Image: Giang Nguyen at the BBC World Service
EJO recently caught up with Giang Nguyen about his work at the BBC World Service. Giang is a PhD candidate at City St George’s, University of London, whose work focuses on trust in the BBC and public engagement through the soft power of the UK in Southeast Asia. Prior to his PhD, Giang served as Editor-in-Chief of the BBC Vietnamese Service in London, among many other roles held previously. In this interview, Giang reflects on how he began his career as a journalist, the many lessons he has learnt along the way, and how all that is inspiring his PhD.
EJO: Could you tell us a little bit about yourself? How did you get into journalism?
GN: I left Vietnam in late 1989 after receiving a scholarship to study in Poland. At the time, I was among the last group of exchange students sent from communist Vietnam to socialist Poland. This was a very unusual historical moment.
I learnt Polish in my first year, and then started at the University of Warsaw, studying law, in a new system. But as a foreigner, I couldn’t practice law. So I switched to academia here. I published research papers on the Vietnamese reform of the 1980s, and a comparative study of the perception of the French concept of ‘liberté’ and Polish ‘wolnosc’ (freedom) in the new context of socio-political changes in Eastern Europe.
I was quite an active student, and I was elected to the Board of Union leadership in the University. I was very active among foreign student associations as well, and then I got a lot of interest from fellow Vietnamese refugees and migrant workers, who had fled from the Soviet Union. As a student, I got involved with activities like helping the refugees, working with human rights organisations, and with various Vietnamese associations.
How did this lead to your work with BBC?
I was very interested in the changes that were happening in Eastern Europe. I knew the systems and also the language. But I saw that other Vietnamese, my fellow countrymen, weren’t in this situation. Some of them ended up in Warsaw thinking they were in Berlin. They had no clue about the borders, about what was happening in this country and in the surrounding areas.
Over time, a Vietnamese community of migrant workers was founded, but I felt I needed to do something to help. And obviously, I didn’t have the money to help. But I had the knowledge, the contacts, and the knowledge of the languages – English, Polish, and Vietnamese. To realise that goal, I founded a small weekly news magazine called Phuong Dong (The Orient) and worked pro bono for four years to develop it. It helped the Vietnamese to learn about what was happening in the new Poland and Europe.
I also began to do some freelance reporting for the Vietnamese service of Radio France International (RFI). Through all this work, I got to know people in France and in the UK. When they saw a BBC job pop up, they just told me to apply.
You’ve worked in BBC bureaus in London and the Far East among others. Through your work, you’ve also encountered different political and social contexts. What were some of the interesting or challenging stories you’ve covered, and are there any lessons you’ve learnt?
BBC is one of the best, if not the very best, global broadcasters. However, there’s a big lesson I learned working for the BBC and the BBC World Service. That is how to navigate the differences in news perspectives between BBC domestic services in the UK and the World Service. In the World Service, we broadcast in more than 40 languages, plus English. Firstly, I’ve seen some differences, even in terms of the language. One term could mean something in English that is quite uniform, quite established, like impartiality, balance, and media independence. But in Vietnamese, there are two or three terms to convey that meaning of being impartial, as the concept of impartiality is derived from the British party system which is not the case in Vietnam.
Secondly, there are the power dynamics, for instance, between countries, between the urban areas and the rural areas. The content is mainly produced by elite members, because first you have to know English. Then, you have to know politics. You probably come from a very high background, at least an educated family. In my case, my parents were working for the government in Vietnam and my other sister is a professor of law. So how to reach out to the mass audience out there? The way we use language in our native languages in the World Service must be democratising somehow to serve a wide audience. I remember one colleague from BBC Arabic. He said we can’t use only the Arabic from Cairo, or from the Levant, or from Lebanon. We have to speak a type of BBC Arabic for many countries at once.. The BBC World Service languages services have the inevitable task of navigating those differences while at the same time producing one content, often under pressure, to serve multiple audiences, and meet their diverse expectations.
What is the media landscape like in Vietnam?
Vietnam is a socialist country, and the government adheres strongly to that ideology still, despite the economic wealth. Vietnam now is one of the powerhouses of Asia economically, and they are doing really well. They attract a lot of foreign investment. In my PhD, I also look at that contraction between the ideology and the market economy they have adopted.
Vietnamese diplomacy has been very clever. They’ve been friendly and able to be so with all big powers. Vietnamese leaders can go to Beijing to see Xi Jinping today and then they go to Washington DC, to see Donald Trump tomorrow. Vietnam still maintains a long-term friendship with Russia, but at the same time, they send aid to Ukraine during the war there. In many ways, Vietnam is unique and fascinating.
But in terms of media, the BBC’s operation as a whole has been always restricted in Vietnam. Like any other foreign media, the Vietnamese Service of the BBC could, from time to time, send someone into Vietnam on a short-term permit or reporting visa for specific events. The person could be bilingual, holding an Australian, British, or Vietnamese passport. Upon arrival they had to report to the Foreign Ministry of Vietnam and declare any preset agenda for interviews. The government runs a Foreign Press Centre and by law, you cannot just come in and interview anyone but must go through the Press Centre, through the system.
In terms of online media, it’s much freer. Unlike China, Vietnam is more open in cyberspace, a feature being discussed partially in my PhD project. Vietnam has an evolving media landscape and a relatively new, vibrant digital economy. The digital media policy reflects the diplomatic alignments of the Vietnamese government with multiple global partners. For example, unlike China, Vietnam accepts Facebook, YouTube, Twitter (now X) and Instagram. Those Western platforms are allowed to operate in Vietnam, although sometimes certain types of content are removed, but by and large, Western media are not restricted online. However, if you want to come in for filming on the ground, whether you are CNN, BBC News, or Chinese media, you will need a special permit. In that sense, Vietnam is very guarded in terms of physical access to the country. But in cyberspace, it is relatively liberal.
It is also interesting to observe how the Chinese and Russian media are allowed into Vietnam to broadcast and express their opinions on social media. If you look at Vietnamese Facebook, you will see a lot of discussion, even confrontation among Vietnamese users. One group supports Russia, another supports Ukraine. I did some research on that too — it is quite amazing. It is like the war in Ukraine is happening in the cyberspace of Vietnam, on Facebook. And it is very intense — very intense. I have friends on both sides. I have friends who studied in Russia during the Soviet times. Having come home, they are engaged in virtual confrontation with colleagues who studied in Poland, or stayed in Ukraine, or went back to Vietnam. What I am trying to convey here is that Vietnam is often seen from the outside as a controlled society, but in fact and informally, it is much more free-flowing. There are pockets of restriction, but also pockets of freedom.
Going back to the BBC World Service… there were closures of some services and some re-structuring. What was its role in East Asia when you were Editor of those Services?
I think BBC WS East Asian services played a very important role in feeding back information to the wider BBC — the BBC mainstream — on key events in Asia. I remember we were working around the clock during the military coup in Thailand, and the Trump-Kim Jong-un summit in Hanoi in Feb 2019, and then the protests in Hong Kong in 2019. I would like to add that the BBC Chinese did play a key role in covering events such as Taiwan’s political developments, including the election of its first female president, Tsai Ing-wen in 2016.
Another major focus was the war in Ukraine. I think East Asian and South Asian public opinion – and media – held slightly different views. For example, in India and Sri Lanka there were different interpretations of the war in Ukraine. At the BBC World Service, the East Asian Service have tried to stay aligned in all languages on reporting the atrocities in Donbas and other regions of Ukraine, drawing on the reports and opinions from our BBC Russian and BBC Ukrainian colleagues. To see things with my own eyes, I went to the Poland–Ukraine border two months into the war. There was an exodus of foreigners – African, Indian, Vietnamese – moving into Poland and then Germany. It was a refugee crisis. I went there and interviewed people and volunteers, and I did a live broadcast from there for the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese program helped to change perceptions about the war in Vietnam. In the beginning of the war, the Vietnamese state media often leaned towards the Russian side rather than the Ukrainian side. Our reports helped them to recalibrate and reflect on what was going on.
How does all of this work feed into your PhD? What inspired you?
I think during my career – a long career now – with the BBC, I had always somehow been connected with academics and with academia. I was a visiting guest lecturer at Westminster University, LSE, and my old alma mater, Goldsmiths College in London. My European life experience started at Warsaw University in Poland. So mentally, I feel very comfortable sitting with books, newspapers, interacting with students and professors.
But what inspired me is that when I was still working as a journalist and editor, I found that something was missing. We are rushing to put the news out there. So we were competing for speed, for accuracy, and other things. But with that kind of newsroom psychology — in the BBC, in other newsrooms I’ve been to, in India, Japan, in America, in Europe — somehow it is like you are running all day.. And actually, there was that thought of taking a step back, almost like to shed light onto what you have been doing for so long, and getting something useful from it. So personally, that’s my alternative — my intellectual journey.
So for me, starting a PhD at this age, I’m no longer young, but then you bring in such a vast amount of experience. One of the thinkers I read is Ulrich Beck, a German sociologist. I read his book. His work is more about reflexivity, the society needs to confront unintended consequences of what we have done to the world. But on my personal level my takeaway from the book is we need some reflection on our own things too. Actually, in Buddhist tradition and many religious traditions, you have to be reflective and mindful about what you have been doing. I’m not trying to fix the whole world’s media, but at least for my small part, I want to contribute. I came to City St George’s because I feel that City is a good place to bridge the profession, the industry, and the academy.
That is great to hear. Could you tell us what the focus of your PhD is?
I’m looking at British soft power through media in Southeast Asian, including Vietnam, so the BBC World Service — not just Vietnam, but more about the angling of broadcast media from the West to the East as a transmitter of soft power and how it changes journalism.
What else are you doing at the moment?
I still do freelancing, reporting for RFI in Paris as their London-based correspondent for their Vietnamese Service, mainly covering migrants, Brexit, and UK–France relations. I travel to Europe a lot and keep my contacts there.. I see Britain as part of the European spectrum of values and power. And how Europe as a whole interacts with Asia. I would love to look at that from the point of view of a researcher in the field of soft power and media studies, and how soft power today, in the digital age, is demonstrated or exercised through media.
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