How the 2016 Social Evils Campaign defined deviance

In November 2016, Vietnam’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism launched a renewed drive against what officials called “social evils.” The 2016 Social Evils Campaign expanded a moral project repeated since the early 2000s. Prostitution, drug addiction, gambling, beggary, fortune-telling and homosexuality appeared in official discourse as linked dangers. The list joined conduct, poverty, belief and identity, presenting social disorder as a condition requiring organised correction rather than ordinary policing.

The campaign coincided with Decree 69/2016 on businesses linked to social evils, Decree 125/2016 on residential areas and Decree 136/2016 on gambling, giving moral appeals an administrative edge. Local officials could inspect businesses, refer vulnerable people to rehabilitation and expose them publicly. Its history concerns the making of deviance: who named it, who carried it and why separate controversies became one state project. Australian debates over alcohol, gaming, street disorder and online speech offer comparisons, though not exact equivalents.

Moral rhetoric becomes administrative machinery

MCST supplied the national narrative, while provincial and municipal authorities supplied reach. People’s Committees, police, market managers and neighbourhood watch groups identified businesses and people said to threaten public order. Inspections of hotels, brothels, gambling dens and shops translated moral language into visits, closures, confiscations and referrals.

Legal instruments made enforcement possible, though no single decree contained the campaign. Decree 69/2016 increased penalties for businesses associated with prostitution, drugs, gambling and related abuses. Residential rules widened scrutiny of temporary residents, while gambling rules tightened penalties. Authorities could refer people categorised under the campaign to education, administrative detention or rehabilitation. Poverty and marginality could therefore become grounds for state supervision.

The body, the street and the label

Categories were not applied evenly. Sex workers and drug users were more visible targets than office workers, while campaigns against fortune-tellers and beggars mixed conduct with supposed cultural backwardness. Gambling occupied a special place because it was popular and linked to household finances and organised crime.

Official policy also treated homosexuality as a “social evil,” even where raids focused more heavily on sex work, addiction and street vending. A moral label converted differences into a common administrative identity. Once recorded as deviant, a person could be treated in the name of cure. Public exposure could also enable extortion, family pressure and violence, making the campaign part of the danger it claimed to remove.

Enforcement methods and social effects

Everyday enforcement combined surveillance with spectacle.

Methods used by authorities

• Police and local officials raided suspected brothels, drug sites and gambling venues.
• Inspectors checked hotels, shops and residential records for “social evil” activity.
• Residents and online users reported suspects and circulated detention images.
• Police transferred some people to short-term detention or compulsory rehabilitation.
• Authorities closed businesses and seized property linked to alleged vice.

Effects on people targeted

• People lost income, housing and family support during institutional custody.
• Informal workers and addicts became easier for police and residents to identify.
• A family label followed released people into employment and community life.
• Online photographs prolonged humiliation beyond the immediate raid.
• Fear and self-censorship spread through vulnerable communities.

Authorities widened surveillance by shifting work to residents. Reporting a suspected prostitute or gambling place turned policing into everyday participation. Checkpoints and camera phones made enforcement public and sometimes turned neighbours into auxiliaries.

Rehabilitation language softened coercion. Removing someone from the street could mean losing income and autonomy before individual conduct was assessed. “Cure” often meant separation from ordinary life because of identity or association rather than a proven offence.

Online mockery becomes a legal risk

The campaign created a test of public obedience. Social-media users mocked slogans, photographed checkpoints and circulated images of supposed “social evil” people. Satire weakened official claims of national consensus, especially when the line between brothels, massage services and ordinary business remained blurred.

The friction had legal consequences. Blogger Nguyễn Văn Duy was arrested in January 2017 over online material mocking the campaign and later sentenced to four years for content said to harm social morality and national traditions. Contemporary reporting, including Sibuka Media’s political coverage, shows local disputes sitting uneasily with national slogans. Dissent about social policy became a speech case.

Online exposure worked in both directions. It exposed abuses, but also gave authorities evidence and encouraged crowds to identify targets. The attempt to control moral imagery produced more images and counter-claims than it could contain.

Australian contrasts in everyday life

In Melbourne and Sydney, vice regulation is usually encountered through commerce rather than moral spectacle. Residents pass licensed bars in Melbourne’s CBD, clubs in Sydney’s Kings Cross, bottle shops and late-night takeaway venues. In the Vietnamese communities of Footscray, Richmond and Cabramatta, bakeries, groceries and night-market stalls sit within a local market where alcohol, gambling and informal services are part of daily life. Phones, trains and social media carry both advertising and nuisance complaints.

Australian law classifies differently. The federal Interactive Gambling Act 2001 regulates certain forms of online gambling, while states and territories license venues and machines. Homosexuality was decriminalised nationwide by 1997, and Victoria’s Equal Opportunity Act 2010 protects sexual orientation from discrimination. NSW’s Public Order Act 2010 regulates disorder and intimidation rather than branding people “social evils.” Separate statutes and courts remain imperfect, but they matter.

Australia still sees campaigns about methamphetamine, street sex work, youth crime and gambling harm. Councils and regulators can close premises, police enforce public-order offences, and publishers can face privacy or defamation claims. The Privacy Act 1988 and state image-abuse laws constrain some misuse of personal information, although public-interest reporting remains strongly protected. The contrast is institutional: separate laws and courts regulate contested conduct here, whereas Vietnam fused morality, welfare and security in one category.

What the campaign reveals about state power

The 2016 campaign did not invent its methods. Colonial-era moral policing, communist-era labour camps and earlier campaigns against beggars and sex workers supplied precedents. Decrees, local teams and digital mobilisation, however, allowed moral categories to move rapidly through the system.

Its mechanics are visible in three features: unlike problems were grouped under one label; enforcement depended on visibility and public participation; and rehabilitation turned punishment into care in official language while permitting surveillance and coercion. Media cases showed that satire became risky when official legitimacy appeared at stake.

The history warns against policies that turn social problems into moral identities. Public-health and welfare measures can protect people, but they lose legitimacy when targets are treated as inherently defective. What readers should remember is that the campaign’s central achievement was not defeating vice. It was expanding state authority to define, document and correct citizens.