Mother Mushroom: how Vietnam locked up its most famous blogger

This article from The Guardian is about Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh, one of Vietnam’s most influential bloggers. Also known by her online pseudonym, Mẹ Nấm (Mother Mushroom), 38-year-old Quynh was accused of “defaming Vietnam’s communist regime in her blogs and interviews with foreign media,” and sentenced by court to a decade in prison. By the time this article was published (July 8, 2017), Quynh had already spent 9 months behind bars.

In a separate article (http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam/mushroom-10122017151516.html ), I found a more exact timeline: Quynh was arrested on Oct. 10, 2016 while on her way to visit a fellow rights campaigner in prison. She was apprehended and then sentenced to 10 years in jail on June 29 under Article 88 of Vietnam’s Penal Code.

Quynh’s lawyer, Vo An Don, described the bad conditions Quynh was living under: she subsisted only on a diet of anchovies and spinach soup for the first seven months, and was denied both sanitary pads and underwear. As of today, Quynh has still not been released from prison. Her health has continued to decline due to poor living conditions, to point where her arm and leg muscles have atrophied, according to her mother Lan who is allowed to see her once a month for 15 minutes. Quynh is a single mother of two children. Lan is raising them for now, but they will grow up parentless if the Vietnam government does not grant clemency.

News outlets and other media are all state-controlled in Vietnam. Article 88 is one article among a set of provisions authorities have used to detain dozens of writers and bloggers. Online blogs are not as heavily censored as news articles are, so Article 88 serves as a method of control.

Inability to express opinions against a country’s communist regime while living in said country is not something new. It is articles such as these that remind us though, that these are real people with families and children who are advocating for a better future for the next generation. Vietnam is currently struggling with issues of development and urbanization. People like Quynh who speak out about what she views as injustices against citizens are condemned by officials so that the authority of the Vietnamese government is preserved. Such action might reaffirm the power of the state, but from the backlash against Quynh's imprisonment, perhaps decisions like these to squash dissenting opinions in the end will work against the legitimacy of the government in the people's eyes. Whether or not it will lead to change is something to look out for.