Bulletins and News Discussion from May 13th to May 19th, 2024 - The Blazing Furnace - COTW: Vietnam

An image of a Central Committee meeting in Hanoi. Image taken from this article.

General Secretary Nguyễn Phú Trọng implemented an anti-corruption campaign in 2016 called "blazing furnace" in shorthand. Since then, the fire has ripped through both politicians and businesses, up to even the Presidency. Nearly 200,000 party members, 36 Central Committee members, and 50 police/military generals have been disciplined since the initiative began. In 2018, Dinh La Thang, the former party chief of Ho Chi Minh City, became the first sitting Politburo member to be criminally charged, and was sentenced to 30 years in prison. In 2023, President Nguyễn Xuân Phúc was implicated in a corruption scandal and resigned. He was replaced by Võ Văn Thưởng, who was then also caught in a corruption scandal a year later in March 2024, making him the shortest serving President in Vietnamese history. The Presidency is current headed by Võ Thị Ánh Xuân while they find a new President; she also took that role in 2023.

The ousted leaders tend to also be part of the more West-friendly, technocratic faction inside Vietnam, either reflecting how these people also tend to be more easily corrupted, or how the Communist Party is slowly moving away from a foreign policy which allies itself with the West (as Vietnam has comprehensive strategic partnerships with several Western countries), or some combination. Of course, this shouldn't be overstated - Vietnam has maintained a close friendship with China for years, and both incumbent leaders are intimately familiar with anti-corruption campaigns and how and why they must be conducted in order to deliver maximum public benefit.

America clearly desires Vietnam to pick their side, because America strongly desires another vassal state in East Asia like the Philippines, South Korea, and Japan to further encircle and isolate China. And so the headlines and commentary of Western state propaganda like Radio Free Asia, the BBC, WaPo, Business Insider, etc reveal their increasing annoyance with Vietnam's government. They often couch this in the standard "objective" economics language); about how removing leaders who foreign investors were reassured by might mean economic pain for Vietnam ahead. As Bhadrakumar noted in 2023, perhaps the BBC revealed their intentions the best:

Reading Vietnamese politics is always difficult — the Communist Party makes its decisions behind closed doors. But hard-line General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, who was given an unprecedented third term at last year’s party congress, appears to be consolidating his authority by ousting senior officials seen as more pro-Western and pro-business. Officially this is all happening in the name of fighting corruption,.. but it’s indicative of a power struggle at the top of the party… the likely rise now of more security-focused officials to the top of the party will be bad news.

Even a quick google search right now will show a bunch of articles by clearly nervous Westerners: Why Vietnam’s Escalating Anti-Corruption Campaign Might Backfire because, as we all know, only authoritarian regimes are vulnerable to things like public opinion and discontent, while Western "democracies" are insulated from such petty phenomena. Leaders here can have disapproval ratings of 60-70% and not even the slightest consequence will happen to them - a real sign of democratic freedom and justice over those primitive regimes in the East! Or, take: ‘Blazing Furnace’ Turns Vietnam Into Another Chinese Province; China turning both Russia and Vietnam into their provinces in just two years was a real diplomatic masterclass. Or, back in 2022: Vietnam's 'blazing furnace' crackdown burns $40 bln off stocks. Not the stocks! Anything but the stocks!

If your actions as a leader are pissing off Bloomberg, you are going in the right direction.

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Our strike vote is starting today for UAW 4811, the grad student/student researcher union for the University of California system. For those unaware, this push started back after the raids on the UCLA encampment. It apparently gave the union enough cause to start this proceeding. Which is good! Likely the vote will go through, and then things will get spicy. The vote closes Wednesday afternoon.
On the downside, the highest level of the union leadership still has a bunch of collaborationist fuckers, so they undercut the total power of the strike before it started by declaring it a 'limited' strike, with a maximum deadline of June 30th. Obviously, presetting a deadline for your labor action isn't great. It also undercuts the threat of long term withholding of student grades, which would result in the academic machinery grinding to a halt. That said, it is at the very least past the deadline of the quarter's instruction.
The UC system is weird in that instead of semesters, we use quarters of the year, with a Fall, Winter, and Spring quarter of primary instruction, and then a summer quarter. That means that school goes way farther into May/June than pretty much everywhere else, so the campus won't be empty by any means, and there will be disrupted classes. There will be some form of material impact, and every bit helps I hope.
I was talking with someone, and they think that the University might just play nice and try to wait it out, but I'm really not sure about that. They were pretty chill, in terms of direct force at least, during on more "normal" strike about a year ago, but the harsh crackdowns of students literally just sitting around makes me think it might be different this time. I think it's possible that if our strike materializes, and it has actual material consequences, however mild, they might windmill slam that police brutality button. I feel kind of paranoid typing and talking about this lol. But regardless, I started stocking up on first aid supplies and some protective stuff. I don't know how far away we are from Kent State 2.0.
- Nice. Also, organize within the union to undermine that "leadership" BS. Maybe genocide and its being brought home are worth more than two weeks of downtime.
  
  It's a work in process. The union is kind of split into subsections for each campus, each with their own local stewards/leadership, and then there's some top level admin types lurking above. There are good people in union positions. It's not like a totally lost cause. It's just a lot easier to start at the local level and work up. There's been a good push into unfucking it, especially after our last strike, where the shitty people were obviously incompetent/corrupt.
  Different campus also have different material conditions at times, which influences, well, a lot of stuff.
  
  The union is kind of split into subsections for each campus, each with their own local stewards/leadership, and then there's some top level admin types lurking above.
  Which UC school has the most militant local and which UC school is most compromised?
  
  Well, it's impossible to really tell now, but you can see some interesting patterns by looking at the voting pattern on our last contract. Contracts have to be approved by a majority of the membership to be put in place, and generally the votes are more perfunctory, with most people approving. Often times you see 90 percent approval. That was not the case in our last contract.
  Due to truly terrible bargaining, the contract was deficient for a large amount of people. Cost of living varies quite a bit in California, though it's generally high. In some places it's really bad, to the point of homeless grad students, in the case of Santa Cruz. Surprise surprise, the bargaining team delivered a shit contract that didn't address people's needs fully. We and a lot of others tried to agitate for continuing and escalating the strike, because the leadership was being real shit at it. They still had all the levers of power though at that time, so it was difficult. They even hired a PR firm to push the vote through lol. Despite that, several campuses still very much voted No on the contract, and overall, the results are a rather terrible look for the UAW, for anyone that's clued in.
  The vote is split in two here, as this was before the union was combined into one bigger one. The percent is that which voted Yes on the contract. The second grouping was generally a little bit better off on average than the first grouping, though it's complicated as students sometimes went back and forth between the two depending on the quarter.

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