This edited volume explores the nature of authoritarian policing, its transformation and resilience, and its rule of law implications. The discussion of the evolution of policing takes place in the context of the overall development of the police, their professionalization, institutional autonomy and neutrality, legality, and their credibility within the communities they manage and serve. What makes policing “democratic” is a contested concept and the definition varies depending on the level of abstraction and the particular focus of the inquiry. While regime type, which is itself a contested concept, the close nexus between the coercive power of the police and the state, it is never dispositive. Thus, the dichotomous categorization of authoritarian policing (AP) and democratic policing (DP), while useful as a starting point for comparative analysis, misses a large amount of nuance and often overlooks the plurality of either system, neglecting the fact that a police system can be authoritarian or democratic in multiple ways and in different aspects of policing. This volume rejects this simple binary view. It aims to untie and unpack the nexus between the police and the political system and to explore the plurality of both AP and DP.

Assessing authoritarian police and policing in East Asia poses conceptual challenges – which institutions count as “police,” which functions constitute “policing,” which polities are “authoritarian,” what features are “East Asian”? Patterns can be understood in terms of common issues: functions or roles police are expected to perform; internal institutional structures of the police (including centralization/decentralization); horizontal relations with other institutions; vertical relations with the regime; relations with society; and external influences (from abroad and from the past). Policing is beset by several paradoxes and much ambivalence: scope versus effectiveness of police work; laws and the rule of law as both empowering and constraining police; bolstering legitimacy for the police versus for the regime; “police reform,” which can make police more benign (from a liberal perspective) or more potent tools of oppression and control. The country-specific assessments in this volume collectively reveal a complex pattern that includes fundamental similarities and significant diversity.

This chapter examines narrative management as a core function of the police in Vietnam, tracing how this function evolved as an intimate expression of the regime’s politics and ideologies. Narrative management here refers to efforts by policing institutions to guide public opinion in accordance with the vision set forth by the party-state—a practice with a long tradition in socialist regimes. While much has been written about the hard measures of coercion, crackdowns, and punishment that are prevalent in authoritarian policing (and, arguably, in all policing), less is known about the soft public relations campaigns that play a sizable role in the work of Vietnamese policing institutions. The close relationship between the party-state, police, and civil society, down to the household and individual levels, is multifaceted. As analyzed herein, while police work on ideological education is deeply rooted in a desire to control civil society, the Vietnamese police’s grassroots service throughout the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates that a close state–society relationship can also be used for a productive end when the state acts with legitimacy and transparency.