On 10 June 2018, thousands of protesters flooded the streets of Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, and other major cities during a week-long series of demonstrations that saw both widespread offline and online dissident activities. The demonstrations came two days before the final vote on the Special Economic Zone Act was scheduled to take place. The Special Economic Zone Act is a law that would enable the government to lease land in three designated economic zones to foreign entities for up to ninety-nine years. Protesters were met by large cordons of police officers who attempted to contain the demonstration. The demonstrations were, for the most part, peaceful; however, footage has surfaced on the internet showing police officers and individuals who appeared to be plainclothes officers dragging protesters into police cars and unmarked vans.

The protests received extensive media coverage overseas while state-controlled media inside Vietnam kept their coverage of the incident to a minimum. Domestic media outlets reported that people in many localities took to the streets, causing social disorder and that the police detained some protesters. Ultimately, perhaps partly due to the pressure arising from the protests, the National Assembly of Vietnam gave in and voted to postpone the implementation of the bill indefinitely.

This was not the first time Vietnamese took to the street to express their dissatisfaction. Large scale protests erupted across Vietnam in May 2014 in response to the deployment of a Chinese oil rig in the disputed waters of the South China Sea, which was perceived as an illegal and aggressive move by the Vietnamese. The demonstrations quickly escalated into riots with as many as 20,000 protesters torching and looting foreign-owned factories. Subsequent clashes between the police and rioters resulted in at least twenty-one people killed and almost one hundred wounded. In 2016, a series of demonstrations were held from May until as late as December to protest the dumping of toxic waste into the coastal waters of Ha Tinh, Quang Binh, Quang Tri and Thua Thien–Hue provinces in Central Vietnam by a Taiwanese steel plant. Prolonged exposure to toxic substances discharged from Formosa's steel plant through drainage pipes resulted in a massive number of dead fishes found washed up on shore, endangering the life of the locals whose livelihoods depend heavily on fishing.