A reminder to customers at an Internet cafe in Thu Duc, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam warning against accessing "depraved" or "reactionary" materials online. (Photo via)
Advertisement
Today, messages range from the humdrum—"Don’t forget to pay your taxes," for example—to the deification of the government and its leaders. It's not quite 1984, but it's not exactly normal, either—imagine being woken up every day with lectures on socialism and warnings of "social evils" rather than building work that seems designed specifically to fuck with you. Perhaps equally irritating, but way more likely to bum you out for the entire day. “We generally try to ignore the speakers,” says street vendor Hong Minh in the capital’s Old Quarter. “But they're really annoying, so it’s pretty difficult.”
Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung with former President George Bush in Hanoi. (Photo via)
Broadcast media (again, strictly licensed) is also becoming choked. Already beamed with a 30-minute delay to ensure that "sensitive information" can be purged, CNN and BBC news channels disappeared entirely from many TV screens last month as cable providers responded to a new government law decreeing that a large amount of content on foreign channels must be subtitled into Vietnamese. The translation and editing would be conducted by an agency licensed by the government, checking to make sure the content is "appropriate to the people's healthy needs and does not violate Vietnamese press law". So censorship, effectively.
Advertisement
And while many Vietnamese youths simply ignore the media, those who do seek out news are faced with a print media lacking not only in teeth, but eyes, ears and any other tools they might have once used to report injustice. Vietnam ranked 172 out of 179 countries in the 2013 Reporters Without Borders index of press freedom, and it’s easy to see why.
Advertisement
Advertisement