A Vietnamese court yesterday convicted the political activist Nguyen Chi Tuyen of “propaganda against the state” and sentenced him to five years in prison. Tuyen – known to his friends and social media followers by his nickname Anh Chi – was arrested on February 29 for criticizing the government on social media. He was prosecuted under Article 117 of the penal code, which criminalizes “making, storing, disseminating, or propagandizing information, materials and products that aim to oppose the State.”
According to a report by Radio Free Asia (RFA), his trial lasted just over five hours, and was attended only by Tuyen’s wife Nguyen Thi Anh Tuyet and his three lawyers. While Tuyen did not receive the maximum sentence of 12 years, a member of his defense team told RFA that they had “presented evidence proving that Nguyen Chi Tuyen is completely innocent, and the sentence imposed on him is inappropriate.”
Tuyen was an adept user of social media and racked up large numbers of followers on Facebook. The Project88, which advocates for free speech in Vietnam, described him as “arguably one of the most well-known Vietnamese bloggers of the early and mid-2010s,” a period when social media emerged as an important element of the public sphere. His main YouTube channel Anh Chi Rau Den (rau den means “black beard” in Vietnamese) amassed nearly 100,000 followers, while his Facebook account Nguyen Chi Tuyen (Anh Chi) has more than 53,000 followers.
In an interview in Hanoi in 2018, Tuyen told me that Facebook was “the main tool to express our own opinion or discuss some social or political issue, or human rights issue.” He added that the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) “must consider the voice of the people, they must hand the power, the right and the power to the people, so the people can choose the right people to be the leaders of the country.”
This led Tuyen to engage in free speech, pro-democracy, and environmental activism, and to speak up in defense of the many other dissenters and political advocates who preceded him into the bowels of the Vietnamese security state. Often, he traveled to visit political prisoners with their families.
“Tuyen is a straight shooter, an upright human being,” one friend and a fellow longtime activist told Project88. “His love of country is deep and strong.”
Like many Vietnamese pro-democracy activists, Tuyen also took part in protests against China and commemorations of past conflicts between Beijing and Hanoi. He was a founding member of the No U-line Football Club, a soccer team whose members were outspoken against China’s “nine-dash line” claims in the South China Sea. He also participated in unauthorized commemorations for past conflicts in the South China Sea, including the Battle of the Paracel Islands in 1974 and the violent encounter in the Spratly Islands in 1988, as well as events commemorating Vietnamese soldiers killed during the fierce border war between China and Vietnam in early 1979. All of these are highly sensitive issues for the ruling Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), which closely guards public comment about the country’s relationship with China.
Bennett Murray, the former Hanoi bureau chief of the German press agency DPA, who worked with Tuyen extensively between 2016 and 2019, described him in a Facebook post yesterday as a “hero.”
“He loves his country and has always tirelessly worked toward the goal of a free Vietnam where the Communist Party competes in fair elections,” Murray wrote. “He would never hurt a fly, yet the government has decided to send him to prison because of cowards who greatly underestimate the ability of their people to create a democratic Vietnamese government.”
Tuyen’s conviction comes shortly after President To Lam assumed the leadership of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) last month, after the death of long-serving party chief Nguyen Phu Trong on July 19. In May, Lam was appointed president after eight years as head of Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security, during which time the CPV launched a concerted crackdown on rebels and dissenters. The advocacy group Human Rights Watch estimates that during Lam’s time as minister, the Vietnamese police arrested “at least 269 people who had peacefully exercised their basic civil and political rights.”
Given the narrowing space for political speech, it was something of a minor miracle that Tuyen remained free as long as he did. Throughout the 2010s, he faced many types of intimidation, including a physical attack by five unidentified men in Hanoi in 2015, but never made what would have been an understandable choice: to keep silent. The inevitability that he would pay a high price for his continued activism made it all the more remarkable.
“They can arrest me anytime they want,” he told me back in 2018. “If they arrest me, I said to them, okay, you can arrest me, sure – you have everything and I have nothing, but I have one thing much better than you. I have the support of the people. I have a strong heart and strong mind. I’m ready to sacrifice my own body or my own life.”