Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet's latest book, Speaking Out in Vietnam, is a careful analysis of how actors in Vietnamese society express their grievances and preferences to regime authorities and how the Vietnamese party-state responds to those articulations. The findings will enlighten students of both Vietnam and comparative politics more generally. The book will positively shock popular commentary on Vietnam, which tends toward two opposite caricatures of the country as either a purely authoritarian regime or a technocratic, development state. Kerkvliet paints a more nuanced and subtler picture, showing that public criticism of the regime and political mobilization have grown dramatically over time, involving a wide-ranging set of actors from rural peasants to factory workers to elites in the party-state architecture. Moreover, the regime has dealt with these protests in variety of ways. Coercive approaches, such as crackdowns and arrests, have certainly been part of the package, but Kerkvliet demonstrates...

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