A young woman in a red hoodie and wide sungl***es stopped her motorbike just past Tree 55 on Nguyen Huy Tu Street in central Hanoi. She snapped a photo with her phone. She stared at the tree again. She lingered with defiance.
No one else was parked there at lunchtime on Tuesday in front of the quiet men in pairs with hints of plainclothes authority — the middle-manager dress shoes, the aviator shades.
Tree 55, as everyone likely knew, was where an 18-year-old student, Do Ngoc Phuong Thuy, better known as Mina, had been hit along with her father by a BMW. She died after being thrown from a motorbike just days before her university exams. That was 15 months ago.
I was there this week to see whether flowers would arrive. The bright bouquets teens and 20-somethings kept delivering, photographing and sharing on social media. The ones the police had recently removed. And if tension hovered in their absence, it was with good reason.
On Monday night, after an eruption of Gen Z outrage and creativity thrust Memorial Tree 55, or “The Tree of Justice,” into the local zeitgeist, Vietnam’s national broadcaster officially confirmed what many had long insisted: A former Communist Party official, Nguyen Sy Cuong, had been behind the wheel of that BMW.
The TV report said Mr. Cuong — who had been vice chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the National Assembly until earlier this year — caused the crash by illegally driving on the wrong side of the road. It also said that he was not prosecuted because he had compensated the victim’s relatives, and they chose not to press charges. The victim’s father, with his face obscured, urged people to move on in the segment, which did not mention that Mr. Cuong’s wife is Vietnam’s minister of culture, sports and tourism.
Their powerful positions, some said, had kept the crash out of public view.
But in a one-party state that Harvard scholars have described as repressive but responsive, the official acknowledgment of responsibility was an extraordinary concession to public pressure. Warning against “opportunists exploiting the incident on social media,” the report reflected the government’s deep concerns about an unexpected youth movement pushing for accountability at a time when officials are focused on economic growth.
Adding to the sensitivity, the collective action comes after Gen Z activists toppled leaders in Nepal, challenged authorities in Indonesia, and continue to rattle the power structure in India.
Hanoi officials had already warned state-run outlets to reduce coverage of the youth-driven “Cockroach” demonstrations rocking New Delhi, according to a written notice shared among reporters. The internal guidance said that the information could be “exploited for anti-government purposes.”
And yet, for now at least, Monday’s careful admissions in TV form show no sign of weakening the resistance to what many see as sloppy propaganda and protection for the powerful.
On Wednesday, legal experts said the victim’s family could not, simply by declining to press charges, determine whether Mr. Cuong would be prosecuted. Online, anonymous critics accused the state broadcaster of using A.I. to doctor a do***ent showing Mr. Cuong had p***ed a sobriety test. Others questioned if it was really the victim’s father in the report.
Their claims could not be independently verified. The network did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Cuong, reached by phone on Wednesday, said only “I am busy, I cannot talk” before hanging up.
By midafternoon, the original version of the news report had disappeared from YouTube.
And all that public anger is about more than the crash. It reflects a broader frustration with corruption, privilege and the mechanisms of secrecy that benefit elites in a fast-changing society that has become more bifurcated by wealth and political connections.
As one commenter wrote on Threads on Wednesday, letting Mr. Cuong sidestep criminal prosecution simply confirms that the country’s legal system “creates loopholes so that the rich can stuff money and power into them, while the poor cannot.”
Fury over who gets to police both behavior and expression has also fueled the backlash. Censorship, in fact, sparked its rise.
On July 31, a rapper known as MCK announced that he would scrub digital platforms of several songs that cultural authorities had deemed block from his new hit album.
That’s when Mr. Cuong’s wife, Lam Thi Phuong Thanh, the minister of culture since April, became a target of especially intense curiosity.
Within days of MCK’s cleanup, Threads lit up with questions about why there was so little information made public about the crash on May 25, 2025, involving her husband.
On Aug. 12, Luat Khoa, an independent Vietnamese news outlet run by former reporters for state-run media who have mostly left the country, reported that Nguyen Sy Cuong had become one of the platform’s top topics, with more than 1 million posts related to the accident.
The next day, a Facebook page about Vietnamese politics posted an announcement saying that the authorities had requested that Facebook “continuously block three of my posts about Nguyen Sy Cuong.”
Then security video from a nearby building surfaced and started to spread online.
It showed the BMW, an SUV, smashing into the tree with a motorbike against its grill. A man gets out, seemingly uninjured, and can be seen approaching where Mina and her father have been thrown. A woman bearing a strong resemblance to Ms. Thanh emerges from the p***enger side as a crowd gathers. She heads away from the scene, comes back to collect something from the front seat, then walks away.
In the brief clip, neither driver nor p***enger rushed to help the wounded.
Another eruption of social media outrage followed, with some quoting “Animal Farm,” and “The Hunger Games,” accusing Ms. Thanh of trying to protect herself and her husband after online takedown orders spread to more posts.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Threads, did not respond to a request for comment. Its most recent report on Vietnam shows a rise in censorship, with restrictions placed on more than 5,300 items in the last six months of 2025 in response to requests from the Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Public Security.
Undeterred, people found other ways to make their sadness and anger known. They ordered flowers to be delivered to the base of Tree 55. Users posted photos of a growing, colorful pile until the afternoon of Aug. 14, when another set of images made the rounds — showing the bouquets being removed by the police and thrown into a dumpster.
Then the Threads community turned to white ribbons, tying them on backpacks, as symbols of student promise.
Around the same time, someone created a virtual Memorial Tree Number 55.
“Rest in peace down there, sister,” said one of the many notes left at the site. “We Gen-Z will handle everything.”
The government has yet to mention or cut off access to the collection.
Ms. Thanh could not be reached for comment on Wednesday. She and her husband did not appear in the state television report — a point some critics interpreted as a lack of remorse.
In the void, messages of support for Mina and calls for accountability continue to multiply.
Tung Ngo contributed reporting.
