A third way: how vietnam's one party state is managing the internet boom

Submission note: A thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master by Research to the faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, school of sciences and communication, La Trobe University, Bundoora.

Internet use across Vietnamese society has expanded more than eightfold over the last decade. This expansion has brought significant social, political and economic impacts to Vietnamese society. The Internet offers individuals new forms of communication, information sharing, and entertainment while traditional “offline” businesses benefit from new commercial opportunities. Many of these online activities also empower the voices of individuals in a way that is new to Vietnamese society. On the other hand, the Internet also poses challenges for Vietnamese society. New values, some alien to traditions and established social norms, potentially threaten the nation’s social stability and cohesion. Financial fraud, intellectual property violation, and technological crimes, such as hacking, the dissemination of computer viruses and identity theft, also emerge as a part of the Internet boom. There has been relatively little academic research on the impacts of the Internet on Vietnamese society or of Hanoi’s Internet regulation, with much prior research constricted to brief references to particular areas, such as political impacts and Internet censorship. This research thesis explores both the impacts of the Internet on Vietnamese society and the Vietnamese government's Internet regulation strategy. Employing a qualitative approach, it integrates several data collection techniques— semi-structured interviews, online observation, and an online survey and draws on primary and secondary sources in the analysis of the research findings. The study identifies the intricate ways in which popular Internet use is changing Vietnamese society and finds that, in responding to this emergent civil society and the regulatory challenges it raises, the Vietnamese government is paving a “third way” in Internet regulatory policy.