ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Vietnamese people’s online protest against the government’s Special Administrative–Economic Zone draft law released to the public in April 2018. Applying the three–domain framework developed in Chapter 2, the analysis provides significant insights into print and social media in Vietnam as the public sphere in which political participation takes place with contingencies of state–society power relations. Effects of these relations are a tacit knowledge that produces dialectical deliberations of voices that are materially and emotionally different. In speaking out, the people and experts aim to speak ‘truth’ about the government’s lack of transparency, weak governance capacity, risk of national sovereignty and economic problems, and risk of losing Vietnamese rights and livelihood to foreigners. The actual speech acts of protest expose much more power of the people in shaking up the domestic stage of public information, forcing the government media to comment on the emerging voices. The public sphere is thus also the space where contentions of political elites take place, which impact the nature of political participation itself. This chapter illustrates the value of capturing political participation from a societal perspective by looking at not–easily–visible structures of media and how they act as forces to manage and shape political agency, along with the extent to which state decisions can be enforced or resisted.
