Vietnam

This past week, the Thai military launched its second coup in a decade, destroying what was left of Thailand’s shaky democratic system. This coup is likely to last longer, and be much harsher than the coup in 2006; already, the Thai armed forces are censoring Thai media and putting journalists and politicians in detention or in jail. Thailand’s return to military rule was hardly fated to happen. Between the late 1980s and the late 2000s, many countries in Southeast Asia were viewed, by global democracy analysts and Southeast Asians themselves, as leading examples of democratization in the developing world. By the late 2000s, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Singapore all were ranked as “free” or “partly free” by the monitoring organization Freedom House, while Cambodia and, perhaps most surprisingly, Myanmar had both taken sizable steps toward democracy as well. Yet since the late 2000s, Southeast Asia’s democratization has stalled and, in some of the region’s most economically and strategically important nations, gone into reverse. Over the past ten years, Thailand has undergone a rapid and severe regression from democracy and is now ruled by a junta. Malaysia’s democratic institutions and culture have regressed as well, with the long-ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition cracking down on dissent and trying to destroy what had been an emerging, and increasingly stable, two-party system. In Cambodia and Myanmar, hopes for dramatic democratic change have fizzled. Only the Philippines and Indonesia have stayed on track, but even in these two countries democratic consolidation is threatened by the persistence of graft, public distrust of democratic institutions, and continued meddling in politics by militaries. Southeast Asia’s rollback from democracy reflects a worrying global retrenchment toward anti-democratic political change. The implications of this regression from democracy are significant. On a human level, the regression from democracy means that, compared to a decade ago, more of the world’s people are living today under authoritarian or hybrid, semi-authoritarian regimes. People living under authoritarian rule are more likely to have shorter and less healthy lives, as shown by indicators of human development. An increasingly authoritarian and unstable Southeast Asia is also a poor partner for the United States. Southeast Asia contains U.S. treaty allies Thailand and the Philippines, increasingly critical U.S. partners Singapore and Vietnam, and potentially valuable strategic partners like Indonesia, Malaysia, and Myanmar. Southeast Asia has become one of the largest engines of global growth, and the United States and several Southeast Asian nations are attempting to complete the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which would be the largest free trade area in history in terms of gross domestic product (GDP). Regression from democracy will endanger all of this cooperation. History shows that the United States works most effectively around the world with other democracies, as demonstrated in organizations like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The United States’ partnerships with the more democratic nations in Southeast Asia follow this trend—these relationships tend to be more stable than U.S. relationships with more brittle and autocratic Southeast Asian regimes. Stronger democratic governments, including those in Southeast Asia, also usually can deliver the kind of long-term economic liberalization critical to foreign investment, since these economic reforms are not just implemented by fiat. If this democratic rollback continues, it is likely to seriously endanger American security cooperation in East Asia, undermine the region’s growth and economic interdependence, and cause serious political unrest, even insurgencies, in many Southeast Asian nations. In my new working paper, I examine the severe regression from democracy now happening in Southeast Asia, the implications of this trend for the region and the United States, and some possible solutions to this democratic reversal. The working paper is available here.

Over the past week, as Vietnam’s contentious South China Sea dispute with China has escalated into outright ship-to-ship conflict around China’s new rig in the South China Sea, protests in Vietnam have escalated into major attacks on Chinese-owned factories in Vietnam (as well as on some other foreign factories, in part because demonstrators thought these factories were owned by Chinese companies.) Over the weekend, Vietnam’s government worked hard to cool the unrest inside Vietnam, primarily because the authoritarian regime in Hanoi is uncomfortable with any public protest, since it never knows what direction the demonstrations could turn. But Hanoi has not turned down its rhetorical anger at Beijing, with Hanoi’s official news agency accusing Beijing of showing “its aggressiveness by sending more military ships” to the area surrounded the disputed oil rig. Chinese ships reportedly have attacked Vietnamese coast guard ships with water cannons and rammed Vietnamese ships as well. Noticeably absent in this latest South China Sea dispute has been the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Even though the current ASEAN secretary-general is a top former Vietnamese diplomat, and Vietnamese officials (and Philippine officials) have behind the scenes been putting pressure on other ASEAN nations to have ASEAN issue a strong joint statement condemning China’s actions. At ASEAN’s recent summit in Myanmar, the best the organization could do regarding the South China Sea was to issue a weak statement expressing “serious concern” about China’s actions. At the summit, ASEAN countries more favorably inclined to China and not involved in the Sea, including Cambodia and Vietnam, pressed to make sure that any statement on the South China Sea remained as weak as all the prior statements ASEAN has released. ASEAN has often been criticized for being unable to unite and for having virtually no power. ASEAN does have a purpose, but that purpose has not evolved effectively even as the region has become freer, more prosperous, more intertwined, and in some ways more dangerous. When there are no pressing regional issues to address, the organization can fulfill its function of smoothing intra-Southeast Asian relations and serving as a talk shop between Southeast Asia and major powers. But when major regional issues erupt,  ASEAN’s weaknesses are bared to the world. If the organization cannot offer a strong and united position on the South China Sea when an ASEAN member is seriously threatened by China and that member’s diplomat is the ASEAN secretary-general, ASEAN will never take a tougher stand on the Sea.

Ashlyn Anderson, Lauren Dickey, Darcie Draudt, Charles McClean, Will Piekos, and Sharone Tobias look at the top stories in Asia today. 1. And the results are in: A Modi mandate in India! The five-week marathon of elections is complete in India, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has emerged victorious, winning the party’s highest-ever tally of seats in parliament. No single party has captured the number of seats needed to form a government—272—on its own in thirty years, making this election particularly significant in Indian politics. Despite his controversial past, Narendra Modi will lead the new Indian government and will be expected to deliver on his campaign promises of economic growth and good governance. The Congress party—which has been in power for the past decade and promoted Rahul Gandhi as its candidate for prime minister—has conceded its defeat, remarking “Modi promised the moon and stars to the people. People bought that dream.” 2. Three Chinese officials stabbed to death in latest Xinjiang violence. A report from Radio Free Asia said that three Han Chinese government officials were stabbed to death and their bodies dumped into a lake in the restive province of Xinjiang on April 27, during Chinese president Xi Jinping’s visit to the region. The Chinese government blamed the incident on Islamic separatists seeking an independent Uighur nation. Violence has recently been on the rise in Xinjiang, with three people killed, including two attackers, and seventy-nine wounded at a bomb and knife attack in Urumqi last month. The Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP), a militant Islamic group, recently claimed responsibility for the attack in Urumqi. 3. At least twenty-one dead in anti-China protests in Vietnam. At least twenty-one people have been killed and one hundred injured in violent protests against China after the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation stationed an oil rig in a contested area of the South China Sea. Anti-China crowds set fire to factories and industrial parks and attacked Chinese workers, as well as Taiwanese, Singaporean, and South Korean businesses mistaken for being owned by mainland Chinese companies. One of the largest attacks centered on a Taiwanese steel mill in central Vietnam, where one thousand rioters set buildings ablaze and attacked employees, killing five Vietnamese and sixteen Chinese workers. Vietnam and China have been engaged in a tense standoff in the South China Sea after Beijing deployed a mobile oil rig and dozens of security vessels into contested territory. Three other countries, Brunei, Malaysia, and the Philippines, also have territorial disputes with China in the region. 4. Japan moves forward with collective self-defense. In a televised address on Thursday, Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe said that Japan should allow its military, the Self-Defense Forces, to come to the aid of other allies under attack in certain scenarios, exercising what is known as “collective self-defense.” Japan has long acknowledged that it has a right to collective self-defense (as stipulated under Article 51 of the UN Charter), but past governments have banned the practice based on their interpretation of the pacifist Article 9 of Japan’s post-war Constitution. In his remarks, Abe pledged to uphold Japan’s pacifist principles, but said that allowing for collective self-defense was necessary to “strengthen deterrence and prevent Japan from being involved in conflict and warfare.”  Abe’s speech followed the release of a new report from his Advisory Panel on Reconstruction of the Legal Basis for Security, which argues that collective self-defense falls under the minimum level of defense already allowed by Article 9 and should be permitted given Japan’s changing security environment. 5. Pakistan steps up vaccinations amid polio emergency.  The World Health Organization (WHO) declared Pakistan to be “off track” in stopping polio transmission with sixty-two new polio cases this year, a majority of which are in the restive Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Under recommendations from the WHO, Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif directed the Pakistan army to regulate ingress of people into the FATA only after polio vaccine has been administered. Residents of the tribal belt will not be allowed to travel to other regions without the immunization; all Pakistanis will further be required to get a polio vaccination before travel abroad. The WHO has claimed that the outbreak can be overcome within one year, but concerns that fundamentalists will continue attacks against vaccination personnel remain. Bonus: Bhutan set to become world’s first organic country. In a country where gross national happiness trumps gross domestic product, Bhutan’s leaders are planning to turn their agricultural sector completely organic, ridding the country of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Since last month’s Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development, the government of Bhutan has been developing a national organic policy to encourage sustainable farming and rural prosperity. A majority of the agricultural land is already organic by default, but experts speculate that a fully organic Bhutan would hurt export crop levels.

Protests that broke out earlier this week at factories in southern Vietnam have resulted in hundreds of arrests the past two days. Demonstrators torched several factories and smashed up more in industrial areas on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City. The exact number of arrests remains unknown, but some human rights activists I spoke with are now estimating the number of arrests is in the high hundreds, not the figures in the low hundreds given by news reports on Wednesday. Without a doubt, though, the coverage of the riots in the New York Times, which called them the worst public unrest in recent Vietnamese history, is correct. There have  been deadlier protests and riots in rural areas of Vietnam in recent years, especially in ethnic minority highland areas, but these protests and crackdowns received little public attention, and did not involve the numbers of people that we saw involved in the Ho Chi Minh City riots this week. Most of the coverage of these industrial zone protests has focused on the anti-China aspect of the demonstrations; many protestors reportedly started demonstrating to protest Beijing’s recent actions in the South China Sea, where Beijing has put a new oil rig in waters claimed by Vietnam. Beijing has used aggressive tactics, including ramming Vietnamese ships and pelting them with water cannons, to prevent Vietnamese coast guard ships from approaching the rig and disputing China’s claimed economic zone in the South China Sea. Of course, Beijing also has rejected taking overlapping claims in the Sea to international arbitration, as the Philippines wants to do, and has stalled efforts to work on a real code of conduct for the South China Sea with Asean. China’s actions toward Vietnamese coast guard ships have, even by the more aggressive standards of recent years, probably been the hardest-line actions taken by Beijing in the Sea in twenty years. And China shows no sign of backing down. Without a doubt, demonstrations started in part due to anti-China sentiment, which is easy to spark in Vietnam. Rioters clearly were looking to attack factories with what they thought were names of Chinese companies, at least at first. However, I do not think that the demonstrations in the Ho Chi Minh City outskirts were fuelled solely by anti-China sentiment; many demonstrators, even if they were stirred by anti-China sentiment, have several other important reasons to protest. Protestors reportedly shouted a range of slogans while attacking, not merely anti-China rhetoric. In the past five years, Vietnam, which was never in any way an open society, has become increasingly closed and repressive.  During that time the government has overseen one of the harshest crackdowns on activists, writers, and bloggers of any country in the world, and passed some of the most repressive legislation restricting the Internet and social media of any nation on earth. While five or ten years ago complaints about the government and corruption were common in private conversations with educated Vietnamese, now even in private many people are wary of making such criticisms. This growing suppression, at a time when Vietnam’s economy has slowed seriously, the number of entrants to the labor force is growing, and the government has not made good on promises to reform the economy, slash corruption, and cut bloat at state enterprises, has led to a potentially explosive amount of dissent in Vietnamese society. What’s more, manufacturing workers in Vietnam have become increasingly frustrated at their inability to win better working conditions in all factories, not only in those owned by Chinese firms. Vietnam’s state-controlled union is just a façade, which is why Vietnam now is witnessing a growing number of seemingly impromptu worker strikes. So, while anti-China sentiment might have played a central role in these demonstrations, anger at Beijing is not the only driving factor here. Hanoi has now sent large battalions of security forces to crack down on the demonstrators, perhaps regretting that it allowed anti-China demonstrations to take place peacefully in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City prior to these riots. But unless Hanoi recognizes that anger at the Vietnamese government’s own policies also drive unrest, it will have done little to address the root causes of the anger.

Ashlyn Anderson, Lauren Dickey, Darcie Draudt, Charles McClean, Will Piekos, and Sharone Tobias look at the top stories in Asia today. 1. South Korean passenger ferry capsizes. A South Korean ferry, the Sewol, capsized on Wednesday, April 16. As of Friday, twenty-five deaths have been reported, with 271 passengers still missing. The vessel was en route from Incheon, on the northwestern coast of the country, to Jeju Island, a resort island off the southwestern coast. A government investigation team is looking into alleged negligence by the captain and some members of the crew, who reportedly instructed passengers to remain seated and abandoned the ship in the state of emergency. The last sinking in South Korea of this magnitude occurred in 1993, when a ship sank off the west coast and resulted in the death of 292 people. 2. Phase five of the Indian general election ends. Almost 200 million voters (nearly the size of the U.S. electorate) were eligible to cast their vote during the largest phase of the Indian election. The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)--projected to lead the next government--is already focusing on the composition of its ruling coalition. Though the party’s president expects the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance to secure 300 seats, the BJP must balance the demands of disparate political parties such as the Telugu Desam Party in Andhra Pradesh and the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal. The governing Congress Party, in a desperate effort to salvage votes, labeled the BJP a threat to democracy and its prime minister candidate Narendra Modi “a habitual liar.” 3. Thousands of workers in China protest over unpaid benefits. Thousands of workers have gone on strike in Dongguan, Guangdong province, protesting for increased pay, to receive unpaid social welfare contributions, and for improved social benefit plans. Though it is unclear exactly how many of the factories’ 40,000 employees have stopped working (New York–based China Labor Watch estimated strikers at 30,000), as many as 3,000 have taken to the streets to protest. The striking workers are employees of Taiwanese-owned Yue Yuen Industrial Holdings, which supplies and manufactures shoes for many top brands, including Nike and Adidas. Chinese workers are becoming more knowledgeable about their rights, which could decrease the cost advantage of China’s manufacturing sector. 4. Japan, South Korea meet to discuss “comfort women” issue. Officials from the two countries met in Seoul on April 16 to address a long-standing thorn in their bilateral relations: Japan’s use of Korean women as sex slaves during World War II, known as “comfort women.” Junichi Ihara, director-general of the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau, met with Lee Sang-deok, director-general of the Northeast Asian Affairs Bureau in South Korea’s Foreign Ministry. The meeting marked a modest step forward in improving relations, and follows the first meeting last month by Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean president Park Geun-hye at a trilateral summit with U.S. president Barack Obama at The Hague. It also comes a week before Obama’s Asia trip, where he will visit both countries. Ihara told reporters the meeting “allowed for a deeper understanding of each other’s position,” but both sides acknowledged a great deal of work remains and pledged to continue director-general level talks in Tokyo next month. 5. Measles outbreak kills more than one hundred in Vietnam. Vietnam is facing its worst ever measles outbreak, which has killed 108 people since December; by comparison, the last major outbreak in 2009-2010 killed two. Approximately 7,000 cases have been reported so far. Roughly 122,000 people die of measles annually, most of them children under the age of five, despite the availability of an effective vaccine. Vietnam’s Ministry of Health aims to vaccinate up to 95 percent of children under three years old by the end of the month. Bonus: Singapore inadvertently airs worst travel ad in history. Singapore’s Tourism Board aired an ad for the Philippines that has been dubbed “the most unintentionally terrible travel ad ever.” The video features poorly timed dubbing, elevator music, and a cheesy surprise ending. The Tourism Board eventually pulled the video.

Over the past week, as aid trickled and now is flowing into the Philippines in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan, some broader questions about the country’s preparedness—or lack thereof—have arisen. Although it would be unfair to compare the Philippines, a country with a GDP per capita of around $2,600, with richer countries hit by natural disasters (such as Thailand in the 2004 tsunami), it is worth asking why the Philippines seemed much less prepared for Haiyan than neighboring Vietnam, a country with a GDP per capita of only $1,600. Although the typhoon also passed through Vietnam, albeit after slowing down somewhat over the water in between, Vietnam suffered fourteen deaths, as compared to what appears to be thousands of fatalities in the Philippines. Vietnam managed to evacuate over 800,000 people well before the storm hit; the total number of people who evacuated in the Philippines prior to the storm remains unknown, but a sizable percentage of people on Leyte did not evacuate, a factor that surely increased fatalities. What differed in the two countries’ preparations?  To be sure, Vietnam is an authoritarian state where the central government retains far more power than in the Philippines, one of the most vibrant democracies in Asia. But well before the typhoon hit, Vietnam’s government already had labeled it the most serious possible emergency, making it easier for provincial officials to convince people to leave their homes. Philippines President Benigno Aquino III did not label the typhoon the most serious possible emergency, a categorization that would have allowed him to mobilize more resources and possibly force the evacuation of more people prior to landfall. In addition, those who were evacuated in the Philippines were moved only a few hours before the storm made landfall, leaving authorities little time to look for isolated or elderly people who might not have heard warnings or been able to follow them. Vietnam’s buildings also simply seem to have been stronger; structures designated as storm shelters generally did not collapse, while those in the Philippines frequently did. This difference in the quality of building is a testament to the continuing serious problem of graft in the Philippines, where corruption siphons off funds for infrastructure and leads to shoddy work. Although parts of Leyte are regularly hit by typhoons that carry the risk of surges of water, the area had few significant water breaks; many buildings and roads were built with substandard materials, probably because contractors had to pay kickbacks. Vietnam is hardly a model of clean government—the country was ranked among the most corrupt countries in East Asia last year by Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index—but the Philippines is in many respects worse, particularly in areas of the country long under the control of family dynasties. Indeed, because Vietnam’s graft is more centralized, the government sometimes is able to overcome corruption within the Party, whereas in the freer Philippines a more decentralized kind of corruption is much harder to combat from Manila. Finally, Vietnam appears to have more clearly studied government responses to past major disasters in Asia, including the 2004 tsunami and the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. This might seem somewhat surprising, given that Vietnam’s leaders are in many respects suspicious of interactions with other countries and highly opaque in how they run their government. Yet below the senior leadership, Vietnam boasts a relatively (for the size of its economy) qualified group of civil servants and diplomats, particularly in areas that are not politically sensitive, like disaster management. Although the Philippines does have some fine civil servants, particularly in prestigious jobs like the foreign ministry, the overall quality of the civil service is poor, in part because Filipinos with top-quality educations, which includes fluency in English, have more opportunities in the domestic private sector and overseas than educated Vietnamese.

Will Piekos and Sharone Tobias look at the top five stories in Asia this week. 1. China surpasses U.S. in oil imports. According to EIA data, China has surpassed the United States in oil imports, taking the number one spot. The United States still uses more oil than China, consuming an average of 18.6 million barrels per day compared to China’s 10.9 billion, but imports less thanks to increased domestic production. According to analysis by the Wall Street Journal, China’s increased imports of Middle Eastern oil have caused tensions with the United States, because it leaves the U.S. navy to continue policing trade choke points for China’s oil shipments without much help from Chinese forces. 2. Kerry focuses on South China Sea disputes at summits. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry pressed China and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) leaders to come to an agreement on disputes in the South China Sea during a meeting of the East Asia Summit in Brunei. Beijing responded by warning the United States to stay out of the disputes; China has resisted negotiating territorial disputes with ASEAN, an organization with ten member states, preferring bilateral negotiations in which it usually has the upper hand. China claims nearly all of the disputed territory in the South China Sea, competing with claims by Vietnam, the Phillipines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Taiwan. Beijing agreed earlier this year to agree to hold a dialogue towards a "code of conduct" with the other nations, though critics argue that these dialogues lack substance. 3. Fukushima radiation levels hit a two-year high. Radiation levels in seawater near Japan’s damaged nuclear plant jumped to thirteen times the previous day’s reading, reaching its highest point since 2011. The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which is in charge of the plant, said that the increased radiation levels were a result of nearby construction. Also this week, six workers were exposed to radiation after a pipe connected to the water treatment system was mistakenly detached. TEPCO, which stores saltwater to cool reactors, has struggled to contain the radioactive water since the power station was hit by a massive tsunami in March 2011. 4. Kim Jong Un replaces military chief again. North Korean media referenced a new chief of general staff of the Korean People’s Army, signaling that the country’s young dictator, Kim Jong Un, has once again switched the head of the military. The new chief, Ri Yong Gil, is the Hermit Kingdom’s fourth since Kim came into power in December 2011, and little is known about him. His predecessor is believed responsible for attacks on South Korea in 2010 that killed fifty people, so some hope that that his removal represents a move away from a more hard-line approach to South Korea by Pyongyang. Analysts suggest that the move solidifies Kim’s grip on power and the military. Unrelated, North Korea granted permission this week for the mother of Kenneth Bae to visit her son, an American who has been held in North Korea for nearly a year and is in failing health. 5. U.S., Vietnam ink nuclear deal. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Vietnam Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh initialed a nuclear agreement while at the East Asia Summit this past week. If the deal is signed by President Obama and passed by Congress, it would allow American companies to sell nuclear fuel and technology to Vietnam, and Vietnam would be prohibited from enriching or reprocessing plutonium or uranium. Vietnam has plans to build as many as thirteen nuclear power stations in the next two decades; said Secretary Kerry, “Vietnam has the second-largest market, after China, for nuclear power in East Asia, and our companies can now compete.” Bonus: National Cricket Fighting Championships held in Beijing. More than twenty teams from across China competed in the two-day National Cricket Fighting Championships this week. The crickets, with only a one-hundred-day lifespan, are in their prime in autumn; they are fed a high-protein diet and trained regularly in preparation for their bouts. The traditional Chinese sport is more than 1,000 years old, and the rules of cricket fighting date back to the thirteenth century.

In an excellent new piece on Voice of America (VOA) news, Steve Herman analyzes how several nations in Southeast Asia appear to be moving to “emulate China” in the way that these countries, like China, regulate and harshly restrict social media. In Thailand, for example, which has one of the harshest climate for Internet speech in the world—despite being theoretically a democracy—the government is now moving to crack down on Facebook users who just post or “like” any articles that could be deemed insulting to the Thai monarchy. Unlike in most other countries that still have lèse-majesté laws on the books, Thailand actually enforces its  lèse-majesté laws, and anyone—not just the king, queen, and other royals—can file a lèse-majesté charge against anyone else in Thailand. As a result, the  lèse-majesté law has become an oppressive tool of political repression by all sides in Thailand’s never ending political drama. As VOA notes, a well-known Thai journalist, Sermsuk Kasitipradit, is now being questioned by police for some of his Facebook postings. Senior Thai officials also have publicly warned that simply “liking” something on Facebook that could be deemed offensive to the monarchy will result in potential prosecutions under lèse-majesté and computer crimes laws. Similarly, Vietnam just passed a  new law, Decree 72, which apparently prohibits people from posting news articles on social media or blogs. Vietnam’s new law requires any posts on social media to be related only to personal information. There is little doubt that the Vietnamese authorities will enforce the new laws on social media; over the past four years, Vietnam already has been engaged in one of the harshest crackdowns in the world on bloggers posting items on politics, land grabbing, or other sensitive issues. Are Thailand, Vietnam, and other Southeast Asian countries just emulating China’s restrictions on social media? Or is there a more direct connection? Vietnam routinely sends senior officials to China to learn about many aspects of Chinese governance, including Internet monitoring and control. So, it is not unreasonable to assume that officials in Vietnam have modeled their social media strategy directly on tactics learned in China. Similarly, Thai officials have traveled on several occasions to China to study the way China monitors and controls social media and microblogging, so—again— it’s not unreasonable to think that Thailand is modeling its policy on tactics Thai officials have personally seen in China.

The president of Vietnam, Truong Tan Sang, is visiting Washington, only the second visit by the top leader of the country to D.C. since the end of the Vietnam War, even though Washington and Hanoi have had close relations for nearly a decade now. In part, this avoidance of public visits to Washington is because leaders of Vietnam do not like having to face vocal complaints from congresspeople, journalists, and some American officials about Hanoi’s horrible human rights record, which actually has gotten worse in the last year, with a growing number of arrests of bloggers, activists, and religious figures. Vietnam’s terrible human rights record would seem to be the elephant in the room during the visit. In his introduction of President Sang at the State Department, Secretary of State John Kerry, who was one of the two American figures most instrumental in getting the U.S. to restore ties with Vietnam in the early 1990s (the other was John McCain) gushed over Mr. Sang and made no mention of Vietnam’s serious abuses. President Obama has largely avoided the topic too, but Vietnam’s crackdown has been at the center of op-eds about the visit, as well as Congress’ discussion of the relationship. And yet for President Sang, there is a bigger elephant, one that also has gotten little attention during his visit. Although many administration officials and congresspeople still treat Vietnam like a powerhouse economy, a competitor eating the United States’ and other Asian countries’ lunch, in reality Vietnam’s economy continues to tailspin downward; the ruling party—and President Sang—seem paralyzed in trying to stop it. Chinese leaders face their own economic problems today, but they are far more responsive to economic slowdowns, and transparent (it’s all relevant) about their problems than Vietnamese leaders. Vietnam’s state companies remain bloated, the true amounts of the debt on their books largely concealed. Indeed, no reformer like former Chinese premier Zhu Rongji has been empowered by the party to rapidly clean up the state sector and try to right the economy. The government has, in theory, approved a reform and restructuring plan for the debt-laden state enterprises and the overall financial system in the country, including creating an asset management company to deal with bad debts. But this plan is moving far too slowly into action to be effective, and this slowness is infecting the entire economy. Reformers who are promoted, such as  party secretary of Danang Nguyen Ba Thanh, they and their political allies are stifled by hard-liners in Hanoi, or they are panned off to cosmetic but unimportant posts. And so Vietnam’s economy grew in the second quarter of this year by five percent, but this is well off its 7-8 percent growth for much of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Even this second quarter growth was due in part to foreign investment and rate cuts by the central bank, which are important but will not solve the country’s debt morass. Vietnamese households don’t see a recovery – consumer spending is still way off, and so the economy only sputters. And, with one of the youngest populations in Southeast Asia, Vietnam actually needs to grow faster than five percent to absorb all the young people coming into the job force. Like China’s leaders, on whom Vietnam modeled its reform programs, top party officials like President Sang essentially rest their legitimacy on economic performance, since they do not allow elections and their credibility from previous wars has eroded. That legitimacy is waning; the current group of Vietnamese leaders can arrest lots of their citizens, but they do not seem able to arrest Vietnam’s decline.

Sharone Tobias and Will Piekos look at the top five stories in Asia this week. 1. Obama and Xi convene in Sunnylands. The much-touted two-day summit between U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping began on Friday. Cybersecurity and North Korea are expected to be topics raised by the U.S. side, while China would like to hear more about the U.S. pivot to Asia. Experts are generally hopeful that the summit will increase familiarity, though most are quick to temper any hopes of real deliverables coming from the meeting. For its part, China’s state-sponsored Global Times states that the summit “represents not only a conversation in which both leaders can exchange ideas on important global issues, but also puts forward a glimpse of what China’s future might look like when it catches up with the United States.” 2. Positive steps on the Korean Peninsula. On Thursday, North Korea proposed government-to-government talks, which would be the first in years. Pyongyang also offered to reconnect a Red Cross hotline that was cut in March following North Korea’s February 12 nuclear test. The two Koreas are planning talks to discuss a proposed cabinet-level meeting in Seoul, which would be the first in six years. The new diplomatic efforts are a welcome reprieve from months of bellicose rhetoric from the North and heightened tensions on the Peninsula; how long the détente lasts, however, is remains an open question. 3. Japan and France tighten nuclear ties. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and French President Francois Hollande met in Tokyo on Friday to discuss nuclear and defense ties. The two leaders signed a five-year action plan to work together to supply nuclear technology to export markets. Though the two countries are competitors in nuclear-reactor exports, the cooperation is seen as a response to cheaper Chinese reactors. Tokyo has expressed concern to Paris about French military exports to China. 4. China and Vietnam establish a naval hotline. The defense ministries of China and Vietnam agreed to set up a hotline between their respective navies. Qi Jianguo, deputy chief of the general staff of the PLA, stated that “amid rapid changes in international and regional situation, it is significant that the two countries hold talks on defence and security issues, seek effective control of the current disputes and solutions to related issues.” The hotline will hopefully serve as another outlet to resolve flare-ups in the South China Sea. All is not well between the two countries however, as a rare demonstration occurred in Hanoi against China on June 3. Many Vietnamese citizens feel that China is bullying Vietnam in the South China Sea and the government is not doing enough in response. 5. Poultry plant fire in China is one of the worst in years. A fire at a poultry plant in northeast China on Monday killed 120 and injured seventy-seven. Two senior executives of Jilin Baoyuanfeng Poultry Company were detained as part of a criminal investigation that uncovered major security breaches—the plant lacked fire extinguishers and locked nearly all the exits to prevent employees from leaving. The same factory had burst into flames once before, four years ago. About 70,000 workers are killed on the job each year in China. Bonus: Chinese high school students take gaokao (college entry exam). On Friday, nine million high school students began the three-day-long gaokao, China’s college entrance exam. This year, students will only be allowed to take the test where they hold a hukou, or household registry, rather than their current residence. The gaokao has long been criticized for its lack of creativity and testing non-essential information. It includes essay prompts such as “Why chase mice when there are fish to eat?”

This is a guest post by Emily Mellgard, research associate for the Council on Foreign Relations Africa Studies program. Demand for rhino horn increased exponentially over the past few years. The market is heavily concentrated in Asia, particularly Vietnam. Rhino poaching has leapt to keep pace with demand. South Africa’s rhinos are among the most affected. According to the Wildlife and Environment Society of South Africa (WESSA), in 2010, 2011, and 2012, the number of rhinos killed for their horns went from 333 to 448 to 668. So far in 2013, 216 rhinos have been poached in South Africa’s Kruger national park alone. That is more death the past five months than in the years 2000-2008 combined. The rhino population in Mozambique, which was wiped out by large game hunters a century ago and later reintroduced to the national parks, has again been eradicated; this time with the connivance of some of Mozambique’s own rangers. Convictions for poaching and trafficking in rhino horn are rare. But the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, California announced on May 16 the conviction of Vinh Chung “Jimmy” Kha, and Felix Khaon for, among other crimes, smuggling rhino horn into the United States with the intent of selling it to Vietnam. In Vietnam, and other parts of Asia, powdered rhino horn is considered a cure for everything from a headache, hangover, or cold to cancer; and is also often advertised as an aphrodisiac. It holds no such properties. In fact, rhino horn is keratin, the same substance as human hair and fingernails. Despite this, rhino horn sells for between U.S. $25,000 and $40,000 per kilogram. A Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) conference in March 2013, appears to have invigorated the international community to act to save these great creatures. South Africa is threatening to re-erect the boundary fences between the South African and Mozambican halves of Kruger national park. Some game parks in South Africa have taken the additional measure of poisoning their rhinos’ horns to deter consumer demand. The poison is combination of a parasiticide normally used against ticks on livestock and a pink dye that can be detected by airport scanners and is visible even when in powdered form; meaning potential consumers will know what they are buying. The parasiticide is not lethal, but it does make the consumer “seriously ill.” A logical next step is campaigns to raise awareness of rhino horn’s complete lack of medicinal properties and that the animals die, horribly, through the process. Similar campaigns are running in Asia against elephant poaching. They are spearheaded by celebrities such as China’s Li Bingbing, an actress and UNEP goodwill ambassador, and retired NBA basketball player Yao Ming. These initiatives are key because they focus on a crucial truth; anti-poaching and conservation efforts must be holistic to be effective. By addressing conservation efforts not just at halting the poachers, but also in decreasing the demand for rhino horn altogether, poisoning the horns and educating consumers is an important step forward.  

This week’s latest South China Sea incident, in which a Chinese fishing boat cut a Vietnamese seismic cable —at least according to Hanoi— is a reminder that, despite the South China Sea dominating nearly every meeting in Southeast Asia this year, the situation in the Sea appears to be getting worse. This is in contrast to flare-ups in the past, when after a period of tension, as in the mid-1990s, there was usually a cooling-off period. Although there have been several brief cooling-off periods in the past two years, including some initiated by senior Chinese leaders traveling to Southeast Asia, they have not stuck, and the situation continues to deteriorate and get more dangerous. In the new year, it will likely get even worse. Here’s why: The new Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) secretary-general comes from Vietnam. Over the past three years, a more openly forceful China has found it difficult to deal with ASEAN leaders who even voice ASEAN concerns. But these leaders, like former Thai foreign minister and ASEAN Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan, were nothing compared to the new ASEAN secretary-general, Vietnamese Deputy Foreign Minister Le Luong Minh. Although he is a career diplomat and certainly can be suave and attentive, he is still a former Vietnamese official, and undoubtedly will bring with him some of the Vietnamese perspective toward China, which is quickly turning more acrid. This year’s ASEAN chair is Brunei. Keeping to its tradition of rotating the chair every year, in 2013 ASEAN will be headed by Brunei. Although some might think Brunei’s leadership will be better for stability than the 2012 ASEAN leadership of Cambodia, perceived by many other ASEAN members as carrying China’s water, the fact that Brunei is just as much of a diplomatic minnow as Cambodia will mean there is no powerful wrangler in the chair’s seat to hammer out a common ASEAN perspective. Were Indonesia or Singapore the chair, the situation might be different. India is playing a larger and larger role in the South China Sea, adding even more potential players to the mix, and more powerful navies. The recent warning by Beijing that India and Vietnam should not engage in joint exploration is only going to lead to a harsher Indian response, since Indian elites pay far more attention to —and are more easily aggrieved by— China than the reverse. The more they look, the more likely they will find. As reported by the New York Times, “On Monday, China’s National Energy Administration named the South China Sea as the main offshore site for natural gas production. Within two years, China aims to produce 150 billion cubic meters of natural gas from fields in the sea, a significant increase from the 20 billion cubic meters produced so far, the agency said.” Although I do not think that the oil and gas potential in the Sea is the biggest driver of conflict, compared to its strategic value, the more China (and anyone else) explores for energy in the Sea, the more likely they will (eventually) come up with potential deposits that will only raise the stakes, if the forecasts of the Sea’s petroleum potential are to be believed. A new Chinese leadership is unlikely to want to show any weakness. With the leadership of this generation even more split than in the past, following a contentious Party Congress, continued infighting among acolytes of the major Chinese leaders, and the Bo Xilai fiasco, the new leadership is in no position, with Party members and the general educated public, to give any room on a contentious issue like the South China Sea. The Obama administration has passed its period of focusing on more effective dialogue and crisis mediation with China. Officials from the administration’s first term, who naturally had the highest hopes for better dialogue, are gone, with many of them leaving just as convinced as their Bush predecessors that real dialogue was difficult if not impossible. Don’t expect a second term to yield better results with such a dialogue. Happy New Year, South China Sea.  

The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the BBC all ran stories in June 2012 about Tibetan monks who have set themselves on fire to protest against the Chinese government. The stories provoked little reaction in Washington. That was not the case when a sixty-six year-old Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc set himself on fire on June 11, 1963 on the streets of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam. To understand Quang Duc’s story it is essential to know the story of Ngo Dinh Diem, the U.S.-backed president of South Vietnam. He came to power in 1955 in the aftermath of the Geneva Accords, which ended French colonial rule and split Vietnam along the 17th parallel. He had gained national fame when he quit a critical job working for the French colonial government before World War II and then refused to cooperate with the Japanese occupiers during it. But he was hardly the ideal choice to lead the new South Vietnam. He was a French-educated Catholic in a Buddhist majority country, and he had spent much of the decade after World War II living in the United States rather than building a political organization in South Vietnam. And he was hardly a democrat. When he ran in a “national” referendum in October 1955, he arranged it so that he won more than 98 percent of the vote. Not surprisingly, the Vietnamese public’s support for Diem soon faded. He repressed his opponents and favored his friends and family. His policies to counter the growing strength of the Viet Cong had the opposite effect; they alienated many South Vietnamese against his government. By the spring of 1963, public unrest reached a crisis point. On May 8, residents of Hue, the imperial capital of old Vietnam, organized a rally to protest a ban on flying the Buddhist flag. Police fired on the crowd, killing nine and wounding fourteen. Hunger strikes and more protests followed. On June 11, 1963, Thich Quang Duc and more than 300 other monks and nuns marched in a procession down one of Saigon’s major boulevards. Wearing a saffron robe, he sat down in the lotus position on a cushion in the middle of the street. Two other monks emptied a five-gallon can of gasoline on him. Quang Duc then took a match, struck it, and dropped it on himself. The journalist David Halberstam, who was present, described what happened next: Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning flesh; human beings burn surprisingly quickly. Behind me I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering. I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered even to think. . . . As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him. A fire engine raced to extinguish the blaze, but several monks blocked its path. The flames eventually burned out, and the monks placed Quang Duc’s body in a coffin and carried him away. Malcolm Browne, an Associated Press photographer, caught the self-immolation on film. His photograph won the award for World Press Photo of the Year, and it remains among the most famous (and haunting) images from the Vietnam War. It certainly stunned millions of people around the world who saw it in June 1963. As a U.S. embassy official put it, the photo “had a shock effect of incalculable value to the Buddhist cause, becoming a symbol of the state of things in Vietnam.” Seven other monks soon followed Quang Duc’s example and set themselves afire to protest Diem’s rule. Convinced of his own rectitude, Diem did nothing to appease the growing anger being directed his way. His sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, however, added to it. She likened Quang Duc’s suicide to a “barbecue.” “Let them burn,” she said, “and we shall clap our hands.” President John F. Kennedy said of Browne’s photo that “no news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.” The so-called Buddhist Crisis incident certainly helped sour Kennedy on Diem. Five months later, Kennedy looked the other way as a group of South Vietnamese Army generals overthrew and executed Diem. Kennedy himself was assassinated three weeks later in Dallas. The political crisis that Quang Duc’s self-immolation highlighted did not, however, prompt either Kennedy or his successor, Lyndon Johnson, to rethink the wisdom of the American involvement in South Vietnam. In late 1963, the United States had fewer than 16,000 troops in South Vietnam. Four years later, it had half a million. The differences between South Vietnam in 1963 and Tibet in 2012 are many and vast. But if history provides any guide, Beijing will no more learn from today’s events than Washington did nearly a half century ago. Indeed, in the wake of two recent self-immolations in Lhasa, China responded by closing Tibet to foreign visitors.