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.”

A Defiant Map-Hunter Stakes Vietnam’s Claims in the South China Sea

"Vietnam’s top leaders are slaves to Beijing" -- Tran Duc Anh Son
By MIKE IVES

Tran Duc Anh Son, a historian in Danang, Vietnam, says his government is afraid to use the records he uncovered to challenge Beijing. “That’s why we have many documents that are kept in the dark.”

DANANG, Vietnam — Eight years ago, officials in Danang asked Tran Duc Anh Son to travel the world in search of documents and maps that support Vietnam’s territorial claims in the South China Sea.
He did, and he concluded that Vietnam should challenge China’s activities in waters around some of the sea’s disputed islands, as the Philippines successfully did in a case that ended last year. 

But his bosses would not be moved.
“They always say to me, ‘Mr. Son, please keep calm,’” he said during an interview at his home in Danang, the coastal city where he is the deputy director of a state-run research institute. 

“‘Don’t talk badly about China.’”
Vietnam’s top leaders are “slaves” to Beijing, he added, as torrential rain beat against his windows. 

“That’s why we have many documents that are kept in the dark.”
Dr. Son’s mission, and his bosses’ demurrals, are signs of the times in Vietnam, which has always lived in China’s shadow but also harbors a fierce independent streak.

China’s assertiveness in the sea has caused deep anxiety for Vietnam, which regards territorial sovereignty as a sacred principle, and emboldened the government to promote claims over the disputed Spratly and Paracel archipelagos more aggressively.
Yet even as evidence for such claims piles up, Hanoi has been reluctant to weaponize it. 

China, after all, is Vietnam’s next-door neighbor and largest trading partner, as well as an increasingly assertive hegemon that is building a string of military outposts on reclaimed land in the sea.
Everyone in Vietnam, “government and nongovernment, has the same sense that the Chinese should stay away from those islands,” said Liam C. Kelley, a professor of history at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who has studied the roots of the relationship between the two countries.
But he said the recent surge of nationalism over China’s expansive vision raises a thorny question: “How do you position yourself as defending Vietnam from China when China is basically your backbone?”

Dr. Son in his office with a historical map of the South China Sea — or the East Vietnam Sea, as his government calls it. 

Chinese dynasties ruled present-day Vietnam for a millennium, leaving cultural legacies but also a trail of resentment. 

Beijing helped Hanoi defeat the French to win independence in 1954 but also invaded northern Vietnam in 1979, setting off a brief border war.
In 2014, anti-China sentiment flared when 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.
Interest in territorial sovereignty has long been “in the heart” of the Vietnamese people, said a senior Vietnamese legal expert in Hanoi, who insisted on anonymity to discuss a sensitive political matter. But the oil rig crisis has greatly magnified the interest.
China has controlled the Paracels since 1974, when it seized them from the former government of South Vietnam in a naval clash. 

It has bolstered its foothold in the Spratlys recently through an island-building campaign.
Chinese officials and scholars seek to justify Beijing’s claim to sovereignty over waters that encircle both archipelagos — represented by what they now call the nine-dash line — by citing maps and other evidence from the 1940s and ’50s.
But some in Vietnam, like Dr. Son, are trying to marshal their own historical records — even if they may have little power to dissuade China.
Dr. Son, 50, and other Vietnamese scholars say the Nguyen dynasty, which ruled present-day Vietnam from 1802 to 1945, wielded clear administrative control over the Paracels by sending survey parties and even planting trees on them as a warning against shipwrecks. 

This happened decades before imperial or post-revolutionary China showed any interest in the islands, they say.
“The Chinese know very clearly they never mentioned the Hoang Sa or the Truong Sa in their history books or historical maps,” Dr. Son said, using the Vietnamese terms for the Paracels and Spratlys.
By contrast, he said, he found evidence in more than 50 books — in English, French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese — that a Nguyen-era Vietnamese explorer planted the royal flag in the Paracels in the 1850s.
International arbitration over territorial sovereignty can only proceed if both parties agree, analysts say, and China has shown no interest in that.

Fishermen preparing to go to sea from Danang. A Chinese oil rig towed into waters nearby provoked a tense maritime standoff in 2014 and set off anti-Chinese riots. 

Still, the frenzy of interest in Vietnam’s maritime history since about 2012 has produced a buzz in the state-run news media — and a few unexpected heroes.
One is Tran Thang, a Vietnamese-American mechanical engineer who lives in Connecticut. 

He said by telephone that he had donated 153 maps and atlases to the Danang government in 2012 after ordering them on eBay for about $30,000.
Among Vietnamese academics who study the government’s territorial claims in what it calls the East Vietnam Sea, Dr. Son is among the most prominent.
He was born in 1967 in Hue, about 50 miles northwest of Danang, and his father was killed in 1970 while fighting for South Vietnam. 

“I only remember the funeral,” he said.
He grew up poor, he said, but excelled at Hue University, where his history thesis explored Nguyen-era porcelain. 

He later directed Hue’s fine arts museum and led a successful bid to make its imperial citadel a Unesco World Heritage site.
As a student poking around dusty archives, Dr. Son said, he would photocopy maps that highlighted Vietnamese territorial claims in the South China Sea. 

So when top officials in Danang asked him in 2009 to pursue the same research on the government’s behalf, he said, he leapt at the chance.
“I’m always against the Chinese,” he said by way of explanation. 

Chinese scholars have been conducting rival research for years with support from Beijing, he added, and he sees his own work as payback.
Danang officials allowed Dr. Son to recruit a seven-member support team, he said, but did not fund his international travel. 

He said he paid for some of the research that he has conducted since 2013 across Europe and the United States, where he was a Fulbright scholar at Yale University, out of pocket.
Dr. Son, the deputy director at the Danang Institute for Socio-Economic Development, said he still held out hope that Vietnam would take China to court.
But he also said he was not holding his breath and had little say in the outcome.
“I’m not political,” he added. 

“I’m a scientist.”