Nguyen Van Hai under his pen name, Dieu Cay (Peasant's Pipe), is considered as one of the Vietnam's most influential bloggers whose blog posts were about issues considered sensitive to Vietnam's Communist Party-run government. He was sentenced in September 2008 to two and a half years imprisonment for tax evasion after being arrested earlier in April 2008. However, one day before he completed his prison term on October 18, 2010 he was charged with "conducting anti-state propaganda" and was sentenced to 12 years in prison on September 24, 2012. He was granted an early release in October 2014 and sent into exile in the U.S.