2024/01/01 by Tuong Thuy Vu · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Disaster Management and Resilience #Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration
paper · doi:10.1525/vs.2024.19.3-4.190
openalex publication_date 2024/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/12/21
The scandal involving the “rescue flights” in Vietnam broke in early 2023, three years after COVID-19 had spread across the world and created a global crisis. The scandal involved fifty-four officials in five central ministries and several cities and provinces, including a deputy minister, several ambassadors, deputy mayors, and advisors to the deputy prime minister and other ministers. The officials were charged with receiving millions of dollars in bribes for discharging their official duties, which were to review and approve flights to bring home (“rescue”) Vietnamese citizens stranded abroad because of COVID-19. Many private business owners who had offered the bribes were also brought to trial. During the investigation, some of them had bribed senior police officers, and those officers (a major general and a lieutenant colonel) ended up being arrested and put on trial as well.This bribery case has been called one of the “largest and most complex corruption cases ever in [Vietnamese] history” and a “national disgrace” [nỗi đau của đất nước].1 It eventually led to the resignation of First Deputy Prime Minister Phạm Bình Minh, who had been a candidate for higher positions but whose secretary was one of those put on trial. This essay examines the scandal from various social scientific perspectives, from political economy to sociocultural analysis and historical sociology. Each of these perspectives offers useful concepts to explain the scandal and sheds light on different aspects of the event. The purpose of this exercise is not to decide which theoretical perspective has greater explanatory power but to provide a range of lenses through which Vietnam’s opaque politics can be understood.For more than a year after the pandemic emerged, Vietnam implemented a zero-Covid policy, which involved closing off the border, aggressively monitoring the disease, and imposing strict quarantines of entire neighborhoods when cases were detected. As a result of border closures, tens of thousands of Vietnamese citizens, of whom migrant workers were perhaps the largest group, needed or desired to return to Vietnam but could not do so. The first “rescue flight” took place on February 10, 2020, to bring home thirty Vietnamese citizens who were stranded in locked-down Wuhan, China. The official purpose of this flight, which left Vietnam on February 2, 2020, was actually to bring Vietnamese donations of medical aid to Wuhan as a friendly gesture to China, but the Vietnamese government allowed its stranded citizens there to piggyback on the return trip, apparently for free. Following this flight, President Nguyễn Xuân Phúc ordered government agencies to arrange for Vietnamese citizens who needed or wanted to return home under Vietnam’s policy of “protection of citizens [abroad]” [bảo hộ công dân].2 The five ministries tasked with this mission included Foreign Affairs, Health, Public Security, Defense, and Transportation. Representatives of the participating ministries formed a committee that was presided over by Tô Anh Dũng, a deputy minister of Foreign Affairs. Flights specifically for “rescue” purposes were authorized to meet the demand among Vietnamese working, studying, living, or simply stranded abroad. Many were drawn home by the relatively calm situation in Vietnam compared to many other countries, such as Spain, South Korea, and the United States, where the pandemic was spreading rapidly, overwhelming medical facilities, and causing thousands of deaths.By mid-2021, about one thousand such flights (or about two flights per day on average) had taken place, bringing about two hundred thousand people back to Vietnam.3 At around the same time, fearing an economic downturn due to the loss of tourists, the Vietnamese government partially lifted the ban on commercial flights into and out of the country. The government also greenlighted private companies to operate flights to bring home those Vietnamese nationals abroad who wanted to return and could afford to pay the cost. These flights, called “combo” by the Vietnamese authorities, would still need the approval of the five-ministry committee. Approved private companies were to solicit customers or receive the names of those who registered with Vietnamese embassies abroad, collect payment, rent aircrafts and flight crews, and arrange with airport and provincial authorities for airport transfers and quarantine facilities in Vietnam to accommodate returnees for two weeks upon arrival. It appears that selection for these flights was based solely on ability to pay for expenses rather than on an assessment of a given individual’s need to return home.According to documents provided to the court and reported in the media, hundreds of private companies submitted bids for contracts to provide repatriation services. These included some legitimate tour companies and some apparently without any expertise in international transport or tourism. Information provided by the Ministry of Public Security showed that more than one hundred companies were approved, but only twenty carried out operations.4 Yet according to the executives who testified in court, the process dragged out, and the companies were kept waiting for approval, held up by various obstacles. To secure timely approval, these companies sought an audience with members of the government committee through personal connections and offered bribes to the officials in the committee or in Vietnamese embassies abroad. During their testimonies in court, officials explained that they had viewed these bribes as personal “gifts” to indicate appreciation for their kindness. In contrast, business executives testifying at the trial saw the gifts as fees that must be paid to facilitate a business transaction. They revealed that some officials, such as Phạm Trung Kiên, the secretary of Deputy Minister of Health Đỗ Xuân Tuyên, actually yelled at them [quát mắng] and directly demanded money up front in return for approval.These contrasting interpretations of the payments aside, there is no doubt that large sums of cash did change hands, reportedly a total of 9.3 million US dollars or 226 billion đồng. These transactions occurred at coffee shops, inside cars, and at the private homes of officials; some took place directly, others through intermediaries. Nearly two thousand flights had taken place by the end of 2022 when the investigation started, and passengers often paid at least twice the normal round-trip price for a one-way ticket. According to a housemaid who worked in Saudi Arabia, the airfare for one such flight from Riyadh to Vietnam cost between 1,300 and 2,600 US dollars (28–62 million đồng), exclusive of charges related to quarantine once arriving in Vietnam.5In the remainer of this essay I will apply relevant social scientific concepts to analyze the scandal and its implications for Vietnamese politics. First, from a political economy perspective, the criminal practices in this case could simply be described in terms of price gouging and government–business collusion under conditions of monopolistic supply. Only those companies that offered bribes were allowed to operate repatriation flights, and they could dictate high prices, part of which would go to pay for the bribes. The scandal could have been avoided if the government had called for public bids by private businesses to provide air transportation to customers at costs that, though expensive, would at least be competitive. For deserving folks who could not afford to pay, the government would pick up the tab—again, in a transparent manner. The scandal was made possible because officials did not want to use a bidding process. Given that Vietnamese consulates and embassies abroad commonly practice price gouging when it comes to visas,6 they must have seen an opportunity to profit from the situation. At the same time, top government leaders (ministers and higher) chose not to intervene to protect their fellow citizens from the profiteers.The explanation above focuses on the mismatch between demand and supply caused by COVID-19, the closure of borders, and the lack of a competitive business environment in Vietnam. Yet it is well known that in its “market economy with socialist orientation,” the Vietnamese government still intervenes deeply in the market.7 Officials as owners of public resources routinely collect lucrative amounts of “rent” from state-owned enterprises and private businesses in return for access to such resources.8 While the business environment is not competitive, rivalries among politicians’ personal patronage networks can be intense, which explains why scandals like this one sometimes get exposed.In contrast with the political economy approach, a sociocultural perspective analyzes the scandal in the light of Vietnam’s socialist past. In this perspective, the scandal can be explained as a natural, if particularly egregious, outcome of the well-known “envelope culture” [văn hoá phong bì] and xin-cho [begging and granting] practices [thói quen xin-cho] embedded in the social structure of communist Vietnam and prevalent in the administrative practices of the Vietnamese government. Envelope culture and xin-cho practices, especially the latter, in turn, are traceable to the decades when the Vietnamese Communist Party sought to implement a socialist system. In that system (called bao cấp, or subsidy), the government deeply penetrated into individuals’ lives and assumed responsibility for the provision of most basic consumer goods and social services, from healthcare to education. Most citizens were employed by the government, as members of either rural cooperatives or state-owned enterprises. No private entities were permitted to provide goods and services, which were a government monopoly. Yet while keeping its monopoly on consumer goods and service provision, the party prioritized wars and (in times of peace) socialist industrialization. It demanded that the population sacrifice for socialism, rather than looking after their daily needs. With extremely limited resources devoted to public services and consumer goods, only the highest-ranking officials and their families received adequate services as rewards for their positions. For the rest of the population, services and goods were of very poor quality in all respects, and one had to beg [xin] to be granted [cho]. Petty corruption was widespread, as government officials could demand “gifts” (normally goods or cash, but also in other forms) for any services or goods to be obtained, especially services or goods of higher-than-normal quality.In the deeply hierarchial socialist society in Vietnam, the party-state could be likened to a ruthless boss; state officials occupied the top rung of the system, hoarding all its power and privileges. While the Vietnamese system today is socialist only in name, the “rescue flights” scandal suggests that the party-state remains ruthless, and officials still dominate the political, economic, and social hierarchy. Although envelope culture may be viewed as part of traditional gift-giving practices in Vietnamese culture, the contending claims between officials and business executives in the scandal suggest that asymmetric power relationships and the ruthless culture of officialdom, rather than benign customs, were at the roots of the behavior. Remarkably, the government did not acknowledge these relationships, preferring to blame such behavior on the poor morality or degeneracy of officials [tha hoá, thoái hoá, or tự chuyển hoá].While the sociocultural perspective evokes Vietnam’s recent socialist past, the view from historical sociology calls attention to its path to state formation through war and revolution. In Charles Tilly’s formulation of “the state as organized crime,” a mafia rather than a ruthless boss would serve as a more apt image for the party-state.9 Tilly studies state formation in late medieval and early modern Western Europe, an extremely violent process during which modern states emerged out of the struggle for power, territory, and population among monarchs, feudal lords, merchants, and religious leaders. In return for protection, rulers demanded labor and rents from their population, which is very similar to the relationship between street gangs and people who live on their turf. As Tilly argues, “if protection rackets represent organized crime at its smoothest, then war making and state making—quintessential protection rackets with the advantage of legitimacy—qualify as our largest examples of organized crime. Without branding all generals and statesmen as murderers or thieves, I want to urge the value of that analogy.”10Tilly’s analogy supplies a particularly useful heuristic for the rescue flights scandal, in which Vietnamese officials and their business cronies relied on the party-state as a tool to extort money from citizens—ostensibly in exchange for protection from the pandemic. The analogy is also apt in explaining the Việt-Á test kit scandal that broke at the same time. In that case, citizens were forced to pay a high price for mediocre and, in some cases, useless products that were supposed to protect them from the virus. The scheme was deployed and enforced by the government under its zero-Covid policy, which mandated frequent testing for workers in industrial zones, patients and visitors at hospitals, and people in other contexts at their own expense. However, the analogy does not work well for other kinds of corruption scandals in which officials embezzled money from the government, such as the recent scandal involving the Xuyên Việt Tour and Oil Transport Company, which imports and retails petroleum, or the corruption case involving the Vietnamese Navy’s Command of Coastal Patrol [Bộ Tư Lệnh Cảnh Sát Biển].11 These cases did not involve large populations or an exchange of security protection for payment.The idea of the state as a mafia that extorts citizens in exchange for (imagined or real) protection is still not as appalling as the “predatory state,” the archetypical form of the “developmental state” in sociologist Peter Evans’s framework, which examines the different roles of states in economic development.12 Predatory states ruthlessly extract and plunder resources from society without concern for the welfare of citizens or long-term economic development. In contrast, “developmental states” are able to nurture economic transformation even though they also siphon off some resources for their own benefit. The officials charged in the rescue flights scandal clearly behaved in a predatory manner: They took advantage of the situation to profit, without any concern for their victims—among whom were such vulnerable compatriots as housemaids in Saudi Arabia and those recently released from Malaysian prisons.Officials’ predatory behavior in the rescue flights is systematic and institutionalized in the Vietnamese state, as observed by two researchers-cum-long-term policy consultants to the government:At present, off-budget operations and illicit activities are commonplace in all state organizations at all levels.…Informal practices go far beyond ordinary modes of bureaucratic corruption. They are much more strategic, systemic, and highly institutionalized in an informally commercialized administrative culture. Examples include running private firms under the names of relatives and straw men to feed them with public contracts, trading state positions for cash and favors, auctioning off licenses, informally renting out public property, grabbing land in the context of fuzzy property regimes, collecting informal levies, capitalizing on insider information on land speculations, bid-rigging in public procurement, nurturing private firms in the shadow of state enterprise, and siphoning off large profits in state monopolies.…Whether bureaucrats are individually or collectively organized, the ingenuity by which they capitalize on their public offices and privileged access to state resources knows little limit.13According to this account, most incumbent officials are out for themselves, not for the public interest, even while they ostensibly serve the public. Unlike former Zaire, which is the country Evans uses as an exemplar of a predatory state, Vietnam has seen economic growth, albeit not at a transformative level (i.e., a level that would have turned Vietnam into an industrialized country, like South Korea or Taiwan, after three decades). To most analysts, Vietnam is not a state, but not a predatory state the high of and predatory have to explain why Vietnam is not a state as many it to can to the of why Vietnam is not a predatory are two in the focuses on the competitive the and informal political that predatory behavior by the Vietnamese party-state is by a the Vietnamese Communist While some members of this are more than no has the is the of about two hundred where power is The the but it may also the in some provincial officials are also members of the which offers them a to the power of central state networks of personal and relationships that other over bureaucratic and, more over the of power and among As and “the practice of and in the state service is a of of it is an that state positions with an informal price and are specifically and which provide of for making possible these illicit but highly In this environment of illicit a that due to its predatory practices may an formed from other and be it can official and in Vietnam is not as a predatory state is a among top party leaders and the state which and behavior among and leaders want to a of and they can their power and and after they As the most and privileged members in the system, they to the most if that were to In the of political Vietnam to of dollars of and year while the party-state to of its and of all the for party This in the personal and rivalries to some the state agencies involved in security and more political power than other state they have the power to and other state in the court of public or in a court of state agencies involved in especially state-owned positions in the power but and access to goods that can be for While these two kinds of the and the with other to agencies have recently well to Party Nguyễn they are allowed to a of from the agencies and bureaucrats that they In this competitive and are at is that the of officials such as those in the rescue flights scandal will predatory behavior among officials for given their privileged access to state resources and their to others in their personal the of the are not the Vietnamese They the which even greater and power the rest of the It is perhaps no that the has been by a on society in Vietnam, given the of the of the those registered organizations that operate and have with have from recent and the of their of and far that the power of the agencies will Tô party Vietnam’s and as agencies will no doubt even of This will the image of Vietnam as a police state, eventually its as a place for and at some predatory behavior from as Evans Vietnam has avoided the of a country like Zaire, where by officials is and In the this outcome will on the ability of top leaders to in predatory practices by their as in the rescue flights and other recent At the same that Vietnam may to the most of official it perhaps will a have Vietnam from the of an state, the country has to in the of Phạm once an to Vietnam’s prime about a that a country that has to be of the past, as the rescue flights scandal to to a far more for Vietnam.