Thayer Consultancy Background Briefing:

ABN # 65 648 097 123

Bauxite Mining Controversy
in Vietnam: Perfect Storm?
Carlyle A. Thayer
August 19, 2009
[client name deleted]:
Reference: Carlyle A. Thayer, ‘Vietnam: Inside Asia’s Emerging Tiger’, Presentation to Joint
Seminar of the Australian Institute of International Affairs and the Australia Vietnam Business
Council, The Glover Cottages, Sydney, August 11, 2009
Question: Could you please clarify what your ‘perfect storm’ slide at the end of your Power
Point presentation means exactly? Is this combination of problems damaging Prime Minister
Nguyen Tan Dung enough to kill a second term for him? Are there any other implications?
Answer: In my talk I went out on a limb to
suggest that Prime Minister Nguyen Tan
Dung may not be reappointed at the next
party congress in January 2011. But I also
meant 'perfect storm' in another sense -
there are new challenges to the party-
state legitimacy: (a) nationalism vis-à-vis
China is no longer the preserve of the
party but of the informed public and (b)
the party-state's prerogative to set major
development projects has also come
under challenge. In short, challenges
based on human rights and religious
freedom have and will continue to be an
insufficient base to undermine the legitimacy of the party-state. But challenges based on
competence and nationalism/patriotism are more potent. I tempered this analysis by stating
that one-party rule would continue for some time and changes were likely to be generated
internally within the party itself.
Question: Is this bauxite mining project the first time we've really seen this new challenge in
Vietnam? Also, as you point out, it's united a wide array of groups and people, from Vo
Nguyen Giap to Thich Quang Do to National Assembly delegates like Nguyen Minh Thuyet.
How unique is that?
Answer: The bauxite protests are qualitatively and quantitatively different from what has gone
on before. There have been protests over land rights issues in villages, protests over the
development of golf courses, and a self-generated movement on Agent Orange. The latter
because so prominent and threatening to relations with the United States that it was co-opted
by the state. There have been local protests over pollution by foreign firms and wildcat strikes
in the garment industry. And most explosive of all, the peasant mass protests in Thai Binh in
late 1997 which turned violent.
But none of these reached out to such an influential constituency of regime elites and none
had a key figure such as General Giap to speak out. Quite often issues are raised in the
National Assembly, but this time the government conceded that the National Assembly could
exercise a monitoring role.
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I should say that although the government's legitimacy (defined as moral authority) came
under challenge, the way the government has reacted has gone some of the way to assuage
public concerns. But the example of the bauxite controversy has been set as a possible
template when other issues in future.