Vietnam: A Police State Where One-In-Six Works For Security Forces

A plainclothes and a uniformed police officer stand in front of a court in Hanoi. Reuters

By Palash Ghosh | IB Times
August 29 2013 

Vietnam, one of the five remaining Communist nations in the world, takes its security very seriously. So seriously in fact that an estimated one in six working people in the Southeast Asian country are employed either full- or part-time in the massive state security network.

According to a BBC report, Vietnam’s Communist-controlled state security apparatus comprise not only the police forces and regular army, but also paramilitaries, rural militia forces and “neighborhood guardians.” All of these disparate elements answer to either the Ministry of National Defense or the Ministry of Public Security.

Professor Carl Thayer of the Australian Defence Forces Academy estimates that at least 6.7 million Vietnamese belong to the country’s many security agencies, roughly one-sixth of its 43-million working population. As a point of comparison, Vietnam’s largest company, the state-owned PetroVietnam oil producer, boasts a workforce of about 50,000. According to the Vietnam Trade Promotion Agency, the country’s largest industry, textiles and garments, employs about 2 million workers, accounting for about quarter of all industrial employment. But that would make it less than one-third of the state’s total security workforce. Continue Reading…