Introduction: Interview with Trương Huy San (Huy Đức)

The following interview with the writer Huy Đức took place in Kensington, California, during the summer of 2013. The Journal of Vietnamese Studies (JVS) is releasing it now, over a decade after it occurred, both to shed light on the life and times of one of Vietnam’s most important intellectuals and to draw attention to the dramatic recent intensification of his persecution by the Vietnamese security police.

On June 1, 2024, the Hồ Chí Minh City–based Facebooker Lê Nguyễn Hương Trà employed an easily grasped euphemism to alert her 600,000 followers that “journalist Huy Đức” had been arrested. “Saturday morning at 9 a.m., authorities invited journalist Huy Đức to work with them,” she wrote on her timeline. “He returned this evening while they searched his home, and then he was taken away again.”¹ No official announcement confirmed Lê Nguyễn Hương Trà’s report, but Huy Đức’s Facebook page vanished the next day, and he remained suspiciously absent from all social media platforms.

Six days later, on June 7, police officials confirmed the arrest through a brief notice published in state media.² It reported that Huy Đức had been detained and would be held for three months under Article 331, a controversial law that prohibits “abusing rights of freedom and democracy to infringe upon the interests of the state.” The notice failed to explain how precisely Huy Đức had violated Article 331, but global human rights groups quickly pointed out that Vietnamese authorities frequently deploy this overly broad statute when prosecuting peaceful critics of the government.³

While the precise trigger for Huy Đức’s arrest remains unknown, many speculate that it was retribution for posts he had issued on Facebook days earlier bemoaning the growing political power of the Vietnamese police. A risky move at any time during the communist era, such anti-police rhetoric has recently become even more dangerous, owing to the rapid political ascension of Tô Lâm, a former head of the Ministry of Public Security.⁴

Taking a longer view, Huy Đức’s arrest may also be seen as the latest and harshest retaliatory measure in a long-running campaign on the part of the party-state to silence him. The start of the campaign coincided with his rise in Hồ Chí Minh City during the late 1980s and early 1990s as a corruption-busting investigative reporter whose writing for the newspaper Tuổi Trẻ [Young Age] challenged Vietnam’s authoritarian political culture and championed democratic reform. The official campaign against Huy Đức took many forms—including threats, harassment, and intrusive surveillance—and escalated in intensity until it forced him out of institutional journalism entirely in 2009. In response, he moved his writing to social media exclusively, founding the Osin blog in August of that year. When its readership soared to include “hundreds of thousands of hits daily,” as he explained in this interview, the Osin blog was hacked repeatedly and shut down for good in February 2010.

The campaign against Huy Đức spiked again in early 2013 in response to the publication in the United States of Bên thắng cuộc [The Winning Side], his massive, pathbreaking revisionist history of postwar Vietnam.⁵ Critical of the communist North and sympathetic to the defeated South, this rigorously reported narrative of post-conflict score settling, political repression, economic mismanagement, factional infighting, and endemic corruption created a sensation within the transnational Vietnamese-reading public and generated harsh denunciations in the government press.⁶ Although it continues to be accessed online by readers in Vietnam, Vietnamese authorities have never permitted Bên thắng cuộc to be sold openly inside the country.

The following interview took place amid the frenzy of public acclaim and official disapproval sparked by the publication of Bên thắng cuộc. Huy Đức had stopped in northern California’s Bay Area on his way home after spending the 2012–2013 academic year in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a Nieman Fellow. Worried that he faced arrest back in Vietnam, Huy Đức was contemplating various options when the interview took place—including the option of remaining in the United States, at least until the scorching debate inside the country surrounding his book had cooled down. The foreboding final lines of the interview reflect a feeling—widely held at that time, both among his friends and himself—that Huy Đức was in the eye of a gathering storm: “I recently told a friend that no free man would ever choose prison. But, in some cases, to defend a right to freedom, prison cannot be avoided. If everybody avoids prison, we will never achieve freedom.”

Huy Đức returned to Vietnam and was not arrested. Instead, he spent the next decade (2014–2024) Facebooking fitfully about local and global current events and pursuing a handful of politically engaged projects. In January 2014, he opened the Paracel Islands Bridge Fund [Quỹ Nhịp Cầu Hoàng Sa] to inspire popular resistance against Chinese expansion in the South China Seas and to forge reconciliation between northern Vietnamese and southern Vietnamese.⁷ With the help of friends, he raised money for the families of soldiers from the southern Republic of Vietnam (RVN) who had died defending the Paracel Islands during a 1974 firefight with the Chinese Army. The fund was also used to assist veterans and families of soldiers who had died during a Chinese attack against the Spratly Islands in 1988. Huy Đức’s Paracel Islands Bridge Fund remains the first and only attempt by a nongovernmental organization to support soldiers from both sides of the conflict.⁸

In 2020, Huy Đức founded another nonprofit organization called Vietnam Forestation/Reforestation Social Limited Company (VARS) to combat deforestation inside the country.⁹ Raising money from small donors, the organization has planted trees on more than 313 hectares of deforested land in Quảng Bình and Quảng Trị Provinces and in the upland region of Sơn La Province known as Hua Tát. Huy Đức’s pursuit of these ambitious civil society initiatives are of a piece with the courageous political journalism that he produced earlier in his career. Indeed, his work in both arenas may be seen as equally important contexts for his ongoing persecution by the Vietnamese government.

Our decision to publish the following interview is based mainly on an assessment of its scholarly value. It sheds new light on Huy Đức’s upbringing, education, military service, and journalistic career, as well as the evolution of his political views over time. It also illuminates many important issues in Vietnam’s modern history: the structure and functioning of collective farms, the military as an engine of social mobility, the workings of the district-level party bureaucracy, the Vietnamese wars in Cambodia and along the Chinese border, and the struggle over expanding press freedom in Hồ Chí Minh City during the high Đổi Mới decade of 1988–1997. No part of the interview has been released before, and little of the information about Huy Đức that it features has been previously available to scholars, journalists, or interested readers.

A second reason to release the interview is to express solidarity and support for an important Vietnamese studies scholar currently suffering persecution. Although Huy Đức is not a conventional academic, we consider him to be part of our “tribe” because he authored the most important history of postwar Vietnam ever written; because he has participated, together with members of our community, in scholarly gatherings, including annual meetings of the Association for Asian Studies; and because he has consulted extensively on a wide range of topics with many colleagues in our field. Given that a critical objective of JVS is to promote Vietnamese studies globally, we cannot remain neutral when a member of our community is targeted for the peaceful expression of their views about Vietnamese politics, history, culture, or society. We hope that the publication of this interview will draw enhanced attention to the shameful recent treatment of our colleague and augment public sentiment in favor of his speedy release and complete exoneration.