Unearthing Politics: Environment and

Contestation in Post-socialist Vietnam

Jason Morris-Jung
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Unearthing Politics
Environment and Contestation
in Post-socialist Vietnam

Jason Morris-Jung
 Unearthing Politics

“Unearthing Politics: Environment and Contestation in Post-socialist Vietnam is

the best single study of domestic Vietnamese politics during the post-reform era.
Through an exhaustive examination of the contest over Chinese bauxite mining
in the Central Highlands, this book sheds a bright light on the emergence in
late communist Vietnam of new flashpoints for political conflict, novel modes
of political organization and innovative forms of political struggle. Unearthing
Politics will be a required reading for scholars of environmental conflict, late-
communist political culture and contemporary Vietnamese studies.”
—Peter Zinoman, author of Vietnamese Colonial Republican: The Political
Vision of Vu Trong Phung, History, University of California - Berkeley

“The bauxite mining controversy in 2009 opened up an unprecedented era

of contentious politics and heralded the rise of a civil society in Vietnam that
challenges the domination of the communist regime. In this event, Vietnamese
intellectuals, professionals, and activists came together to oppose a major national
project out of their concerns for its environmental impacts, their fears of Chinese
involvement, and their frustration with Vietnam’s corrupt and repressive govern-
ment. As the first detailed account of this event, Jason Morris-Jung offers a
compelling analysis of how politics in one of the few remaining communist states
has evolved in the last decade.”
—Tuong Vu, author of Vietnam’s Communist Revolution: The Power and
Limits of Ideology, Political Sciences, University of Oregon

“In Unearthing Politics, Jason Morris-Jung reveals the surprising and unexpected
public opposition to both the idea and practice of bauxite mining by Chinese
companies in post-reform Vietnam. As in other countries of Southeast Asia,
the project generated profound and contentious concern over this particularly
toxic form of mining’s threat to one of the nation’s iconic agrarian environ-
ments. Morris-Jung shows the ways the opposition came at and contributed to a
pivotal moment in the country’s contemporary history, engaged ordinary people,
founders of the republic, revered intellectuals, and the on-line media in unprece-
dented ways. The book’s echoes of and divergences from socio-environmental
politics elsewhere in the expanding world of Chinese investment, development,
and extraction, make this an extremely important read.”
—Nancy Lee Peluso, co-Editor with C. Lund of New Frontiers of Land
Control, Environmental Sciences, Policy and Management, University of
California, Berkeley
VIETNAM Re
dR CHINA
Sapa v Dong Dang
Lang Son
MYANMAR Dien Bien Phu Hanoi Halong Bay
Haiphong
LAOS Cuc Phuong Cat Ba National Park
National Park Gulf of
Tonkin
Vientiane
M

Hainan Gia lai

ek
on

Vinh Moc
gR

50 kilometers
v

Hué
South Dak Man
Danang Hoi An
THAILAND China CAMBODIA
Sea
VIETNAM

Central
CAMBODIA Highlands Dak Nong
Phnom Nha Trang Da Lat
Penh Moc Bai Dalat Bin Phuoc
Sam Mountain Lam Dong
Gulf of Ha Tien Ho Chi Minh City
(Saigon) MAJOR BAUXITE
Thailand 0 300 km PROVINCES Di Linh
Mekong 0 160 miles Bao Lac
Delta

Binh Thuan
Dong Nai

HO CHI MINH CITY Phan Thiet

Ke Ga
Baria-Vung Tau
LARGE EXPORT
FACILITY UNDER
South China Sea CONSTRUCTION

Map of the Central Highlands, Vietnam (This is a sketch map for illustrative
purposes; all boundaries and representations are approximations only)
 Jason Morris-Jung

Unearthing Politics
Environment and Contestation in Post-socialist
Vietnam
Jason Morris-Jung
Singapore University of Social Sciences
Singapore, Singapore

ISBN 978-981-16-3123-8 ISBN 978-981-16-3124-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3124-5

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021
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For Pha.m Ðoàn Trang, sentenced to 9 years of prison for speaking truths
in Vietnam

In memory of Pha.m Toàn (1932–2019), a “radical” voice for a common

humanity

In memory of my loving parents, Robert and Janice Morris

 Acknowledgments

This book is the product of many conversations with many different

people, for which it holds many debts of gratitude.
In Vietnam, I want to thank many informants, guides and, in the end,
friends that made research for this book possible. They helped me to see
Vietnam from different angles, and introduced me to dimensions of the
country’s social and political life that I had so easily missed while working
and living in Vietnam for many years before.
I am especially grateful to Bác (Uncle) Pha.m Toàn, who was the first
to open his door to my research topic without fear of giving me a frank
opinion on things not meant to be discussed with foreigners, let alone
foreign researchers. Bác Toàn’s lifelong devotion to education, translation,
and writing reflected his passion to elevate the human spirit; may he long
rest in peace and happiness. I also thank his co-creators on the pivotal
online bauxite petition, Nguyễn Huê. Chi and Nguyễn Thế Hùng, who
bravely shared with me their time and insights during uncertain times.
For also generously sharing with me their views and time, I want to thank
Nguyên Ngo.c, Nguyễn Thanh So,n, Chu Hao, Nguyễn Quang A, Pha.m
ij

Duy Hiên, La.i Nguyên An, and Pha.m Quang Tú, among many others
whom I’d also like to thank but refrain from mentioning here in respect
of their expressed wish for anonymity.
I want to make special mention of the many kinds of help I received
from Pha.m Ðoan Trang, even when, at times, it risked her own safety.
Sadly, Ðoan Trang was arrested on October 6, 2020, on trumped up

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

charges of spreading propaganda against the state, and sentenced to 9

years of prison on December 14, 2021. But rather than fighting for
her release, Ðoan Trang has asked that we fight for the freedom of her
country. I dedicate this book to her in support of this worthy struggle.
Outside of Vietnam, I give a special and heartfelt thanks to Peter
Zinoman, whose vast knowledge and clinical understanding of Vietnam
helped me navigate this project through many strong winds and choppy
waters; Nancy Peluso, who regularly illuminated my thinking with her
critical brilliance and trenchant analysis; and Jeff Romm, who always
pushed me to stretch my thinking beyond its current shape. To each of
you, I owe thanks not only for this book, but also for the much stronger
thinker that came out on the other end of it.
I want to recognize the invaluable opportunities afforded to me to
discuss and develop different elements of this book by Nancy Peluso and
the many guests that joined her weekly Land Lab and the Environmental
Politics Writing Workshop at the University of California – Berkeley;
Christian Lund and his Danish colleagues for organizing a memorable
workshop on Southeast Asian local politics at Roskilde University; and
Jonathan Rigg and colleagues for much insightful discussion in the Social
and Cultural Geography discussion group at the National University of
Singapore.
Many others read, discussed, commented on, and read again sections
of this book in its various stages, all of which has been extremely
helpful to me. In particular, I would like to thank Alec Holcombe, Jason
Picard, Trang Cao, Jim Delaney, Andrew Wells-Dang, Danielle Labbé,
Nguyễn Nguyê.t Cầm, Jimmy Tran, Mike Dwyer, Martha Lincoln, Chris
McMorran, Eli Elinoff, and Lim Tai Wei. Thank you all!
Several organizations supported the research and writing of this book. I
thank UC Berkeley, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada, the Trudeau Foundation, and the Institute of East Asian
Studies for generous funding that allowed me to conduct extensive
research for this book. I also thank the Singapore University of Social
Sciences and the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, who
supported me through long periods of writing, revising and rewriting.
I thank the publishers at Palgrave-MacMillan who helped me put this
work into print, and Daphne Gray-Grant, whose Get It Done! program I
recommend to all young book and dissertation writers.
Several of the persons I mention above took personal and professional
risks to engage with me on this research. But I want to be crystal clear
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

that the final representation and interpretation of events and processes

presented in this book are entirely my own, and I am the only one to be
held accountable for them. Likewise, all errors and other shortcomings in
this book belong strictly to me.
Last but certainly not least, I thank my peerless wife Lu,o,ng Kim Thuý
and our two beautiful daughters, Zara and Dani, who, through many
stress-filled moments, kept refilling my cup with love and joy. And without
love and joy, none of this would be worth anything.
 Note on Vietnamese Translation,
Diacritics, and Names

All translations of Vietnamese text in this book are my own, unless

otherwise indicated.
Whenever present in the original text, I have used Vietnamese diacritics
to transcribe Vietnamese words and names. I have used diacritics for
all place names in Vietnam, except for Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, and
Vietnam itself due to their familiarity in the English language.
For referring to Vietnamese names, I have used full names throughout
the book, usually in the order of surname, middle name and first
name, as per Vietnamese convention (e.g., Nguyễn Thanh So,n). Though
cumbersome at times, a limited number of Vietnamese family names—
for example, some 30–40% of all Vietnamese surnames is Nguyễn—have
made this convention somewhat necessary.
One notable exception is General Võ Nguyên Giáp, whom I also refer
to as General Giáp to reflect the familiarity with which he is known by
many Vietnamese people as Ða.i Tu,ó,ng Giáp or, alternatively, Bác Giáp
(Uncle Giáp).

xi
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
2 Political Histories of Vietnamese Bauxite 31
3 Power and Limits of Embedded Advocacy 63
4 Reemergence of the Intellectuals 119
5 Two Arms of the Party-State 153
6 Conclusion: What Came Next 197

Images of Bauxite-Alumina Production at the Tân Rai

Mining Sites in Lâm Ðồng Province (2017) 225
Index 233

xiii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In early 2009, a public debate over bauxite mining rocked the domestic
politics of Vietnam. Bauxite, an aluminum ore, is a hard reddish-orange
clay that exists in massive quantities just below the surface of a region
familiarly known in Vietnam as the Tây Nguyên or, in its English approx-
imation, the Central Highlands. Two years earlier, the Vietnamese Prime
Minister promulgated a decision to excavate 5.4 billion tons of bauxite
from the highland plateau, covering an area estimated by some as equiv-
alent to 20,000 km2 . In one province, bauxite mining activities were
expected occupy two thirds of the province’s total territory. The social
and ecological consequences were expected to be enormous and irre-
versible. Furthermore, the Prime Minister proposed to pre-process all
of that bauxite into an aluminum feedstock that, while creating possibly
dozens of jobs for local people, would leave behind tens, if not hundreds,
of millions of tons of a toxic sludge called “red mud”. One critic, noting
the importance of the Central Highlands as a regional watershed, likened
this scenario to hanging a “mud bomb” over the whole of southern
Vietnam.
The mere prospect of these projects produced a public reaction against
government and the ruling Vietnamese Communist Party of a kind rarely
seen in Vietnam, at least not since the introduction of market reforms in
the late 1980s. Diverse voices from across the country spoke out against

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021
J. Morris-Jung, Unearthing Politics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3124-5_1
2 J. MORRIS-JUNG

the government plans for bauxite mining, traversing many of the socio-
political and geo-political divisions that had helped cement communist
rule since the end of the Vietnam wars. These voices included Vietnamese
from the north and the south, from inside and outside the country, as
well as scientists and experts, writers and artists, religious and community
leaders, former state officials and military leaders, domestic and foreign
journalists, National Assembly delegates, and a local NGO. The chorus
of voices included some of the nation’s most highly accomplished and
renown intellectuals, the brightest lights of the Socialist education system
and its emigrés. Also among these voices was that of the legendary mili-
tary leader of the People’s War and, at that time, last surviving founder
of modern Vietnam, General Võ Nguyên Giáp.
Yet, along with these nationally celebrated heroes were some of the
country’s most outspoken dissidents and regime opponents. They ranged
from internally exiled Catholic priests and Buddhist leaders to members
of the outlawed human rights and democracy coalition Bloc 8406 and the
overseas Vietnamese anti-communist organization Viê.t Tân. Even as these
diverse groups held a range of approaches toward, as well as a distinct
histories with, the party-state, they came together at this moment in a
common opposition to what the Prime Minister himself had referred to as
a “major policy of the Party and the state” (Communiqué No. 17, 2009).
Not since the wartime era had such a wide cross section of Vietnamese
persons from across the country and beyond been so openly vocal in their
opposition to a major policy of the party-state.
These groups made use of diverse media to make their views public,
including workshops and seminars, newspapers and magazines, interviews,
private letters, open letters, petitions, and blogs, among others. Amid
this diversity, the Internet provided a relatively new tool for hosting,
promoting, circulating, collecting and monitoring the contributions to
the debate. Since the turn of the millennium, Internet use had grown
steadily in Vietnam as a source of information and entertainment, but
also as a platform for expressing a wider range of social and political views.
Nowhere was this more evident than in the posting of an online petition
against bauxite mining by two Hanoi literary intellectuals and one hydrol-
ogist from Central Vietnam. The Bauxite Vietnam website that emerged
from that petition became a new hub for public discussions on bauxite
mining, and a clearing house for the mounds of commentary and docu-
mentation that was being unearthed on the government’s plans. This
online petition and the many that followed became a new platform for
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

the re-emergence of the Vietnamese intellectuals in domestic politics and

a new voice of domestic opposition to the ruling communist regime.
The issues that the bauxite mining debates brought together were
also wide-ranging. They included many of the social and environmental
concerns typical of a mining conflict, such as deforestation, soil erosion,
watershed degradation, risks to local communities, and big questions on
economic viability and choices of technology. However, these discussions
took on even greater import as they were articulated with questions over
the involvement of a Chinese state-owned company in the mining projects
and concerns for national security. These issues were particularly sensitive
for a region that was historically occupied by non-Vietic ethnic minority
groups and whose forests and mountain landscapes played a fabled role in
the communists’ military battles against foreign foes and southern oppo-
sition. Another Vietnamese General of Hồ Chí Minh’s era captured the
sentiment of a nation, when he wrote in an open letter:

Now, again, if we let China mine bauxite in the Central Highlands, there
will be five, seven or ten thousand Chinese laborers (or soldiers) coming
to live and get busy there. In this infinitely important militarily strategic
region of ours, they will turn the place into a “Chinese town,” a “military
base” (where bringing in weapons would not be difficult either). To the
North, on the sea, China has a powerful naval base, while, to the South-
west, China has a totally equipped military force. And so what will all this
mean for our precious sovereignty that we had to earn with the blood and
bones of millions of lives? (Nguyễn Tro.ng Vı̃nh, 2009, February).

Yet even this deep-seated historical suspicion of all things Chinese was a
challenge to the communist leadership, as expressed by the authors of the
intellectuals’ petition: “It is a pity that, in the bauxite mining situation
today, the honest people of our country are suddenly realizing that the
old ideology of hand-in-hand building the nation together has all but
disappeared because of how our governing organizations are currently
running the country” (Nguyễn Huê. Chi et al., 2009, April 12). To these
authors, as well as to their thousands, if not millions, of followers that
signed the petition or visited the Bauxite Vietnam website, the decisions
around Central Highlands bauxite concerned nothing less than the “fate
of our nation.”
As important as these events were at the time, their legacy has been
even more important. In the decade that has passed since, we can see even
4 J. MORRIS-JUNG

more clearly now how political culture and consciousness has transformed
for a growing segment of the Vietnamese population. Cross-national
demonstrations that were unheard of in the postwar period have now
become a near annual event, on one issue or another. Open criticism of
the party regime and especially of individual political leaders, which used
to be almost unheard of, has become more commonplace and widespread.
Perhaps above all, more and more diverse groups within Vietnam have
begun questioning and contesting the status quo of government policy
and domestic politics. The bauxite mining controversy was, to be sure, a
culmination of trends that had been building since the market reforms of
the 1980s, but they also signaled and catalysed important new beginnings.
This book is an intimate and in-depth examination of the bauxite mining
controversy, its origins, its developments, its people, and its legacy. As I
argue in this book, this controversy reflected a transformative moment in
Vietnam’s contemporary politics, and by examining this moment closely
we can better understand not only what happened then, but also what
has happened since and what might lie ahead.

The Ambiguities of Environmental Politics

How was it that a marginal issue in a remote region of Vietnam became
the focus of a debate that sent tremors through the foundations of
national-socialist hegemony? To many observers of Vietnam’s domestic
politics, the bauxite mining debates were a surprise. This was partly
because any open criticism of government and the ruling communist
regime was still rare in the post-reform era, and the scope, scale, and tone
of these particular criticisms were extraordinary. As one veteran analyst
of Vietnamese politics had suggested at the time, the party-state “had
never faced widespread national opposition of the scope that emerged in
2009” (Thayer, 2010, p. 49). Even more surprising was that this extraor-
dinary debate emerged from discussions on the socio-ecological risks of
a mining project. Was this, as one researcher suggested, “the beginning
of a more autonomous environmental movement in Vietnam” (Marston,
2012, p. 187)?
For decades, if there was one thing that people and party had appeared
to agree on in Vietnam, it was that the environment took a back seat
to economic growth and development. This was the unspoken mantra
that had accompanied the socialist drive for rapid industrialization and
modernization, and it only accelerated during the decades of outstanding
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

economic growth that followed the reforms of the late 1980s. So why,
just as Vietnam had joined the World Trade Organization in 2007, was
the environment suddenly grabbing so much attention, and how did
discussions on a mining project in a hinterland region develop into “one
of the most telling contemporary examples of the changing nature of
state-society relations in Vietnam” (Marston, 2012, p. 186)? Did the
environment transform politics?
Notions of the transformative potential of environmental movements
and activism has important theoretical and historical underpinnings. From
the “liberation ecologies” that heralded the “emancipatory potential of
current political activity around the environment” (Peet & Watts, 2004,
p. 5) to the social movements literature that saw in global environmen-
talism the “new social movement” par excellence (Keck & Sikkink, 1998),
scholarly theorists has frequently returned to the theme of the transfor-
mative potential of the environment. For the early political ecologists, the
environment had emerged as a new terrain for contesting capitalism and
injustice at multiple scales. For students of social movements, environ-
mentalism replaced what had previously been seen as the social movement
par excellence in the global labor movement, which had tried, and failed,
to unite the world’s oppressed populations around a single collective
struggle against capitalist exploitation. For some, the environment had
re-inspired this long-held wish for universal revolution and had become
a new “global symbol” for collective action and transnational struggle
(Chester, 2012; Doyle, 2005, p. 161; Pralle, 2006).
However, the relationship between environment and politics is a
complex one. As much as environmental issues and movements can
inspire hope for a more progressive or democratic politics, their discourse,
symbols, and institutions can also become co-opted for consolidating the
status quo or “green-washing.” States can selectively attend to different or
particular elements of environmental issues, and narrowly proscribe who
and what count as legitimate discussions on the environment. Human
geographer Eric Swyngedouw is among those who have articulated this
critique most forcefully, arguing that, rather than expanding the polit-
ical sphere or enhancing citizen engagement, the environment can also
be a “cause célèbre” for post-politics (Swyngedouw, 2010, 2011, p. 255).
Post-politics refers to the reduction and degradation of political debate,
which should more properly be characterized by democratic participation,
a plurality of perspectives, and, reflecting that plurality, disagreements. As
Swyngedouw (2011) argues, post-politics “reduces the political terrain to
6 J. MORRIS-JUNG

the sphere of consensual governing and policy-making, centered on the

technical, managerial and consensual administration (policing) of envi-
ronmental, social, economic or other domains, and they remain of course
fully within the realm of the possible, of existing social relations” (p. 266).
Focusing on contemporary debates around climate change and sustain-
ability, Swyngedouw argues that the status of these issues as a “global
humanitarian cause” (p. 255) has created a false consensus, whose primary
effect is to bind multiple and varied discourses on the environment into a
putative reaffirmation of existing political and economic relations (Swyn-
gedouw, 2010, p. 215–216). In other words, rather than challenging
existing relations of power, these “universal” views of environmental
problems effectively eliminate possibilities for discussion or, more to the
point, disagreement with the political and economic relations that have
produced them. Clearly, Swyngedouw is not referring to all environmental
issues or movements—which he emphasizes are multiple and diverse—but
rather drawing attention to how certain environmental discourses, poli-
cies, and institutions can be and have been co-opted into processes that
effectively shrink the political sphere.
While theory outlines a range of possible outcomes on the relation
between environment and politics, history has offered up some poignant
examples of environmental activism catalyzing deep political transforma-
tion, especially in socialist settings. Environmental activists were among
the most aggressive in pushing for regime change in communist Poland,
while “Ecoglasnost” became a core platform of the Union of Demo-
cratic Forces in Bulgaria (Economy, 2010, p. 248). Sometimes organizing
around industrial pollution and environmental degradation were the only
forms of activism tolerated in the communist regimes of Eastern Europe,
which allowed activists to create new networks, organizational infras-
tructure, and powerful symbols of resistance that later lent themselves
to more direct forms of political organizing (Economy, 2010; Gold-
stone, 2001; Ho & Edmonds, 2008). Elizabeth Economy (2010) has
commented, “As the Soviet and Eastern Bloc experience shows, social
forces, once unleashed, may be very difficult to contain” (p. 136). Envi-
ronmental disasters also exposed the hollowness of the communist state’s
self-legitimating paternalism. As political theorist Jack Goldstone (2001)
has argued, the Soviet state’s “wooden response” to Chernobyl made
visible how the state, which had justified authoritarianism on the basis of
its paternalistic protection, had violated an unspoken law of its own legit-
imacy. While environmentalism obviously was not the sole cause for the
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

collapse of these communist regimes, it had an important role in inspiring

and organizing the opposition against them.
Similar ideas around the transformative potential of environmental
activism have also been discussed in the more contemporary setting—
and more socio-culturally comparative one to Vietnam—of communist
China. Elizabeth Economy’s analysis of a campaign to clean up the
Huai River demonstrated the possibilities for Chinese citizens to organize
collectively and enhance government accountability under an authori-
tarian regime. As Economy argued, the Huai River campaign revealed
“the potential of [Chinese] society to become more vocal in its demands
for a cleaner environment and to bring a new level of accountability to
the Chinese government’s environmental policies and proclamations, and
perhaps even to the entire Chinese political system” (Economy, 2010,
p. 21). Other scholars have argued that environmental NGOs in China
have the potential to create “jarring political change” (Cooper, 2006,
p. 109), and environmental campaigns provide “laboratories” of polit-
ical action, “where citizens may practice political skills, organize and
participate in civic action, and test political limits” (Yang, 2005, p. 65).
One reason that environmental activism has had more success in
organizing collectively under authoritarian regimes is that activists are
sometimes able to hide behind a facade of being apolitical and strictly
based on science. Economy (2010) described this as a “shelter function,”
which protected activists from being perceived as politically motivated
or challenging state authority (p. 23). Peter Ho and Richard Edmonds
(2008) called it a deliberately calculated, if subtly applied, “depoliticiza-
tion of environmental politics” (p. 8). Its core features are adopting
non-confrontational approaches to the state, staying clear of potentially
“sensitive” issues, and avoiding any association with a broader movement.
As Ho and Edmonds argue, “environmentalism has gained an increasing
political leverage [in China] by avoiding any connotation with being a
movement, by all means trying to appear small, low key and localized,
and acting as the state’s partner rather than its adversary” (p. 21).
The irony of these claims is that environmental activists are seen
as engaging in politics best when they dissimulate it the most. Practi-
cally speaking, this usually means that environmental campaigns can be
successful when addressing smaller and more marginal issues, while possi-
bilities for effecting broader and more enduring political change remain
off limits. As strategy, it condemns activists to the perennially precar-
ious position of having to rely on the willingness of state offices to
8 J. MORRIS-JUNG

perceive their activities as non-threatening, and maintaining that charade

within the confines of arbitrary, single-issue and almost always local-level
resolutions to their grievances.
Relatively recent events in Vietnam, notably since the bauxite mining
controversy, have provoked similar discussions about the relation between
politics and environment. Recent activism around the environment has
led some scholars to suggest that the environment has emerged as a
“new frontier” of Vietnamese civil society (Nguyen & Datzberger, 2018)
and a “new arena of contestation for civil society activism in Vietnam”
(Vu Ngoc Anh, 2017, p. 1205). In particular, massive cross-country
protests in response to a massive fish die-off caused by industrial pollu-
tion in Central Vietnam in 2016 and a Hanoi “tree-hugging” campaign
to stop city officials from chopping down some 6,700 urban trees in 2015
have led many to wonder whether “the environment [will] be the Viet-
nam’s government’s fall?” (Hutt 2017). Both of these events, which are
discussed in more detail in Chapter 6, also occurred at a time when envi-
ronmental disputes have become second only to land disputes as source
causes of social conflict in Vietnam (Gillespie et al., 2019).
Scholars have also shown how local communities in Vietnam have
been able to find redress to local environmental grievances through more
informal and less confrontational means. Wells-Dang’s (2010, 2012) anal-
ysis of a successful citizen’s movements to block a luxury hotel from
encroaching on a popular Hanoi park in 2007 suggested that flexible,
informal, and low profile forms of advocacy can be effective in protecting
urban green space. O’Rourke (2004) also suggested that local commu-
nities can be effective in regulating local industrial pollution through
informal means and building relations with sympathetic local officials.
However, as in China, these successes were unusual and their outcomes
often arbitrary, while the networks that formed around them had little
endurance. This form of activism in Vietnam may offer hope for incre-
mental changes, but it can also be symptomatic of a political regime that
is willing to cede some power on the margins but reacts fiercely to any
challenges to its core. As in China, Vietnamese activists can be political if
they successfully pretend not to be.
From the new social movement par excellence to a cause célèbre for
post-politics, the political promise of environmental activism remains
ambiguous. It is clear that the environment can be enrolled in polit-
ical struggles in different ways and with wildly different outcomes. What
seems more important, however, is a careful understanding of how
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

environmental issues become articulated with other social and political

struggles at particular moments and in particular places. In the bauxite
mining controversy, both sides of this complex relationship featured
strongly. As this book shows, Vietnamese activism around bauxite mining
showed both how initial appellations to the “environment” were effective
in shielding critics from immediate state retribution, but also how this
sheltered approach was limited in pursuing broader goals for transparency,
public accountability and, ultimately, a more democratic form of political
participation. This is not to say that mining and environment were irrel-
evant. Government plans for bauxite mining were massively disruptive
with wide-ranging social and ecological impacts, which opened up new
possibilities for contesting and re-imagining politics in Vietnam.

Resource Conflict as Disruption and Possibility

Resource development is one of the most contested forms of devel-
opment. From the “resource curse” to “conflict minerals,” theorists
have often highlighted the conflictive nature of resource development.
Furthermore, as mining has become more industrialized, technologi-
cally sophisticated, and internationally networked, these conflicts have
also become larger, more sophisticated, and more globally networked.
Human geographer Gavin Bridge (2004) has described how growing
expectations for a “social license,” a growing number of non-traditional
and non-state institutions involved in mine management, and a broader
canvas of environmental issues to consider has only added complexity to
conflict. Anthropologist Stuart Kirsch (2014) has suggested that mining
projects have become targets of “unprecedented conflict on almost every
continent” (6), while Bebbington et al. (2008) have noted that growing
investments in the extractive industries in Latin America has coincided
with “an equally remarkable surge in social mobilisation and conflict”
(p. 2889). Bebbington (2012) has further noted that resistance to mining
operations can take on diverse forms, which broadly include contentious
politics, struggles within state institutions, sub-national and international
conflict, and direct involvement of the law and legal professions.
A key reason for conflict is that mining is inherently disruptive, and
massive mining projects tend to be massively disruptive. As anthropolo-
gist Stuart Kirsch (2014) reminds us, “Mining moves more earth than
any other human endeavour” (p. 3). Moving massive amounts of earth—
no matter how carefully planned, how technologically advanced, or how
10 J. MORRIS-JUNG

“socially responsible”—is massively disruptive. The disruption affects not

only people’s lives and their livelihoods, but also complex sets of socio-
ecological relations built over generations that connect people to the
landscapes they inhabit. Anthropologist Jill Nash described the impacts
of industrial mining on subsistence communities—a descriptor that can
be applied to many groups in the Central Highlands of Vietnam—as a
“cataclysmic event”; this is because “land is not only for material benefit,
which compensation payments reduce it to; it encodes their history and
identity and is a major source of security” (Nash, 1993, as cited in
Kirsch, 2014, p. 6). Similarly, Anthony Bebbington et al. (2008) have
argued that sudden influxes of new investment, the accelerated effects of
cultural modernization, and the disarticulation of moral economies that
mining brings to rural and more traditional communities are akin to a
“colonization of lifeworlds” (p. 2890).
Yet it is not only “moving earth” that disrupts lives, livelihoods and
landscapes. Major investments in infrastructure and landscape adaptations
to make the “production” of minerals commercially viable can be equally
or more disruptive. They can include the re-drawing of transportation
networks, such as roads, railways, and water transport; accommodating
new forms of employment and migrant workers, along with their asso-
ciated housing, education, health, food and energy needs; and at times
re-shaping major geological features, such as rivers and lakes, to provide
water, energy or serve as cesspools for mining waste.
These disruptions can be positive or negative, they can create new
jobs and economies as much as they can destroy old ones. Bridge and
Frederiksen (2012) have referred to as these processes as disordering
and re-ordering the landscape into “novel socio-natural juxtapositions”
(p. 367). Juxtaposition refers to the way a mining landscapes disrupts an
existing set of social, economic, or religious, spiritual and cosmological
relations to nature and “re-orders” them in new ways that can create “dis-
order” for the people experiencing them. While these disruptions can be
acute, even existential, for the subsistence and rural communities describe
by Nash (1993) and Bebbington et al. (2008), they are no less relevant to
the so-called modern citizens of the industrialized world and their imag-
ined communities of nation and state. A geobody is one expression of
how land and particularly territory are tied to relationships of nationality
or nationhood.
A geobody, as discussed by Thongchai Winakachul (1994), is the
spatial boundary or geometric shape of a nation that instills feelings of
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

identity and belonging. Yet those feelings are created through a collective
experience of that land-space informed by ways of seeing and knowing
it, such as modern mapping, but also through historiography and folk-
lore. In addition, geographical features of landscape, such as mountains
or rivers, or elements of its flora and fauna often become symbols of the
nation or other community, which may be sub- or supra-national. For
the Central Highlands, the historiography and folklore of how the Viet-
namese communists fought and defeated the French and the American
military machines through the forests and hills of the Central Highlands,
and other mountainous regions in the north, reinforces a relationship
of nationality that connects the Vietnamese people to the nation (i.e.,
each other), to communism and, not least of all, to the indigenous
groups that continue to inhabit the Central Highlands. The disruption
and disordering of these complex set of relations that reverberate over
history, geography, and politics, can have far-reaching implications. Not
surprisingly, they also create conflict.
As Michael Watts and Nancy Peluso remind us, conflicts are pre-dated
by and reflective of broader structural inequities and historical struggles,
be they between different regions, religions, ethnic groups, urban–
rural communities, colonial-indigenous peoples, countries and nations, or
otherwise (Peluso & Watts, 2001; Watts, 2004). This is a further part of
the reason why seemingly “remote” conflicts in “remote” places can take
on the proportions of larger national and international standoffs. In addi-
tion to conflict over access to minerals they also become conflicts over
environment, indigenous rights, state–society relations, capitalism, colo-
nial histories, and other unresolved issues. As Gavin Bridge (2004) has
argued, “the mine sits at the nexus of history, politics, and culture, the
focal point of a contested moral landscape” (p. 242). This landscape is
both material and symbolic, both imagined and real. The conflicts that
emerge around it are also both material and symbolic, as relfected by the
socio-ecological relations embedded in the landscape.
In discussing how the mine can become a focal point for contesta-
tion, Bridges borrows from Marxian literary critic, Raymond Williams,
who argued that that the mining landscape “is a technological one—but
it is also a mental landscape, a social terrain, and an ideological map” (as
cited in Bridge, 2004, p. 241). For Bridge, the mine is a cultural land-
scape and it has “cultural power”; it is a “potent metaphor for the energies
and contradictions of development” (p. 241). In discussing global contes-
tation around mining today, Bridge (2004) argues that mining conflict
12 J. MORRIS-JUNG

reflects “society’s displacement onto mining of more general anxieties

about the scale of human intervention in the environment, the glob-
alization of business, a perceived loss of local control, and rapid social
and ecological change” (Bridge, 2004, p. 241). Understanding mining
conflict in this broader way will help us develop a wider appreciation for
the issues at stake during the bauxite mining controversy, and help us
from distracting ourselves about what whether the environment or poli-
tics was the “real” issue at stake. It forces us to look at the bauxite mining
debates not only as a struggle over resources or the environment, but also
as a focal point for many layers of conflict and enduring political struggle
were unearthed. However, to begin to understand these layers of conflict,
we need to understand the situation of domestic politics at the onset of
the bauxite mining controversy.

The Encrusted Politics of Post-Socialist Vietnam

In the late 1980s, Vietnam embarked on a series of policy reforms that
put an end to the centrally planned economy, which the communists had
first implemented throughout the north after the First Vietnam War in
1954, and then through the entire country after the Second Vietnam War
in 1975.1 These reforms that put Vietnam on a path to a post-socialist
, ij

market economy are widely known as the d-ôi mói reforms, commonly
translated as “renovation.” Developing a market economy also required
a new openness toward the capitalist world, which had hitherto been
mostly shut out from Vietnam due to both the state-run economy and the
US-led international embargo. As the international embargo was lifted in
ij
,
1994, the d-ôi mói reforms reaped huge rewards. Vietnam recorded spec-
tacular rates of economic growth through the 1990s and early 2000s,
usually second only to China. In less than thirty years, Vietnam went

1 In this book, I refer to the wars that engulfed Vietnam from the mid-1950s to the
mid-1970s as the Vietnam wars. The First Vietnam War (c.1946–1954) primarily involved
Hồ Chí Minh’s communists against the returning French colonists and concluded with
the Geneva Accords in 1954, which recognized the communist-led Democratic Republic
of Vietnam in the north and the Republic of Vietnam in the south as two independent
states. The Second Vietnam War (c.1955–1975) revolved around the ensuing conflict
between these two newly created states, though each side was variously supported by
the United States, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, among others.
The Paris Peace Accords of 1973 marked the United States’ withdrawal from the Second
Vietnam War, and it concluded with the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975.
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

from one of the least developed countries in the world to a middle-

income country. This era of new prosperity and opportunity for so many
ij
,
of Vietnam’s millions of citizens can be called the d-ôi mói or post-reform
era.
The general enthusiasm in the economic sphere also occasions some
optimism for reforms in the political sphere. As socialist regimes were
crumbling in Eastern Europe through this period, and as the Soviet
Union would soon do too, the Vietnamese Communist Party reaf-
firmed itself as the sole force to lead State and society. Scholarship on
Vietnamese politics through the 1990s highlighted what Gareth Porter
(1993) referred to as the Party’s “political monopoly on power” (p. 96).
The party maintained this monopoly in telltale ways, such as forbidding
the formation of opposition parties, elections, and a free press; heavily
restricting political and civic freedoms, including freedoms of expression,
association, and worship; and deploying a repressive apparatus to silence
and intimidate its citizens.
Addressing questions of how the communist regime legitimized
and maintained power, political scientists have highlighted the Party’s
extensive bureaucratic organization. Carlyle Thayer (1995, 2010) has
described Vietnam as an exemplar of “mono-organizational socialism.”
Mono-organizational socialism describes how the extensive organizational
networks of the party overlap onto state organizations like a parallel
hierarchy, penetrating and maintaining control over its governing insti-
tutions. One of the key mechanisms for creating this parallel hierarchy is
the installation of “dual-role elites.” Dual-role elites are high-level party
members assigned to multiple and overlapping leadership positions. They
help ensure both unity and obedience within government and party so
that the state effectively functions as a party-state.
Another key mechanism to the party’s bureaucratic power is its perva-
sive network of “party cells” (d-ang uy), which are installed in every type
ij ij

of state or state-sponsored organization. They include not only govern-

ment agencies at every level, but also state-run banks, schools, hospitals,
and every single media outlet in the country. Each party cell has a desig-
nated leader, and depending on the organization, dedicated staff, resource
streams, and office space. Their presence not only helps to monitor the
organization’s activities but also reminds employees, including execu-
tives, of the party’s proximity. As London (2009) has described, party
cells enable the Vietnamese Communist Party to reach into “all terri-
torial units of society, every functional branch of government, and all
14 J. MORRIS-JUNG

institutional spheres, and beyond the formal bounds of state administra-

tion, into neighbourhood units, economic units, schools and hospitals”
(p. 376–377).
The party-state’s bureaucratic power extends further beyond state and
parastatal organizations and into those of civil society through a strategy
that Yeonsik Jeong (1997) has referred to as “state corporatism.” State
corporatism relies on incorporating groups and associations that emerge
from civil society into a government-led system of singular, compulsory,
non-competitive, hierarchically ordered and functionally differentiated
social organizations (Schmitter 1974, as cited in Jeong, 1997, p. 155).
Under state corporatism, the party-state bestows recognition to an orga-
nization or association as the single official national representative of
its domestic constituency. In exchange, the association submits to the
demands of the regime, which may include communicating exclusively
through state organs and allowing party officials to intervene in the selec-
tion of its leaders. Essentially the system functions as a hub-and-spokes
model of power that allows state authorities to manage how associations
interact and communicate both with the party-state and each other.
Jeong argued that state corporatism emerged as a strategy to deal with
the “wave of democratization” that followed the collapse of the Eastern
European communist states in the late 1980s, as well as the atrocities of
the Chinese Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989. However, the rollout
of its basic structure can be perceived from the very beginnings of the
Vietnamese party-state. For example, the Vietnam Committee of Catholic
Solidarity was formed in 1955 out of concern over the subversive poten-
tial of Vietnamese Catholics, whose membership outnumbered that of the
communists by several millions (a condition that remains true today) and
whom the communists deeply distrusted because of alleged loyalties to the
French colonial regime. The Committee was established as the singular
state-sanctioned national organization for Vietnamese Catholics, which
allowed state officials to more closely monitor and control Catholics in
Vietnam. To this day, the Committee continues to function as a wedge
in the larger Vietnamese Catholic community, a significant proportion of
whom reject party interference in church matters and continue to pledge
their ultimate allegiance to the Vatican. Later, shortly after the Second
Vietnam War, the Vietnam Fatherland Front was established as a way of
managing and incorporating wartime mobilization units, which operate at
national, provincial, district, and all the way down to village levels. They
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

included the Hồ Chí Minh’s Youth Union, Women’s Union, Farmer’s
Union, and others.
These state-sanctioned associations have also been created in direct
response to outbreaks of public dissent. For example, in 1981, the
Buddhist Sangha of Vietnam was created in response to protests and
defiant monks of the southern-based Unified Buddhist Church of
Vietnam in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This was the same association
of monks who had protested the southern Vietnamese regime by immo-
lating themselves during the Second Vietnam War, and then found that
religious freedoms were little better under the communists after 1975. By
establishing the Buddhist Sangha of Vietnam, state authorities were able
to purge what they perceived as problematic leaders while co-opting large
numbers of the Buddhist following. In 1989, the party-state formed the
Veteran’s Association as a way to stave off a challenge emerging from a
group of southern veterans known as the Club of Freedom Resistance
Fighters. The Club sought recognition for the grievances endured by
the South in the postwar era and advocated for a national reconciliation
process—a desire that had also been expressed by the late former Prime
ij
,
Minister and architect of the d-ôi mói reforms Võ Văn Kiê.t. To curb this
threat, however, the party-state removed its leadership and established
the Veteran’s Association as another of Vietnam’s mass organizations,
administered by the Vietnam Fatherland Front.
Even as international NGOs poured into Vietnam through the 1990s
and domestic NGOs mushroomed, the party-state developed legal and
regulatory structures to ensure that all of these NGOs were also absorbed
into the party-state’s bureaucratic structures. All domestic NGOs are
required to register under a Ministerial or other government organiza-
tion, while the People’s Aid Coordinating Committee was established as
a supervisory body for foreign NGOs. As a result, all of the NGOs in
Vietnam are required to operate under the license of a government orga-
nization, and for which reason they tend to remain “within the letter of
the law” and focus primarily on supporting existing government programs
and “state-approved policy goals” rather than advocating against them
(Thayer, 2009, p. 7; Kerkvliet et al., 2008). Of course, these organiza-
tions can always find margins of maneuverability, which vary according to
time and place, but at any moment for any reason the government can
simply withdraw their license to operate.
In other words, even as the economic sphere has undergone dramatic
transformations in the post-reform era, the political sphere has not much.
16 J. MORRIS-JUNG

Jonathan London (2009) has dubbed Vietnam’s political system in the

post-reform era as Market-Leninist, which combines a liberalized market
economy with an essentially Leninist political structure. As London
describes, in a unipolar world of global capitalism, Market-Leninism
allows communist parties to “pursue their political imperatives through
market institutions and market-based strategies of accumulation while
maintaining Leninist principles and strategies of political organization”
(p. 376).
The result of the expansive bureaucratic power of the party-state has
been to bury Vietnam’s domestic political life and history under a hard
crust of feigned socialist harmony. As much as possible, all forms of polit-
ical struggle, debate, and conflict, both contemporary and historical, are
quietly suppressed beneath layers of party control. And when the forces
of those conflicts begin to disturb the surface, then the regime can always
resort to hard repression. As human rights organizations testify, Vietnam’s
record on human rights remains abysmal. The party-state severely curtails
freedom of expression, opinion, and speech by routinely harassing, intimi-
dating and, when the occasion demands, imprisoning journalists, bloggers
and activists; exerts strong control over domestic print media, radio, tele-
vision and, increasingly, the Internet; inhibits freedom of assembly and
association for labor unions, human rights organizations, and political
parties; and, through legislation, registration, and surveillance, severely
restricts religious freedoms (Human Rights Watch, 2019).
In a post-reform era, repression is perhaps used more sparingly, if at
times confusingly, as the party-state has to constantly balance its image
of a modern liberalized economy with its insistence on maintaining single
party control. Within this restrictive political structure, Vietnamese citi-
zens and activists may continue to pursue interests that do not always
align with those of the party-state, but they do so within strict limits and
often at great risk.

The Promises of Everyday

and Underground Politics
While the dominance of Leninist state structures remains relevant today,
if one were to focus only on these structures one would miss a lot in
the political lives of the Vietnamese people and their multi-stranded rela-
tions to the party-state. As Vietnam opened up through the post-reform
era, the restrictive research conditions for social and political scientists also
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

began to loosen up. Foreign researchers, in particular, were newly allowed

to venture further afield from major cities and government minders. For
researchers with a more ethnographic bend, this loosening of conditions
allowed them to explore a wider range of sites for observing state-society
relations in Vietnam. The result has been a more nuanced, and complete,
picture of how citizens engage state authorities, contest policies, and
barter power. A lot of this scholarship has focused on local and everyday
politics. It has built on ideas of passive resistence and Vietnamese notions
of “fence-breaking” (phá rào), which refer to a propensity to quietly
defy the edicts of the party-state while pursuing self-interest or policy
objectives (Fforde & De Vylder, 1996; Kerkvliet, 1995, 2006).
A number of field studies emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s
that examined state–society relations in a wider range of local contexts,
such as local elections (Koh, 2006; Malarney, 1997), village tax collec-
tion and issuance of trading licenses (Hy Văn Lu,o.,ng, 1993), regulation
of industrial pollution (O’Rourke, 2004), traffic and construction regu-
lations (Koh, 2006), and state development programs (Sikor & Truong,
2002; Tan, 2006; Taylor, 2007). Building on key insights from political
scientist Joel Migdal, David Koh (2006) argues that state-society relations
in these diverse contexts can be better understand with a disaggregated
view of the state. That is, rather than viewing the state as one harmo-
niously functioning monolithic entity, as an emphasis on state structures
tends to suggest, we need to recognize that the state is multiple and frag-
mented. It is represented by diverse actors and bodies, and it operates at
multiple levels in multiple locations. Inevitably, gaps and contradictions
emerge between these different instances of the state that can be lever-
aged and exploited by clever citizens. As Koh (2006) argues, citizens take
advantage of “confusion of roles” and “other weaknesses of the admin-
istrative system,” such as low salaries and high levels of corruption and
incompetence (p. 10). Koh refers to this area of wiggle room between
what the state tries to impose as laws and policy and the actual prac-
tices of its emissaries (e.g., policy implementation) as the “penumbra of
state-society relations” (p. 2).
In the penumbra of state–society relations, there is a lot more room to
evade state strictures and contest state policy than what a simple reading
of state structure would suggest. However, to operate in this sphere, local
actors have to do so in a way that is not too loud, that does not disrupt
the status quo too much, or does not raise too much suspicion, all of
which can be punished with state brutality and repression. In practice,
18 J. MORRIS-JUNG

this usually means that Vietnamese citizens adopt low profile and non-
confrontational approaches as they barter power with state authorities,
depend on personal and informal connections that span state and society
boundaries, and appeal to moral and cultural justifications that emphasize
compassion for villagers and residents (Koh, 2006). While creating some
space for collective organizing and contestation in a restrictive political
system, this approach also entails very limited and precarious condi-
tions for engaging state authorities and often relies on very personalistic
and arbitrary solutions to personal or communal problems. It essentially
confines activism or political contestation to, in a paraphrase of Koh’s
language, shadows at the local level.
Andrew Wells-Dang (2012) has built on the insights of the everyday
politics literature to rethink the conundrums of Vietnamese civil society
and political engagement. As discussed in the previous section, an
autonomous civil society in Vietnam is constantly challenged by the exten-
sive bureaucratic controls and repressive measures of the party-state. Or
if civil society is conceived more as a Gramscian political terrain, then,
in Vietnam, this terrain is deeply infiltrated and heavily dominated by
the Vietnamese Communist Party’s organizational networks. For Wells-
Dang, however, civil society in Vietnam is better understood in terms
of networks of individuals and organizations that “frequently span tradi-
tional social and political boundaries between state and non-state actors”
(p. 24).
As with the literature on everyday politics, civil society networks are
usually based on personal connections that develop into “flexible, often
informal structures” (p. 3). Their mode of engagement is normally low
key and non-confrontational, though it can be amplified at times with the
help of the local media or branching out into local communities. Ulti-
mately, however, these networks rely on “working within the system and
making direct contact with parts of the state using personal and insti-
tutional ties” (p. 105). Their flexibility and informality helps them to
survive the perils of activism under an authoritarian regime. But they
are also what makes activists’ activities sporadic and precarious, typically
reliant on personal favors and arbitrary decision-making by sympathetic
state actors. As Wells-Dang’s case studies show, civil society networks
sometimes win in exceptional cases, but few, if any, examples exist of
them challenging major national policies or advancing systematic change
in Vietnamese politics. Furthermore, as Wells-Dang recognizes, one of
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

the enduring challenges of civil society networks is the lack of even their
own endurance.
The literature on local and everyday politics in Vietnam is testimony
to the resourcefulness and ingenuity of people living under highly restric-
tive political conditions. But it also reflects the perils and limits of these
conditions. The wrong message to take from these studies is that these
informal and personalistic tactics are an adequate replacement for func-
tioning democratic institutions and political rights, and even less that they
reflect some kind of culturally essentialist way of doing politics in Vietnam
or Asia. It would be more accurate to say that the restrictive political
system in Vietnam conditions a particular kind of political practice and
culture that allows for this kind of constrained underground form of polit-
ical activity amid a wider context of strictly limited political rights and
freedoms. It is a level of political activity that can sometimes achieve what
Wells-Dang describes as “path-breaking advocacy with authorities and
elites” (p. 3), but is ultimately constrained by a lack of more fundamental
political transformation.

∗ ∗ ∗
ij
,
A lot has changed in Vietnam since the d-ôi mói reforms of the late 1980s,
and yet the basic governance structures of the party-state has not changed
much. In essence, the party-state continues to suppress criticism of its
leaders and major policies; repress activists deemed to be challenging state
legitimacy, which now includes environmental activists; and strictly moni-
tors and censors the social and political activities of its citizens. In the years
leading up to the bauxite mining controversy, what could pass as activism
or political contestation at the domestic level remained largely buried
underground and encrusted in Vietnam’s historical legacy of Leninist
political structures.

Unearthing Politics in Vietnam

The controversy over bauxite mining was neither the beginning nor the
end of political transformations in post-reform Vietnam, but it marked a
pivotal moment in its evolution. This controversy brought to the surface
political tensions and historical struggles that had been building up since
at least the 1990s, while also forging a path for the even more contentious
and oppositional politics that have emerged in the ten years since. This
20 J. MORRIS-JUNG

book tells the story of that moment, how it came to be, who was
involved, and what ramifications it had on Vietnamese politics and society.
This book challenges ideas that the environment provides any kind of
privileged pathway to political emancipation. Instead, it begins with a
recognition of the political possibilities that emerged with the massive
socio-ecological disruptions of a massive resource extraction project, and
then enquires into the individuals, associations, networks, resources, tech-
nologies and political and historical narratives that made a moment of
political transformation possible. The analysis begins with an clod of clay
hidden just below the surface of the Central Highlands plateau continuing
through the local organizations, national activists, transnational networks,
and cyber realities that gave voice to a wider opposition contesting not
only bauxite mining but also the fundamental legitimacy of the ruling
communist regime.
The next chapter begins with a short political history of the Central
Highlands bauxite mining projects, one that takes root almost immedi-
ately after the end of the Vietnam wars. The history of these projects
challenges ideas that resources are apolitical, or more precisely that
decision-making around resource development can avoid politics by
simply following the science. Opponents to bauxite mining, understand-
ably perhaps, suggested as much when referring back to decisions of the
Soviet-led Council for Mutual Economic Cooperation (COMECON) not
to invest in Central Highlands bauxite for scientifically enlightened envi-
ronmental reasons. The idea that Central Highlands bauxite extraction
was scientifically unsound helped to expose many of the problems with
the Vietnamese government’s plans for it in the 2000s. However, this
idea also presented a very reductive, and misleading, view of the political
struggles at the center of decisions on over three decades whether or not
to invest in Central Highlands bauxite.
A look back at the history of these projects shows not only how
Vietnamese bauxite was always deeply embedded in shifting political
visions for the newly independent nation, but also how mining plans
actually helped to materialize and consolidate these visions. As Vietnam
sought out shifting foreign alliances to support its national-socialist recon-
struction after a century of colonialism, revolution, and war, it created
and recreated political visions that included solidarity with international
socialism, a new openness to global capitalism, and, more recently,
management of a complex relationship with a rising China. This chapter
traces the history of Central Highlands bauxite through these shifting
 1 INTRODUCTION 21

visions and alliances in the postwar era, which eventually led to the Prime
Minister’s national bauxite policy in late 2007.
The next three chapters provide a roughly chronological account of
how the national policy on bauxite ignited a national controversy, of the
like that had rarely, if ever, been seen in the post-reform era. Chapter 3
explores the little known story of how the public debate on bauxite
mining began. It follows the low-profile activities that a domestic NGO
and a handful of Vietnamese scientists initially pursued to create a public
debate on bauxite mining, beginning in early 2007. By meeting discretely
with domestic experts, collaborating with provincial government leaders
on information exchange, and gradually involving the domestic press,
these activists exemplified the informal and non-confrontational efforts
to try to sway policy decision-making that characterize an embedded
approach. Chapter 3 highlights how this type of approach can be effec-
tive in a restrictive political context, but it also demonstrates the limits
of this approach. It shows that the more an issue is important, the more
it concerns a wide cross section of people, and the more it asks funda-
mental questions about the legitimacy and viability of an authoritarian
regime, the less effective an embedded approach becomes.
The limits of the embedded approach was perhaps best signaled in
the way the domestic NGO that had begun these discussions gradu-
ally began to step away from them as a new cast of activists stepped in
to articulate a more confrontational and oppositional rhetoric. The new
cast included writers and artists, community and religious leaders, and
overseas Vietnamese communities, among others. In Chapter 4, I zoom
in on the efforts of three particular individuals, a literary scholar and
a writer-educator from Hanoi, and a hydrologist from Ðà Năng. ˜ Their
creation of an online petition, initially supported by some of Vietnam’s
most renowned intellectuals, from both inside and outside the country
and across generations, helped to move the discussion from its tradi-
tional approach of gently criticizing the party to make it stronger to a
more oppositional approach that questioned the party’s legitimacy to rule.
The petition was significant not only because it superseded the bounds
of the embedded approach, but it also signaled a re-emergence of the
Vietnamese intellectuals in domestic politics.
The petition collected 2,700 signatures online, which might appear as
a negligible number in other contexts, but it is one that had few, if any,
precedents in post-reform Vietnam. The online petition set a new tone for
domestic activism and contentious politics in the way it brought diverse
22 J. MORRIS-JUNG

Vietnamese groups together in common opposition to a major policy of

the party-state, including Vietnamese scientists and artists, activists, and
community leaders, dissidents and retired or semi-retired state officials, as
well as Vietnamese from the northern, central, and southern regions, and
from both inside and outside the country. The petition further evolved
into the Bauxite Vietnam website, which became a new hub for the
bauxite mining debate and a new platform for the Vietnamese intellec-
tuals. This chapter highlights the capacity of the Vietnamese intellectuals
to mobilize their public prestige and intellectual talents to create new
channels for expressing opposition to the ruling regime while maintaining
their nationalist authority.
While Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the efforts of anti-bauxite activists,
Chapter 5 shows how state authorities tried to manage them through
familiar tactics of incorporation and repression. While this two-track
approach might at first glance appear confused or contradictory, this
chapter focuses on how these two different arms of the party-state worked
together to achieve one end, maintaining the undisputed authority of
the communist regime. The repressive measures to which state author-
ities finally resorted may have put an end to the public discussion on
bauxite, but they also marked the beginning of new networks, forms and
discourses of political activism that have continued to grow and develop in
the decade since. This chapter emphasizes that the success of the bauxite
controversy was not in how it changed policy, for which it can claim only
limited success, but rather in its effects on Vietnamese political culture
and consciousness.
By way of conclusion, the last chapter discusses some of the devel-
opments in domestic politics that flowed from the bauxite mining
controversy. It demonstrates how politics has changed for activists and
a growing sector of the Vietnamese citizenry since the controversy. These
changes include a run of high profile online petitions that address the
most sensitive or controversial issues of the day, massive cross-country
demonstrations directly or indirectly targeting state leadership, and the
formation of new self-declared online autonomous civil society associa-
tions. This final chapter traces the emergence of these developments in the
legacies of the bauxite mining controversy and examines their significance
for the future.
 1 INTRODUCTION 23

Methodological Notes
The same conditions that make activism difficult in Vietnam also made
it difficult to conduct research on the bauxite mining controversy. I
conducted this research while I was based in Hanoi from 2009 to 2011.
Early 2009 was just when the public discussion on bauxite mining had
exploded. General Giáp had written his letter to the Prime Minister on
January 5th, along with two more open letters in April and May; the
intellectuals’ online petition had just come out in April; and the domestic
newspapers provided nearly daily coverage on the bauxite issue during the
National Assembly’s bi-annual meeting in May and June. At that time,
nearly everyone who pays attention to Vietnam’s domestic politics was
surprised by this chain of events, and nobody knew how it would turn
out. Activist intellectuals, many of whom had grown up during war and
ij
,
the hard socialist decades prior to the d-ôi mói reforms, were well aware
of the major state crackdowns on groups of intellectuals, including many
Vietnamese Communist Party members, in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1980s.
These crackdowns resulted in arrests, imprisonment, and state sanctions
that destroyed careers and personal relationships for decades to come. Was
the controversy on bauxite mining also headed in this direction?
The shroud around these discussions continued well after the govern-
ment had embarked on its more obviously repressive measures in the
summer of 2009, and again at the end of 2009 and beginning of 2010.
Activists’ openness and audacity, ebbed and flowed during these years,
depending largely on recent events and the tone set by state’s responses
to them. Even by 2011, when the Vietnamese intellectuals launched their
third major petition to protest the sentencing of activist lawyer Cù Huy
Hà Vũ, taking a more obviously political opposition to the ruling regime
than what they had protested against bauxite mining, there was still a lot
of uncertainty about how far they could take this discussion and what the
consequences would be. These conditions still exist in Vietnam today, but
the past ten years have shown, as I discuss in Chapter 6, that Vietnamese
activists and a growing portion of the citizenry have taken them a lot
further than what they were in 2009.
As a result of these circumstances, identifying who were the key players
in the bauxite mining debates and speaking openly with them about what
they knew and what they thought was a long and careful process. I had
to do so discreetly to protect their identities and avoid exposing them, as
well as protect the possibility for me to carry out this research. To do this,
24 J. MORRIS-JUNG

I employed a broadly ethnographic approach. My methods comprised

primarily of meeting and discussing with people who were involved in
the bauxite mining discussions in some way, or who had an angle on them
that could supplement my own; some participant observation, notably in
the milieu of the Vietnamese networks that had started off the public
debate and intellectual circles in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City; and the
collection and review of hundreds of newspaper articles, online commen-
taries, blog posts, letters and petitions, government reports, and other
documents related to the debates. As the bauxite mining controversy was
primarily a discursive one, the proliferation of these texts went a long way
in supplementing the views and opinions that were often only hinted at
in my interviews.
During the course of my field research, I met with more than fifty
different people connected with the bauxite mining debates. Several of
them I met on multiple occasions, and those with whom I conducted
participant observation we met and discussed regularly. These meet-
ings included scientists and experts, artists and writers, journalists and
NGO workers, as well as current and retired government officials,
foreign Embassy officials, and representatives of domestic and interna-
tional NGOs. Almost all of my interviews were in Vietnamese. Most were
based in Hanoi, though I also met with some in Ho Chi Minh City and
˜
Ðà Năng. I usually met them in their homes or offices, or at nearby cafes
and restaurants. The tone of these discussions was generally informal, and
sometimes clandestine.
Due to these challenges, I recruited my interviews through a guide
or snowballing methods, which was necessary to help generate a founda-
tion of trust for the engagement. Consent to the interviews was given
orally, because I did not want to keep physical or digital evidence of
their discussions with me lest they should be seized by state authorities
at some point. Fortunately, this never happened, but the precaution was
warranted. For these same reasons, I did not record my interviews, except
for a few exceptional cases where it was appropriate and the interviewee
agreed. Instead, I took copious notes either during or immediately after
my interviews, which I encrypted and kept separate from my record of
who those interviews were with. The interviews varied in length, though
they were usually in the range of one to two hours each. Language
was another complicating factor for this research, as I was reluctant to
use interpreters so as to keep the encounters as informal and with as
few unknown variables as possible for my interviewees. At the time, I
 1 INTRODUCTION 25

had a very functional Vietnamese, having previously lived and worked in

the country for several years, but it did not always match the expansive
technical or literary vocabularies, often rich with cultural allusion, of my
interlocutors. Fortunately, as mentioned above, a plethora of texts were
available to help supplement and reinforce the insights and impressions I
was drawing from these interviews.
In several cases, we spent interviews discussing written pieces that
the interviewee had published, as it provided a safe ground for discus-
sion given that the material was already in the public domain. Many of
these materials were posted in domestic newspapers, sometimes uniquely
in online versions, Vietnamese blogsites and international news media
operated by overseas communities, and eventually the Bauxite Vietnam
website established by the creators of the first online bauxite petition.
The Bauxite Vietnam website provided a tremendously helpful clearing
house for texts and written information on the debates for the first six
months, until it was successively hacked and dismantled most likely by
state-employed hackers in late 2009. Key domestic newspapers I followed
ij
ij
included the southern-based Thanh Niên and Tuôi Tre, commonly known
as two of the most daring domestic newspapers, at least within their
tightly controlled ambit of permissible activity; the online and relatively
new VietnamNet , which had innovated with pursuing a style of lengthier
editorials and commentary on current events, which was and still is rare in
Vietnamese newspapers; and more mainstream papers, such as Vietnamese
Communist Party’s mouthpiece Nhân Dân and the English language
Vietnam News. Important international media included the Vietnamese
language versions of the BBC, Radio France Internationale, and Radio
Free Asia, as well as overseas blogsites, such as Diễn Ðàn (Forum),
Viet-Sciences and the former X-Café.
My research methods were ethnographic in the sense that they allowed
me to be in place at an extraordinary moment. Being in place enabled me
to explore and assess this moment from the perspectives of the persons
most closely involved with it, and to view it from multiple and diverse
perspectives. Constantly, I aimed to compare and contrast views of people
holding different positions on the discussions, such as activist versus state
official, or scientist versus literary scholar, or Vietnamese from the north
and south, or inside and outside the country. That was a key principle
driving my snowball recruitment strategy. It helped me to develop both a
more comprehensive and nuanced account of the events unfolding before
our eyes.
26 J. MORRIS-JUNG

However, there was one very important place that this research was
not a part of. That place was the Central Highlands, at the sites where
the bauxite mining projects were being planned. On two occasions, I
requested formal permissions to conduct research there, and on both
occasions I was denied by government officials. I did not want to imperil
the larger research project by clandestinely venturing into areas where
I had been explicitly disallowed. I felt that the voices and stories I was
hearing were too important to risk. But it means that the voices of
the people most affected by the government’s plans are largely lacking
from this analysis, as they were in the broader bauxite mining debates.
Their stories are for another research project. I cannot pretend that they
informed the narratives in this book in any direct way, but only indicate
the limits of this research.

Conclusion
While the extraordinary debates that, for the main, took place in late
2008 and early 2009 never entirely stopped government plans for
Central Highlands bauxite—especially not the two main projects that
had drawn widespread international investor attention since the end of
the Vietnam wars—their accomplishments were elsewhere. Policy “effec-
tiveness” is not the measure by which to assess the significance of the
bauxite mining debates. The significance of those debates was in the new
networks of activism, new discourses of resistance and opposition, and
new and renewed forms of contesting government and regime authority.
It is the accumulation of these transformations in rhetoric, activity, and
consciousness that signal an evolving political culture in contemporary
Vietnam.
The bauxite controversy marked a fault line shift from an older political
culture of reformist or what I have referred to as embedded politics to a
new kind of contentious and more oppositional politics. By exploring this
fault line further, we can understand more clearly what the nature of this
shift consisted of, where it came from and, while not predicting the future,
provide more solid bases for understanding the possibilities that have been
opened up for alternative political futures. It also helps us to understand
better the nature of the state–society deadlock that activists continue to
struggle with despite their growing numbers and heroic efforts.
In essence, this book examines how the bauxite mining debates
unearthed diverse voices of contention within the party-state and helped
 1 INTRODUCTION 27

articulate them into new coalitions of opposition for a more democratic

and politically liberal Vietnam. As such, it is a story about ongoing polit-
ical transformation in one of the last remaining communist regimes in the
world.

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 CHAPTER 2

Political Histories of Vietnamese Bauxite

Introduction
When General Võ Nguyên Giáp wrote his first letter to protest bauxite
mining in January of 2009, he reminded the Prime Minister that a
joint research program sponsored by the Soviet-led Council for Mutual
Economic Assistance (COMECON) had already rejected the Central
Highlands projects in the 1980s. General Giáp claimed that their reasons
were the “long-term and very serious ecological consequences… not only
in the local area but for the entire rice producing areas of the South
Central Region” (Võ Nguyên Giáp, January 5, 2009). General Giáp
wrote authoritatively on the matter because, as he noted in his letter, “I
was delegated to monitor and direct this program” (Võ Nguyên Giáp,
January 5, 2009). General Giáp’s remarks signaled an environmental
sensibility that likely resonated more in Vietnam in 2009 than it ever
did in the 1980s. They also elided a more complex story of the popular
aspirations and hard realities of Vietnam’s newly won national sovereignty
and resource wealth.
It is worth recalling that during the Cold War, the Soviet Union was
among the most scientifically advanced nations in the world, and the
Soviets had played a foundational role in the scientific, as well as cultural,
education of modern Vietnam. In the eyes of many Vietnamese scien-
tists and experts, the Soviets were a paragon of scientific reason and the
perfect foil to the Vietnamese leaders they sought to expose and censure.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 31

Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021
J. Morris-Jung, Unearthing Politics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3124-5_2
32 J. MORRIS-JUNG

Underlining this line of argument, in what became a common refrain for

the campaign against bauxite mining, especially in its early phases, was
the idea that the politics of resource development can be neatly separated
from its scientific bais.
A deeper look in the history of these mining projects, however, shows
that the decision-making around them was, from beginning until end,
deeply political. As expressed by one Hungarian chemist, who had also
conducted research on Vietnamese bauxite in the late 1980s, the idea
that the Soviets would have forgone a massive reserve of aluminum feed-
stock out of concern for environmental consequences in an impoverished
country at the far ends of the socialist world was inconceivable. For the
impoverished Vietnamese government in the 1980s, the massive amounts
of capital and levels of technology required to develop a project of this
size depended on forging strong political relations with foreign counter-
parts. These political relations were not so much an added value to mining
Vietnamese bauxite as a necessary condition for it.
In this chapter, I examine how the Vietnamese government’s plans
for Central Highlands bauxite were built on and helped to shape Viet-
nam’s shifting political alliances through the postwar decades until the
present. Each period shows not only how Vietnam depended on foreign
powers to develop what the nation’s leaders saw as their “natural” and
national wealth, but also how they used natural resources to bolster their
belonging in different international political-economic configurations. I
trace these developments through three main periods, the immediate
postwar decade when Vietnam was cementing its alliances with the Soviet-
ij

led socialist world, the d-ôi mối market reforms as Vietnam tried to
convince audiences at home and abroad that it was open for business
as a market economy, and most recently as it has tried to manage the rise
of its large and powerful northern neighbor.
This chapter will show how discussion on the government’s plans for
Central Highlands bauxite evolved through these three distinct, though
overlapping, periods and finally became national policy in the Prime
Minister’s Decision 167 in late 2007, commonly dubbed as the national
bauxite policy. Before delving into these histories, however, I will first
examine the geology and technology of bauxite, alumina, and aluminum
production, whose materiality and international political economy are also
an integral part of this political history.
 2 POLITICAL HISTORIES OF VIETNAMESE BAUXITE 33

Geology, Technology, and Political

Economy of Bauxite, Alumina and Aluminum
Lightweight, flexible, durable, and shiny, aluminum has been described
as the metal that made the twentieth century. Through the twen-
tieth century, aluminum reshaped transportation through faster trains,
commercial aviation, and personal mobiles. It transformed communi-
cations with high-power electricity lines and satellite communications,
and inaugurated the age of space exploration. It also reshaped everyday
lives and consumption habits with lightweight soda cans, kitchenware,
aluminum foil, food preservatives, makeup, and antiperspirants. As D. H.
Wallace wrote in 1937, “If steel was the workhorse of the industrial revo-
lution, the light metal [aluminum] has become the queen of the newer
technology bridging the gap from railroad to rocket ships” (as cited in
Graham, 1982, p. 14). However, this dazzling story of the metal of the
twentieth century begins with a dull orangey-colored clod of clay known
as bauxite.
Bauxite, also described as aluminum ore, is the primary feedstock for
producing aluminum today. It was first identified in 1821 in Les Baux,
France, from where it gets its name (Gow & Lozej, 1993). Bauxite
occurs in three main varieties: gibbsite, boehmite and disapore. Gibbsite
is considered as the highest grade because it has the highest aluminum
content. Boehmite is considered as a medium grade, while diaspore is the
lowest. While boehmite and some grades of diaspore bauxite can be used
to produce aluminum, gibbsite is the most valued for aluminum produc-
tion. The bauxite deposits in the Central Highlands are primarily of the
gibbsite variety.
The gibbsite found in massive quantities in the Central Highlands was
formed over hundreds of thousands of years through a process called
laterization. Through laterization, wind and water gradually dislodge
soluble organic substances from the topsoil, while concentrating and
compacting the insoluble ones, such as hydrated aluminum, into a hard-
ened clay. The geological formation of lateritic bauxite is important
because it conditions both where and how bauxite can be extracted.
Laterization is more likely to occur on relatively flat or unperturbed
topographies, especially where the water table is close to the surface,
and it favors hot climates with periods of heavy rainfall. As a result, the
largest and most economically viable bauxite reserves today are located
in the tropical world, and in many cases developing countries. The main
34 J. MORRIS-JUNG

exception is Australia, the world’s largest bauxite producer, although even

in Australia bauxite is produced in its less developed regions. This has
reinforced a recurring dynamic in the post-World War II global order of
exploiting bauxite resources in poorer and underdevelopment countries to
produce aluminum for the consumer market and industrial advancement
of wealthier ones.
The laterization process further means that bauxite deposits tend to be
shallow and scattered, as they are in the Vietnamese Central Highlands. As
a result, more than 80% of world bauxite production is extracted through
open-pit mining, also known as strip mining or surface mining (Gow &
Lozej, 1993; UNCTAD Secretariat, 1996). Open-pit mining is the most
destructive form of mining. It requires complete removal of the ground’s
surface layer, which can include forests, farms, houses, and anything else
that happens to dwell there. Rehabilitation efforts can help to mitigate
the impacts of bauxite extraction, but only if they are done effectively;
and rarely, if ever, can they restore complex socio-ecological systems to
an original condition. Furthermore, because bauxite deposits tend to be
shallow and scattered, they usually need to be mined over massive areas
to be commercially viable, as bauxite is a low value commodity. This is a
further reason why wealthier nations have tended to look toward poorer
ones to mine bauxite, notably where the economic costs of land clearing
tend to be lower and political organization to resist weaker.
Bauxite is not, however, a rare resource. Aluminum is the third most
common element in the Earth’s crust, after silicon and oxygen. It is
also the most common metal, comprising 8% of the Earth’s crust (The
Aluminum Association, Bauxite, n.d.). However, aluminum is a highly
reactive metal. It is almost never found alone in its natural form. It is
usually fused together with one or more other elements. From a technical
and commercial point of view, the main challenge in aluminum produc-
tion is extracting the aluminum metal from the bauxite rock. The tech-
nology involves a complicated, energy intensive, two-step process, which
was discovered only in the late nineteenth century and was commercial-
ized only in the early twentieth century. Understanding these processes
is important for understanding why global production of aluminum is
largely divided between the poorer bauxite and the wealthier aluminum
producers.
The first step was discovered by the German inventor Carl Josef Bayer
in 1887. The Bayer process involves immersing crushed bauxite into a
highly caustic solution of sodium hydroxide (NaOH) in a high-pressure
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