When Nguyễn Thành Nam released In Conversation with Thanh: A New Account of the Light in April, Vietnam’s state media fell in line. Twenty official outlets, including major Communist Party mouthpieces, coordinated their praise. Nam, a former CEO of telecoms giant FPT (now half-owned by the Ministry of Public Security), is now a lecturer on Hồ Chí Minh ideology at Hanoi’s VinUniversity, a non-profit institution established in 2018 by Vingroup. The book appeared to be an approved project, a dialogue between Thanh, a Gen Z college student indifferent to history, and her teacher Thành, who embodies Nam’s own life story, through which the journey of Hồ Chí Minh, founder of the Communist Party of Vietnam, gradually unfolds. But less than two months later, the orchestrated celebration turned into complete erasure. After a handful of Facebook users accused the book of distorting history and disparaging “the Father of the Nation”, state outlets that had championed it quietly removed their praise in unison. By July, Nam, the chief promoter of his book, Trần Việt Anh, and three publishing officials faced charges under Article 117 of Vietnam’s Criminal Code, accused of “Making, storing, distributing or propagandizing information, documents, or objects aimed at opposing the Socialist Republic of Vietnam State.” If convicted, each could face up to 20 years in prison. Nam reportedly admitted that much of the content in the book was false, expressed regret, and apologized to readers.Human Rights Watch called on Vietnam to drop all charges and release those arrested over the publication and promotion of the book. It is perhaps rare for the organization, which had reported 160 political prisoners still locked up in the country, to call for justice for a group of regime-friendly propagandists. “For the Communist Party leadership, even a book about their founding father written for young people can be deemed a threat to the party’s monopoly on power,” said Elaine Pearson, Asia director at Human Rights Watch.The case sends a chilling message to Vietnam’s intellectual class: no author, no matter how wealthy, politically connected or institutionally protected, is safe if they stray from approved orthodoxy, not even in service of the regime’s own heroes. Yet to dismiss Nam’s book as pure propaganda oversimplifies its actual contributions and potential “threats.” The wrong authorThe aftermath was swift and severe. Nguyễn Quang Thiều, chairman of the Writers’ Association and head of the state-owned Vietnamese Writers Publishing House, a former police official, was expelled from the Communist Party. The Publishing House was fined VND 100 million ($3,900) and suspended from operations for two months. In addition, the Publishing House must recall and destroy all copies of the book. It also must return the “illegal” profits obtained from the violations, amounting to VND 424 million.The Ministry of Public Security’s formal allegations were damning: the book “distorts the history of revolution, the political lines and policies of the Party and State; insults President Hồ Chí Minh, general Võ Nguyên Giáp and many other Party and State leaders.” But these charges obscure the deeper transgression. Nam was previously awarded a Certificate of Merit by former Prime Minister Nguyễn Xuân Phúc for exemplary achievements in “studying and following Ho Chi Minh’s thought, morality, and style during the period 2016-2019,” and was honored by the Central Propaganda Department in 2019. He had reportedly invested VND 1 billion in publishing this 300-page book. Yet the first real transgression was Nam as the author. Within Vietnam’s tightly controlled publishing system, authorized Ho Chi Minh biographies are often designated to be written by very red writers. Nam, a mathematician by training and an entrepreneur by profession, became the first author of his kind to write about the revered leader. Even Nam’s current affiliation with Vingroup, one of Vietnam’s largest conglomerates, offered no shield.Nam’s inspiration came from Ho Chi Minh: A Life, a 2000 biography penned by former US State Department Foreign Service officer William Duiker. Duiker’s work is widely regarded as the first comprehensive, major Western biography of Hồ to draw on extensive archival research conducted in Vietnam. Nam had enjoyed the book so much that he even translated it into Vietnamese. The treatise was cited verbatim numerous times in Nam’s book. The teacher character even urged his student to find anecdotes of Hồ’s love life in the book, an absolute taboo given the official narrative that Hồ remained single and selflessly sacrificed everything for the country all his life.Nam broke with the convention by referring to Hồ by his various names across different periods: Nguyễn Sinh Cung, Nguyễn Tất Thành, Nguyễn Ái Quốc, etc., rather than exclusively as “Uncle Hồ,” the official honorific. This seemingly small choice reflected a larger methodological commitment to treat Ho as a historical figure subject to normal scrutiny rather than as a quasi-religious icon. The book’s Gen Z-friendly tone and language have been equated with the trivialization of Hồ’s image. Nam presented Hồ as admirable but imperfect, a down-to-earth but dignified figure. It is a portrait that allows readers to recognize Ho’s genuine achievements without placing him on an untouchable pedestal. Pro-democracy activist Nguyễn Quang A interpreted the book as an example of “soft propaganda” and the repercussions on Nam as a top-down attempt to “monopolize the worship” of political leaders. The message sent to Vietnam’s intellectual class was unmistakable: even those who adore the heroes the Party loves are not free to love them thoughtfully. Even propaganda can be considered seditious if it deviates from the approved narrative.Dangerous nuanceWhat truly alarmed the authorities was not only Nam’s alleged disrespect toward Hồ, but rather the intellectual pluralism the book embraced and even encouraged among young people. The book examines Vietnam’s past with nuance and reference to different sectors rather than conformity to traditional textbooks. Such balance is, by Vietnamese state standards, heretical.The book’s timeframe goes from the French invasion in 1858 to NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s visit to Vietnam in December 2024. The leaders of the Nguyễn dynasty (1802 – 1945) emerge not as pure villains but as complex historical actors. The book acknowledges their role in enabling the French invasion while crediting their dedication to national sovereignty, a characterization that diverges sharply from the villainy and cowardice portrayed in Party-centric histories. More tellingly, the book addresses American support for the Viet Minh during the anti-Japanese resistance of World War II. Historical records and declassified documents confirm that the US military did assist Hồ’s forces against Japanese occupation, though no formal alliance was ever established. Hồ himself, in the war’s early stages, believed that only the United States had the capacity to help Vietnam achieve independence. The Communist Party of Vietnam has never publicly acknowledged this fact. The book also treats South Vietnamese leaders with unprecedented fairness. Rather than depicting them as mere foreign puppets, Nam presents Bảo Đại and Ngô Đình Diệm as leaders possessing their own vision and agency. Moreover, he notes that the South’s land reforms and market-oriented economic policies achieved “considerable high growth rates in 1955–1963” – a comparison that implicitly questions the superiority of the Communist path. Such statements would never appear in state-approved textbooks.Darker chapters also surface throughout Nam’s narrative. He discusses land reform injustices, the brutal Nhân Văn-Giai Phẩm literary and intellectual movement of the 1950s, South Korean participation in the Vietnam War and the atrocities committed, the reeducation camps that imprisoned former Southern officials without trial, the exodus of boat people fleeing Communist rule, and the rupture with China following reunification, etc. All are subjects the regime prefers left unexamined, or examined only through the lens of approved Party interpretations. The book’s true offense was not disrespect toward Ho Chi Minh. Nam is a genuine admirer, someone who had organized ceremonies in Hồ’s honor and reportedly spent a billion dong publishing this book and thus promoting his legacy. His crime was allowing Hồ the complexity and humanity that the regime demands be denied him. The book presents Hồ as a polymath and patriot who “encouraged critical inquiry,” a characterization that, ironically, suggests young readers should engage with history the way Hồ himself supposedly did.The broader campaignThis case comes at a time of systematic tightening of state control over historical narrative. The National Assembly passed an amended publishing law in late August – approved for implementation in 2027 – that explicitly aims to “rein in the distortion of historical facts.” Also this year, politicians who championed liberal arts education were denounced as “posing a threat to the Party’s ideological foundation, losing its grip on the younger generation.”In educational settings, where students are expected to respect teachers unquestioningly, Nam’s dialogue format was already revolutionary. Students and teachers engage as “equal inquirers,” examining Vietnamese history together rather than having it transmitted downward from the Communist Party as received truth. But more provocatively, the conversations introduce complexities that Party-controlled textbooks have so far systematically excluded.Nam also recounted his giant enterprise’s little-known political involvement. In 2019, he helped fulfill Võ Nguyên Giáp’s wish to organize a formal ceremony to honor soldiers who fell in the border war with China, a corporate gesture that would not be encouraged by the Communist party.“Having contributed to organizing an event that was somewhat considered sensitive at the time, it remains one of the most moving memories from the early days of our work at FPT”, wrote Nam.Vietnam’s Communist Party does not actually seek honest discourse about its founding father or its history. It seeks monopoly control over the narrative and absolute uniformity, not understanding. Deviation, no matter how respectfully framed or authentically motivated, is treated as ideological subversion.Now fear grips Vietnam’s publishing industry and the reading public. Pirated copies of Nam’s book circulate online and in secondhand bookstores, treated as contraband the way banned books have been treated throughout history. Even Nam’s considerable institutional protection—his ties to Vingroup, one of Vietnam’s largest conglomerates and a company politically untouchable in most respects—offered no shield against state punishment. Nam’s own fate remains uncertain; imprisonment remains a real possibility.