Interview with Vietnamese Dissident Journalist and Author Huy Đức
In this essay, UC Berkeley historian and Journal of Vietnamese Studies Co-Editor Peter Zinoman discusses the detention of Trương Huy San (Huy Đức) and his interview with the imprisoned journalist.
Journal of Vietnamese Studies is proud to publish an interview with the distinguished Vietnamese journalist and popular historian Truong Huy San, better known by his pen name Huy Đức. On June 1, 2024, Huy Đức was arrested and remains today under detention in Hà Nội. He stands accused of violating Article 331 – an overly broad statute frequently used to silence peaceful critics of the Vietnamese government. Some speculate that the arrest was triggered by criticism that Huy Đức had recently expressed on Facebook about the growing power of the Vietnamese security police in national politics. Others link the timing of the arrest to the ascent within the politburo of Tô Lâm—a long-serving and unusually repressive Minister of Public Security and an opponent of democratic reform.
Our interview occurred in 2013 and we release it now as a show of support for a colleague facing unjust persecution. In addition to translating it from Vietnamese into English, we add an introduction, annotations, and citations.
Deeply biographical, the interview sheds light on Huy Đức's “revolutionary” family background, his childhood on a “model” collective farm, his experience as a soldier in Cambodia and at the Sino-Vietnamese border, and his demobilization from the military and move to Ho Chi Minh City in 1987. Supplementing this detailed and largely unknown account of Huy Đức's life prior to the start of his journalistic career, the interview illuminates the evolution of his thinking during this era about a variety of complex and sensitive issues including Vietnamese communism, the Second Indochina War, and Sino-Vietnamese relations.
The interview devotes considerable attention to Huy Đức’s career as a muckraking investigative reporter in Ho Chi Minh City during the late 1980s and 1990s. He gained a measure of celebrity during these years, covering some of the most sensational (and tawdry) corruption scandals of the reform era. Then, at the height of his fame and influence, Huy Đức was targeted by the security police and hounded out of professional journalism by a communist political establishment threatened by the reformist implications of his writing. Forced to give up newspaper work, Huy Đức turned his attention to an ambitious historical project, and spent the next decade researching and writing The Winning Side (Bên Thắng Cuộc): a pathbreaking, deeply revisionist two-volume history of Vietnam’s postwar decade grounded in original reporting.
Unlike official histories that tout the uncomplicated glory of “reunification” after 1975, The Winning Side exposes North Vietnam’s punitive brutality towards the defeated southerners. It describes the exodus of the “boat people,” the proliferation of re-education camps, “exile” to New Economic Zones, rapacious official economic campaigns targeting the old Republic of Vietnam elite, and government-sponsored pogroms against the ethnic Chinese community. Due to its politically controversial subject matter, The Winning Side has never been sold openly in Vietnam, but it was made available for purchase online in 2012. It made a huge splash within the transnational Vietnamese reading public that included many readers inside the country.
During the decade after the release of the book, Huy Đức was watched closely by the police and was never able to resume steady employment. Instead, he wrote semi-regularly about local and global current events on his widely read Facebook page. And he founded and ran two non-governmental organizations focused on welfare for military veterans and environmental protection.
Huy Đức is noteworthy for his powerful reformist convictions and for the unusual (for a northerner) degree of sympathy that he expresses for his defeated southern countrymen. Our interview spotlights these unusual aspects of his character and thinking, providing unprecedented insight into how his mature political commitments have evolved over time.
The interview is prefaced by Peter Zinoman’s brief introduction that comments on its significance and describes the context in which it was carried out. Given our desire to introduce Huy Đức to as large an audience as possible during this critical period, JVS is pleased to announce that it is lifting the paywall on the interview and the introduction for the following six months.
Journal of Vietnamese Studies promotes and publishes original social science and humanities research about Vietnamese history, politics, culture, and society, as well as Vietnam-related topics that have traditionally been set apart from mainstream area studies scholarship such as the Vietnamese diaspora and the Vietnam War.