Vietnam: Is Thanh the man?

Vietnam: Is Thanh the man?:

A scandal-ridden party lashes out at dissent and tries to tackle corruption

EARLIER this month Vietnam’s courts handed out long jail sentences to 14 young democracy activists and bloggers accused, on the flimsiest of evidence, of subverting the state. Even by the sorry standards of the country’s Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) rulers this marked a new low of pitiless, disproportionate repression. Their main transgression seems to have been nothing more belligerent than to attend a training session in Bangkok run by a banned political party.

The CPV might have meant the show trial as a sign of political strength, to intimidate any opposition, but most Vietnamese read the event more cynically—as an act of desperation by an increasingly paranoid party. Despite the economic progress brought by a quarter-century of reform and relative openness, the CPV risks losing the moral authority it needs to ...