Politics & Power Quote by Nong Duc Manh

The line is built like a legal syllogism, but it plays like a political magic trick: redefine dissent as crime, then declare the prison empty of politics. Nong Duc Manh’s insistence that Vietnam has “no political prisoners” hinges on a familiar authoritarian maneuver, one that borrows the language of rule-of-law legitimacy while quietly emptying it of its liberal meaning. If every jailed critic can be labeled a lawbreaker, the state gets to claim both order and innocence.

The intent is defensive and external-facing. It’s the kind of sentence designed for foreign governments, NGOs, and trade partners: calm, procedural, technocratic. It avoids the heat of ideology by shifting everything into the cooler register of legality. The subtext is that speech is free as long as it doesn’t matter. The moment speech becomes mobilizing, embarrassing, or capable of challenging party authority, the “law” appears as a trapdoor: broad provisions on national security, propaganda, or “abusing democratic freedoms” can convert a viewpoint into a violation without ever naming it as such.

Context matters because Vietnam’s one-party system cannot admit the category “political prisoner” without admitting political persecution. So the statement doesn’t just deny specific cases; it denies the vocabulary critics use to describe them. It’s a rhetorical firewall. By presenting jail as the consequence of neutral rules rather than power, the regime aims to make repression look like governance - and to make anyone who objects seem like they’re arguing against the law itself, not against its strategic use.