When communist propaganda meets western public relations: Examining Vietnam’s government pandemic communication

Abstract

This article explores the communication strategies used by Vietnam’s communist government during the earlier phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. What makes this case worth studying is the examination of Vietnam’s hybridised use of Western public relations strategies with communist propaganda and the fluctuating, emphasis on one or the other depending on the outbreak’s implications. While Vietnam was praised as a pandemic hero in 2020, thanks in part to some academic and news media representations of the Vietnam government as an effective communicator, this perception changed when the Delta variant hit the country. What happened? Which communication strategies changed? Which remained? To answer these questions, we used a mixed qualitative method consisting of a case study and manual and computational thematic analyses of government and news media and social media texts to identify the strategies and themes that were dominant during the first COVID-19 outbreaks. This study helps to throw light on the effectiveness but also the problems that may arise from a mixed use of public relations and propaganda strategies during a global pandemic; it also raises questions about the need to build a country-specific pandemic communication framework as well as to rethink theories and uses of propaganda vis-à-vis PR today.