Category: Vietnam

(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

Beetham, D. (1991). The legitimation of power. Macmillan. Beetham, David. (Một trong những công trình kinh điển về lý thuyết tính chính danh chính trị.)

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.

Hoang Thang Dinh (PhD, CRT Fellow)

There is a famous line by Vietnamese poet Xuân Diệu: “How can one live without loving, without longing, without cherishing someone?” Yet in international politics – especially in Asia today – states often find it convenient to “love without saying it,” to “grow closer without letting others know,” to “align without making it official.” That is why General Secretary and President Tô Lâm’s state visit to India, and the decision by Hanoi and New Delhi to elevate their bilateral relationship to an “Enhanced Comprehensive Strategic Partnership” (ECSP), has a significance far beyond ordinary diplomacy. In many ways, it was an effort to “make clear who we truly are to each other” after years in which both sides recognized each other’s strategic value but publicly maintained enough distance to avoid unnecessary geopolitical discomfort.

A close reading of Tô Lâm’s remarks at the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s statements at the joint press conference, and the wording of the Joint Statement itself, reveals that this note of “enhancing” is not merely a cosmetic upgrade in diplomatic terminology. (1,2,3) Rather, it reflects an important transformation in how Vietnam and India perceive each other within Asia’s evolving balance of power – an Asia in which China has become increasingly assertive, the United States increasingly present, and middle powers such as India, Japan, and Vietnam increasingly compelled to construct flexible forms of strategic alignment in order to preserve their own autonomous maneuverability. 

The first critical question is what exactly distinguishes an “Enhanced CSP” from the previous “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership.” On the surface, some might dismiss it as little more than an exercise in diplomatic semantics, given that Vietnam and India already established a CSP back in 2016. But in modern diplomacy – particularly among Asian states that tend to use strategic language sparingly – the addition of the word “Enhanced” is never accidental. If the 2016 CSP focused primarily on political trust, high-level exchanges, foundational defense cooperation, trade, and people-to-people ties, the ECSP of 2026 signals movement toward much more substantive strategic integration: coordination within the regional order itself about the nature of that order.

In other words, the earlier CSP resembled a strategic friendship, while the ECSP increasingly resembles a strategic alignment of interests and capabilities. This becomes especially clear in the phrases repeatedly emphasized by Indian officials: “strategic convergence,” “shared vision,” and “economic security.” These words are no longer the vocabulary of symbolic diplomacy; they are the vocabulary of geopolitics. When New Delhi stresses strategic supply chains, critical minerals, economic security, advanced technology, and maritime security, it effectively signals that Vietnam now occupies a new place within India’s Indo-Pacific strategy. From the Indian perspective, Hanoi is no longer merely a traditional friend in Southeast Asia – it is becoming a crucial player in an intentional response to China’s restructuring of regional strategic space.

Indeed, Indian newspapers such as The Economic Times and The Times of India have treated To Lam’s visit not as an ordinary bilateral event, but presented it using the the prism of Indo-Pacific, strategic competition, and the reshaping of Asia’s balance of power. Within that framework, Vietnam emerges as perhaps India’s most trusted strategic partner in ASEAN. It is hardly accidental that New Delhi has steadily deepened defense ties with Hanoi over the years, from submarine training and defense credit lines to discussions surrounding the BrahMos missile system.

This context explains why Vietnamese media placed unusual emphasis on Tô Lâm’s meeting with Indian National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, even before highlighting several other diplomatic engagements. (4) In today’s Indian power structure, Doval is not merely a security adviser; he is one of the principal architects of the Modi era’s strategic doctrine, deeply involved in shaping India’s Act East policy and broader Indo-Pacific approach. By foregrounding this meeting, Hanoi effectively signaled that security has become the core pillar of the ECSP.

There is an unwritten rule in Asian diplomacy: the most sensitive matters are rarely settled during semi-public official talks but are instead handled more discreetly through national security channels. Issues involving intelligence-sharing, defense technology, maritime coordination, or balancing China are seldom discussed publicly in full detail. Thus, Tô Lâm’s meeting with Ajit Doval carried far greater significance than a ceremonial diplomatic encounter. It suggested that Hanoi and New Delhi are quietly building layers of cooperation far deeper than what appears in public communiqués.

Yet an intriguing paradox remains: despite the ECSP and extensive international reporting about Vietnam potentially acquiring BrahMos missiles (5), Vietnamese media have almost entirely avoided references to the “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” (FOIP), “balancing China,” or even “hot weapons purchases.” This silence is not accidental. (6) It reflects Hanoi’s characteristic practice of strategic balancing.

Vietnam currently faces an extraordinarily delicate challenge: how to strengthen deterrence capabilities without becoming confined and stereotyped inside a new Cold War-style alliance system. If Hanoi openly emphasized BrahMos, the Indo-Pacific, or maritime security cooperation aimed at countering pressure in the South China Sea, Beijing could easily interpret such moves as participation in a broader containment structure against China. Yet while Vietnam seeks to diversify strategic partnerships, it also remains determined not to destabilize its overall relationship with Beijing. (7)

Consequently, Hanoi has adopted a remarkably nuanced discourse: security cooperation is real, but the language presenting its reality is deliberately “de-militarized.” Vietnam speaks more often about “non-traditional security,” “regional stability,” “technological cooperation,” and “international law” than about alliances, deterrence, or counter-balancing. Put differently, Vietnam seeks to “enjoy the substance without donning the uniform.” This is “bamboo diplomacy” at the geopolitical level.

This approach also shapes how Vietnam interprets FOIP. For Washington, FOIP carries an unmistakably strategic meaning centered on freedom of navigation and counter-balancing China’s becoming a naval power. Japan sees FOIP as a framework for preserving a rules-based order. (8) India, meanwhile, presents FOIP in softer terms – as inclusive and multipolar, avoiding the appearance of an Asian NATO. (9) Vietnam’s public messaging about the enterprise is even more nuanced.

At the most superficial level, Vietnam views FOIP primarily as an economic opportunity: diversification of supply chains, attraction of high-tech investment, semiconductors, rare earths, and logistics development. (10) This is the least politically sensitive dimension for Hanoi because it aligns directly with national development priorities. At a more balancing-of- power level, Vietnam sees FOIP as a legal and normative space for defending UNCLOS, freedom of navigation, and peaceful dispute resolution. This is, in essence, ASEAN’s version of FOIP.  (11) But at the third level –  unsentimental balancing of hard power – Vietnam remains extremely cautious. Hanoi understands perfectly well that it benefits from the presence of the United States, Japan, India, and Australia in maintaining regional equilibrium, yet it also understands that moving too close to any single source of power projection could threaten its own strategic autonomy. (12)

It is precisely here that the triangular relationship among Vietnam, India, and China becomes particularly significant. Over recent years, competition between New Delhi and Beijing has intensified dramatically, stretching from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean. Vietnam has consequently emerged as a key partner in India’s eastward strategic outreach. Yet Hanoi also understands that it cannot become the “frontline state” of any anti-China coalition. Vietnam needs India to widen its strategic space, but simultaneously it needs a stable relationship with China in order to sustain national development.

For this reason, Vietnam – India relations are likely to continue evolving in a manner that is “substantial but soft.” In practical terms, meaningful cooperation in security, technology, and economics will steadily expand, while public rhetoric will remain carefully calibrated. The sharper the U.S.–China rivalry becomes, the more skillfully Hanoi will need to manage its strategic image. (13)

Within this broader context, Vietnam’s potentially joining BRICS also becomes increasingly interesting. (14) n theory, Vietnam possesses many characteristics associated with BRICS+: strong relations with Russia, China, and India; growing importance within ASEAN; an open export-oriented economy; and a highly strategic geopolitical location. Yet Hanoi remains cautious. The reasons are not merely economic but geopolitical. Since its expansion, BRICS has increasingly acquired the image of a bloc seeking to reduce Western influence and challenge the dominance of the U.S. dollar. Vietnam, however, still depends heavily on the United States, the European Union, Japan, and South Korea for trade, investment, and technology. Joining BRICS prematurely could generate geopolitical interpretations that would complicate Hanoi’s balancing of its strategic needs against offsetting risks.

Thus, Vietnam is likely to continue prioritizing “multi-alignment” over bloc politics. Hanoi seeks connectivity with all centers of power without becoming glued to any single one. This, in many ways, distinguishes Vietnam’s diplomacy from that of many other middle powers.

More broadly, the international and Indian media reactions to To Lam’s visit also reveal Vietnam’s changing position within the regional order. What captured attention was not ceremonial protocol, but geopolitics: the ECSP, BrahMos, strategic supply chains, rare earths, the Indo-Pacific, and Tô Lâm’s evolving political role. Vietnam is no longer viewed merely as a developing Southeast Asian country; increasingly, it is perceived as a “swing state” – a country capable of influencing the broader strategic balance of Asia. (15)

And perhaps that is the deepest meaning of the ECSP. The enhancement is not about choosing sides, but about expanding strategic space for both Hanoi and New Delhi in an Asia growing ever more polarized. India needs Vietnam to deepen its presence in Southeast Asia and the South China Sea; Vietnam needs India to diversify strategic partnerships and avoid being trapped within the binary, zero-sum, logic of U.S.–China competition. Meanwhile, China – though rarely mentioned explicitly – remains the silent shadow present throughout the entire public staging of this visit.

Ultimately, the “Enhanced CSP” is not merely a story about two countries. It is a reflection of a new Asia in which middle powers are becoming increasingly proactive in shaping their own strategic destinies. And in such a world, the most important task is not to stand entirely on one side or another, but to become strong enough to “impress on others who we truly are to one another” with every major power – while still preserving enough distance in order not to lose one’s autonomy in any single bilateral relationship. (16)

References:

THAM KHẢO:

 

(1) https://baochinhphu.vn/phat-bieu-chinh-sach-cua-tong-bi-thu-chu-tich-nuoc-to-lam-tai-hoi-dong-cac-van-de-the-gioi-cua-an-do-10226050621193717.htm

(2) https://www.mea.gov.in/Speeches-Statements.htm?dtl/41106/English+Translation+of+Prime+Ministers+Press+Statement+during+the+Joint+Press+Statement+with+the+General+Secretary+of+the+Communist+Party+of+Vietnam+and+the+President+of+Vietnam+May+06+2026

(3) https://tuoitre.vn/tuyen-bo-chung-viet-nam-an-do-ve-quan-he-doi-tac-chien-luoc-toan-dien-tang-cuong-2026050701250451.htm

(4) https://baochinhphu.vn/tong-bi-thu-chu-tich-nuoc-to-lam-tiep-co-van-an-ninh-quoc-gia-an-do-102260506002141007.htm

(5) https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/defence/countering-china-india-offers-vietnam-brahmos-missile-during-president-to-lams-visit/articleshow/130922764.cms?utm_source=chatgpt.com

(6) https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/india-may-discuss-brahmos-missile-sale-to-vietnam-during-presidential-visit-sources-say/articleshow/130822763.cms?utm_source=chatgpt.com

(7) https://magazine.thediplomat.com/2023-01/how-vietnam-can-balance-against-china-on-land-and-at-sea?utm_source=chatgpt.com

(8) https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/05/02/japan/politics/japan-vietnam-foip-takaichi/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

(9) https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/indian-foreign-minister-says-does-not-share-ishiba-vision-asian-nato-2024-10-01/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

(10) https://fulcrum.sg/vietnams-hedging-strategy-in-the-indo-pacific/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

(11)https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10357718.2020.1869132?utm_source=chatgpt.com

(12) https://www.belfercenter.org/research-analysis/balancing-without-allying-vietnams-middle-power-strategy-amids-us-china-rivalry?utm_source=chatgpt.com

(13) https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/vietnam-s-bamboo-diplomacy?utm_source=chatgpt.com

(14) https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3293207/vietnams-strategic-hesitation-brics-highlights-delicate-us-ties-and-economic-

(15) https://thediplomat.com/2024/03/vietnam-a-swing-state-in-the-us-china-rivalry/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

(16) https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/middle-powers-and-indo-pacific-order?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Reconciliation is not an act of benevolence, but a strategic choice!

Dinh Hoang Thang (PhD, CRT Fellow)

April 30, 1975 marked the end of a cruel and bloody war that had lasted for decades on Vietnamese soil. In territorial terms, it was a day of reunification for a divided people. But in terms of collective consciousness, it was not necessarily a day when political and moral divisions selflessly evaporated. More than half a century has since passed since the end of that war, yet invisible lines distinguishing North from South, and “nationalists” from “communists,”  and between opposing memories of victory on the one side and of anger over defeat on the other, still persist across many strata and  different subcultures within the national family of Vietnamese.

The question that must now be asked candidly is not which side was right or wrong, but rather: Why could the war end so decisively on one day, while reconciliation continues to elude the Vietnamese at home and abroad?

Lessons from the American Civil War: Victory Without Annihilation

After its devastating Civil War from 1861 to 1865, the United States found itself deeply divided, no less than Vietnam. More than half a million people had been killed, the Southern economy was devastated, and hard feelings spread widely throughout society as the Southerners bitterly resented the victors while the Northern victors looked down on the White southerners. Yet what stands out is the way Americans handled the postwar era without indulging in unremitting antipathy and disdain for the other.

The South was defeated, but it was not completely stripped of its honor or identity. Some of its leaders such as Robert E. Lee continued to be recognized as part of the nation’s history, rather than erased from collective memory. This conveyed an important message: defeat does not mean exclusion from the national community. Southerners were permitted – once they abolished slavery – to reconstitute their local governments as part of a united America.  All prisoners were freed and there were no ‘re-education” camps for the losers.

Upon Lee’s surrender, Union General Grant allowed Confederate officers to keep their sidearms, horses, and baggage as they returned to their homes. Confederate officers and men were allowed to return to their homes, promising not to take up arms against the United States. Rebel soldiers who owned their own horses or mules were allowed to keep them for spring planting. Grant ordered 25,000 meals to be issued to the hungry Confederate troops

The victorious federal government, instead of insisting on punishment of its enemies, prioritized their economic and infrastructural reconstruction.  The Republican Party victors understood that a nation cannot be strong if half of it remains trapped in the traumatic mindset of defeat. Reconciliation, therefore, was not only an act of charity, but a strategic choice.

This strategic but so honorable wisdom, came from one leader – President Abraham Lincoln. In his second inaugural address after re-election as the President of the Federal Union and before the war ended, Lincoln so vey wisely asked his people to act as follows: “ With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Vietnam: When Victory Is Tied to Absolute Truth

Unlike the American Civil War, the Vietnam War was not merely a civil war dividing one people against one another, but it was also part of international Hot and Cold Wars between secular faiths. This reality made any victory in the struggle for systemic domination not only a military triumph, but also the affirmation of a trans-national ideological dogma.

When a victor obtains authority to define “legitimacy” for an entire people, the space for alternative perspectives within that community inevitably narrows. History, in such a case, is easily thrust forward in a single direction, and memories that do not align with the dominant narrative are pushed to the margins. The result is that portions of the post-victory governed population cannot find themselves accepted within the officially sanctioned national story.

Military victory in such an intra-communal conflict may have been achieved swiftly, but thereafter the process of social healing might or might not be pursued with equal passion and priority. This creates a paradox: the war of ideas and ideals could end on the battlefield, but continue in opposed memories and in conflicting perceptions, even as, in the Vietnam War, “the winning side itself acknowledged that ‘a million people were happy, a million were sad…’”

External Factors and the Limits of the “Shadow Effect”

It is understandable, given historical and geopolitical contexts, that some point to the influence of China or the Soviet Union on the war in Vietnam. However, attributing all internal divisions or developmental stagnation solely to external factors risks oversimplifying the dynamics of that struggle of Vietnamese one with another. Vietnamese reality does not always fall under the shadow of outside preferences.

In recent decades, both the Soviet Union and China have made significant modifications to their economic systems and modes of governance, even if they have not entirely abandoned their earlier political choices. Vietnam, in its development process, has been shaped both by external influences and by its own internal constraints. The choices confronting Vietnam now lie not only in “who will exert influence on national policies,” but also in deciding upon internal options for structural adjustments and reconciliation.

A society cannot fully mobilize its internal strength if unresolved, divisive psychological fixations remain post conflict. When part of collective memory is silenced, social consensus struggles to pull forth from the depths of the national spirit the convictions and energies necessary for sustainable progress.

A Hard Truth: Peace Does Not Automatically Create Reconciliation

No nation can move forward rapidly if within it there remain communities that feel excluded from the official narrative of history. Peace, if it merely means the absence of gunfire, is only a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one for sustainable development—especially for a nation that truly seeks to rise high in wealth and well-being in comparison with others.

Reconciliation requires more than an end to the shooting and the killing: it demands recognition of diverse memories, the willingness to accept that history can be viewed from multiple perspectives, and that a conscious effort among people of good faith and good moral character can build a shared identity that transcends old divisions.

Reconciliation Is Not about Forgetting, But Coexisting and Collaborating

Reconciliation does not mean erasing the past or forcing everyone to think alike. On the contrary, it requires the maturity to accept that the people of a nation can live with multiple memories while still coexisting within a common framework and agreeing to build shared futures for mutual benefit.

What matters—and it is by no means easy—is not to make all memories identical, but to create a space where those different memories are acknowledged to be true but without closing minds to the truth of other memories. Only then can a viable national identity emerge and build a prosperous and honorable future above the distractions of “factions” or conflicts of “us versus them,” and instead bring forth a foundation for diversity in unity and unity embracing diversity.

Conclusion: Ending a War Is One Thing; Ending Division Is Another

The United States became strong not because it avoided division, but because it found a way to overcome it after the Civil War. So too did Europe after World War II when rival French and German nationalisms jointly brought forth the European Union. Vietnam has come a long way since April 30, 1975, but the more difficult journey—the journey toward genuine reconciliation within and among all its people—likely still continues.

One day, when April 30 is seen not only as a marker of victory, but also as a symbol of understanding and healing, only then will peace and Vietnamese truly be complete.

Introduction by Professor Stephen Young 

 

The metaphor “politics as a market” authored and developed by Dr. Đinh Hoàng Thắng in the essay below, in fact points to a natural constituent element of political economy, both in theory and practice, and has, at times, found concrete expression in history. Politics has been, and still is, a natural condition for all human communities, so too markets.

In 1945, Friedrich August von Hayek, in his seminal essay The Use of Knowledge in Society, challenged the traditional assumption in economics that all information necessary for beneficial decision-making could be collected and processed by a single “central brain.” In his view, this assumption was unrealistic. In real life, knowledge exists in a dispersed, uneven form, often local in nature—tied to specific circumstances of time and place. In short, information for Hayek was a commodity dispersed and “owned” by individual members of a community or other relevant social network, transitory or more reliably institutionalized

Yet nearly nine centuries before Hayek, Vietnam’s Prince Trần Hưng Đạo had already emphasized the enduring significance of the concept of Xã Tắc (the ”altars of soil and grain”) as the sacred foundation for the enduring political self-determination of the Vietnamese as a national community). Reverencing the soil and the grain it brought to life and made available for harvest was directly giving respect to the common people. For Tran Hung Dao, the survival of this country depended very much on more than loyalty to the monarch; it demanded concern for the people as a moral vector in history.  Thus, to speak of the Xã Tắc was to speak of the nation itself.  Ultimately, political and economic strength resided in the wisdom of the people.

Later the great statesman Nguyen Trai would write: humaneness and righteousness rest in the well-being of the people.  As the people needed food and belongings, so did they need good governance. Markets (economics) and politics (allocation of decision-making) were foundational supports of the nation. In his moral essay on the humane and righteous education to be provided by each family, Nguyen Trai wrote that for each individual prosperity and well-being depended on the moral accomplishments of the mothers – not of the Emperors and their mandarins.

Still later, in his morality tale – the poem Kim Van Kieu, Nguyen Du would conclude, harmonizing with Shakespeare’s depictions of human tragedy in the decisions made by King Lear, Macbeth and Othello, that individual virtue and goodness drove destiny towards the good, not the selfish passions of kings and those who serve them.  Such individualism – for better or for worse – always and inevitably delivers results for both markets and politics. 

Thus, for Tran Hung Dao, Nguyen Trai, and Nguyen Du, the most important information and decision-making for building and sustaining national vitality and geo-strategic positional power is distributed widely among individuals – those mothers who bring about good fortunes (phuc duc) for their descendants, those individuals who, hopefully, decide matters only as instructed by their good hearts (tam), and all those who work hard to till the soil, harvest the grain, and in so doing bring prosperity to markets.

In my work on “moral capitalism,” I have sought to underscore a similar insight: that sustainable systems—whether economic or political—cannot rely solely on centralized control, but must also depend on widely dispersed moral capacity and knowledge, along with the responsible participation of individuals throughout society. In this sense, the metaphor  of “politics as a market” should not be understood literally as an institutional model, but rather as a perspective suggesting that excellence in decision-making benefits from having access to multiple sources of knowledge, from competition among ideas, and from mechanisms that allow better solutions to emerge through comparison and accountability. If markets thrive through a decentralized pluralism avoiding monopolies, cartels, and cronyism, then so can a nation’s politics contribute sustainability to its possession of good fortune through a similar expansion of its participatory substructures.

In his essay, Dr. Đinh Hoàng Thắng sketches a journey across time and space, through what might be called the “flow of human intelligence.” Without imposing a definitive conclusion, he opens up a direction of thought—creating space for deeper reflection on how to balance inherently tension-filled elements within a contemporary political system structured around a single party.

In that spirit, I am honored to introduce this essay within the framework of the Caux Round Table’s “U.S.–Vietnam Project”: “Market Politics – Why Not?”

 

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“Market Politics” – Why Not?

 

Đinh Hoàng Thắng, (PhD, CRT Fellow)

 

Recently, the online platform “Tiếng Dân” recalled an intriguing historical detail: Party General Secretary Hà Huy Tập once criticized comrade Nguyễn Ái Quốc (later Hồ Chí Minh) in the mid-1930s. (1) At that time, the communist party was still very young, “like a newborn lying on the grass” (as described in Tố Hữu’s poetry). Yet even in that seemingly embryonic stage, differences in strategic thinking had already become routine—and notably, this reality did not disappear over time.

Looking along the subsequent course of history—from the resistance period, land reform, intense debates over “dogmatism” versus “revisionism,” to the turning point of adopting the Đổi Mới reformation of doctrine—we can observe a consistent thread: differences in policy thinking have always existed as a natural part of Vietnam’s political life. This is by no means a sign of instability, but rather the inevitable consequence of a deeper reality—that knowledge, experience, and perspectives on the realities of our world are never fully concentrated in one place.

Here, Friedrich August von Hayek’s intuition from 1945 becomes particularly valuable. In The Use of Knowledge in Society, he was not merely revisiting economic questions, but fundamentally posing a question for all social systems: where is knowledge located, and how is it used? (2) His answer was, in essence, “deconstructive”: knowledge in not a concentrate, but a gas; it does not have only one residence, but lives scattered across the minds of countless individuals, caught up in specific contexts of time, place, and lived experience. No individual or institution can fully gather and process this entire body of knowledge.

If this holds true in economics, it is even more deeply and persistently true in politics.

For politics does not deal merely with data, but with interests, values, and expectations—elements far more resistant to centralization than market information. In this context, the existence of policy debates that largely remain internal within officialdom, with limited public visibility, is not just an organizational feature. It is also a choice about how social knowledge is used: keeping it within a small cage, rather than bringing it into a broader arena for comparison, testing, and adjustment.

From this arises a natural question: if differences are inevitable, if knowledge is dispersed, then why is the mechanism for handling those differences not more “open”?

After more than forty years of Đổi Mới, this question has become more urgent than ever. Vietnam has transitioned from a centrally planned economy to one operating under market logic—a shift not only in management technique, but in worldview. In Hayek’s deepest sense, the market is not merely a place for exchanging goods. It is a mechanism for processing dispersed knowledge: through prices, competition, and countless individual decisions, society “computes” outcomes in a way that no central brain could ever calculate.  We might say that markets are a form of AI data management operating down through the centuries.

Yet the striking point is this: while the economy has embraced that logic, politics appears to continue operating under a different one—the logic of centralization, of narrowing the space in which data is collected and processed and decision alternatives are evaluated one against another.

This misalignment does not necessarily lead to crisis, but it has created a particular condition: society is increasingly diverse in its interests, knowledge, and expectations, yet the mechanisms for reflecting and processing such diversity have not expanded accordingly. Differences persist but become harder to observe from the outside. Citizens are directly affected by policies, but do not meaningfully participate in the process of comparing and choosing among alternatives.

From Stephen Young’s perspective, this is precisely where a system begins to encounter its limits. In his concept of “moral capitalism,” he emphasizes that the sustainability of any system—economic or political—cannot rely primarily on centralized control. It must rest on three elements: moral capacity (ethical and legal), dispersed knowledge within society, and the responsible participation of individuals in decision-making. (3)

When one of these elements is minimized—especially dispersed knowledge—the system’s adaptive capacity declines. Not because of a lack of capable people, but because of a lack of mechanisms that allow different understandings to “dialogue” one with another.

It is here that the metaphor of a “political market” begins to make sense.

It is not a literal institutional proposal. No serious observer would suggest that politics could function exactly like a commodity market. But if we strip away the surface differences between markets and politics, we arrive at a deeper understanding: a market is a mechanism that allows alternatives to compete in order to reveal their value. Without competition, without comparison, concepts such as “better” or “more efficient” become vague.

Hayek emphasized that competition is not merely a state, but a “discovery procedure.” Firms do not know in advance which solution is optimal; they experiment, fail, and adjust. It is this very process that generates new knowledge. Applied to politics, the same insight holds: no group can know in advance which policy is best under all circumstances. The only viable approach is to create a mechanism that allows alternatives to be tested, compared, and refined.

In his widely praised recommendations for how the new republic of the United States of America could optimize the outcomes of its future politics, James Madison wrote in 1787 that traditional constricted systems of politics designed to minimize divisiveness within the nation imposed great burdens on a people. One approach – government imposition of uniform lifestyles on all citizens – would abolish self-advancing individualism. The other approach – “giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests” – would similarly rob the society of energy, innovation, wealth-creation, creativity. (4)

Madison rather recommended a kind of market competition among those will different interests, different ideas, different cultural and religious orientations. “Great and aggregate” national interests would be referred to a central government while, simultaneously, local and particular interests would be consigned to local governments to consider and regulate.   In short, politics would be distributed over different markets, each balancing buyers and sellers of different products seeking mutual satisfaction, compromise, through persuasion and bargaining.

In Federalist 37, Madison again used a market analogy of bargaining, saying that all political power should be derived from the people as purchasing decisions made by politicians and administrators. (5)

In Federalist #51 (written either by James Madison or Alexander Hamilton) the point is made of the power of having checks and balances – market competition among sellers: “Ambition must be made to counter ambition.” “This policy of supplying by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the 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.”

“It is of great importance … 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.”  (6)

Federalist #55 (written either by Hamilton or Madison) includes an insight into human nature that echoes the moral wisdom of Nguyen Du on the need for persons with good hearts to have power to do what they think, based on their own determinations of fact, is right. “As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form. Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be, that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.” (7)

In two volumes (1835 and 1840), the French student of society, culture and government, Alexis De Tocqueville, compared the decentralized, market-like, politics of the youthful American Republic with the centralized politics and governance of France, a system put in place successively by monarchs and their bureaucrats, the Revolutionary Jacobins, and by the autocrat Napoleon Bonaparte.  De Tocqueville much preferred the American alternative.

He wrote: “But I think that administrative centralization only serves to enervate the peoples that submit to it, because it constantly tends to diminish their civic spirit.”  (8) 

Administrative centralization, he wrote, “militates against the increase of [national] resources. … So it can contribute wonderfully to the ephemeral greatness of one man but not to the permanent prosperity of a people”.

“A central power, however enlightened and wise one imagines it to be, cannot by itself embrace all the details of life of a great nation. Such a task exceeds human strength. When it attempts to create and set in motion so many complicated springs, it must be satisfied with a very imperfect result, or exhaust itself in futile efforts. … In a word, [centralization – a monopoly of the political marketplace] excels at preventing and not at doing.”

De Tocqueville admired America because it permitted local community self-governance. He was struck by how Americans governed themselves at the local level — town meetings, juries, and civic associations gave ordinary citizens real practice in the art of self-rule. He saw this as the foundation of American democracy. Americans formed voluntary associations for virtually everything — religious, civic, political, commercial. He found this remarkable and believed it was democracy’s answer to the aristocratic institutions of Europe. Americans were intensely energetic, commercially minded, and always in motion – like eager buyers and sellers in crowded market seeking to buy the best for the  best price or sell the most for an acceptable profit.

The question, then, is: where is that mechanism today which can reach out to absorb knowledge wherever it sits and put ideas and facts, emotions and ideals, into competitive dialogues until some acceptable agreement emerges as to what is true, what is relevant, what is stupid, what is dangerous, what is reliable?

A common argument is that the current centralized political system can still make correct choices without open competition. This argument rests on confidence in the organization’s capacity for1) acquiring relevant knowledge and 2) self-adjustment. Yet, as Hayek warned, such confidence can easily fall into the “illusion of knowledge”—overestimating the ability of a central authority to grasp and process information.

From another perspective, Vietnamese history offers an interesting demonstration that knowledge cannot be monopolized. Trần Hưng Đạo—reverently called Đức Thánh Trần by the people—did not adopt a totalizing, centrally controlled approach even in moments of national survival. He understood that xã tắc was not an abstract concept, but the crystallization of the entire nation—its knowledge, will, and responsibility, distributed among its people.

His strategy was not one of absolute control, but of comprehensive mobilization. From the “scorched earth” policy to protracted resistance rooted in the people all designed to maximize an effective resistance movement against foreign invaders, reflected a fundamental principle: the strength of the system lies in activating the knowledge and capacity of the many, not in concentrating wisdom and morale at a single point of authoritarian discretion.

Placed alongside Hayek, we see a remarkable convergence between modern economic thought and historical experience: both point to the same conclusion—no center is large enough to substitute for society.

Thus, the question “Market Politics – Why Not?” can be reframed in a less contentious way: why not design a mechanism in which policy alternatives are placed within a broader space of comparison, where social knowledge can participate in the process of choice?

This does not mean abandoning control. On the contrary, it raises higher demands for institutional design. Politics, unlike economics, involves greater risks: fragmentation of power, conflicts of interest, social instability. These concerns are entirely legitimate.

But from Stephen Young’s perspective, the issue is not to avoid competition, but to place it within a moral framework. A system is truly sustainable only when its participants not only pursue their interests but are also accountable for the consequences of their actions. Ethics and legality, in this sense, are not slogans, but conditions that prevent competition from descending into chaos.  Young wrote in his book Moral Capitalism: … free markets have an inherent tendency to bring about a convergence of virtue and interest. “In other words, the logic of self-interest considered upon the whole when applied to business over time leads to betterment for the individual as well as for society.” (9)  Young noted that the German philosopher Hegel concluded that private property (see: Politburo Nghi Quyet 68, May 2015) was necessary for morals to emerge in human communities. Without the ability to take hold of some touchable part of Heaven and Earth, no person can fully bring his or her values into worldly effect.  Young noted that moral choice presumes that people do in fact have the power to make a choice, that they are in command of some force or power that an make a difference – like sellers and buyers in a free market.

Young noted that markets cannot thrive with trust as human and social capital. So too politics. Where there is no trust, there can be no collaboration or compromise. Thus, to have good markets and good politics, trust must be encouraged and rewarded while suspicions and debilitating manipulations must be called out and sanctioned.  Sincerity causes markets and politics to flourish for the benefit of all.

Both markets and politics thrive in states of equilibrium, where bargaining delivers a middle way and the Buddha advocated or a Mean which anchored Confucian decision-making.

When we combine three strands of thought—Hayek on dispersed knowledge, Trần Hưng Đạo on xã tắc rooted in the people, and Stephen Young on the moral capacity of market institutions—we begin to see a clearer logical structure which provides a practical answer to the original question – market politics – why not?

An effective political system cannot rely solely on centralized control, because necessary knowledge lies beyond the center’s reach. Nor can it rely solely on free, no-holds-barred, brutish competition, because without moral grounding such rivalries lead to dysfunctional and even dangerous instability. An effective political system requires a space where ideas can compete, but within a framework that ensures responsibility and stability.  What is needed is a “moral politics” to complement “moral markets”.

This is where the “market” metaphor reveals its value—not as a model, but as a principle for acquiring and then organizing knowledge and for making informed choices.

Ultimately, “Why not?” is not a question demanding a definitive answer. It is an invitation to rethink centralization and the advantages of openness, to reconsider how systems function—not to reject what exists, but to expand what is possible.

For if history—from the Trần era through the 20th century to the present—has shown one consistent truth, it is this: the strength of a society lies not in eliminating differences, but in how it uses those differences to become wiser.

And in that sense, a “market for politics”—even as a metaphor—may not be a distant idea, but rather a way of naming a long-standing need: the need for social knowledge to be heard, compared, and transformed into better choices for both the economy and politics.

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REFERENCES:  

(1)https://baotiengdan.com/2026/04/22/tbt-ha-huy-tap-phe-phan-dong-chi-nguyen-ai-quoc/

(2) https://oll.libertyfund.org/publications/reading-room/hayek-boll-12-f-a-hayek-the-use-of-knowledge-in-society-1945

(3) Stephen Young, Moral Capitalism (Berrett-Koehler, 2003); www.cauxroundtable.org

(4) James Madison, Federalist # 10, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp

(5) https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed37.asp

(6)) https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed51.asp

(7) https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed55.asp

(8) Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, New York, Doubleday and Company 1969, p. 88)

(9) Young, op. cit., p. 47

See also:

–  https://cdn.mises.org/qjae5_3_3.pdf  (COMPETITION AS A DISCOVERY PROCEDURE)

 – https://www.bbc.com/vietnamese/articles/c78n7e28xeeo  (50 năm kết thúc chiến tranh: Việt Nam, một lịch sử khác?)

– https://vi.wikisource.org/wiki/H%E1%BB%8Bch_t%C6%B0%E1%BB%9Bng_s%C4%A9

(Các bản dịch tiếng Việt của 諭諸裨將檄文 (Dụ chư tỳ tướng hịch văn) của Trần Hưng Đạo)

– https://press.uchicago.edu/books/excerpt/2011/hayek_constitution.html  (Why I am Not a Conservative)

Living under Institutional Path Dependence, Patron-Client Governance, and the Rationality of De-Risked Reform

Stephen B. Young & Đinh Hoàng Thắng

Executive Summary 

Vietnam is widely UNDERSTOOD through the lens of post-Cold War transition theory as a NATION-STATE moving gradually toward either liberal democracy or market-based convergence BUT NOT BOTH AT ONCE. This paper challenges that interpretation. Drawing on Magyar Bálint and Madlovics Bálint’s theory of post-communist regimes, combined with the stakeholder governance philosophy of the Caux Round Table (CRT) and the moral capitalism framework of Stephen B. Young, we argue that Vietnam is better understood as a stable managed-market authoritarian system embedded in patron-client networks of resource allocations (including all forms of discretionary power) .

This system is not transitional in the classic sense used in development theory, but neither is it static. It is adaptive within its own structural constraints. Reform outcomes therefore will depend less on ideological dispositions than on the internal reconfiguration of elite networks, institutional memory, and geopolitical risk management.

The central policy implication is that institutional change in Vietnam cannot be conceptualized as rupture or regime replacement. It must instead be approached as incremental, sequenced, and de-risked evolution within a constrained regime space. It will follow an evolutional trajectory keeping within boundaries set by its own cultural dynamic of legitimation.

I. BEYOND TRANSITION THEORY: VIETNAM AND THE STRUCTURE OF HYBRID ORDER 

The dominant paradigm in post-Cold War political economy theorizing assumed that liberal democracy and market capitalism represented the endpoint of institutional evolution, along the lines of Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis. This assumption shaped what was known as “transition theory,” which treated political development as a linear progression from authoritarian rule to democratic consolidation. However, empirical trajectories in Vietnam and other post-socialist systems have revealed limitations in this conceptional model.

Magyar and Madlovics demonstrate that such frameworks rely on three assumptions that are empirically unstable in hybrid regimes: the separation of political and economic spheres, the  active correspondence between formal institutions and actual power relations, and the role of the state as a neutral agent seeking public welfare. In Vietnam, none of these assumptions fully holds true.

Instead, Vietnam is better understood as having arrived at a stable position within a structured regime space characterized by the coexistence of formal institutions and parallel informal patronage coordination. In this bi-modal decision-making dynamic, markets function not as autonomous allocative systems but as embedded mechanisms within a politically structured resource distribution network. The network both provides input resources and extracts them in exchanges of value propositions. Economic liberalization therefore does not imply political liberalization; rather, it becomes an instrument for enhancing state capacity and elite coordination as more wealth is generated of which some is channeled to those systemically privileged,

Within Magyar’s typology, Vietnam aligns most closely with what he defines as a market-exploiting communist dictatorship, a regime type in which the ruling party maintains monopoly control over political authority while actively utilizing market mechanisms for growth, legitimacy, and integration into global capitalism. This configuration is not an incomplete transition to an “End of History” finish; it is a distinct equilibrium, an end-state of its own making.

The key analytical shift is from viewing Vietnam today as “moving toward” democracy to understanding it as operating within a bounded adaptive space. Movement occurs, but it is movement within constraints rather than movement toward convergence of free markets and pluralism in governance.

A central explanatory mechanism in this system is what Magyar terms the adapted political family. This refers to a networked structure in which party institutions, state agencies, and economic actors are integrated into a unified system of coordination and resource allocation. Within such systems, the boundaries between public and private authority are functionally blurred. Governance is exercised not only through formal institutions but through relational networks that determine access, opportunity, and constraint.   The moral autonomy of actors and the quality of their agency are compromised by inter-personal networks and reciprocating dyads of individuals each looking out for the other’s access to resources.

This structure helps explain a persistent paradox in Vietnam’s development: why market expansion and anti-corruption campaigns can coexist without fundamentally altering the distributional logic of the system. Reform is absorbed into the network through clever adaptations sustaining the status quo rather than qualitatively transforming it.

II. STRUCTURAL ACTORS AND THE DEMANDS OF PATERNALISTSIC AUTHORITY 

Understanding Vietnam’s institutional resilience requires moving beyond formal institutional analysis toward An inter-personal, relational, understanding of power. In Magyar’s framework, the state is not a directive, monolithic actor but a forum for coordination among elite networks. Authority is distributed through layered relationships of dependency, loyalty, and protection rather than solely through legal-rational rules.

This produces what can be analytically described as a captured state from above, in which the ruling elite simultaneously governs the institutional system and operates through its formalities to accomplish desired coordination. Unlike classical models of state capture driven by external oligarchic pressure, this configuration is internally generated and sustained by elite self-interest.

Within such a system, reform dynamics must confront paradoxes. Individuals who are most capable of initiating change are also those most embedded in and wedded to the structures that constrain it. This creates what may be called a risk-lock equilibrium. As actors ascend within the system, their exposure to institutional vulnerability decreases, while their dependence on system stability increases. Reform thus rationally becomes individually costly even when systemically beneficial. Thus a lock is created keeping perceptions of risk to individual high and unchanging.

This risk-lock dynamic is reinforced by institutional memory. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the instability experienced in several post-socialist transitions remain powerful reference points for elite risk perception in Vietnam. As a result, institutional conservatism rests not simply on ideological devotion but is deeply embedded in lived experience. What appears externally as resistance to reform is internally interpreted as prudential governance of a system functionally efficient to insiders.

At the same time, Vietnam’s development trajectory has been shaped by a gradual evolution of legitimacy narratives. Here, Stephen B. Young’s concept of moral capitalism provides a useful interpretive bridge. In this framework, legitimacy is no longer derived solely from ideological coherence but increasingly from measurable outcomes in terms of social welfare, economic performance, and institutional effectiveness.

This aligns closely with the Caux Round Table’s stakeholder governance principles, which define legitimate authority as stewardship of power in trust for all affected stakeholders rather than ownership of authority by officeholders. From this perspective, governance legitimacy becomes increasingly dependent on performance rather than ideological orthodoxy.

However, a systemic shift to the practice of a moral capitalism is structurally constrained. Because elite cohesion depends on existing distributive mechanisms, any move toward performance-based legitimacy necessarily alters established internal, inter-personal, power balances. This creates an inherent tension between maintaining system stability and benefiting in the future from undertaking adaptive reforms in the present.

III. DE-RISKED EVOLUTION: POLICY PATHWAYS WITHIN CONSTRAINED TRANSFORMATION 

The central policy question is not whether Vietnam will transform, but how institutional change can occur without triggering systemic instability. Magyar’s framework suggests that real regime evolution occurs not through crisis and zero-sum confrontations leading to rupture but through reconfiguration of coordination mechanisms within existing constraints.

From a policy perspective, this implies that reform must be understood as a process of reducing the perceived and actual risk of institutional change rather than maximizing its speed or ideological depth.

One key mechanism for enabling such evolution is the gradual shift toward performance-based legitimacy. When institutional authority is increasingly justified through economic productivity, administrative competence, and social outcomes, the ideological rigidity of the system is reduced. This does not eliminate existing power structures, but it changes the criteria by which those structures are evaluated.

For example, the Caux Round Table has pioneered assessment techniques for quantifying performance outcomes for both market enterprises and government agencies and officials.

A second mechanism involves the strengthening of institutional constraints. This does not necessarily imply Western institutional transplantation, but rather an increase in what can be called grounded predictability—the extent to which institutional behavior is governed by transparent, stable, and enforceable rules. Enhancing transparency in appointments, improving legislative oversight capacity, and institutionalizing policy evaluation mechanisms are examples of such incremental reforms. Their significance lies not in their symbolic alignment with external models, but in their capacity to reduce systemic uncertainty.

A third mechanism applies sequencing. Institutional change is more likely to succeed when it is structured in phases rather than pursued as an immediate, comprehensive, transformation. A phased approach—beginning with transparency and accountability, followed by institutional consolidation, and culminating in structural refinement—reduces uncertainty for all actors within the system. This is crucial because uncertainty, rather than policy or theoretical opposition, is often the primary driver of resistance to reform. Uncertainty intensifies perceptions of risk.

Comparative evidence from Eastern Europe suggests that successful transitions were not primarily the result of revolutionary rupture but rather of carefully sequenced institutional adjustments combined with inter-elite negotiations under conditions of external anchoring. Conversely, cases of instability often reflected making abrupt changes without having in place sufficient internal coordination capacity.

Vietnam’s situation includes a significant and unique difference in that it lacks a clear external anchoring mechanism comparable to EU accession for countries in Eastern Europe. This increases the importance of internal sequencing and elite consensus formation as stabilizing mechanisms of reform.

Conclusion: Reform as Controlled Movement in a Constrained Space 

Vietnam’s institutional trajectory cannot be adequately explained through binary categories of democracy versus authoritarianism or of transformation versus stagnation. Instead, it should be seen to be a process generating movement within a structured regime space shaped by patron-client networks, historical memory, and external anchors tied to geopolitical constraints.

The metaphor of a fearful “specter” haunting the Vietnamese elite is therefore analytically misleading if interpreted as an external force or ideological illusion. The constraints facing Vietnam are not metaphysical; they are structural and relational. They arise from the interaction between elite coordination systems, institutional design, and historical experience.

However, structural constraint does not imply immobility. Following Magyar, regimes evolve through shifts in coordination equilibrium rather than through systemic rupture. From the perspective of the Caux Round Table and Stephen B. Young’s moral capitalism, such evolution is most sustainable when legitimacy is increasingly grounded in outcomes that benefit all stakeholders.

The central policy implication is therefore clear: institutional reform in Vietnam is most viable when conceived not as transformation against the system, but as adaptive evolution within the system.

History does not present fixed endpoints. It presents structured possibilities.

And within structured constraints, opportunities for agency can remain meaningful.

 

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Footnotes (selected) 

Magyar, B. & Madlovics, B. (2022). The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes. CEU Press.
Young, S. B. (2018). Moral Capitalism.
Caux Round Table (2009). Principles for Responsible Business.
North, D. (1990). Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance.
Kornai, J. (2000). The Socialist System. Princeton University Press.
Helmke, G. & Levitsky, S. (2004). “Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics.”
O’Donnell, G. & Schmitter, P. (1986). Transitions from Authoritarian Rule.
Carothers, T. (2002). “The End of the Transition Paradigm.”

Such can be a profoundly risky turning point. Because afterwards,  systemic governance no longer follows the principle of “legitimizing power through law,” but privileges power “to selfishly legitimize itself.”

Introduction: 

Stephen B. Young, Global Executive Director, the Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism

This essay reflects on the implications of consolidating control of media and two academic institutions under the supervision of Vietnam’s Communist Party.  The author – writing under a pen name – defends the Rule of Law consistent with the Caux Round Table’s Principles for Moral Government.

The fundamental Principle for Moral Government is:

Power brings responsibility; power is a necessary moral circumstance in that it binds the actions of one to the welfare of others. Therefore, the power given by public office is held in trust for the benefit of the community and its citizens. Officials are custodians only of the powers they hold; they have no personal entitlement to office or the prerogatives thereof. … The state is the servant and agent of higher ends; it is subordinate to society. Public power is to be exercised within a framework of moral responsibility for the welfare of others. Governments that abuse their trust shall lose their authority and may be removed from office.

Second, the CRT Principles for Moral Government affirm the wise and responsible use of discourse, including free expression of opinion:

Public power, however allocated by constitutions, referendums or laws, shall rest its legitimacy in processes of communication and discourse among autonomous moral agents who constitute the community to be served by the government. Free and open discourse, embracing independent media, shall not be curtailed except to protect legitimate expectations of personal privacy, sustain the confidentiality needed for the proper separation of powers, or for the most dire of reasons relating to national security.

Third, the CRT principles for Moral Government affirm the Rule of Law as the foundation for legitimacy of public decision-making:

Only the Rule of Law is consistent with a principled approach to use of public power.

Nguyễn Hữu Quang, taking a Microscopic eye view

No need for euphemisms: the decision to transfer a wide range of key state institutions—from the national media system to the two academies—under the direct authority of the Vietnamese Communist Party’s Central Committee is unconstitutional.

This is not just another “bureaucratic restructuring,” nor is it about “strengthening the leadership role” of the Communist Party. It is a reorganization that warps the power structure as has been authorized by the Constitution for many years.

A constitution—under any regime— provides the necessary, protective, boundaries between potentially competitive institutions: the state, political parties, and society. It is not a superficial, only decorative, trapping. It is a promise to the people that power, no matter how overwhelming, must always remain within limits.

But when state institutions—belonging to the nation, funded by public resources, and carrying public authority—are transferred outright to a political organization, what is erased is not merely an administrative structure. What disappears is a definitive boundary between the State and the Party. The Party thus assumes for itself the authority of the people.

And if the Constitution has not been amended to allow this, then there is no other way to describe it than to plainly say out loud: power has suppressed  the Constitution.

NOT A LEGAL WORKAROUND — BUT STOMPING THE LAW UNDER FOOT 

For years, major changes have typically followed a familiar sequence: adjusting policy first, formalizing the law later. That is how power politely and circumspectly “worked around” institutional constraints.

But what is happening now is no longer a workaround. It is a direct suppression.

The timing of the change—before the National Assembly session scheduled for April 6—is not a technical detail. It is a political message.

And that message is clear: there is no need to wait for formal legal ratification. What the Party decides, that is the law.

If there were still respect for the Constitution, the process would begin with a constitutional amendment followed by a reordering of structures. But when reform action precedes legal authorization, it can only mean one thing: the law has lost its power.

Taking such a shift comes with many risks. From this point forward, the system no longer legitimizes power through law, but allows power to legitimize itself.

In other words, the Constitution ceases to be a foundation of the nation and becomes just a byproduct of history.

“SITTING ON” THE CONSTITUTION — NO LONGER A METAPHOR BUT A REALITY

There were stages in the past when power needed to maintain respectful appearances—when a veneer of constitutionality was thought necessary for its legitimacy.

But when a structural decision is made without seeking any constitutional approval, then even that veneer is devalued as superfluous.

This is when metaphor becomes reality.

The Constitution—rather than the apex of the legal system—is reduced to nothing more than a document capriciously revised at will. Its words no longer constrain power; the entire document is no more than a tool in the service of  power.

What else can this subjugation be called if not “sitting on the Constitution”?

What is striking is that such disrespect is no longer concealed. It is open, direct, and requires no justification.

That disrespect reveals a system which has crossed a psychic threshold: it no longer feels the need to pretend to follow rules.

“NOT LIKE ANY OTHER” DECISION —THAT IS THE PROBLEM

Supporters may call this decision to place state functions under the Party “exceptional.” But in politics, being “unlike any other” is rarely a sign of thoughtful evolution. More often, it signals willful radicalization.

Even in highly centralized systems, certain limits still exist:

• In China, major academies and research institutions remain within the government system.

• In Russia, despite tight media control, the state retains the legal role of authorizing public institutions.

Why don’t the Chinese Communists and Russian autocrats erase that boundary between personal power and constitutional legitimacy entirely?

Because they understand one thing: if the state dissolves into a just a factional political organization, the entire legal structure of the country loses its meaning, encouraging lawlessness across the board

The state, even when subordinate in practice, must still exist as a formally independent entity. That is a condition for maintaining international relations, signing agreements, assuming responsibility, and functioning within the global system.

But the current decision goes further than re-arranging supervisory control relationships:   it is direct and explicit absorption of state functions by a sub-state apparatus.  It is a tail wagging a dog.

This is no longer “the Party leading the state.” It is the Party replacing the state.

And that is precisely why it is “unlike any other.”

WHEN MEDIA NO LONGER BELONGS TO THE NATION

Radio, television, and news agencies are, by nature, the public voice of a nation—not of a party, but, ideally, of the collective.

They are founded with taxpayers’ money, operated with public resources, and represent the country as a body-politic both domestically and internationally.

When these institutions are transferred to a political organization, what changes is not just governance. The very nature of the national voice is what changes.

From such a point on, there is no longer a “Voice of Vietnam” in the national sense—only the voice of a political organization purporting to speak in the name of the nation.

This distinction is not superficial. It is elemental. The one can never become the other.

A country without a voice independent from its ruling organization loses part of its internal sovereignty.

WHEN SCIENCE TOO BECOMES AN INSTRUMENT OF POWER

If media provides the flow of information, science is the foundation of knowledge.

The academies, in principle, must safeguard intellectual independence, provide policy critique, and generate knowledge free from short-term political objectives.

But when they are placed under the direct command of a political organization, an unavoidable question arises: how much intellectual space remains for academic freedom?

Science cannot develop in an environment where conclusions are predetermined. Research cannot survive if its goal is not the pursuit of truth, but compliance with elite narratives.

At that point, science becomes something history has seen before: a tool for legitimizing willful self-interest.

And once science is politicized, the consequences extend far beyond laboratories and conferences—they spread across society, from education to technology to national competitiveness.

AN INEVITABLE CHAIN OF CONSEQUENCES

A decision like this is not a singularity. It belongs to  a familiar pattern seen in centralized systems:

• Concentration of power in a single center
• Central control over the entire information system
• Elimination of space for dissent
• Politicization of knowledge and science
• Gradual isolation from the global ecosystem

There are no exceptions.

• When information is monopolized, errors go undetected.
• When errors go undetected, they accumulate.
• When they accumulate long enough, they conjoin and erupt all at once—often when the system encounters a serious weakness  .
• History has demonstrated this repeatedly.

THE COST MAY BE DELAYED – BUT INEVITABLY IT WILL BE PAID

Advocates of the by-passing the Constitution might argue that the decision will guarantee “stability”.

But stability based on absolute control is not sustainable. It can only cover the surface of society, with no more adhesive holding power than cellophane tape.

Beneath such surface stability lies:

• A system without self-correction mechanisms 
• A suffocated scientific environment
• A controlled information landscape
• A society gradually losing all nourishing connections with the world
• An economy that cannot modernize 
• A system that will not become either effective or efficient because all criticism is treated as a threat.

CONCLUSION: HOW MUCH DAMAGE HAS BEEN DONE?

The pertinent question now is no longer whether the system is moving toward centralization.

Rather, the important question is: how much centralization of power has been consolidated?

• When the Constitution is no longer a constraint, but a utensil. 
• When the state is no longer an independent sovereign entity, but only the extension of a partisan organization. 
• When both media and science are directed from a single center of power. 
• Then this is no longer a sign warning of danger ahead. It is already a social condition.

A social condition in which power no longer needs to conceal itself, justify itself, or limit itself.

And history has made one thing clear: systems like this do not collapse from a lack of power.

They collapse because they lose the ability to self-correct.

The question is not whether destabilizing consequences will come.

It is: when?

[This essay is sponsored by the Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism (CRT) as a contribution to public policy discussions in Vietnam and the United States on Vietnam’s opportunities for growth and development, in the context of the CRT’s global ethical principles for capitalism and government]

I Ching Hexagram “Lake over Thunder – Following” (隨): What to do When Domestic and Foreign Policies Are Two Sides of the Same Coin?

Following external pressures while ignoring the will of one’s own people… Internal changes such as bureaucratic reshuffling, administrative downsizing, or inspections of major projects already underway may satisfy certain factions, but they have not yet liberated the vast social energies that have long been constrained.

 

Stephen B. Young & Nguyễn Thế Hùng

 

Introduction: The Political Wisdom of the “I Ching” 

 

In the “I Ching” (Book of Changes), the hexagram “Lake over Thunder – Following” (隨) conveys a profound political principle: when historical circumstances undergo powerful transformation, leaders cannot simply resist the currents of change. Instead, they must align themselves with the evolving patterns of the time and guide their nation through the turbulence.

The symbolic structure of this hexagram is revealing. The upper trigram is “Lake” (Dui), associated with joy, openness, and social harmony. The lower trigram is “Thunder” (Zhen), representing sudden movement, awakening, and dramatic change. The imagery suggests a society experiencing powerful forces of transformation beneath the surface, while the leadership above must maintain balance, responsiveness, and harmony.

The classical judgment for this hexagram reads: “Following. Supreme success. Perseverance brings benefit. No blame.”

In other words, when a society responds to change according to fundamental principles, it can achieve prosperity, benefit the many, and maintain long-term stability.

 

However, “following” in the I Ching does not mean blind compliance. The text consistently emphasizes that true success arises only when strength and flexibility are balanced, and when internal legitimacy aligns with external adaptation.

Viewed through this lens, a major tension becomes visible in contemporary Vietnam: foreign policy seeks flexibility and integration with the world, while domestic political structures remain constrained by outdated institutional patterns.

When the two sides of the same system operate according to contradictory logics, the balance described in the hexagram can begin to break down.

1. Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba: Global Thunder Before the Storm 

The inner trigram of this hexagram is Thunder (Zhen). In nature, thunder never erupts without warning. It is always preceded by the accumulation of dark clouds, pressure, and storm.

Recent developments in several countries illustrate this dynamic clearly.

In Venezuela, years of economic collapse, corruption, and authoritarian governance have produced extreme levels of social frustration. The anger of the population accumulated over decades before erupting into political upheaval.

In Iran, economic crisis has intensified as currency depreciation and inflation erode living standards. Public dissatisfaction has triggered waves of protests and growing instability within the political system.

In Cuba, the situation may be even more stark. Poverty and stagnation are visible throughout cities and rural areas. The country has experienced widespread blackouts, shortages of fuel, and lack of food supplies—clear signs of a system exhausted after decades of isolation and inefficient governance.

These examples illustrate an important political law: A regime may survive for a long time through political control, but without institutional and economic reform it eventually faces systemic crisis.

In many cases, the trigger for change is not purely domestic. External pressures often accelerate the moment of transformation.

The assertive foreign policy of Donald Trump toward countries such as Venezuela, Iran, and potentially Cuba should not be interpreted solely as a geopolitical struggle for resources like oil. Rather, it may function as a trigger mechanism within a larger historical process.

From the perspective of the I Ching, such actions correspond to the word “Yuan” (Origin or Foundational Principle) in the hexagram’s judgment. They attempt to reshape the underlying principles governing international order.

 

The key question, therefore, is not whether change is coming. The key question is which national leaders will recognize the emerging principles of the new era and adapt accordingly.

2. Should Vietnam “Follow the Times” in This Global Storm? 

Navigating between competing great powers is not automatically equivalent to practicing the wisdom of the Hexagram “Following”.

Vietnam currently faces intense geopolitical pressures. It must maintain relations with China, while simultaneously deepening economic and strategic cooperation with the United States, Europe, and other major powers.

In this context, the upcoming visit of Vietnamese Communist Party General Secretary Tô Lâm to Beijing fits the logic of pragmatic adjustment: one cannot ignore geopolitical realities and must adapt to protect national interests.

Yet the I Ching warns that genuine “following” only produces positive results when it rests upon moral legitimacy and a stable ethical center.

Without such a center, flexibility risks degenerating into dependence.

True strategic autonomy requires something deeper than diplomatic maneuvering. It requires internal legitimacy rooted in the trust and participation of the people.

3. Vietnam’s Greatest Paradox 

This brings us to Vietnam’s most fundamental contradiction today.

Vietnam is seeking deep integration into the global system—economically, technologically, and strategically. It has signed numerous trade agreements, expanded foreign investment, and established comprehensive strategic partnerships with many countries.

Yet domestically, the political system continues to severely limit fundamental civil liberties, including freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and broader civic participation.

This creates the central paradox: Following external change while not following the will of the people at home.

Internal reforms—such as administrative restructuring, anti-corruption campaigns, or oversight of large state projects—may resolve conflicts among political factions. But these actions have not yet unleashed the enormous social and creative potential of Vietnam’s nearly 100 million citizens.

If Vietnam truly wishes to “follow the time,” it must liberate the productive energies of its society.

 

A country cannot realistically aspire to become a Comprehensive Strategic Partner (CSP) with democratic nations while simultaneously maintaining a political system that restricts core civil liberties.

In the long run, foreign policy and domestic governance cannot travel on separate paths.

The I Ching teaches that yin and yang must remain balanced. If one side develops while the other is suppressed, the entire system becomes unstable.

4. The “Illusion of Stability” in Closed Systems 

One of the greatest dangers faced by closed political systems is self-deception produced by their own propaganda structures.

When information flows are tightly controlled, ruling elites may come to believe that society remains stable—even when deep transformations are occurring beneath the surface.

This produces what might be called an illusion of stability.

Propaganda does not only reassure the population; it can also prevent those in power from accurately perceiving the real condition of the country they govern.

In the digital age, however, this situation is becoming increasingly unsustainable.

As Vietnam integrates more deeply into the global economy and as internet connectivity expands, citizens inevitably compare their own political and economic realities with those of other societies.

Information, knowledge, and global benchmarks are steadily reshaping how people understand:

• their rights
• their opportunities
• and the legitimacy of political institutions.

5. Following the Time — But Ultimately Following the People 

The deeper message of Hexagram Following is not that societies should simply align with the strongest power.

Rather, it teaches that the ultimate force in history is the collective will of the people.

Wise diplomacy is necessary. But diplomacy cannot substitute for internal reform.

If a country truly seeks to integrate into the modern world—economically, technologically, and politically—it must build institutions based on:

 

• rule of law
• transparency
• and respect for human rights.

These principles are not merely moral ideals. In today’s global system, they function increasingly as structural requirements for sustainable development and international credibility.

Without such foundations, foreign policy strategies become temporary patchwork solutions.

Democratic societies cannot be indefinitely misled or manipulated. Their governments operate under real constitutions, competitive elections, and the constant scrutiny of voters.

Even when policymakers act from pragmatic interests rather than moral conviction, they must still respond to ethical expectations embedded within democratic institutions.

The earlier intellectual work on Moral Capitalism, as well as the continuing discussions within the CRT (Caux Round Table) community, reflect precisely this fundamental principle: societies endure when economic power is aligned with moral legitimacy.

Conclusion: 

The hexagram “Lake over Thunder – Following” teaches that political wisdom lies in recognizing when the fundamental principles of an era are changing. To recognize that shift is to understand how to move with the current of history rather than against it. But the defining currents of the 21st century are not limited to geopolitical competition among great powers. They also include:

• the rise of civil society
• the global diffusion of rule-of-law principles
• and the growing human demand for dignity, freedom, and civic participation.

If domestic and foreign policy are understood as two sides of the same coin, the strategic choice facing any nation becomes clearer. A country can adapt to the direction of history, reform its institutions, and integrate authentically into the international community. Or it can continue along an older trajectory—one that many nations have already followed, only to discover too late that delaying reform merely magnifies the crises that eventually arrive.

Stephen B. Young, JD, is a retired Dean and Professor of Law at Hamline Law School.  His book Moral Capitalism is being published in Vietnamese. His scholarly works on Vietnam include The Tradition of Human Rights in China and Vietnam, a study of classical jurisprudence in China and Vietnam. When serving in the United States Agency for International Development in Saigon (1968-1971) he studied the I Ching (Kinh Dich) with Mr. Duong Thai Ban, a noted master of the art of consulting the ancient hexagrams. He has been interviewed by the BBC in Vietnamese on his book Kissinger’s Betrayal: How American Lost the Vietnam War and has been published on the Tieng Dan website.

Dr. Nguyễn Thế Hùng, a Vietnamese physicist holding a Ph.D. in Physics, is a scholar known for his strong scientific foundation and analytical approach to philosophical and cultural studies. With a deep interest in exploring ancient principles, he brings a modern scientific perspective to traditional Eastern thought. His latest publication on I Ching (Kinh Dịch), one of the oldest philosophical classics of East Asia, reflects this interdisciplinary vision.

In the book, Dr. Nguyễn seeks to interpret the I Ching—a system centered on the concepts of yin and yang, transformation, and the dynamic nature of the universe—through the lens of contemporary scientific reasoning. Rather than treating it solely as a mystical or divinatory text, he approaches it as a symbolic framework that embodies profound insights into change, order, and human experience.

Vietnam and the United States Confront Multidimensional Strategic Variables: some are only optics but others have resilient substance

 

Introduction by Professor Stephen Young  

Unlike September 2024—when mixed signals and discordant domestic voices accompanied Vietnam’s high-level engagement with Washington—General Secretary To Lam’s visit to Washington on February 18 – 20) unfolded with more controlled message discipline and more obvious choreography. Over two days, the Vietnamese leader not only attended the inaugural session of President Donald Trump’s Gaza Peace Board but also secured something more politically consequential: a formal meeting with the American President at the White House.

After three previously unsuccessful attempts to arrange direct talks, the doors of the White House finally opened. The handshake, the carefully worded public praise, and the optics of mutual respect were unmistakable.

 

HOÀNG TRƯỜNG (PhD)

And yet: beneath the hopeful symbolism lies a more complex strategic landscape. Vietnam–U.S. relations are not stalled—but neither have they achieved a lasting structural break with the past. Instead, they remain in a transitional phase shaped by multidimensional uncertainties: institutional tensions within the United States, geoeconomic rivalry centered on China, and internal political calibrations in Vietnam.

This review examines the strategic consequences of the meeting—not merely as a diplomatic event, but as a node within a broader matrix of power, legitimacy, trade negotiation, and geopolitical balancing.

1. The Meaning of Access:  Washington’s Recognition of Party Leadership in Vietnam 

One of the most consequential dimensions of the visit lies not in what was signed, but in who was received—and how.

To Lam arrived in Washington not as head of state, nor as prime minister, but as General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam.  He does not hold a state office. Yet in Vietnam’s political system, the General Secretary of the Party is the supreme decision-maker, positioned over the Constitution and the laws

This distinction once posed a diplomatic complication for Washington. When General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong was invited to the Oval Office in 2015 by President Barack Obama, the meeting triggered a deliberate institutional adjustment in American protocol. Former U.S. Ambassador to Hanoi, Ted Osius, later described the extensive effort required to persuade Washington bureaucrats that the Party leader—not just the state president—was Vietnam’s highest authority in fact.

That meeting marked a turning point. It established a presidential–general secretary axis in bilateral engagement.

By contrast, President Trump appeared entirely comfortable hosting To Lam. Public remarks highlighted Vietnam’s importance and conveyed personal warmth. The ease of the interaction reflects how normalized the recognition of Vietnam’s Party leadership has become in U.S. diplomacy.

Strategically, this matters in two ways:

External legitimacy: It reinforces To Lam’s status as Vietnam’s principal interlocutor with the West.

Internal authority: It allows him to demonstrate to domestic audiences that he commands direct access to the world’s leading power. For a leader consolidating his position after the 14th Party Congress—and no longer holding the presidency—such symbolism carries weight.

2. Multilateral Cover, Bilateral Priority 

Officially, To Lam’s presence in Washington centered on his participation in the inaugural session of President Trump’s Board of Peace. 

Vietnam positioned itself as an early supporter of the effort. While President Trump announced that participating countries in the new international entity had pledged over $7 billion for Gaza reconstruction, Vietnam was not publicly listed among major financial contributors. Instead, Vietnamese officials later indicated future possible contributions in peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, and post-conflict reconstruction support.

Yet the full bilateral schedule revealed the real priority for the two leaders: trade and technology.

Meetings included discussions with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and other economic officials. The Board of Peace discussion of Gaza provided diplomatic cover for what was, for Vietnam and the United States, fundamentally a commercial and strategic negotiation.

This dual-layer approach reflected Vietnam’s general foreign policy approach: using multilateral engagement as a platform to open up opportunities  bilateral negotiations.

3. Trade Tensions: Surplus, Tariffs, and Structural Friction 

The economic relationship between Vietnam and the United States is both extensive and contentious.

Vietnam’s trade surplus with the U.S. remains substantial. Washington has imposed a 20% tariff on Vietnamese imports and up to 40% on goods deemed to be Chinese products transshipped from Vietnam. Six negotiation rounds have yet to produce a comprehensive agreement resolving American concerns

Two structural concerns dominate U.S. calculations:

• Persistent trade imbalance.
• Allegations that Vietnam serves as a conduit for Chinese goods circumventing American tariffs.

Vietnam’s response to these concerns during To Lam’s visit was clear: visible rebalancing.

Agreements reportedly totaling more than $30 billion were showcased, prominently including aircraft purchases involving Boeing:

• Sun PhuQuoc Airways agreed to buy 40 Boeing 787-9 aircraft.
• Vietnam Airlines confirmed purchases of 50 Boeing 737-8 aircraft.
• Vietjet announced financing arrangements tied to additional Boeing aircraft acquisitions.

These transactions serve a dual purpose: commercial modernization of Vietnam and political signaling.

However, industry observers note that Vietnamese carriers—particularly Vietjet—have repeatedly signed memoranda of understanding (MOUs), restructuring agreements, and phased contracts over the past decade. Public announcements often do not clarify whether such deals represent new commitments or restructured previous orders.

In political terms, however, precision may matter less than perception. Large procurement announcements reinforce the narrative that Vietnam is actively narrowing its trade gap with the United States.   And President Trump loves to announce that foreign cash is flowing into America.

Thus, President Trump publicly acknowledged Vietnam’s efforts to rebalance – who buys from whom? —a domestic political win for him, even absent a signed trade agreement with Vietnam.

 

4. Export Controls and Technology Access: A Conditional Opening 

The most concrete outcome of the White House meeting was President Trump’s pledge to direct agencies to remove Vietnam from strategic export control categories D1–D3.

If implemented, this could expand Vietnam’s access to:

• American advanced semiconductors.
• American Artificial Intelligence technologies.
• American dual-use systems critical to industrial upgrading.

For Vietnam, this aligns with its ambition to move its economy up the global value chain and integrate Vietnamese companies into next-generation supply chains.

Yet President Trump’s pledge sits awkwardly within a volatile institutional environment.

On the same day as Trump met with his Vietnamese counterpart, the U.S. Supreme Court revoked Trump’s executive authority to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).  Trump then immediately signaled his intention to pursue alternative legal routes under the Trade Act of 1974.

This episode illustrates a broader point: U.S. trade policy is currently shaped by friction among executive ambition, judicial oversight, and congressional scrutiny.

For Vietnam, this means that any prospective commitment from the White House must pass through domestic institutional filters. Policy durability cannot be assumed.

5. The China Variable: Transshipment and Strategic Suspicion 

Vietnam’s position within the serious U.S.–China rivalry is a central strategic variable.

Washington has grown increasingly attentive to transshipment practices—where Chinese goods are routed through third countries to evade tariffs. Congressional testimony has emphasized preventing such “leakage.”

Vietnam’s geographic proximity to China and deep integration into regional supply chains make it particularly scrutinized for assisting its neighbor gain access to US customers

If Vietnam is perceived as a backdoor channel for Chinese exports, punitive tariffs could be imposed by the United States. Conversely, overly restrictive Vietnamese measures against Chinese-linked investment could strain Hanoi–Beijing ties.

Thus, a balancing act defines Vietnam’s contemporary strategic posture:

• Maintain economic interdependence with China.
• Expand strategic partnership with the United States.
• Avoid formal alignment with either.

To Lam’s White House meeting may have strengthened reciprocal trust—but such trust remains conditioned on verifiable trade compliance.

 

6. Media Strategy and Narrative Construction 

An underexamined but strategically important dimension of the visit was narrative management.

Vietnamese media prominently highlighted digital displays in Times Square and a Washington Times article praising Vietnam’s proactive diplomacy. The latter appeared under an “advertisement” label, reflecting a sponsored placement.

Such media practices are not unprecedented; Vietnam has used similar strategies during previous high-level visits. Domestically, they serve to project international recognition and prestige.

For To Lam, narrative control was especially significant. Unlike September 2024—when online commentary and dissenting voices surfaced—this visit was subject to tighter domestic messaging discipline.

In political terms, such management of optics is a form of power consolidation on To Lam’s behalf.

7. Domestic Political Implications 

The domestic implications of the visit may be as important for Vietnam as the foreign policy outcomes.

To Lam previously served briefly as Vietnam’s President before consolidating his role solely as General Secretary. His continuing to operate internationally as Vietnam’s de facto head of state reinforces a Party-centered structure of national authority for the Vietnamese.

For internal Party audiences, the White House reception strengthens To Lam’s standing. It signals that he can command Western respect without diluting Vietnam’s political model.

However, risks remain.

In Vietnam, segments of ideological conservatives and veterans—whose political identity remains shaped by the “anti-American resistance” narrative—may view deepening U.S. ties with caution. Visible warmth with Washington could prompt calls for renewed emphasis on ideological vigilance against “peaceful evolution” – the importation into Vietnam of decentralizing and democratizing reforms.

Thus, external diplomatic successes must be balanced against internal ideological counterforces.

8. From Symbolism to Structure: What Would a Breakthrough Look Like? 

What would constitute a genuine strategic breakthrough?

Three developments would signal structural transformation:

1. A comprehensive bilateral trade agreement institutionalized over and above executive discretion.
2. Formal recognition under US trade law of Vietnam as a market economy. 
3. Ending American export control restrictions backed by congressional authority.

None of these steps occurred during To Lam’s visit.

Instead, the Vietnam/US bilateral relationship remains one of incremental adjustments.

Conclusion: Transitional, Not Transformational 

The February White House meeting between President Donald Trump and General Secretary To Lam was symbolically significant and politically useful for both sides.

For Washington, it reinforced influence in Southeast Asia without formal alliance commitments.

For Hanoi, it consolidated leadership legitimacy and advanced technology access negotiations.

Yet the relationship has not entered a new structural phase.

It remains in transition—shaped by:

• Institutional tension within the U.S. political system among the Presidency, the Congress, and the courts.
• Differing Strategic needs on the part of China and the United States.
• Unresolved domestic political differences within Vietnam.

The handshake mattered. The optics mattered. The promise on export controls mattered.

But transformation requires institutionalization of mutual collaboration and respect.

Until only political commitments harden into legally resilient frameworks, Vietnam–U.S. relations will continue advancing—carefully, conditionally, and in response to the differing influences of multidimensional strategic variables.