Thayer Vietnam: Bauxite Mining Controversy

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Background Briefing: Bauxite Mining Controversy in Vietnam: Perfect Storm? Carlyle A. Thayer August 19, 2009

[client name deleted]: Reference: Carlyle A. Thayer, ‘Vietnam: Inside Asia’s Emerging Tiger’, Presentation to Joint Seminar of the Australian Institute of International Affairs and the Australia Vietnam Business Council, The Glover Cottages, Sydney, August 11, 2009 Question: Could you please clarify what your ‘perfect storm’ slide at the end of your Power Point presentation means exactly? Is this combination of problems damaging Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung enough to kill a second term for him? Are there any other implications? Answer: In my talk I went out on a limb to suggest that Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung may not be reappointed at the next party congress in January 2011. But I also meant 'perfect storm' in another sense there are new challenges to the partystate legitimacy: (a) nationalism vis-à-vis China is no longer the preserve of the party but of the informed public and (b) the party-state's prerogative to set major development projects has also come under challenge. In short, challenges based on human rights and religious freedom have and will continue to be an insufficient base to undermine the legitimacy of the party-state. But challenges based on competence and nationalism/patriotism are more potent. I tempered this analysis by stating that one-party rule would continue for some time and changes were likely to be generated internally within the party itself. Question: Is this bauxite mining project the first time we've really seen this new challenge in Vietnam? Also, as you point out, it's united a wide array of groups and people, from Vo Nguyen Giap to Thich Quang Do to National Assembly delegates like Nguyen Minh Thuyet. How unique is that? Answer: The bauxite protests are qualitatively and quantitatively different from what has gone on before. There have been protests over land rights issues in villages, protests over the development of golf courses, and a self-generated movement on Agent Orange. The latter because so prominent and threatening to relations with the United States that it was co-opted by the state. There have been local protests over pollution by foreign firms and wildcat strikes in the garment industry. And most explosive of all, the peasant mass protests in Thai Binh in late 1997 which turned violent. But none of these reached out to such an influential constituency of regime elites and none had a key figure such as General Giap to speak out. Quite often issues are raised in the National Assembly, but this time the government conceded that the National Assembly could exercise a monitoring role.

2 I should say that although the government's legitimacy (defined as moral authority) came under challenge, the way the government has reacted has gone some of the way to assuage public concerns. But the example of the bauxite controversy has been set as a possible template when other issues in future.