Author: CRT Admin

The central question facing all Vietnamese today is whether Vietnam possesses enough confidence to accept the competition of ideas as a force for development. Marx, after all, was never afraid of contradiction. In every age, it is those who hold power who most fear contradiction.

Hoang Thang Dinh

Ph.D. in Political Science; Fellow of the Caux Round Table

History sometimes produces anomalies – unnecessary inconsistencies and contradictions that become visible only when a political order faces a decisive turning point. A ruling party founded upon Marxism-Leninism may continue to proclaim its loyalty to that doctrine in every official document, while in practice steadily suppressing the very force that Marx regarded as the source of all development. Seen from this perspective, perhaps the greatest paradox in Vietnam today is not that Marxism is feared, but that Marx’s own personal intellectual dialectic is.

This is not merely a play on words. If one sets aside the familiar conventions surrounding revolution, dictatorship, and class struggle, the philosophical core of Marx’s thought revolves around a single question: how does society develop? His answer was clear. Every social order contains contradictions within itself. Change arises from the meeting up  of opposing forces and their mutual antagonisms, while absolute uniformity leads not to progress, but to stagnation.

The question, therefore, is not whether contemporary Vietnam continues to invoke Marxism-Leninism as an official doctrine. It plainly does. The more important question is whether a political system can remain faithful to Marx while attempting to remove contradiction, silence competing ideas, and reduce social life to hearing only a single authorized voice.

That contradiction between Marxist dogma and Marx’s philosophy of the natural law bringing about human evolution lies at the heart of Vietnam’s present dilemma.

1. What Did Marx Actually Say About Human Development?

Marx did not invent the social dynamic of dialectics. He inherited it from Hegel and transformed it by shifting its center of gravity from the realm of spirit to the material and social world. Yet whatever differences separated Marx from Hegel, the central proposition remained intact: there can be no movement without addressing contradictions and no development without conflict between what exists and what is struggling to emerge.

Hegel proposed a natural law of change.  A fixed logic – the thesis – comes into being. Then, in a fluid ecosystem, a counter-logic appears – the anti-thesis. Next, the thesis and the anti-thesis interact and meld their truths one with the other to create a new logic or truth – the synthesis. And then the cycle repeats itself: the synthesis becomes a new thesis which begets a new anti-thesis, which then combine into a second generation synthesis, which …

Thus, from a Hegelian approach, any contradiction between a thesis and an anti-thesis is only an interim waystation on the road to successful innovation and the future.  It is to be welcomed as step forward for humanity.

Hegel’s dialectic conforms nicely to the Second Law of Thermodynamics which holds that any energy state which does not flow degenerates. The isolated system – a thesis – cut off from innovation and new energy flows (anti-theses) succumbs to entropy whereby its internal energy is decomposed and becomes useless chaos.  Such an isolated system ultimately loses all productivity and so becomes useless.

For Marx, contradiction was therefore not simply a system defect to be eliminated. It was the driving force of history. Without tension inside the forces and relations of production, there would be no structural transformation of the economy over time. Without conflict between old institutions and new social realities, there would be no political change. Without disagreement between competing interpretations, there would be no advance in human understanding.

Dialectics, in this sense, is not a philosophy of unanimity. It is a philosophy of forward movement generated by differences.

Long before Marx, similar intuitions appeared in the civilizational wisdom of Asia. An old Chinese saying observes that “on the Yangtze River, the waves behind push forward the waves ahead”. The Vietnamese express the same insight more simply: “when old bamboo dies, new shoots rise”. Both images point to a universal law of life. Renewal occurs because the new emerges, challenges the old, and eventually transforms or replaces it.

A river without new waves becomes stagnant water. A society without new ideas gradually loses its vitality.

In fact, the Vietnamese have applied a Hegelian approach to nature for more than 2,000 years as part of their national identity – Truong Ton Dan Toc.  Their origin myth brings together a paternal figure – Lac Long Quan – with a maternal figure – Au Co – to meld their different energy orientations and so bring forth a unique new ethnicity.

Separately, the Truong Ton Dan Toc included a sophisticated balancing of different energy flows in the melding of Yang and Yin forces, Yang being the thesis and Yin the anti-thesis, and the 62 normal configurations of both energies constituting a set of differing syntheses.

Modern history offers repeated confirmation of this dialectic. In science, major discoveries often begin with the rejection of what had previously been accepted as truth. In economics, new firms and new technologies continuously displace established models. Joseph Schumpeter later described this process as “creative destruction,” the dynamic through which capitalism renews itself by dismantling obsolete arrangements and creating new ones.

The language differs, but the underlying principle is strikingly similar: without difference, there is no innovation; without challenge, there is no renewal.

This raises an unavoidable question. What happens when a society no longer accepts the existence of opposing forces? What happens when criticism is treated primarily as a political risk, debate is progressively narrowed, and difference itself becomes something to be monitored and controlled?

Under such conditions, social life does not merely become intellectually poorer. The very mechanism of development that Marx regarded as fundamental is disabled. The contradiction between theory and practice becomes even sharper when the political system responsible for suppressing disagreement continues to claim Marx as its ideological foundation.

It is precisely at this point that the anomaly of contemporary Vietnam reveals itself.

A genuinely dialectical society would not fear contradiction. It would institutionalize a process to constructively exploit contradiction, regulate it through law, and transform it into a source of correction and renewal. It would understand that disagreement is not necessarily disloyalty, that criticism is not automatically hostility, and that competing ideas are not enemies of national unity.

By contrast, a system that treats every significant difference as a threat may preserve outward conformity for a time, but it does so by weakening its own capacity to learn and grow stronger. It eliminates not only dissent, but also the warning signals through which errors are detected before they become crises.

This is why the issue reaches far beyond how best to interpret Marx. It concerns the conditions under which any modern society is capable of development. A nation cannot enter the knowledge economy while suppressing the social processes through which knowledge is tested. It cannot call for innovation if it fears intellectual independence. It cannot celebrate dialectics in theory while abolishing contradiction in practice.

The essential question, then, is no longer whether Marxism remains present in official discourse. The question is whether those who speak most frequently in Marx’s name are prepared to accept the principle at the very center of his thought: that development begins when opposing forces are allowed to exist, interact, and generate something new.

2. The Greatest Irony: Governing in Marx’s Name While Abandoning Marx’s Method

If Marx was correct that contradiction is the engine of historical development, then contemporary Vietnam presents a puzzle that deserves careful examination. The issue is not whether Marxism-Leninism continues to occupy a privileged place in official ideology. It clearly does. The more fundamental question is whether the governing method increasingly contradicts the very philosophical principle upon which Marx built his understanding of history. It is here that one encounters perhaps the greatest irony of Vietnam’s contemporary political development.

According to Marx, contradiction was never an unfortunate defect that society should eliminate. Quite the opposite. Contradiction was the source of movement, adaptation, and renewal. Social systems evolve because competing forces interact with one another, exposing weaknesses, correcting errors, and generating new possibilities. Development therefore requires tension—not permanent conflict, but the continuous encounter between different perspectives capable of producing higher forms of organization and understanding.

Measured against that standard, today’s Vietnam appears to be moving along a remarkably different path. Over time, the public space available for intellectual diversity has become progressively narrower. Journalism exercises less independent scrutiny than before. Civic organizations function within carefully defined limits. Scholars, artists, entrepreneurs, and policy specialists have all learned that some questions are best avoided and some conclusions are wiser left unstated. The significance of this trend lies not in any individual case, but in the broader political culture it gradually creates: one in which conformity offers security while intellectual divergence carries increasing uncertainty.

Such a development is not difficult to understand from the perspective of political power. Governments naturally seek stability. They attempt to reduce uncertainty, minimize social disruption, and preserve institutional coherence. These are legitimate objectives of governance. The difficulty begins only when stability gradually becomes indistinguishable from uniformity, and when the absence of disagreement comes to be interpreted as evidence of political success.

At precisely that moment, however, another process quietly unfolds beneath the surface. A political system may become more orderly, yet simultaneously lose part of its capacity for self-correction. Independent criticism becomes rarer. Alternative analyses disappear from public debate. Institutions hear fewer warnings before policy mistakes accumulate into structural weaknesses. What appears externally as consensus may, in reality, conceal a growing decline in the system’s ability to learn from its own experience.

Seen through Marx’s own dialectical framework, this outcome is deeply ironic. What is being reduced is not merely criticism of particular policies, but the social existence of opposing forces themselves. Yet Marx never regarded opposing forces as enemies of development. He regarded them as its indispensable condition. A society that removes contradiction from public life also removes one of the principal mechanisms through which historical progress becomes possible.

The paradox becomes even more striking as Vietnam enters what its leaders describe as a new era of national advancement. Official strategy now emphasizes innovation, digital transformation, artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, private enterprise, and global competitiveness. These aspirations are entirely understandable. No country can hope to prosper in the twenty-first century without embracing scientific creativity and technological innovation. Yet history has never produced an innovative economy within an intellectually homogeneous society.

Here lies the paradox within the paradox. Competition is encouraged in markets, but competition among ideas remains far more constrained. Technological innovation is celebrated, while intellectual innovation often encounters institutional hesitation. Entrepreneurs are encouraged to challenge old business models, but society remains considerably less comfortable when citizens challenge established assumptions in public life. The result is an increasingly visible gap between the economic imagination required for modernization and the political imagination permitted within the public sphere.

Eventually, theory and practice begin moving in opposite directions. A nation may continue to invoke Marx as the philosophical foundation of its political legitimacy, while simultaneously narrowing the very conditions under which Marx’s dialectical method could actually operate. In that situation, dialectics survives primarily as doctrine rather than as a living method of understanding reality. Contradiction is praised in textbooks but discouraged in public life.

Perhaps this is the deepest irony confronting Vietnam today. The central issue is no longer whether some citizens criticize Marxism. The more revealing question is whether a political system that continues to govern in Marx’s name remains willing to accept the single principle that gives Marx’s philosophy its enduring intellectual vitality: that societies develop not by eliminating contradiction, but by allowing competing forces to interact, challenge one another, and ultimately produce something better than either could achieve alone.

3. Innovation Begins Where Conformity Ends

One of history’s greatest ironies is that many of civilization’s most transformative revolutions did not begin in royal palaces, government ministries, or the headquarters of powerful institutions. They began in places so ordinary that they seemed almost invisible. A suburban garage. A university laboratory. A rented apartment. A dormitory room. Again and again, history reminds us that the future rarely announces itself from the center of established power. More often, it arrives quietly from its margins.

When Bill Gates imagined that every office and every household would one day possess its own personal computer, the idea struck many observers as wildly unrealistic. When Steve Jobs insisted that technology should become an extension of human creativity rather than merely a calculating machine, established companies saw little reason to take him seriously. Years later, Elon Musk was widely dismissed for arguing that electric vehicles could redefine the automobile industry and that private companies could compete in space exploration. Their proposals often sounded less like business plans than acts of intellectual audacity.

The remarkable fact is not that these individuals encountered skepticism. Every genuinely original idea does. The remarkable fact is that these men lived in societies capable of distinguishing between disagreement and disloyalty. They were free to fail, free to be criticized, and equally free to prove that conventional wisdom had been mistaken. Their greatest protection was not political influence or inherited privilege. It was an institutional environment that accepted intellectual deviation as a normal condition of progress.

This pattern extends far beyond Silicon Valley. Galileo challenged the cosmology of his age. Charles Darwin overturned centuries of established assumptions about the origins of life. Albert Einstein transformed modern physics by questioning concepts that had appeared settled since Newton. Tim Berners-Lee changed the architecture of global communication with an invention whose significance few initially recognized. In every generation, history advances because someone is willing to ask questions that the majority has not yet imagined.

The lesson is remarkably consistent. Innovation is never produced by unanimous agreement. It emerges from continuous competition among ideas. Some fail. Many disappear. A few fundamentally reshape the world. The decisive factor is not whether every new idea is correct, but whether society provides sufficient intellectual space for better ideas to emerge, compete, and eventually replace inferior ones. This process is precisely what Joseph Schumpeter described as “creative destruction”—the permanent renewal of society through challenge rather than repetition.

This is why the world’s most innovative nations share certain institutional characteristics. Their universities enjoy substantial intellectual autonomy. Their scientific communities encourage rigorous criticism rather than ritual agreement. Their entrepreneurs regularly challenge established industries. Their journalists question those who govern. Their courts protect lawful dissent. None of these institutions exists because disagreement is inherently desirable. They exist because history repeatedly demonstrates that societies capable of correcting themselves invariably outperform societies that merely preserve appearances of consensus.

Vietnam now stands before precisely this historical reality. The country can import advanced technologies, attract foreign investment, construct modern infrastructure, and acquire sophisticated machinery. Yet none of these imports will on their own automatically produce innovation. The most valuable strategic resource of the twenty-first century is neither oil nor rare earth minerals nor financial capital. It is the human capacity to think independently, to imagine alternatives, and to challenge inherited assumptions before circumstances force change from outside.

This reality raises a question far more fundamental than industrial policy or technological strategy. Can a gifted Vietnamese student pursue an unconventional scientific hypothesis without fearing that intellectual independence itself may become a liability? Can a young entrepreneur openly challenge established methods without first calculating the political acceptability of new ideas? Can scholars engage in serious debate over national development without every disagreement being interpreted primarily through the lens of political conformity? These questions reach beyond individual freedoms. They concern the creative capacity of the nation itself.

Perhaps this brings us back, unexpectedly, to Marx. If contradiction constitutes the engine of historical development, then every society aspiring to innovation must ultimately decide whether it views intellectual diversity as a strategic asset or as a political risk. The answer to that question will determine far more than the future of academic debate. It may well determine whether Vietnam succeeds in building a genuine knowledge economy or merely acquires the outward technologies of one.

For nations do not become innovative simply because they purchase advanced machines. They become innovative because they cultivate citizens who are unafraid to think differently. History has rarely rewarded societies that perfected conformity. It has consistently rewarded those confident enough to allow new ideas to challenge old certainties before the rest of the world does it for them.

4. Strong States Do Not Fear Independent Minds

Perhaps the deepest misunderstanding in modern politics is the assumption that political stability demands intellectual conformity; that political stability and intellectual paralysis are essentially one and the same reality. History suggests precisely the opposite. The strongest states have rarely been those that eliminated disagreement. They were the ones that developed institutions capable of absorbing disagreement, learning from it, and transforming it into better public policy.

This distinction is more important than it first appears. Every government seeks stability; no responsible state welcomes chaos. Yet stability achieved through institutional resilience differs fundamentally from stability achieved through intellectual uniformity. The former grows stronger because criticism exposes weaknesses before they become crises. The latter often appears solid until accumulated errors suddenly reveal how little corrective capacity remains beneath the surface.

Modern constitutional government developed precisely from this insight. Independent courts, professional journalism, autonomous universities, competitive elections, civic associations, and open policy debate were never designed simply as expressions of individual liberty. They evolved because societies gradually discovered that governments, like markets, make mistakes. Institutions capable of identifying those mistakes early became one of civilization’s greatest political innovations.

In this respect, political systems resemble living organisms more than mechanical machines. A healthy immune system does not weaken the human body by constantly identifying abnormalities. It protects the body by detecting danger before it becomes irreversible. Public criticism performs a remarkably similar function within political communities. It identifies institutional blind spots, challenges obsolete assumptions, and exposes emerging risks before they mature into national failures. Silence, by contrast, is not always a sign of health. Sometimes it merely indicates that the immune system itself has ceased to function effectively.

This may explain why societies that appear highly stable often prove unexpectedly fragile when confronted with profound change. Systems accustomed to hearing only agreement gradually lose the capacity to recognize reality as it evolves. Information becomes increasingly filtered. Honest feedback becomes progressively rarer. Decision-makers receive reassurance precisely when they most need correction. Under such conditions, crises seldom emerge because criticism was excessive. More often, they emerge because criticism arrived too late.

Vietnam’s long-term challenge therefore extends well beyond economics or technology. The country undoubtedly requires investment, infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, and scientific capability. Yet none of these achievements can fully substitute for institutions capable of continuous self-correction. Sustainable national development ultimately depends not only upon the efficiency of government but also upon the quality of feedback available to government itself.

Perhaps this returns us once again to the anomaly with which this essay began. A confident political order does not fear competing ideas because it understands that ideas, unlike conspiracies, become stronger or weaker through open examination. Only weak arguments require permanent protection from criticism. Strong arguments improve precisely because they survive criticism.

The question for a political system is what kind of “order” it should seek and institutionalize. There is a continuum of systems of order – from chaos and anarchy, at one pole, to a paralyzing stasis hugging tight to inertia at the other pole.  The most constructive and vital systems of order lie in the middle of the continuum. Finding such fluid but confined systems requires searching for a Middle Way, an Aristotelean Mean or a Daoist Wu-Wei equilibrium.

The American Constitution with its system of checks and balances is just such a Mean in the distribution of power among those who hold different Hegelian Theses and Anti-theses.  The Federalist Papers explained how checks and balances worked to produce a system of dynamic order avoiding both anarchy and tyranny through moderate movements taking place within a bounded social setting.

In Federalist Paper #10 we read: “AMONG the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. … By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”  Here James Madison associated “faction” with the seeking of power to dominate others living in the same community.

Factions, he said, arise from separations in the possession of social, economic, and political power. “From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties. … It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.”

Federalist Paper #51 describes how checks and balances produce equilibrium among factions so that society as a whole benefits from the contributions of each faction:  “by so contriving the interior structure of the government as that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places. …  Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. …  a subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights.”

Where, in an operative Hegelian dialectic, different theses, anti-theses, and syntheses contend with each other in seeking approval and support, checks and balances are at work bringing about, over time, benefits for the entire society to share and enjoy. The central issue confronting Vietnam, therefore, is not whether intellectual diversity creates temporary discomfort. Every living society experiences disagreement. The more important question is whether the nation’s institutions possess sufficient confidence to transform disagreement into knowledge rather than interpreting it primarily as political risk. The answer to that question will shape far more than the future of public debate. It will determine the adaptive capacity of the Vietnamese state itself in a century defined by technological disruption, geopolitical uncertainty, and unprecedented rates of change.

For history leaves little room for ambiguity. Strong states are not those that succeed in silencing independent minds. Strong states are those confident enough to govern among them.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the question is no longer whether Vietnam remains faithful to Marxism-Leninism as an official doctrine. The more consequential question is whether it remains faithful to the single principle that gave Marx’s philosophy its enduring intellectual power: that development emerges through contradiction rather than conformity.

History has repeatedly demonstrated that scientific discovery, economic innovation, and political progress all begin with ideas that challenge established certainties. Societies prosper not because they eliminate disagreement, but because they possess the confidence to transform disagreement into knowledge, correction, and renewal.

The paradox confronting Vietnam today is therefore larger than Marx himself. A nation cannot aspire to become an innovation-driven economy while narrowing the intellectual space from which innovation naturally arises. Nor can it cultivate creative citizens while expecting them to think within predetermined boundaries.

The ultimate question is not who still speaks in Marx’s name. It is who still believes in the dialectical spirit that made Marx intellectually significant in the first place.

For Marx never feared contradiction.

History has never feared contradiction.

Innovation has never feared contradiction.

In every age, it is those with power who most fear contradictions.

(Ideology, Performance, Public Trust, and Civic-National Identity)

Stephen B. Young and Hoang Thang Dinh

Author’s Note: This working paper is one outcome of an ongoing scholarly dialogue between Stephen B. Young and Dr. Hoang Thang Dinh, conducted in Caux, Rome, and Paris, on political legitimacy, public trust, and Vietnam’s civilizational development. It also forms part of a broader collaborative research project exploring the long-term resilience, civilizational maturation, and future path of the Vietnamese nation, which is currently being prepared for publication.

Introduction: The Puzzle

Political systems rarely transform through dramatic declarations. More often, they change first in the language through which they justify themselves. Before institutions evolve, political discourse begins to shift. Before doctrines disappear, they gradually recede from the center of public rhetoric. Contemporary Vietnam may now be entering such a transition.

This paper does not claim that Vietnam has entered a new political system, nor does it attempt to infer the intentions of individual leaders. It proposes a more modest hypothesis: that official political discourse in Vietnam may be undergoing a gradual rebalancing of its sources of legitimacy, from a language centered primarily on ideology and revolutionary history toward one increasingly grounded in governance, state capacity, economic performance, public trust, and civic-national identity.

The question is not whether ideology has disappeared. It has not. Marxism-Leninism, socialism, and the constitutional role of the Communist Party remain central to Vietnam’s formal political framework. The question is whether ideology continues to function as the dominant language through which political authority explains and justifies itself, or whether performance, trust, and national development have moved closer to the center of political legitimation.

1. What Is Political Legitimacy?

Political legitimacy refers to the belief that political authority is rightful, not merely powerful. A government may command obedience through law, bureaucracy, coercion, habit, or fear. Legitimacy, however, concerns something deeper: whether citizens, elites, and institutions regard authority as justified.

Max Weber’s classic typology distinguished among traditional, charismatic, and legal-rational legitimacy (Weber, 1978). David Beetham later argued that legitimacy depends on three connected elements: power must conform to established rules; those rules must be justified by shared beliefs; and there must be evidence of consent or acknowledgment by the governed (Beetham, 1991). Seymour Martin Lipset added an important modern dimension by linking political legitimacy to a regime’s capacity to maintain effectiveness and secure social acceptance over time (Lipset, 1959).

This paper builds on these traditions but adapts them to the Vietnamese case. It treats legitimacy not as a single source but as a layered structure. In Vietnam, four layers are especially important: ideological legitimacy, performance legitimacy, public trust, and civic-national identity.

Ideological legitimacy derives from doctrine, revolutionary history, and official narratives of political purpose. Performance legitimacy derives from the state’s ability to deliver growth, stability, security, development, and effective governance. Public trust concerns whether citizens believe that public institutions act fairly, competently, and in the common interest. Civic-national identity refers to the deeper relationship between citizens and the political community: the sense that public authority reflects the dignity, memory, values, and aspirations of the nation.

These layers are not mutually exclusive. They interact. Ideology may provide historical narrative. Performance may provide practical credibility. Public trust may provide moral confidence. Identity may provide belonging. The central question is how the balance among these layers changes over time.

2. Doi Moi and Vietnam’s First Legitimacy Transition

The transformation that began with Doi Moi in 1986 is usually understood as an economic turning point. Vietnam moved from central planning toward a socialist-oriented market economy while preserving one-party rule. This interpretation is historically correct, but analytically incomplete.

Viewed through the lens of political legitimacy, Doi Moi represented Vietnam’s first major legitimacy transition. Before Doi Moi, legitimacy rested primarily on two pillars: revolutionary legitimacy, derived from national liberation and reunification; and ideological legitimacy, grounded in Marxism-Leninism and the socialist project. During the decades of war and immediate postwar reconstruction, these sources reinforced one another.

The economic crisis of the mid-1980s changed this equilibrium. Inflation, shortages, declining productivity, and international isolation weakened the capacity of ideology alone to sustain political confidence. The challenge facing Vietnamese leaders was not only economic recovery. It was also the preservation of political legitimacy under dramatically changing domestic and international conditions.

Doi Moi did not abolish ideology. Rather, it added a new source of legitimacy: performance. Growth, poverty reduction, improved living standards, foreign investment, international integration, and social stability increasingly became part of the state’s claim to effective rule. Citizens were asked not only to believe in a revolutionary project but also to evaluate authority through tangible improvements in everyday life.

This interpretation is consistent with a significant body of scholarship on post-Doi Moi Vietnam. Carlyle Thayer, Martin Gainsborough, Benedict Kerkvliet, and especially Le Hong Hiep have shown that socio-economic performance became a crucial foundation of the Communist Party’s contemporary legitimacy (Thayer, 2010; Gainsborough, 2010; Kerkvliet, 2005; Le Hong Hiep, 2012). Doi Moi should therefore be understood not only as economic liberalization but also as an adaptive political strategy that enabled institutional continuity through developmental success.

The result was not democratization in the liberal constitutional sense. Nor was it ideological abandonment. It was a rebalancing: revolutionary history continued to provide symbolic authority, while economic performance increasingly provided practical credibility.

3. Is Vietnam Entering a Second Legitimacy Transition?

If Doi Moi marked Vietnam’s first legitimacy transition, an intriguing question now emerges: is the country entering a second?

This question must be approached cautiously. Political systems do not transform simply because official rhetoric changes. Nor should isolated speeches be treated as conclusive evidence of institutional evolution. Yet political discourse deserves careful attention because it often reveals changing priorities before those priorities become visible in law, policy, or institutional reform.

Recent official discourse appears to place increasing emphasis on a vocabulary different from that which dominated earlier decades. Themes such as administrative restructuring, institutional reform, technological innovation, digital governance, implementation capacity, infrastructure, competitiveness, growth, and national development seem increasingly prominent in major policy speeches.

This observation should be tested more systematically. A future version of this paper should include a content analysis of major leadership speeches from the late Nguyen Phu Trong period and the early To Lam period. The following categories could be coded across comparable speeches:

Category	Examples of Terms to Code
Ideological references	Marxism-Leninism, socialism, Ho Chi Minh Thought, Party-building, revolutionary tradition
Revolutionary legitimacy	liberation, reunification, sacrifice, national independence, historical mission
Performance legitimacy	growth, productivity, competitiveness, infrastructure, income, investment
State capacity	institutional reform, administrative restructuring, implementation, efficiency, governance
Technology and modernization	digital transformation, AI, science and technology, innovation, data governance
Public trust	integrity, accountability, transparency, service to the people, public responsibility
Civic-national identity	nation, people, Vietnamese aspiration, national rise, dignity, civilizational development

Such an analysis would help determine whether the observed shift is durable or merely rhetorical. It would also allow scholars to distinguish between three possibilities: continuity in new language, tactical adaptation, or a deeper rebalancing of legitimacy.

At present, the evidence remains preliminary. But the hypothesis is plausible enough to merit investigation. As Vietnam becomes more integrated into the global economy, its government faces challenges that cannot be addressed through ideological narratives alone: productivity, technology, demographic change, environmental stress, geopolitical competition, and institutional effectiveness. Under such conditions, performance naturally becomes more central to political justification.

4. Why Performance Alone Is Not Enough

Performance legitimacy has strengths. It forces governments to deliver. It links political authority to concrete outcomes. It may encourage reform, competence, and responsiveness. But performance is also conditional.

Growth can slow. Markets can change. External shocks can occur. Demographic trends can become unfavorable. Technological disruption can create new inequalities. A political system that relies too heavily on performance becomes vulnerable when performance declines.

This is why performance legitimacy cannot be a complete theory of political legitimacy. It answers the question: what has the government delivered? But it does not fully answer: for whom, toward what purpose, and under what moral obligations?

Here Stephen B. Young’s emphasis on public trust is crucial. The Roman question Cui bono?—who benefits?—remains central. Growth alone is not enough if its benefits are captured by narrow interests. Administrative efficiency is not enough if public authority serves itself rather than the public.

In the United States, for example, President Richard Nixon was impeached by the House of Representatives for abusing his trust in holding the office of President. The Impeachment Resolution in Article 1 concluded: 

In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.

Wherefore Richard M. Nixon, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.

The idea of government as public trust has deep roots. Roman law treated public office as a responsibility exercised for the public good. John Locke developed this into a theory of government as fiduciary authority: officials hold delegated power on behalf of society and remain accountable to the purposes for which that authority was entrusted (Locke, 1689/1988).

This shifts the discussion from power to responsibility. Public authority is not legitimate merely because it is effective. It must be effective in serving the public good. It must be trusted as fair, competent, restrained, and oriented toward the welfare of the community.

Modern scholarship on trust reinforces this point. Francis Fukuyama emphasized the importance of social trust for prosperity and institutional performance (Fukuyama, 1995). Bo Rothstein argued that quality of government depends not only on capacity but also on impartiality, fairness, and institutional integrity (Rothstein, 2011). Public trust is therefore not decorative. It is a core element of durable legitimacy.

5. Which Identity? Clarifying the Concept

The concept of identity must also be clarified. Identity can mean many things: ethnic identity, cultural identity, national identity, political identity, civic identity, or civilizational identity. A paper on legitimacy cannot use the term loosely.

This paper does not use identity in an ethnic or racial sense. Nor does it reduce identity to cultural nostalgia. The relevant concept is civic-national identity: the relationship between citizens and the political community to which they belong.

Civic-national identity answers a fundamental question: why does this political order deserve my loyalty? It is not simply a matter of blood, ancestry, or tradition. It concerns whether citizens recognize themselves in the institutions, values, memory, dignity, and aspirations represented by the state.

Benedict Anderson’s idea of the nation as an “imagined community” remains useful here (Anderson, 1983). Charles Taylor’s work on recognition also helps explain why political communities require more than administration; they require acknowledgment of dignity and belonging (Taylor, 1994). (see also Ruth Benedict’s Chrysanthemum and the Sword on the political implications of Japanese identity.)

In the Vietnamese case, civic-national identity may be especially important because Vietnam’s political history has long been shaped by the struggle for survival, independence, unity, and dignity. Concepts such as sinh ton, truong ton, and truong thanh are not merely cultural expressions. They point toward a deeper question: what does it mean to be Vietnamese in the twenty-first century?

This is where identity becomes the deepest layer of legitimacy. Ideology may tell a story about history. Performance may deliver results in the present. Public trust may sustain confidence in institutions. But civic-national identity gives citizens a reason to see the state not as an external power but as an expression of their own political community.

In this sense, legitimacy is not inherited once and for all. It must be continuously earned. A state may survive through performance. But a political community endures through identity.

Conclusion: A Research Agenda

This paper has advanced a modest argument rather than a definitive conclusion. It does not claim that Vietnam has entered a fundamentally new political system, nor does it suggest that changes in official discourse necessarily indicate institutional transformation. It proposes a framework for examining how political legitimacy may evolve through changing relationships among ideology, performance, public trust, and civic-national identity.

From this perspective, Doi Moi may be understood as Vietnam’s first legitimacy transition, introducing performance as a central source of credibility alongside revolutionary and ideological legitimacy. Contemporary political discourse raises the possibility—still requiring careful empirical investigation—that Vietnam may now be entering a second phase, in which governance capacity and state effectiveness assume even greater importance.

Whether such a transition proves durable will depend on factors beyond performance alone. Governments may secure support through development, but enduring legitimacy rests upon something deeper: public trust, institutional integrity, and the ability of political institutions to embody the shared values and aspirations of the community they serve.

The principal contribution of this paper is not to offer a political judgment about contemporary Vietnam. Rather, it seeks to reopen a broader theoretical question: how do political systems adapt their foundations of legitimacy as societies, economies, and identities evolve?

Vietnam offers one important case through which that larger question may be explored.

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References:

Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso. https://www.versobooks.com/products/1126-imagined-communities

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Ruth Benedict, Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Mariner Books Classics; ‎ 2006)

Fukuyama, F. (1995). Trust: The social virtues and the creation of prosperity. Free Press. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Trust/Francis-Fukuyama/9780684825250

Gainsborough, M. (2010). Vietnam: Rethinking the state. Zed Books. https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/vietnam-9781848135659/

Kerkvliet, B. J. T. (2005). The power of everyday politics: How Vietnamese peasants transformed national policy. Cornell University Press. https://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg/publication/763 (The Power of Everyday Politics: How Vietnamese Peasants Transformed National Policy)

Le Hong Hiep. (2012). Performance-based legitimacy: The case of the Communist Party of Vietnam and Doi Moi. Contemporary Southeast Asia, 34(2), 145–172. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41756339

Lipset, S. M. (1959). Some social requisites of democracy: Economic development and political legitimacy. American Political Science Review, 53(1), 69–105. https://cooperative-individualism.org/lipset-seymour_some-social-requisites-of-democracy-1959-mar.pdf

Locke, J. (1988). Two treatises of government (P. Laslett, Ed.). Cambridge University Press. Original work published 1689. https://www.yorku.ca/comninel/courses/3025pdf/Locke.pdf

Nathan, A. J. (2003). China’s changing of the guard: Authoritarian resilience. Journal of Democracy, 14(1), 6–17. https://nghiencuuquocte.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Authoritarian_Resilience.pdf

Rothstein, B. (2011). The quality of government: Corruption, social trust, and inequality in international perspective. University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/Q/bo11632847.html

Taylor, C. (1994). The politics of recognition. In A. Gutmann (Ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the politics of recognition (pp. 25–73). Princeton University Press. https://web.stanford.edu/class/polisci92n/readings/nov6.1.taylor.pdf

Thayer, C. A. (2010). Political legitimacy in Vietnam: Challenge and response. In J. London (Ed.), Politics in contemporary Vietnam: Party, state, and authority relations. Palgrave Macmillan. https://journals.sub.uni-hamburg.de/giga/jsaa/article/view/170/170.html

Weber, M. (1978). Economy and society: An outline of interpretive sociology (G. Roth & C. Wittich, Eds.). University of California Press. https://www.ucpress.edu/books/economy-and-society-2/paper

Young, S. B. (forthcoming). Moral government and public trust. Caux Round Table Working Paper. https://www.cauxroundtable.org/

Young, Stephen, “Public Office as a Public Trust: a suggestion that a fiduciary standard is implied in Impeachment for High Crimes and Misdemeanors”. Georgetown Law Review, 1975

The American Presidency Project, https://www.google.com/search?q=richard+nixon+articles+of+impeachment&rlz=1C1CHZN_enUS986US986&oq=richard+nicon+artic&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqCQgBEAAYDRiABDIGCAAQRRg

Suggested Reading:

David Beetham, The Legitimation of Power. https://www.jomswsge.com/pdf-207099-127014?filename=127014.pdf

Max Weber, Economy and Society. https://www.ucpress.edu/books/economy-and-society-2/paper

Seymour Martin Lipset, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy.” https://www.jstor.org/stable/1951731

Le Hong Hiep, “Performance-based Legitimacy: The Case of the Communist Party of Vietnam and Doi Moi.” https://www.jstor.org/stable/41756339

Martin Gainsborough, Vietnam: Rethinking the State. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-southeast-asian-studies/article/abs/vietnam-vietnam-rethinking-the-state-by-martin-gainsborough-london-zed-books-2010-224-pages-maps-notes-bibliography-index/ACC763EA92E613E5BAB5E3C21268969B 

Benedict Kerkvliet, The Power of Everyday Politics. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/59999

Fukuyama, Trust. https://www.persee.fr/doc/rfsp_0035-2950_1995_num_45_6_403599

Bo Rothstein, The Quality of Government. https://www.gu.se/sites/default/files/2020-05/2005_6%20Rothstein_Teorell.pdf

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. https://criticallegalthinking.com/2023/04/25/benedict-andersons-imagined-communities/

Stephen B. Young, CRT writings on Moral Government, Moral Capitalism, and public trust. https://www.cauxroundtable.org/

There are moments in history when internal strains and external pressures converge. At such moments, problems once dismissed as isolated deficiencies suddenly reveal themselves as the limits of an entire development model. Vietnam appears to be approaching precisely such an imperative to decide – this way or that? 

Hoang Thang DINH (Fellow of the Caux Round Table) 

At the National Conference convened by the Politburo of the Vietnamese Communist Party on July 1, 2026, General Secretary and State President Tô Lâm identified seven major bottlenecks which he believed were hindering the country’s development. They ranged from institutional weaknesses and bureaucratic inefficiency to human capital, science and technology, and the quality of governance. None of these deficiencies is new. Vietnamese scholars, economists, and even many officials within the system have discussed them for years. What is new—and politically significant—is that they have now been recognized at the highest level as systemic national challenges rather than isolated administrative shortcomings.

At almost the same time, another form of pressure was gathering from abroad. Over the past several months, the United States has initiated a series of investigations under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, focusing on Vietnam’s industrial overcapacity, labor standards, and intellectual property protection. On the surface, these appear to be trade disputes. Yet viewed more carefully, they may convey a deeper strategic message. In an era of intensifying geopolitical competition, Washington is no longer evaluating Vietnam merely through the lens of geography or strategic location. Increasingly, it is judging the quality and sustainability of Vietnam’s own development model.

It is the intersection of these two currents – domestic and foreign –  bringing Vietnam into a new phase of history. On one side stand the domestic structural constraints that the leadership itself has now acknowledged. On the other stands an international environment undergoing rapid transformation, where the comparative advantages that has fueled Vietnam’s remarkable growth over the past three decades can no longer be taken for granted. These may appear to be two separate stories, yet they ultimately reflect the same underlying reality: Vietnam’s current development model has reached the limits of its effectiveness.

Put differently, the seven bottlenecks just identified by General Secretary Tô Lâm and the recent American trade investigations are not unrelated challenges. One is identified by an internal diagnosis; the other by an external assessment. Both lead to the same fundamental question: will Vietnam continue relying on the existing model of development, or will it undertake a deeper, more comprehensive, and more strategic reform?

For that reason, this essay is not intended as either praise or criticism of any individual leader. The more consequential fact is that the country’s highest-ranking official has publicly acknowledged the existence of these structural obstacles. Once such a diagnosis has been made, the essential question is no longer whether an illness exists, but what has caused it.

If the illness resides merely within the administrative apparatus, then organizational restructuring may well be a sufficient cure. But if the bureaucracy merely exhibits the most visible symptoms while the underlying causes are embedded in the country’s broader model of governance, then the reforms required must necessarily be far more ambitious. They must extend well beyond administrative streamlining or personnel reduction. They will require a comprehensive realignment of domestic governance and foreign policy, institutional reform and strategic repositioning, all within an international order that is itself undergoing profound change.

Modern Vietnamese history has repeatedly demonstrated that major diplomatic breakthroughs endure only when supported by meaningful transformation at home. The Đổi Mới reforms of 1986 offer perhaps the clearest example. The normalization of relations with the United States in 1995, Vietnam’s accession to ASEAN, and its participation in successive generations of global trade agreements likewise rested upon internal reforms that expanded the country’s capacity to engage the world. Today, as the international economic order enters another period of transition, Vietnam confronts a similar challenge—but at a considerably higher level of complexity. The central issue is no longer whether Vietnam should lean toward one great power or another. The real question is whether the country possesses sufficient capacity for self-renewal to preserve its own strategic autonomy in an increasingly competitive international environment.

A superficial understanding of the seven bottlenecks might suggest that they concern little more than administrative management: fragmented institutions, cumbersome organizations, unclear demarcations of decentralization, inadequate personnel, slow scientific and technological development, weak human resources, and ineffective policy implementation. Yet a closer examination reveals that virtually none of these problems belongs exclusively to the bureaucracy itself. Each represents the manifestation of a much deeper structural condition. The bureaucracy is merely where the symptoms become most visible; the underlying pathology lies in the operations manual for the entire system.

For many years, the standard response to major policy failures has followed a familiar pattern: amend several regulations, reorganize a handful of agencies, or launch another campaign to streamline the state apparatus. Such measures have certainly produced incremental improvements. Yet when the same categories of problems repeatedly reappear after successive rounds of reform, the difficulty can no longer be attributed to isolated institutional weaknesses. It lies in the design and operation of the entire governing system.

The most significant aspect of General Secretary Tô Lâm’s remarks, therefore, is not simply the enumeration of seven bottlenecks. More important is the implicit acknowledgment that these challenges have become systemic in nature. When a nation simultaneously struggles with institutional quality, human capital, governance effectiveness, innovation capacity, and economic competitiveness, it becomes increasingly implausible to attribute all these deficiencies solely to administrative shortcomings. Together they suggest that an entire development model—one that has shaped Vietnam’s trajectory for decades—is butting up against its structural limits.

If that diagnosis is correct, administrative reform alone will no longer suffice. A better-organized bureaucracy may still perform poorly if the rules governing its operation remain fundamentally unchanged. Conversely, a governance system built upon transparency, fair competition, and public accountability can generate significant improvements even without a perfectly designed administrative structure. The central issue, therefore, is not simply how government agencies are organized, but the principles by which they exercise authority and answer to society.

This distinction points to two concepts that are often conflated in Vietnamese policy debates: bureaucratic restructuring and governance reform. Bureaucratic restructuring addresses essentially technical questions. How should agencies be organized? How should authority be decentralized? Who should be responsible for what? These are undeniably important issues, but they remain questions of administrative engineering.

Governance reform, by contrast, asks far more fundamental questions. What should be the proper role of the state in a modern economy? Under what principles should markets operate? Is the rule of law genuinely supreme for all actors, or do political exceptions continue to prevail? Are relations between public authority and private enterprise governed by equal competition under law, or by administrative privilege and discretionary power?

One concept is merely regulatory; the other fundamentally constitutional.

Choosing one concept over the other ultimately determines a nation’s long-term capacity for development. It would therefore be a profound misunderstanding to regard the seven bottlenecks merely as a checklist of administrative deficiencies awaiting correction. Behind them lies a much larger challenge: how can Vietnam move beyond a growth model driven primarily by inexpensive labor, capital accumulation, and export expansion toward a new one based on productivity, innovation, institutional quality, and genuine competitiveness? This is no longer simply an issue for the Ministry of Home Affairs or the state bureaucracy. It is a challenge which must be met correctly by the country’s entire development paradigm.

Ironically, just as the need for such reforms has become increasingly urgent, the international environment has entered one of its most turbulent periods in decades. Recent changes in American trade policy did not create Vietnam’s structural bottlenecks. They have, however, dramatically increased the cost of postponing reform. Weaknesses that once manifested themselves largely within the domestic economy are now beginning to shape Vietnam’s external relationships and strategic room for maneuver.

Every great reform movement in history begins with what appears to be a deceptively simple question: what must change first?

Vietnam answered that question in 1986 by liberating productive forces, recognizing a multi-sector economy, and opening itself to the world. Those decisions inaugurated one of the most remarkable development cycles in modern Vietnamese history. Tens of millions escaped poverty. The country emerged from decades of isolation and became an integral participant in the global economy.

History, however, never stands still. A development model that once served as a powerful engine of national progress may, over time, become the principal constraint upon further advancement.

For that reason, the reforms Vietnam now requires cannot be confined to reorganizing government agencies. They must involve a fundamental transformation of the development model itself. The state can no longer simultaneously serve as referee, competitor, allocator of economic resources, and ultimate gatekeeper determining who gains access to opportunity. A modern state must gradually shift from exercising control to creating enabling conditions—from distributing privileges to guaranteeing a fair legal framework; from governing primarily through administrative directives to governing through the rule of law, public accountability, and effective public service.

Only when the state’s role is properly redefined can the private sector fully develop, society unleash its creative potential, and the economy finally escape the long shadow of the traditional “ask-and-give” administrative culture.

In the twenty-first century, a nation’s most valuable resource is no longer land, inexpensive labor, or even foreign investment. Its greatest strategic asset is trust which generates action and optimism.

Investors commit capital because they trust the predictability and transparency of legal institutions. Entrepreneurs innovate because they believe their achievements will be protected. Citizens contribute because they trust that their efforts will not be undermined by arbitrary authority or entrenched privilege. International partners deepen cooperation because they believe commitments will be honored consistently over time.

No government can manufacture trust through slogans or political resolutions. Trust is accumulated only through the quality of institutions when that quality depends on how people behave towards one another.

For precisely that reason, meaningful reform must begin with the rule of law. Law must become the common framework governing every actor, rather than an instrument applied differently according to political influence or administrative discretion. When laws are transparent, power naturally becomes constrained. When power is constrained, social creativity gains room to flourish. And when creativity is protected, national competitiveness acquires a durable foundation.

It is impossible to build an innovative economy upon an unpredictable legal environment. Nor can entrepreneurs be expected to mature into globally competitive firms if property rights, commercial autonomy, and contractual security remain vulnerable to arbitrary reinterpretation.

Yet the establishment of genuine rule of law, indispensable though it is, will not by itself be sufficient unless accompanied by an equally profound transformation in Vietnam’s philosophy of development.

For many years, Vietnam’s achievements have been measured primarily through GDP growth, export performance, foreign direct investment, and the scale of infrastructure projects. These cash-flow indicators remain important, but they are no longer sufficient in an age increasingly defined by technology, data, knowledge, and high-value production.

The decisive question is no longer how many goods Vietnam exports. The more important question is how much Vietnamese knowledge, Vietnamese technology, Vietnamese brands, and genuine Vietnamese innovation are embodied within those exports.

Escaping the limitations of an assembly-based economy therefore requires placing education, science and technology, and an independent private sector at the very center of national strategy. No country becomes truly developed if its educational system values conformity more than independent thinking; if scientific research remains stronger in official rhetoric than in practical achievement; or if private entrepreneurs continue to be viewed as simultaneously indispensable and politically suspect.

An innovative economy requires citizens educated to think critically, universities and research institutions protected by academic freedom, businesses competing on equal terms under the law, and a society willing to reward experimentation rather than merely punish failure.

If that diagnosis is correct, administrative reform alone will no longer suffice. A better-organized bureaucracy may still perform poorly if the stipulated (but more importantly the tacit) rules governing its operation remain fundamentally unchanged. Conversely, a governance system built upon transparency, fair competition, and public accountability can generate significant improvements even without a perfectly designed administrative structure. The central issue, therefore, is not simply how government agencies are organized, but what will be the principles by which they exercise authority and answer to society.

Hoang Thang DINH (PhD, Pollical Science, Fellow, Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism)

Political power can rename a city. It cannot rename the collective memory of a people.

Governments may redraw maps, revise administrative boundaries, issue decrees, and proclaim new official identities. Yet history repeatedly reminds us that collective memory obeys a different power paradigm. It is not created by administrative power, nor can it be abolished by administrative power. It is shaped by lived experience, by family stories, by the emotional geography of childhood, by the streets, schools, hospitals, cafés, seasons, departures, and returns through all of which a people slowly comes to recognize itself.

Half a century has passed since the National Assembly of Vietnam officially renamed Saigon as Ho Chi Minh City. From the standpoint of state administration, that decision took effect immediately. From the standpoint of historical consciousness, however, the change of name has unfolded in a far more complex and revealing way.

1. A City May Be Renamed, but Memory of what was Cannot Be Disciplined

There are events that alter the destiny of a nation. There are decisions that change borders, institutions, and even the official name of a city. But there are also realities that neither time nor the power to command can easily erase. Among these realities, collective memory may be the most invisible, yet also the most durable, inheritance of a people.

Fifty years ago, the renaming of Saigon opened a new chapter in Vietnam’s political history. It marked the end of one historical order and the beginning of another. Administratively, the change was clear and immediate. Maps were revised. Documents were updated. The official vocabulary of the state was transformed. Yet the history of administration and the history of a people’s inner moral life do not always move at the same pace or in the same direction.

Today, several generations of Vietnamese have been born and raised without ever seeing the name “Saigon” on their birth certificates or household registrations. And yet the name remains alive in the most natural rhythms of Vietnamese speech. People in the North still say they are “going to Saigon.” People in Central Vietnam still say they are “heading into Saigon.” People in the South still speak of “going up to Saigon.” Across the Vietnamese diaspora — from Paris, Berlin, and Budapest to California and Sydney — millions of Vietnamese continue to speak of Saigon not merely as a place, but as a memory, a longing, and a fragment of their own lives.

After half a century, this persistence of a name can no longer be explained away simply as a a linguistic habit. Nor can it be sublimated under a political attitude. Something deeper is at work. The continued life given to the name “Saigon” reveals the extraordinary resilience of collective memory. It shows that what endures in history is not always what power has officially declared, but what generations of human beings have carried within themselves.

Memory operates according to laws different from those of power. Memory is rooted in childhood, family, neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, streets lined with tamarind trees, old cafés, sudden tropical rains, farewells, reunions, and all the ordinary moments that quietly become part of the soul of a city.

It is precisely those ordinary things that crystallize into personal identity. A city is not only an administrative unit. It is a lived world. It becomes real through the emotional and moral attachments of the people who inhabit it, leave it, remember it, and pass its name on to the next generation. That is why Saigon has survived not merely as a former name, but as a cultural symbol, a style of life, and a spiritual presence through which many Vietnamese, wherever they may live, still recognize something of themselves.

In this sense, Saigon today is no longer only a geographical designation. It has become a moral and cultural reference point. It evokes not simply nostalgia for a vanished city, but poses for all who hear it named a broader question about the continuity of Vietnamese history. What survives after political rupture? What remains after war, victory, defeat, and administrative transformation? Which memories become the property of the nation?

Perhaps the most interesting development after fifty years is that the present itself has begun, cautiously but unmistakably, to return to that memory. When Vietnam’s current leadership recalls Saigon as the former “Pearl of the Far East,” or refers to the time when Singaporeans once came to Cho Ray Hospital for medical treatment, the significance lies not only in those specific remarks. More important is the fact that the memory of Saigon is gradually re-entering official discourse.  Memory is overcoming power.

That return is revealing. It suggests that the deeper sediments of collective Vietnamese consciousness never truly disappeared. They merely sank beneath the surface of political history. At certain moments, when a nation begins to search for standards by which to imagine its future, those submerged layers of memory rise again. They become not a burden from the past, but a source of reference for the future.

The same tendency can be seen in education. In recent years, the idea of “liberal education” has been invoked more frequently in Vietnam. Yet any serious attempt to trace the Vietnamese roots of that spirit cannot ignore the educational legacy of Saigon before 1975. This does not require idealizing the past or denying the limitations of that historical period. It simply requires intellectual honesty. Knowledge has no national  or party flag. A good school, a capable hospital, and an open cultural environment do not lose their value merely because they emerged under a different political system. If they were achievements of Vietnamese people, then they belong to the unmanipulated inheritance of the Vietnamese nation.

It is at this point that the story of Saigon rises above the question of a city’s name. It asks a much larger question: when does a nation possess enough confidence to regard the whole of its history as a common inheritance?

After war, history is often told in the different languages of the winners and the losers. But after half a century, what remains most important for the Vietnamese is no longer that 1975 line of division. What demands attention is the question of which values still possess enough vitality to accompany the nation into its future. If Vietnamese people still speak of Saigon today with recognition, tenderness, or respect, then what they are recalling is not only a city of the past. They are also pointing toward a possible source of inspiration for the future.

Saigon, therefore, is not merely a name that refused to disappear. It is a reminder that a nation cannot mature by amputating parts of its own memory. A mature civilization does not fear the complexity of its past. It learns to distinguish between political rupture and historical continuity. It knows that the deepest foundations of national identity are not built by forgetting, but by transforming memory into a common inheritance.

2. Healing Begins by Respecting One Another’s Memory

If, after half a century, the name Saigon continues to live naturally in the language of millions of Vietnamese, then the essential question is no longer what the city ought to be called. The more important question is why this memory has proved so enduring. The answer, perhaps, lies not in the name itself, but in Vietnam’s unfinished journey toward reconciling differences in its own history, antagonisms and contradictions within Vietnamese-ness itself.

For many years, Vietnamese society has spoken of national reconciliation as both an aspiration and a necessity. No nation can move confidently into the future while remaining divided by unresolved memories of the past. 

Yet reconciliation cannot be achieved simply through commemorative ceremonies, political declarations, or official slogans. Those may express goodwill, but they cannot by themselves restore the moral trust that history has fractured. Genuine reconciliation is not merely a political process; it is, before all else, a cultural and ethical achievement. It begins when citizens become willing to acknowledge the legitimacy of one another’s memories, even when those memories are not identical to their own.

Throughout the years following the war, Vietnamese people have often been encouraged to “leave the past behind” in order to focus on the future. There is undeniable wisdom in looking ahead. But looking ahead does not require erasing what came before. 

The past is not a door that can simply be closed at will. It survives within the memories of individuals, families, and communities, and memory has never yielded easily to administrative decree or ideological instruction. No government possesses the authority to legislate remembrance. Political institutions may shape official history, but they cannot fully determine the history that people carry within themselves.

For that reason, no nation can truly heal by amputating part of its own memory. Nor can reconciliation flourish if one group of citizens is expected to forget before it is permitted to belong, while another is encouraged to remember only within officially prescribed boundaries. Healing does not require uniform memories. It requires the moral generosity to recognize that different memories may all belong to the same national experience. Diversity of remembrance is not a threat to unity. Properly understood, it is one of the conditions through which authentic unity becomes possible at a higher level of generalization as to who we really are.

The passage of time offers every society an opportunity to revisit its history with greater calmness and greater intellectual honesty. The Saigon that existed before 1975 possessed both remarkable achievements and undeniable limitations. The Ho Chi Minh City of today likewise represents extraordinary vitality, creativity, and economic dynamism, while at the same time confronting new questions concerning urban development, social cohesion, and the quality of public life. Neither historical period should be romanticized. Neither should be dismissed. Both deserve to be understood as successive chapters in the continuing history of Vietnam.

Only when these different chapters are viewed as parts of one continuous national experience can history become a teacher rather than a battlefield. The purpose of remembering is not to assign permanent moral superiority to one period over another. It is to understand how a nation has evolved, what it has learned, where it has failed, and which achievements remain worthy of preservation regardless of the political circumstances under which they first emerged.

Some Vietnamese scholars have compared the nation to travelers who have not yet fully crossed the symbolic “River of Stars” toward reconciliation. The metaphor is illuminating. Wars may end with military victories or diplomatic agreements, but the currents of memory often continue to flow on for generations before they finally mingle. Territorial peace does not automatically become peace within the human spirit. A nation may rebuild its roads, bridges, and cities within a few decades. Rebuilding mutual trust among memories often requires much longer.

Seen from this perspective, Saigon is no longer merely a story about South Vietnam, nor simply a reminder of an earlier political order. It has become a measure of Vietnam’s own cultural confidence. A mature nation does not fear memory, nor does it require memory to submit to political authority. It understands that the more turbulent its history has been, the more necessary it becomes to preserve every layer of that experience with honesty and compassion. National identity grows stronger not because difficult memories disappear, but because they are gradually woven into a broader and more generous understanding of the nation’s common journey.

Perhaps the time has come to look at Saigon through a different lens—not as a symbol of division, but as an inseparable chapter in the making of modern Vietnam. A people who preserve every layer of their historical memory are ultimately richer than a people who preserve only those memories that conform comfortably to the present. The spiritual resources that enable a civilization to renew itself are rarely created overnight. They are accumulated slowly across generations, deposited quietly within the collective consciousness of a nation, and rediscovered whenever history demands new sources of wisdom.

Ultimately, healing does not mean forgetting. Nor does reconciliation require unanimous interpretations of the past. It asks something both simpler and more demanding: that a nation possess enough moral confidence to accept the whole of its own history as a shared inheritance. Only then can memory cease to divide and begin, at last, to unite.

3. Still Saigon—Still Vietnam

Half a century has now passed. The city bears a different official name, a different skyline, and a different place in Vietnam’s national development. New boulevards have replaced old avenues. New urban districts continue to expand beyond what earlier generations could have imagined. Ho Chi Minh City has become one of Southeast Asia’s most dynamic metropolitan centers and the principal economic engine of the country. History has never stood still, nor should anyone wish to reverse its course. Every generation must build upon the foundations it inherits while creating new possibilities for those who follow.

As nations move forward, what should they carry with them from the past? Economic growth, technological innovation, and institutional reform are indispensable. But civilizations are sustained not only by what they build. They are equally sustained by what they choose to remember. Material progress gives a nation greater capacity. Historical memory gives that capacity meaning.

Perhaps the most revealing question after fifty years is no longer whether the city should officially be called Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City. The more revealing question is why the name Saigon continues to resonate so naturally across generations of Vietnamese, including many who never personally experienced the city that once bore that name. The answer lies neither in geography nor in ideology. It lies in a far more enduring characteristic of human societies. People readily adapt to changing institutions, but they seldom abandon the memories that have become woven into their moral and emotional identity.

That attachment should not be mistaken for nostalgia, nor should it be interpreted as resistance to historical change. Rather, it reflects one of the essential conditions of civilizational continuity. A mature society does not preserve its identity by freezing history. It preserves its identity by allowing each generation to reinterpret inherited memories without destroying them. Historical continuity is not the absence of change; it is the capacity to carry the past into the future without becoming imprisoned by either.

For that reason, no civilization becomes stronger by erasing the achievements or experiences of earlier historical periods. It grows stronger by integrating them into an increasingly comprehensive understanding of itself. Pre-1975 Saigon possessed accomplishments worthy of recognition, alongside limitations that deserve honest assessment. Contemporary Ho Chi Minh City likewise reflects remarkable achievements while confronting challenges that will define Vietnam’s future. Wisdom lies neither in idealizing one period nor condemning another. Wisdom lies in recognizing that both belong to the same unfolding story of the Vietnamese nation.

Vietnam today often speaks of entering a new era of national development. Such an aspiration is both legitimate and necessary. Yet no genuinely new era can be built upon fragmented memories. A nation advances most confidently when it possesses the moral courage to regard the whole of its history as a shared inheritance—to celebrate genuine achievements, to acknowledge painful failures, and to learn from both with equal honesty. This is precisely what may be described as the sedimentation of collective consciousness: those quiet layers of memory deposited over generations within language, culture, social habits, and the moral imagination of a people. They cannot be manufactured by political authority, yet they quietly sustain the continuity of civilization itself.

Seen from this perspective, Saigon is no longer simply the name of a city. It has become evidence of a larger historical truth. Political power may administer the present. Historians may continue to debate the past. Governments may reinterpret national narratives according to changing circumstances. Yet the collective memory of a people ultimately belongs neither to governments nor to historians. It belongs to the civilization itself. No political authority, however powerful, can permanently govern the inner memory of millions of human beings.

Nations reach true maturity not when they cease discussing their past, but when they no longer fear it. They become stronger when they recognize that historical memory exists not to serve the political needs of the present, but to deepen the moral resources with which the future will be built.

Fifty years from now, this city will undoubtedly look different once again. Its skyline will continue to rise, its economy will continue to evolve, and future generations will inherit a Vietnam very different from the one we know today. Yet if those future generations still speak the name Saigon with quiet familiarity and unforced affection, that will not represent the failure of some part of history. It will represent one of a civilization’s deepest victories: the triumph of collective memory over the transience of political power.

Perhaps that is the shortest path by which Vietnam, after enduring so many crashing waves and violent storms in its modern history, may finally guide its national vessel toward the farther shore—not through enforced forgetting, but through using  the quiet wisdom of remembering together.