The Growing Salience of Online Vietnamese Nationalism

Book excerpt: Vietnamese nationalism has a strong undercurrent of anti-China sentiments, and Vietnam's leaders have regularly tapped into such sentiments to shore up their legitimacy and boost Vietnamese nationalism.Over the last decade, the helter-skelter growth of social media has bred new popular actors in Vietnamese cybersphere, who are deeply nationalistic but who pursue entirely different political and social agendas. In sum, they give rise to a new nationalistic narrative, one that paints the Vietnam Communist Party as being often too meek and subservient to China, and calls for drastic reforms to th.