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Vietnam’s Online Petition Movement

In July 2014, sixty-one members of the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) posted online an open letter to the party leadership and all of its members. While decrying the Party’s response to China’s bullying in the South China Sea, the letter called on the Party to “leave off from the mistaken path of socialism for a definitive change to the path of the people and democracy” (Para 6). It was a bold statement for a country where public expressions of opposition to the authoritarian regime are strongly discouraged and sometimes harshly punished. Later in October, another online statement by a new generation of self-declared independent “civil society organizations” declared their support for prodemocracy demonstrators in Hong Kong and made an appeal to Vietnamese youth to take on a similar struggle at home. These initiatives were examples of a new movement in Vietnam of using online petitions to publicize social grievances while also directly or indirectly promoting liberal democratic ideas and challenging authoritarianism. The online petition movement is a recent development in Vietnam’s domestic politics. It has helped generate open and critical commentary on the most controversial topics of the moment, in contrast to the state’s tendencies to hide and censor them. In doing so, it has also advocated for liberal constitutional freedoms of speech, assembly and private property, rule of law, and opposition to party dictatorship. Furthermore, the people leading the petitions have included many renowned public figures — loosely referred