Cultural Studies

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcus20

From hope to haunt: digital activism and the

cultural politics of hope(lessness) in late-socialism

Giang Nguyen-Thu

To cite this article: Giang Nguyen-Thu (2022): From hope to haunt: digital activism
and the cultural politics of hope(lessness) in late-socialism, Cultural Studies, DOI:
10.1080/09502386.2022.2066146

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2022.2066146

Published online: 20 Apr 2022.

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CULTURAL STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2022.2066146

RESEARCH ARTICLE

From hope to haunt: digital activism and the cultural

politics of hope(lessness) in late-socialism
Giang Nguyen-Thu
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland, Brisbane,
Australia

ABSTRACT
This article explores the formation and diminishment of collective hope in
Vietnam by tracing the Facebook-based circulation, intensification, and
attenuation of affective engagement with the Đồng Tâm land dispute in
Hanoi from April 2017 to September 2020. The dispute enables us to
conceptualize online activism as essentially fueled by collective embodiment
of hope, understood as temporalized openness toward the ‘not-yet’ that
stretches beyond pre-existing agendas. The magnitude of online activism
depends not on the network itself but on how new media facilitate an
attunement between the public and the latent force of subaltern dissensus.
When such connection was disrupted, political hope faded when it was
enveloped by endless crises habituated by the network. With implications in
Vietnam and beyond, the article highlights hope as a political affect and a
political capacity indispensable in social struggles, which enables us to
embrace instead of enclosing precarious possibilities of change.

KEYWORDS Digital hope; digital activism; activist spontaneity; postsocialism; digital temporality;
Vietnamese digital media

Setting the scence of Đồng Tâm

Field note, 15 April 2017
Tuấn entered the kitchen when I was spoon-feeding our little son some por-
ridge for dinner. As Tuấn began talking in the casual tone of a partner-
coming-home-after-a-long-working-day, I detected some contained restless-
ness in his unusual eagerness to start a conversation. ‘Have you heard? At
the outskirt of Hanoi, villagers have taken hostage a bunch of police officers
and poured gasoline around as a burning threat.’ He went on before I could
gather myself to demand more details: ‘At Đồng Tâm, Mỹ Đức, Hà Tây. Land
dispute, again.’ Reaching for our son and putting the little boy on his laps,
Tuấn then brought to my view a photo (Figure 1) on his iPhone’s Facebook
app. About twenty young policemen in dark green uniforms were shown
sitting docilely against a yellow wall, while dozens of non-uniformed people

CONTACT Giang Nguyen-Thu t.nguyen72@uq.edu.au

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content
of the article.
© 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 G. NGUYEN-THU

– presumably the ‘villagers’ – were squeezing outside, curiously gazing into the
room through the closed glass doors. Sensing that I began to realize the politi-
cal weight of the situation, Tuấn nodded his head as if he already agreed with
what was going on in my head: ‘You see, just like a Hollywood movie!’

The above field note describes how the initial information about the Đồng
Tâm land dispute leaked into my homely evening through Facebook and
dramatized my sense of national belonging in the middle of a childcare
chore. In my follow-up interviews, many interlocutors – bloggers, journalists,
researchers who subscribe to an activist ethos in varying degrees of political
commitment – shared more or less the same version of how the leak ani-
mated their daily routine. Beyond some basic facts and figures, nobody
knew what was happening in the blocked village. But anyone with
minimum sensitivity in navigating the Vietnamese life, whereby evading
the police (instead of arresting them) was an essential skill, would recognize
that something consequential was mattering in the middle of banal network-
ing sociabilities. In its emerging, enlivening, and disturbing force, the leak
captured wandering online readers into an ‘affective public,’ understood in
Zizi Papacharissi’s terms (2015, pp. 125–26, my emphasis) as the public that
is ‘transformed by networked technologies to suggest both space for the
interaction of people, technology, and practices and the imagined collective
that evolves out of this interaction.’ While the hostage situation occurred
beyond most readers’ direct knowledge and control, its progression,
affecting power, and final outcomes were significantly informed by its

Figure 1. The photo, without confirmed information of authorship, was leaked to Face-
book on the first day of the Đo ng Tâm hostage situation. Although the image was never
verified, it was widely believed to be taken on 15 April 2017 when the hostage situation
began. The image was collected from a public Facebook post.
 CULTURAL STUDIES 3

online publics, which were, following Warner (2002), conjured into being by
the very act of reading, waiting, witnessing, sharing, and commenting.
The Đồng Tâm crisis is considered ‘the largest peacetime land dispute in
Vietnam in terms of troop deployment, public awareness, and deaths’
(Phạm and Nguyễn 2020, p. 1). The crisis originates from the villagers’
lasting resistance against the Army’s claim of 59-hectare agricultural land,
on which the villagers have been growing crops for generations, and
which, in 1980, was planned to be the site for a (never-built) army airport.
In the early 2010s, the disputed area became an expensive block of land
due to the real estate fever. Conflicts between the villagers and the auth-
orities thus escalated, especially after the land was allegedly transformed
into a site for a golf court, understood by the villagers as a profit-seeking
project instead of a public service. The hostage event on 15 April 2017
erupted as a radical reaction against the police’s brutal capture of Mr Lê
Đình Kình (from now on, Mr Kình), the then 82-year-old ‘spiritual leader’ of
the villagers, without an arrest warrant. After seven days of intense public
pressure, the then-mayor of Hanoi, Mr Nguyễn Đức Chung (hereinafter, the
Mayor), entered the village and successfully persuaded the villagers to
release all captured men. In exchange, the Mayor signed a hand-written
promise to ‘carefully inspect’ the dispute and ‘not to prosecute’ any Đồng
Tâm villager.
Two months after the widely admired ‘happy ending,’ the Mayor broke his
first promise when Hanoi police launched a criminal investigation against
Đồng Tâm villagers. Soon came the second broken promise when Hanoi
Inspectorate Committee completely dismissed the villagers’ claim of land
ownership. Repeatedly ‘cheated’ by the state, the villagers declared a state
of war (BBC 2017).
On 9 January 2020, after more than two years of intensified tension follow-
ing the 2017 hostage event, it was again leaked out on Facebook that thou-
sands of policemen equipped with guns and tanks were performing an
organized raid in the village at midnight. Soon online publics were informed
that Mr Kình was ‘was shot in the heart and head, with one leg barely hanging
on’ (Phạm and Nguyễn 2020, p. 16). His body was taken away and then
returned to his family after being cut open and perfunctorily stitched up
by forensic service. Videos of his half-naked corpse, mourned with neigh-
bours’ tears and screams, went viral on Facebook for a couple of days.
From mainstream online media, the publics also learned that three policemen
were killed when trying to enter Mr Kình’s house. Dozens of villagers, includ-
ing Mr Kình’s two sons and one grandson, were arrested during the attack.
Twelve days after Mr Kình’s death, the first case of COVID-19 in Hanoi was
announced. The brutal story of Đồng Tâm quickly sank under the thickness of
pandemic (mis)information. Waves of COVID-19 outbreaks in 2020 provided a
new ground for the Mayor to rebuild his shaking leadership after his foul
4 G. NGUYEN-THU

handling of Đồng Tâm. But despite his admired efforts to keep the pandemic
away from the capital city, on 28 August 2020, the Mayor was arrested after a
year of intense online rumours about his family’s extensive involvement in
various lucrative businesses backed by his power. On 7 September 2020,
just ten days after the Mayor’s arrest, the Đồng Tâm trial started. Two
death sentences for Mr Kình’s sons and a life sentence for his grandson put
a haunting end to one of the most tragic crises of land dispute in Vietnam
since the 1986 Reform.
By the end of September 2020, the sparks of collective hope kindled by Mr
Kình and the Mayor were completely extinguished. The vanishing of hope
was epitomized in the physical disappearance of Mr Kình and the political
removal of the Mayor in front of the (online) public eyes. The fates of these
two men – one a heroic symbol of the oppressed and the other a rising
star of charismatic leadership – were twisted and tangled into various political
and economic structures, whereby corruption, betrayal, and mistrust were
pervasive. In its dramatic ups and downs, the emergence, disorientation,
and conclusion of this mega-event are neither a matter of course nor of
pure contingency, but laborious negotiations among multiple stakeholders
who wrestled to occupy the space–time within which new political relation-
ships emerge, or old ones persist. At the heart of these public dramas was the
affecting power of digital platforms, with which these two men were caught
up and turned into protagonists.
What marked Đồng Tâm as an unprecedented event is not simply the scale
of violence involved. Grassroots uprisings and top-down suppression are
existing problems in the history of land conflicts in post-Reform Vietnam (Kur-
fürst 2015, Kerkvliet 2019). The analytic significance of Đồng Tâm lies in the
fact that it was the first land conflict whose progression and outcomes
were fundamentally mediated by and attained through widespread and
largely uncontrollable online engagement, thanks to the recent ubiquitous
presence of Facebook in Vietnam.1 The digital mediation of extensive
public pressure turned Đồng Tâm from a provincial case of land dispossession
into a national crisis of political dissent. Put simply, without social media, the
Đồng Tâm land dispute would be a different story. The event of Đồng Tâm
thus offers an excellent case study to unpack the fermentation and erosion
of digital collective actions. It also provides a fertile ground to reflect on
the connection between the novelty of digital networks and the historical
inheritance of subversive and conservative energy in the late-socialist
context.
This article highlights hope as a political affect and a political capacity that
are essential in all struggles for social change. As a political affect, hope
spreads with the collective embodiment of an anticipated future that is not
yet conscious but already leaking out of the present impasse. In this sense,
hope emerges with a fissure of instability within the existing structure of
 CULTURAL STUDIES 5

feeling. Such a breach opens a liminal space–time of suspension where pol-

itical newness could grow, albeit without any guarantee. As a political
capacity, hope involves a laborious and uncomfortable process in which a
hopeful subject must endure and dwell in the open-endedness that inevita-
bly comes with the unsettling force of change. Like all capacities, the political
capacity to hope is grounded in the thickness of social entanglement and
inheritance. Its strength comes not from an arbitrary sense of wishful opti-
mism or an elsewhere model, but a humble connection with the subaltern
force of resistance that is historically latent but yet to summon a concrete
form. Hope is abandoned when the crack of possible change is contained,
and the connection with the subterranean force of common resistance is
tamed or distracted. When despair spreads, the voice of cynical certainty
envelopes the hopeful murmur of the yet-to-come.
My article contributes to the scholarship of digital activism in several ways.
First, my analysis draws from concrete ethnography to unveil the necessary
indeterminacy, or the open-endedness, of collective actions and power insti-
tutions. Such open-endedness is indispensable to unlatch the hopeful possi-
bility for radical newness to emerge; it could also nurture ambivalence and
doubt; and it might attract more blatant forces of taming. My emphasis on
indeterminacy is not to downplay the role of planning or to propose yet
another false dichotomy between organization and spontaneity. Rather, I
would like to shift our attention to an overlooked but irreducible element
of social transformation: the bearing of the yet-to-know, or the capacity to
be (still) surprised by the future, for better or worse.
Second, against the tendency to focus on the network as a self-referential
entity, I draw from the example of Vietnam to show how the magnitude of
digital activism depends on its connection with political and social inheritance
that long predates the birth of social networks. In my case study, such inheri-
tance was latent in the country’s history of peasant-based insurgency and
nation-building, which fueled the initial hope for an alternative future of
equal dialogue between the government and the grassroots. But Vietnamese
digital activism simultaneously inherited the post-Cold War exhaustion of the
revolutionary spirit that was once the hallmark of Vietnamese politics. When
cynicism shadowed the capacity to be surprised, political hope was contained
by the impasse of endless digital crises under neoliberalism. In focusing on
situated inheritances instead of some organizational agenda centred on
the medium, I propose to connect the often short-lived digital waves with
the long temporality of social struggles against lasting injustice.
Third, in paying close attention to the affective nuances of digital activism,
my paper challenges the enclosing language of hindsight evaluation that is
widely seen in analyses of digital activism. The evaluative language effectively
encapsulates a social movement in its completed outcomes, but in so doing,
it inevitably erases the processual indeterminacy that is so central to the
6 G. NGUYEN-THU

fermentation and cessation of social transformations. I thus call for more ana-
lytic and methodological attention to the ways activism is fueled by an
ambiguous openness to the not-yet, instead of a well-planned strategy
based on the already-known.

Situating hope in the Vietnamese media landscape

The case of Đồng Tâm, in its unexpected moves from both sides of the
dispute, poses the analytic question of whether a ‘social movement’ is
necessarily organized around a ‘strategy,’ a ‘rationality,’ or an ‘agenda’? In
recent analyses of digital activism in Vietnam, the answer is often leaning
toward a ‘yes’ (Kurfürst 2015, Bui 2016, Vu 2017, Duong 2017, Le 2018; for
an exception, see Phuong 2021). These studies are usually centred on
some readily available ‘agents of change’ – bloggers, NGO staff, lawyers,
journalists, artists, intellectuals – whose interventions are analyzed mainly
in their rational and planned dimension. In the few cases of successful
mobilizations, credit is given to some proactive opinion leaders who
helped direct the course of the event toward a positive ending in a ‘well-
organized, professionalized and hierarchical’ manner (Vu 2017, p. 1183).
The orientation of a social movement is usually prescribed – a ‘program’ –
which is fitted into the formation of civil society, the promotion of democ-
racy, or the resistance against the violation of human rights. These given tra-
jectories of political progressiveness often mirror the Western discourse
about the notorious ‘lack of freedom’ in Vietnam. In responding to the
fixing gaze from the West, the evaluative language about social movements
forecloses the possibility to understand the processual, affect-laden, and
situated nature of local movements in their emerging, expanding, and
halting temporalities.
I do not doubt the possible existence and value of an abstract agenda
beneath, behind, or above a social movement, but my ethnographic engage-
ment with Vietnamese digital culture in the last four years has embedded me
in a field of collective actions with a significant degree of incertitude, disor-
ganization, and improvisation. Participants, more often than not, are
caught up in networked activism against their desire to stay disinterested.
‘I can keep silent anymore.’ ‘I could not help it.’ ‘I was really busy but … ’
Their incapability to remain indifferent points less to an activist agenda
already laid out on the table than a matter of affective thresholding and
over-spilling. My interlocutors were channelling the pressure of political dis-
appointment that was surging inside-out and outside-in when they navi-
gated their Vietnamese life in the digital world. It was only through this
worlding process that they came to occupy the course of something called
‘digital activism.’
 CULTURAL STUDIES 7

While I shall argue that no struggle for social change should be

reduced to its programmable dimension, the context of Vietnamese
media makes the open-ended nature of a social movement more observa-
ble and analysable due to the lack of coherence and transparency in
media governance. On the one hand, the state employs a thorough
system of censorship over prints, broadcasting, and domestic online
news pages. Layers of direct and indirect supervision are built into not
only the police system but also institutional bureaucracy, linguistic con-
ventions, and most intensively, self-and peer- censorship. In real life,
however, authoritarian censorship never operates in a seamless manner
because there is a slight chance to shift the discursive balance with
every misstep of the state (and the state takes a lot of missteps). For sur-
vival, professional, and ethical purposes, Vietnamese media practitioners
precariously rely on years of trained sensibility to extemporize along
and across the felt threshold of the sayable, which varies on topics,
styles of presentation, political capital, and the overall public moods. In
navigating layers of censorship, the capacity to improvise and play
‘between the lines’ is more crucial than professionalized planning. (The
story of Nam, my journalist interlocutor in the latter part of this article,
exemplifies how a mainstream media practitioner gets tangled in digital
activism by intuiting his way both ‘in’ and ‘out’ of the system).
On the other hand, American corporate digital platforms, predominantly
Youtube and Facebook, have gained tremendous influence in shaping Viet-
namese public opinions. In 2020, Facebook reached a plateau of more than
65 million active users (Degenhard 2021), an impressive presence if we con-
sider that there are only more than 70 million people over fourteen years old
in the country. For the first time since the national independence in 1945, the
Party has lost its direct control over a powerful medium used by almost every
citizen. Although it is relatively easy for the state to terminate ‘problematic’
accounts and imprison individual activists (BBC 2020c), the capillary reach
of Facebook into the depth of social life means that the state itself must
learn to surf the viral ‘trends,’ now largely regulated by the algorithmic
logic of profit-based global companies. Vietnam’s heavy dependence on
foreign social networks marks a decisive difference from China, where the
party-state enjoys much fuller control thanks to thriving indigenous digital
platforms.2
Seen as an ‘alternative’ medium, Facebook has quickly become the outlet
of Vietnamese activist discourses since around 2015, as exemplified in the
case of Đồng Tâm. The irony is that Facebook is never known for being
pro-democracy, in Vietnam or elsewhere. More importantly, Vietnamese acti-
vists’ dependence on this platform means they are less prepared to cope with
its intensive influence in enveloping possibilities of change. As I shall argue,
Facebook’s habituation of crisis, which embraces the destabilizing logic of
8 G. NGUYEN-THU

neoliberal control (Chun 2016b), had made it harder to find a breach of hope
than when the Đồng Tâm peasants directly confronted the police system.
The odd mixture of lasting communist restriction and blatant capitalist
expansion in Vietnam leads to a media landscape that operates under sys-
tematic supervision but is also full of contradictions and unpredictability. In
a context where secrecy, arbitrariness, and ambiguities abound in the
absence of readymade ‘civil society,’ ‘democracy,’ and ‘transparency,’ it
would be rather hasty to think that some skilful actor could direct the
course of a social movement by following a coherent plan based on some
existing model.
In fact, the language of spontaneity and improvision is far from peculiar to
Vietnamese digital activism but is increasingly reported across the Global
South by emerging scholarship on decentralized movements. In China, for
example, critical journalists must constantly improvise to carve out ambiva-
lent and volatile spaces to host their dissent voices (Repnikova 2017). In
the Middle East, Arab Spring protesters shocked the world ‘by dint of what
they did not have – a clear program, a hierarchical organization with figure-
heads and followers – and by what they did not want – a specific ruler, his
party, his family, his policies that enriched his elites and impoverished the
people’ (Noueihed and Warren 2012, p. 6). In Hong Kong, ‘leaderless,’ ‘the
lack of organizational affiliation,’ and ‘self-mobilization’ were the hallmark
of the Umbrella Movement (Cheng & Chan 2017). As Snow and Moss
(2014) conclude in their pioneer discussion of activist spontaneity, ‘off-script-
edness’ is more a virtue than vice in contemporary social struggles. The rise of
decentralized movements reflects a world where the organizing power of
‘progressive’ programs in both communist and liberal directions has been
increasingly exhausted. But perhaps these programs run out of steam in
the first place because of too much planning,3 which inevitably suppresses
the capacity to embrace, rather than enclose, the radically open possibilities
of an alternative future.
If we conceptualize ‘social change’ as reaching for the not-yet that is more
than something exhaustively programmable, then the question of how
‘change’ happens, or how ‘newness’ emerges beyond a mere extension of
the already-present, is curious. In responding to the question of political
novelty, the framework of hope offered by the Marxist theorist Bloch (1986;
1998) serves as an illuminating instruction. In The Principle of Hope, Bloch
(1986, pp. 197–99) argues for a different kind of realism that can take into
account a reality more than the total sum of what is already there. In his
words (Bloch 1986, p. 341):
Not only hope’s affect (with its pendant, fear) but, even more so, hope’s meth-
odology (with its pendant, memory) dwells in the region of the not-yet, a place
 CULTURAL STUDIES 9

where entrance and, above all, final content are marked by an enduring
indeterminacy.

If hope stretches its force into what is more than a fully-assembled reality,
then an inherent quality of hope is its openness to the possibilities of being
surprised, disturbed, and ultimately disappointed by itself and by the world
within which it emerges. Hope is neither ‘automatic progress optimism’
(Bloch 1986, p. 198) nor ‘merely subjective confidence’ (Bloch 1998, p. 341)
because both of these expectant feelings rest too easily on a finished sense
of certainty. Becoming hopeful, as Ben Anderson (2006, p. 744) comments
on Bloch, is laborious because it is marked ‘not by a simple act of transcen-
dence in favour of a good elsewhere or elsewhen but by an act of establishing
new relations that disclose a point of contingency within a present space–
time.’ Hope, or the felt emergence of newness, thus orients toward the
future but is grounded on the affective tendencies and latencies of the
present life, which can never be fully contained by institutions, ideologies,
or technologies.
Understood as a force of ‘change,’ activist labor is necessarily ‘hopeful’ in
the Blochian sense that it is always more than merely implementing a pro-
grammed future. Becoming activist is becoming hopeful, when one embo-
dies a thin possibility for an alternative future and thus stretches oneself to
endure the present situation without being fully reduced to it. As my analysis
of the Đồng Tâm event shall reveal, by waiting, watching, exposing, drama-
tizing, and adjusting along their (digital) ways, a citizen becomes an activist,
sometimes just briefly, in her learned and socially grounded attunement to
the latent intensities that fuel the yet-to-come.
An exploration of social change thus calls for neither an all-encompassing
critique of totalizing oppression or emancipation, nor a kind of empiricist
evaluation that casts the processual and open-ended nature of social move-
ments as a mere background of the ‘actual.’ Recent methodological discus-
sions of affect, understood as an ‘immanent capacity for extending further
still’ or a ‘bridge of not yet, to the next’ (Seigworth and Gregg 2010, p. 2,
14, my emphasis), is highly instructive in attending to the ‘moreness’ or ‘less-
ness’ of political hope. Kathleen Stewart (2017, p. 192, my emphasis) argues
that, in sensing and making sense of the affective world, ‘the point of analysis
was not to track the predetermined effects of abstractable logics and struc-
tures but, rather, to compose a register of the lived affects of the things
that took place in a social-aesthetic-material-political worlding.’ This ethos
of researching-writing-worlding lays open the insecure ground on which
the researcher and her interlocutors dwell, allowing her to unpack structural
violence and possible changes in an unassuming way that humbles herself
from the imperative to reduce the nuances of social transformation to
abstract ‘models’.
10 G. NGUYEN-THU

Driven by the conceptualization of social change as affect-laden processes

and intensities, my methodological design for this project locates itself in the
field of digital ethnography, which, following Postill and Pink (2012, p. 125),
‘creates deep, contextual and contingent understandings produced
through intensive and collaborative sensory, embodied engagements,
often involving digital technologies in co-producing knowledge.’ My ethno-
graphy is composed of the five research routines suggested by Postill and
Pink (2012, p. 128): catching up, sharing, exploring, interacting, and archiving
– each of these is a kind of ‘skilled, embodied activity that the researcher must
learn to perfect over time.’
Since July 2016, I have been keeping a diary of my encounters with texts
and humans on Facebook, as well as the offline contexts in which these
online encounters are embedded. The opening field note of how the first
leak of the Đồng Tâm situation reached my kitchen was an extract from
this diary. During the course of the Đồng Tâm event, it was impossible for
me to know what lay ahead. But precisely thanks to this contextual and con-
tingent engagement with Đồng Tâm that I could gather the essential inputs
to conceptualize the temporalities of affective publics beyond evaluative
hindsight. After the hostage situation, I was prompted to collect more in-
depth knowledge about this case study in addition to my regular notetaking.
In a snowball manner, I started interviewing my Facebook ‘friends,’ all of
whom I have ‘followed’ with different depth of mutual bonding for at least
one year. Until September 2020, I have conducted thirteen interviews, each
of which lasted from one to two hours. Some interlocutors kindly agreed
to share their thoughts and feelings with me every time there was a new
occurrence related to Đồng Tâm. Besides these in-depth interviews, I have
engaged in numerous casual chats, mainly through Facebook, WhatsApp
and Telegraph, and also over a cup of tea on the streets of Hanoi with
friends and colleagues on the topic of Đồng Tâm. These interviews and con-
versations have provided me with valuable details about others’ involvement
with the event, thus allowing me to correlate my own experience and theirs
to gain a better understanding of how various affective publics were formed,
maintained, and lost their activist momentum in the case of Đồng Tâm.

Seizing hope: waiting, watching, and ‘doing something’

As a hopeful struggle for an alternative relationship with the future, a social
movement is a matter of creative time-making: of scandalizing, stealing, sus-
pending, capturing, and using time away from the business-as-usual tempor-
alities of the state, the market, and the household (Poell 2020, Barassi 2015).
Initially, it was the uncompromising peasants at Đồng Tâm who kidnapped
thirty-eight policemen, putting the protecting bodies of the state on hold.
But it was the online publics, always half a step slower but virally expanding,
 CULTURAL STUDIES 11

that joined the local drama to inflate the space of reverse captivation and put
the state’s control over collective temporalities on a hanging mode. Only
within this space–time of liminality was it possible to push the state onto a
stage, removing it from the power of concealed violence, and exposing it
to the returning of the gaze. As my partner remarked: ‘Just like a Hollywood
movie!’. Hanging in the air of Đồng Tâm, for seven days, was the promising
and threatening force of change, or the precarious seedling of hope.
Nhung4 was among many young people who actively participated in
maintaining and channelling the possibility of an equal dialogue between
the government and the peasants during the hostage situation. She gently
rejected the ‘activist’ title when I called her so, although Nhung had joined
many protests online and offline against various misconducts of the state.
Like many Vietnamese citizens with an interest in politics (Phuong 2021),
Nhung mastered the art of reading between the lines and evaded publicly
associating with any radical position when it was possible to do so. In her
words, ‘I am sort of gathering information from all sides and I was never
really active on Facebook.’
But Nhung authored the iconic image ‘Pray for #Dongtam: Dialogue, Not
Confrontation’ [Pray for #Dongtam: Hãy đối thoại, không đối đầu], which
was widely shared on Facebook during the peaking days of the hostage
event (Figure 2). The origin of this image was lost in the middle of digital vir-
ality, and I only learned about Nhung’s authorship in one of our conversa-
tions, when she explained how she got caught up in the Đồng Tâm dispute:
I had been watching [hóng] over this event since the first leak. During the fourth
or fifth night, it was rumoured that police troops had been mobilized to the
border of the village. I didn’t know if this alarming leak was true or not,
because earlier, there was also a rumour that Mr Chung [the Mayor] had
made an effort to negotiate. The situation was really worrying, I mean,

Figure 2. A Facebook avatar with the hashtag Pray for #DongTam. The image was col-
lected from a public Facebook post.
12 G. NGUYEN-THU

everybody was anxious, not just me […] I had always felt that in a situation of
direct confrontation like this, it would be very unlikely that the government
would give any concession. There had been many similar cases in the past,
like those of Đoàn Văn Vươn or Nhô Village. We all knew how decisive and
unforgiving the state normally responded. That night, somehow I found
myself chatting with Kiên [our mutual activist friend]. We felt that we should
be doing something [làm điều gì đó] before it was too late. I told him I could
design an avatar and then we would share it around. So we came up with
the slogan. I then created the image and inserted the hashtag. When I was
designing this avatar, I hoped that a dialogue would reduce the chance of a
violent strike by the state. I was surprised that many well-known dissenters
reused the image. (Personal interview, 19 January 2019.)

This quote reveals two important temporalities of everyday digital activism:

the intense mode of ‘watchful waiting’ (hóng) and the expressive mode of
‘doing something’ – both pointing to an unassuming sense of openness
toward the not-yet, rather than a confident act of pre-plotting. Hóng – a
new slang mobilized from ordinary language – is an extremely popular
term used by Vietnamese Facebookers to denote a particular mode of
digital embodiment. In the Vietnamese language, hóng simultaneously com-
prises ‘waiting for,’ ‘waiting on’ and ‘watching’ – a commitment to staying
attuned to something of special importance but yet to come. Far from
passive time-biding or random attention paying (hence, not merely slackti-
vism), hóng is an intensive mode of anticipation – a precarious inclination
toward the future, not without a hint of excitement.
The power of hóng is particularly intensified in an algorithmized economy
of attention, whereby private data of users’ watching, sharing, reading, liking,
and stalking, is used to summon a digital ‘trend’ that moves the social toward
the future. Precisely thanks to this algorithmized blurriness between digital
privacy and publicness that, within less than a day, the hostage event at
the blocked village of Đồng Tâm had gathered enough pressure to turn
itself into an uncontainable crisis of a national scale. Hóng, is thus itself a
social action – a type of political waithood from which ‘agency oozes out’
(Hage 2009, p. 2). If we think with Bloch’s vision of expectant realism, hóng
would be a potent component of an activist reality in the age of digital leaks.
Of course, not all watchful actions of hóng share the same kind of agency.
What gave Nhung’s practice of hóng its affective depth and political weight
was her trained sensitivity, acquired after years of living in Vietnam, where
brutality and corruption are a matter of regular witnessing. Here the intensity
of hóng constituted social actions through the accumulation and amplifica-
tion of political intuition that were thickly woven into Vietnamese ways of
life. Her anxious mentioning of Đoàn Văn Vươn and Nhô village (Le 2018, Ker-
kvliet 2019) – tragic precedents of top-down cruelty in rural land disputes
after the 1986 Reform – revealed the inheritance of trauma and mistrust
that, in order to hope, one must carry and transcend at the same time. To
 CULTURAL STUDIES 13

put such historical weight in my partner’s words: ‘Land dispute, again.’ Only
from this political groundedness that the struggle over the ownership of time
in the case of Đồng Tâm gained its vigilance and perseverance beyond the
dramatizing effect of digital voyeurism.
But the activist force of digital watching emerges from the inheritance of
not only political traumas but also political strength. The shaking force of
Đồng Tâm came from two equally important sources of co-authorship, irredu-
cible to the digital. First and most directly was the corporeal power of the
bodies that made visible the undercurrents of lasting resistance. While land
conflicts were highly common in Vietnam, only when the living bodies of
both the peasants and the hostages were perilously locked inside the small
village of Đồng Tâm could a local dispute virally jolt the world of digital
comfort and prevent online surfers from looking away. We could see
similar examples elsewhere, as with the self-immolation of the Tunisian
street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi that inflamed the Arab Spring, or the suffo-
cated death of David Floyd that reignited a worldwide Black Lives Matter
movement. Against the false opposition between the physical and the
digital, the body proves itself to be an ever more vital means of insurgency
in the new media age (Kraidy 2016), where corporeal disobedience fuels
digital augmentation of politic subversion.
Second and less conspicuously, the affecting power of Đồng Tâm drew its
strength from not an ‘elsewhere’ model but the long temporality of peasant-
based resistance in Vietnam, which much predated the social networks and
will surely subsist beyond the digital waves (Phạm 2018, p. 268). In other
words, the expanding force of Đồng Tâm that jolted the digital world was
far from some random corporeal disturbance but an invitation to reconnect
with the subterranean inheritance of common resistance, which had been
there for decades, if not centuries. The principle of latent inheritance was
observed not only at Đồng Tâm but also in the Arab Spring, and the Black
Lives Matter movement, with each instance linked to a different subversive
genealogy. In the case of Đồng Tâm, the subsistence of peasant strength
was proven in the very ‘again-ness’ of land disputes led by peasants after
the 1986 Reform. When Nhung mentioned Đoàn Văn Vươn and Nhô village
as the antecedents of brutal land disputes, she was obsessed with the punish-
ing force of the state. But these two examples, followed by the insurgency at
Đồng Tâm, simultaneously confirmed how subaltern strength in rural areas
was still untamed despite repetitive punishment.5 In fact, the enduring tem-
porality of peasant-based struggles dated back much further than the 1986
Reform, to the peasants’ decolonial revolutions, their generous contributions
to continuous anti-imperialist wars, and their primary but forgotten role in
enabling the very economic Reform that later cast them as industrially ‘back-
ward’ or rebelliously ‘uncivil’ (Phạm 2018, Kerkvliet 2005). It was thus the
reconnection and attunement with the latent force of subaltern resistance
14 G. NGUYEN-THU

that explained the impactful digital expansion of Đồng Tâm beyond techno-
logical solutionism.
If the intensive practice of hóng gathered enough public pressure to keep a
political crack from being quickly sealed, then the expressive mode of activist
labor is to occupy this temporal stretch by filling it with affective and discur-
sive substance that, in turn, provided continuous materials to feed the poten-
tialities of hóng. In the words of Nhung: ‘We felt that we should be doing
something before it was too late.’ In her race against the threat of villagers’
death, Nhung was not alone. She was prompted to design the avatar
during her messaging with Kiên, a friend. Together in their joint labor of
hope, Nhung and Kiên crafted not only the slogan and the hashtag but
their very political subjectivities in performative solidarity. Their activist
labor was plural from the outset, and in Sarah Ahmed’s terms (2014, p. 4),
it was ‘sticky’ and ‘moving.’ Only in these unfoldings of affective relationality
did hope happen: ‘When I was designing this avatar, I hoped that dialogue
would reduce the chance of a violent strike by the state.’ When it happened,
hope weighed on the hopeful subject with its enduring in-between-ness –
‘the Pandora-box of the unfinished world’ (Bloch 1986, p. 335). Through its
half-open window toward the not-yet, hope offered an equal chance of
not-knowing, regardless of the side one was taking. Left unguarded in con-
fronting with traumas and potentialities, one must decide whether or not
to carry a thin chance of change into the future: ‘I was surprised that many
well-known dissenters reused the image.’ Within this liminal space–time of
emerging hope, Nhung embodied her ethos of activism not in an agenda
plotted in advance but in her humble inclination towards the not-yet that
is always a little unexpected.
Nhung’s decision to publicly claim a political stance by promoting an
avatar was among many moments of micro-occupation in which the latencies
of political energy gained a concrete form. Together with Nhung, many
others Facebook users also seized this unusual space–time of liminality to
pronounce their political disappointment and to demand a change. Most
scandalously were those who diligently leaked news to Facebook, attracting
a great number of shares, likes, and comments. A leak could be as detailed as
the following: ‘Here is an update by Đồng Tâm villagers just five minutes ago:
A gun was found under the blanket of a hostage … ’ A video showing villa-
gers chasing and throwing rocks at policemen popped up in the middle of
nowhere and immediately went viral. Fervent debates about the (in)validity
of the villagers’ claim of land ownership flooded Facebook feeds, opening
a discursive space for conflicting ‘cartographic actions’ (Harms 2020) to
emerge. People avidly argued for and against various visions of political refor-
mation: the plurality of justice, the need for private property rights, the ethics
of non-violent activism. Besides high-profile activists, commoners who pre-
viously acted as indifferent bystanders also joined the choir, forming a
 CULTURAL STUDIES 15

thickness of political solidarity across social groups. After testing the water for
a couple of days, mainstream journalists started raising their ‘personal’ voices
on Facebook pages to promote the ‘mutual benefits’ of a peaceful resolution
– a hint that their editorial teams had turned a green light for them to surf the
waves of public pressure against the threat of top-down censorship. The Viet-
namese online editions of BBC and VOA recycled and amplified many major
leaks from Vietnamese social media, authorizing these largely unverifiable
sources and adding an international weight to the crisis. Then The
New York Times was involved (Ives 2017). Within just a few days, the enduring
space of openness had accumulated enough pressure to turn Đồng Tâm into
‘a ticking bomb.’
On 22 April 2017, the ticking bomb of Đồng Tâm had been finally ‘defused.’
Seven days of intense public pressure led to a moment of positive surprise
when the Mayor performed a face-to-face conversation with the villagers –
conduct of modesty and sincerity rarely seen and felt in the Vietnamese pol-
itical field. The Mayor’s ‘Guarantee Document’ [Bản Cam Kết] (Figure 3) –
written by a hurried hand in fresh blue ink, on a lined sheet torn from a note-
book of a kind frequently used by primary school children, and witnessed by
two highly-regarded congressmen – became the material manifestation of the
‘happy ending’. This hand-written document, together with a viral photo of a
policeman bowing to the villagers (Figure 4), were viral hallmarks of the col-
lective hope for a government that knew how to respect its people.

‘I am not surprised … ’: losing hope, confidently

The embarrassment of being ‘too hopeful’ caught one off-guard in exposed
naïveté and premature trust. A self-protective mechanism was to bounce
back to the voice of negative confidence (or else, a Zen quotation).
Announcements, such as, ‘I am not surprised at all … ’; ‘it is hardly a new
thing … ’; ‘this is not the first time … ’ pervaded online discussions of Đồng
Tâm after the Mayor’s promises were unashamedly broken. Hope is ever
more fragile, not because we lack the knowledge to plan the future, but
because we have known too much to the point that there is hardly anything
that can ‘surprise’ us. After the Đồng Tâm dispute turned into a murderous
tragedy in January 2020, the incapacity to be astounded by bad news was
even more pronounced in comments by well-known activists (see, for
example, BBC 2020a, BBC 2020b, Doan 2020). ‘Hope is unconditionally disap-
pointable,’ as Bloch (1998, p. 341) puts it. The cost of betrayed hope is a new
depth of cynicism.
Gabriel Marcel (1965, p. 101) argues that ‘the conditions that make it poss-
ible to hope are strictly the same as those that make it possible to despair.’
Bloch (1998, p. 341) also emphasizes that ‘hope holds eo ipso the condition
of defeat precariously within itself.’ If the study of hope promises an entry
16 G. NGUYEN-THU

Figure 3. The ‘Guarantee Document’ signed by the Mayor, which was widely circulated
on Facebook on 22 April 2017 without an identified origin. The image was collected
from a public Facebook post.

to the possibilities of transformative practice, then an analysis of hopeless-

ness invites us to unpack the enclosing force in a structure of feeling that
limits the intensity and stretch of social hope. Hope and despair can serve
as a productive diagnosis for each other.
Nam, a Facebook ‘friend’ of mine since October 2016, was one among
many reporters who eloquently took the side of the villagers during the
hostage crisis. Thanks to my background as a journalist and a media educator
 CULTURAL STUDIES 17

Figure 4. A policeman bowing toward villagers after the Đo ng Tâm hostage situation
ended peacefully on 22 April 2017. The viral photo was taken by Nguye n Khánh for
Tuo i Tre Newspaper. The image was collected from a public post on Nguye n Khánh’s
Facebook page.

in Vietnam, we shared a network of ‘mutual friends’ that grants our virtual

bonding a little more thickness than a mere tie between two complete stran-
gers. Before the hostage event, Nam had already gained more than twenty
thousand ‘followers’ by using his Facebook page as an alternative outlet
for ‘politically sensitive’ news and opinions that his mainstream newspaper
failed to accommodate. The practice of carefully churning out otherwise-cen-
sored information on social media was highly common among Vietnamese
journalists who struggled to maintain a sense of professional integrity and
social relevance within and (a little) beyond the thresholds of top-down cen-
sorship. A national crisis like Đồng Tâm was a public test to measure the bold-
ness of a political reporter with social influence like Nam, when he faced the
ethical choices between remaining safely underground (just hóng, which was
also an index of professional obedience) or exposing himself on social media
to claim an explicit stance.
Being a witness, Nam posted many Facebook updates during the
hostage situation. He recalled the feeling of being at the hot spot: ‘It felt
as if you were inside a pressure cooker’ (personal communication, 3
October 2020). His memory of the inflaming effect of the hostage situation
must be accurate, because on 21 April 2017, just one day before the event-
ual release of all the hostages, Nam shared a public Facebook status that
read:
18 G. NGUYEN-THU

First was the dreadful bomb in Tiên Lãng [2012],6 then the absurd gunfire in Yên
Bái [2016], 7 and now the alarming sirens in Đồng Tâm [2017]. The interval [of
violent outbreaks] was shortened and the pressure was more intense each time!
You might think that these were but small dots on the map of Vietnam. But
these tiny sparks of fire were set on the vast field of dry hay. It might be possible
to extinguish a couple of sparks. But if one spark spread, the whole field would
be on fire.

In Vietnam, ‘revolutionary flame’ [ngọn lửa cách mạng] has long been a pro-
pagandist cliché in describing grassroots movements of anti-colonialist
struggles under the flag of communism. The difference is that in anti-colonial
imagination, the ‘tiny sparks of fire’ need to be relentlessly fueled and spread,
not settled. Nam’s vision of contemporary Vietnam as ‘a vast field of dry hay’
waiting for the final burning, unless carefully managed, thus significantly
diverges from the peasant-based revolutionary heritage that saw the future
as radically open. In Nam’s imagination, the latencies of peasant uprisings
were understood as already too strong that required a prudent venting mech-
anism to avoid an overwhelming explosion.
In my fieldwork, it was common to encounter the description of Vietna-
mese life as a field of potential explosion, from which eruption can pop up
anytime and anywhere in various sizes, intensities, and orientations.
‘Ticking bomb,’ ‘pressure cooker,’ ‘a vast field of hay,’ ‘cul-de-sac’ are
popular metaphors that capture the alarming latencies of collective mistrust
within which Đồng Tâm emerged. The most optimistic version of social pessi-
mism is the widely popular saying ‘co-living with the flood’ [sống chung với lũ]
that describes the never-ending troubles of Vietnamese life – like someone
who manages to carry on living when half of their body is already under
the water.
What was revealing about the formation of activist hope during the Đồng
Tâm hostage situation was the near-total absence of a collective wish to make
the ‘crack’ radically widened, except by the peasants themselves. On the one
hand, the viral hope for a peaceful negotiation, which Nhung had impactfully
visualized into the avatar Pray for #Dongtam, ran directly against the state’s
tradition of violent suppression. On the other hand, the demand for a tempor-
ary dialogue without questioning the status quo nevertheless aimed at con-
taining the leak and taming the latency of subaltern insurgency. The state
wanted to close this unprecedented episode of land dispute by guns and
tanks while the urban activist-citizens wanted to do the same thing by
words and contracts. Both sides yearned for a settlement anyway. The
motto of social actions was no longer revolution (that was to turn a spark
into an uncontainable fire so that radical newness could emerge) but mitiga-
tion (that was to cool the fire as much as possible before it was too late). The
‘not-yet’ of digital hope during the hostage event was thus the ‘not-yet-
exploded’ instead of the ‘not-yet-coming.’ The best outcome one could
 CULTURAL STUDIES 19

hope for was that things did not get any worse. The digital formation of hope-
as-resistance in the event of Đồng Tâm was thus directed against the state
but conserving in its overall orientation. The will to change was already con-
tained by the will to settle.
The feeling of being entrapped by a ‘not-yet-exploded’ future exemplified
the post-Cold War mentality of cynical waithood for some laggy ending to
come. Such an impasse was a common temporality embodied by late-social-
ist subjects long before the current wave of global dystopia shaped by the
apocalyptic vision of climate change. Alexei Yurchak (2006, my emphasis)
captures the structure of feeling that overshadowed the late-socialist con-
dition in his important study of the last Soviet generation in the 1970s: ‘every-
thing was forever, until it was no more.’ In Vietnam, the most powerful
declaration of the late-socialist impasse was the iconic film Chuyện tử tế
(The story of kindness) directed by Trần Văn Thuỷ in 1985, right before the
Reform. In this film, the late-socialist subjects endured an immanent sense
of political fatigue when entrapped by the two equally bitter choices of
failed socialism and selfish opportunism. The difference between Vietnam
and the Soviet Bloc was that the ‘foreverness’ of communism in the former
had managed to survive the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 2020, after several
decades of hurried marketization and suffocating environmental degra-
dation, accumulated disappointment about communist immutability was
now blended with an augmented feeling of capitalist overdose – ‘a vast
field of dry hay’ waiting for a final burn. The land of Đồng Tâm, torn
between its past of a never-built army airport and its future of a golf court,
was an exemplary site of such combined stuckness.
Mapping onto the late-socialist collective impasse, Facebook offered a
venting outlet for anti-state discourses, but it simultaneously introduced its
own temporality of neoliberal entrapment, now centred on the global habitu-
ation of endless self-referential crises. When the tragic trial of Đồng Tâm was
immediately joined with the first outbreak of COVID-19 in January 2020, the
combination of pandemic waves and intensified blockage introduced
another layer of crisis-based enclosure. Facebook (an American profit-based
platform) thus acts as a medium to connect the late-socialist impasse of
Vietnam with the global rise of existential stuckness – an ‘order of the prac-
tico-affective’ under neoliberal governmentality (Hage 2015, p. 36).
Over more than two years, the intensive unfolding of the Đồng Tâm
event and its entanglement with other dramatic events offered me a
chance to keep track, partially, of the digitally mediated sense of inescap-
ability that blanketed social activism. This structure of feeling did not
imply an absence of activities but pointed to an overflow of scandals
staged by new media. Starting with the first leak of the hostage situation
in April 2017, my field notes summarized the sequencing and layering of
scandals in nine acts:
20 G. NGUYEN-THU

- 22 April 2017. A huge ‘up.’ The hostage crisis ends without bloodshed – a
genuine moment of hope.
- 13 June 2017. A little ‘down’: The Mayor breaks his promise the first time. But
a ‘prosecution order’ from the police did not mean any direct harm to the
Đồng Tâm villagers yet. Let us wait.
- 07 July 2017. A serious ‘down’: The Mayor breaks his promise the second
time. All the land claims by the villagers are dismissed. We are back to
the starting point, or worse. People started blaming around: ‘See, I told
you!’
- 09 January 2020. A heartbreaking ‘down.’ They murdered Mr Kình! Now we
know what it feels like to stare down into the abyss. All our fearful pro-
phecy has come true. In this decisive raid, the state has learned to
move more quickly than activist hyperlinks.
- 21 January 2020. A little ‘up.’ The first wave of COVID-19 in Vietnam hap-
pened just about a week after the death of Mr Kình. Quite unexpectedly,
this small outbreak was neatly controlled.
- April 2020. A real pandemic-induced kind of ‘up’: The second wave of COVID-
19 in Vietnam. In its bio-digital virality, this ‘second wave’ of the pan-
demic flooded Internet users with fear, hatred, and fake news, but also
with grassroots solidarity, and oddly enough, hope! The Mayor’s exemp-
lary success in containing the virus in the capital city was impressive (look
at what is happening in the US!).
- July 2020. Half-up, half-down, or else, indifference: The third wave of COVID-
19 in Vietnam is so draining, but again, it is contained quickly. Now we’ve
learned the lesson: this pandemic limbo is going to last forever.
- 28 August 2020. Indifference, again. The live-streamed arrest of the Mayor
goes viral. The long drama of his political ups and downs eventually
comes to a concrete ending. But who cares? Just another arrest in an
unending series of corrupt politicians going to jail in the last few years.
So what?
- 07 September 2020. ‘I am not surprised … ’. The Đồng Tâm trial has ended
with two death sentences. Like the fate of the Mayor, the long tragedy
of Đồng Tâm finally concludes. Why do all the Western embassies that
normally raise their voice against Vietnam’s violation of human rights
remain silent? By the way, like them, I am busy navigating my way in
the pandemic mess …

Meanwhile, Vietnam had become the most lucrative market for Facebook and
Google in Southeast Asia, and without much taxing (Ma 2019, Vân 2018).
‘Because of changes in how we (humans and machines) read and write, we
are now characters in a universe of dramas putatively called Big Data’
(Chun 2016a, p. 363). In its programmatic nature, social networks depend
on new errors and crises to feed their machine learning. The habituation of
 CULTURAL STUDIES 21

crisis is thus the temporality of networks. Digital platforms are a real game-
changer in Vietnam thanks to their capacity to stimulate endless social
dramas at the national scale that the state has no way to completely
contain. But in their seductive promise of real-time witnessing and participat-
ing, small and not-so-small crises have been also banalized into the routine of
either paranoia or indifference.
Nhung, Kiên, Nam and other interlocutors grew more and more silent, not
because they stopped caring but because there seemed to be no point trying
to stir up a bigger mess in the middle of considerable messiness. By the end
of 2020, I have heard many interlocutors expressing their mixed feelings of
empowerment, excitement, confusion, anger, indifference, boredom, numb-
ness, exhaustion, and helplessness about the Đồng Tâm situation and Vietna-
mese social movements more generally. The keyword is ‘chán,’ a short
Vietnamese adjective pregnant with a long list of affects: bored, fed-up,
weary, indifferent, impotent, tired. Being ‘chán’ is to care deeply about some-
thing to the point of getting oneself overloaded, only to then look away.
Another crisis is coming soon, anyway. It may catch us, or not, when it
moves. We are not quite sure what exactly it is, but we are always already
waiting for it – another ‘update’. Hence, ‘reflexive impotence’ (Fisher 2009,
p. 21). The efforts required to maintain balance at the digital speed mean
that anyone who wants to still engage with digital activism has to face the
radical openness and assailing exposure of connectivity to stay barely rel-
evant. ‘Endlessly fascinating yet boring, addictive yet revolting, banal yet
revolutionary’ (Chun 2016b, p. ix). Crisis, once critically functioning as a
medium to fight against dominating power, now becomes a temporalized
structure of feeling that limits far-reaching transformations beyond the
desire to hang-in-there. When disconnected from the long temporality of
grounded struggle, digital networks intensify the feedback loop of enduring
ephemerality. One step forward, two steps back, and a thousand clicks into
the bottomlessness of hyperlinking.

Conclusion: from hope to haunt

‘Even disappointed hope wanders around agonizing, a ghost that has lost its
way back to the cemetery and clings to refuted images.’ (Bloch 1986, p. 195).
The figure of the peasant haunts modern Vietnamese (failure to achieve)
progress. Providing the nation with food, labor, defence force, and collec-
tive identity, the peasants themselves never neatly fit into onrushing pro-
grams of modernization, whether it was colonialism, communism, or
neoliberalism. Their uprisings and deaths, known and unknown, are traces
from the outside that continue to disturb the inevitability of ‘progressive’
transformations. When faced with their half-forgotten stories of robbed
lands and broken promises, fantasies made in the name of civilization,
22 G. NGUYEN-THU

national salvation, economic prosperity, and forever-evasive democracy

turn into bleeding wounds.
On 9 January 2020, the viral pain and contagious fear induced by the
shocking video of Mr Kình’s broken corpse marked him as the first digitally
mediated specter in the post-Reform times. The state refused to include
him in its scope of grievability by banning the villagers and the publics
from joining his funeral (VOA 2020) but people continued to mourn him
online in small groups who refused to let it sink. An announcement of his
funeral on Facebook read: ‘Let us pray together, in our own religions and
beliefs, for his soul to be free (siêu thoát) and sacredly responsive (linh
thiêng)’ (Figure 5). My translation of ‘siêu thoát’ into ‘free’ is a serious conces-
sion because ‘siêu thoát’ points specifically to the spiritual force of transcen-
dence when the newly dead manages to get rid of all mundane attachments
so that his afterlife is no longer stained by the suffering of the living. To be
‘free,’ in this way, means to be finally ‘settled’ (yên nghỉ). At the same time,
there was still a collective whisper for him to be ‘sacredly responsive,’
because people keep on hoping for his mysterious power of returning.
Neither absent nor present, neither dead nor alive, the spectre refuses a
final settlement. The haunting power of Mr Kình carries the disturbing
weight of collective traumas and latent resistance that continue to leak
into the world of business-as-usual and afflict Vietnamese minds. In the
digital age, this historical weight is blended with the spectrality of online
data itself. On 9 January in years to come, I imagine, his unsettling death

Figure 5. A mourning announcement made public on Facebook on 13 January 2020,

four days after Mr Kình’s death. Screenshot by the author.
 CULTURAL STUDIES 23

would pop up, again and again, in the middle of banal social networking to
remind us of a bleeding wound, from which we have to avert our eyes in
order to obtain some peacefulness: ‘The undead of information haunts the
past and the future; it is itself a haunting […]. This undeadness means that
a decision is never decisive, that it can always be revisited and reworked’
(Chun 2016b, p. 91, my emphasis). In the case of Đồng Tâm, the future
could be understood as ‘the not-yet-coming,’ ‘the not-yet-exploded,’ but
also ‘the not-yet-passing.’ While the short temporality of digital crises could
spark the ‘not-yet-coming’ or blanket us even more deeply within the ‘not-
yet-exploded,’ the enduring temporality of subaltern struggle is still there,
waiting for a return. Mr Kình was not the first and surely won’t be the last sub-
altern subject who risks their life to fight for an alternative future. Against the
enclosing force of perpetual crises that relentlessly induces totalizing para-
noia, we need to remember that, in this still-unfinished world, everything is
at risk of being leaked, cracked, exposed, messed up, and transformed:
bodies, borders, secrets, states, promises, binaries, police systems, networks,
activist agendas, online apathy, and even deaths.
I would like to end this emotionally difficult article with hope, still – not the
kind of hope that Marcel (1978, p. 53) describes as ‘piercing through time’ but
as a refusal to look away from an open wound, or our shared inheritance of
ruins, betrayals, and traumas. The event of Đồng Tâm has not ended. Its tem-
poral window toward the future is yet closed. The lingering spectrality of
killed hope warns us against the seduction of cynical totalization that
grants false confidence to any easily plotted telos, whether it is about auto-
matic progression or an inevitable finish. Such decisive emplotment is pre-
cisely how we are disconnected from the situated undercurrents of
subaltern strength. Learning to endure and dwell on the space of indetermi-
nacy thus means to struggle against not only the containing force of external
oppression but also our internalized defeat in the form of confident
hopelessness.

Notes
1. Before the dominance of Facebook in Vietnam around the mid-2010s, land
conflicts were already widely reported by activist-bloggers and obtained signifi-
cant online visibility. But the web-based engagement with land disputes was
mainly centred on non-interactive reports and commentary hindsight. In a sig-
nificantly different manner, the national drama of Đồng Tâm unfolded simul-
taneously with Facebook-based engagement. The event was fundamentally
tied to specific features of Facebook unavailable in individual blogging, such
as spontaneous interaction, viral leaks, livestreams, long posts, inboxing, and
mobile-friendliness. Please note how various discussions of digital activism in
Vietnam, written mainly by non-media studies scholars, make no analytic dis-
tinction between blogs and social networks (see, for example, Bui 2016).
24 G. NGUYEN-THU

2. For more elaboration of the digital landscape in Vietnam, see Nguyen-Thu

(2018).
3. On the problem of too much planning in Vietnam, see MacLean (2013).
4. Interlocutors’ names in this article have been changed.
5. Although intensively and empathetically affected by the uprising spirit at Đồng
Tâm, my urban activist-interlocutors showed significant hesitancy in celebrating
rural insurgency. Leaning toward the newly borrowed ideal of ‘civil society’
unfamiliar to rural settings, my interlocutors often explained the event of
Đồng Tâm in terms of collective victimhood or a singular surge of accumulated
anger, instead of seeing the peasants as lasting protagonists of political and
social changes, despite numerous examples in modern Vietnamese history
(Phạm 2018, Kerkvliet 2005).
6. In Tiên Lãng, a district in the Northern city of Hải Phòng, a land dispute led to an
armed conflict between a peasant family and local authorities in 2012. The key
actor in this dispute is Mr Đoàn Văn Vươn, whom Nhung also mentioned in an
earlier quote of this article.
7. In the Northern province of Yên Bái in 2016, a man walked into the provincial
Communist Party Office with a pistol and killed the Party Secretary and the
Head of the People’s Committee.

Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Mike Zuber and the two anonymous reviewers for their incisive com-
ments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor
Giang Nguyen-Thu is a postdoctoral fellow at Institute for Advanced Studies in the
Humanities, University of Queensland, Australia. She is also an on-leave lecturer at Uni-
versity of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University, Hanoi,
Vietnam.

ORCID
Giang Nguyen-Thu http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0067-9223

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