Backlash Against Fulbright University Vietnam: Are Propagandists Barking Up the Wrong Tree?

The spectre of street protests led by disaffected youths toppling autocratic regimes has long unsettled Vietnamese authorities. This is a concern starkly illustrated by the recent online vitriol aimed at Fulbright University Vietnam (FUV). The US-backed university was accused of fostering dissent and being a potential hub for “colour revolutions”, movements historically associated with destabilising authoritarian regimes.

This uproar underscores an entrenched anxiety within some factions of the Vietnamese leadership that “Western influences” might incite dissent and challenge the regime’s grip on power. However, the regime’s propagandists, in their attempts to engage with a tech-savvy, cosmopolitan audience, have remained didactic and out of touch.

FUV, founded in 2016, grew out of a 1994 partnership between Harvard University’s Kennedy School and the University of Economics in Ho Chi Minh City. FUV was established by a prime ministerial decision, with the Vietnamese government providing land for its campus in Ho Chi Minh City. Both the US and Vietnamese governments have strategically leveraged FUV as a symbol of their evolving bilateral ties. While its enrolment remains modest compared to larger state-run universities in Vietnam, FUV, whose faculty is a mix of local and international professors, markets itself as offering a liberal arts-focused education.

The backlash against FUV emerged following the deadly student-led protests that rocked Bangladesh in July. This situation swiftly captured the attention of pro-government social media accounts in Vietnam, which in early August seized upon the unrest in Bangladesh to craft a narrative warning against “colour revolutions”. These narratives were quickly adopted and magnified across various social media platforms in Vietnamese cyberspace, chief among them TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube.

Pro-government social media accounts emphasised the threat of colour revolutions, portraying them as risks to political, economic, and social stability. They claimed these movements, often driven by foreign “hostile forces”, had severe consequences elsewhere and suggested that similar dangers were emerging in Vietnam, particularly in educational settings. In this context, FUV was cast as a breeding ground for dissenting voices and a potential catalyst for these revolutionary movements.

Intriguingly, pro-government groups resurrected early criticisms of FUV to bolster their attacks. For instance, the university faced backlash for a June 2024 commencement parade that omitted the Vietnamese flag. Another point of contention was what the university’s former president Dam Bich Thuy said in a 2019 discussion about Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s documentary “The Vietnam War”. In the recorded YouTube video of the discussion, Thuy noted that the documentary deeply moved FUV students, who were surprised to learn about American suffering during the war, challenging their prior understanding of history.

Harping on the threat from external forces and portraying Vietnamese youth as easily manipulated is condescending, laying bare the regime’s detachment from the younger generation.

Pinpointing the exact orchestrators of the online attacks is challenging but it is likely that Vietnam’s state-sponsored cyber troops were involved. On platforms where the government has exerted increased control, such as TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube, most comments appeared uncannily uniform in tone and phrasing, merely regurgitating propagated narratives. This similarity suggests that the support may have been artificially amplified — by cyber troops or otherwise — to create the illusion of widespread agreement. In contrast, sentiments that were more supportive of FUV and pushed back against the hostile discourse targeting it emerged on Threads, a newer Meta-owned platform where public sentiment is more freely expressed due to less government oversight (for now).

It is also evident that the overarching message of these attacks aligns closely with the regime survival agenda favoured by certain factions within the ruling Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV). On 21 August 2024, the state-run Vietnam National Defense television channel aired a commentary that strikingly mirrored the rhetoric from pro-government social media accounts. This alignment suggests that, even if the Vietnamese propagandists did not initiate the attacks, they piggybacked on them to advance their agenda.

Just a week later, however, the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement affirming its support for FUV, highlighting the university’s positive impact on US-Vietnam relations and its importance to bilateral ties. The online commentary by the Vietnam National Defense channel has since been removed.

These inconsistent responses to the incident might have stemmed from internal rifts within the CPV over how to navigate its burgeoning ties with the US. The forthcoming visit by Vietnam’s party chief and president To Lam to the US might have influenced the moderation of the reaction. However, one certainty remains: the fixation on the threats of foreign forces co-opting Vietnamese youth to overthrow the Communist regime continues to dominate the mindset of certain conservatives within the CPV.

Vietnam’s history of external interference and colonialism fuels the authorities’ heightened sensitivity to even the slightest suggestion of foreign influence. Such a preoccupation manifests in a formulaic strategy that blames external forces for any potential domestic instability. This approach, however, driven by ideological posturing and political expediency, mostly creates noise without addressing real issues.

In Bangladesh, the protests initially sparked by demands to abolish discriminatory job quotas quickly metastasised into a violent anti-government movement driven by deeper issues like economic inequality, inflation, and job scarcity. Similarly, uprisings like the Arab Spring and recent protests in Asia were driven by deep-seated socioeconomic grievances. These protests should serve as a cautionary tale, not about the dangers of external influences but about the urgent need to address underlying domestic issues that drive popular discontent.

Harping on the threat from external forces and portraying Vietnamese youth as easily manipulated is condescending, laying bare the regime’s detachment from the younger generation. As previously argued, youth-led movements in contemporary Vietnam have focused on urging authorities to address pressing socioeconomic issues — that could boost the regime’s performative legitimacy — rather than seeking regime change or yielding to external influences. Unlike China, Vietnam has not experienced any student-led pro-democracy protests on the scale of Tiananmen Square in 1989.

While suspicions of US and Western agendas among Vietnamese hardliners are not entirely unfounded, the persistent use of formulaic rhetoric by propagandists may backfire. Absent a more nuanced and engaging approach, the regime risks not only alienating the next generation but also eroding the very legitimacy it seeks to preserve. In an increasingly interconnected world, the true threat may not come from external forces but from within: a disaffected and disengaged populace that no longer believes in the official message being delivered.

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