Asia Sentinel
Written by David Brown
Monday, 18 March 2013
Round up the usual suspects…
Twenty months ago, I was approached by a member of the team that puts out the Anh Ba Sam blog, Vietnam’s leading source of “alternative news.” Would I mind, they asked, if they posted a Vietnamese translation of a story that I’d written on the deepening South China Sea crisis.
I agreed, and there began a relationship that has made my writings on contemporary Vietnam far better known to readers there and in the Vietnamese diaspora than to the several thousands who read me in Asia Sentinel and other regional online publications.
Lately — up to March 8, anyway — there has been a lively debate on the Ba Sam blog about how the Vietnamese Constitution ought to be revised. There’s nothing strange there; the National Assembly is going to vote on a new text in the fall, and in anticipation it has called for the people to express their ideas.
Taking the legislature at its word, commentaries posted on Anh Ba Sam have tilted sharply toward freeing the current constitution’s guarantees of human rights from a host of eviscerating national security-based limitations. There’s also been considerable support for diluting the Communist Party’s monopoly of political decision-making and freeing the courts and the mainstream media from a surfeit of political instruction.
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