Government repression and toleration of dissidents in contemporary Vietnam

Abstract

All governments, including democratic ones, use repression against their own citizens. What varies is the intensity, form, and scope of repression. Governments in authoritarian political systems, according to conventional thinking, are far more repressive than those in democratic systems. Among the most repressive, by many accounts, are single-party communist governments such as those that ruled in the Soviet Union and much of Eastern Europe after World War II until the early 1990s, and that still rule in China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam.