Photo by Oliver Gregory

Saigon – Ho Chi Minh City doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue – is not Dubai. You can make a lot of money here, but not that much. The oil rich sheikhs of the UAE don’t think twice about waiving tax for western workers, but foreign residents in Vietnam can expect to pay a cool 40% in income tax on any salaries amounting to more than about £30,000 a year. Quite right too, of course: if you choose to live somewhere, you should pay your way, and with exchange rates where they are at the moment, tax bands in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam differ only slightly from those in Britain.

But then you have to ask yourself, where does all that money go – what exactly am I paying for? It can be comforting to believe that in a nation that calls itself a Socialist Republic the majority of it makes its way to the people. Sure, there’s a bureaucracy to be paid for, cogs to be oiled – all that – but ultimately it’s all in a good cause, a kind of state- run charity. You’re funding state-owned schools and state-owned hospitals and state- financed infrastructure projects all across the country. There’s that new suspension bridge down the road in My Tho, you think, and the HIV/AIDS awareness campaign selling itself on billboards all over the country. As long as you’re paying tax, you’re doing your bit. All this, surely, is a good thing?

Perhaps. But you’re also paying for a corrupt one-party state that concedes little to democracy and devotes much of its attention to preserving the status quo. You’re paying for the arrest and trial of pro-democracy activists like Tran Khai Thanh Thuy and Pham Thanh Nghien, writers imprisoned in 2009 for no more than sharing their democratic ideas. You’re paying for the suppression of ‘dissenting’ newspapers like Thoi Dai and Cong Ly, both banned in 2006 for criticising the introduction of new bank notes. And you’re paying for laws and arrests designed, according to Human Rights Watch, “to wipe out the independent trade union movement”. So much for a Socialist Republic; a worker’s paradise this certainly isn’t, unless you happen to be an expat.

You can take some consolation from the fact that foreign investment in a developing country like Vietnam undoubtedly does more good than harm. Foreign manufacturers provide employment and offer a viable alternative to atrophying local industry. Foreign teachers facilitate greater social mobility and enhance the global competitiveness of the local workforce. And foreign wealth trickles down into society as a whole through the burgeoning service sector that caters to expats’ needs. It’s easy to exaggerate these benefits – in a country where over three quarters of the population still live in rural areas, the impact of foreign wealth remains negligible for most Vietnamese outside Hanoi and Saigon. But for those who do benefit, improvements in quality of life are real and lasting. As an expat, it’s good to know all this. It’s reassuring to view your work as part of a wider economic process that transcends the political regime and its excesses. But you’re still an individual, you’re still paying tax and the question of complicity doesn’t go away.

In a place like Dubai it must be easy to detach yourself from the world you’re buying into, from the regime you’re propping up. You live in an artificial geography of sandcastles and ivory towers, and socially and professionally you only come into contact with people like you. In Saigon, though, this separation isn’t possible. Financially, you’re paying tax to the official regime. Socially and professionally, you’re interacting regularly with local people. And geographically, you’re confronted daily with the realities of a lived-in, naturally evolving city. The house I shared was a stone’s throw away from a Buddhist pagoda, a Catholic school, the U.S. Consulate, the state TV station, a luxury apartment complex, a market, a supermarket, a Czech beer hall, a KFC, Vietnamese dwellings little better than slums and plenty more much nicer than my own. An artificial geography, too, perhaps, but one that admits to its own contradictions.

And there’s a lesson in that. The onus is on the expat to do the same – to admit, like an alcoholic, to the problems and contradictions in the country; to be aware that it isn’t all a game. You can’t change the status quo. You shouldn’t even try to. But you owe it to those who are doing just that to be aware of what you’re paying for, of the oppression they’re fighting against.

When Facebook was temporarily banned in 2009, the expatriate community didn’t hesitate to express their indignation. How can I upload my photos now? How can I poke my friends in England? How can I organise a club night, update my status, add a new friend? The anger was temporary but intense and it was reflected in the international media outlets that reported the ban. Rights, it was generally felt, had been infringed.

But foreign workers and foreign media tend to be much quieter about rights infringements that don’t directly affect them, no matter how serious they are. There’s little mention of the Vietnamese journalists, writers, activists and union leaders who routinely fall foul of the government’s oppressive dictats. The same goes for the extensive censorship of the Vietnamese media. Within the expatriate community these problems go largely unacknowledged, but they’re no less real for that. Vietnamese journalists tread carefully, fearful of reprisals; newspaper editors know certain stories will get their publications banned. TV is state-controlled and the government is rapidly learning from the example of China in its suppression of online content. We may well bewail the loss of Facebook. But of far greater import is the banning of websites like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which catalogue the abuses of the Vietnamese regime, or the Catholic News Agency, which supplied valuable reports on the government’s violent anti-Catholic crackdown in the summer of 2009.

Photo by Oliver Gregory

And that’s where knowledge becomes so important. In Vietnam crackdowns and cover-ups go hand in hand; ignorance is the Party line, so knowledge becomes a viable form of protest. As an expat there’s not much that you can do – you don’t have the right to interfere. But you do have a moral duty to learn as much as possible about things the government would prefer you didn’t know. The moral value of such knowledge is hard to quantify, but the moral cost of ignorance is very clear. It’s a paradox, but the more you’re willing to know, the less complicit you become; resisting ignorance is the only way to avoid towing the Party line.

In the absence of opinion polls and a free press, trends in expat attitudes are difficult to gauge. But the role of the expat press in preserving the kind of political ignorance the government works hard to maintain is very clear. The English-language magazines so beloved of expats in the cafés and coffee shops of Saigon are just as susceptible to the kind of silent omissions that make the Vietnamese press less than representative of the truth. In many ways these publications are the safety net, filtering out everything expats don’t want to hear, preserving the bubble. There’s little commentary on Vietnam’s social problems, on the expatriate predilection for prostitution, on the political repression common throughout the country. Instead there are articles on the five-star beach resorts you can escape to for weekends away from work, reviews of world-class restaurants of the calibre you couldn’t hope to visit at home but which here become frequent haunts, your local. It’s all lifestyle, expat-style: an elaborate and luxurious half-truth. These articles and the act of reading them become part of the well maintained façade that keeps expat culture in, and Vietnam out, like the mouldy yellow stucco on the French buildings throughout Saigon.

When you’ve seen through this façade it’s difficult to know what you can do. You can’t wade in and liberalise Vietnamese censorship rules, you can’t change Vietnamese law. And you can’t just leave, either – not if you believe that international investment in the developing world is fundamentally a good thing, that employment sectors like education are an undeniable social good. And for all that grates about government policy and expat culture, you can’t deny that you’re having a good time. By earning money and by paying taxes in a country like Vietnam, it’s perhaps inevitable that you have to shake hands with the devil. But by staying informed and staying honest – honest, above all, with yourself – it might just be possible to let go of his hand and raise your middle finger. There’s not much else that you can do.