”. They seek for an act of retaliation, he believes. While describing what it means to act by virtue of his values, he exemplifies:

The people must truly hold the ballot, be free to vote for a candidate that has enough competence, qualification (nang luc) and knowledge to take the responsibility for this country (để làm gánh vác những trọng trách). It means that people should not vote because a candidate follows this flag or that Party. Candidates can be activists, Communists, the next generation or even diaspora Vietnamese. But for this, we need to regain our right to vote (Interview Anh Chi).

Another historical dimension that many democracy activists nostalgically reference is the 1946 Constitution, Vietnam’s first Constitution born in the year of the country’s official independence. Activist Trang agrees that it included at least some democratic principles and held governmental leaders accountable instead of pursuing a harshened socialist line like the Constitutions that followed in the years 1959, 1980 and 1992 (Sidel 2009:27). Vietnamese activists consider the 1946 Constitution as a democratic Constitution that put the people and their political participation at the centre and was built on the idea of “broad national consensus” (Sidel 2009:27). Trang writes that one day after the Declaration of Independence (September 3, 1945) Ho Chi Minh called for a democratic Constitution and requested a general election to form the National Assembly. Despite the country’s economic hardships, socio-political fragility and foreign interventions, 85 percent of the Vietnamese population voted and established the first democratically elected National Assembly in 1946. Trang (2019:75) remarks: “It affirms all people’s right to freedom, right to be the master of their country, and demonstrates Ho Chi Minh’s thoughts of national liberation, independence and freedom”. Interestingly enough, renowned Vietnam analyst Bernard Fall noted: “The [1946] Constitution gives a generally ‘Western democratic’ impression to the reader in that it does not deal in economic theories and does not make use of stereotyped communist phrases […]. Like the Democratic Republic’s declaration of independence, it appears designed to provide ‘reader appeal’ in the Anglo-Saxon countries, and particularly the United States” (Fall 1954:13–14 cited in Sidel 2009:27). Yet, to democracy activists the

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influence of Western thoughts is not a hindrance but, in fact, an affirmation of their demands:

[…] the Vietnamese people, facing a severe lack of information and knowledge for reference, remain strangers to democracy, liberty, rule of law, and other political concepts. Until recently, you can still find top propagandists arguing strongly that human rights are Western values that should never be sowed in Vietnamese land, that the Vietnamese people do not need a “US-style democracy” (Pham Doan 2019:20–21).

Arguing against this relativist approach, Trang is convinced that democracy is a universal struggle, but one that requires the people’s grasp of basic political knowledge: “Fortunately, it’s just the basic knowledge that is available elsewhere in the world; we need not create new one [knowledge]” (Pham Doan 2019:22). She refers to the experiences of multiparty systems in Western democracies. The concept of multiparty systems represents the multiplicity of groups and interests and thus, concretises the core concept of political participation. What is striking is that although different activists (Northern based and Southern based) do refer to the democratic ideas of the country’s own (subjugated) history, the imagination of a prospective democratic multiparty system is repeatedly made with reference to Western-oriented liberal democracies, illustrating the hegemony of Western ideology.

7.2.3 Peripheral Concept: Anti-China Nationalism In September 2008, democracy blogger Lien was sentenced to 4 years in prison and 3 years under house arrest. She was accused of propaganda against the State (Article 88), particularly for her involvement in anti-China demonstrations. I asked Lien about the link between territorial disputes with China and her demands for democracy in order to understand the role of anti-China sentiments. She argues:

I can see how for you it may look like the two have no relation to each other, that they are different things, but they are not. Besides struggling for the environment, human rights and democracy, we also have to focus on territorial sovereignty, because this is about the security, the safety of

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a country’s people. The whole problem is not between the Chinese Communists Party and the Vietnamese people, but actually between the Communist Party of Vietnam and the Communist Party of China. The two parties fight over domination and now it is not only about the Paracel and Spratly Islands anymore but about large parts of the Vietnamese country. Many products, the environment, the culture, almost everything is affected by China.

Her quote testifies that the struggle against China is an indirect struggle against the Vietnamese party-state. In October 2018, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam Nguyen Phu Trong has been sworn in as the country’s 11th president, making him the first leader to hold both positions since Ho Chi Minh’s presidency. This constellation resembles China’s political configuration and became a major point of critique for democracy activists like Lien. She commentates:

Vietnam is a dictatorship because only one political party is allowed. Nguyen Phu Trong is the official representative of the people but, in fact, excludes the people out of any political decision. He is influenced by the West, especially by Europe and America, but the biggest influence on him comes from China. […] We are dependent on China. The problem here is the relation between the two Communist Parties, for which the Vietnamese people are the product of exchange. To be clear, this is not an issue between the Vietnamese people and the Chinese people, but between the two Parties (Interview Lien).

Similarly, blogger Ha My (member of The Network of Vietnamese Bloggers) explains that the majority of protesters against China understand that Chinese businesses, investments and their military actions in the East Sea are linked to Vietnam’s foreign policy. Many anti-China and democracy activists believe that there are political agreements between both governments that are kept hidden from the population. Ha My asserts that “protests against China are protests against the Vietnamese government’s support for it” and that protesters “want to exercise pressure on the Vietnamese government and ask them to choose sides: Protecting

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the Vietnamese people or their relations to the Chinese Communist Party” (Interview Ha My). In recent years, Chinese political and economic involvement has become more apparent and threatening to many Vietnamese. Violent clashes between Chinese and Vietnamese workers, regular reports of Chinese managers harassing Vietnamese employers, but also the state’s incentives of tax breaks and low rents for foreign investors in Special Economic Zones whose alleged key beneficiary will be China are among the real and perceived threats by activists and the wider population (see Tran 2018). In January 2019, the new cyber security law entered into force resembling the Chinese strategy of internet control. Online activists, particularly democracy activists, discussed how the new law authorises state bodies to gain legal access to private data, undermine the already limited freedom of expression and cut down on activists’ Facebook pages and chat groups. Yet, democracy activists have appropriated their legitimate critiques against China as a framing opportunity to create a common enemy and invoke a sense of national liberation that has already proved effective throughout Vietnamese history. As a peripheral concept, ‘anti-China nationalism’ expresses the anti-stance and is thus, in a dialectical relationship to the adjacent concept. Unlike the concept of a ‘multiparty system’ which expresses the pro-stance of diversity and multiplicity, ‘anti-China nationalism’ denotes an anti-stance against the ruling elite, while at the same tame it creates an idea of imagined national unity and homogeneity. It also exerts a performative role as it links the idea of democracy to anti-China nationalism from a cultural (and geographically specific) perspective. One of the closely associated concepts is ‘anti-communism’, which has been one of the central features in the anti-Formosa movement (see Chapter 9). Yet, some democracy activists conflate it with their anti-China position. Both democracy activists Nguyen Quang A and Thien pointed out that China was depicted as the main evil by many activist voices who spoke out against Formosa. Yet, Thien affirmed that despite the small number of Chinese contractors there has been no clear evidence about China’s involvement in the Formosa case, but that it has been Taiwan’s responsibility (Interview). Anti-China activists, however, have instrumentalised available political opportunities to stress China’s relationship with

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the CPV in order to disrupt the CPV’s legitimacy among the population. For other activists, like Thien, the most pressing concerns about China are its human rights violations. He considers a form of ‘inclusive’ nationalism (‘love for one’s country’, see Chapter 9) that unites against China as an opportunity to target the Vietnamese government (see also Kurfürst 2015). As Tuan puts it: “In this context, it is an opportunity, because resisting China equals resisting Vietnam’s government and vice versa” (Interview Thien). Yet, the anti-China issue raises questions of discrimination and racism. Nguyen Quang A is alarmed about activists conflating criticism against China’s political power over Vietnam and the concerns about ethnic diversity. He stresses that “Hoa people and their communities (Chinese diaspora living in Vietnam) have always lived and contributed to the country together with the ethnic Vietnamese (Kinh) and are therefore part and parcel of Vietnam”. He warns:

If we are not careful, we will end up discriminating the Chinese Vietnamese. This form of nationalism can turn out to be extremely harmful to the democracy movement […]. History must not be repeated. You remember, when they [the Hoa people] were forced out of the country in 1978/79. This was a very stupid decision of the Communists in Vietnam. Equality for Hoa, Kinh Vietnamese and any other race. Never promote and encourage any action that divides the people of this country. Only do actions that connect the people in a way that the culture of Vietnam becomes more diverse (Interview Nguyen Quang A).

Political fragmentation is a pressing concern. Although anti-China/anti-Communist nationalism itself has been identified as a unifying indicator for democracy activists, its pro-Western/pro-U.S. American extension developed into a divisive issue among democracy activists. In fact, many activists I met have expressed their sympathies for U.S. President Donald Trump. I noticed some activists proudly wearing a Donald Trump cap and uploading photos to show off their pro-Trump election give-aways that have been sent to them by American Vietnamese. Donald Trump is perceived as the leader of the world’s strongest economy and the personification a liberal democracy. He and Melania Trump are also lauded for granting political asylum for Vietnamese prisoners, while his trade war against

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China is certainly supportive of the activists’ anti-China/anti-communist nationalism. By granting political asylum for Vietnamese political prisoners and making bilateral trade agreements conditional on the superficial improvement of labour and human rights, America (as much as the European Union) continues to campaign for its role as a democratic crusader, illustrating what Mentan (2015) and Güven (2015) have described as the neo-colonial political project of Western democracies. Environmental activist Kim (Green Trees, anti-Formosa, pro- democracy) worked with an U.S.-based environmental NGO and spend several months in Washington D.C. She reflects on the general pro-Western attitude in Vietnam:

Many people in Vietnam think that the U.S. is a very prosperous place, but when I was there, I realised that the U.S. is not so much different from Vietnam. As is the case of any system, I think it is most important that we learn how to protect our environment and realise that we are the tenants of this planet.

Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh (pen name: Me Nam, engl: Mother Mushroom, blogger, anti-Formosa, democracy) is one of the political prisoners whose early release and subsequent move to the U.S was publicly portrayed as dependent on Melania Trump’s patronage and commitment for ‘freedom’. In March 2020, Quynh was attacked for her critique of Trump’s management during the Corona pandemic by other Vietnamese democracy activists. On March 22, 2020, Quynh stated on her Facebook page: “America is not as great as many of you think […] It’s not any different here. […] Follow the advice of medical professionals, instead of obeying any leadership [by which she referred to D. Trump].”55 Her post received around 1000 comments and was shared and ‘liked’ around 700 times. Individuals of the Vietnamese diaspora living in the U.S. started a petition against Quynh titled: Say No to Undercover Communist ‘Me Nam’. In the description of the petition, it was argued that she “blasted at President Trump”, “indoctrinated Communist propaganda” and that “She is ungrateful to our beloved country [U.S.A] and a

55 Source of Quynh’s Facebook post: Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh. 2020. Facebook Entry. Retrieved March 22, 2020 (https://www.facebook.com/bloggermenam/posts/269613360698746).

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traitor. She should be deported back to where she belongs”. 13,000 people have signed the petition.56 Unlike the adjacent concept of a multiparty system that marked the pro- stance towards multiplicity and diversity, the peripheral concept anti-China/anti- Communist nationalism seeks to denote the anti-stance as well as a sense of unity. Although it is analytically faulty to flesh out democracy and political participation by anti-China nationalism, this configuration of concepts has been socially legitimised within the activists’ socio-political environment. It also shows symptoms of a dualistic political imaginary that embraces Cold War rhetoric and divides the world into two camps: the democratic West and authoritarian- Communist Vietnam.

7.3 Conclusion

Similar to what Castell (2012) has observed in other regions, Vietnam’s nationwide access to Internet has paved the way for a first-time cross-regional and cross- generational network of activists that linked together previously isolated struggles under the banner of a democracy movement. More precisely, this chapter illustrated how activists from various social backgrounds including former Communist Party members, lawyers, well-educated urbanites with different political affiliations ranging from labour, human rights, environment and civil society form a networked social movement that seeks to disclose subjugated knowledges concerned with the struggle for democracy and human rights. By carving out new spaces in social media, such as Facebook livestreams, activist news channels on YouTube and online blogs, activists employ what Castell (2015:316) describes as “mass self- communication”. In doing so, they reclaim autonomy, produce public criticism against the state and communicate these subjugated knowledges with the wider population. However, as this chapter has shown, online activism cannot supplant the practice of democratic organising such as

56 Change.org. undated. “Say No To Undercover Communist ‘Me Nam’ Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh”. Retrieved September 20, 2020 (https://www.change.org/p/uscis-say-no-to-undercover- communist-mę-nấm-nguyễn-ng%E1%BB%8Dc-như-quỳnh).

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physical meetings, demonstrations, workshops, ballots or activist conferences: A lack of democratic experiences that activists bemoan; while decolonial scholars problematise that the lack of true democratic experience is inherent to all liberal democracies. Given the constraint of real democratic practices, activists exercise resistance in itself and focus on the critique and improvement of state-society relations. In light of this, the second section of the chapter discussed the process of cognitive resistance by examining the configuration of political concepts that substantiate the activists’ idea of democracy. I contend that they are ideologically embedded in Western models of liberal democracies which, as Ferit Güven (2015) puts it, produces disciplined subjects fit for a political system, rather than ways to “re-learn how to live together. In real democracy” (Castell 2015:316). Common to the idea of liberal democracies, the democracy activists’ core concept emerges around the notion of independent ‘political participation’. Democracy activists associate political participation with critical thinking and non-ideological education, political expertise, the availability of time as essential resource (i.e. “workers might not have the resources to be good politicians”) and the organisation of interest groups (in the form of civil society organisations and a multiparty system). At the same time, they reject the idea that communism can exist along a democratic leadership and by no means can communism facilitate a democratic life for the people. As adjacent concept, democracy activists advocate for a multiparty system and thus, call for a representative democracy rather than a system of direct democracy. It occupies the pro-stance towards multiplicity, diversity and equal representation of different interests, and is anchored in the political participation of varying social classes. A significant line of thought was that citizens, including activists themselves, are not educated enough and thus, ineligible for a system of direct democracy. A multiparty system is thus perceived as the logically derived attribute to specify the idea of democracy and political participation as it channels the current lack of political education. Finally, I identified anti-China nationalism as peripheral concept. It exerts a culturally derived anti-stance against China and communism and simultaneously performs the idea of national ‘unity’ in a dialectical relationship to the ‘diversity’ of a multiparty system. Linking anti-China

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nationalism to democracy is driven by a socio-cultural and emotional standpoint rather than an analytically legitimised inference. China and communism signify the overarching enemy and are built into a hidden transcript with which they articulate critique against the Vietnamese Communist Party. What I tried to lay bare in this chapter is that democracy activists assess Vietnam’s political reality from a standpoint that is structured by the experience of repression as well as the lack of democratic participation and political representation. In order to disclose subjugated knowledges and, at the same time, counter the “regime of discourse” (Foucault 1976:116), they combine anti- authoritarian practices with re-contested concepts taken from nationalist, statist, Westerncentric and Cold-War ideologies. This displays a state of epistemological coloniality and evinces that democracy activist are yet to trespass on the ideological systems of capitalism, nationalism and Westerncentrism in order to arrive at resistance for itself. In the following chapter, I explore another type of political practice and set of political ideas, namely, rights-based resistance exercised by labour and peasant activists. In doing so, I pay particular attention to the functions of law as an ideological state apparatus that contributes to the reproduction of the ideological systems of capitalism and coloniality.

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Chapter 8 Rights-based Resistance: Labour and Peasant Activism

“The Vietnamese Law is interpreted like poetry”, says democracy activist Kieu, with which she describes her perception of how Vietnam’s officially declared ‘rule of law’ became subject to arbitrary interpretation by the judicial system itself (Interview Kieu). As Kieu got involved in the struggle against land dispossession, she developed a close relationship with peasant activists. Like Kieu, other democracy activists maintained close interpersonal relations with peasants and labour activists. Nguyen Quang A and Pham Doan Trang, for instance, publicly expressed their solidarity with the peasants of Dong Tam and helped to investigate and campaign against the unlawful procedures of land grabbing. Democracy lawyer Dao was a founding member of an independent labour activist group, whereas Trang and Thien together with the civil society group Green Trees published the first book-length report on the marine disaster caused by the steel factory Formosa (see Chapter 9). The position of the working class and the peasantry is pervasive to many democracy activists, which signifies the existence of a connected struggle against ‘capitalist totality’ (Webber 2019). This chapter explores how democracy, labour and peasant activists share a common network of supporters and allies and are thus connected through the political practice of rights-based resistance. Rights-based resistance has a global tradition from female workers in the United States using legal strategies to demand wage reforms, indigenous environmental networks in Canada (Thomas-Muller 2013) to peasants in rural China as well as labour and peasant activists in Vietnam. In this chapter, I explore how rights-based practice is about the rediscovering of subjugated legal knowledges and accompanied by a particular configuration of political concepts. This chapter begins with a detailed account of rights-based strategies by drawing on examples of grass-roots labour organising in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi and peasant resistance in Dong Tam and Duong Noi. It is followed by a second section, which deals with the process of cognitive resistance of peasant and labour activists. I identify ‘rule of law’ (core concept), ‘self-determination’ (adjacent concept), and

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‘state responsibility’ (peripheral concept) as component parts that structure the ideational level of rights-based resisters. Throughout this chapter, I show that rights-based resistance is about disclosing subjugated knowledges with particular focus on the production and dissemination of legal knowledge. It interrogates whether rights-based resistance can trespass on the legal and ideological systems set by the state and the capitalist- colonial world order.

8.1 Political Practice of Rights-based Resistance

In Vietnam’s Socialist Constitution the working class and peasantry are declared to be the pillar on which the society and economy is build. Although working and living conditions in Vietnam have improved in recent years, workers and peasants remain subject to unjust working conditions, exploitation and forced dispossession. Rights-based resistance that targets these problems includes a variety of approaches. In the first section of this chapter, I touch upon two processes: The practice of reclaiming positive rights and the rediscovering of subjugated knowledges, the latter of which entails the promotion of legal knowledge and the production of state-critical knowledge. The predominant pattern of Vietnamese labour and peasant activists resonate with a form of political contention that O’Brien and Li (2004:2) called ‘rightful resistance’ by which they refer to:

“a form of popular contention that operates near the boundary of authorized channels, [that] employs the rhetoric and commitments of the powerful to curb the exercise of power, [and] hinges on locating and exploiting divisions within the state and relies on mobilizing support from the wider public”.

Rightful resisters employ existing laws, policies and officially promote values to reveal the gap between rights promised and rights delivered (O’Brien and Li 2006:24). O’Brien and Li’s concept of ‘rightful resistance’ helps to signify the practical and ideational orientation of labour and peasant activism. Yet, unlike O’Brien and Li’s conceptualisation of ‘rightful resistance’, Vietnamese labour and

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peasant activists exercise forms of political contention that indeed put the implementation of ‘legal rights’ at the centre of their practice, but transgress the boundaries set by the given legal apparatus and at times choose tactics that disrupt state-authorised channels of resistance (see also Kerkvliet 2014b). Particular cases of peasant resistance, such as the Dong Tam case (Chapter 8.1.2), indicate a shift away from purely rightful and unsanctioned resistance to more disruptive, illicit tactics of contention. Hence, in order to allow more analytical flexibility, I consider the practice of labour and peasant resistance simply as ‘rights-based resistance’. Like rightful resistance, rights-based resistance centres on the implementation of legal rights and encourages the use of authorized channels, but unlike the former, rights-based resistance trespasses on these very spaces of authorized channels of popular contention.

8.1.1 Underground Labour Activism, Trade Unions and Legal Knowledge Labour resistance against exploitative working conditions has a long tradition in Vietnam. Hundreds of spontaneous wildcat strikes each year (Anner, M., Liu 2016; Anner 2018; Siu and Chan 2015), as well as collective work stoppages or “micro- strikes”57, lodging complaints and petitions against the management (Nguyen 2019:1) and the publishing of labour newspapers (Tran 2007b) are common forms of labour resistance in Vietnam. Resistance comes with a variety of demands related to wages, social insurance, unfair treatment by employers or deprived working conditions in general (Kerkvliet 2011; Nguyen 2019; Tran 2007a, 2015). However, demands related to state laws and national policies are uncommon. Many contemporary scholars of labour resistance focus on workers’ agency and class consciousness, while problems of alienation, ideological confusion or – what I call - cognitive resistance tends to fall short of analysis. For instance, Vietnamese workers mistrust the idea of trade union representation, they even feel abandoned, partly because the currently only legally recognized trade union federation is the

57 During micro-strikes, workers stop operating the production line but usually stay at their workplaces, rather than leaving the factory (for further information, see Joseph Buckley, unpublished PhD thesis, 2019)

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state-led Vietnam General Confederation of Labour (VGCL). Furthermore, positions in trade unions on the enterprise level are oftentimes filled by the factory’s management personnel and controlled by the VGCL (Nguyen 2019:3, also interviews with Chi, Mai, Huy, Nam). Although the official trade union does provide space for the enhancement of legal knowledge in formd of workers’ congresses and trainings, those are provided mainly for employers and not for workers (Do Hai 2016:322). Moreover, policy makers employ language that alienates the workers from the idea of any independent trade union. For example, because the ‘grassroots trade unions’ (cong doan co so) as currently in operation, are also controlled by factory management, workers are questioning the credibility and impact of any possibly independent trade unions in general (Interview Mai). In the course of negotiating U.S.-Vietnam and EU-Vietnam trade agreements (Trans-Pacific-Partnership (TTP) and the European Union Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA)), proposals concerning amendments of the labour code became a subject of intense discussion. Recent negotiations over the EVFTA require Vietnam to comply with standards of the International Labour organization (ILO). This led Vietnam to ratify six out of eight ILO standards and agree to an amendment of the Labour Code that comes into effect in January 2021. The New Labour Code allows for the formation of ‘worker representative organisations at the enterprise level’ (WROs) and are not required to be affiliated with the VGCL (Buckley 2020). However, freedom of assembly is one of the ILO standards Vietnam refuses to ratify, which, among other vague formulations, leads analysts to point out that the idea of VGCL independent WROs must be taken with a grain of salt as results and credibility are yet to be seen (Ebbighausen 2020; Francavilla 2020).58 While labour resistance, including strikes and trade union activism limited to the sites of the factories and enterprises are fairly tolerated, channelled and accommodated by the state, the following pages will illustrate how independent

58 Vietnam has insisted that the terms "civil society" or "civil society organizations" do not appear in the draft text of the agreement. In November 2019, 18 NGOs wrote a letter to the EU Parliament calling for the free trade agreement to be postponed until Vietnam releases all political prisoners and allows for a free press.

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labour activism beyond the enterprise level are subjected to much harsher mechanisms of repression including long prison sentences and public denunciation. For now, the potential spaces for collective action in official trade unions continue to be effectively contained, while organising an independent labour movement in Vietnam is particularly unlikely, especially for labour activists who are already known to the police and deemed reactionaries. At the time of writing, Hoang Duc Binh (Catholic, former construction worker, see also Chapter 9) serves his third year in prison. To understand Hoang Duc Binh*’s story, I met with one of his relatives, Hoai, as well as three other labour activists, Mai (Catholic), Huy (Protestant, former mechanic), Nam (atheist, former accountant in a factory) and a blue-collar factory worker Chi. Years-long observation of exploitation, harsh working conditions and the failure of state media and police to tackle workplace injustice, led them to focus on the improvement of working conditions, first individually, then in form of an organized political group. For instance, in 2006 Huy co-founded the United Workers-Farmers Organization Vietnam (Hiep Hoi Doan Ket Cong Nong VN). They aimed at combining the struggles of the working class and peasantry for which, only a few months later, Huy was sentenced to 18 months in prison on charges of ‘abusing democratic freedoms’. Two other members of the group, Mai and Hung, are also members of pro-democracy Bloc 8406 and supporters of Victims of Injustice (dan oan), a petition movement that assisted dispossessed farmers to demand fair compensation from the government. These Vietnamese labour activists declare that the working class is an important force to disrupt the power structures of the state and to advance systemic change. Yet, the criminalisation of labour activists constrains their potential to build a mass base (Interview Nam). Despite this, labour activists seek to organise workers with the intention to increase legal knowledge, form solidarities and ultimately establish an independent trade union. In doing so, rights-based resistance lies at the core of labour resistance. Navigating within the boundaries of the state became an existential question and de facto the only option available to full time labour activists and workers alike. Mai avows:

I used to find access to the workers quite easily. I could talk to them naturally and freely… Knowing that the other person is also poor was

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good enough of a reason to trust each other. Nowadays, workers are very sensitive and don't really want to talk to you. They immediately question who you are. They are very sceptical.

She recalled three different types of reactions that she experienced while talking to blue-collar workers. While some seemed to agree with her standpoints, others were more reserved, mostly nodding and repeatedly saying “yes” but then walked away quickly. Other workers were visibly afraid and refused to talk to her. Reflecting on these three types of reactions points to the fact that Mai (Chi, Nam and Huy had similar perspectives) find it difficult to build a mass base within the blue-collar working class. However, she argues:

Mobilising the workers to strike is impossible in our country. You cannot mobilise the workers to undertake industrial action by saying: When you go on strike you will receive this and that in exchange. We only show them what may happen after they go on strike. We want to show them how valuable it is when they unite and demand their rights. And in the end, they will realise themselves that there is no other way but to go on strike. This is the most powerful method.

In an environment that restricts labour activism and were workers seem too afraid of management repression, how should political mobilisation be possible after all? What tactics are left to be chosen without risking their safety and the further alienation of the working class? A concatenation of difficulties for which labour activists have yet to find solutions. Mai describes:

When I first entered the movement [the underground labour movement], there was no actual strategy or tactic. The tactics developed over time. … Many of us [members the movement] used to be workers ourselves, so we know how hard it is to live in such an environment. The first step is always to examine the environment, the places where they work and live. Living with them in order to fully understand is an important part of our activities. We learned about their emotions, their ideas and wishes, their strengths and weaknesses and what is needed for them to speak up and fight for their rights and what can be a safe platform for them to do so.

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The only way to raise legal knowledge among the working class is to live with them. Huy narrates his experience of living in the most precarious industrial areas where the working class resides: At the outskirts of HCMC, he rented a room in a typical workers’ compound of about 7sqm, made out of simple cement walls, all rooms erected side by side. “Although I used to be a worker, my condition was not as bad. That’s why I decided I had to experience how it is to live on subsistence level”, he says. He bought books of the Vietnamese labour law, stapled them in piles in his room and distributed them to workers whenever possible. “I said to the numerous young workers: Only this [the labour law] is going to protect you.” He gave them directions about which laws are promised and which laws are violated. The right of physical protection (for instance, safety equipment) was one of the most important rights he shared with the workers. He explained that another important step was to recruit potential activists within the working class, by which he meant the workers who felt capable of becoming a labour activist. Finding someone who would speak out for the rights of the fellow workers in the workplace was the main idea behind it. This person was also responsible for sharing information and knowledge about the labour law and workers’ rights. What Huy and others are promoting is what Foucault described as the “insurrection of subjugated knowledges” (1976:81). In this particular case, labour activists are concerned with the subjugated knowledges contained in the labour law. By discovering these buried knowledges, they hope to unleash critical thinking among the working class. In February 2010, Huy (back then 26 years old), Mai (back then 26 years) and Hung (back then 30 years) were held responsible for helping to organise a spontaneous strike of 10,000 workers at the My Phong shoe factory in Trà Vinh. The three were sentenced to long prison terms, nine years for Hung, seven years for Mai and Huy. The Court convicted them under Article 89 of the penal code: “Disrupting security and order against the people’s administration”. With the help of international pressure, Mai was released after more than four years in 2014. After Huy was released in 2017, he continued to be politically active. He became an online activist mostly explaining the labour law via Facebook livestreams. Huy identifies himself as “an activist for workers’ rights, for democracy and for the law”

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whose aim is to “direct the people to protect themselves and their rights” (Interview Huy). Nam (labour, democracy activist) is a member of another grassroots labour activist group whose members have managed to stay anonymous. Similar to the above-mentioned labour group, Nam’s group aims at the establishment of an independent trade union and considers the advancement of worker’s education and awareness as most important given the restrictive conditions for underground organising. “But we do it very silently. No demonstrations, no strikes, as these have to be organised from within [the working class]”, he commentates. His group organises offline classes and prints leaflets with which they aim to distribute knowledge about the labour law. Questions concerning: How to put together a petition? How to go on strike effectively? What to do when the employer does not pay overtime allowance? What to do when the employer makes deductions of social insurance and health insurance, but they are not put into effect? Difficulties in organising these activities, Nam explains, lie mostly in overcoming the fear of many workers:

They know that they can get fired easily once they raise their voice [or become politically active]. … If you want to increase workers’ resistance, you have to first improve the educational base. We want to provide knowledge about the law but also about work ethics. For example, if your manager violated ethical codes, let alone the labour law, workers need a framework and the confidence to say: ‘This was offensive’. In the law no article controls the insulting language of managers.

Similar to Mai, Nam reflects on the lack of a mass base: “Many of us worked in a factory … But you will get fired as soon as you speak up because they [the management] fear you will mobilise other workers” (Interview Huy; Nam). This makes it almost impossible to build a sustainable labour movement or independent trade union from within. Nam too has moved to industrial areas for a certain amount of time. He tried to encourage workers to organize their own trade unions. Interestingly enough, Nam doesn’t use the term trade union when he speaks to the workers in order to avoid any stigma or criminalisation. Instead, he uses the

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terminology ‘support group’, which is a way to modify sensitive language into ‘safe language’ in the hope that this will later develop into overtly transformative projects (Cox and Nilsen 2014:46). In other words, rights-based resistance provides a toolkit for normative legal language through which legal injustice can be called out. At the time of the interview, his group was able to form a small number of unofficial and independent ‘trade unions/support groups’ with white-collar workers, who station their activities mostly outside of the workplaces. The nature of these groups is first and foremost to support each other in their daily lives and everyday struggles:

For example, if something is going on in your family, it is the member’s responsibility to share it with the group and find solutions together. In Vietnam, those support groups don’t exist, especially not among the working class (Interview Nam).

Yet, Nam also expresses his doubts about this method:

But to be honest, I am not even sure that they would support each other in the struggle for democracy or that they would unite with other workers when necessary. The essence of trade unions is to protect workers’ rights and not to support each other in the daily lives. But the way things look like at the moment [i.e., having support groups] this is important for whatever comes next.

Certainly, organising the working class with a mass base comes with extreme conditions. Mai hopes that “those individuals who start to fight for their own rights will have an effect that can uplift entire factories”, and ultimately the rights for the entire working class. In other words, current grass-roots labour activism seems to be confined to the spaces outside the shop floors and to the everyday forms of resistance enacted by individual workers. Although labour activists seem to have no direct impact on blue-collar workers’ living and working conditions, labour activists – criminalised and made redundant themselves (see Chapter 6)– seek to open channels that enable the experience of collective organising and the circulation of legal knowledge. Along the lines of Foucault, I explored how subjugated legal knowledges are produced in critique and resistance against the

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state’s repressive apparatus, capitalist exploitation and the ‘regime of thought’ (Foucault 1976).

8.1.2 Peasant Resistance against Land Dispossession In this section, I will discuss the centrality of legal knowledge and its practical translation into a concrete political strategy for peasant resistance. To begin with this part of my research I first sat with Hien and her family. Hien is a prominent female peasant activist. She gave someone a video call; on the other line: democracy activist Kieu (introduced in Chapter 7). An immediate change of energy filled the room. I could sense the friendship, trust and mutual respect both have for each other. Hien told me that when Kieu tried to connect to her the first time, she ignored Kieu. Unlike Kieu, Hien is very calm and motherly who was cautious of Kieu’s public appearance partly because she was sceptical of Kieu’s affluent social and financial background. Both women met each other for the first time in prison. As they loudly exchanged their experiences of injustice in prison across their cells (mostly naming and shaming individual prison guards), prison guards got afraid of them agitating other inmates. As a result, both Kieu and Hien ended up in the same cell. It is well known that Vietnamese peasants have engaged in forms of everyday resistance and expressed discontent in open forms of protest and petitions mostly since the 1960s until the 1980s (a period of collectivization of the means of production under a cooperative system followed by a period of economic liberalization, privatisation and industrialization) (Kerkvliet 1995, 2005, 2014). Yet, overt forms of resistance were rather localized and focused on holding local cadres responsible for misconduct (mostly corruption) rather than demanding structural or policy changes (Kerkvliet 2014b:23; Nguyen Van Suu 2009; Tran Thi Thu Trang 2009:175). However, contemporary peasant resistance in Vietnam is mostly caused by forced dispossession and subsequent inappropriate compensation, which implies state control and corrupted local authorities as main fulcrum for peasants’ discontent. Kerkvliet’s (2014b) research on protest over land in Vietnam showed that millions of complaints and petitions filed from 2008 to 2011 were related to issues of land confiscation. Kerkvliet’s analysis was also informed by

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O’Brien and Li’s concept of rightful resistance. He concluded that a predominant pattern of village protests corresponds to strategies of rightful resistance (petitions, complaints, seeking help from Communist Party members and authorities, quiet sit- ins), while other examples did not fit this pattern. These outliers exceed rightful resistance in that they challenge state laws (Kerkvliet 2014b). This indicates that rightful resistance is a form of resistance in itself as it responds to immediate conditions of repression rather than demanding long-term structural betterment. Taking up on Kerkvliet’s observation, the following pages demonstrate that more recent cases of peasant resistance indicate a shift away from purely rightful resistance to more disruptive, illicit tactics of contention, for which I use the term ‘rights-based resistance’. The following sections ask: Are peasant activists transgressing the repressive state apparatus and is this indicative of a development towards resistance for itself?

The Duong Noi Case Located at the south-western edge of Hanoi, Duong Noi is one of the numerous cases in which farmers were evicted from their agricultural land under the pretext of loosely defined state-business projects. Duong Noi farmers and activists objected bulldozers from clearing land where their ancestors were buried and demonstrated for months in front of the parliament in Hanoi. They also sought help from state- run newspapers to make their cases public and worked with anti-corruption activists like Le Hien Duc and bloggers like Hung (Barras 2013). Hanh and Hien are two female farmers and vocal activists living in Duong Noi. They, too, confirmed the tactical usefulness of abiding to the Vietnamese law, Constitution and the Human Rights Declaration (Interview Hanh; Hien). Just like labour activists, peasant activists of Duong Noi use the Facebook livestream feature to make their voices heard and distribute copies of the Constitution and the Human Rights Declaration to other farmers. Hanh emphasizes: “Although the current laws on land rights have some difficulties, there is still much potential that we can make use of” (Interview Hanh). This, again, is a reminder on how the dissemination of subjugated knowledges – particularly land and democratic rights - is central to rights-based resistance. Yet, Hanh has also received criticism for her approach:

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I never had the thought of being violent. Some people text me and say that it is useless to speak up against the government, but that the only thing we can do is to stand up and overthrow it. This is ridiculous. (Interview Hanh).

Non-violence is an important principle for rights-based resisters, and dialogue and transparency the precondition for a flowing communication. In order to ensure this, the peasants of Duong Noi organised what resembles the idea of a council democracy. According to Hien, a leadership consisting of one or two people would increase the likelihood of that very leadership being corrupted by the police. This is a typical strategy of state repression and leaves a movement decapitated as a result. Instead, Hien’s community elected 20 representatives who are living in the same residential area that would be responsible for any potentially occurring dialogue with the government. Among this group of 20, one person was elected as head of the team, whose position was to gather and circulate information to the rest of the group. All decisions required unanimous consent and voting by hand sign. “We formed a mini-government” declares Hien. As soon as she was imprisoned, the 19 other members voted another person to fill in her position. This way, they ensured that the movement could continue. With a subtle smile, Hien says: “There is no law that forbids us peasants to meet and hang out in the neighbourhood”. The Duong Noi case testifies that the disclosure of subjugated knowledges entails not only acquiring and disseminating legal knowledge for the cases of land grabbing, but is also about discovering ‘historically disqualified’ knowledges of democratic living illustrated by the implementation of an independent council structure.

The Dong Tam Case I was invited to visit Dong Tam, a village about 40 km south of Hanoi. Dong Tam became a prominent site of contestation after local residents, most of them were farmers, took 38 police and security officials captive in protest over a land dispute in 2017. For nearly a week (15 until 22 April 2017) residents controlled the village and erected barbed-wire barricades to block the police from accessing the village. In question was a 59-hectare area that the state-owned telecommunications

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conglomerate Viettel Group, owned and operated by the Ministry of National Defence, claimed for building a defence-related project. The military claims that the plot belonged to the state since 1968 and that villagers are illegally occupying the land. Protesters refuted this claim, arguing that the specific 59-hectare (out of 106,36 hectares) lie outside the military plot. In fact, however, farmers paid taxes, land fees and cultivated the farmland at least since the 1980s (Le Hong Hiep 2020). As Viettel began to clear parts of the land, residents tried to obstruct the construction and were subsequently investigated for “disturbing social order” (Ives 2017). Disputes over land rights are common in Vietnam, as land ownership, property rights and the local government's right to reclaim land for socio-economic development and public or national interest are loosely defined and vulnerable to corruption.59 As we arrived at the village of Dong Tam, I entered a house that turned out to be the home of Mister Le Dinh Kinh* (1936-2020). To my surprise, the front door of the house was decorated with Communist Party flags and slogans:

Solidarity. Solidarity. Great Solidarity (Đoàn Kết. Đoàn Kết. Đại Đoàn Kết).

Down with corruption (Đả Đảo Bọn Tham Nhũng).

Long live President Ho Chi Minh. Work in the name of the constitution and the anti-corruption law is the responsibility of the entire Party and the entire people. The people of Dong Tam commune unite to fight against the corrupted enemy. (Chủ Tịch Hồ Chí Minh Muôn Năm Sống, và lam việc theo hiến pháp và pháp luật phòng chống tham nhũng là

59 See Article 17 (Ownership of the Entire People) according to which “The land, forests, rivers and lakes, water supplies, wealth […] the funds and property invested by the State in enterprises and works in all branches and fields […] and all other property determined by law as belonging to the State, come under ownership by the entire people.” and Article 18 (Management of the Land), which states that (1) The State manages all the land according to overall planning and in conformity with the law, and guarantees that its use shall conform to the set objectives and yield effective results. (2) The State shall entrust land to organizations and private individuals for stable and lasting use. (3) These organizations and individuals are responsible for the protection, enrichment, rational exploitation and economical use of the land; they may transfer the right to use the land entrusted to them by the State, as determined by law.

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trách nhiệm của toàn Đảng, toàn dân. Nhân dân xã Đồng Tâm đoàn kết để đấu tranh với giặc tham nhũng là giặc nội xâm).

Throughout his career, Le Dinh Kinh served as the head of the local police and secretary of the local Party cell. Mr. Kinh was a Party member for 58 years and considered loyal to Communist ideals. In the course of the Dong Tam case, he became the official representative of the residents. Mr. Kinh sat with his back to the wall that was decorated with two large maps of the disputed land area. He narrated the recent developments of the case, which - at the time of my visit in January 2019 – was mostly dominated by confidential meetings of local authorities, while the villagers’ demands to be included in the negotiations and discussions were ignored (Interview Le Dinh Kinh). It was April 2017, when the Dong Tam case started to attract public attention. After the Hanoi police invited Dong Tam representatives, among them Mr. Kinh, to take part in an official land measurement on April 15, 2017, he was beaten by the police and arrested without any written warrants. Mr. Kinh got his leg broken. At this point, non-violence as a principle of rights-based resistance turned untenable. As clashes with the police broke out, Dong Tam villagers took 38 police officers hostage as an act of retaliation (The Dong Tam Task Force 2019:6). Mr. Kinh’s son in law, Hai, was one of the villagers who filmed and witnessed significant scenes during the days in April. He told me that the policemen were hold in the commune’s house of culture (nha van hoa):

The house of culture is beautiful, not a basement or dark hall or anything. There was a lot of dialogue between the hostages and the protesters. We talked about the policemen’s schools, what they do and everything. We were busy cooking food, they got three meals per day, brought fruits and drinks. We treated them very well.

Hai narrated that when all policemen were released both sides were respectful to each other, protest leaders shook hands with hostages upon release, some were hugging and crying, and others even expressed sympathy with the villagers of Dong Tam (Ives 2017). Taking the policemen captive was certainly illegal, but Dong Tam residents stressed that they acted upon the principle of non-violence and guaranteed that every hostage would be treated well (Interview Hai).

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As time went by during my visit, Le Dinh Kinh’s house filled with more people, mostly neighbours including one female local Communist Party member. She expressed solidarity with the villagers of Dong Tam. Mr. Kinh’s son in law explained that Dong Tam has not formed any organization or official group, but that anyone who had information about the land dispute was welcomed to share it with Mr. Kinh. From time to time, plainclothes policemen were sitting close to the house or even in the house, but this did not bother anyone to come and speak to Mr. Kinh. Dong Tam residents and protest leaders installed banners in the village stating: “We, the people of Dong Tam, are not opposing the Vietnamese State” (Nhân Dân Đồng Tâm Chúng Tôi Không Chống Đối Nhà Nước Việt Nam). Later, Dinh (retired police officer, critical Communist Party member, supporter of the Dong Tam case) explained that many comrades in the Party agree with him and “express solidarity in private, but that they don’t dare to speak up as their children and relatives are generally also Party members who would lose their jobs if one of them would get involved in any form of activism or public criticism” (Interview Dinh). For this reason, many Party members criticise Party policies publicly only after they retired. In January 2020, the situation in Dong Tam changed radically. In the night of January 9, 2020, the Vietnamese government dispatched a special task force with an estimated number of three thousand policemen which overwhelmed the villagers of Dong Tam. According to official reports, three policemen were set on fire and burned to death. In turn, Mr. Le Dinh Kinh was shot dead by the police. Mr. Kinh’s eldest son Le Dinh Cong*, his younger brother Le Dinh Chuc* and 27 other peasant activists were charged with obstruction of officials, murder and terrorism, while activists from all regions expressed solidarity and formed groups to investigate the case independently. On September 14, 2020, the Hanoi People’s Tribunal sentenced the two brothers to death. The other 27 people on trial received sentences ranging from 15 months of probation to life imprisonment (Nguyen Will 2020).60 The cross- regional solidarity network of the Dong Tam case exemplified that this was not

60 Further source: BBC news. 2020. “Dong Tam case: Two sentenced to death in Vietnam over police killings”. Retrieved September 14, 2020 (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia- 54090407).

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about Dong Tam alone, but farmers from other regions, journalists, Communist party members and anti-Communists joined forces to criticise land seizure and forced dispossession. Contemporary peasant resistance in Vietnam highlights how land seizure, and thus, ‘accumulation by dispossession’, plays a crucial role in the Vietnam’s political economy (Harvey 2004, 2005). It also shows that rights-based resistance is left with few alternatives when an unfortunate combination of repression, powerlessness and anger renders rights-based resisters defenceless and subject to police violence. So far, this chapter demonstrated that labour and peasant activists carve out (il)licit spaces in order to rediscover subjugated legal knowledges without appearing to be outright anti-systemic (O’Brien and Li 2006:46). However, rights- based resisters, in fact, exercise an anti-systemic practice that seeks to avoid and transcend the state’s repressive and constraining judicial apparatus. Yet, rights- based resistance manifests as a vulnerable political practice and is not a guarantor for unsanctioned collective action. Contrary to the existing literature that argued for the state’s relative tolerance vis-à-vis peasant protests and labour resistance (see Chapter 2), this chapter indicates that when political practice is linked to an implicit or explicit critique against capital-labour and capital-state relations, activists seem to be subjected to much harsher forms of repression than suggested in previous scholarly work. In general, scepticism about rights-based practices raises legitimate concerns about its effectiveness to advance social change. Given the existing global and domestic power relations, the answer seems to be an open secret. As a tactic to change the nature of a state, a rights-based approach may seem like an impasse. In an Althusserian manner of speaking, the main function of the legal apparatus is to facilitate the interplay of the capitalist relations of production, “since it defines proprietors, their property (assets), their right to 'use' and 'abuse' their property with complete freedom, and the reciprocal right to acquire property (Althusser 2014:166). Influenced by Althusser, Foucault (1976) argued that if one wants to turn towards a liberated idea of rights, one must liberate it from the principle of state sovereignty, i.e., the authority of the state. Put differently, it is not the concrete laws or the erroneous implementation of laws that poses the root of the problem,

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but the legal apparatus itself and the ‘normalisation’ of the law as the expression of state sovereignty that needs to be challenged. In view of this, the following section investigates the process of cognitive resistance by exploring the re-configuration of political concepts that underlie the practice of rights-based labour and peasant activism. This way, I can analyse whether activists are able to transcend the ideological system of the legal apparatus and thus, perform resistance for itself.

8.2 Cognitive Resistance and the Law’s Ideological Apparatus

The subsequent section explores how the practice of rights-based resistance and, with it, the disclosure of subjugated legal knowledges, gave rise to a cluster of political concepts that shape the process of cognitive resistance. Drawing on the definitions provided in Chapter 3, embodied cognition implies that perceptions and ideas/knowledges are based on their relation to the existing material conditions and social relations including classed, raced and gendered structures (Bustamante et al. 2018, 2019; Cox 2014a:52; Pitts-Taylor 2016; della Porta and Pavan 2017:302; Williamson 2011). Therefore, the political concepts and ideas represented in the following pages uncover how - despite the anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian political practice of labour and peasant activists - a rights-based approach unconsciously subscribes to the law’s ideological apparatus by upholding the state’s role in regulating and controlling capitalist relations of production. However, rights-based resisters also seek to transcend capitalist concepts of leadership and ownership and negotiate over ideas of self-determination. I identify ‘rule of law’ as the core concept, ‘self-determination’ as adjacent concept and ‘state responsibility’ as peripheral concept. Again, this clustering of concepts is not meant to be deterministic, yet it provides a level of abstraction that helps to work out the general argument of the thesis. Before illustrating these concepts in detail, I briefly recapitulate Althusser’s (1971) understanding of the law as integral to the ideological state apparatus (ISA) and Saeed’s (2019) expression of ‘coloniality in law’ (described in Chapter 3). This

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will be helpful to understand the bipolarity of the context. To Althusser (2014:57, 166), the law is “a system of codified rules” that is repressive in nature, as it “inscribes the sanction of law in law itself”, for example in the form of the Civil Code, the Penal Code, Public Law and Commercial Law”. The law functions only on the conditions of a repressive state apparatus to perform the penalty (ibid.), yet it operates also by mechanisms of preventive repression and consequently, relies on the internalization of legal ideology. In other words, the institutionalisation of entitlement relations regarding ownership/property and state responsibility codify the meanings of (il)legality and (in)justice and conceal that law is an expression of capitalist relations of production aiming at the protection of the ruling class and capital structures. In short, law holds two positions: law as a repressive apparatus and law as ideological force. In line with Althusser, Raza Saeed helps to understand that law itself is a battlefield of epistemological coloniality and a way to arrive at epistemic and cognitive normativity. Legal concepts such as state accountability, private property and terrorism have come to dominate our minds only since modern and colonial history. It demonstrates the continued epistemological dominance of Western legal thinking and its political institutions (Saeed 2019:104). Saeed’s coloniality in law, rather than coloniality of law, stresses that the nexus between law and coloniality is not indestructible, but that law can include an approach to decolonize legal imaginations in particular (Saeed 2019:113, 129) and counteract colonial ‘hierarchies of knowledge’ in general. While the first half of this chapter examined how labour and peasant activists make tactical use of their subordination to the legal framework, the second half asks how labour and peasant activists make sense of the law’s ideological apparatus. It illustrates that although labour and peasant activists struggle against the capitalist state, they express their adherence to the Constitution and the law. Therefore, I argue that rights-based resisters are subjected to a codified system of capitalist relations, ideological apparatuses and epistemological coloniality.

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8.2.1 Core Concept: Rule of Law Labour and peasant activists believe that the ‘rule of law’ must be reclaimed by the people. When I asked about the main political demand of Dong Tam villagers, one elderly person was particularly expressive:

We only demand what is already inscribed in the Constitution and the law, nothing beyond that. We demand that our rights must be implemented. We, the residents of Dong Tam, only fight for justice and want to reclaim justice. Because when I lose my land, I have the right to reclaim it or at least get proper compensation.

Similarly, Hanh (peasant activist in Duong Noi) states:

The only thing we can do is to demand the implementation of our rights. … I say to the other farmers that our base is the law and that we don’t have to be afraid of making use of it.

Both also affirm that demands for democratic change and human rights are deliberately precluded from their political language, displaying that a rights-based approach is also an act of tactical compromise. The avoidance of anti-state language resonates with principles of rightful resistance, as described by O’Brien and Li (2006), however, as far as I observed, ‘safe’ language is not enacted consistently. Nonetheless, the two quotes stated above reveal how openly proclaiming a rights- based approach helps them to build a tactical narrative that counters the criminalization of activists as reactionaries or anti-state forces. Moreover, insisting on the ‘rule of law’ denotes the action-oriented stance of rights-based resisters who base their claims on the legal framework, while holding the state accountable to protect the rights of its citizens. Accordingly, rights-based resisters particularly refer to Article 8 and Article 119 of the Constitution which states that “the State is organized and operates in concordance with the Constitution and the law […]” and that all state agencies must “maintain close contact with the People, listen to their opinions and submit to their supervision; resolutely struggle against corruption, wastefulness and all manifestations of bureaucracy, arrogance and authoritarianism” (Article 8). Moreover, it says, “The Constitution is the fundamental law of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and has the highest legal

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effect” (Article 119). Particular laws that peasant activists regularly draw on include the law on administrative procedures (luat to tung hanh chinh), the law on denunciations and complaints (luat khieu nai, to cao), the criminal law (luat hinh su) and the Grassroots Democracy Decree (dan chu o xa).61 These laws regulate legal procedures, the right to submit complaints and the right to legal representation (Interview Hanh; Hien). Yet, rights-based resistance, with particular reliance on the law and Constitution, is an approach that does not protect activists from the violation of the law. For helping workers to increase their legal knowledge and defending peasants from land grabbing, activists were charged with “abusing democratic freedoms to infringe upon the interests of the state, the rights and interests of individuals” (Article 258, penalty up to 7 years). Other common charges for activists under the penal code include “activities aiming to overthrow the people’s administration” (Article 79, penalty up to death sentence), “undermining national unity policy” (Article 87, up to 15 years in prison), “conducting propaganda against the State of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam” (Article 88, up to 20 years), “disrupting security” (Article 89, up to 15 years). Huy (labour activist) proclaims that the function of the legal system is to protect the interests of the ruling elite:

Is the law protecting the weak or the Party? The Vietnamese law is protecting the powerful. The police are called people's police (bộ công an nhân dân), but they are not protecting the people, they are protecting the Party and the military (Interview Huy).

Similarly, Hien (farmer, Duong Noi) says:

Our principle was that no one should violate the law, otherwise we will end up in prison very fast. […] I respect the Vietnamese law and the Constitution, but the government and the police are using it to suppress us (Interview Hien).

61 For more details on the effectivity of grassroots democracy, see Nguyen, Tu Phuong. 2015. “Grassroots democracy made in Vietnam”, in: new mandala. Retrieved December 22, 2020 (https://www.newmandala.org/grassroots-democracy-made-in-vietnam/); or Nguyen, Hai Hong. 2016. Political Dynamics of Grassroots Democracy in Vietnam. Palgrave macmillan.

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In a similar manner, farmer Hieu in Dong Tam linked the tactical principle of rights- based resistance to the chances of wider systemic changes:

Many foreigners [by which he includes me] don't understand why we only demand our rights [instead of a radical political transformation]. It's not that villagers don't know what a multi-party system is. They [the foreigners] don’t understand that if we successfully reclaim and implement our constitutional rights, the system as it operates now will not be able to survive and that is will change by implication. The problem is that many villagers don’t even know their rights and behave as if they are asking the government for good will (di xin) (Interview Hieu).

Despite experiencing the state apparatus as repressive, violent, arbitrary and asymmetrical, rights-based resisters insist on the power of the Constitution and the law, a phenomenon that underlines the activists’ embeddedness in the state’s ideological apparatus and the epistemological coloniality in law, as described by Althusser (1971) and Saeed (2019).

8.2.2 Adjacent Concept: Self-determination Considering the totality of anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian practices of Vietnamese activists, it is not surprising that labour activist Nam stresses the importance of connecting the workers’ struggle to the wider struggle for democratic change:

Democracy has to go hand in hand with the rights of the workers. The workers have to make use of their rights as their own masters (lam chu). Masters of their education, their knowledge and intellect. Be the masters of their actions (hanh vi). […] But most importantly, democracy has to arrive together with the improvement of the lives of the workers (Interview Nam).

Labour activist Mai uses a similar framing:

Democracy is the right for workers to be their own masters, to have universal human rights, have the right to participate in and decide over

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relevant policies, contribute to the advancement of society (thuc day phat trien xa hoi) and be respected in the society (Interview Mai).

Hanh (peasant activist in Duong Noi) takes a step further and identifies the state’s institutions as paternalistic and ideologically driven. She explains:

The Party says: ‘We will take care of everything’. And because of this, the Vietnamese people don’t even know their own rights and believe that the Party will manage all problems. Communists proclaim to provide educational orientation (giao duc dinh huong) - but this education is fake, what it does, is that it makes people dim. People don't dare to be their own masters anymore (lam chu) (Interview Hanh).

What is particularly interesting is that Mai, Nam and Hanh use the expression “being one’s own master” (lam chu), which can be interpreted as a description for a self-determined life. In view of this, consider how Mai explains why she thinks the working class plays an important role in social transformations:

Workers are powerful, more powerful than intellectuals. Because intellectuals have more rights, and these rights constrain their potential and power to lead a movement. The chances of frustration are much higher for intellectuals. For example, when they start to criticise publicly, they will lose many things. A worker won't lose much. I mean, the level of loss is much lower than the loss for intellectuals. Farmers may lose their land, but the workers own literally nothing and thus, cannot lose much, except their workplace without which they won’t be able to nurture their families.

Mai’s answer reveals that self-determination as a pro-stance is brought into a relation with the rules and regulations of ownership. Mai does not refer to a Marxist understanding of ‘ownership over means of production’ and ‘ownership of land’ (farmers don’t own land according to the Socialist Constitution; and workers do, in fact, own their labour power), yet it illustrates the fact that she considers the power/agency of workers as rooted in the lack of access to material resources. Although labour activists do not seem to demand workers’ ownership over the means of production (at least not explicitly), it reveals that a positive connection is

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drawn between the embodiment of deprivation (or: social and material inequality) and agency and, by implication, between ownership and self-determination. Indeed, negotiating the meanings of agency, leadership and ownership over means of production and land is pervasive in a socialist-oriented market economy, where contradictory ideologies manifest blatantly obvious, and thus, shed light on the law as ‘epistemological battlefield’ (Saeed 2019). While the meaning of self- determination and ownership in a neoliberal market economy is openly based on private ownership and capital accumulation, a socialist-oriented market economy is proclaimed to be a combination of collective ownership and private ownership, supposedly under to rule of the working class. Accordingly, the Vietnamese Constitution states that “The people are the masters of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam; all state powers belong to the people whose foundation is the alliance between the working class, the peasantry and the intelligentsia” (Article 2, emphasis added), while the country’s political economy is “based on the regime of concurrently all-people ownership, collective ownership and private ownership, in which all-people ownership and collective ownership constitute the foundation” (Article 15). Yet, it also states that resources are managed by the Party-State: “the citizen enjoys the right of ownership over his/her lawful incomes, savings, housing, chattel, means of production, capital and other assets in enterprises or other economic entities; with regard to land allocated by the state for use, the provisions of Articles 17 and 18 will apply (Article 58). In Article 17 and 18 of the 1992 Constitution, ownership over means of production has been redefined in a way that adapts to the needs of the capitalist market. Accordingly, citizens’ ownership rights were expanded and, therefore, the right to freedom of enterprise for those who could afford it was unlocked. Article 17/18 and 58 also imply that collective ownership (especially over land and the means of production) are subjected to state capitalist purposes disguised under the rhetoric of ‘national development’. It is therefore unsurprising that labour and peasant activists are largely concerned with ownership relations as a means to acquire self-determination. Consider what peasant activist Hai (Dong Tam) has to say against forced land dispossession:

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The people only have their land to farm on. If they lose that, they will lose everything. What comes next for them [dispossessed farmers] is exploitation.

What Hai points at is that land is not only of substantial importance to the farmers’ right to self-determination, but that ownership over land constitutes a way to avoid free market exploitation. Expanding on this, farmer Hien (Duong Noi) explains that dispossessed farmers are in fact entitled to get free training to enhance their chances on the labour market, but that these programmes rarely adapt to the lived realities of the farmers. Hien, for instance, is 60 years of age and was offered training to become a taxi driver, while her neighbour also at the age of 61, was offered to participate in an APEC organised programme to work in IT related jobs. After the Ministry of Resources published a critical report on the fallacies of state-funded educational programmes that aimed at the integration of peasants into the labour market, the Vietnamese government suggested intensive training in the service sector instead. Hien explains that land dispossession forces peasants into the chain of labour exploitation and strips them off their right to self-determination:

Yes, some laws in Vietnam are oriented towards human rights standards, for example the right to live, the right to choose work, the right to own means of production. But dispossessed farmers can’t change their jobs. You take our land and now you want to teach us how to be a waitress and serve the rich, so that these rich people can live on my land? But all they [the state authorities] have to say, is that we can be waitresses even without knowing how to read and write (Interview Hien).

Half-way between sarcasm and seriousness farmer Hanh (Duong Noi) notes:

If I had one last wish, I would like to go to a Western capitalist country and get exploited over there.

Hanh seems to be aware that capitalist exploitation is a global issue and that she would be exploited in Western capitalist countries too. She signifies that the critique is not directed against capitalism per se, but explicitly against the Vietnamese state and its particular authoritarian capitalist nature. Farmer Hai, for instance, voices:

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I am not a reactionary. I just want the land to be given back to the villagers of Dong Tam. It was us, the villagers, who have been cultivating and living on this land for decades. We don’t want to do business with it (Interview Hai).

Hien’s husband (Interview), who is also a peasant activist for which he was imprisoned twice, narrates:

I am a peasant of Duong Noi. I was born here, and I met my wife here. Now I am over 60 years old. I am deeply connected to the paddy field, to my home country, to the grass and soil of this land. … . I don’t care about how much they [the authorities] would offer me [in compensation]. They are the sharks with millions of dollars in their pockets. The communists are also untransparent, they should publicize what they make with the land, how much profit they make and how they invest, but none of this is public. Instead, they call us reactionaries and say that they work in the interests of the Duong Noi villagers to advance national interests and develop the economy of the country.…The communists are only still alive because they live on the base of stealing and betraying the people.62

Hai and Hien’s statements display awareness about the state’s contradictory political economy and the fact that ‘collective ownership over land’, as inscribed in the Constitution, is in actuality the state’s control over land to serve the interests of the ruling and capitalist elites. Further to this, Hien’s husband illustrates how peasants embody an emotional connection to soil and land, which is however affected by an environment of capitalist structures and political denunciation. What the previous section has shown is that peasant activists and labour activists alike seek self-determination through the ‘rule of law’. Peasant activists are particularly unwilling to concede to the state’s control over land and therefore, demand ownership over land. However, demanding private ownership over land and the implementation of workers’ rights are not meant to maximise personal gain

62 Accumulation by dispossession relates the struggles against land grabbing to the material reproduction of the very social groups that rely on agriculture and land for their livelihood (Spronk and Webber 2007).

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but signify that the lack of access to material resources becomes a matter of self- determination. As the next section will show, this is complemented by and partly conflicts with the peripheral concept and anti-stance: ‘state responsibility’.

8.2.3 Peripheral Concept: State Responsibility Labour activists have expressed uncertainty about the future role and ability of the working class. Mai, for instance, states:

I don't think we can say for certain that workers should occupy the role of a country’s leadership. You see, the Communists used to say that the working class will lead the country... But when the qualifications are not high enough, how would that country look like in the end? A person who has been educated until eight class, how should this person lead the country or even become a president? (Interview Mai).

The limited education of workers poses a problem to Mai. She is concerned that the lack of education and political experience may affect the actual ability of the working class to form a country’s political leadership. Then again, doubts about the activists’ own involvement into the realm of parliamentary politics has been articulated by labour activist Nam:

If there would be a new political Party, I wouldn't participate. I am too sensitive for this. I am very aware of my social environment, but for politics you need to be very cruel. Politicians say one thing and do another; you have to be cold and everything. I prefer to remain in the field of civil society, because for me this is a matter of sharing and being close to the people (Interview Nam).

Nam does not identify with political leadership and succumbs to the rigid and unbreakable distinction between politics ‘from below’ and ‘from above’. In doing so, he externalises the responsibility of state leadership to a type of personality that does not apply to people like him. Consequently, despite Nam’s and Mai’s anti- authoritarian and emancipatory political practice they seem unable to imagine that labour activism, civil society as well as any other form of politics ‘from below’ is, in fact, the essential component part of democratic politics.

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Another critical perspective on the repressive state and its ideological apparatus is provided by Huy:

If the state would be on the side of the people, if they would uphold the people’s rights and wellbeing, why would anyone resist the state? […] Instead, they are taking our resources, pollute our environment and sell our country […].

The Vietnamese police does not protect the people, but it protects the state and the managers. Citizens pay tax, they pay the salary of the police, but they do not get protected in turn (Interview Huy).

Huy’s comment starts with centring the state’s responsibility to protect the rights of the people (i.e. the rule of law) and refers to the collective ownership over land (“our resources, our environment”). His proclamation that resistance against the state would not exist, if the state would abide to the rule of law is telling. It demonstrates how the Vietnamese (Communist) state is singled out as the source of all evil, while global capitalist structures remain unmentioned. Retired police officer and still communist Party member Dinh (Dong Tam) is also critical of the political apparatus but stresses that it is a matter of time until the Constitution is fully implemented, signifying that he also transfers the responsibility to the state:

The Constitution of Vietnam says that the Vietnamese people have the right to protest, to form groups, to organize, the right of freedom of expression etc. but when it comes to the implementation of the rights, problems occur. That doesn’t mean that these rights will never be implemented and realized, but that they are not realized yet [emphasis added]. That is why we need the law. There is no law that regulates demonstrations yet and no law of association. For these ones we have to wait.

After police officer Dinh retired, he had to visit the district police office several times to complete his retirement papers. There, he observed a distorted perception of the state’s role on the part of the civil servants:

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[In the police office] I met people and [learned about] their grievances of which I have not been aware of in the past. I met people at my age for example. I noticed how the employees in the office treated the people like shit. They shouted at them and disrespected them. I got furious and asked the young boy: ‘Do you know who pays for your salary?’ He said: ‘Yes I do, it is the government’. I replied: ‘You are very wrong. The people who pay for your salary are the people like the men at whom you were shouting at a minute ago […]’. I want to believe he started to understand. This is not the failure of an individual person, but the failure of an entire political system that is responsible for his education [Interview Dinh, emphasis added].

Dinh’s narrative and explanation points to the political and institutional levels of the state apparatus that must be held responsible for the ideological and educational status of public servants. State responsibility becomes the anti-stance and formulates a dialectical relationship with the adjacent concept self-determination. While the previously articulated notion of self-determination criticizes the people’s subjugation to the state and appeals to the agency and autonomy of workers and farmers, rights-based resisters justify their struggles with the state’s failure to hold its institutions accountable for the protection of civic rights. In line with Foucault, Althusser and decolonial theorists like Saeed, this displays the reproduced subjugation of individuals and groups to the rules of the established order, which considers the law as part of the ideological state apparatus. Despite the fact that rights-based resisters do express opposition to ideological state apparatuses, they display a mode of epistemological and cognitive normativity – one that leaves capital relations out of critique. Following Althusser (1971, 2014), I consider law and its ideological apparatus as formally regulating the interplay of capitalist relations and state hegemony. Therefore, I argue that demands for the mere implementation of institutionalised rights as ultimate political objective, while omitting the simultaneous refutation of ideological subjection is reflective of epistemological normativity and coloniality. Hence, rights-based resistance is a form of resistance in itself, as its cognitive resistance re-inserts contested political concepts into a new

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ideational structure that remains embedded in statist, capitalist and anti-communist ideological systems.

8.3 Conclusion

This chapter began with tracing the interpersonal relations among democracy, labour and peasant activists, and illustrated that these different struggles are connected through their anti-capitalist nature - a strong indicator for an existing struggle against ‘capitalist totality’ (Webber 2019). I explored how labour and peasant activists encounter different manifestations of capital relations (exploitation and dispossession) in urban and rural areas. The chapter also revealed that legal knowledge particularly concerned with labour and land rights have been silenced and subjugated in - what Foucault (1976) called - ‘the regime of discourse’ or the ‘hierarchy of knowledge’. To counteract this ‘regime of discourse’, activists have exercised a rights-based approach of resistance, whereby these subjugated legal knowledges can be rediscovered and disseminated. In doing so, labour activists accommodate themselves within the existing dominant structures and carve out (il)licit spaces that allows them to share these silenced knowledges without appearing to be outright anti-systemic (O’Brien and Li 2006:46). For this, some of them were sentenced to lengthy prison terms, which illustrates sensitivity and vulnerability of rights-based resistance. In a similar vein, peasant activists in Dong Tam and Duong Noi took state officials hostage but chose to be non-violent and peaceful in the hope to enforce negotiation. Although rights- based resisters exercise a form of resistance in itself, activists are willing to transgress the boundaries set by the repressive state apparatus, such as the judicial institutions. Transgressing the repressive state apparatus, however, caused a violent clash between the two opposing parties. Obstructing military power and capitalist investment projects was ultimately answered with police violence and resulted in the death of Dong Tam’s village leader and three policemen. Ultimately, peasant resistance in Dong Tam brought to light the violence of land grabbing, or as Marxists say, the violence of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2004, 2005). The second half of the chapter explored the ideational level of labour and peasant activists and showed that rights-based resistance and, with it, the disclosure

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of subjugated legal knowledge has been used not only as a counter-hegemonic weapon, but also to unleash public criticism against the repressive state apparatus and authoritarian communist ideology. In doing so, peasant and labour activists re- contest the meaning of political concepts including ‘rule of law’, ‘self- determination’ and ‘state responsibility’ but at the same time, these re-contested political concepts are re-inserted into a new ideational structure that reinforces the hegemony of state-centred and capitalist political concepts. The core concept ‘rule of law’ provides rights-based resisters with an action-oriented guiding principle with which activists can both draw on and navigate through a legal repertoire that passes more or less unsanctioned through the repressive state apparatus. ‘Self-determination’ as adjacent concept denotes the pro-stance with which activists flesh out their understanding of the ‘rule of law’. Given the particular ideological context of a socialist-oriented market economy, activists couple self-determination with the right to exercise agency and the right of ownership over land. Yet, exploitation of labour and the right of private ownership as a precondition for capital accumulation itself are not criticised. ‘State-responsibility’ as a peripheral concept embodies the anti-stance and signifies the partial embeddedness of activists in the judiciary’s ideological apparatus. ‘State-responsibility’ also displays a dialectical relationship to ‘self- determination’ as it contradicts the pro-stance with which activists seek to reclaim agency. The anti-stance criticises the state for malgovernance that ignores the interests of the people. Concurrently, activists have expressed confidence in the judicial system to fulfil its function, while a critique against global capitalist structures remains absent. The composition of these three political concepts suggests that despite displaying awareness of the state’s general repressive and ideological apparatuses working in favour of the capitalist elites and the Communist Party, activists nevertheless succumb to the ideological apparatus of the judiciary system. As a result, they have not trespassed on dominant ideological systems embedded in the repressive state apparatus and thus, do not exercise resistance for itself. This accentuates not only the activists’ embeddedness in the ideological state apparatus, but their epistemological entanglement with coloniality in law (Saeed 2019). It

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testifies that the “socio-legal architecture that runs much deeper than colonialism” creates epistemic and cognitive normativity with which “normative struggles take place” (Saeed 2019:108). Complementary to the two previous chapters, the following deals with the political practice and cognitive resistance of progressive Catholic activists. It asks how Catholic activists justify their practices and to what extent they are epistemologically situated in dominant ideological systems.

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Chapter 9 Catholic Politics: A Case for Environmental Justice

200 years prior to the French colonial period (1887-1954), French Catholic missionaries had already played a key role in establishing Christian communities in Vietnam. Western influence however tightened when French colonial forces established an imperial structure in Cochinchina under the pretext of a ‘civilising mission’ that included the propagation of Christianity and the oppression of non- Christians. However, Christianity in Vietnam is not only marked by the history of Western domination and colonial oppression, but also by processes of enculturation and religious resistance. The intellectual and revolutionary Phan Boi Chau, for example, considered the Catholic religion as “culturally separate and precolonial”, however he blamed this “on missionaries for exploiting religion for political ends and on anti-Catholic elements in Vietnam for allowing anti-Catholicism to divide the nation” (Keith 2012: 6). Vietnamese Catholics together with a number of French missionaries started to criticise and ultimately resist against French colonial forces. In other words, anti-colonial resistance politicized the Catholic Church, but so has subsequent Catholic anti-communist resistance. In fact, after Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the nationalist and communist-dominated group Viet Minh, declared independence from French Indochina in 1945 and announced the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) the position of Catholics further complicated. Against this historical background, it is not surprising that religion – and particularly Catholicism – continues to play an important role in contemporary dissident activism in Vietnam. Environmental and labour activist Hoang Duc Binh* (Catholic), for instance, who was sentenced to more than 10 years in prison for criticising the marine disaster that occurred in Central Vietnam in 2016 due to the release of chemicals from the steel plant Formosa, was also a member of the labour movement group described in Chapter 8. Other environmental activists were involved in peasant resistance against land grabbing, while at the same time, many farmers expressed solidarity with environmental activists and political prisoners. Democracy activist Bach (Catholic) insists: “If you seek to understand the powers of democratic change in Vietnam,

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you must know the power of the bishops and the priests. Only they are powerful enough to mobilize the people”. Priest Sang (see below) is one of the main protagonists of an environmental movement against an industry-caused marine disaster that affected Central Vietnam, an area in which Catholic communities have a strong foothold and Catholic activism became particularly visible. In reaction to his political activities, priest Sang was removed from his current position in the Catholic Church in September 2020. Present-day Catholic activists hope to contribute to the making of a civil society and to a knowledge system that is based on justice, truth and love. Although the Catholic Church’s potential to foster democratic change in Vietnam is recognized by NGOs, it continues to be a pessimistic topic in scholarly work (Chu 2008:151). One reason is the authority of the Vietnamese state over Church activities that severely limited the Church’s role in civil society and its links to Vatican resources (Chu 2008:152). Indeed, many Catholic activists and writers avow that, at least partially, the Catholic Church was and continues to be co-opted by the state as well as the political and financial bodies of the Vietnamese Communist Party. Yet, in the same breath they would emphasise that a small number of Catholic priests and activists are one of the most important driving forces for democratic change and an important institution that creates spaces for collective action. Armando Salvatore’s view of knowledge and religion could be applied to the Vietnamese context:

Religious traditions often play a decisive role in equipping practitioners with a type of knowledge that decisively nurtures - even though not always smoothly – wider civilising processes (Salvatore 2016:161).

It is worth noting that this chapter does not propose the birth of a new kind of liberation theology specific to the Vietnamese context, neither is it comparable to the tradition of classical liberation theology popularized by Gustavo Gutierrez and others.63 In fact, the history of Christianity in the geographical area that encompasses today’s nation state Vietnam was largely dominated by foreign and

63 Classical liberation theology originated in Latin America. Gustavo Gutierrez, David McLellan and many others have explored the congruities and contradictions between theology and Marxism, which became globally known as liberation theology.

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Western powers in the precolonial and colonial era. Throughout its history, Christianity in Vietnam underwent a process of enculturation and adapted to the local traditions and hierarchies of Confucianism. Elsewhere, I argue that the socio- political role and position of Catholicism and the Church has been historically shaped by the changing state-society relations (forthcoming 2021). Yet, as I will demonstrate in this chapter, present-day political practices of progressive Catholicism are also ignited by the totality of capital relations. This chapter interrogates whether Catholic activists in present-day Vietnam transgress the constraints of the non-political Church (and its compliant behaviour towards the state), and whether their cognitive resistance shows a trespassing on ideological systems and apparatuses. In so doing, I will address the political practice and ideas of Catholic activists and examine how isolated struggles and collective actions concerned with knowledge production reconnect in the spaces of the Church. It explores how Catholic activists exercise resistance in itself and engage in anti-capitalist practices that opened up a small number of Churches to create politically protected spaces in which class-action lawsuits and petitions as well as campaigns for the freedom of political prisoners can be organised. And while the core of their ideas ‘justice and truth’ is committed to the enhancement of social justice and the liberation of the oppressed, the adjacent concept ‘love for one’s country’ as well as the peripheral concept ‘anti-communism’ exemplify how re- contested concepts are re-inserted into nationalist and Cold War ideologies, again, reflecting the activists’ epistemological embeddedness within dominant ideological systems informed by capitalism and coloniality.

9.1 Political Practice of Catholic Activists

As Vietnam opened the doors for a capitalist market economy, many things have changed. The increase of domestic and foreign capital investments, the protection of international corporations, continued land expropriation, environmental pollution, low wages, poor working conditions and the lack of legal protection and social welfare for the marginalised, have prompted a small number of Catholic priests and Catholic activists to carve out protected spaces within the Church in order to facilitate civil society activities and the production and dissemination of

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subjugated knowledges. Eyerman and Jamison (1991) have highlighted the importance of activists’ social learning and social movement spaces in which interaction and knowledge production can take place. It is in these spaces that knowledges can be created, transformed and tested. However, they also remind us that the fluidity, the impermanence and ultimately the decline of a social movement is equally central to processes of knowledge production in social movements. With this in mind, I interrogate some of the political spaces of the Catholic Church and explore in more detail three concrete expressions of political practice. This included the creation of politically protected spaces in the Church, the launching of class- action lawsuits and petitions, and the campaigning for freedom of political prisoners.

9.1.1 The Church as a Political Space for Knowledge Production On April 06, 2016 fishermen in the economic zone Vung Ang and several regions in Central Vietnam Ha Tinh, Quang Binh, Quang Tri, Thua Thien-Hue and Nghe An started to find dead fish washed ashore along Vietnam’s 200-km coastline. The cause was excessive release of toxic wastewater that polluted coastal waters and killed an estimated 115 tonnes of marine life and left thousands out of work, especially workers in the fish and tourism industry. Official reports estimated that the livelihoods of about 44,000 families were affected by the pollution, operations of regional fisheries (about 2600 fishing boats) were halted, while the long-term consequences on residents’ health remain unclear (Fan, Chiu, and Mabon 2020:5; Radio Free Asia 2016). When fishermen in the province Ha Tinh discovered a giant waste discharge pipe buried undersea that was directly connected to the Vung Ang economic zone, they suspected a relation to the increased number of dead fish. Yet, the government’s initial response was to classify it as a natural disaster and not as a result of industrial processing. Due to the pressure of citizens and scientists, the Ministry of Science and Technology initiated an investigation process with more than 100 national and foreign specialists involved. They discovered (or rather attested) that a huge waste source from the Vung Ang economic zone contained phenol, cyanide and ferrous hydroxide flowing down the sea as the cause for the

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mass fish killings.64 By the end of June 2016, the company Formosa Ha Tinh Steel, a subsidiary of Taiwan’s Formosa Plastics Group and one of Taiwan’s biggest conglomerates, admitted responsibility for pumping untreated industrial wastewater into the ocean causing a toxic chemical spill in Vietnam’s waters. The steel complex in Ha Tinh, worth $10.6 billion, includes a steel plant, a power plant and a deep seaport and is thus, one of Vietnam’s largest foreign investments. Prior to the permission of FDI-led projects, state agencies and foreign investors are officially required to assess possible environmental impacts and protection plans and consult with local residents (Vasavakul 2019:60), but officials failed to live up to their responsibilities in monitoring the steel plants’ environmental protection measures. Instead, state agencies were hesitant and only started to investigate weeks later in May 2016 after the fish deaths took place in early April. Initial responses from the government attempted to disconnect the case from the steel plant and explained it as natural disaster (Vasavakul 2019:61). Later, more practical measures were taken including demarcating safe and unsafe maritime zones for fisheries and offered financial and material support for affected residents, which were implemented insufficiently and lacked transparency. After Formosa voluntarily paid its fine of US $500 million, the Vietnamese government continued to permit the factory to operate and expressed its commitment to enforce further environmental protection measures in Ha Tinh and other key FDI sites (Vasavakul 2019:61). Residents responded with anger. Due to the FDI character of the Formosa project, there has been no authorized channel for civic action in forms of mass organisations to monitor environmental pollution or illegal corporate behaviour (Vasavakul 2019:60). The anti-Formosa movement formed shortly after the dead fish occurred, whereby protesters raised their discontent with conditions that favoured FDI projects and include subsidised land rentals over the protection of citizens and the environment. Many critics also raised anger with Chinese investors who were thought to be involved in the Formosa project (Vasavakul 2019:61). The

64 Vietnam Law & Legal Forum. 2016. “Formosa admits responsibility for toxic chemical spill in Vietnam”. Retrieved December 11, 2020 (http://vietnamlawmagazine.vn/formosa-admits- responsibility-for-toxic-chemical-spill-in-vietnam-5459.html).

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key actors of the movement against Formosa were the fisher families, mostly Catholics, from the provinces of Nghe An and Ha Tinh.65 Catholic bishops and priests were assisted by individual activists from the labour activist group introduced in Chapter 8, the environmental group Green Trees66 and the Association of Fisherman in Central Vietnam (Hiep Hoi Ngu Dan Mien Trung)67, as well as many pro-democracy and human rights activists and lawyers. The Catholic parishioners in the province of Nghe An were the most vocal members of the movement. To a large extent, the movement was organised by Catholic bishops and priests, among them priest Sang, priest Phuc and priest Thanh. Because the majority of villagers in Central Vietnam are Catholics with their base of living in the fishing industry and agricultural sector, the priests were organically holding leading positions in the movement and represented the victims in the judicial proceedings against Formosa. The movement applied exclusively non-violent means of resistance including protests, demonstrations, sit-ins, marches, blockading the National Highway (1A) and the organization of class action lawsuits. These quite common tactics of resistance were combined with religious practices mainly consisting of collective prayers.68 It was February 2019, when I was invited to a parish in Nghe An province, in Central Vietnam. When I arrived, priest Sang was engaged in a conversation with a local family in front of his office. They seemed to be asking for his advice. Their faces indicated unease and worry, while another couple was waiting outside for their turn to speak to the priest. I recognised the busy schedule of a priest and gave him a sign of my understanding. I waited outside. The next three days would reveal the complexity of Catholic activism. I was surprised, when I realised that the

65 Solidarity protests in the cities of Ha Noi, HCMC, Hai Phong, Da Nang, Nha Trang and Vung Tau were also supported by activists and local citizens, who were not necessarily direct victims of the environmental disaster. The main movement, however, took place in the two provinces Nghe An and Ha Tinh. 66 Green Trees is an independent and unregistered environmental organisation based in Hanoi. 67 Hiep Hoi Ngu Dan Mien Trung made statics of all families that were affected, gathered the information given by the victims and sent them to human rights organisations, NGOs and civil society organisations. The parish in Vinh was also one of the crucial places with bishop Nguyen Thai Hop* who assisted the victims by organising legal advice, material support and moral support. 68 For a whole year, from 10 June 2016 until 30 May 2017, parishioners organized Saturday supplications to pray for the victims of Formosa.

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Saturday prayers at the Church in Nghe An developed into an important meeting point for the victims of Formosa and the activists living in the commune. The Church became an information center in which residents would be provided updates on recent developments. The Church was also an educational space that aimed at connecting the lived realities of the people with the moral and religious obligations of a Catholic. Indeed, these Saturday prayers were different from all the Church services I have witnessed throughout my life. Priest Sang combined his prayer with religious teaching and historical knowledge and provided a critical analysis of current political affairs of the country. On that evening priest Sang gave a lecture about the Chinese-Vietnamese Border war in 1979 and reminded us to commemorate the fallen soldiers and “be eager to learn and study the Vietnamese history independent of State propaganda”. He finished the Saturday mass by calling for solidarity with the oppressed and the poor, and at that time, especially with the fisher families that were harmed by the Formosa case. The Church has carved out a protected space in a double sense: A physical space for activists and civil society groups that is shielded from the state’s ideological apparatus and surveillance mechanisms, and a political space that allowed for public criticism and knowledge transfer that is otherwise subjected to censorship. Later that year, I met democracy activist Thien (non-Catholic) in Hanoi again. He was also one of the leading activists involved in the protests and collective actions against Formosa. Thien narrates how he found refuge in the Catholic Church when he organized the distribution of rice to the Formosa victims. Anti- Formosa activists conducted interviews with fishermen, which they then uploaded to their social media accounts. Many democracy activists conducted citizen journalism (see Chapter 7) and helped the fisher families to do the same and self- organize by using social media. They taught the residents how to conduct interviews, how to set up Facebook pages and upload information and videos to the internet. Similarly, priest Phuc from the neighbouring parish transformed his Church into a safe space that facilitated meetings with international journalists, civil society organisations and lawyers. Members of the NGO Green Trees that focuses on environmental protection travelled to Nghe An and Ha Tinh to gather information about the case. They too had to rely on the spaces provided by the

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Church. As a result, Green Trees was first to publish a detailed report on the Formosa case both in Vietnamese and English language. They also produced a documentary film that featured different voices of Vietnam’s wider civil society including progressive priests and Catholic activists. Both the report and the film could only be investigated and released clandestinely.69 By the end of my fieldwork in Vietnam, I met environmental activist Kim who is one of the founding members of Green Trees. She narrates how she converted from Buddhism to Catholicism:

I never thought I would convert from Buddhism to Catholicism […] Before I converted, I sometimes went to the Church, just because I liked sitting in the Church and listening to what the Father preaches, especially what he preaches about human rights. This [particular] Church is one of the few places where you can hear someone talking about human rights in an honest and most straightforward way (Interview Kim).

Her experience testifies how some Churches provided a space for knowledge concerned with human rights that otherwise remains subjugated. Moreover, Priest Phuc explained to me that in order to distribute information to the local residents (for instance about the Formosa case) members of his Church printed information flyers. Those were conducted in a language that was intelligible to the fishermen, workers and locals. In so doing, they expanded their practice from the immediate material help for the victims of Formosa to the practice of citizen journalism as the strategy of self-directed investigation. And indeed, the demand for transparency and political accountability manifested as one of the central demands during protest events. A popular protest slogan shows:

“Fish need clean water, people need transparency” (Vietn.: Cá cần nước sạch, dân cần minh bạch)

The slogan referred to the overarching struggle for the protection of natural resources and the people’s right to know about and participate in political decision- making processes.

69 Green Trees published the report An Overview of the Marine Life Disaster In Vietnam in October 2016 and the documentary film Don’t be afraid, later renamed to “Fear???” (Vietn.: Đừng Sợ, later renamed: Sợ???) in May 2019.

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Priest Sang described how in the period between June and October 2016, the diocese Vinh counted 60-100 young people showing up at the Church every day to volunteer in helping the victims of the marine disaster and to investigate the case ‘from below’. Most actions that included direct involvement of witnesses and victims (e.g. interviewing them) did not last long, as the activists were soon faced with police harassment and surveillance. In addition, the hard-liner Communist group known as the ‘Red Flags’ have a particularly strong foothold in Nghe An, recruiting mostly young people from Communist Mass Organisations such as the Communist Youth Organisation and Women’s association. In Nghe An, Red Flag groups have been a strong force spreading denunciatory misinformation about Catholic priests and bishops. During this time of political discontent, locals came to realise that collective action against Formosa was not merely about the water pollution and environmental justice, but that there was another element central to this case. Thien states:

As a matter fact, it was the government’s lack of accountability that the people were furious about. Now, people understand that with this government in office, our environment will never be saved (Interview Thien).

Accordingly, the protests against Formosa went beyond the environmental cause, but the marine disaster threatened the lives of the deprived working class and the poor alike.

9.1.2 Class-Action Lawsuits in Solidarity with the Poor In June 2016, Formosa admitted responsibility and promised to pay $500 million in damages, a turning point that initiated a second phase (June until September 2016) of the anti-Formosa movement. Villagers and activists started to expand their demands and called for immediate action. This included the provision of proper compensation to the victims and ultimately the shutdown of the Formosa steel factory in Ha Tinh. Yet, the actual negotiation over and distribution of the $500 million compensation money took place in an opaque and arbitrary manner (Fan et al. 2020; Green Trees 2016:108ff) . Interview partners and locals reported that in

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some cases corrupt government officials took back the money from the families or kept it for themselves (Interviews with priest Sang, priest Phuc, priest Thanh and informal conversations with locals).

Moreover, priest Phuc narrates:

Many Christian activists have a strong awareness and are very commitment to resist wherever there is injustice. We Catholics are also more united and stand in solidarity with one another and have a high communal awareness.

In cases of smaller towns and communes (lang/xa structures), Christian communities maintain even closer personal relations. The Vietnamese Catholics consider the parish a family, with the priest at the top of the hierarchy, a patriarchal system attributable to both the colonial and pre-colonial Confucian order. There are meetings once, sometimes twice, a day. The fact that the communities provide meetings on a regular base helps them to stay informed about their situations, to communicate and share ideas and demands. This sense of collectivity developed “especially because we have the fighting spirit, the spirit of resistance”, priest Phuc emphasises. While the religious practices have developed a collective identity of the community long before the protests against Formosa ignited, it was the political character of the weekly prayers in particular that developed a collective identity beyond its religious affiliation. How this was put into practice could be observed in the Sunday activities. On Sundays, the parishioners and villagers organized weekly demonstrations and sit-ins in the villages. However, as the political situation changed, the demands and activities of the movement had to be adapted too. This clarified that - against the many attempts to defame the protesters as religious conservatives - the anti-Formosa activists were not a religious group that exploited the environmental cause in order to promote its self-interests, such as religious freedom. Rather, the anti-Formosa protests pointed to a fundamental problem inherent to the capitalist system itself, that is, the legal protection of capital- intensive industries and the repression of political dissent that objects to these capital-state relations.

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The protesters and residents appealed to the Vietnamese law and undertook collective legal action to demand justice for the victims. While the religious component played a crucial role in the formation of an independent political identity of the protesters and the residents, it was the collective legal actions that took centre stage in the Catholic’s political practice. Priest Sang gathered evidence and legal documents to file a class action lawsuit against Formosa. In order to file the lawsuit, collective legal documents needed to be organized and drafted meticulously, while individual cases had to be legally advised by volunteering lawyers. All this happened within the spaces of the Catholic Church.70 The first class-action lawsuit comprised a total of 506 individual cases filed by fisher families and other residents whose businesses were affected by the water pollution. Each case included evidence from ten affected families, with which they demanded compensation from the steel plant. On September 26/27, 2016, priest Sang together with 545 residents travelled 200 km to the Ky Anh People’s Court to file the 506 lawsuits against Formosa. In response to the movement’s call, the Court rejected and returned the 506 lawsuits. Chief Judge of the Ha Tinh People’s Court Nguyen Van Thang stated that the claimants had failed to provide legal evidence and hence, according to the law the Court is prohibited from granting legal procedure (Nhi 2016).71 Two days after the claimants went to Court (September 29, 2016) Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc issued the aforementioned Decision 1880/GD-TTg in which Formosa steel company agreed to pay $500 million in compensation to the victims. The Decision did not mention the specific damages that resulted out of Formosa’s chemical spill

70 To file a lawsuit in Vietnam the claimant has to address the Court at the provincial level that is in charge of the factory. In this case, it was the province of Ha Tinh. Three options are available to submit the documents that will justify the lawsuit: Either the claimants send the documents via postal service, they submit it via online form or hand in the documents in person. Postal service is not a reliable option in Vietnam as the risks of loss or sabotage are high. Similarly, online submission is also not an option for most villagers as they don’t have computers or access to the internet. Therefore, the only reliable option was to submit the documents in person. 71 The Judge was quoted in official media: “The rejection of the petitions is pursuant to the Civil Procedural Code. Clause 5, Article 189 of the Code stipulates that a petition must be backed by proofs of the damages caused by the violation of the claimant’s legitimate rights. Furthermore, Point C, Clause 1, Article 192 cites issues that have been resolved with a valid decision by the relevant authorities. In this case, the compensation process has already been resolved with Decision 1880/QD-TTg by the Government.”

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and thus, did not provide any specific measures on how to compensate the victims.72 In addition, it stated that the Formosa case was officially processed according to the proclamations agreed upon in the Decision 1880, while in fact, it was two days earlier, on September 26/27, that the Catholic priest Sang together with the fishermen submitted the petition to the Ky Anh People’s Court in Ha Tinh and received nothing but rejection. On October 02, 2016 more than ten thousand people protested in front of the steel plant, as the affected residents and fishermen have reportedly not received the promised compensation. A day later, priest Phuc represented a petition that was filed by more than one thousand households to be send to Vietnam’s National Assembly in order to demand immediate compensation. And in the same month, priest Sang organized another journey with one thousand residents from Vinh to the Ky Anh Court, this time to file a complaint about the wrongful processing by the Court and to resubmit the 506 cases from the first time with 100 new cases adding to the previous one. However, on their way out of the village, the protesters and activists were intimidated and attacked by the local police. Bus drivers were stopped, car drivers pulled out of their cars and beaten up, and cars sabotaged by large nails placed under car wheels. Afraid of further violence, priest Sang withdrew the journey with the one thousand residents and decided to travel to the Ky Anh Court with only 49 people. Similarly, priest Phuc and the villagers of his commune experienced police violence with a number of activists being arrested. The anti-Formosa movements in 2016 is one of the more recent landmarks of large- scale collective action that made the criminalisation of public criticism apparent.

9.1.3 Against and from within the Prison System After the protests abated, vocal activists against Formosa continued to be assaulted and arrested, among them Hoang Duc Binh (Catholic labour activist). During the Formosa disaster he helped the fishermen and villagers to file the lawsuits and petitions, for which he was sentenced to 14 years in prison. Hoang Duc Binh was

72 The seven categories of affected persons included 1. seafood harvesting; 2. aquatic breeding; 3. salt production; 4. coastal seafood business activities; 5. fishing logistics; 6. coastal tourism services; and 7. seafood stockpiling and purchase.

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first arrested in Nghe An province while he was accompanying priest Phuc. The police stopped their car and violently removed him from the vehicle. Hoang Duc Binh was charged with “resisting persons in the performance of their official duties” under Article 257 and “Abusing democratic freedoms to infringe upon the interests of the State” under Article 258 of the 1999 Criminal Code. In August 2017, authorities added another charge of “destroying or deliberately damaging property” (Article 143) against Hoang Duc Binh. Dozens of Formosa activists have been sentenced since then, including Nguyen Van Hoa* (Catholic, anti-Formosa activists) to 7 years in prison for capturing drone footage of the protests and Le Dinh Luong* (Catholic, anti-Formosa activist) to 20 years for writing online articles about different cases including Formosa. Nguyen Nang Tinh* (Catholic, democracy and anti-Formosa) was sentenced to 11 years in prison for his posts on Facebook with alleged “anti-state” content. The criminalisation of political activists was publicly denounced by priest Sang and priest Phuc, especially after activists were convicted for their protest activities. Resistance, however, does not end behind bars but continues in prison. At the time of writing, many Catholic anti-Formosa activists are serving their sentences, yet their voices are made to be heard. During Church services priest Sang and priest Phuc, together with the parishioners, light candles to express their solidarity with the prisoners. Some are holding photos of the activists who were recently detained; others hold up signs and banners stating: ‘Freedom for Prisoners of Conscience’. Photos of these solidarity prayers are widely shared on social media by which the parishioners want to devote attention to the prisoners’ identities and their stories (Interview priest Sang). Priest Sang quoted Tran Huynh Duy Thuc*, one of the current political prisoners whose intellect and willpower became an inspiration for many democracy activists:

There are crimes that make you feel embarrassed and humiliated. But there are others that make you feel proud.

The priests are targeting the societal stigmatisation of political crime and encourage solidarity with political prisoners by building on the notions of pride and patriotic sacrifice (more on this later). This is particularly important for family members, friends and other vocal activists who are affected by political stigmatisation.

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Musician Bach, a former political prisoner who served 7 years for writing state- critical lyrics, narrates that after he got arrested the priests of his local Church came to visit his family, prayed for him and expressed solidarity with his cause. The priests encouraged his family and, in fact, “made them proud”, he said (Interview Bach). Supporting and campaigning in solidarity with the families, who not only bear the burden of financially supporting the prisoners, but who have to cope with emotional, mental and social distress, eases the fear of societal rejection and gives a positive identity to the prisoners, by recognising them by names. By campaigning for political prisoners, Catholic activists remove the stigma of criminalisation and ground the “struggle for political, social judicial and economic justice” in the liberation of the oppressed, which is in accordance with the gospel of Jesus Christ (Pounder 2008:279). Countering the imprisonment of political activists is not only concerned with the physical repression within the prison complex, but with what Pounder (2008:282) called the liberation “for transformation”.73 According to Bach’s observations in prison, religious inmates (many of them adhere to religious sects, such as the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao) suffered less from mental distress, were more resilient to physical and psychological abuse and extremely durable in hunger strikes. This has also been claimed by other former political prisoners. Unsurprisingly, like democracy activist Lien (Chapter 7) who has been secular throughout her entire life, she found her connection to God in prison (Interview Lien). Pounder explains that it is about individual transformation and inner freedom, but also about the transformation of the criminal justice system, the government and the Church’s position towards the criminalised that “prison theology” wants to address (Pounder 2008:283). Therefore, the political resistance of Catholics like Hoang Duc Binh, Le Dinh Luong, Nguyen Van Hoa and Nguyen Nang Tinh continues from within the prison walls. Liberation “for transformation”, as Pounder (2008:282) puts it, “includes those things to be free for, especially freedom for the soul and mind through the power of God”. Liberation does not

73 Sadie Pounder (2008) proposes the term “prison theology”, by which she targets the oppressiveness of a criminal justice system and identifies liberation, hope and justice as basis for a Church-led movement for the support of those who are criminalized.

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depend on the opening of the prison gates but becomes a matter of “concrete struggle rather than abstract ideas” (ibid.). By the end of my stay in the parish, priest Sang and priest Phuc asked me whether I have heard of democracy activist Pham Doan Trang (Chapter 7) and some vocal labour activists I have already introduced in Chapter 8. They assured that if I needed to get in touch with one of them, they would be pleased to also introduce me to labour activist Mai and others. They explained that some of the most committed and trusted Christian activists of Central Vietnam are involved in a wide range of societal struggles around democracy, environmental protection, human rights, labour rights and ‘national sovereignty’ (Interview priest Sang; priest Phuc). It reminded me on Mai’s (Catholic labour activist) statement:

When the Formosa disaster happened, it affected many other issues, not only the environment, but the people's work throughout the whole country. It affected politics and democracy.

Mai points to the fact that many workers in the fishing industry living in urban areas were also harshly affected. Especially fish sellers working in the cities were left out of the negotiations, compensation measures and are not recognized in official reports. For several months, people could not make a living. Others had to migrate to the cities to find work, as one former fisherman told me in the bus ride back to Ho Chi Minh City. Therefore, Mai and many other activists considered the Formosa case an issue related to worker’s rights and the lack of democracy. She declares:

Worker’s rights are human and democratic rights, and this is why our [labour resistance] group was involved in the Formosa protests. We speak of labour in many ways.

This chapter too illustrated that different social movements reconnect in resistance against capitalist totality. Catholic activists have carved out spaces in the Church to rediscover subjugated knowledges mainly concerned with public criticism against the state as a facilitator of environmental pollution due to capitalist investments, labour exploitation and incarceration. In doing so, Catholic activists engage in anti- authoritarian and anti-capitalist practices and simultaneously seek to transcend the constraining rules of the official Catholic Church that has avoided confrontation

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with the government and political issues at large. We have seen that Catholic activism is subjected to severe state repression. Contrary to the existing literature that emphasises the Communist Party’s tolerance towards various religions, this chapter indicates that when religious politics occurs in relation to the critique of capital relations, activists seem to be subjected to much harsher forms of repression than Catholics who focus purely on religious freedom. From a decolonial-Marxist perspective, scepticism about religious politics raises legitimate concerns about its ideological embeddedness in colonial epistemology. As a way to counter authoritarian state communism and its ideological apparatus, religious politics offers an alternative way to imagine and explain the world. Indeed, many secular activists have converted to Catholicism in the course of their political activities. Speaking with Althusser (2014:52), however, the main function of the religious apparatus is to teach knowledge in “forms that ensure subjection to the dominant ideology, or else the ‘practice’ of it”. Therefore, the following section looks at the process of cognitive resistance of Catholic activists. Again, by exploring the cognitive resistance and the ideational structure of Catholic politics, I will be able to understand whether activists aim at the trespassing on dominant ideological system and thus, perform resistance for itself.

9.2 Cognitive Resistance and the Church’s Ideological Apparatus

“Our life will begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter!” Martin Luther King, Jr

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor” Désmond Mplio Tutu

“The world suffers a lot. Not because of the violence of bad people, but because of the silence of good people!” Napoleon Bonaparte

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(Quotations from a banner installation in a Church in Nghe An, Central Vietnam)

The four quotations stem from a banner installation in the Church in Central Vietnam. The banners depicted and quoted revolutionaries and liberation theologians including bishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu, bishop Paulo Nguyen Thai Hop, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and (oddly enough) Napoleon Bonaparte. These quotes have one message in common: They oppose injustice and condemn silence. This banner installation made a very powerful background to what the priests narrated throughout the days of my visit. The following section investigates the political ideas that motivate Catholic political practice. By delving into the cognitive resistance of Catholic activists, this section seeks to understand how political concepts are re-contested and re-inserted into a new ideational structure. Inferring from the composition of these quotes, Catholic activists seem to encounter the simultaneity of progressive and conservative ideas. I identify ‘justice and truth’ as core concept, ‘love for one’s country’ as adjacent concept and ‘anticommunism’ as peripheral concept. These concepts inform and motivate the practices of Catholic activists. In order to draw together the data presented below with the theoretical framework of this thesis, I shall briefly summarise Althusser’s (2014) understanding of the Church as ideological apparatus followed by reiterating the arguments surrounding ‘coloniality in religion’ (see Chapter 3). To Althusser (2014:82-84), the Church (and other state institutions such as schools) produces a certain kind of knowledge that ensures “subjection to the ruling [religious] ideology” and its religious practices. These religious practices are mainly performed inside the Church wherein the dominant religious ideology is realized and reproduced. The Church and its religious ideological apparatus educate its agents, such as the priests and the faithful to adhere to particular hierarchical structures that organise the social positions given to, for example, the “high priests of the dominant ideology” and its “functionaries”, the worshippers (Althusser 2014:51–52). Althusser also raises that this religious education is accompanied by methods of moral and physical punishment such as expulsion, selection and excommunication (Althusser 2014:86). And although large parts of the Church

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succumb to the repressive state apparatus, its ideological apparatus is also represented by their own religious publishing houses, masses, processions and pilgrimages (Althusser 2014:136-37) with which the sharing of information and religious knowledge can be enacted relatively autonomous from the law and state censorship (Althusser 2014:86). Whether Vietnamese Catholic activists can transgress the dominant ideology of the Church will be explored in the rest of this chapter. Another theoretical reference relevant to this chapter relates to the notion of ‘coloniality in religion’. Decolonial theologians stated that a colonial interpretation considers Christianity as a superior Western religion with which colonial hierarchies can be re-inscribed in postcolonial contexts (see Poole 2010; Vaidyanathan 2019). Against this, decolonial scholars argue for the liberation of Christianity in the postcolonies by deconstructing and unlearning Western Christianity and instead take into account “religious pluralism, political struggles, and inculturation” (Joy 2012:5). In this light, classical liberation theology has reinvigorated Jesus Christ as a revolutionary figure that focuses on the struggle of the working poor and the marginalised. In so doing, liberation theology re-contested the conservative Western Church and instead reformulated Christianity along Marxist and postcolonial lines. The following pages demonstrate that Vietnamese Catholic activists too enculturate and reformulate Christianity according to their particular socio-political context. Yet, the cognitive resistance of Catholic activists indicates that they remain subordinated to an ideological system that reproduces capitalism and nationalism.

9.2.1 Core Concept: Justice and Truth The most repeated concepts referred to by Vietnamese Catholic activists are ‘justice and truth’. Inferring from the political practice of the anti-Formosa movement, analytically derived concepts would include different kinds of justices, such as legal justice, restorative justice and transformative justice. However, as will be shown in the following pages, the kind of justices and truths Vietnamese Catholics (and Catholics in general) refer to remains undefined but is considered constitutive of transcendental power. Nevertheless, Catholic activists and progressive priests in

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particular approach the concept ‘justice’ through the teleological orientation described as see-judge-act (Interview priest Sang), which is known as a method also embraced by liberation theology.74 In order to navigate through this brief section, I assess the meanings of ‘justice and truth’ through the method of see- judge-act and borrow from Gayarre’s (1994:40) formulations, according to which the first dimension ‘seeing’ deals with the socio-analytic dimension, which observes and recognises the conditions of poverty and oppression. The second dimension ‘judge’ refers to the hermeneutic analyses of current material, political and social conditions in the light of the Bible and theological teachings. The third dimension ‘act’ appeals to the people’s involvement in direct action. In Catholic theology, seeing, recognizing and speaking the truth is where the struggle for justice begins. To priest Phuc,

liberation is rooted in speaking the truth, as the truth starts with rejecting expressions of injustice.

To him, it is a Catholic’s main responsibility to face the truth and raise one’s voice against injustice. Justice and truth are therefore interrelated, yet they are not the same (Lorenzen 2009:281). Speaking the truth forms the basis of the struggle against injustice:

God teaches us Catholics that for love and justice you have to respect the truth…. Life is the truth, and the truth will liberate us! … For that reason, priests do not accept fraud and betrayal. The acceptance of fraud and betrayal must be disregarded, even if the betrayal originates in the political. Any force that is aggressive shall not be overseen and the truth shall not be ignored (Interview priest Phuc).

In an attenuated manner, priest Phuc points to misconducts on the political level and emphasises that seeing and naming political misconduct is part of the Catholic’s duty of upholding justice and truth. In Catholic social teaching, justice and truth are

74 See-judge-act is an approach promoted by Joseph Cardinal Cardijn, a method from the early 20th century Young Christian Workers movement in Belgium. In 1961, Pope John XXIII enshrined it in Mater et Magistra.

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rooted in the very nature of God, the transcendental power. Yet, priest Phuc also elaborates:

So, when we see citizens facing injustice or become victims of the communist system or victims of public policies that influence their wellbeing, a priest has to raise his voice and advocate for them.

Justice is therefore not only rooted in the relationship to God but grounded in the material conditions and lived realities of the people. Priest Phuc analyses and judges the “communist system” and “public policies”, by which he seems to refer to those state regulations that interfere with the people’s welfare, as the political sources of injustice and the reason to act (“a priest has to raise his voice and advocate for them”). He raises particular discontent towards state-controlled media and how these affect the protection of ‘justice and truth’:

The socialist ideal was the dream of a few people but is the catastrophe for humanity. Places of justice [e.g. journalism] turned into de facto places of injustice and fake news. All this is supported by a whole system of media-communication. With over one thousand state-controlled newspapers, there is only one central propaganda department of the CPV. When you listen to the propaganda of the CPV, citizens know that the opposite is true. Reality and CPV’s propaganda differ from one another by 180 degrees.

From a sociological and secular perspective, it remains unclear what concrete kinds of ‘justices’ are imagined, or whether they are imagined at all. In view of this, priest Sang counters that speaking out for justice is part and parcel of Catholic faith, but that it is

[…] God [who] sets the standards that measure justice and equality of all human beings before God.

However, he further adds:

On earth, truth is always relational. Many things are different than they appear to be.

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Relationality is an important concept in Christian theology. Priest Sang’s reference resembles the ‘theology of relationality’ as it was imagined by Haitian priest and politician Jean-Bertrand Aristide (2000:63):75

We begin with what is in front of us. I cannot see God, but I can see you. I cannot see God, but I see the child in front of me, the women, the man. Through them, through this material world in which we live, we know God. Through them we know and experience love, we glimpse and seek justice.

In other words, justice and injustice are measured through seeing and judging the individual (i.e. ‘children, women and man’) relative to her different material and social context. Accordingly, justice cannot be defined merely along transcendental and universal standards (set by God or human rights declarations) but is to be considered relative to concrete lived experiences and material conditions. Accordingly, priest Sang links the principle of ‘justice’ to the protests against Formosa and how the Vietnamese government handled the incident:

Until this day, not a single initiative has been taken on the side of the government to improve the environment and to clean the water. Even worse, the government has officially declared that the water is now clean due to the government’s management. But what we see in reality is that people in this area are getting ill, the number of people suffering from cancer increased dramatically, and people are forced to migrate to other regions (Interview priest Sang).

Priest Sang judges the government for mismanagement and the cause for the deteriorating lives of the people. He admits that according to canon law, Christians are obliged to protect, connect and unite with the government rightfully and in line with the Constitution. Yet he also proclaims:

Our religion also teaches us that any societal norm or legal rule must harmonize with our conscience, our morality and the principles of God.

75 In Aristide’s articulation of theology of relationality justice is perceived as expressed in solidarity with the poor. The theology of relationality centres democratic values, rights, freedom and the poor. It is a participatory approach that promotes the struggle against poverty and oppression (Joseph 2014:273).

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Those principles we have to perform and enforce. But any rule set by society or politicians that contradicts our good conscience, morality and the truth, those laws do not need to be accepted, nor performed.

Priest Sang points to the relation between Catholic social teachings and socio- political structures of the secular public space and legitimises his act of public criticism with religious teaching. As Lorenzen puts it: “Christian faith entails a truth claim that is concerned with justice in the public space” and in this regard, Christian faith provides as moral foundation that natural law does not offer (Lorenzen 2009:282, 288). This was affirmed by many Vietnamese Catholic activists. Environmental activist Kim (GreenTrees, converted to Catholicism) describes:

They [progressive Catholic priests] are not scared of telling the truth. […] I first supported the Church not because I wanted to change my soul or my belief, but because I wanted to support the fathers and what they did. […] The truth they spoke included saving the environment, resisting Formosa and the importance of human rights. […] They spoke about rights of the people and the rights of individual activists. Many activists were imprisoned, and everyone saw it, but only the fathers shared their individual stories and raised their voices even for the activists who are not Catholic.

Her observation affirms priest Phuc’s description of the judging and acting method within the public place:

I want to help the citizens to make use of their legitimate rights and fight against the things that are wrong. And by wrong things I mean the violation of universal human rights.

In a similar manner, priest Sang states:

If our society would be a just society, we priests would not need to do this [political] work. We could be priests who do only religious teaching. But the people today face inequalities and injustices, and this is why we stand with the people and serve the Vietnamese nation.

As priest Phuc’s statement illustrates, they refer not only to the priest’s judgement and action but call for the common people to participate and act for themselves in

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the public space. Priest Sang expounds on the theological roots of his call for action and cites Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World that was formulated in the course of Vatican Council II in 1965:

According to religious law, we, the Catholics, are allowed to call upon the people. Because in the Pastoral Constitution of the Vatican II, it is said that ‘the joys and hopes, the grief and anguish of the people of our time, especially of those who are poor or afflicted, are the joys and hopes, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ as well’ (Interview priest Sang).76

The previous section displays the relation between material conditions, theological principles and the Catholic political practice. As a core principle, ‘justice and truth’ provides Catholic activists with an action-oriented guidance that calls not only for the Catholic’s duty to speak out in public, but to act in service of the common people and the oppressed.

9.2.2 Adjacent Concept: Love for one’s Country Before the territory of today’s Vietnam (former part of Cochinchina) fell under the rule of French colonialism (1887-1946), Christianity has already played a role in the region since the 16th century.77 French colonialism sought spiritual and political legitimacy under the pretext of protecting and spreading the already existing

76 Full quote: The joys and hopes, the grief and anguish of the people of our time, especially of those who are poor or afflicted, are the joys and hopes, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ as well. Nothing that is genuinely human fails to find an echo in their hearts. For theirs is a community of people united in Christ and guided by the holy Spirit in their pilgrimage towards the Father's kingdom, bearers of a message of salvation for all of humanity. That is why they cherish a feeling of deep solidarity with the human race and its history. 77 Vietnam’s history of Christianity can be traced back to the pre-modern era, the time of the two kingdoms Dang Trong and Dang Ngoai in the 16th century. Charles Keith explains that with Catholicism arriving in the region it was particularly “the social authority, scientific knowledge and the international connections of foreign missionaries” that were perceived as a threat by the kingdoms’ rulers. As a consequence, they called for “the destruction of Church property and the imprisonment or execution of Catholics” (Keith 2012:4). However, despite ongoing conflicts, by the end of the 18th century, Catholicism was able to settle its foundation, became officially tolerated and ultimately embraced as part of the religious scenery especially in Dang Ngoai, the northern kingdom of today’s Vietnam. Back then, Vietnamese Catholicism did not challenge the given socio- political order but quite contrary, integrated itself into Confucian hierarchies (Keith 2012: 4). This changed in the course of political developments in the 19th and 20th century.

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footholds of Christianity. However, racial and social hierarchies between Vietnamese and French missionaries led to an increase of social conflicts. Catholicism’s role as strategic instrument of colonial oppression became increasingly obvious, resulting in a decline of spiritual legitimacy amongst the wider population. Anti-colonial revolutionary Phan Boi Chau (1867-1940), for instance, was aware that Catholicism in Vietnam was “culturally separate and precolonial”, however, “blamed it on missionaries for exploiting religion for political ends and on anti-Catholic elements in Vietnam for allowing anti- Catholicism to divide the nation” (Keith 2012:6). In the course of French colonial expansion, French but also general Western and Eastern scholarship started to influence anticolonial Vietnamese intellectuals, who sought to reimagine ideas of Vietnamese history. Concepts of national independence ultimately shaped the anti- colonial struggle and gave birth to the 1946 Western-oriented Constitution (Sidel 2009:27). It also gave rise to different expressions of nationalism and patriotism that continue to be part of the religious-political landscape since then. Long Yeu Nuoc (Long=Soul/mind; Yeu=Love; Dat Nuoc=Country) is one of these expressions which, rendered freely, stands for ‘love for one’s country’. Yet, it is one of those expressions of which the meaning cannot be translated neatly into ‘nationalism’ or ‘patriotism’. Throughout my interviews, I came to understand that ‘love’ itself plays a fundamental role in all traditions of Catholic theology. Therefore, I asked Mai (Catholic labour activist) what this expression ‘love for one’s country’ meant to her. She isn’t sure either, she says, but explains:

The fact that many workers went on protest, shows that they care about the country and that they love our country. The love of the country is performed during those demonstrations.

And fellow Catholic labour activist Huy responds:

Love for one’s country has a lot of meaning. It means that you look after your nation and your people. You look at what your community is suffering from, […] which includes resisting China. What do we have to do, so that Vietnam won’t get erased from the world map?

I also remember how priest Sang introduced himself to me:

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First of all, I am a member of the Vietnamese people. I was Vietnamese before I became a priest and remain a Vietnamese now in the position of a priest. I have one home country and one nationality. The duty of a citizen is to create the good things for a country, a society, a nation. Having said this, I am also a Catholic. As Catholics we love our country and our people, as our worldly authority comes from God.

I was puzzled. Despite the fairly different explanations, they do have one perspective in common that is the emphasis on the ‘love for one’s country’ (and of God) as positively connected to the sense of community, resistance in the name of the people and ethnic belonging. This position mirrors what priest Phuc explains to me:

The Bible and God teach us to love all people, by which we mean not just the love expressed in words but expressed through your actions. This is a true Catholic.

The above-mentioned quotes express ‘love for one’s country’ as a pro-stance towards the people (i.e. the working poor and oppressed), which is anchored in the duty to “act” and manifests in “protests”. Priest Phuc further emphasizes that it is the close relationship between faith and the responsibility to “liberate the disadvantaged” from which he derives his daily actions. They show that ‘love’ and a Catholic sense of belonging are anchored in the action to support the disadvantaged, the working class and the poor. I came to understand that the feeling of national belonging in combination with God’s love is by no means that of xenophobic illiberal nationalism we find in many Western capitalist countries. Interestingly enough, scholars like Philip Taylor (2001) elaborate that it is the elite-national version of history propagated by state agents since the end of the war that puts different visions of modernity and tradition into contestation.78 This is an important note, as it leads me to consider ‘love for one’s country’ as continuously contested.

78 Scholars like Shawn McHale (2004) and Tuong Vu (2007) articulate that one way of understanding Vietnamese nationality is through the viewpoint of communal identity. McHale also examines that different imaginings of community as related to the idea of a Vietnamese nation, in fact, do not always correspond to nation-state boundaries.

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I remind myself that the Vietnamese Communist revolution was not only an anti-colonial/anti-imperial revolution, but also a nationalist movement, in which the ideas of patriotism, nationalism and ‘love for one’s country’ played a decisive role. In light of this, priest Sang remarks that there have been “meaningless struggles carried out in the name of the ‘love for one’s country’” by which he alludes to the patriotic narrative of the Vietnamese Communist Party and the ‘fallen heroes’ of the Communist-led liberation movement. To him, ‘love for one’s country’ is defined by “the struggle for human liberation”, which he considers contradictory to the history of Communist patriotism:

The historical struggles and fights hitherto carried out under the banner of ‘love for our country’ were senseless. All things in life are common and belong to the people, only the voice of a hero makes the difference. The hero is not just the one who speaks in public, uses fists and sticks or violence to pursue a revolution. For us [progressive Catholics], the hero is the one who dares to love, dares to forgive and dares to dedicate himself to serve the others. For us, it was Jesus Christ himself, a person who sacrificed his own life. This is the ideal: To live for the others, for the others to have a good life (Interview priest Sang).

This explains why priest Sang and priest Phuc dedicate part of their practice (prayers and time for personal visits) to the cause of political prisoners.

Prisoners of conscience are people who really love the country and the people. People who live for justice and truth and who are fighting for our rights (Interview priest Sang).

Admittedly, as a secular scholar one might be inclined to argue that we are nonetheless dealing with a form of nationalism and that it is as dangerous as any other kind of nationalism. That deduction might not be entirely wrong, yet I believe it would be erroneous to subsume ‘love for one’s country’ under the same category as imperial, colonial or Western forms of nationalism. To Vietnamese Catholic activists, it is not a concept of racial exclusion, economic dominance over other countries or the preservation of their ethnicity for feelings of superiority. Rather, the type of ‘nationalism’ that is expressed here reflects a typical form of

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anticolonial/postcolonial patriotism/nationalism in a way that resembles ideas articulated by Frantz Fanon (1963 [2004]:142):

[N]ationalism, that magnificent hymn which roused the masses against the oppressor, disintegrates in the aftermath of independence. Nationalism is not a political doctrine; it is not a program. If we really want to safeguard our countries from regression, paralysis, or collapse, we must rapidly switch from a national consciousness to a social and political consciousness.

Fanon considers nationalism of the oppressed as a unifying force against the oppressor, a remark that has also been made by democracy activist Thien in Chapter 7. Fanon also hoped that nationalism would ultimately disintegrate and transform into social and political consciousness, which would certainly indicate a development from resistance ‘in itself’ to ‘for itself’. In view of the preceding pages, I interpret the activists’ ‘love for one’s country’ as an expression of ‘national thinking’ that is positively linked to questions of resistance, collectivity, sense of belonging and the support for the oppressed (the pro-stance). Yet, its close relation to nationalism and patriotism cannot be ignored either, as it indicates a state of epistemological coloniality. This indication is fleshed out by the anti-stance ‘anti-Communism’ and elaborated in the following section.

9.2.3 Peripheral Concept: Anti-Communism Anti-Communism in this particular context is expressed with regard to a historical and a contemporary dimension. To many Catholic activists, the former Republic of Vietnam (1945-1975) continues to be an important point of reference. South Vietnam’s first president Ngo Dinh Diem, who was a Catholic himself, attempted to synthesize contemporary ideas about Catholic Christianity, Confucianism and Vietnamese national identity (Shaw 2015:27). Diem himself was a resolute anti- communist and linked his anti-communism to his identity as a Catholic (Miller 2013:39).79 As Miller (2013:40) highlights, Diem “represented himself as a

79 However, neither Diem’s anti-communism nor his Catholic identity was the decisive factor for his career, but his believe in the development of a modern Vietnamese nation state. Perhaps for

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progressive reformer who believed that U.S. aid and expertise would figure prominently in Vietnam’s postcolonial future. However, as Fear (2016:56) notes, that although “many anti-communist South Vietnamese gained a new admiration for Ngo Dinh Diem, they decisively rejected the political institutions he had created”. However, especially Catholics enjoyed religious freedom under Diem’s presidency and as corruption began to penetrate the Southern regime, it allowed only a Catholic political elite to access material and social privileges (in terms of education and property) while the majority remained poor and uneducated (Marr 1987:6). Moreover, critics of the South Vietnamese regime have foregrounded the violence against other religions, the crackdown on student activists and Buddhist protesters, repression against the political opposition and his undemocratic system of nepotism (Fear 2016:6). Under the rule of South Vietnam’s Catholic presidents (Ngô Đình Diệm was followed by Nguyễn Văn Thiệu who also converted to Catholicism), it was the Buddhists who suffered most from prosecution, harassment and the restriction of religious freedom. As a consequence, the legitimacy of South Vietnam’s government as well as the two presidents’ Catholic integrity was increasingly put under scrutiny. Despite this, the Republic of Vietnam (1945-1975) and Ngo Dinh Diem continue to be an important point of reference for many Catholic activists who follow Diem’s path and seek U.S. support in order to fight Communism. Accordingly, some scholars argue that anti-communism is historically grounded in the collective traumas left behind by the Communist independence movement (Tuan Hoang 2013). They consider anti-communism as stemming from “decades of conflict and chaos, deprivation, and physical suffering directly inflicted at the hands of Communist officials” and the pain that emerged out of having “their families permanently broken apart and their relatives and friends psychologically destroyed, brutally tortured, and murdered” (Le 2009:193). Moreover, arrests of Catholic priests, monks, long-term sentences for religious activities and the internment into re-education camps shook Catholic life in the post-revolutionary period (Chu 2008:163; Hoang 2016). The individual and collective memories of

this reason, many people do not commemorate the Republic of Vietnam for having lived by Catholic principles.

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trauma and loss culminated in a practical rubric of Vietnamese anti-communism that is dominating certain worldviews to this present-day. However, anti-communist sentiments expressed by present-day Catholic activists are also rooted in concrete socio-political conditions of their times. Priest Sang’s following declaration, for instance, is expressive of the anti-stance towards present-day Communism/Socialism:

According to the authorities’ language, our government is a ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’. […] But nothing of this is close to reality. Rather, it would be better to say: ‘Vietnam of Formosa, by Formosa and for Formosa only’.

His comment displays awareness about the dissonance of communist rhetoric and the government’s subservience to capital relations. He adds:

You can see the nature of Communism expressed in the cases of Vuon rau Loc Hung, Dong Tam, Duong Noi and Thu Thiem, by which he refers to the areas subjected to a forced land-grabbing scheme and that became known for activist campaigns for land rights, peasant resistance and a stronger Catholic foothold (Duong 2019).80 In view of the ‘anti-capitalist’ practice of Catholic protesters described in the first half of this chapter, priest Sang criticises the state’s priority to protect and advance foreign industries and thus, capital investment projects. In this vein, however, he also equates the “nature of Communism” with the dispossession of peasants and the state’s general ignorance towards its citizens, which again, displays a certain dissonance between political practice and political ideas. As a result, one may hasten to frame present-day Catholic activists as plain anti-communists. Although Vietnamese Catholics do not centre on anti- communism (morphologically speaking anti-communism does not stand for its

80 At the time of my fieldwork, Vuon Rau Loc Hung (see also Chapter 6) and Thu Thiem were two contested areas in Ho Chi Minh city. Both represented important historical sites for Catholics. Vuon Rau Loc Hung originally belonged to a Roman Catholic missionary organization of secular priests and lay persons, which permitted the French colonial government to set up property. Residents of Thủ Thiêm, many of them belong to the Catholic community, are subject to forced eviction and ill- planning in the reallocation of land and houses. The appropriated land was seized at low prices and sold high to investors for a new urban area project.

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own), it certainly plays a role in a peripheral position. In other words, anti- communism holds meaning only relative to the core and adjacent concepts. Therefore, priest Sang proclaims:

If our society would be a just society, we priests would not need to do this [political] work. We could be priests who do religious teaching only. But the people today face inequalities and injustices, and this is why we stand with the people and serve the Vietnamese nation.

Our faith stands in contradiction to the kind of communism that is practiced today. The fundamental contradiction lies in the fact that one side is atheist, the other has God. However, this is not the reason why we criticise or resist the government. It is because we are committed to the society, to the aim of advancing and empowering the people. And this is what we do to the level of our possibilities.

Again, the concept ‘justice’ is invoked to flesh out the anti-stance, which in turn, evinces that anti-communism is positioned relative to the concept ‘justice and truth’. At the same time, the formulation “serve the Vietnamese nation” visualises the dialectical relationship between anti-communism and the pro-stance ‘love for one’s country’. A final general remark made by Catholic activists surrounds the principle of obeying God rather than any social group or individual leader. Priest Sang explains that as a non-believer one may embrace different kinds of “humanism, or belong to a group, organisation or political Party”. That way, he criticises, one follows a certain group interest and hence, one’s self-interests, while obeying God means following the interest of the “voiceless and powerless” (thap co be hong). Priest Sang considers Communism as contradictory to the totality of humanity and criticises:

The communist principle: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” (Vietn. Lam theo nang luc, huong theo nhu cau!) is actually a biblical reference. But communists strip off its underlying meaning […]. We know that in this world there is no absolutism, everything is relational. But with this saying they [the communists] transform themselves into saints or God-like figures who

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set new standards of what is wrong and what is rights, what is just and what unjust, what is true and what is false.

This last quote testifies, once again, that anti-communism is driven by the action- oriented concept of ‘justice and truth’. Progressive Catholic activists have integrated progressive and conservative ideas into Catholic teaching and practice, which reflects the ideational tensions and contradictions that colonialism and an authoritarian ‘socialist-oriented market economy’ have left behind. The new generation of Vietnamese Catholic activists conflicted with communist ideology and the failures of actually existing socialism. Centring on the liberation of the working poor, they re-contested concepts of justice, truth and the nation and re- inserted them into a new ideational structure that reinvigorates Catholic teaching while simultaneously de-contesting the notion of anti-Communism taken from Cold-War ideology. In so doing, religious activists engage in resistance in itself rather than for itself.

9.3 Conclusion

Despite Catholicism being rooted in Western missionary activities and the civilizing mission of French colonialism, Vietnamese progressive Christians enabled the enculturation of Western religion into the local Vietnamese culture. Catholics resisted not only against colonial dominations and socialist dogmatism in the 19th and 20th century but have encountered capitalist relations under the present- day system of a ‘socialist-oriented market economy’. This chapter has illustrated that progressive Catholicism as it manifests today is characterised by an interplay of anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian and religious practices with a proletarian and politically oppressed perspective, but also with nationalist and anti-communist concepts. It has also shown that the Catholic Church, despite being rooted in Western missionary activities and colonialism, plays an important role in the advancement of democratic change. Accordingly, the first half of the chapter illustrated that the political practice of Vietnamese Catholics is directed against concrete capital-state relations as well as against the repression of political activists. Scholars like Eyerman and Jamison

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(1991) and others have highlighted that processes of social learning and movement formation open up spaces in which social interactions and knowledge production can take place. The 2016 marine pollution and the consequential damages and losses for peasants and workers led to a number of Catholic priests and Catholic activists to carve out spaces in the Church in which they produced and shared knowledge about legal processes, documented the losses of the people due to the pollution and learned techniques of journalism ‘from below’. These spaces facilitated the filing of class-action lawsuits and the organisation of demonstrations, petitions and campaigns in solidarity with Vietnam’s political prisoners. The Formosa case gave birth to a new generation of Catholic activists that plays an important role in countering the state’s repressive apparatus. In so doing, Catholic activists exercise forms of resistance in itself. In the second half of the Chapter, I interrogated the cognitive resistance of Catholic activists that manifested around the anti-Formosa movement. This study has shown that Catholic activists put the concept ‘justice and truth’ at the center of their ideas. I revealed that the transcendental notion of ‘justice and truth’ is coupled with a standpoint that ‘puts the last person first’, that is, the working poor and oppressed. However, what kinds of different ‘justices and truths’ Catholics imagine and call for remains unclear. The adjacent concept ‘love for one’s country’ is, in turn, anchored in the concept of ‘justice and truth’ and articulates the duty to act in support of the oppressed. As a pro-stance, ‘love for one’s country’ functions as a unifier that goes beyond Catholic faith and appeals to Vietnamese collectivity, sense of belonging and individual sacrifice (e.g. by being made a political prisoner). Although ‘love for one’s country’ is closely related to nationalist and patriotic ideologies, I argued that activists re-contest the meaning of nation (or “one’s country”) and re-insert it into a new ideational structure that responds to the postcolonial context in which the former revolutionary force is now holding the position of the oppressor. In contrast to classical liberation theology (i.e. the Latin American school), the ideas of Vietnamese Catholic activists developed in opposition to Marxist and Communist ideas and in response to the failures of actually existing Socialism. Therefore, ‘anti-Communism’ manifested as the anti-stance that holds the

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Communist Party and its state apparatus responsible for social, environmental and political injustice. Communism is perceived as the ideology of the oppressor and thus, wants to be de-contested by activists. ‘Justice and truth’ are espoused by the adjacent concept ‘love for one’s country’ which is closely related to nationalism and the peripheral concept of anti- communism. This ideational re-structuring is not analytically derived, but culturally and emotionally legitimized within the given socio-political environment of Vietnamese Catholic activists. What this chapter tried to demonstrate is that Catholic activists engage in anti-capitalist practices and seek to counter the repressive state apparatus. However, their cognitive resistance re-contests the concept of nationalism and reinserts it into a new ideational structure that, at the same time, de-contests anti-communist ideology. This reflects, once again, a state of epistemological coloniality and evinces that Catholic activists are yet to trespass on hegemonic ideological systems including nationalism and anti-communist ideology in order to arrive at resistance for itself.

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Chapter 10: Conclusions

In this thesis, I considered social movements as a terrain of knowledge production, in which actors perform concrete political practices and re-formulate political ideas, while encountering different forms of structural violence and constraint. These terrains open up spaces in which hegemonic ideological systems can be both countered and reinforced. Based on this observation, I distinguished between resistance in itself and resistance for itself to denote whether political practices and underlying political ideas become system-transcending on the basis of their relationship with dominant ideological systems and apparatuses. Within the context of activism in contemporary Vietnam, I determined that various activist groups exercise resistance in itself as they respond to rather immediate forms of state repression. In so doing, they focus on the critique of state-society relations. By contrast, I conceptualised resistance for itself as the act of trespassing on the spatiality of ideological systems and apparatuses. Thus, resistance for itself centres on the relationship between structure and epistemology (a relationship I referred to as capital-epistemology relations). Based on this, I conceptualised cognitive resistance as the process of re-contesting and restructuring political concepts taken from dominant ideological systems. Cognitive resistance puts emphasis on the complex interplay of ideologies and the embodiment of structural violence. With this, I was able to grasp knowledge production in formation as well as the inherent contradictions of political concepts shaped by the material conditions and embodied experiences of a given time and space. Starting with an elaboration of the research context, I interrogated how activists embody experiences of stigmatisation, criminalisation, repression and collectivity. I then explored how distinct political practices in urban, suburban and rural areas position themselves towards state-society and capital relations and distilled three concrete political practices: online activism, rights-based resistance and religious politics. These political practices focus on the rediscovering and dissemination of subjugated knowledges through which activists perform public criticism against the state and the Vietnamese Communist Party. In so doing, they counter the existing ‘hierarchy of knowledge’ (Foucault 1976). Further to this, I

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explored how these practices are motivated by a set of re-contested political ideas that are derivative of capitalist, liberal, nationalist, statist and anti-communist ideologies. By looking into the basic morphological architecture of cognitive resistance, I identified a landscape that is characterised by complexity and dissonance. This landscape, however, is not intangible but informed by systems of ‘capitalist totality’ (Webber 2019), ‘ideological state apparatuses’ (Althusser 1971) and ‘epistemological coloniality’ (Quijano 2000; Mignolo 2002; Grosfoguel 2011). Overall, this thesis made an empirical contribution to the study of social movements in Vietnam in particular and Southern social movements and Southern epistemologies in general. It also made a theoretical contribution to the formulation of a decolonial-Marxist theoretical framework. In this concluding chapter, I will wander through my fieldwork sites, recapitulate the moments of confusion, while reflecting on the key arguments and - hopefully - scholarly novelties made in this thesis.

10.1 Researching Activism in Vietnam

Like many countries in the Global South, the Vietnamese state is neither fully authoritarian, nor democratic; neither a communist or socialist state, nor is it a purely capitalist project. It is a state that clings to the legacy of national liberation from colonial and Western forces and legitimises its authoritarian capitalist rule under the pretext of Marxism-Leninism. The ‘socialist-oriented market economy’ is a place of ‘in-betweenness’ and the ideological bedrock of a system that is subordinate to the rules of global capitalism, state authoritarianism and the continuation of neo-colonial structures. This research project was an attempt to understand how political dissent responds to the errors of a ‘socialist-oriented market economy’ and how present-day Vietnamese activists navigate through the ideological contradictions of this place of ‘in-betweenness’. And indeed, an authoritarian capitalist state that operates under the ideology of Marxism-Leninism has wide-ranging implications, as repression - according to embodied cognition theory (Cerulo 2019; Pitts-Taylor 2014; Bustamante et al. 2019) - has a significant impact on the ideas and knowledges born in a given system.

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Three empirical key findings took centre stage in this thesis. As a first key finding, I distilled three distinct political practices that characterise contemporary activism in Vietnam: online activism, rights-based resistance and religious politics. With these practices, different activist groups seek to counter what Foucault (1976) called the ‘regime of discourse’ and the rediscovering of ‘subjugated knowledges’. These subjugated knowledges are particularly concerned with democratic and human rights, labour and land rights as well as public criticism that question the political legitimacy of the Communist Party and communist ideology. Further to this, I demonstrated that these practices emerged in response to different manifestations of capital relations in urban, suburban and rural areas. Accordingly, the censoring and control of public criticism and investigative journalism led to a networked social movement of democracy activists in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City; labour exploitation in urban and suburban factories as well as land dispossession in rural areas resulted in labour and peasant activists to employ practices of rights- based resistance; and an acute increase of environmental pollution due to industrial complexes in the rural areas of Central Vietnam gave rise to a new generation of Catholic activists that advocate for the rights of the working poor and against political repression. What has not been covered in this thesis are movements and activist groups that are not considered as anti-communist dissidents by the state, such as feminists, LGBTQ and disability activist, Stalinists, Trotskyists or other self-declared communists that are not affiliated with the CPV. The second key finding responds to the hitherto “fragmentation of subject matter” in social movement studies (Barker et al. 2013; Webber 2019:10) and justifies the need to consider the connectedness of seemingly disconnected struggles. What first appeared to be a ‘non-movement’, wherein disjointed yet parallel practices initiate processes of solidarity building and trigger social change without being ideologically guided or bound to a specific organisation (Bayat 2010:4), this research demonstrated that well-educated urbanites who advocate for democratic change, in fact, join forces with peasant, labour and Catholic activists. Together they form a network that offers space to all kinds of political discussions, across generations and classes. I evinced that activists from different social backgrounds and different political groups come together under the banner of

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democracy and connect through the struggle against state authoritarianism and – however unconsciously – against ‘capitalist totality’. In view of this, I also showed that democracy, peasant, labour and Catholic activists are subjected to different forms of state repression and physical violence. The majority of activists I spoke to have experienced surveillance, arrest or imprisonment, exclusion from the labour market and alienation of their families, which led to the embodiment of continuous anxiety and doubt (Chapter 6). Mostly as a result of these circumstances, they become full-time activists who aim at the discovering of subjugated knowledges and the change of public opinion. However, some of the currently most vocal urbanite democracy activists like Thien and Nguyen Quang A have not been arrested. I surmise that this is linked to the type of critique that these protagonists perform. Unlike labour and peasant activists, whose critique is implicitly directed against capital-labour and capital-land relations, many urbanite democracy activists focus on the critique of state-society relations and advocate for a stronger civil society and political participation in parliamentary politics. Hence, capital-society, capital-state and capital-epistemology relations are rarely addressed. The third key finding concerns the epistemological level of activists. Against expectations, the protagonists of this thesis express no hostility against capitalism as an ideological system, the West and its geopolitical dominance or its colonial past. Instead, activists direct their criticism against the Communist Party – the capitalist elite leading the authoritarian state - and China’s political and economic domination over the region. By following the footsteps of democracy, labour and peasant activists, Catholic priests and former political prisoners, I learned how Vietnamese activists move, feel and live. I argued that their political practices are, in essence, anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian, but what also characterises them is their epistemological and cognitive ambiguity. The experiences of repression and constraint caused activists to equate communism with authoritarianism, while Western capitalism is associated with political freedom and democracy. Based on this, I argued that Vietnamese activists succumb to liberal, statist, nationalist and Cold-War ideologies. Unable to grasp capitalism as a global system that relies on the perpetuation of colonial relations with Global Southern countries and that, by implication, the Communist Party is forced to integrate into

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and depend on the free market economy, many activists became anti-communists. All this combined with the lack of actual democratic experiences (as highlighted in Chapter 7) shoulders both the opportunity for bottom-up political agenda setting and the trap of façade democracy. Responding to these three key findings, I derived a theoretical framework that synthesises decolonial and Marxist perspectives and suggested a morphological approach to assess the epistemological and cognitive level of Vietnamese activists.

10.1.1 Towards a decolonial-Marxist framework Decolonial scholars have expressed that we are witnessing a “counter-hegemonic use of western-centric knowledges” (Santos 2017:347). As Santos elaborates, decolonial liberation movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America inspired the rethinking and reformulation of the meanings of democracy, human rights, freedom, liberation and nationalism. Yet, these movements also demonstrated a limit to the use of these counter-hegemonic reformulations, in that they have not generated real alternatives to capitalism and its global power relations that are based on colonial relations. Hence, rather than seeking emancipatory politics and epistemologies separately in the North or in the South, I draw on Fadaee who argues for “the systematic inclusion of these [Southern] movements” and to “embrace their realities as an inseparable part of world history and transformative global processes” (Fadaee 2016:2, emphasis added). Following Sousa Santos and Fadaee, I propose that the ultimate goal should be the formulation of theories that are truly global, rather than particularly Northern or Southern. But for this, social movements scholars need to scrutinise the historical entanglement of southern epistemologies with their northern counterparts and vice versa. Many current studies of social movements, however, are informed by methodological limitations such as methodological nationalism, Westerncentrism, Third-world fundamentalism or antagonistic categories (Hanafi 2020). These methodological limitations are analytically obstructive to the extent that they disguise the interlacing of political resistance and the reproduction of ideological systems. To this end, I proposed a decolonial-Marxist theoretical framework that guided my analysis and helped to explain how structures, ideas and power relations that have developed under

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capitalism and colonialism continue to dominate Southern movements and epistemologies. The proposed decolonial-Marxist framework helped to shed light on the historical and socio-political development of political practices and ideas in Global Southern countries. The decolonial-Marxist framework I proposed includes three theoretical concepts: ‘capitalist totality’ (Webber 2019), ‘repressive and ideological state apparatuses’ (Althusser 1971) and ‘epistemological coloniality’ (Quijano 2000, Mignolo 2002, Grosfoguel 2011). Accordingly, the first and encompassing level of theoretical abstraction enters the theories of ‘capitalist totality’ and ‘ideological state apparatuses’. As pointed out earlier, Vietnamese activists cover a spectrum of issues ranging from democratic change, human rights, labour, land, environment and political prisoners. In order to capture and explain the entanglement of these seemingly disconnected struggles, Webber employs the concept of ‘capitalist totality’ and suggests that “struggles across these interrelated domains can be linked analytically” (Webber 2019:3), by which he emphasises that various strands of political resistance tie together in response to the totality of capital relations. This helped to understand the socio-political composition of Vietnamese activists as well as their choice of political practices from a macro-level perspective. In addition, the decolonial- Marxist framework applied in this thesis is informed by Louis Althusser’s concept of repressive and ideological state apparatuses. With Althusser, I was able to integrate the meso-level which emphasises the psychosocial role of institutions in the dissemination and reinforcement of ideology. Therefore, it is not only the repressive state apparatuses such as the police and military, but also the ideological bodies of state-controlled institutions including communist mass organisations and trade unions, schools, the judiciary and religious institutions that constrain and shape the activists’ political practices and ideas. The second level of theoretical abstraction dealt with micro-level processes and focussed particularly on cognitive and epistemological normativity within social movements. Based on embodied cognition theory, I considered cognitive processes in social movements as interacting with socio-political structures, which includes structural violence, such as state repression and criminalisation. Accordingly, it integrates how perceptions and thoughts of activists are interwoven

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with corporeal experiences of repression and constraint. In view of this, I drew on decolonial theorists Quijano (2000), Mignolo (2002) and Grosfoguel (2007) who argued that former colonial hierarchies continue to manifest on the epistemological level in present-day societies. Therefore, they emphasise, it is important to understand the role of standpoint in the geopolitics of knowledge production. The decolonial-Marxist framework offers a perspective, standpoint and method of analysis that counters not only the Eurocentric inclinations of Marxist analysis but combines the analysis of capital relations with the continuation of epistemological hierarchies and colonial dependencies. The proposed framework provided a level of abstraction through which I was able to make sense of certain specificities at a macro level. At the same time, the ethnographic method applied in this thesis allowed me to illustrate the socio- cultural contingencies and local specificities that are typically lost through such level of abstraction. A brief recapitulation of how I employed this decolonial- Marxist framework in relation to different political practices and ideas that prevail among the Vietnamese activist scene is provided in the following section.

10.1.2 Cognitive Resistance and the Spatiality of Ideological Systems The occurrence of concrete political ideas is difficult to pattern spatially, while thought processes themselves are perhaps impossible to measure empirically. Nonetheless, this thesis has shown that a logic of spatial distribution of political ideas and a general architecture of political concepts can be assembled together. Put simply, there is a way to understand how and why certain ideas are re-contested and reformulated, in which context and under what conditions. For this, I adapted Michael Freeden’s (1992) conceptualisation of core, adjacent and peripheral components to operationalise the spatial configuration of political ideas that accompany activists’ political practices. In so doing, I dealt with the familiar and the unfamiliar. For a social movement scholar, the political practices of Vietnamese activists seem fairly familiar to movements elsewhere in postcolonial or authoritarian contexts. The unfamiliar, however, lies in the composition of the underlying ideas and concepts that seem rather illogical from a Western academic

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point of view. There is, in fact, something fundamentally missing in Vietnam’s activist scene. That something is located in between the political and philosophical ideas and the material reality of a given time and space; and that illustrates the tensions and quasi-contingencies inherent in the configuration of political thought. In the following, I briefly recapitulate the moments of confusion and contradiction I encountered in different fieldwork sites. In Chapter 7, I raised that democracy activists in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City assess Vietnam’s political reality from a standpoint that is structured by the experience of censorship as well as the lack of democratic participation and political representation. Further to this, I identified that democracy activists combine anti- authoritarian practices with liberal, nationalist and Cold-War ideologies, which – as I interpreted – displays a state of cognitive normativity. This, in turn, can be explained through the knowledge hierarchies established along the continuation of colonial structures on an epistemological level. Although activists are aware of the fact that Western democracies are far from being perfect, they would consider U.S. American and European pressure on Vietnam’s political elite as a strategic opportunity that is favourable to their own cause of democracy. As a result, the narrative of democracy being a political project brought by the West to the non- West is reproduced and the imagination for an alternative democratic future that could be independent of Western epistemology continues to be occupied. Similarly, chapter 8 explored that labour and peasant activists encounter different manifestations of capital relations in suburban and rural spaces. Dominated by an environment of labour exploitation and land dispossession, activists engage in anti-capitalist practices and exercise forms of rights-based resistance. In doing so, they pay particular attention to the dissemination of legal knowledge about labour and land rights to other workers and peasants. Labour activists also encourage workers to form independent trade unions, while peasant activists formed democratic council structures as well as applied militant strategies against police forces. What was striking is that rights-based resisters employ the mechanisms of the law to reclaim their rights and thereby combine liberal ideas with statist ideologies, despite showing awareness of the judiciary’s repressive and ideological apparatus that disciplines rather than liberates the people. Confusing,

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therefore, is the fact that neither labour exploitation nor private ownership as a precondition for social and material inequality became subject of criticism. In Chapter 9, I engaged with the anti-Formosa movement that guided me towards the political practice of Catholic activists resembling core practices of traditional Latin American and Black liberation theology. Contrary to the traditional liberation theology that is globally known for its closeness to Marxist ideas, my research has shown that the politics of Vietnamese Catholics combines the perspective of the working class and poor with an anti-Communist pillar. Like democracy, labour and peasant activists, Vietnamese Catholics too are confronted with the rivalry of political ideas and their actual material conditions. Particularly manifest through the marine disaster in 2016 that initiated a revitalisation of Catholic resistance and its surrounding theological and political ideas, this thesis revealed that the political practice of Catholics, in fact, responds to state authoritarianism, capitalist exploitation and environmental pollution. Activists carved out spaces of the Vietnamese Church, in which they made the ongoing oppression against political activists discernible and initiated the reorganisation of a concrete political practice for Catholics to engage with the rediscovering of subjugated knowledges and to support the working poor and the politically oppressed. However, engaging with the ideational level of Catholic activists demonstrated that they seek alternative ideas independent of communism and Marxism. These ideas are instead provided by the Bible and the teachings of the Catholic priests and reinserted into a new ideational structure that is derivative of nationalist and anti-communist ideologies. Despite this, I concluded that Vietnamese Catholic activists are not a camouflage for Western coloniality but are certainly agents of politics from below. Instead, Vietnamese Catholics changed their ideological affiliation with the changing state-society relations under actually existing ‘communism’, that is, from communism as the ideology of the liberator to communism as the ideology of the oppressor and facilitator of capitalist exploitation. And although Catholic activists seek to formulate an epistemological alternative to authoritarian communism, a critique against capitalism as an ideological system is left out of direct scrutiny.81

81 I also did not look into patriarchal and religiously legitimated social hierarchies.

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Situating the data analysis provided in chapter 7 to 9 in the decolonial- Marxist framework, I argued that the configuration of contradictory political ideas is interlaced with the political practice, which is, in turn, conditioned by the material conditions and social relations of a given time and space. In light of this, it is important to understand that practices of resistance and the development of political ideas are not created in a vacuum but influenced by the authoritarian ‘local’ and the colonial-capitalist ‘global’. Therefore, I emphasise that political ideas and concepts are products and processes of collective resistance which are largely shaped by the embodied experiences of structural repression and the disciplining mechanisms of different ideological systems. As cognition responds to the conditions of the ‘cramped space’ (Thoburn 2016), actions and ideas are not always intentional or analytical, but can well be the emotional outcome of misrecognition (Papadopoulos et al. 2008:68). In light of this, I analysed that activists re-contest and re-structure political concepts taken from hegemonic ideological systems and apparatuses which demonstrates that their “conduct is not independent and autonomous, but [oftentimes] submissive and subordinate” (Gramsci 1998:327).82 To put it bluntly, Vietnamese activists and possibly other social movement actors in the Global North as well as in the Global South may reflect political awareness and the power to act and mobilise, but they also reflect an ideational subordination to ideological systems and apparatuses of capitalism, coloniality, nationalism, statism and anti- communism. In general, the empirical data generated in this research provided a better understanding of how, in which context and under what conditions certain political practices and ideas emerge. This suggests that the spatial distribution of political practices and the general architecture of political ideas can be made assessable. From here we can infer information about wider practices and thought processes

82 This concluding remark reminds on Gramsci’s notion of ‘common sense’ by which he discusses the composite and often contradictory nature of subaltern consciousness. Although Gramsci emphasises that the subaltern may indeed conceive of the world in their very own terms, he also stresses that “this same group has, for reasons of submission and intellectual subordination, adopted a conception which is not its own but is borrowed from another group … [T]his is the conception that it follows in ‘normal times’ – that is when its conduct is not independent and autonomous, but submissive and subordinate.” (Gramsci 1998:327; also cited in Nilsen and Cox 2013:75).

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and extrapolate information about a social evolution of political practice and ideas that may, at some point, trespass on the spatiality of ideological systems and apparatuses: a process I called ‘cognitive resistance’. Cognitive resistance is the missing element to develop from epistemic and cognitive normativity to cognitive liberation (see Barker and Cox 2001:6) and hence, from resistance ‘in itself’ to resistance ‘for itself’.

10.1.3 No End to Cognitive Resistance In the remaining pages of the conclusion, I devote my attention to the limitations of and absences in this thesis. This thesis has shown that Vietnamese activists are situated within a hierarchy of knowledge that keeps them subject to a codified system of capitalist-colonial ideology. I exemplified that many activists cannot evade the global capitalist-colonial belief system and are thus hindered from sidestepping the underlying power structures of capitalism and Western hegemony. Thus, my thesis shows a relative absence of resistance for itself (i.e., the rejection of ideological systems and ideological apparatuses) as well as a relative absence of decolonial voices outside the progressive Catholic Church (especially among democracy, labour and peasant activists). This infers that in order to arrive at a full and more complex picture of resistance for itself, more data that expands over a longer time period needs to be generated in future research. This is reminiscent of Nilsen and Cox (2014:38), who describe that social structures are enabling and constraining at the same time as they “provide the means through which the deployment of capacities to satisfy needs can be initiated and enacted”, while these “structures constrain how we deploy our capacities to satisfy our needs as well as the direction in and extent to which we develop new capacities”. In other words, if cognitive resistance is in fact possible, it is because the specific social structures of a given time and space provide the means to do so. At the same time, these very structures make it difficult for movements to fully trespass on the spatiality of dominant ideological systems and apparatuses and thus, to arrive at resistance for itself. To re-integrate (or reconcile with) political concepts taken from hegemonic ideological systems into a new ideational structure – even if it is ‘from below’ - is to affirm capitalist relations and epistemological coloniality.

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Future research possibilities that build on the findings of this thesis are plenty. As a result of this thesis, we know that the clustering of political concepts as a representation of activists’ cognitive and epistemological situatedness provided an analytical starting point that allowed me to operationalise the abstract level of analyses, while acknowledging the fluidity and complexity of cognition and political ideas. However, as this thesis was only able to provide a snapshot of the moment, it insufficiently recognises the real-time changes in the clustering of concepts that can happen in response to collective cultural reactions or affect to a particular political event. Further to this, I was not able to consider the cross- fertilisation between different concepts and ideational structures, nor to conceptualise and compare the spatial distances of core, adjacent and peripheral concepts in each ideational structure. One possibility of future research could focus on tracking these changes via methods of social network analysis which provides tools for a detailed visualisation into clusters. With regard to the relation of (capitalist) structures, epistemology and embodied cognition, future research would need to question whether different forms of state repression are related to the sensitivity of certain capital relations and by implication, whether different forms of state repression can be directly linked to different forms of embodied cognition. Both questions would need to be studied and empirically tested in further research. This requires the elaboration of a methodological approach to cognitive resistance, which could be done by qualitative and quantitative cross-country, cross-regime type and Global North- Global South comparison. Seeking to understand possible correlations between the embodiment of structural violence and ideological systems would offer a wider perspective on the spatiality of ideological systems and ideological apparatuses, especially in those that (due to insufficient data) have not been covered in this thesis, such as patriarchy and racism. In conclusion, to understand and translate political ideas independent of European and Western theoretical grounding has always been a challenge. But in order to be a researcher who is reflective of one’s own position in the global hierarchy of knowledge means that one must learn and unlearn the meaning of different concepts, ideas and languages in different constellations of power. And as

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a final note from a Marxist perspective, I contend that with the basic improvement of material conditions, it is not only the infrastructure of opportunities and resources that change, but the political practices and ideas of dissenting voices that are subject to transformations as well. As much as material activity conditions ideas, these ideas condition political practice too.

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Appendix

Participant Information Sheet

Developing (New) Forms of Protest in Vietnam Participant Information Sheet You are being invited to take part in a research study [as part of a student project – participants should be told about the overall aim of the research and whether it will be for a degree]. Before you decide, it is important for you to understand why the research is being done and what it will involve. Please take time to read the following information carefully and discuss it with others if you wish. Please ask if there is anything that is not clear or if you would like more information. Take time to decide whether or not you wish to take part. Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Who will conduct the research? This research will be conducted by myself, Anh-Susann Pham Thi, a PhD research student at the University of Manchester. My contact information is at the end of the leaflet.

What is the purpose of the research? The research aims to explore forms of protest, resistance and collective action in urban spaces in Vietnam. I hope to find out more about the everyday lives, background and political motivations of protesters in Vietnam.

Why have I been chosen? You have been chosen because you participated in at least one of the recent protests in Vietnam (in 2016 or 2018) or because you identify as an activist in Vietnam.

What would I be asked to do if I took part? If you decide to take part, we will set up a face-to-face interview that will last about one to three hours. This interview will be informal and address experiences you may have had before, during and after the protests. I would also like to discuss what you think the protests were about, why you participated in them and what you do in terms of political participation beyond these protests. You do not have to answer any question you would prefer not to; it is up to you what you choose to tell me. The interview will be audio-recorded but you can request that this be paused or stopped, or that the interview be ended, at any time without an explanation.

What happens to the data collected? The audio-recordings of interviews will be transcribed into text and analyzed. The interview text will be anonymized and identifying information removed. Personal information such as your contact details will be filed securely and separately from your interview. Anonymized quotes may be used in the PhD thesis and resulting publications.

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This research is partly exploring the links between personal background, working conditions, everyday life and political motivations in Vietnam. Therefore, general descriptions of class, political economy and political ideologies may be used in the thesis and future publications. No contact information, real names or place of work will be used in the PhD thesis or resulting publications, unless you give additional verbal and recorded consent. We can also discuss any other questions you may have before you give your verbal consent.

How is confidentiality maintained? Confidentiality will be maintained by storing all the interviews on a secure TRESOIT server with password protection and end-to-end encryption. Your contact information will not be linked to your interview as this will be anonymized and stored in a separate file on a separate University of Manchester server. Interviews will be collected and analyzed by me and discussed with my supervisors in private with no third-party involvement.

What happens if I do not want to take part or if I change my mind? If you decide to take par,t you are still free to withdraw without giving a reason and without detriment to yourself.

Will I be paid for participating in the research? No. You will not be paid for participating.

What is the duration of the research? The study involves an interview of one hour to three hours.

Where will the research be conducted? The research will be conducted in Vietnam (Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Nha Trang and Binh Thuan Province) between September 1, 2018 and September 1, 2019. Meetings with the researcher will occur at your convenience in public places such as quiet coffee shops, restaurants, your private shops, your home during hours that are most convenient to you.

Will the outcomes of the research be published? The research may be published in academic journals and books. Fully anonymized quotes will be used in publications.

Disability and Barring Service (DBS) Check (if applicable) If there are any complaints or issues related to the research, your first point of contact should be the researcher. My contact details are as follows: [email protected]

Your second points of contacts are my supervisors. The supervisors’ details are: [email protected] [email protected]

If you wish to make a formal complaint or if you are not satisfied with the response you have gained from the researcher, please contact

Research Governance and Integrity Manager The Research Governance and Integrity Manager, Research Office, Christie Building, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, U.K.

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[email protected]

(+44) 161 275 2674 (+44) 161 275 2046

How can I contact you? If you have queries about the study or if you are interested in taking part, then please feel free to contact me at [email protected] or call 09674 08621, so I can answer your questions and/or we can schedule an interview.

Thank you for your time. This project has been reviewed and approved by the University of Manchester, School of Social Sciences, Ethics Committee. Ref no: 2018-4416-696, Date approved:20/08/2018.

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List of Interview Participants

No. Date of Pseudonym Location Gender Religion Group Affiliation Interview 1 Oct 18 Chi Bien Hoa, South F Evangelic Factory worker, sympathises with labour activism Vietnam 2 Oct 18 Diep HCMC F secular independent film maker, civil society activist 3 Dec 18 Dong HCMC F former Catholic independent Marxist, student 4 Dec 18 Bach HCMC M Catholic Human rights and democracy activist, musician, former prisoner of conscience 5 Dec 18 Bien HCMC M secular student, no group affiliation, independent Marxist and anarchist 6 Dec 18 Pham Doan HCMC F secular Independent Author, human rights and democracy Trang* activist 7 Dec 18 Giang Bien Hoa F Evangelic Protester against SEZ and cyber security law 8 Dec 18 Ha My HCMC F unknown Member of network of independent bloggers 9 Dec 18 Cach Tai Ninh, South M Cao Dai Religious leader Vietnam 10 Dec 18 Cuong Cu Chi, South M Catholic Former political prisoner Vietnam 11 Dec 18 Chinh HCMC M former Member of Brotherhood for Democracy Buddhist, now Catholic 12 Jan 19 Danh Can Tho, South M Hoa Hao Former prisoner of conscience (25 years), former Vietnam Buddhist Congressman of Republic of Vietnam, religious activist (Hao Hoa Buddhism) 13 Jan 19 Dat Can Tho, South M Hoa Hao Former political prisoner, activist for religious Vietnam Buddhist freedom, democracy and human rights

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14 Jan 19 Lien HCMC F Catholic Independent blogger and author, former political prisoner, activist against land grabbing 15 Jan 19 Dong HCMC M Catholic Independent Blogger, former political prisoner, activist against land grabbing 16 Jan 19 Duy HCMC M secular Journalist, member of group Le Hieu Dang 17 Jan 19 Huy Bangkok M Catholic Independent labour activist, former political prisoner 18 Jan 19 Hoai HCMC M Evangelic Relative of leading anti-Formosa activist who is currently imprisoned 19 Jan 19 Suong HCMC F Catholic Civil society activist 20 Jan 19 Thu HCMC F Catholic Daughter in law of imprisoned democracy and human rights activist 21 Jan 19 Hoang HCMC M Evangelic Priest, religious activist, democracy and human rights activist 22 Jan 19 Nguyen Hanoi M secular Independent journalist, translator, blogger Quang A* 23 Jan 19 Thuy Hanoi F Buddhist Former democracy activist 24 Jan 19 Le Dinh Dong Tam, North M secular leading activist against land grabbing Kinh* Vietnam 25 Jan 19 Hai Dong Tam M secular Le Dinh Kinh’s son in law, activist against land grabbing 26 Jan 19 Hieu Dong Tam M secular Dissident poet 27 Jan 19 Xuan Hanoi F Buddhist Founding member of "Prisoner of Conscience Foundation 50K" 28 Jan 19 Dao Hanoi F Catholic Independent activist-lawyer, pro-democracy and human rights 29 Jan 19 Hoang Hanoi M unknown Member of "Prisoner of Conscience Foundation 50K"

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30 Jan 19 Thuc Duong Noi, North M Buddhist Peasant activist against land grabbing Vietnam 31 Jan 19 Hanh Duong Noi F unknown Peasant activist against land grabbing 32 Jan 19 Hien Hoa Binh, North F Buddhist Peasant activist against land grabbing Vietnam 33 Jan 19 Lap Hanoi M unknown No-U Football group, democracy and human rights activist 34 Jan 19 Le Hanoi M unknown Independent activist, photographer, former soldier 35 Feb 19 Anh Chi* Hanoi M unknown Independent activist, journalist and member of No- U FC Saigon 36 Feb 19 Minh Hanoi M Buddhist Activist for freedom of political prisoners 37 Feb 19 Ngai Hanoi M Catholic Online activist, co-creator of YouTube Channel, former member of channel CHTV 38 Feb 19 Hao Hanoi F Catholic Peasant activist against land grabbing 39 Feb 19 Nghi Hanoi M secular Peasant activist against land grabbing 40 Feb 19 Dinh Hanoi M secular Communist Party member, former policemen, blogger and critic against land grabbing 41 Feb 19 Thien Hanoi, Da Nang M Secular, later Independent activist, civil society and anti-Formosa Catholic 42 Feb 19 Nhan Hanoi M Catholic Member Brotherhood for Democracy, former political prisoner 43 Feb 19 Hung Hanoi M unknown Creator of CHTV YouTube Channel, independent journalist 44 Feb 19 Priest Phuc Nghe An M Catholic Priest, anti-Formosa 45 Feb 19 Priest Sang Nghe An M Catholic Priest, anti-Formosa 46 Feb 19 Priest Ha Tinh M Catholic Priest, anti-Formosa Thanh 47 Feb 19 Toan Ha Tinh M Catholic Teacher, anti-Formosa

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48 Mar 19 Kieu Vung Tau, South W Buddhist Human rights, democracy activist, against land Vietnam grabbing, former political prisoner 49 Apr 19 Nam Hanoi F Secular Independent labour activist 50 Apr 19 Mai HCMC F Catholic Independent labour activist 51 Jul 19 Kim Hanoi F Catholic Environmental activist, GreenTrees 52 Jul 19 Xanh Hanoi M Catholic Environmental activist, GreenTrees, filmmaker

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Sample Extract of an Interview Transcription

Interviewer ASPT: Can I please ask you to introduce yourself and talk about your activities, which topics are important to you?

Interviewee X: I am _____, member of Network for Bloggers in Vietnam. I am fighting for human rights in Vietnam. I started to learn about and get active in 2005 until today. Once I realised that the Vietnamese system is a dictatorial system, I also chose to get involved in the human rights activism. When I was young, I also participated in different groups. But once i grew up I realized that the theories and the reality are not the same. And slowly Ilearned about human rights and realized that Vietnamese people lack many basic human rights.

Interviewer ASPT: Can you please tell me how your forms of political activism look like? What is your role in the Network for Bloggers?

Interviewee X: In the group Mang Luoi Blogger, I, Nguyen Quynh and Lien we were the official representatives of the group. We struggle for freedom of expression, freedom of speech and the freedom of the press. And always push for the free voice of the people. We are a network, and we are not only active through our writings, but we have campaigns (chien dich) that demand human rights and the freedom of speech and prisoners of conscience.

Interviewer ASPT: Can you give me an example of the campaigns you were involved?

Interviewee X: At the beginning, our roots, we started with the campaign "cong nhan tu do"/"freedom for workers" in 2013. After that we had other campaigns, we demanded the right to know "Chung toi muon biet". These campaigns demanded the government to be transparent about their political actions that refer to the society. One of the biggest campaigns was in 2015, "human rights campaign". We campaigned for human rights in Vietnam and especially the rights for prisoners of conscience. many people supported and joined our campaign both within and outside the country. During Formosa we supported the victims of Formosa too.

Interviewer ASPT: How did you get politically involved during the Formosa case?

Interviewee X: In the Formosa Movement we had some members of the network who went to the affected areas and gather information together with Vietnamese citizens. We also interviewed victims of Formosa and shared their losses. I think the Formosa movement affected the Vietnamese people in a very direct and visible way. It influenced the population that's why the people in Vietnam mobilized and activated very smoothly and easily and did not interfere in politics very much. Formosa is a foreign company, and the citizens did not directly address the Vietnamese government. It demanded the government, as the intermediary between the company and the citizens, to take sides, and either protect the Vietnamese people or Formosa. And who they sided with was clear, especially after the demonstrations.

[…]

Interviewer ASPT: Can you say something about the leadership of the Formosa movement?

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Interviewee X: In terms of leadership, especially in the case of Formosa, a number of priests and bishops had some sort of leadership role, because they have the voice to convince the people to become active. In the diocese Vinh, bishop Nguyen Thai Hop raised his voice. And in other areas, they don't raise their voice. And when a bishop raises his voice, the parishioners are listening to him. in Saigon for example, the bishop did not raise his voice for the Formosa case, but some Churches have priests who concern about politics and society in Vietnam, the environment. They still raise this topics and issues during their prayers. However, this is not the case for any diocese, but it is usually due to the initiative of the individual priest or bishop.

Interviewer ASPT: What role plays Buddhism?

Interviewee X: Contemporary Buddhism in Vietnam is to a large extent controlled by the government in Vietnam. These people who are monks who are related to the government (monks: su tru tri) are called An ninh ton giao, religious security police.

Interviewer ASPT: Would you say that the anti-Formosa movement embraced a number of other political issues other than the environment and the steel factory? Or, to ask differently: Do you think that the Anti-Formosa movement covered up other political issues that citizens and activists were able to raise through criticising the Formosa factory?

Well, I can speak of the South of Vietnam, I cannot speak of the North, but in 2007/2008 when the first demonstrations against China took place, out of 10 people who participated in those demonstrations, at least 6 people started to understand the the essence of this government. They of course understand that the Chinese businesses, handlings (the things they do) are not independent of the Vietnamese government. But that there must have been certain agreements between both governments. They protest against China, but they KNOW that the Vietnamese government is supporting it. And they want to put pressure on the VN government and demand to choose sides: protecting the VN population or China.

Interviewer ASPT: The different activist groups in Vietnam, you know them better than I of course, do they have different strategies and tactics, different ways to be politically engaged? For example, I can imagine there are activists who use art, others use education, others abide by the law and some break the law. Could you please explain what the general picture looks like?

Interviewee X: nowadays, we have a lot of groups that is active in societal issues. But I think every field there is a lack of personnel. This is why I support all social groups that is using non-violent, peaceful means of resistance. No matter in which field. Being just a blogger who criticises, is good. Or there is a concrete action campaign that aims at changing the society, or you can follow the tactic of civil disobedience ( Bất tuân dân sự ), that is violating the law in order to fight against the inequality that comes with this law. Or you can be active in the topic of law, that is analysing and criticising the international law. So, in general, I support all tactics that are non-violent. But I can see that in all groups, in all fields of social action there is a lack of members and personnel. The more we are, the better it is. But there are also violent groups, but no one knows who they are.

Interviewer ASPT: In what sense are they violent?

Interviewee X: They for example throw bombs into police stations. Their aim is to fight against the police. And I don't support this, but if I would have the chance to talk to them, I still would because I want to learn and to know why they choose this path. Especially, because there are many other tactics of resistance that we can use. And to be honest, many

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of them are just normal people who are disillusioned with the government and angry. The citizens of our country, who don't really know much about our laws and thus, our rights, they are easily drawn into these violent means of resistance. This is an instinct, if you fight me, I fight back. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. But those who have the knowledge about non-violence, they need popular power, they have to write about their ideas and share what they know. This way at some point they will also reach those one who sided with violent means of repression. I think those people who use violent means, they don't have the knowledge about non-violent means. They don't know what they can do, and that peaceful resistance can change things and reveal the good and the wrong, and that non- violence really can fight against injustice.

Interviewer ASPT: Can you talk about the June 10th protests?

Interviewee X: On 10 June I did not go on protest. I did know that this is going to happen and that police will surround my house. around 20-30 people were surrounding my house. But i knew that it won't be important whether there will be my face or not. But I was curious who were the people that were protesting. The June protest were massive and very powerful. The state could not control the masses. The police beat up the protesters heavily in the centres of the protest places. The June protest was not organized by one or a number of organizations.

[…]

I printed many shirts, Anti-China shirts. And many many many people asked for those shirts. I had not enough shirts to distribute. I did not take money for this of course. And I printed shirts for the SEZs as well. Within hours only people commented on my FB page and asked for those shirts. The protests took place mainly in Hoang Van Thu park and in district one. I heard about the protests online on Facebook and also in the state media. But I knew that even if we reactionaries don't go on protest, this demonstration will still happen. Because the people know! Sometimes you think, I am the only one who thinks critical of the government. But on those days, you know that the citizens know as well.

[…]

Interviewer ASPT: Why do you think China is such an important issue to activists? How or why do Vietnamese citizens and activists feel threatened by China?

Interviewee X: China is geographically close to Vietnam, that’s why we feel China’s power very closely, very directly. The Communists are always working indirectly and acting in their interests only, never in the interest of the people. China is throwing their waste to Vietnam export their contaminated food to us. The environment, the Mekong Delta is barricaded with a dam that causes flooding the land. The Communists don't stand with us people. […]

Interviewer ASPT: According to your view, what does Vietnam need to change socially and politically?

The future of Vietnamese politics, I think we first have to change the dictatorial system, a dictatorial Party and need a multiplicity of Parties. People have to get their right to vote. This must happen first in the field of politics. […]

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Interviewer ASPT: What is the role of workers for democratic change? Workers are the base of any economy, right? Would you say workers have enough power and knowledge to lead the struggle for social transformation?

Interviewee X: First of all, the workers in Vietnam need an independent trade union. Second, they have to get the knowledge about their rights, labour rights. And they have to be educated. It is not that they are only producing the products for Vietnam, but they have to understand their value and their rights. Only than they will have a good position in any future society. A worker's Party would be one example to compete with other Parties. But this accounts for every class in a society. Every class has to learn a lot, has to study by themselves. The workers, however, have no time to rest, they work at least 10 hours a day and don't have time and energy to struggle for societal issues. if they have any time left, they will use the time to relief their stress a bit. They don't have time to study. The workers are listening to the radio for example. Many are listening radio all day because it makes them less stressed and less tired. And if we know how, we can make a channel for them and in this channel push knowledge in the language of the workers and will learn very fast. However, this is very difficult because the results will come maybe only in 10 years. But workers are large in numbers, but they don't have the energy to popularize/universalize new ideas ( phổ cập ý kiến mới ). Workers are not disinterested, alienated (tho o). But many activists who fight for the workers’ rights have not yet analysed the realities of the workers thoroughly enough. They have to weigh what is helping them to gain immediate achievements ad what not. Of course, they can only see the immediate gains, not the long- term gains. We have to analyse and learn about the worker's real interests. What they really need and many worker's themselves know that many activists are instrumentalized for political demands.

Interviewer ASPT: Finally, I would like to ask you, why you became an activist?

Interviewee X: For me it is important to have in mind and struggle for the long-term goals. When I started to learn that there are activists fighting for democracy, human rights and freedom in Vietnam, I slowly tried to learn about them and got involved with the time. And I understand that every society that has democracy, human rights etc that these societies not just happened the way they happened, but that there has been a struggle behind everything. Of course, I am scared, but when I got my children, I understood that talking is not enough. I teach my kids not by many words but by my actions. Be responsible towards your family is part of being an activist for the society and the other way around.

Interviewer ASPT: Thank you very much.

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