Chinese Satellite

Vietnam’s Communist Party Ousts Historian Who Criticized Its China Policy

By Mike Ives

The historian Tran Duc Anh Son said that Vietnam has irrefutable claims to islands in the South China Sea that China claims as its own.

A prominent Vietnamese historian who criticized his government for not doing more to challenge Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea has been ousted from Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party over comments he made on Facebook.
The political purge of Tran Duc Anh Son, an expert on Vietnam’s claims in the South China Sea, is a rare window into how the party handles dissent among its rank-and-file members.
It may also underline the sensitivities around Vietnam’s handling of its relationship with China, its largest trading partner and former imperial occupier.
Vietnam’s state-run news media reported last week that Dr. Son, who is in his early 50s and worked for years at a state-run research institute in the central city of Danang, was expelled for posting "false" information and violating a code that governs party members’ behavior.
“I knew this day would come,” Dr. Son said in an interview over a messaging service.
He closed his Facebook account this week, saying he needed more time to work on book projects and transition to a new job as the director of a publishing house.
Dr. Son said the Facebook comment that got him in the most trouble was a short question he posed last September under a cartoon that obliquely criticized the government.
A character in the cartoon said: “Seventy-three years ago they corralled people to a rally to listen to the Declaration of Independence. Seventy-three years later they forbid people to gather to celebrate Independence Day.”
That was an apparent reference to a famous 1945 speech by Ho Chi Minh in which the Vietnamese dictator declared his country’s independence from France, and an oblique criticism of the Communist Party’s current leaders, who have escalated repression of political dissidents.
Dr. Son said the question he wrote underneath the cartoon — “Is this true?” — prompted a monthslong investigation by Danang’s Communist Party Central Committee.
He said he was also investigated for a Facebook comment — “How have things become this bad?” — that he left under a post featuring two articles in the state-run news media about the country’s education minister.
Even though many Vietnamese have low opinions of the Communist Party, its members generally avoid criticizing it for fear of repercussions that would affect their livelihoods, said Mai Thanh Son, a senior researcher at the state-affiliated Institute of Social Sciences in central Vietnam.
“The expulsion of Tran Duc Anh Son is a thoughtless decision,” he said.
“It’s like releasing a tiger into the forest, and it contributes to stripping away the cowardly face of the ruling apparatus that the party represents.”
In January, a cybersecurity law took effect in Vietnam that requires technology companies with users there to set up offices and store data in the country, and disclose user data to the authorities without a court order.
Vietnam’s new cybersecurity law was meant to let the government better surveil its critics on Facebook, the country’s most popular social media platform.
Facebook declined to comment on the record about Dr. Son’s account.
The Foreign Ministry did not respond to emailed questions about Dr. Son’s expulsion from the party, including whether his criticism of Vietnam’s South China Sea policies had played a role.
Vietnam has clashed repeatedly at sea with China, which claims most of the waterway as its own. Notably, in 2014 a state-owned Chinese oil company towed an oil rig to waters near Danang, provoking a tense maritime standoff and anti-Chinese riots at several Vietnamese industrial parks. The Communist Party fears a repeat of such anti-China-fueled Vietnamese nationalism, because critics question why the government does not take a harder line against Beijing.
Chinese officials and scholars seek to justify Beijing’s claim to sovereignty over South China Sea waters that encircle the disputed Paracel and Spratly archipelagos by citing maps and other evidence from the 1940s and ’50s.
But Dr. Son and other Vietnamese historians argue that the Nguyen dynasty, which ruled present-day Vietnam from 1802 to 1945, wielded clear administrative control over the Paracels, decades before post-revolutionary China showed any interest in them.
Dr. Son is a former director of a fine arts museum in Hue, Vietnam’s imperial capital, and a specialist in Nguyen-era porcelain.
He developed an interest in Vietnam’s territorial claims as a student poking around archives of old maps and documents.
In 2009, officials in Danang asked him to pursue his research on Vietnam’s maritime claims on the government’s behalf.
He subsequently spent years traveling the world in search of material, including as a Fulbright scholar at Yale University.
Dr. Son has said the historical evidence of Vietnam’s maritime claims is so irrefutable that the government should mount a legal challenge to China’s activities in waters around some of the sea’s disputed islands, as the Philippines successfully did in a case that ended in 2016.
“I’m always against the Chinese,” he told The New York Times during an interview in 2017.
But he said at the time that Vietnam’s top leaders were “slaves” to Beijing who preferred to keep the old maps and other documents hidden.
“They always say to me, ‘Mr. Son, please keep calm,’” he said.
“‘Don’t talk badly about China.’”
The city of Danang, where Dr. Son lives and works, once had a reputation for its powerful, family-based networks that were willing to ignore dictates from the central government, said Bill Hayton, an author of books about Vietnam and the South China Sea and an associate fellow at Chatham House, a research institute based in London.
But Mr. Hayton noted that Vietnam’s current leadership, led by the Communist Party’s general secretary, Nguyen Phu Trong, has lately disciplined some key Danang political figures, including firing Nguyen Xuan Anh, the head of the city’s Communist Party Central Committee.
Even though Danang officials presumably supported and financed Dr. Son’s research, he added, “the current Vietnamese leadership does not want to rock the boat with Beijing and seems determined to keep a lid on criticism of China’s actions in the South China Sea.”