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• Introduced by Professor Stephen B. Young, Global Executive Director of the Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism; author The Tradition of Human Rights in China and Vietnam
• Written by Former Ambassador Hoang Thang Dinh, Ph.D. in Political Science and Fellow of the Caux Round Table

What comes next for Vietnam in the twenty-first century?

A TRANSFORMING VIETNAM IN A TRANSFORMING WORLD

If Resilient Continuity is the capacity not to disappear, and Maturity is the capacity to become a activist conscious of who one is and what one has to do, then Opening Up poses a more difficult question: What will Vietnam transform to use  its freedom to choose in a world where  all the rules of the game are themselves changing at the same time.

This is no longer the relatively familiar world experienced during the decades following the Cold War, when globalization appeared to be an ever-widening current of human progress, markets seemed destined to become increasingly integrated, and it was still possible to distinguish with some confidence the demands of economics and security, technology and geopolitics. Those boundaries are now becoming blurred. Tariffs can serve as strategic instruments; semiconductors have become matters of national security; data and artificial intelligence are generating new forms of power; and supply chains simultaneously bind economies together and expose their vulnerabilities to one another.

It may therefore be premature to describe what is emerging simply as a “new world order.” An order implies rules that have already acquired a certain degree of stability. What we are witnessing looks more like a transforming global configuration: the old has not disappeared, the new has not yet taken shape; competition and cooperation coexist; and economic interdependence does not eliminate strategic rivalry but can instead create new sources of vulnerability.

For Vietnam, this uncertainty brings both danger and opportunity.

It is dangerous because a medium-sized country bordering China, heavily dependent on international trade and deeply embedded in cross-border supply chains, cannot easily insulate itself from systemic shocks originating from abroad. Yet precisely because the system is in transition, strategic and tactical spaces for choice have not been entirely closed off. A country does not have to become a great power in order to acquire strategic value. In a networked world, a nation’s position increasingly depends not only on how large it is, but also on what it connects, what capabilities it possesses, and how much others need what it can provide.

Opening Up therefore does not pose the question of whom Vietnam should “side with.” It asks a different question: What kind of activist must Vietnam become if it is to make its own choices and not have those choices made for it by others?

18. FROM THE CURSE OF GEOGRAPHY TO THE CAPACITY TO CHOOSE

Geography has been and still is among the most consequential drivers of Vietnamese history.

A long, narrow country facing the South China Sea, situated where continental East Asia meets Southeast Asia, and sharing a border with an immense center of power to the north: this geographical structure has brought opportunities for exchange, but also incoming pressures with which virtually every generation of Vietnamese has had to contend.

One may call this a “curse of geography,” provided that the word curse is understood not as destiny but as a problem that can never be removed from the table. Vietnam cannot choose its neighbor, but it can choose how to live beside that neighbor. It cannot change China’s size, but it can change its own strength, the breadth of its relationships, and the costs that any potential intruder must consider before attempting to exert its pressure upon the Vietnamese.

Vietnamese history, in this sense, is not merely a history of struggling against geography. It is also a history of learning how to use geography.

Looking upon the Bạch Đằng estuary, Nguyễn Trãi once wrote:

“The mountains and rivers form a natural stronghold;
Here heroes of old established their renown.”

Nature may create thế — a favorable configuration or strategic position — but human beings turn that position into history. The natural feature of Bạch Đằng did not win battles by itself. Mountains and rivers can provide terrain; they cannot provide strategy, organization, will, or timing.

This is even more true in the twenty-first century.

The South China Sea today is not merely a space of competing sovereignty claims. It is also part of one of the world’s most important maritime trading corridors. Vietnam’s geography is therefore simultaneously a vulnerability and an asset of connectivity. But geography becomes a strategic asset only when a country can convert location into capability.

A well-situated seaport is not yet a logistics hub. A country located within global supply chains does not necessarily control any critical link in those chains. A country that attracts foreign factories does not automatically acquire the technology, data, intellectual property, or design capabilities behind them. Nor does being courted by several great powers necessarily give a country greater freedom of choice if its economy and institutions remain dependent upon resources it does not control. How then does a country “add value” to the global economy so that others seek its collaboration and honor its desires? 

This is where the concept I call the “comprehensive entanglement” of Vietnam–China relations becomes particularly important.

The relationship between Vietnam and China cannot be reduced to a “win-lose” binary of friendship or confrontation. This complex entanglement of two peoples intersects with almost every major paradox of Vietnamese history: cultural proximity and differentiation; borrowing and resistance to assimilation; war and accommodation; asymmetry of power; party-to-party relations; the land border; the South China Sea; trade; supply chains; security; and the perennial problem of national autonomy.

Reducing dependence on China therefore cannot mean escaping all relationships with China. Geography does not offer Vietnam that option, nor would its national interest require such a simple-minded choice.

The challenge is to move from asymmetric dependence toward manageable interdependence.

That requires a perspective more sober than either anti-Chinese sentiment or illusions created by the rhetoric of friendship. China is at once an unavoidable neighbor, a major market and supplier, and a great power whose interests do not always coincide with those of Vietnam. Precisely because this relationship is so broad, deep, and geographically immediate, autonomy cannot be protected by well-phrased diplomatic declarations alone. It must be institutionalized in economic, technological, defense, institutional, and international-networking capabilities.

This produces an important paradox: to live independently beside a great power, the most important step may not be to reduce every connection with that power, but to increase the number of other external relationships and internal capabilities upon which it can rely.

This is why “multilateralization and diversification” become substantially advantageous only when they produce greater freedom of choice.

If strategic inputs still come overwhelmingly from one source; if exports remain vulnerable to a handful of markets; if core technologies must still be acquired from abroad; and if domestic firms remain concentrated in activities goods and services which can easily be relocated elsewhere, then having more diplomatic partners does not necessarily bring about greater strategic autonomy. 

Vietnam has often been described as being relatively successful in hedging among the major powers, aided by its geostrategic location, expanding network of relationships, and growing importance in reconfigured supply chains. Yet the long-term limit of such “in-betweenness” is equally clear: Vietnam’s position will ultimately depend on whether it can convert a favorable location into institutional capabilities that are difficult for others to replace.  Vietnam can’t change its location; it can only deploy human and social capitals to make the most of that location and its possibilities – most importantly the possibilities to be realized by its people.

To overcome the curse of geography, therefore, does not mean defeating geography.

It means refusing to allow geography to dictate one’s place in history and world affairs.

19. FROM “STANDING IN BETWEEN” TO PARTICIPATING IN NETWORKS

For many years, Vietnam’s position has been described through metaphors such as “balancing,” “hedging,” “bamboo diplomacy,” or standing somewhat in-between the great powers. Such descriptions capture part of the reality of a country determined not to be drawn fully into major-power confrontation. Yet they can also create an illusion: that the world is essentially a chessboard dominated by a few major players, while Vietnam’s task is mainly to find a relatively safe square on which to stand.

The issue can be explored at a deeper level. The Vietnamese historian Trần Quốc Vượng once argued that one of the great and complex theoretical questions was the mutually conditioning relationship between entities called nation-states and the larger whole that we call human or world history, with yet another layer in between: regions and civilizations. In his view, this dimension of mutuality was notably underdeveloped in Marxist historiography. His formulation helps us avoid two opposite errors: treating national history as an isolated ecosystem, or dissolving it into an abstract universalism.

Vietnam can be imagined as a drop of water in the ocean. The drop has properties of its own, yet it cannot exist outside the ocean tides, currents, and storms of the greater sea all send it here or there. But the relationship is not entirely one-way. The ocean itself consists of countless drops, and its great currents emerge from interactions among innumerable smaller elements. Vietnam is shaped by the world, but through its choices, capabilities, and connections, Vietnam also participates in shaping a part of the world in which it lives.

This perspective is particularly appropriate to the present global configuration. Power is no longer distributed only among states; it also flows through overlapping networks of technology, finance, energy, data, and supply chains. A country may cooperate with one partner on security, depend upon another for technology, have its largest export market in a third, while simultaneously adapting to regulatory systems established by several different centers of power. The nation-state has not disappeared under globalization. Rather, it must learn to exercise its agency in an environment where sovereignty increasingly takes advantage of interdependence.

This is the ideal of associative power, which is more fluid, collaborative, multi-vectored, that either hard power or soft power.  Through association – checks and balances leading to partnerships, seeking equilibrium – one people can gain lasting benefits from many others.

One striking manifestation is the emerging division of the global economy around the United States, China, and the European Union. Sebastian Contin Trillo-Figueroa has described one aspect of this process as “trifurcation”: not a simple division into two opposing blocs, but the emergence of overlapping and competing legal-economic spaces. Tariffs, export controls, technology standards, data rules, investment screening, and extraterritorial enforcement are increasingly instruments of geoeconomic power. A firm or country may therefore operate simultaneously within several networks whose rules are not always compatible.

Yet power within this system does not belong only to its largest actors. Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, Taiwan, and other economies that are not superpowers occupy critical positions because they possess technologies, equipment, or production capabilities that global value chains cannot readily replace. In a networked world, power is therefore measured not only by territory, population, or military assets, but also by the ability to occupy a position whose absence would create difficulties elsewhere in the system.

This reality demands that Vietnam must move beyond the mentality of merely “standing in between.” If the world is only a chessboard of great powers, smaller states must principally learn how not to be crushed between larger pieces. But if the world is also a network, a medium-sized country can increase its autonomy by becoming a valuable node within that network. The strategic question is no longer simply where Vietnam should position itself between the United States and China, but what Vietnam can create or possess that important networks will themselves need and so will reach out to Vietnam with favorable proposals.

This shift in strategic thinking from a focus on position to one of building capability is fundamental. Geography largely gives a country its position; capabilities must be built. 

The idea of a strategic chokepoint must therefore be understood more broadly than a strait on a map. A twenty-first-century chokepoint may be a maritime route, but it may also be a manufacturing technology, a particular semiconductor, a critical mineral, a technical standard, a data resource, a payment system, or a specialized stage of a supply chain. Vietnam cannot and need not control all such links. What matters is identifying areas where geography, human resources, and organizational capability can be combined to create value that is sufficiently important and sufficiently difficult to replace.

Artificial intelligence now intensifies the significance of this challenge. For countries that are still catching up, AI offers possibilities for narrowing certain gaps, but it can also create an additional layer of dependence. A society may use millions of AI tools and still remain primarily a consumer if its data, computing infrastructure, models, intellectual property, and most of the economic value reside elsewhere. The challenge, therefore, is not merely to adopt AI quickly but to move fast without moving blindly: to exploit new technology while developing the people, data, and capabilities necessary to control at least part of the value it generates.

A broader principle is visible here: technology can amplify the capabilities of an activist, but it cannot create the intentionality needed to become such an existential actor. A country lacking the capacity to choose may acquire the most advanced technologies and still operate largely under conditions established elsewhere. A country that knows what it needs and can organize itself accordingly may use the same technology to enlarge its own room for action.

From this perspective, an idea first developed decades ago may deserve to be reconsidered under new conditions. P&DOWN — Partnership, Democratization, Organizing, Wisdom, Networking — was originally conceived as a way of thinking about the capacities Vietnam would need in the post-Cold War world. There is no need here to develop the entire paradigm. But its two outward-facing elements have acquired new meanings. Partnership should mean not merely having more partners, but having more choices; Networking should mean not merely accumulating relationships, but making Vietnam a valuable component of networks that others themselves have an interest in sustaining. Partnership and Networking thus become enhancements to sustaining autonomy.

Yet this brings us back to the Vietnamese as a “drop of water.” Opening oneself to the ocean does not mean dissolving into it. The broader the connections, the more important endogenous capacity becomes, because a network increases the power of a country only when that country has something of value to bring into the network. Otherwise, integration may enlarge markets and produce growth without proportionately enlarging freedom of choice.

The necessary transition is therefore not from “standing in between” to “choosing sides,” but from standing in between to participating, from participating to creating value, and from creating value to acquiring the capacity to help shape the networks to which one belongs. Vietnam may remain only one drop in the vast ocean of human history, but maturity means understanding that this drop is both carried by larger currents and capable of contributing to the currents themselves.

Diplomacy, in that sense, can no longer be merely the art of finding a safe position between external forces. It must become part of national capability: transforming geography into connectivity, connectivity into value, and value into freedom of choice. Only then can Vietnam move from sitting on the chessboard to participating in shaping moves in the game.

20. FROM INTEGRATION TO ENDOGENOUS CAPACITY

During the decades of Đổi Mới economics, international integration has been one of Vietnam’s most consequential strategic choices. From a relatively closed economy, Vietnam has become deeply engaged in global trade, attracted large flows of foreign investment, expanded its export markets, and entered numerous transnational production networks. Yet this very success raises the question that defines the next stage: Does deeper participation in the world necessarily make a country proportionately stronger?

Not automatically. Integration can generate growth without creating sufficient autonomy. It can place a country inside supply chains without enabling it to control the activities where the greatest value is created. An economy can become a major exporter while remaining heavily dependent on external inputs, components, technologies, and markets. During favorable periods these limitations may remain obscured; when geoeconomic competition intensifies, they quickly become sources of vulnerability.

We therefore need to distinguish openness from the capacity to open up. Openness without more measures the extent to which an economy is connected with the outside world. The capacity for opening up concerns whether those connections can be converted into knowledge, technology, enterprises, human capital, and capabilities of one’s own. A country is genuinely open not merely because goods and capital cross its borders easily, but because its society can learn, absorb, innovate, and ultimately create value that others seek from it.

Foreign investment, from this perspective, should not be measured only by registered capital or export turnover. The more difficult question is what remains after ten or twenty years: how much technology has been absorbed, how many domestic suppliers have matured, how many Vietnamese firms have climbed toward higher levels of the value chain. If a factory can move elsewhere and most of the knowledge, technology, and decision-making capacity move with it, the host country possesses the location of production more than it possesses the capability to make that production possible.

Changes in today’s global economy make this question increasingly urgent. What was once treated mainly as a matter of efficiency — where to buy most cheaply, where to manufacture most conveniently — is now being considered with the same thoughtfulness as security, resilience, and control of one’s destiny. Major powers employ tariffs, subsidies, export controls, industrial policy, and technology standards to reshape supply chains. In such an environment, the advantages of a country can no longer rest principally on inexpensive labor or investment incentives. They increasingly depend on the quality of its people, infrastructure, legal system, institutional reliability, and capacity to develop capabilities that are difficult to replace.

Stephen M. Walt’s warning about strategic “quagmires” has implications beyond the wars he was directly discussing. Countries can become trapped not only because an intervention was misguided from the outset, but because policies persist after their original assumptions have ceased to hold. Ignorance, one-sided advice, groupthink, overconfidence, and the prestige invested in earlier decisions can make it progressively harder to acknowledge that a course needs correction. Strategic capacity therefore lies not only in the determination to pursue a policy, but sometimes in the ability to recognize when to correct it, how to limit losses, or adopt an entirely new direction. 

This is particularly important for countries without unlimited resources. A great power may absorb the costs of its mistake for years and still retain substantial capacity for recovery. A medium-sized country rarely enjoys such luxury. Vietnam therefore needs a capability that development strategies do not always emphasize sufficiently: the capacity for self-correction. This requires information accurate enough to challenge assumptions, debate open enough to reveal alternatives, and mechanisms through which inconvenient signals can still reach those responsible for decisions.

Endogenous capacity, however, is not only about avoiding mistakes. It is also the ability to transform existing resources into new capabilities. Education must produce people capable of continuing to learn, rather than merely completing a curriculum; firms must progress from subcontracting toward design and innovation; science must connect with production; and Vietnamese abroad must have channels through which their knowledge and networks can contribute to national capacity. An economy that merely imports machines will always await the next generation of machines from elsewhere. A society that learns how to create knowledge can begin on its own to build that next generation.

Artificial intelligence provides an especially clear test of this distinction. Vietnam’s new national AI strategy emphasizes human resources, infrastructure, data, research, development, and technological mastery rather than simply the adoption of AI. The significance of this direction lies in the underlying question: will Vietnam become primarily a market for the artificial intelligence of others, or will it acquire the capacity to create some of its own data, products, firms, intellectual property, and value?

The principle of moving fast without moving blindly therefore extends well beyond AI. In an age when technology changes faster than many policy cycles, moving too slowly can mean losing an opportunity; but chasing every new technological wave can create new layers of dependency. Opening Up demands something more difficult than either caution or enthusiasm: enough speed not to miss the moment, enough judgment to know where one is going, and enough capability not to hand the steering wheel entirely to technology, capital, or models created elsewhere.

The distance between a national strategy on paper and having a genuine national capability is always the distance between organization and implementation. Ambitious objectives become deployable strengths only when they are taken up by schools, research institutes, firms, public administration, and so ultimately become activated capabilities nested in real people. The next stage of global integration therefore cannot simply mean more integration. It must mean deeper absorption, faster learning, and greater creation. If the first stage of Đổi Mới opened Vietnam’s doors to the world, the new stage of Opening Up must enable Vietnam to turn what it receives from the world into capabilities of its own.

For a country can possess meaningful freedom of choice only when it also possesses the capacity to act effectively upon its preferred choices.

21. FROM ADAPTATION TO STRATEGIC AUTONOMY

Vietnam has demonstrated a considerable capacity for adaptation. Centuries of living beside major centers of power, followed by war, colonial rule, division, changes in the international order, and economic integration have cultivated a flexibility repeatedly visible in Vietnamese history. Yet adaptation alone does not guarantee autonomy. A country can become highly skilled at adapting to rules created by others without acquiring much capacity to influence those rules or make its own rules.

The distinction is that adaptation responds while autonomy chooses freely. Adaptation asks what must be done in response to circumstances already present. Autonomy looks at a farther horizon: what must be built today so that more options become available tomorrow? Strategic autonomy therefore does not mean autarky, still less withdrawal from international connections. In an interdependent world, practical autonomy is often created by diversifying dependencies, strengthening domestic capabilities, and preventing any single relationship from becoming irreplaceable.

This is especially important in relations with great powers. A small or medium-sized country cannot normally match them symmetrically in material power, but asymmetry in this or that efficacy need not become generalized dependence. Some of the imbalances can be offset through international law, partnerships, economic networks, strategic geography, and, above all, the internal strength of society. The greater a country’s capabilities and the broader its reliable relationships, the higher the cost to outsiders of forcing it into a choice it does not wish to make.

Thus, “not choosing sides” has its best value only if it rests upon the ability to choose freely and widely. If a country cannot refuse a demand, replace a supplier, shift a market, defend an interest, or endure short-term pressure, the language of balance may simply conceal a dependency that has not been named. Autonomy is not found in maintaining equal rhetorical distance from every great power; it lies in the number and quality of genuine alternatives still available when a crisis arrives.

Vietnam’s relationship with China illustrates the limits of simplistic balancing particularly well. The “comprehensive entanglement” between the two countries runs through politics, economics, culture, security, supply chains, and geography. It cannot be managed by attempting to “escape” China, but neither should the depth of the relationship allow China to acquire the power to veto Vietnam’s strategic choices. The challenge is therefore not to determine an absolute degree of closeness to or distance from China, but to maintain a necessary relationship without losing the capacity to say “no” when the national interest requires it.

The same principle applies to the United States and other Western partners. Deeper relations with them can provide markets, technology, education, capital, and greater strategic space, but no external partnership can substitute for the building of internal strength. If a distant great power is regarded mainly as a means of escaping pressure from a nearby one, Vietnam merely exchanges one psychology of dependence for another. The more durable safeguard for smaller states is not the discovery of a perfect patron, but the ability to ensure that multiple partners acquire a stake in their stability, independence, and success.

External partnerships, however, constitute only half of autonomy. The other half lies within the purposeful agent. A society unable to hear inconvenient information, an administrative system unable to correct policy before costs become excessive, or an economy that keeps resources trapped for too long in inefficient sectors – all diminish a country’s capacity for constructive activism. Wanting to possess strategic autonomy therefore ultimately returns us to domestic institutional quality, organizational capacity, and the ability of a political community to correct itself – which taken together make for the internalized psycho-social communal process of Maturation and Opening Up.

This outcome also requires resisting another temptation: equating the name of an institutional model with its actual outcomes. Comparisons among the United States, China, Vietnam, Singapore, or the Nordic countries sometimes lead to a question more useful than the labels “capitalist” or “communist”: Through what mechanisms are power and wealth connected, who controls that connection, and who ultimately benefits from growth? Yet this is only one dimension. It cannot replace asking probing questions about the rule of law, citizens’ rights, accountability, or the capacity to change policy. No political system can be assessed solely by nominal formalisms, or solely by its growth rate.

What should be retained from such comparisons is a simple principle: no ideological brand in itself guarantees good governance or good outcomes. What matters more is whether concrete institutions prevent power structures and private interests from becoming permanently interdependent; whether mechanisms for correcting policies exist; and whether development enlarges the capacity of ordinary people to live, create, and choose. A society can change its slogans repeatedly while leaving its underlying operating structure largely untouched.

Opening Up for Vietnamese should therefore not be understood as a search for the next imported model. Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the Nordic countries, and the United States all offer experiences worth studying, but each success arose from a distinctive history, social structure, and geopolitical environment. Learning becomes useful only when Vietnam can recognize and appreciate principles that can be learned from foreign models but which cannot simply be copied and engraved on the Vietnamese soul

Strategic autonomy, in this sense, is not a condition attained once and then permanently secured. It is a continuous process of creating additional options and reducing the points at which others can decide on one’s behalf. Sometimes that requires another partner; sometimes a new technology; sometimes better institutions; and sometimes the capacity to admit that a policy once useful has reached its limits.

A mature nation does not demonstrate strength by never changing course. Strength also lies in knowing when to continue, when to adjust, and when to seek another path.

This brings Opening Up into dialogue with an ancient problem that has never ceased to be relevant: geography may create thế (a disposition of reality); human beings may devise mưu (big plans) and kế (little plans); but history opens its doors only when a community recognizes thời (the realities of the times).

This is where we must recall the thinking of Hoàng Minh Thảo.

22. FROM THẾ TO THỜI

In Vietnamese strategic thought, thế is an unusually rich concept. Looking upon Bạch Đằng, Nguyễn Trãi saw that mountains and rivers could create a favorable configuration, but terrain alone could not make history. His second line brought human agency to the center: heroes had once made their names there. Nature creates thế; human beings recognize it, employ it, and, at exceptional moments, transform relationships that once appeared fixed.

Centuries later, General and scholar Hoàng Minh Thảo expressed this strategic logic succinctly through four interconnected concepts: Mưu – Kế – Thế – Thời. Mưu is strategic insight — seeing what others have not yet seen. Kế translates insight into a course of action. Thế is the configuration of forces and conditions that has been created or accumulated. Thời is the moment when these elements converge and make transformation possible. None stands alone. An opportunity without a favorable configuration may disappear unused; a favorable position without strategy can be wasted; and even the most sophisticated plan will fail if it misreads the limits and timing of circumstances.

To apply Mưu – Kế – Thế – Thời in the twenty-first century is not to convert military experience into a doctrine of national development. Its deeper value lies in viewing history as a field of possibilities, a field theory resting on integration of the plural. Circumstances create constraints, but they do not determine every outcome. Human beings can accumulate capabilities that alter the balance, and they must be sufficiently alert to recognize when a window of opportunity is opening. Here traditional Vietnamese strategic wisdom meets the requirements of a Vietnam facing a transforming world.

Vietnam today possesses several elements of thế. Its geography places it at the intersection of continental East Asia and maritime Southeast Asia; a highly open economy connects it to numerous production networks; its international relationships have expanded considerably; and a population approaching one hundred million provides a substantial market and human-resource base. Competition among centers of power has also increased the strategic value of countries able to connect different networks without becoming wholly incorporated into a single bloc.

Yet possessing some amount of thế does not mean possessing sufficient strength, still less that one has correctly taken advantage of thời. A factory relocated to Vietnam may reflect the restructuring of supply chains, but it becomes enduring national strength only if Vietnamese firms and workers absorb its technology. An upgraded partnership may open a door, but its ultimate value depends on what passes through that door. Great-power rivalry may increase Vietnam’s strategic relevance, but it may equally increase pressure if the country lacks the capacity to manage conflicting demands.

Thời, therefore, should not be understood as a gift bestowed by history. An opportune time truly exists only for the activist prepared to recognize and use it. Some countries encounter favorable international circumstances only to watch them pass because institutions fail to move, education fails to keep pace, firms fail to mature, or the state cannot translate decisions into action. Other societies use relatively brief windows to accumulate capabilities that sustain them for decades.

Walt’s warning about strategic quagmires can again be read in reverse. If ignorance, groupthink, one-sided advice, and overconfidence can prevent a country from recognizing that it is heading in the wrong direction, strategic competence must include the ability to re-examine assumptions, listen to inconvenient signals, and change before the costs of error become overwhelming. Recognizing thời therefore means not only knowing when to advance. Sometimes it means recognizing when a particular time has passed and a new time has arrived to take its place bringing with it new pitfalls and new opportunities

This capacity correctly to judge the times becomes especially important during periods of transformation. Many historical failures do not start with a mistaken choice.. A policy or a decision may have been appropriate at the time; a governance model may once have generated momentum; an institution may once have solved a problem specific to the circumstances of that moment. The difficulty begins when interim success is converted into proof that the same choice must remain the correct course of action indefinitely. Experience then hardens into inertia, while inertia then elevates itself into principle.

No model of development is exempt from being so tested. The technological transformation now underway provides one example. AI may allow countries that are below modern performance standards to gain access to knowledge more rapidly, raise productivity, and enter fields that did not previously exist for them. But it may also widen the divide between societies that create technology and those that merely consume it. The thời (existential challenge) of AI in this moment of human history is therefore not about who first adopts chatbots. It is far more about who can convert new technology into human, corporate, and national capabilities while retaining independent judgment.

The same applies to geoeconomics. The fragmentation of trade and technology, strategic chokepoints, supply-chain restructuring, and the desire to diversify production are creating opportunities for Vietnam that might not exist under a different global configuration. But these opportunities will not remain open indefinitely. Other countries can see them as well; technology may alter existing advantages of labor costs; supply chains will eventually establish new equilibria. If Vietnam merely benefits from the relocation decisions of others without using this period to build capabilities of its own, thời will pass before a new Vietnamese thế has been created.

Mưu – Kế – Thế – Thời therefore leads us back from external strategy to an internal question: Can Vietnam think far enough ahead, organize action effectively enough, and correct itself quickly enough? Mưu without organization remains an idea; kế without implementation remains talk; thế without internal strength can become a weakness, a liability, to be exploited by others; and thời without an alert and self-confident activist capable of choosing wisely becomes merely an opportunity to be remembered with regret after it has been lost.

Here the remaining elements of P&DOWN begin to come into view: Organizing, Wisdom, and the capacity for self-correction associated with Democratization. But these belong to the larger question of the next Part of this essay: how a political community organizes power, knowledge, and responsibility in order to become an existential activist capable of making its own choices. For present purposes, one principle is enough: a nation’s freedom of choice is not created at the moment when the choice has to be made. It must be firmly anchored in reality long before such moment arrives

If the “curse of geography” is what Vietnam cannot choose, Mưu – Kế – Thế – Thời represent the dimensions of power and success in which human agency can operate. Geography gives a location; history gives circumstances; the world may provide opportunities. What future emerges from them remains the responsibility of the Vietnamese themselves.

23. OPENING UP IS NOT A SEARCH FOR THE READY-MADE ROAD

Whenever people stand before a major turning point in their history, there is a natural temptation to search for a model that has already succeeded somewhere else. A road already travelled appears safer than territory for which no map yet exists. 

The American poet Robert Frost understood this truth. In his poem     he taught us the value of maturely taking charge of our destinies by opening up to possibility:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost, whom President John F. Kennedy invited to read at his inauguration when the poet was already well into his eighties, evoked the human hesitation when standing before two diverging paths in an autumn wood. One cannot travel both at once. As one road leads on to another, the chance to return may slip away. Yet many years later, the traveler looks back and recounts how that choice made all the difference. In the context of Opening Up, the poem invites a reflection: maturity means daring to choose amid imperfection and accepting responsibility for the path one has chosen.

Throughout modern Vietnamese history, successive generations have looked outward for answers: to Japanese reform, revolutionary doctrines from Europe, the experiences of the Soviet Union and China, the developmental models of East Asia, Singapore and South Korea, and the democracies of the West.

Each of these searches took place under particular historical conditions, and each left experiences that deserve to be assessed fairly. Ideas that once opened possibilities of liberation may later reveal their limitations; models that generated development in one society cannot simply be transplanted into another. History does not invalidate the value of earlier choices merely because circumstances have changed. But neither does it permit a choice that once possessed value to become an eternal answer.

This may be the most important lesson as Vietnam enters a global configuration whose eventual shape remains uncertain even to the great powers themselves. If the future has not yet taken form, there can be no perfect model waiting for Vietnam at the end of the road. The United States, Europe, China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and the Nordic countries each offer achievements as well as problems. Learning from them is necessary; turning any of them into Vietnam’s final blueprint would amount to surrendering the responsibility to think for ourselves.

Opening Up is therefore different from simply opening the door. Opening the door primarily means removing barriers that prevent a society from engaging with the outside world. Opening Up goes further. It requires a society capable of receiving the new without losing its power of judgment, learning from others without becoming their replica, and changing without having to deny everything that has made it what it is.

This perspective also allows the ideological debates of the twentieth century to be viewed from a greater distance. Labels such as “communist,” “capitalist,” “socialist,” and “free market” once divided the world into camps that seemed irreconcilable. In the twenty-first century, the actual workings of societies are far more complicated than those labels suggest. The state can intervene deeply in a market economy; private enterprise can flourish under a system that defines itself as socialist; democracies can also struggle with concentrations of wealth and the influence of money upon politics.

This does not mean that ideology, constitutional arrangements, or political rights have ceased to matter. On the contrary, precisely because labels are insufficient to explain the quality of a society, we must look more closely at its concrete institutions: how power is constrained, how law is applied, how property and opportunity are created, whether citizens can hold those who govern accountable, and whether a system can identify and correct mistakes before they become crises. A society does not become good merely because it gives itself an admirable name.

Seen across the longer span of history, this also calls for a certain humility. Dynasties that once appeared to constitute the durable framework of the nation eventually became chapters of the past; international orders once considered permanent were transformed in turn. There is no reason to assume that any modern political paradigm stands outside this historical condition. The nation outlives every dynasty, and a people outlives every doctrine that has ever claimed to speak in its name.

Recognizing the finitude of political paradigms does not mean waiting for the collapse of any particular system, still less attempting to predict when history will turn. The more useful question is what capabilities a people must develop so that, whatever form change eventually takes, it does not lose the ability to determine its own future. If history teaches anything repeatedly, it is that societies prepared only to preserve what already exists are often those most surprised when existing arrangements can no longer solve new problems.

Opening Up must therefore mean, above all, expanding the field of choice. An economy with more sources of supply is less vulnerable to coercion; a country with more partners has greater diplomatic room; a society with more sources of knowledge and a wider range of voices is better able to detect error early. The same logic links geoeconomics, technology, institutions, and culture: the greater the real capabilities, the greater the number of options; the greater the number of options, the less likely the future will be determined by a single choice from which there is no exit.

Artificial intelligence can be seen in the same light. The ultimate question is not how intelligent machines will become, but whether human beings will retain responsibility for decisions made with their assistance. The more powerful a technology becomes, the more urgent the question of the human subject. If people use AI to enlarge knowledge and judgment, it can become an instrument of Opening Up. If they voluntarily surrender judgment and responsibility to it, a technology of empowerment can become a new form of dependence.

The same is true of nations. A great power may help Vietnam with markets, technology, or security; an international network may create opportunities Vietnam could not generate alone; a doctrine may provide useful concepts with which to understand the world. But partners, networks, and doctrines should expand Vietnam’s capacity to choose, not replace it as the activist making the choices.

Here the image of the Vietnamese “drop of water” returns. The drop cannot command the ocean, nor can it pretend that the great currents do not exist. But neither must it lose its form or its history. Maturity means knowing that one belongs to a world larger than oneself. Opening Up means entering that world with the capacity to receive, connect, and choose without dissolving into it.

The journey from achieving Resilient Continuity to success in Opening Up therefore does not culminate in the discovery of a great highway already laid out by someone else. If the twentieth century repeatedly confronted Vietnamese with the question of which road to follow, the twenty-first century demands a more difficult capability: to examine many roads, to recognize when one has reached its limits, and to be capable of opening a new path when old maps no longer point toward the future; to make its own road across the years to come.

This is where Opening Up ceases to be primarily a question about the external environment and becomes a question about who the Vietnamese are: an object in the hands of others or an empowered playwriter writing and directing a play for history to applaud. 

The next Part, therefore, will no longer ask primarily where the world is going. It must ask: What kind of collective activist must the Vietnamese become in order to live in an unknowable future without surrendering to others the right to decide what that future will bring forth. 

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REFERENCES — PART IV

Opening Up: Vietnam in a Transforming World

1. Nguyễn Trãi, Ức Trai thi tập [Collected Poems of Ức Trai], especially “Bạch Đằng hải khẩu” [At the Bạch Đằng Estuary] — for the line of thought developed in §§18 and 22: “Heaven creates the strategic configuration; human beings make history.”
2. Trần Quốc Vượng, Việt Nam, cái nhìn địa-văn hóa [Vietnam: A Geo-Cultural Perspective], Văn hóa Dân tộc Publishing House, Hanoi, 1998. This is an important Vietnamese source for Part IV: the geo-cultural space of Vietnam, the relationship between Vietnam’s particularity and the region and the wider world, and the conceptual basis for the image of “the Vietnamese drop of water in the ocean — and the ocean in the drop.” Vietnamese university catalogues confirm the 1998 edition and Trần Quốc Vượng’s characteristic geo-ecological, geo-humanistic, and geo-historical approach.
3. Hoàng Minh Thảo, writings and lectures on Vietnamese military art and strategic thought, particularly the conceptual framework “Mưu – Kế – Thế – Thời” [Strategic Insight – Planning – Strategic Configuration – Timing] — a direct source for §22.
4. Lê Hồng Hiệp & Anton Tsvetov (eds.), Vietnam’s Foreign Policy under Doi Moi, ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore, 2018.
5. Nicholas Chapman, “Vietnamese Foreign Policy in the Post-Doi Moi Era: A Case for Strategic Autonomy,” TRaNS: Trans-Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia, Cambridge University Press, 2026. This source relates directly to §21 on strategic autonomy, multilateralization, diversification, and the building of networks of relationships to safeguard sovereignty and preserve room for development.
6. ASEAN, ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific, 2019 — particularly relevant to the argument against reducing the Indo-Pacific to a binary US–China chessboard, while preserving the importance of connectivity, cooperation, and ASEAN’s role in the regional architecture.
7. Marty Natalegawa, Does ASEAN Matter? A View from Within, ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute, 2018 — adding a Southeast Asian perspective on the agency of states and regions, rather than viewing the world solely from Washington or Beijing.
8. Henry Farrell & Abraham L. Newman, “Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion,” International Security, 44(1), 2019, pp. 42–79. One of the new backbone sources for §19: asymmetric networks, hubs, chokepoints, and the capacity to turn interdependence into power.
9. Henry Farrell & Abraham Newman, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy, Henry Holt, 2023.
10. Sebastian Contin Trillo-Figueroa, “The Reshaping of Global Trade as EU, China and US Shift to Enforcement,” Nikkei Asia, September 2026 — a particularly valuable new source for §19: trifurcation, the overlapping of three legal-economic spaces, and the increasingly coercive and geoeconomic character of international trade.
11. Richard Baldwin, The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization, Harvard University Press, 2016 — on the cross-border fragmentation of production, information technology, and the changing logic of global value chains.
12. Dani Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy, W. W. Norton, 2011 — particularly relevant to a question running throughout §§20–23: how far integration can proceed while preserving national policy space and the capacity for choice.
13. Albert O. Hirschman, The Strategy of Economic Development, Yale University Press, 1958 — a classic source that remains useful for thinking about linkages, bottlenecks, endogenous capacity, and unbalanced development, particularly in the transition from §19 to §20.
14. World Bank, Viet Nam 2045: Trading Up in a Changing World – Pathways to a High-Income Future, 2024 — a major empirical source for §20: Vietnam needs to move toward higher-value activities through technology, skills, and innovation rather than remaining satisfied with its present position in global supply chains.
15. World Bank, Viet Nam 2045: Breaking Through – Institutions for a High-Income Future, 2025 — focused on institutions rather than value chains. The World Bank emphasizes deeper institutional reform, the legal and regulatory environment, and the effectiveness of public investment.
16. Stephen M. Walt, “Top Signs You’re Heading for a Quagmire,” Foreign Policy, September 2026 — relevant to §§20 and 22: ignorance → bad advice → groupthink → overconfidence → prestige. For TĐV, the key issue is not the “quagmire” itself, but the capacity to detect error, cut losses, and self-correct.
17. Parag Khanna, Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization, Random House, 2016 — retained for §19, particularly for the shift from territorial geography toward connectivity, without turning “connectography” into a central theory of TĐV.
18. Tô Văn Trường, “AI: Nỗi lo của thế giới giàu, cơ hội của Việt Nam?” [“AI: A Concern for the Rich World, an Opportunity for Vietnam?”], 2026. A Vietnamese commentary/case study for §§20 and 23: “move fast, but not blindly,” from the use of AI to the capacity for technological mastery, and ultimately to the question of human judgment. Specific policy claims in the article should be verified against official documents.
19. Government of Vietnam, National Strategy on Artificial Intelligence to 2030, with a Vision to 2045, 2026 — a primary source for the discussion of AI. The official policy document is given priority over a second journalistic source on AI.
20. Joseph S. Nye Jr., The Future of Power, PublicAffairs, 2011 — providing a broader framework for understanding the changing nature of power in a world where power can no longer be identified solely with territory and military capability.

A  community may survive for a very long time without necessarily maturing in its capacities as time passes on and on. Survival and resilience demonstrate vitality; maturity demands something more: the capacities to look critically at oneself, to place limits on  power, to accommodate differences, to correct mistakes, and to transform painful experiences into strategies for building out a better future.

If the preceding Parts I and II sought to identify the resources that enabled the Vietnamese people to survive through repeated cycles of disruption, the question now changes: will the abilities that enabled us to survive for so long be sufficient to help us mature? A historical community becomes a civilizational activist not because it possesses a very long past, but because it can now  intentionally and responsibly choose its future, in having institutions that allow its people to learn from their own mistakes.

13. FROM COMMUNITY PERSISTENCE  TO  SOCIAL MATURITY

In Vietnamese history, survival was never easy. Vietnam’s geopolitical position, centuries of Chinese domination, wars, partitions, natural disasters, and repeated changes in the regional geo-politics have shaped a community with a remarkable capacity for endurance. Yet precisely here a misalignment emerges: qualities that are highly effective for survival under dangerous circumstances are not necessarily sufficient for building a self-sustaining, developed, society in peacetime.

Fernand Braudel helped historians look beyond the surface of events to recognize the structures of the longue durée—the long duration of history. For Vietnam, this perspective is particularly useful. Beneath changing dynasties, regimes, and wars, more persistent structures can be discerned: family and village, a psychology of adaptation, the capacity to absorb external influences and then Vietnamize them, and a powerful determination not to succumb to otherness.

But longevity by itself does not necessarily produce maturity. A tree that has lived for a thousand years may demonstrate extraordinary roots; this does not necessarily  mean that it can grow new branches suited to a changed climate. Trần Đình Hượu, in examining Vietnam’s journey “from tradition to modernity,” placed tradition as living within modernity rather than treating it as a treasure chest to be occasionally opened merely for admiration. Such an approach helps today’s Vietnamese avoid two opposing extremes: inferiority before the West and complacent pride in our past accomplishments.

Comparisons with other ancient civilizations makes the point clearly. Persia passed through successive civilizational layers: from ancient antiquity and the Achaemenid Empire through the Hellenistic era, the arrival of Islam, the Mongols, the frise of the Safavids, and now a modern Iran. China likewise experienced repeated dynastic changes, foreign conquest, fragmentation, and reunification. The past of a community, therefore, cannot in itself be used as a measure of its current political or civilizational maturity.

To place Vietnam in this broader historical scale is not to diminish the vigor and accomplishments of its thousands of years of moral and intellectual endeavors . On the contrary, consideration of scope frees us from the need to use history i as proof of contemporary value. More important than having lived in community for a long time is what the present descendants of such a community have learned from their past. A mature community does not remember only its victories; it is also capable of looking at defeats, mistakes, and opportunities that were missed.

Here we need to make a fundamental distinction between a consciousness of having been resilient and a consciousness of being civilizational. The memory of survival The consciousness of resilience usually asks: Who threatened us? How did we resist? Who were our heroes? Where were the victories? Civilizational consciousness brings to mind  more uncomfortable questions: After victory, what happened to society? How did ordinary people live? Was power disciplined? Did talent gain opportunity? Was there a place for those who thought differently? A community may be exceptionally capable of mobilizing itself to overcome danger and yet remain uncertain when facing the more ordinary but more difficult task of constructing the institutions that allow human persons to develop excellence in times of peace.

This distinction helps explain a conundrum often found in the histories of nations that have lived for long periods under external threat. External danger easily creates internal unity; but once that danger passes the natural diversities within a society reappear. Skills that were once useful—unity of will, obedience to command, suspicion of difference—can become obstacles if they continue to be prioritized once the danger has passed. A peacetime society requires negotiation, competition, experimentation, the acceptance of error, and the ability to correct error. The strength of a tree required to remain standing in a storm is not the capacity to grow taller under a clear sky.

This is also where literature can express what chronicles often cannot. Nguyễn Trãi left behind not only a proclamation of victory but also poems about loneliness, human relationships, and the vicissitudes of life. Nguyễn Du saw history through the fate of human beings crushed between power and destiny. By the twentieth century, war and revolution had generated more reservoirs of memory: Hữu Loan, Văn Cao, Trần Dần, and Quang Dũng in the North; Nhất Linh, Võ Phiến, Nguyễn Mộng Giác, andother voices from the South or the post-1975 diaspora, which spoke out about very different experiences. They cannot all be included in in only one ideological metaphor , but they can be read as social sensors registering the shocks of history.

Literature thus adds a necessary dimension to historical interpretation. History may document when a policy was introduced, where a battle took place, or how many people participated in a migration. Literature, though, can show how a historical event entered the human soul. One approach seeks the factual truth of events; the other preserves the truth of how those events were experienced. A nation that reads only the official documents written by  victors will overlook half of what is remembered; but a nation that lives only with remembered traumas will  find it difficult to escape its history.

Civilizational maturity for the Vietnamese today, therefore, does not require rejecting those qualities that once enabled Vietnam to successfully endure. The need is for their transformation. Communal solidarity needs to become civic responsibility; passive adaptability needs to become inventive creativity; patriotism needs to protect both territory and human dignity; tight cohesion in the face of foreign invasion needs to become a more flexible capacity for cooperation within society’s diversity . Tradition then ceases to be an anchor that keeps the ship stationary and becomes part of the map by which the ship sets its course.

Thus, the transition from Resilient Continuity to Civilizational Maturity begins with changing the question to be asked. We should no longer ask only what forces the nation resisted in order to survive, but also to what extent Vietnamese people have or have not been enabled to become individuals with dignity, judgment, responsibility, and the right to participate in decisions affecting their own lives. At this point, the question of what is the nation confronts the question of who is a citizen.

14. INTELLECTUALS AND THE “FIFTH FRONT” MAKING VIETNAMESE HISTORY TODAY

Vietnamese history is often spoken of as having been made by the actions of various “fronts” – military, diplomatic, economic, or political. Yet there is another, though less visible,front: the struggle between institutional power and society’s power expressed through self-reflection. On this front, intellectuals are not necessarily always opponents of institutional power. Their role – a very important one, is to articulate what institutions cannot see about themselves—or do not wish to hear.

Chu Văn An with his Seven Beheadings Petition, Nguyễn Trường Tộ with his reform memorials, and Phan Châu Trinh with his advocacy of raising the people’s intellectual level became advocates in  very different historical circumstances. What was common to all three was  not a common platform for reform but an attitude: the belief that patriotism does not require an intellectual to agree with the thinking and priorities of an existing administrative order. On the contrary, responsibility toward the community may sometimes require intellectuals to point out limitations implicit in how that community functions

The twentieth century pushed this tension to a much sharper level. In 1956, following the mistakes of the Land Reform, the jurist Nguyễn Mạnh Tường presented before the Fatherland Front his paper Through the Mistakes of the Land Reform: Building a Conception of Leadership.  Important in his text is not merely his criticism of a particular political program. He searched for determining causes of dysfunction situated within the mechanisms of leadership and raised probing questions regarding legality, responsibility, the control of power, and the conditions necessary to prevent similar mistakes from recurring.

At almost the same time, Trần Đức Thảo approached the problem of institutional shortcomings through philosophy. In The Social Content and the Form of Freedom, he criticized the maladies of “bureaucratism, commandism, dogmatism, factionalism, and the cult of personality,” while highlighting individual freedom for its contribution  to a citizen’s capacity to contribute to community.

If the first spoke through the language of Law, and the second through the language of Philosophy, Hữu Loan and other poets of the same generation raised concerns at the deeper level of human experience. From this approach, concepts such as class, revolution, victory, and error ceased to be merely political terms; they passed through the realities of family, death, love, fear. Literature cannot prove an event in the manner of historical scholarship, but it preserves the part of history that statistics cannot: what real human persons felt as history made itself part of  their lives.

These three languages—Law, Philosophy, Poetry—can therefore be read as three levels – each in a different way – responding to the demands of self-reflection. Law asks how far power may go. Philosophy asks how free the individual can be within a community. Poetry asks what remains of our humanity after great systems have encapsulated our lives . None is sufficient alone; taken together, they show that a society can mature only when it uses multiple languages by  which to question and understand itself.

Viewed more broadly, this is not uniquely Vietnamese. In the history of many societies, important turning points begin when a question previously whispered only within a narrow circle is able to enter public space. The progress of a civilization therefore cannot be measured only by the number of universities, research institutes, or academic degrees. It must also be measured by the distance between what intellectuals know and what they are permitted to say, between the knowledge available within society and the ability of that knowledge to influence public decisions.

When that gap becomes too great, an invisible form of waste appears. Those with knowledge learn to remain silent; those with decision-making authority receive progressively less truthful information. The institutional machinery may continue to operate, reports may remain complete, yet the systemic capacity to learn withers away. At this point, academic freedom, freedom of debate, and the ability to criticize cease to be luxuries for intellectuals. They add value to the cognitive infrastructure of a  nation that is searching for Maturity.

South Vietnam before 1975 provides a relevant experience. The educational philosophy articulated at the National Education Congress of 1958 centered on three principles: Humanism – Nationalism – Liberalism, which subsequently became the foundations for defining the objectives and methods of education in the Republic of Vietnam. There is no need to idealize that educational system in order to recognize it as a legacy worthy of study within the broader history of Vietnamese education.

The recollections of Associate Professor Nguyễn Kim Hồng are particularly noteworthy because he came from the North and was assigned to the Ho Chi Minh City University of Education after 1975. He recalled his surprise at the scale of Saigon, its physical facilities, the qualifications of some lecturers in the social sciences, and the behavior of Southern students; he particularly emphasized the importance attached by families and schools to manners and individual values. This is a personal recollection, not a measurement of two educational systems as a whole, but precisely for that reason it has value as a particular perspective from someone who directly experienced the transition from one structure of mindfulness to another.

More important than such a comparison is the way a society treats what it inherits. After a communal war, the victorious side does not merely take over territory, government offices, schools, or libraries; it confronts a more difficult choice: how should it deal with the intellectual capital created by the other side? One can reject an opposing political regime without rejecting all the knowledge produced under that regime. One can change a system without necessarily beginning again from a ground zero.

At the civilizational level, the capacity to inherit can sometimes be more important than the capacity to break with the past. Meiji Japan did not become Western simply because it learned Western science, law, and technology; it sought to absorb new instruments into a society that remained deeply conscious of its own identity. Many civilizations developed through similar acts of borrowing. The Romans learned from the Greeks; medieval Europe recovered much of the classical legacy through Arab scholars; East Asia adopted Chinese characters and Buddhism and then transformed them in very different ways. Civilizations do not grow by remaining untouched; they grow through the capacity to digest what comes from elsewhere.

Placing these different Vietnamese experiences side by side is not intended to decide whether North was better than South or South better than North. Historical interpretation should ask a different question: after internal political ruptures, is a people capable of preserving the intellectual capital created on both sides? If a new regime accepts only what confirms its own legitimacy and rejects what belonged to the defeated side, the ultimate loss is not borne only by the defeated. It becomes a loss to the common civilizational capital of the nation.

A mature nation therefore not only needs intellectuals, but something more difficult: institutions capable of listening to intellectuals. If criticism is honored only after the critic has died, such rehabilitation of the once excluded may possess moral value but it has not yet created a systemic capacity for self-correction. The measure of maturity is not how many courageous truth-tellers a society produces, but how many mechanisms it builds so that those who tell the truth do not have to pay a price for speaking out honesty.

15. FROM THE POWER TO MOBILIZE TO THE POWER TO  DEVELOP   

In war and revolution, the capacity for mobilization can determine survival. It concentrates resources, simplifies commands, and turns millions of individuals into a common force. Twentieth-century Vietnam demonstrated the particular effectiveness of this model. Yet success under emergency conditions can itself create inertia: methods that were effective in winning wars may be extended into peacetime, even though civilizational development requires a different logic.

A developmental state is not weaker than a mobilizational state. It is strong in a different sense. Its strength lies not in issuing as many commands as possible, but in establishing stable rules of the game, providing public goods, ensuring accountability, receiving bad news, and correcting policy before mistakes become crises. Montesquieu saw limits on power as a condition for protecting liberty; Hayek warned of the limits of centralized knowledge. These different intellectual traditions meet in one intuition: no center of power can know everything that society knows.

The problem of knowing what is best to know lies not only in excessive power but also in the smallness of centralized knowledge compared with the complexity of life. A fishing village knows things about its waters that a central authority cannot know; a business understands its market; a teacher knows the students; a doctor knows the patient; a locality understands characteristics that a general regulation cannot fully anticipate. A modern state cannot accurately replace on its own all this dispersed knowledge. Its best use  lies in connecting and so collecting it, establishing the rules of the game, and changing those rules when reality demonstrates that they are wrong.

The concentration of power and the concentration of intelligence are therefore two different things. Power can be centralized very quickly; the intelligence of a society cannot. When the two are confused, decision-makers can easily fall into the illusion that the authority to decide also implies the ability to know what is right. A mature institutional system must do the opposite: the greater the power held by decision-makers, the more they need independent sources of information, mechanisms of verification, and opportunities to hear things they would rather not hear.

Vietnam’s history after the war shows that the capacity for self-adjustment on the part of Vietnamese has emerged when pressures become sufficiently strong. Đổi Mới in 1986 was not a rejection of the entire past, but an acknowledgment that certain old management mechanisms no longer corresponded to reality. In foreign affairs, Politburo Resolution No. 13 of May 1988, developed with an important role played by Nguyễn Cơ Thạch, is often regarded as a significant shift that helped Vietnam gradually escape isolation and move toward diversified and multilateral external relations.

What deserves attention in this case is not the rise and fall of an individual. More important is the fact that an idea can survive longer than the political position of the person who proposed it. Vietnam subsequently joined ASEAN, normalized relations with the United States, and broadened its international integration. Those developments had many causes and many actors, but they demonstrate that when national interests are interpreted through a framework broader than ideology, the country’s room for maneuver also expands.

Economic reform contains a similar lesson. Forms of agricultural contracting that arose from local practice before becoming broader policy suggest that innovation can sometimes move upward from below before receiving official recognition from above. The important issue here is not to determine who first had the idea, but to recognize a pattern: practice often discovers the limits of dogma before official theory is ready to acknowledge them. A system capable of learning is one that shortens the interval between these two moments.

Conversely, every highly centralized system encounters an information conundrum. The more subordinates fear making mistakes, the more likely information traveling upward will appear more favorable than the reality; the more leaders need to know the truth, the stronger the incentives within the bureaucracy to conceal what the leaders do not wish to hear. This is not merely a problem of personal morality. It is a problem of institutional design: how can disturbing  information best reach the place where decisions are made without the person carrying that information forward being disciplined for disloyalty or incompetence?

Experience around the world shows that major institutional failures often begin not because information is unavailable but because information cannot reach the place where it is needed. An organization may employ thousands of experts and still make poor decisions if experts understand that telling their superiors what they do not wish to hear will harm them. Conversely, debate may sometimes slow decisions, but it can also prevent mistakes whose costs may last for decades.

Self-correction must therefore be institutionalized. Correcting a bad policy after ten years is still better than never correcting it, but a mature society requires mechanisms that identify mistakes early on: investigative journalism, scientific debate, the necessary degree of judicial independence, accountability of public authorities, and legitimate channels through which citizens can criticize policy. Such institutions do not weaken the state; they reduce the price that both state and society must pay for informational blindness.

Education is part of the same structure. An educational system mainly designed to train students to find the “correct answer” can produce people more skilled at adapting to the system rather than acting as thoughtful citizens capable of questioning it. Mature education does not teach students to doubt everything, but it should teach them to distinguish evidence from assertion, authority from truth, and disagreement from betrayal. A society that seeks innovation while resisting independent thought encounters a paradox: it wants new inventions but remains uncomfortable with new questions.

At a deeper level, a developmental state must move from viewing society as an object of administration to recognizing society as a source of developmental energy. Businesses, universities, professional associations, local communities, creative circles, and individual citizens are not merely units waiting for policy. They are places where knowledge, initiatives, and solutions are generated—solutions that no central authority can design in their entirety. The more the state can open space for these sources of energy, the less national strength depends upon a single center.

The transition from mobilizing power to developmental power, therefore, is not a transition from a “strong state” to a “weak state.” It is a transition from the strength of command to the strength of communal capacity, from the ability to make society comply to the ability to create conditions in which society can develop itself. A mature nation needs a state strong enough to protect the common interest, but also confident enough to accept that the collective intelligence of the nation is always greater than the factional intelligence of the apparatus.

16. THREE VIETNAMS: MEMORY, TRUTH, AND A NATION NOT YET FULLY RECONCILED

There can be no maturity if memory belongs only to the victors. Yet reconciliation cannot be built simply by reversing the monopoly of memory—replacing the history of the victorious side with the history of the other side. What is needed is a space in which once-opposing memories can coexist without one memory having to prohibit the other.

Twentieth-century Vietnam consisted of more memory zones than two geographical regions. After the war, we can imagine at least three spaces of memory: the memory of those whose lives were associated with the 1945 revolution and the victory of 1975; the memory of those who lived under the Republic of Vietnam and subsequently experienced defeat, re-education, loss, or departure; and the memory of generations born after 1975, both inside Vietnam and overseas, who bear no direct responsibility for the conflict but nevertheless inherit its stories. These “three Vietnams” are not three countries. They are three regions of a national memory that have not yet fully merged one with the others.

The concept of collective memory helps us understand why a war may end militarily without ending in the life of the mind. Maurice Halbwachs showed that memory does not reside only in individuals; it is maintained within families, communities, and social groups. Memory can therefore be transmitted across generations. A person born after an event can still inherit its pain, pride, or prejudice through parental stories, school textbooks, cemeteries, commemorative days, songs, and even through those things about which a family chooses not to speak.

Memoirs from all sides should therefore be read not as final verdicts but as windows. Trần Quang Cơ’s recollections of Vietnamese diplomacy, different reflections by Southern intellectuals, memoirs of those who served the Republic of Vietnam, memories of regrouped Southern officers and officials, those sent to re-education camps, and the stories of boat people, all contain different parts of the truth. Mature historical interpretation does not require them to be identical; excellent history must verify each source and seek to understand why the same event generated such different memories.

This also requires us to distinguish historical truth from historical memory. Historical truth requires documentation, comparison, and verification. Memory may be wrong about a date yet entirely truthful about a sense of fear; it may be partial in its interpretation of an event while accurately reflecting the state of mind of a community. Memory should not replace historical evidence; neither should it be excluded from history merely because it is subjective. Maturity means being capable of placing these two levels in dialogue and in parallel with one another.

Văn Cao offers an especially painful example. In the poem My Comrade, written in the context of the Land Reform, the man being led to his death continues to affirm his political identity. The value of the poem lies not in replacing the historical record of a specific case, but in the spiritual paradox it preserves: a human being can remain loyal to an ideal even when the apparatus acting in the name of that ideal causes him suffering. Literature here becomes the memory of a gray zone, where a victim and a believer in the revolution can be the same person.

That “gray zone” is particularly important for historical interpretation. Political history often divides people into distinctly different categories: revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, victor or defeated, right or wrong. Real life is far more complicated. Some people love their country but disagree with its government; some once stood on one side but later served a reunified country; some left Vietnam yet devoted their lives to Vietnamese culture; and some fought on the victorious side but later looked back upon parts of their experience with pain. If historical interpretation cannot accommodate these gray zones, it may make the recorded facts of history easier to understand, but it impoverishes the human beings who lived through it.

After 1975, the question moved to another scale: how does a nation treat the legacy of the defeated side? Universities, books, administrative experience, cultural life, and the social memories of the South are all parts of Vietnamese history, whatever one’s political judgment of the Republic of Vietnam may be. A country does not need to restore a vanished regime in order to acknowledge that values worthy of inheritance existed under it.

Looking beyond Vietnam, there is no single formula for reconciliation. After the Second World War, Germany required decades to develop a sufficiently strong culture of memory in which the Nazi past became a continuing subject of education and public debate. South Africa after apartheid chose another path through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: it did not assume that society could reconcile simply by forgetting, but attempted to bring victims’ testimony, perpetrators’ responsibility, conditional amnesty, and questions of reparation into a public process. These models have their own limitations and remain contested. Their relevance here is not that Vietnam should copy them, but that reconciliation is institutional work, not merely a moral appeal.

Comparison with Vietnamese-American reconciliation makes the paradox even more striking. On September 15, 2026, in Da Nang, Vietnam handed over to the United States the “Camp Reasoner” sign and a guard tower from a former U.S. Marine Corps installation during the war. Official Vietnamese sources publicly described the gesture in the language of goodwill, humanitarianism, reconciliation, and healing.

It is an image worthy of respect. But precisely for that reason it raises a question that deserves reflection: if two countries that once fought each other directly can go so far as to respect the relics of a former enemy, how far should reconciliation go among people like the Vietnamese who believe in the shared ancestral myth of coming from the same “womb of one hundred eggs”? The question of the Biên Hòa Military Cemetery, the language used to describe the dead, the right of remembrance, and the place of the Republic of Vietnam’s memory within the common national history therefore belongs not only to the past. They bear directly on the maturity of the present community. The decision to “civilianize” the cemetery was made in 2006–2007, but questions surrounding its preservation, restoration, and meaning for reconciliation have not yet been closed.

Symbols have a power of their own here. A cemetery is no longer a military unit; those lying beneath its graves can no longer participate in any political struggle. How the living treat the dead therefore says more about the living than about the dead. When a community can care for the graves of those who once stood on the opposing side without feeling that its own current identity is threatened, this does not amount to a revision questioning the reality of victory. It may be evidence of greater self-confidence among the victors: the victory has become secure enough that compassion no longer needs to be regarded as dangerous.

Reconciliation does not require everyone to agree about history. That is both impossible and unnecessary. It requires a more basic moral foundation: the dead are no longer enemies; the suffering of a family does not lose its value because their relative once stood on the other side; and the right to belong to the nation cannot forever depend upon the political biography of one’s parents or grandparents.

But reconciliation cannot remain merely a matter of sentiment. If old prejudices continue to reside in language, records, policy, education, and the classification of human beings, appeals to national unity will have difficulty moving beyond the dead hand of ritual. Mature reconciliation must be translated from admirable idealism into daily life: the right to return, the right to remember, the right to contribute, equal access to opportunities, and above all the right to be recognized as a member of the national community without being required to abandon one’s family memory.

This is why overseas Vietnamese communities should not be viewed merely as sources of remittances, expertise, or investment. They also carry a part of Vietnamese history. Within those families are memories of the South, of escape by sea, re-education camps, and loss; but there are also new generations who may no longer speak Vietnamese fluently yet continue to search for the culture of their ancestors. The capacity to allow these memories to rejoin the common national story without first passing a test of political loyalty would be another indicator of  successful maturation.

Reconciliation thus becomes a question of the future more than of the past. A Vietnam that seeks to mobilize the resources of millions of Vietnamese overseas, and that wishes to become a civilizational activist in the eyes of the world, cannot stop at geographical reunification. It needs a concept of community broad enough so that Vietnamese people with different memories can still recognize themselves as a legitimate part of a common national story.

17. SELF-CORRECTION – THE MOST DIFFICULT MEASURE OF MATURITY

Every nation can make mistakes. Every state can pursue failed policies. Every civilization has passed through periods in which the values it proclaimed did not correspond to the way it acted. The important difference does not lie in whether a country possesses a spotless past, but in its capacity to recognize, name, and correct its mistakes.

Karl Popper located the advantage of an open society not in its ability to produce perfect rulers, but in its capacity to change decisions and rulers without destroying society itself. Hannah Arendt, from another direction, reminds us of individual responsibility within systems where action can easily dissolve into the machinery of institutions. These reflections meet Vietnamese experience at one point: long-term hope cannot rest upon the assumption that a “wise ruler” will always stand at the top; mechanisms must exist that constrain both good and bad leaders through law and responsibility.

This touches upon a deeper tradition in East Asian political thought. From Mencius’s proposition that “the people are most important” to Nguyễn Trãi’s reflections on the power of the people, earlier thinkers recognized that authority could not be entirely separated from the lives of ordinary people. But there is a great distance between offering moral advice to rulers and constructing mechanisms that make power accountable. Modern political civilization emerged precisely within that distance: from hoping that rulers will be virtuous to constructing institutions that limit power even when rulers are not sufficiently virtuous.

In Vietnam, “rectification of errors” is a phrase carrying considerable historical weight. The Land Reform was followed by a campaign to correct errors. The difficulties of the centrally planned economy were followed by Đổi Mới. In foreign affairs, Vietnam moved from the isolation of the late 1970s and 1980s toward diversification and international integration. These changes demonstrate something important: the current Vietnamese system has not entirely lost the long-standing Vietnamese capacity to adapt.

But adaptation under pressure is different from institutionalized self-correction. If change occurs only after a crisis has become sufficiently severe, the social price may be very high. Maturity requires embedding reflective capacity within normal life: policies can be tested and evaluated; unfavorable data are not concealed; experts can disagree; journalists can ask questions; citizens can lodge complaints; and mistakes of the past can be studied without turning those who study them into objects of suspicion.

We can imagine three levels of self-correction. The lowest is correcting a decision after its consequences have become undeniable. A higher level is correcting the mechanism that produced that decision. The highest is building a system capable of detecting error before it becomes disaster. This third level requires relatively independent institutions, reliable data, professional journalism, scientific freedom, and a political culture that does not interpret the admission of error as a loss of face.

This is the difference between pretense and responsibility. In a political culture heavily concerned with preserving “face”, correcting an error can easily be understood as admitting defeat. There is therefore a tendency to defend an old decision with a new decision, and then defend the new decision through still more measures. In a culture of responsibility, by contrast, the ability to say “we were wrong” can itself be evidence of strength. A mature scientist does not lose credibility by revising a hypothesis in the face of new evidence; neither should a mature institution.

Seen in this sense, science and democracy share one civilizational quality: both assume that no one possesses final truth.

 Science advances because hypotheses can be falsified. Politics advances when policies can be questioned and power can be scrutinized. Wherever every criticism is interpreted as hostility, the system’s capacity to learn will gradually contract.

This lesson is not addressed only to the state. A mature society must also know how to correct itself. Regional prejudice, credentialism, a culture of personal connections, habits of avoiding responsibility, tolerance of false information, or the tendency to turn every disagreement into a moral battle between individuals cannot all be attributed to a governing apparatus. If policy changes but the social habits that generate these problems do not, reform will repeatedly encounter old problems under new names.

Family and education therefore return in vital importance for Maturation as two fundamental institutions. A child taught to obey adults absolutely will not suddenly become a citizen capable of debate upon reaching the age of eighteen. A student accustomed to memorizing the “correct answer” will have difficulty becoming a researcher willing to question the textbook. An official formed in an environment where safety matters more than initiative will not automatically become a reformer simply because a resolution calls for innovation. Institutions and human beings produce one another.

We can therefore understand why “Maturity” is not a vague psychological quality but a civilizational process. It occurs simultaneously within individuals, families, schools, society, and the state. Individuals learn responsibility; families learn to respect difference; schools learn to encourage questions; society learns to live with disagreement; the state learns self-restraint. If one of these levels is missing, the others will find it difficult to endure.

Maturity also requires the capacity to inherit what was once rejected. A value does not become wrong merely because it once existed on the other side of a battle line. Reflections by Northern intellectuals once criticized, educational and cultural experiences from the South, achievements of overseas Vietnamese communities, and lessons of governance learned from the wider world can all become common assets once they cross the barriers of political identity.

This is not eclecticism, still less an attempt to dissolve right and wrong into an undefined memory. Inheritance requires selection. What matters is that the criterion of selection should be the value of an idea for human beings and for the future of the country, not the political identity of the place from which it came. When an idea is right merely because it is “ours,” or wrong merely because it is “theirs,” thought has not yet escaped the battlefield.

This is precisely the transition from a historical community to a invigorated civilizational activist. A historical community is bound together by what has happened: origins, wars, memories, victories, and losses. A civilizational activist, by contrast, is also held together by the capacity to decide collectively what will happen. One receives its identity from the past; the other acquires, in addition, the capacity to create the future.

This also changes the meaning of patriotism. Patriotism is no longer only the defense of territory or loyalty to a single narrative of history. It also means protecting the dignity of the Vietnamese people, their creative capacities, and the right of generations not yet born to inherit a better country. In such a conception, a dissenter is not automatically outside the nation; a Vietnamese living abroad is not less Vietnamese because of geographical distance; and a memory different from the official memory does not therefore have to be erased from the community.

At the deepest level, a civilizational community must be capable of living with its own incompleteness. No nation ever “finishes” maturing. Every generation encounters questions that earlier generations could not have known: artificial intelligence, climate change, population aging, shifts in supply chains, new forms of digital power, and competition among great powers. The past can provide fortitude, but it cannot provide ready-made answers to use in the future.

Maturity therefore does not mean finding an immutable formula for Vietnam. It means building the capacity continuously to learn, choose, and adjust. A mature society does not need to know every crossroads in advance; it needs people and institutions sufficiently clear-minded that, when a crossroads appears, they can recognize the alternatives, debate them, and accept responsibility for the path they choose.

A mature nation, therefore, is not a nation without division. It is a nation that knows how to live with differences without turning difference into a battle line; not a nation that never makes mistakes, but one that creates mechanisms through which mistakes can be detected and corrected; not a nation that forgets the past, but one sufficiently confident to look at its past in its entirety.

CONCLUSION

Resilient Continuity answers the question: why are we still here? Maturity asks the more difficult question: what will we become given everything we have experienced?

From voices once excluded from the mainstream; from the different educational experiences of the two regions; from memories that have not yet fully encountered one another since 1975 to the capacity for reconciliation with a former enemy such as the United States, a common thread emerges: Vietnam does not lack vitality. What remains to be built is the capacity to transform that vitality into self-reflection, self-restraint, and self-correction.

Maturity therefore does not negate past greatness in enduring the whims of fate. It is a higher stage in the application of resilience to reality. A community that once learned how not to disappear must now learn how not to allow the past to lock away the possibilities of the future. From resisting assimilation to accommodating difference, from mobilization to development, from victory to reconciliation, from reactive correction of mistakes to institutionalized self-correction—these are the transformations through which historical vitality can become civilizational capacity.

A community truly becomes a civilizational activist when the past is no longer a prison for the future. Maturity, therefore, is not the final destination. It is the condition for moving toward another question: after knowing who we are, and after daring to look at both our achievements and our failures, what possibilities can Vietnam open up in a world undergoing transformation? This is also the subject of PART V: OPENING UP: VIETNAM IN A TRANSFORMING WORLD ORDER.

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TÀI LIỆU THAM KHẢO – PHẦN III

1. Trần Đình Hượu, Đến hiện đại từ truyền thống, NXB Văn hóa, Hà Nội, 1996.
2. Nguyễn Mạnh Tường, Qua những sai lầm trong Cải cách ruộng đất – Xây dựng quan điểm lãnh đạo, tham luận tại Mặt trận Tổ quốc Việt Nam, Hà Nội, 30/10/1956.
3. Trần Đức Thảo, “Nội dung xã hội và hình thức tự do”, 1956.
4. Fernand Braudel, Écrits sur l’histoire [Luận về lịch sử], Flammarion, Paris, 1969.
5. Maurice Halbwachs, La Mémoire collective [Ký ức tập thể], Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1950.
6. Paul Ricœur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli [Ký ức, lịch sử, sự lãng quên], Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 2000.
7. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States [Ra đi, Lên tiếng và Trung thành], Harvard University Press, 1970.
8. Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance [Thể chế, thay đổi thể chế và thành quả kinh tế], Cambridge University Press, 1990.
9. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom [Phát triển như là tự do], Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1999.
10. Karl Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage [Vấn đề tội lỗi của nước Đức], 1946. Dùng chủ yếu cho sự phân biệt giữa trách nhiệm hình sự, chính trị, đạo đức và trách nhiệm của con người trước những thảm họa lịch sử.
11. Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence [Giữa trả thù và tha thứ: Đối diện lịch sử sau diệt chủng và bạo lực đại chúng], Beacon Press, Boston, 1998.
12. Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik [Cái bóng dài của quá khứ: Văn hóa ký ức và chính trị lịch sử], C.H. Beck, Munich, 2006.
13. Albert Camus, L’Homme révolté [Con người nổi loạn], Gallimard, Paris, 1951.
14. Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless [Quyền lực của những người không quyền lực], 1978.
15. Nguyễn Văn Trung, các khảo luận về văn hóa, giáo dục, trí thức và xã hội miền Nam Việt Nam trước 1975. Dùng như một tiếng nói trí thức miền Nam trong đối thoại về dân tộc, hiện đại hóa và căn tính văn hóa.
16. Vương Trí Nhàn, các khảo luận về tâm lý, tập quán và những giới hạn văn hóa của người Việt. Sử dụng theo hướng khảo sát khả năng tự phản tỉnh và tự sửa mình của xã hội, không xem các đặc điểm được mô tả như những “bản tính dân tộc” bất biến.
17. Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonisé, précédé du Portrait du colonisateur [Chân dung người bị trị – Chân dung người thực dân], Éditions Buchet/Chastel, Paris, 1957.

“From Endurance to Opening: A New Path for the Vietnamese People”

• Introduced by Professor Stephen B. Young, Global Executive Director of the Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism; author The Tradition of Human Rights in China and Vietnam
• Written by Former Ambassador Hoang Thang Dinh, Ph.D. in Political Science and Fellow of the Caux Round Table

What comes next for Vietnam in the twenty-first century?

RESILIENT CONTINUITY: ITS CAPACITIES AND LIMITS

Part I read Vietnamese history through recurring cycles of challenge, adaptation, and recovering sovereignty. Part II looks inside those cycles to examine the capacities that made each of their phases possible: what enabled the Vietnamese people repeatedly to contract without dissolving, to receive outside influences without wholly losing themselves, to disperse when in danger and then re-group when circumstances permitted?

Yet the most difficult questions lie in understanding the causes of those restorations.

Why would the very capacities that once enabled a people to survive later become limitations on its continued Maturation? Why have the Vietnamese often proved remarkably quick at overcoming immediate difficulties, yet less consistently successful at building durable institutions after a crisis has passed? Why has the capacity to absorb what is new repeatedly produced visible achievements in outlook and manners while deeper structures of power, social habits, and accumulated institutional capacities changed much more slowly?

If these limitations associated with modern Vietnamese resilient continuity are attributed only to war, colonialism, or the ideological choices of the twentieth century, the explanation of why Vietnam is what it today remains incomplete. Those events were immensely consequential, but they unfolded on the surface of an underlying historical foundation, one in which patterns of survival, forms of communal organization, relations with power, and ways of absorbing external influence had been taking shape for centuries.

Resilient Continuity must therefore be seen from two points of view: one recognizing the extraordinary vitalism of the Vietnamese down through history, the other recognizing the limitations that may have been preserved within that very vitality. A capacity that once enabled a community to survive a particular danger does not thereby become, automatically, a capacity for successful development when new  historical conditions present themselves.

6. The Paradox of Vietnamese Survival

Vietnamese Resilient Continuity was formed in response to many different challenges, not through a succession of identical intrusions or oppressions.

Centuries of Chinese rule exerted powerful assimilative pressure on Vietnamese, yet these pressures simultaneously made the family, the village, the language, and religious practices stalwart repositories of communal continuity. The years of an independent Đại Việt nation consolidated statehood, literary culture, and consciousness of sovereignty. The later Ming occupation, national restoration under the Lê, the southward expansion of Vietnamese rule, and successive civil wars, enlarged the national territory while also leaving violence, division, and dissimilar memories among different communities living under Vietnamese rule.

French colonialism destroyed Vietnamese sovereign authority, yet it also introduced cultural expressions that Vietnamese would later appropriate for their own purposes: the romanized national script, journalism, modern science and education, together with new vocabularies in which to think about nationhood and citizenship. The following era of anti-colonial revolution, war, partition into two governing regimes, reunification, and Đổi Mới economic reformation produced major achievements in independence, territorial unity, and economic development, while also leaving behind tangible and intangible wounds between Vietnamese, ruptures in social continuity, and memories that still remain incompletely reconciled.

There is no law of history by which a community necessarily matures in understanding and capability in optimal proportion to the pressures it has endured.

Challenge can stimulate creativity, but it can also circumscribe a society, distorting moral norms, and transmitting trauma from one generation to the next. A community does not necessarily mature in competence after catastrophe. It may merely learn how to live with catastrophe, carrying forward reflexes formed under conditions of danger into circumstances in which they are no longer necessary.

The gains made in each phase of every historical cycle must therefore be considered alongside the harms inflicted.

The Vietnamese people endured not because their every historical choice was correct, but because even after making wrong choices, defeats, and suffereing great harms, the community retained a capacity to reconstitute its integrity. That is the fundamental achievement of the Vietnamese over the centuries. 

 A paradox is that successful reconstitution may also preserve the very reflexes that allow crises to recur in different forms. One such reflex is the tendency to make too radical a break with the past, not learning the right lessons, whenever political power changes hands from one ruling elite to another

New dynasties traditionally strengthened their legitimacy by disparaging their predecessors. Victorious forces did not merely take control of the state; they sought to establish a new official history most favorable to them. The legacy of those who came before was consequently divided between what should be inherited and what must be rejected.

The mechanism of selective appropriation has appeared in different forms, from monarchical society to modern, Westernized, regimes.

The new can criticize the old while still standing upon part of what the old achieved.

In Vietnam, the recurring impulse to clear the board and begin again from ground zero has often meant that renewal of community came with a form of selective amnesia. The Nguyễn dynasty diminished the Tây Sơn; later Hanoi’s revolutionary historiography placed much of the legacy of the Republic of Vietnam outside the officially recognized national narrative.

When the victor obliges the country to reconstruct its history starting with its achievements, society may still recover from setbacks, but its capacity for accumulation of constructive points of view and risk tolerance is damaged.

To survive is to retain the possibility of beginning again. To recover with gracious maturity avoids having to begin again from zero.

The paradox contained within survivability can also be seen in the relationship between war and peace.

Under foreign invasion, concentrated authority, severe discipline, and the subordination of private interests become sources of collective strength. Yet the methods that can rescue a community in wartime do not naturally disappear when peace comes. An apparatus built for command may continue to govern through command though the war is over; secrecy that once protected a clandestine movement may become a means of shielding power in times of peace; dissent that was regarded as dangerous during war may continue to be viewed with suspicion through a national security lens in peacetime.

A community can defeat its enemies and still fail to overcome the necessary habits created during the struggle.

Resilient Continuity is therefore not an unqualified virtue, much less a fixed essence of Vietnamese identity. It is a collection of historically formed capacities which  may save a people under one set of conditions but constrain it under another.

To move towards a grand Opening Up of possibility today, Vietnam need not discard the inheritance left by surviving. It must distinguish within that inheritance what constitutes vitality worth preserving, what was a reflex that now must be transformed, and what is an injury that should not be transmitted into the next historical cycle.

7. Adaptation as a Civilizational Pattern

Arnold Toynbee interpreted the history of civilizations through the dialectic of “challenge and response.” A community does not grow simply because it overcomes difficulties; it grows when its response opens the way toward a higher level of civilization development.

Vietnamese experience suggests a recurrent pattern: bend without breaking, receive without accepting everything offered or imposed, withdraw into smaller units when the center is threatened, and reunite when opportunity returns.

This might be described as a rhythm of Consolidation and Dispersion — Tích and Tản.

Assets – human capital, social capital, economic, political – accumulate as conditions permit, scatter when the center weakens so that they are not destroyed and later re-converge hosted within a new structure of command and control. The rhythm of dispersal and then consolidation can be seen in villages, migration, guerrilla warfare, family networks, and, today, even among overseas Vietnamese communities.

When the state weakened, village society preserved part of communal life in the margins of official governance. When the centralized economy reached an impasse, families and informal networks sustained livelihoods. When the country was relatively closed and stagnant, Vietnamese abroad continued to construct networks of knowledge, finance, and international connection.

Thus, the center might fail while dispersed currents of life continued to flow.

This is a remarkable elasticity. Yet such adaptation to events always has two sides.

It enables people to live through an inhospitable environment; at the same time, it may reduce the pressure to transform that environment. People learn how to circumvent an unreasonable regulation rather than organize themselves to demand a better one; to rely upon personal connections rather than fair procedures; to transfer responsibility to the family rather than build institutions capable of protecting a wider common interest.

In dispersal, each individual may very well be acting entirely rationally to protect himself or herself. Yet the aggregate of millions of rational individual decisions can produce a society characterized by low trust and high costs of cooperation.

The familiar saying “Ở bầu thì tròn, ở ống thì dài” — roughly, to take the shape of the vessel in which one finds oneself — captures this adaptive capacity well. Under difficult conditions, it is survival intelligence. Once elevated into a permanent philosophy applied after the danger has evaporated, however, it can justify living without stable principles: speaking the language expected by each different power grouping, accommodating whoever has the whip hand, and above all preserving personal safety and advantage.

A bi-focal, inside/outside, existence easily develops from this pattern.

In official settings, people speak the permitted language; privately, they may think differently. A civil servant enforces a regulation he knows to be unreasonable; an intellectual writes what does not entirely correspond to what she believes; citizens comply outwardly while quietly devising ways to neutralize an order.

A society can adapt for a very long time to a political order in which the social space for expressing genuine belief cannot expand.

The ability to coexist with what is unreasonable can prevent immediate hardship, but it can also enable the unreasonable to survive much longer.

The same limitation appears in the modern Vietnamese reception of new ideas and practices.

Vietnamese society often learns quickly, applies techniques flexibly, and catches up rapidly in practical skills. Yet absorbing an accomplishment of modernity is not the same as absorbing the conditions that made that accomplishment possible.

A university can be built according to international models while its tolerance of academic freedom remains constrained. Modern techniques of administration can be imported without giving rise to corresponding structures of accountability. A market economy can expand without the simultaneous construction of a sufficiently strong rule of law and genuinely fair competition.

The new penetrates deeply enough to alter the surface, but not deeply enough to transform the society’s foundations and thus maximize the benefits so made available for years to come.

The problem, then, is not that the Vietnamese do not know how to learn.

Rather, for them learning has too often been driven only by the necessity of immediate response instead of by a long-term strategy of beneficial accumulation: learning in order to pass an examination, meet a target, fulfill a campaign, or catch up with the outside world — but not always learning in order to cultivate independent thought or generate new knowledge.

Đổi Mới in 1986 offers a national-scale example:

As the centrally planned economy entered profound crisis, individual initiative, household production, and market activity were permitted far greater room. Results appeared quickly, demonstrating the considerable vitality already present in society.

Yet reform focused primarily on the economy, while the structures of power, the rule of law, and the freedom to organize social entities evolved more slowly. The market was accepted as an instrument for generating growth, while many of the political and legal conditions that allow a market economy to become fair, innovative, and sustainable, developed far less fully.

That was adaptation. It was not transformation.

A rigid people cannot survive in a changing world. But real, effective, productive, systemic Opening Up requires adaptation to be elevated to another level: from finding a path to manage one’s way in an irrational environment to changing that environment together; from learning in order to catch up to learning in order to create; from flexibility toward circumstances to fidelity to principle combined with flexibility in method.

Resilient Continuity helps people find a way to live inside a narrow tube. Maturation – systemic Opening Up – requires them together to widen the tube.

8. Non-Absolutism: From the Strength of Synthesis to the Danger of Ambiguity

Vietnamese society has rarely carried any single system of thought to the final logical implications instructing us how best to live our lives. 

The Three Teachings — Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism — could coexist among Vietnamese. A person could worship ancestors, visit Buddhist temples, respect Confucian norms, maintain local religious practices, and absorb certain Western values without feeling compelled to choose only one of them as providing the absolute truth about heaven and earth and our fates in this life. Things that might appear contradictory in theory could coexist quite comfortably in personal practice.

This tendency toward non-absolutism has encouraged cultural absorption and everyday tolerance.

Vietnamese society has often been able to accept the new without immediately abandoning the old, to modify this or that behavior before reconstructing an integrated  holistic system of belief. This has generated considerable capacity for synthesis.

It also helps explain why imported ideologies, once in Vietnam, have been modified by the society that received them.

Confucianism never eliminated village religion; Buddhism coexisted with ancestor worship; Vietnamese Catholicism absorbed many expressions of local culture. Communism, while preserving Marxist-Leninist language within the official system, also combined in practice with nationalism, family structures, village psychology, and traditions of authority that had long predated its arrival from the West.

Even those speaking in the name of an absolute doctrine do not necessarily live by all its prescriptions.

A Party cadre might speak the vocabulary of class struggle while giving priority to the interests of his family. The state may maintain a socialist political identity while increasingly relying on markets, private enterprise, and integration into the global economy.

Doctrine can survive in language while practice quietly adjusts to the requirements of survival.

This produces a notable inconsistency.

An ideology does not necessarily disappear when belief in its theoretical propositions weakens. When people become accustomed to saying one thing but thinking another, while acting according to a third normative assumption, a political order may continue to function long after its original intellectual foundations have lost much of their persuasive force.

Ideology, once institutionalized, survives not through intermediation of belief alone. It survives through organization, interests, language, habits, and the self-interest of power structures.

What efficacy remains after an ideology loses its moral appeal may therefore prove more socially durable than the abstractions of that belief system. Habits of obedience, the distribution of privileges, the relationship between authority and official truth, or the expectation that decisions must descend from above, can persist even after the language that once justified them has lost much of its currency.

Non-absolutism, however, must not be confused with the absence of principle.

When it degenerates into “anything can be accepted,” it blurs the distinctions between tolerance and accommodation, flexibility and opportunism. One may respect beliefs different from one’s own, but tolerance cannot be invoked to excuse corruption, the denial of rights, violence, or systematic falsehood.

Nor does the idea of a “Middle Way” mean positioning oneself halfway between truth and falsehood or distributing responsibility equally simply to avoid having to judge. The Middle Way demands resistance to extremism in thought and action; it does not require the abandonment of moral discrimination.

Tolerance respects persons and differences within a zone of proportional morality and practical reason. It cannot become a tolerance without limits which therefore accepts even conduct that destroys human dignity. 

A new path for the Vietnamese people today must preserve their resilient capacity for synthesis, because a plural society cannot mature under monopolies of truth.

But a right-minded synthesis needs banks within which to flow: human dignity, truth, responsibility, the rule of law, and the right to dissent.

Without such boundaries, the current of synthesis can only lose momentum and become stagnant water wherein principle gradually dissolves into convenience.

The strength of the Vietnamese lies partly in the fact that they are not easily swallowed whole by a doctrine. Their limitation is that they do not always follow to the full the values they claim to have chosen.

The journey from Resilient Continuity to fully Opening Up must preserve capacities while overcoming limitations.

9. The Accumulated Sediments of Collective Consciousness

History does not stop in its tracks when an event ends.

It settles into language, symbols, habits, fears, and forms of tacit knowledge that people use without necessarily remembering their origins. These accumulations of experience may be called the sediments of a people’s collective consciousness.

Every generation receives such sediments from family, school, community, and state, and then transmits them — sometimes almost unchanged, sometimes partially transformed — to the next.

Sediments are not an immutable essence.

They are history that has entered into human consciousness and conscience.

The memory of Chinese domination nourishes Vietnamese vigilance toward China, while centuries of interaction also left a deep dependence upon written forms, classical references, and patterns of political organization originating in Chinese civilization.

The Vietnamese repeatedly resisted rule from the north, yet their state was also organized to incorporate many forms learned from that same neighboring civilization. This is not uniquely Vietnamese; civilizations often learn a great deal from their most powerful rivals.

In Vietnam’s case, however, the prolonged asymmetry produced a particular tension.

China was both a major source of civilizational learning and a recurrent threat to political autonomy. Vietnamese elites learned writing, classics, and techniques of statecraft from China while repeatedly asserting that Vietnam was not Chinese.

Vietnamese-Chinese relations have therefore long carried paired opposites: proximity and distance, reception and vigilance, admiration and resistance.

That tension has never entirely disappeared.

One of the deeper consequences of this long-standing tension may be that Vietnamese consciousness has often been highly sensitive to national independence without always connecting national independence equally strongly to the autonomy of individual citizens. A country may defend its political frontier while continuing to reproduce its own forms of hierarchy and obedience shaped by a much longer history.

The memory of war has left another double sediment.

On one side, it nurtures patriotism, endurance, sacrifice, and the capacity to mobilize society in the face of danger. On the other, it can reinforce the habit of dividing the world into “us” and “the enemy,” treating disagreement with “us” as a domestic threat and identifying unity of will as the only possible basis of national strength.

Military vocabulary consequently survives in peacetime life: “campaign,” “front,” “battle line,” “shock force,” “victory.”

When every problem is imagined as a battle, society tends to follow commands rather than seek dialogue, favors mobilization rather than participation, values victory rather than interim solutions that can be tested, corrected, and improved over time.

A person who disagrees with the method chosen to meet a particular need can then be treated as though he or she rejects the common good.

Another layer of sediment was produced during periods when political power reached deeply into social life but met with subtle non-compliance.

When public language diverges from private belief, outward compliance is easily accompanied by withdrawal from common responsibility. People learn what may be said, where it may be said, and to whom.  But acquiescence does not necessarily mean agreement. Applause does not necessarily mean approval.

Over time, this bi-modal existence undermined more than truth. It weakens trust between people. When no one is certain what others actually think, social cooperation becomes more difficult. Family and close relationships become safe spaces, while public life is treated as the domain of procedure, ritual language, and unnecessary risk.

For today’s Vietnamese, April 30, 1975 is one clear expression of a bi-furcated political memory.

Within the narrative of the victorious side, it is the day of liberation and reunification. In the experience of many former South Vietnamese and members of overseas communities, it is associated with collapse, reeducation, dispossession, escape by sea, and exile.

A historical event can carry profoundly different meanings depending on who is shaping the narrative, and no such meaning automatically disappears because one side possesses state power.

Maturation requires the creation of a space in which different memories can be expressed, tested against evidence, and allowed to coexist. Non-absolutism can contribute constructively here. Historical events must be investigated through evidence; memories of suffering also call for the capacity to listen.

Reconciliation cannot be achieved by demanding that people renounce and abandon their own narratives. 

To excavate historical sediments is neither to persecute one’s ancestors nor to apply contemporary standards simplistically to every decision made in the past. It is to bring forward unconscious reflexes so that a community can recognize what perceptions and feelings continue silently to influence the quality of its collective li.

Once recognized, the past can become an object of choice. When denied, it continues to govern the present from the shadows.

A people does not mature by forgetting what happened.

Rather, a people matures when formalized perceptions of the past no longer possesses absolute authority over what must happen next.

10. When the Advantages permitting Survival Become Limits on Development

A survival capability becomes a developmental limitation when a method that once worked in emergency conditions is transformed into the normal method of government.

Centralized authority can enable rapid mobilization during war but weaken initiative in peace. Secrecy may protect a persecuted organization but diminish transparency once that organization becomes the state. Discipline may prevent a movement from disintegrating but turn into the punishment of dissent if independent thinking is no longer tolerated.

A core capacity then hardens into a core rigidity.

Solidarity against foreign aggression is one of the clearest strengths in Vietnamese history. Yet once an external danger has passed, solidarity does not automatically become the capacity to live constructively with internal differences.

The Vietnamese may rally remarkably quickly in the presence of a common enemy, yet divisions can persist for generations when the immediate need becomes the distribution of power, interests, and responsibilities among themselves.

The Lê-Mạc conflict, the Trịnh-Nguyễn division, the Tây Sơn – Nguyễn Ánh rivalry, followed later by the ideological struggles of the twentieth century, all point toward a recurring problem among Vietnamese: the capacity to identify “us and the enemy” is extremely useful in war but becomes an obstacle when the supposed “other side” is also part of the national community.

The capacity for enduring is similarly double-edged.

It helps human beings survive poverty, war, and natural disasters, but it can also lead society to tolerate for too long conditions that might actually be changed for the betterment of the common good. A community accustomed to celebrating sacrifice can forget to ask why ordinary people must always be the ones who sacrifice, and whether better government might have prevented at least part of the suffering.

Endurance is a virtue when human beings face what cannot be changed.

It becomes a political problem when endurance is used for submission to the irresponsibilities of those who govern.

Vietnamese ingenuity and improvisation have also produced remarkable achievements. Under scarcity, people devised solutions with few resources; enterprises adapt quickly to changing circumstances; families invest intensely in the future of their children.

Yet when improvisation substitutes for beneficial institutions, a society comes to depend upon exceptions rather than rules.

Success may then belong to those who know how to find a way around the infirmities of the system, rather than flow to those who are most capable or who follow fair procedures.

Cleverness can defeat standards. Connections can replace law.

The 19^th century case of Nguyễn Trường Tộ again reveals the distance between seeing the possibility of Opening Up and possessing the institutional capacity to bring about new approaches.

Vietnam has not lacked people capable of recognizing historical challenges. What it has often lacked are institutions able to listen to their voices, test their proposals, and accept recommended changes to established interests.

At such turning points, individuals sometimes emerge whom we might call hinge figures: they discern something of the logic of the coming age while still living and acting within institutions belonging to an age that is passing. Their tragedy does not necessarily lie in being always right, or even in failing. It lies in the distance between the capacity of certain individuals to recognize the need for change and the capacity of the system they serve to correct itself.

The same gap continues into modern history.

Many reform programs may set advanced objectives while recruitment systems, resource allocation, and mechanisms of accountability resist such changes. New ideas must pass through old networks of power; reform policies can themselves be reshaped to accommodate the structures that they were originally intended to change.

A policy failure therefore does not always demonstrate that the direction of reform was entirely mistaken. At times, an idea moving in the right direction passes through a mechanism incapable of implementing, testing, and correcting it, and the weaknesses of the implementing mechanism undermine the well-intentioned reform efforts.

Vietnam can therefore change very rapidly while transforming very slowly.

In the 1980s Đổi Mới generated rapid growth partly because it restored a measure of economic initiative to society. Yet when reform approaches directly affect the ordained structure of political power, the pace of change becomes much slower.

Whenever an older structure reaches its inherent limits, it may open up just far enough to absorb new resources and recover vitality. But if the forces that produced the original disappointments remain unchanged, a syncopated rhythm of Closing and Opening — Khép and Mở – risks repeating itself to perpetuate excessive institutional lassitude and economic stagnation.

A society must always be prepared to ask  whether what is accumulating within its parameters is sufficient to make the next opening up a productive transformation rather than just another interim adjustment.

Maturity arrives for a people only when their capacity to endure hardship becomes the capacity to prevent other avoidable hardships; when sacrifice is complemented by participation; when solidarity no longer requires uniformity of thought; and when flexibility operates within principles that cannot simply be bent whenever circumstances change or to favor the few at the expense of the many

What saved a people yesterday does not automatically carry that people into tomorrow.

11. Broken Accumulation and the Malady of Half-Learning

One recurring weakness occurring in Vietnamese history has been that the capacity to accumulate has not always generated the capacity to recover.

Transitions of power have repeatedly been accompanied by rewritten histories, replacement of elites, and excessive repudiation of the defeated side. The new does not merely correct the old; it often tries to demonstrate that little of value existed before itself.

Under the various family monarchies, a new dynasty could diminish the virtues of its predecessor in order to establish for itself legitimate receipt of a new Mandate from Heaven. Modern ideologies could take repudiation of past governments further by dividing history into progressive and reactionary eras, revolutionary and counterrevolutionary movements, inclusion in or exclusion from authoritative public memory.

The consequence of these re-conceptualizations is not merely injustice toward the past.

It impoverishes the present.

When a political order ends, administrative knowledge, law, education, and culture associated with that order can easily be discarded together with its political apparatus. Skilled people may be removed because of political background; archives and memories may be neglected; achievements of the defeated side may no longer be viewed as part of the common national inheritance.

The victor must then rebuild capacities that might instead have been inherited, corrected, and re-focused.

The treatment after 1975 of parts of the legacy of the Republic of Vietnam is one case worth reconsidering. Many professionals lost their positions or left the country, while experiences accumulated in education, law, administration, economics, and international engagement could not easily be assessed on its merits because it was associated with the delegitimized defeated government.

In 1975, Vietnam achieved territorial reunification while also losing part of its human capital and part of its accumulated memory — assets that a different process of reconciliation might have preserved.

Đổi Mới later restored or legitimized many elements that had previously been constrained or rejected: household production, markets, private business, relations with the West, and a greater role for expertise.

Yet this recovery was not always accompanied by a public mechanism for examining why the earlier choices had failed.

A society cannot fully learn necessary truths about reality if it cannot name its mistakes accurately.

And naming a mistake is only the beginning. The capacity for self-correction requires a fuller cycle: truth must be able to reach decision-makers; those who identify errors must have space to speak; responsibility must be traced beyond a convenient individual toward policies and mechanisms; and what has been learned must be translated into changes that make recurrence less likely.

A system may be highly capable of mobilization and still be weak at learning if success is routinely attributed to the system while failure is assigned mainly to individuals. Correction then becomes a matter of replacing people rather than repairing the conditions that produced the error.

Without the capacity to acknowledge error, there can be no genuine capacity to learn.

Incompetence in accumulation is closely connected with another recurring short-coming: half-learning.

Vietnam has repeatedly adopted the achievements of another civilization without fully absorbing the conditions that generated those achievements.

Confucian institutions were adopted to create an educated bureaucracy without a comparably developed tradition of independent disputation. Western technology was learned while freedom of thought remained more cautiously received. The Soviet model of organization was embraced without providing sufficient insulation from the dangers of concentrated power. A market economy was developed without a simultaneous maturation of the rule of law, transparent property rights, and genuinely equal competition.

Learning has often been more transactional and instrumental: take what is immediately useful while avoiding those elements which could not be smoothly synchronized with the deeper needs of the power structure.

Science is celebrated as an engine of development while academic freedom remains constrained. Digital transformation is accelerated while privacy and control over personal data lag behind. Artificial intelligence is embraced as an instrument of administrative efficiency even as it may also increase the technical capacity for surveillance.

The new is therefore invited inside while simultaneously being separated from some of its realities which are the very things which give it transformative force.

The old saying about taking the shape of one’s vessel now applies not only to individual behavior. It may become a national approach to imported models: adopt what satisfies an immediate need, modify what conflicts with existing arrangements, and then declare that the new global standard has been embraced.

The result can be modern institutions operated through premodern relationships, new institutional names carrying forward old political logics.

This is not the consequence of a lack of intelligence.

On the contrary, it may be the product of an adaptive intelligence that has become too accomplished in just being transactional in the moment.  Such instrumental cleverness can easily lead to half-learning and no more.

When society becomes accustomed to finding rapid solutions for particular situations, it becomes harder to construct systems requiring time, discipline, transparency, and consistency. Dramatic leaps are more attractive than quiet accumulation; campaigns more visible than institutions; measurable achievements easier to celebrate than foundations whose importance may not become visible for a generation.

To move toward Opening Up, Vietnam must learn how to inherit without worshipping, to break with the past without forgetting it, and to learn truths without merely imitating superficials.

What matters is not how many additional models the country imports, but whether it can understand them to their foundations, test them under Vietnamese conditions, acknowledge mistakes openly, and continue accumulating knowledge across generations.

A mature people need not be ashamed to learn from others.

The danger begins only when a society learns a great deal but the knowledge it acquires does not enhance its own creative capacity.

12. Communism in Vietnamese History: From a Capacity for Liberation to the Restraints on Reconciliation

Communism cannot be understood simply as something foreign imposed upon Vietnam.

Nor can it be equated with the entirety of Vietnamese patriotism, the desire for independence, or the sacrifices of those who followed it.

In the twentieth century, the communist movement provided disciplined organization, a language of liberation, methods of mass mobilization, and an international network for the struggle against colonial rule. It promised not only national independence but also a more equal social order.

In a poor, colonized, and deeply stratified country, that promise possessed genuine attraction.

The historical strength of Vietnamese communism lay partly in its ability to connect the national question to the social question. It did not merely promise to expel foreign rulers; it also promised to transform the lives of peasants, workers, and social groups possessing little voice within the previous order.

Organizational discipline, clandestine capacity, and support from an international communist movement helped it outperform competing nationalist organizations that were often more fragmented.

Yet the patriotic motivations of millions of Vietnamese cannot be reduced to belief in Marxism-Leninism.

The example of Tạ Quang Bửu, mentioned in Part I, is instructive: he joined the revolution in 1945 and became a Party member only later. A single individual cannot represent an entire generation, but his path reminds us that for many intellectuals and ordinary Vietnamese, the nation came before the doctrine; the doctrine was a path chosen in the service of the nation.

The Communist Party of Indochina’s announcement of its dissolution in November 1945, followed by clandestine organizational activity before its public reappearance as the Workers’ Party of Vietnam in 1951, should likewise be understood in the context of efforts to construct a broader national front while responding to domestic and international concerns.

The episode does not permit the simplistic conclusion that Vietnamese society as a whole rejected communism.

A more defensible proposition is that the movement’s broadest appeal did not arise from Marxist theory in the abstract. It came from the capacity to connect that theory with independence, national unity, social justice, and liberation from colonial subordination.

That combination created a capacity for liberation.

The paradox emerged when a doctrine that had functioned as an instrument of liberation became the exclusive foundation of political legitimacy for an independent nation with a remarkable past made possible by a resilient continuity.

Class struggle placed people into political categories heavily conditioned by social origin. Land reform did more than redistribute property; it also inflicted deep wounds upon community relations. The political classification of family background blurred the distinction between individual responsibility and inherited identity.

More consequentially, when a political organization identifies itself simultaneously with the nation and with the allegedly necessary direction of history, rival domestic political competition can easily be interpreted as betrayal rather than as a normal possibility within national life.

A doctrine that speaks in the name of human liberation can thereby produce a structure in which human beings no longer possess a full right to choose the path of their own liberation.

During war, discipline and concentration of authority provided significant organizational advantages. In peace, if not transformed, they can become foundations for monopoly.

A propaganda apparatus once used to mobilize society during war can continue to define which memories are legitimate. Security institutions created to confront infiltration from outside can easily be turned toward supervision of dissent within. The category of “enemy” migrates from the battlefield into political life, where criticism of policy may still be viewed through the lens of loyal solidarity.

After 1975, territorial reunification did not produce uniformity of memories.

Economic reorganization, reeducation camps, the exodus of the boat people, and the legacy of the Republic of Vietnam were for many years represented in official discourse primarily through the perspective of the victorious side. An opportunity for postwar reconciliation was therefore only partially used, while the normative logic of winner and loser held sway long after the fighting had ended.

Yet the limitations of the communist model do not disappear merely because belief in communist theory declines. This is where the analysis must go deeper.

A modern political system does not survive only through the writings of Marx or Lenin, textbooks, ideological instruction, or public slogans. It also survives through an apparatus of power, networks of interests, procedures for selecting personnel, relationships between property and political position, languages of legitimacy, and fears of instability. It survives, too, through social habits accumulated over long periods: withdrawal from politics, the search for patronage, self-censorship, and the tendency to regard existing structures of authority as almost immutable facts of life.

An ideology may weaken in the minds of citizens while continuing for a long time to inhabit institutions.

The distinction is essential. The end of belief in a doctrine is not the same thing as the disappearance of mechanisms created under that doctrine. Institutions, interests, habits of power, and social psychology do not dissolve at the same moment as ideological conviction. The central challenge of any future transition is therefore not simply to leave an old order behind, but to avoid carrying its deepest reflexes intact into what comes next.

For that reason, any future transition — whatever name it may eventually bear — cannot consist merely of changing symbols, replacing terminology, or announcing the repudiation of an ideology.

If political power remains beyond effective restraint; if a new victor erases a new loser; if dissent continues to be interpreted as betrayal; if society continues to place its hopes in a leader presumed capable of resolving problems that properly belong to institutions, then a new political order may do no more than reproduce the mechanisms of the order it has replaced.

The lesson extends far beyond communism. Political names can change much faster than the habits of power those systems leave behind, and the removal of an old orthodoxy does not in itself create a culture of responsibility.

Justice requires truth, individual responsibility, and reform of the institutions that permitted abuse. Reconciliation requires equal dignity, the right to dissent, and the rejection of collective vengeance. These two imperatives do not cancel one another. They need each other.

Without justice, reconciliation may become compulsory forgetting. Without reconciliation, justice risks becoming only the punitive instrument of whoever claims the power to rule.

Only when the history of the nation is understood as larger than the separate histories of every political party can memories once used to divide Vietnamese begin to become part of a common moral and spiritual inheritance befitting an intelligent and ambitious people.

Communism can then be restored to its proper historical proportion: an exceptionally important chapter of modern Vietnamese history, capable of mobilizing great energies and associated with achievements that cannot reasonably be denied, while also carrying profound limitations and tragedies — but neither the beginning, nor the end, nor the ultimate meaning of Vietnamese history.

The Vietnamese people existed long before every modern political doctrine contributed to global discourse, and they will remain a people after many such doctrines have changed, faded, or passed away.

The decisive question, therefore, is not when a particular political label will disappear. It is whether a society has accumulated by the time a historical order reaches the limits of its own capacity – enough independent persons, enough knowledge, enough respect for law, enough institutional responsibility, enough reconciled memory, enough space for truth, enough experience of cooperation — so that what follows need not become just another variation on what had gone before.

A new cycle for the Vietnamese, should one emerge, does not become better merely because an older cycle has ended. It will become a genuine Opening Up only when the conditions for Maturing have already begun to form: autonomous persons, the rule of law, accountable power, memories capable of reconciliation, and a society that possesses the institutional courage to detect and correct its own mistakes.

CONCLUSION TO PART II

Resilient Continuity is one of the great achievements of Vietnamese history, but it does not provide the Vietnamese with an exemption from the limitations of the present. That inheritance remains life-giving only if the Vietnamese learn to distinguish nourishment from poison, endurance from stagnation, tolerance from ambiguity, solidarity from submission, and flexibility from the absence of principle.

Almost every capacity that enabled the Vietnamese people to survive over the centuries possesses this double character. Village society preserved community, yet it could also nourish localism. The family generated resilience, yet it could weaken obligations toward the public realm. Adaptation helped people cross periods of danger, yet it could prolong an irrational environment. Non-absolutism made cultural synthesis possible, yet it could blur distinctions between right and wrong. Concentrated authority made extraordinary mobilization possible during crisis, yet when normalized it could weaken precisely the capacity for self-correction upon which long-term development depends.

Historical ruptures repeatedly allowed Vietnam to recover without fully retaining the achievements of preceding cycles. Half-learning brought modern forms to the surface without necessarily transforming the foundations below. Communism gathered immense energies associated with patriotism, equality, and the struggle for independence; once made the exclusive source of political legitimacy, however, it also revitalized older normative sediments of obedience, fear of difference, and the exclusion of the defeated side from common memory.

None of these limitations is destiny. They were produced in history, and because they were historically produced, they can also be recognized, modified, and overcome.

The rhythm of history is therefore not a promise that renewal must inevitably follow deterioration. History owes salvation to no people. What history allows us to recognize is something more modest and more demanding: no historical condition is naturally permanent, yet an opportunity for change becomes meaningful only when a society has developed the capacities required to use it.

Here the two historical rhythms followed throughout this essay meet. Consolidation and Dispersion — Tích and Tản – help explain how Vietnamese communities could disperse without disappearing and then converge again when circumstances permitted.  Closing and Opening —Khép and Mở – pose the more difficult question: after each convergence, does society reach a higher level of development, or merely reconstitute a familiar structure under a new name?

Replacing one center of power with another is not yet an Opening Up. Replacing one political language with another while preserving obedience, monopolized memory, and the longing for a savior does not  introduce a new advance in civilization

That is why the decisive issue is not simply recognizing when an order is approaching its limits. It is what has already been prepared before that  point of transition arrives: are there available people capable of independent judgment; knowledge capable of surviving political changes; a culture of responsibility; the rule of law; memories capable of speaking to one another; institutions able to discover errors and correct them rather than merely conceal them. A society should not wait for an old order to end before asking what must be built next. The foundations for what will follow are laid, quietly and often imperfectly, while the existing order is still standing.

Transformation of the Vietnamese begins when endurance is no longer used as a reason to endure indefinitely; when victory no longer confers ownership of historical truth; when popular ingenuity is no longer treated as a substitute for institutional responsibility; and when a society ceases to believe that a new era can be brought into existence merely by giving it a new name.

A new age begins only when the people and institutions capable of inhabiting that age have themselves begun to mature.

From this point onward, the central question is no longer simply why the Vietnamese people survived. It becomes more demanding: what must a people that has demonstrated such extraordinary Resilient Continuity transform within itself in order to become capable of self-knowledge, self-correction, responsibility, and the deliberate construction of its own future?

That is the passage from Resilient Continuity to Maturation — and the subject of Part III.

SELECTED REFERENCES

1. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised ed. London: Verso, 2006.
2. Braudel, Fernand. Écrits sur l’histoire. Paris: Flammarion, 1969.
3. Brocheux, Pierre, and Daniel Hémery. Indochine: la colonisation ambiguë, 1858–1954. Paris: La Découverte, 2001. English edition: Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858–1954. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
4. Goscha, Christopher. Vietnam: A New History. New York: Basic Books, 2016.
5. Guillemot, François. Viêt-Nam, fractures d’une nation: Une histoire contemporaine de 1858 à nos jours. Paris: La Découverte, 2018; updated as Histoire du Viêt Nam contemporain: De 1858 à nos jours. Paris: La Découverte, 2025.
6. Marr, David G. Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
7. Papin, Philippe. Histoire de Hanoi. Paris: Fayard, 2001.
8. Taylor, Keith Weller. A History of the Vietnamese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
9. Toynbee, Arnold J. A Study of History. London: Oxford University Press, 1934–1961.
10. Trần Ngọc Vương. Thực thể Việt nhìn từ các tọa độ chữ. 2 vols. Hanoi: Vietnam National University Press, 2025.
11. Trần Quốc Vượng. Văn hóa Việt Nam: Tìm tòi và suy ngẫm. Hanoi: Văn hóa Dân tộc / Tạp chí Văn hóa Nghệ thuật, various editions.
12. Woodside, Alexander Barton. Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study of Vietnamese and Chinese Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.
13. Kiernan, Ben. Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
14. Bradley, Mark Philip. Vietnam at War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

• • Introduced by Professor Stephen B. Young, Global Executive Director of the Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism; author The Tradition of Human Rights in China and Vietnam
  • Written by Former Ambassador Hoang Thang Dinh, Ph.D. in Political Science and Fellow of the Caux Round Table

  Introduction

  What comes next for Vietnam in the twenty-first century?

  This is a question not only for Vietnamese scholars and citizens, but also for any policymaker, international business partner, social-media communities, and younger generations seeking a practical vision of Vietnam’s possible place in a rapidly changing world.

  From Endurance to Opening: A New Path for the Vietnamese People begins by recounting an extraordinary historical achievement: despite centuries of foreign domination, warfare, division, political rupture, and displacement, the Vietnamese people have preserved their identity, communal continuity, and national sovereignty. The essay calls this capacity “Endurance”, a resilient communal continuity

  Yet such endurance alone is no longer sufficient to advance Vietnam’s prospects. Qualities that once enabled survival—adaptability, resilience, social cohesion, and the ability to absorb external shocks and alternative narratives on norms and proper socialization—may become constraints when they harden into political inertia, intellectual accommodation, or acceptance of conditions that should be changed. Vietnam’s twenty first century journey must therefore lead from Endurance through a process of national Maturing  leading to a cultural, social, economic and political Opening Up to all of humanity:  internalizing the capacity to transform historical experience into wisdom, power into responsibility, economic growth into human dignity, and national identity into a creative contribution to humanity.

  This essay was developed within the framework of the broader U.S.–Vietnam Project, an effort to deepen mutual understanding between the two countries and help realize the full potential of their Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. Such understanding is increasingly important as Vietnam and the United States navigate a changing Indo-Pacific shaped by strategic competition, technological transformation, and their shared interest in a free and open regional order. I am pleased that a number of friends and other officials in our diplomatic and national security agencies have taken an interest in this essay and previous commentaries.

  For scholars, policymakers, citizens, and young people asking where Vietnam may go next—and what values should guide that journey—this essay offers not a finalized proposal, but an invitation to reflect and dialogue on what is to be done by the Vietnamese to advance their destiny in promising directions. It is in this spirit of seeking the greater good that I am pleased to commend this thoughtful and ambitious essay to all those concerned with Vietnam’s future.

  Here is the essay.

  AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION

  FROM AN AGE OF “ORDER” TO AN AGE OF “TRANSITION”

  For much of the twentieth century, strategic thinking often began with the question: What kind of order is framing world events? People gave names to various structures of behaviors and expectations: the colonial system, the bipolar order, Pax Americana, or liberal globalization. Yet an “order” is only a still photograph capturing a particular moment, while history is a film that continues moving from one frame to another. The twenty-first century increasingly shows that humanity is preparing to enter a new order that has not yet fully taken its shape. We are living in an age in which power, technology, climate, population, data, and systems of values are changing simultaneously, while no great power is yet capable of establishing a new and enduring status quo.

  For Vietnam, this movement fundamentally changes the modalities of survival. In the past, we could endure through resilience by contracting when invaded, dispersing to avoid destruction, and then gathering strength to restore our sovereignty. Today, borders remain important, but dependence on others also operates through supply chains, obtaining core technologies, data infrastructure, finance, education, and even algorithms created by others that quietly shape human perceptions and decisions. A country may preserve its territorial integrity while losing its capacity for self-determination; it may grow rapidly while mortgaging its future; it may maintain political stability while trust, creativity, and civic responsibility gradually withdraw from common life. Adaptation for the sake of survival is no longer sufficient. Vietnam must acquire the capacity to orient itself towards the future it wants amid the very process of transition.

  This essay begins with an undeniable achievement: through thousands of years of war, foreign domination, division, natural disasters, and political ruptures, the Vietnamese people have maintained their historical continuity. Many communities that once possessed territories, languages, and cultures have been assimilated by others or have just disappeared; the Vietnamese, although they lost their sovereignty more than once, repeatedly re-established communal life and re-asserted ethnic autonomy. This capacity can be called resilient continuity (Truong ton) and provided for lasting Endurance for the Vietnamese as a people

  Such Endurance is not a mysterious gift reserved for our people, nor is it evidence of an immutable “Vietnamese essence.” It is the result, year in and year out,  of many forces operating together: the resilience of the family and the village, the tenacious survival of language and memories, the capacity to receive but then Vietnamize external influences, and the ability to disperse in times of danger and reunite when opportunities to do so arose. Such a capacity for Endurance encompassed the intelligence, sacrifices, wise choices, and tragic decisions of many generations and still today energizes Vietnamese to advance by themselves their national destiny.

  Yet it is precisely here that the central paradox emerges. A capacity developed in response to a particular set of circumstances may become a form of inertia when those circumstances change and new, more fitting, capabilities are demanded by those circumstances A core capability that once ensured success may harden into a core rigidity that obstructs renewal as times and economic realities change. Resourcefulness in the moment may weaken the capacity for long-term construction; accommodation may become avoidance of principle; just enduring may cause society to accept for too long conditions that should have been changed. Unity in the face of foreign invasion has repeatedly dissolved into divisiveness once the external enemy disappeared. Endurance is therefore both a precious legacy and a possible ceiling limiting the nation’s maturation as new possibilities arise.

  Moving beyond the ceiling on responsiveness imposed by enduring is the stage of of Maturation, which his the capacity of a historical community to become more fully self-aware and intentional, to correct and orient itself appropriately; to elevate power into responsibility, growth into personal dignity, memory into wisdom, and uniqueness into creative energy. If Enduring answers the question of how not to be erased from history, Maturation answers the question of how to rise above systemic conformism and acquire a comprehensive agency, not to continue being led by history in an uncertain and unreflective manner.

  Enduring and Maturing must both be understood on two levels: as a crystallized outcome of actions taken and as a continuing process moving forward in time. Classical Endurance was expressed by protecting the community and recovering sovereignty. Yet Enduring in these modern times is never enough, because sovereignty today also encompasses the capacity to master knowledge, technology, natural resources, data, and make strategic decisions. Similarly, Maturation is now necessary in a period when independence and civilization have reached a high degree of development, but this contemporary Maturing must be the shared undertaking of all Vietnamese. It cannot be monopolized by either the nationalists or the communists, by those inside the country or those overseas, by the state or independent intellectuals. A people becomes truly mature only when each and all participate in defining the common interest.

  Such a perspective also requires a multilinear reading of history. The history that did occur was not the only history that could have occurred. Alongside the victorious currents, there have always been possibilities that emerged but were then cut short, ideas that foresaw the future but found no institutions capable of adopting and acting on them, and communities that left a remembered legacy despite having suffered military or political defeat. In the 19^th century, Nguyễn Trường Tộ very correctly perceived the “great tendency of the world” at that time and so proposed comprehensive reforms in scholarship, administration, economics, and technology, but this his new understanding was not adopted by a sufficiently powerful coalition capable of turning it into a national program. A mature nation is not afraid to look back at the possibilities that history did not champion.

  If Maturation is a process of evolution, then Opening Up to bring about viable possibilities is a process looking towards a horizon. For Vietnamese to Open Up today, to unfold their collective genius does not mean their Westernizing, breaking with tradition, or pursuing everything new. It is the liberation of valuable possibilities that are ready for exploitation but have not yet been fully developed: moving from adaptation to initiating creativity, from defensiveness to construction, from submission to taking responsibility, and leaving behind a community trapped by its history to become an agent capable of making history going forward. Opening Up does not negate Endurance; it enables the sources of Endurance to find a larger current.

  A new path for the Vietnamese people is therefore neither a new ideology nor a declaration that the Vietnamese possess a truth of their own. It must be a way of moving forward together: sufficiently grounded in “Vietnamese character” and so not becoming a copy of others, yet sufficiently open to the global community to consider universal values; sufficiently connected to history to have roots, yet sufficiently free to criticize that very history. Values such as love, tolerance, creativity, responsibility, humanity, and dignity acquire real meaning only when they are embodied in modern life through human rights, citizens’ rights, the rule of law, democracy, and institutions that enable society to recognize and correct its mistakes.

  This new journey for the Vietnamese may be imagined through the image of a tree. Its roots, reaching deep into the soil of history, represent Enduring. Its growing trunk, forming a structure, withstanding storms, and healing itself, represents Maturing. Its canopy, receiving light, air, water, and nourishment from all directions, represents Opening Up to possibilities. Its flowers and fruits are what the Vietnamese people may offer to the world. Preserving the roots does not mean rejecting the sky; opening the canopy to light does not mean losing the roots. Yet roots that cannot absorb nourishment will rot, a trunk that cannot carry sap up to the branches and leaves will wither, and a canopy that receives no light will bear neither flowers nor fruit.

  This essay reads history as leaving behind layers of sediment. Each layer contains nourishment and toxins, achievements and wounds, realities that came into being and possibilities that remained unrealized. The challenge today then is neither to worship nor to reject the past, but to make the past a set of options for the future. A mature nation does not carry history as a sentence imposed upon it. It carries history as memory subjected to reflection, and thereby learns what must be inherited, what must be transcended, and what must never be allowed to happen again.

  The central thesis of this essay may be expressed as follows: the Vietnamese people have demonstrated their capacity to survive, but to succeed and flourish in this twenty-first century they must acquire the capacities for Maturing and Opening Up. Endurance is the foundation; Maturation is transformative growth; Opening Up envisions the horizon. This journey does not belong exclusively to a state, a political party, an intellectual class, or a generation. It is the shared undertaking of Vietnamese communities inside and outside the country, of people who carry different memories, and especially of the younger generation—those who not only have inherited the debts and disappointments of history but also have the right to participate in writing a covenant with the future.

  PART I

  HISTORICAL CYCLES: CHALLENGE, ADAPTATION, AND SOVEREIGNTY

  This historical section does not seek to retell the long history of the Vietnamese people, nor does it use the past as mandating a necessary destiny. This section reads history as a series of repeated cycles of challenge, response, accumulated capacities, and enduring wounds. Vietnamese Enduring therefore appears not as an immutable miracle, but as the end result of many choices, repeated processes of adaptation, and hopeful possibilities that emerged only to be cut short.

  1. From the Early Period to Chinese Rule: Preserving the Core while Adapting External Influences

  The periods of Văn Lang–Âu Lạc tribal coalescence and the revolt of the Trưng Sisters against Han Chinese imperialism must be discerned at the intersection of mythology, archaeology, and historical records written in later times. Legends should not be turned into facts in the modern sense, but neither should mythology be regarded as fiction. Origin stories, memories of the Hùng Kings, Mother Âu Cơ and Father Lạc Long Quân, and the uprising of the Trưng Sisters tell us how later generations, looking back, imagined their community: as a hundred children born from a single womb, bound by symbolic kinship yet accepting dispersion to the mountains or the seashore; bearing traces of female authority and indigenous beliefs; and carrying memories of a distinct political space before incorporation into the Chinese imperial bureaucratic state.

  The endurance capacity accumulated in this early layer of psycho-social reality was the consciousness that the community could possess a life of its own. But caution, however, arises from the fragmentary nature of the evidence and the temptation to use mythology to legitimize present-day conclusions. Endurance did not arise from some pre-existing and homogeneous essence shared by all historic Vietnamese. The Vietnamese experience began with numerous communities in the river deltas and uplands gradually forming connections, both conflicting and integrating with one another, and later being remembered as having shared a common origin.

  From the defeat of the Trưng Sisters in 39 CE to the Vietnamese victory at the Bạch Đằng River in 938 CE, the pressure of assimilation continued over centuries.  Han Chinese administrative institutions, written characters, laws, scholarship, and the imperial model penetrated deeply into Vietnamese communities. Yet this reception did not take place in a vacuum. Families, villages, popular beliefs, the spoken language, and memories of resistance created places of refuge for the community to continue as a self-system. A unique identity was not lost, but preserved, and even venerated.

  The subsequent indigenous uprisings extending from Lady Triệu to Lý Bí, Mai Thúc Loan, Phùng Hưng, Khúc Thừa Dụ, and Dương Đình Nghệ showed that a desire for self-rule did not suddenly appear in 938. That moral and political energy – a social capital – was a capacity nurtured and refined over many generations. In 939 CE, Ngô Quyền did not establish independence upon a land that had remained entirely quiescent; his victory at Bạch Đằng was the point at which currents of separateness and resistance, flowing quietly or erupting openly across many centuries, finally converged generating military effectiveness.

  Buddhism played a significant role in this process because it created spiritual and intellectual networks that did not completely coincide with the mores and teachings of the colonial bureaucracy. Lê Mạnh Thát’s bold approach to the history of Vietnamese Buddhism may be consulted, but an interpretation such as his that remains contested should not be turned into the sole basis of understanding. What is more certain is that religious centers, trading networks, and villages helped the indigenous society maintain its connections to its past, receive written scripts and ideas from both India and China, and gradually Vietnamize them.

  What these cycles of intrusion, adaption, and resistance produced was a core ability to contract without dissolving, to learn from the stronger power without entirely losing oneself in that foreignness, and to reunite as a community when opportunity appeared. What was lost were many indigenous cultural layers that became obscured; the long-term imposition on the evolving but enduring community was a deep dependence on the writing system, canonical models, and structures of social power and governance brought by the Chinese. The capacity for adaptation created vitality, but it also planted the seeds of a lasting disposition toward the neighboring giant civilization where admiration, insecurity, and resistance existed side by side.

  2. The Lý–Trần and Early Lê Dynasties: 450 Years of Classical Self-Rule and National Flowering

  After regaining sovereignty for the Vietnamese people, the Lý and Trần dynasties did not merely defend their borders against Chinese imperialism. They also built viable state institutions, a legal order, irrigation systems, an army, and a cultural space capable of expressing itself. That culture flourished with an amalgam known as the Three Teachings coexisting within a relatively flexible moral and intellectual order of spiritual development; Buddhism contributed to political and ethical life;  A Confucianism derived from the Analects and the Mencius gradually supplied norms and techniques of governance; and indigenous beliefs continued to provide spiritual sustenance in both villages and the royal court. The uniquely Vietnamese Trúc Lâm school of Zen was a representative synthesis: it followed Buddhism while linking spiritual practice with responsibility toward the community and the country.

  This may be regarded as a major Opening Up of the Vietnamese as a people permitted by an age of self-rule: knowledge received from outside was transformed into national capacity and a distinct cultural dynamic passed on from generation to generation. The solidarity displayed in the face of the Mongol–Yuan invasions of the 14^th Century showed that the royal court, the nobility, the villages, and the army could coordinate efficiently with one another when the country confronted an existential threat. Although the historical and symbolic dimensions of the Diên Hồng Conference where the ruling Dynasty decided to fight back on behalf of the entire people must be elevated in contemporary esteem, it nevertheless gave rise to the memory of a moment when state power had to seek a consensus of values and personal commitments extending far beyond royal courtyards.

  Yet this era of Buddhist influence should not be romanticized. The social order remained hierarchical, power belonged to a minority, ordinary lives remained precarious, and dynastic struggles between and within families never disappeared. This classical Opening Up created a high point of civilization for the Vietnamese people, but it did not yet constitute freedom and citizenship in the modern sense. The lesson for Vietnamese today is not to replicate the Lý–Trần model, but to recognize and apply once again its ability to receive multiple intellectual sources without allowing any one of them immediately to monopolize the spiritual life of the people.

  The twenty years of Ming colonial rule which followed the collapse of the Tran Dynasty were shorter than the earlier centuries of Chinese domination, but the intensity of foreign control, exploitation, and cultural destruction was particularly severe. Responding to that ordeal, the Lam Sơn uprising did not merely recover political authority; it also created a new language of legitimacy. The Proclamation of Victory over the Wu placed Benevolence and Righteousness alongside consciousness of territory, customs, history, and civilization as essential for the Vietnamese capacity to Endure. It’s author, Nguyễn Trãi transformed resistance to foreign invasion into a moral proposition: bringing peace to the people was the standard of politics, and independence meant not merely replacing a foreign ruler with an indigenous one but restoring the full dignity of a civilized community deserving a status equal to that claimed by Chinese Neo-Confucian mandarins and scholars

  The new capacity for Vietnamese Enduring produced by this cycle of invasion, repression, resistance, and re-assertion of national autonomy was a clearer consciousness of what a state should be and of what constituted its legitimacy. Yet the early Lê rulers subsequently strengthened centralized monarchy, the legal order, and Mencian Confucianism. This organizational capacity that helped stabilize the state also narrowed the social and cultural options permitted by the more pluralistic space which had prevailed during the previous period. A collective capacity that liberated the country from foreign domination could become a force for concentrating power domestically once peace had been restored.

  This cycle shows that oppression does not automatically generate a fulsome Maturing of a people. Only when leadership, organization, a moral language, and the capacity for institutionalization are present can wounds from the past be transformed into bringing forth and then supporting a new, more consequential, stage of national development. Even then, the fruits of liberation may carry with them the seeds of rigidity in centralizing power in the state and its preferred elite families. Defeating foreign invasion and building a mature political community are related capacities, but they are not the same.

  3. Civil Wars, Southward Expansion, and the Formation of a Multivector Vietnamese Identity

  The prolonged conflicts beginning int he late 1500s between the Lê and Mạc clans, the Trịnh and Nguyễn clans, and the Tây Sơn brothers fighting Prince Nguyễn Ánh exhausted the Vietnamese, while also opening new realities of regional expansion, trade, and cultural interchange. The southward expansion down from the Red River Delta and contiguous provinces cannot be told solely as the Vietnamese people’s journey of territorial enlargement. It is also a history of dispossession, adaptation, and profoundly unequal coexistence involving the Chăm, Khmer, indigenous peoples, and the Minh Hương community of Chinese fleeing the Manchu Qing Dynasty. A mature common history must contain both pride in national expansion and  memories of those communities who paid a price for that expansion.

  Through the stage by stage pioneering movement southward, Vietnamese identity became more multilvectored. The “Five Quảng Provinces” bore the strong imprint of interaction with Chăm culture; the far South, including the Mekong River Delta, brought encounters, conflicts, and mixtures among Vietnamese, Khmer, Chinese, Chăm, and other communities. The commercial talents of the Chinese Minh Hương settlers , the Mạc Cửu, and regional trading networks showed that the South provinces were not simply an extension of life in the Red River Delta. It was a new social space in which Vietnamese identity continued to take shape through contact with other identities. Three dialects of spoken Vietnamese emerged: one in the Red River Delta, another in the central provinces along the coast of the South China Sea, and a third north and south of the two branches of the mighty Mekong River.

  In each civil war, every protagonist constructed its own legitimacy, heroes, villains, and created it own victims. The Tây Sơn rebels may be viewed as a force that, in the late 18^th century, broke the old order, unified much of the country under their rule, and defeated a foreign invasion; Prince Nguyễn Ánh, who defeated the Tây Sơn to establish his own Nguyen Dynasty, may be viewed as the ruler who completed the territorial unification of the country while opening the door for an increasingly conservative dynasty to reign from the city of Hue in Central Vietnam. Neither side consisted only of light or darkness. Nguyễn Huệ of the Tây Sơn defeated the Qing forces in the north, but the Tây Sơn army also devastated Gia Định in the south; Nguyễn Ánh relied upon foreign assistance to help him defeat the Tây Sơn, but this alone cannot erase him from the history of national construction.

  This was not yet an ideological division in the twentieth-century sense, but it already put in place the prehistory of a binary habit: the victor turning himself into the sole legitimate historical current, while the defeated were expelled from authorized memory. When history is told only in the language of the victorious, a people loses not merely the truth of the defeated side, but also the ability to understand itself in full. Excluded memories do not disappear; they survive within families, regions, and communities that carry forward a sense of dispossession.

  What this episode of the recurring cycle produced was an expanded national territory, the development of trade, and a Vietnamese identity that became regionally diverse and so complex. What it cost was human life, social trust, and the ability to build a form of legitimacy recognized by multiple communities. Endurance through division preserved a common territorial space, but it could not by itself heal the wounds inflicted by Vietnamese upon one another. Those fractures would reappear in different forms in the twentieth century.

  4. The Nguyễn Dynasty and the Colonial Period: Unification, Delayed Reform, and the Reception of Modernity

  The Nguyễn dynasty organized a unified state across an extensive territory, completed its administrative system, and sought to establish sovereignty. The nineteenth century for Vietnamese cannot be understood merely through use of the label “reactionary,” because the ruling dynasty had to govern a country needing discipline due to its having emerged from a prolonged civil war, weakened by deep regional differences, and facing unprecedented external pressures.

  Yet as the world entered the age of industrialization and colonialism, the Hue royal court turned strongly towards Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, using old Chinese categories of thought to interpret an entirely new balance of power with the arrival of French expansionists. What had once helped organize the state and consolidate order was no longer sufficient to identify the nature of the new challenge. Vietnam faced not merely a stronger army, but an entire new civilizational system driven by science, industry, trade, maritime power, and a type of state capable of mobilizing resources on a scale far beyond that achieved by traditional Asian dynasties.

  Nguyễn Trường Tộ represented a notable “counter-history”—a possible response for Vietnam that was proposed  but never realized. Through The Great Tendency of the World, the Eight Urgent Proposals, and dozens of other petitions, he did not merely recommend purchasing machinery or learning Western techniques. He sought to change education, the recruitment and use of talent, administrative organization, the economy, the legal order, and the Vietnamese understanding of the world. He understood that preserving the country required, first of all, recognizing how profoundly the world had changed.

  This tragedy cannot be reduced to the story of a genius rejected by ignorant men. The court lacked the money and the capacity for implementation; the bureaucracy defended established interests; wounded national pride turned into cultural defensiveness; Nguyễn Trường Tộ’s Catholic identity and personal connections aroused suspicion. More fundamentally, Vietnam lacked a reform coalition powerful enough to establish priorities, gather talent, and transform knowledge of the future into a national program.  

  Perceiving the danger was not enough. There also had to be institutions capable of listening to those who perceived it. No Meiji restoration came to the rescue of the Vietnamese.

  Like Vietnam, in the 1860s Japan also lacked capital, faced pressure from the West, and was constrained by an old intellectual order. Yet the Meiji leadership created a reform coalition, accepted the dismantling of many privileges, and directed scarce resources according to the priority of building “a rich country and a strong army.” This comparison is not intended to idealize Japan’s path, still less to condemn the Vietnamese as an inferior people. It simply reveals the system advantage that comes from having a few individuals who could see the future and possessing a structure of power capable of using them.

  The capacity that had once permitted the stability of the Nguyễn dynasty hardened into a limitation on its prospects  at precisely the moment when national survival required another kind of envisioning and organizing. This is a characteristic example of the paradox of Endurance: what once helped a community preserve order may obstruct its ability to renew itself when renewal becomes necessary; national pride that once protected identity may become a refusal to acknowledge the arrival of a new reality; loyalty to tradition may become a fear of admitting that tradition can no longer provide good answers for how best to respond to a new situation.

  French colonial rule brought forth for Vietnamese a period of lost sovereignty, colonial exploitation, and racial stratification. Every discussion of the impacts and effects of that French “civilizing mission”  to enlighten and uplift the Vietnamese must begin with that reality of coercion.

  Yet the impress of Colonial rule was not unidirectional. Cities, the press, the Romanized Vietnamese script, new schools, laws, science, and global trade created channels of modernization that the Vietnamese actively appropriated in order to better resist the colonial regime itself. Instruments introduced to facilitate colonial rule gradually became means for the formation of a new public, a new political language, and new ways of imagining the nation.

  Phan Châu Trinh placed the advancement of popular knowledge and the development of social capacity as the first priority in reasserting national self-governance before the direct use of violence. Phan Bội Châu sought national salvation through the Đông Du movement and connections with other Asian cultures. Phạm Quỳnh saw the Vietnamese language as the repository of the national soul which could use it to survive and outlast the French intrusion in another instance of the Vietnamese capacity for Endurance.. The Đông Kinh Free School, the Duy Tân movement, the printed press, and modern literatur created an unprecedented and very modern space for public discussion. Ideas concerning citizens’ rights, the nation, science, education, and the role of the individual began entering social life, opening competing possibilities for Vietnam’s future.

  The “golden generation” of Western-educated Vietnamese intellectuals did not share a single political orientation. Some followed nationalism, some chose communism, and others served different governments; many placed patriotism and the aspiration for modernization above loyalty to any single doctrine. This multivectorism must be recovered for Vietnam to prosper in the twenty-first century.

  Tạ Quang Bửu provides a verifiable example: he participated in the revolution against French colonial rule from August 1945 but did not join the Communist Party until July 1947. A single example cannot support a generalization about an entire generation, but it is sufficient to prevent us from equating patriotic motivation with a pre-existing ideological conversion. For many intellectuals of the period, the nation was the point of departure; doctrine was a path chosen in its service.

  What the period of Western colonialism produced was a modern language, a new intellectual class, the capacity for global communication, and new ideas of citizens’ rights, nationhood, and science. What it cost the Vietnamese was sovereignty, resources, human lives, and the opportunity for autonomous development. These two dimensions do not cancel one another out. Civilization did not prevent the oppressive nature of colonialism; but oppression could not entirely forestall the growth of creative capacities among the colonized.

  The deeper lesson is that external knowledge generates an internal capacity only when the Vietnamese appropriate it, debate it, and translate it into the language of needs that they themselves define. Not everything introduced from abroad represents progress; neither does every foreign influence threaten national identity. The decisive question is whether the community possesses sufficient autonomy to select, transform, and use it.

  5. From 1945 to the Present: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, Two Vietnams, and Remembered Experiences Yet to Be Reconciled

  The August 1945 Revolution against the return of French governance mobilized an aspiration for independence that extended far beyond the communist constituency. During the following decades of war, communism provided organization, discipline, and an appealing vision of equality. Yet along with Cold War polarization, domestic repression, land reform, ideological control, and political monopoly, Communism also produced profound wounds.

  The story of this period cannot be told monochromatically as a victorious resistance against foreign invasion. Nor can it be reduced to the story of a society subjected entirely to one-party coercion. Patriotism, revolutionary faith, organizational power, the intervention of great powers, and fear were all present. History becomes difficult to understand precisely because very different motivations could bring people into the same ranks, while people sharing the same patriotism were driven onto opposing sides.

  During the thirty years from 1945 to 1975, the Vietnamese were not fighting a single war. At least four wars overlapped: the struggle for independence from colonial rule; the conflict between competing national projects; the ideological war embedded in the structure of the Cold War; and a conflict fought among international powers on Vietnamese territory.

  If any one of these four dimensions is absolutized, history is denied. To describe the entire conflict only as a “war of national resistance” obscures the moral and civilizational conflict among the Vietnamese themselves. To call it solely a “civil war” diminishes the powerful aspiration for independence and the scale of conflict associated with great-power interventions and subventions. To characterize it entirely as a proxy war denies the agency, responsibility, and choices of the Vietnamese forces themselves. A mature reading must be broad enough to weave these difficult truths together.

  The Republic of Vietnam governing from Saigon must be studied as a legitimate chapter in Vietnam’s history of modernization. It left memorable experiences in education, the press, law, the market economy, and international engagement; at the same time, it could not divorce itself from political instability, external dependence, war in the villages, and considerable limits on democratic processes. Military defeat does not erase the value of studying that very Vietnamese experience. The Saigon government in its own way was an expression of Vietnamese Endurance. Excluding the Republic of Vietnam from learned history impoverishes the common memory and prolongs the feeling among millions of people that their symbolic homeland has been taken from them.

  South Vietnam itself contained many currents and cannot be reduced to a singularity of “puppets” or “nationalists.” Some opposed communism as a very intentional political choice; some staked their hopes on building a non-communist democracy; some joined peace movements or Third Force groups, or opposed foreign intervention; others were simply trying to protect their families in wartime.

  Neither was North Vietnam a completely homogeneous political entity. Differences existed within the Communist Party concerning policy, the degree of international dependence, and the conduct of the war. Outside the Party, patriotism, revolutionary loyalty, fear of power, and the instinct for survival existed in society. A person could sincerely sacrifice for independence without fully understanding the apparatus he or she served; another could use an ideal just as a means to acquire power.

  The histories of the two post 1954 Vietnams therefore cannot be reduced to a simple story of patriots on one side and traitors on the other, of complete autonomy versus complete dependence, or of absolute justice versus absolute injustice. Both sides were affected by great powers; both included people who sacrificed for what they believed to be the national interest; both committed errors, engaged in coercion, and contained unrealized possibilities. Realizing this does not mean distributing responsibility equally or erasing differences. It only restores to history its inherent complexity.

  After 1975, Vietnam was unified territorially but its various memories were not reconciled. The transformation of private commerce, re-education camps, the exodus of boat people, the command economy, and the system of privileging certain political family backgrounds left a deep divide between victors and defeated, and between those in Vietnam and those overseas. The victors held unilateral power to authoritatively define the past, but they had no power to make the private memories of the defeated disappear from history.

  Administrative centralization did not automatically become a unification of hearts. Military victory did not automatically produce national reconciliation.

  The reforms of 1986 then opened an important door. Economic reality forced ideology to retreat; individual initiative, the household economy, and international integration were gradually restored. Farmers, household businesses, enterprises, and social networks released some of the capacities that had previously been constrained. The reforms demonstrated that Vietnamese society could recover rapidly when initiative was returned to the people. They also showed that solutions previously condemned as ideologically wrong could become paths to national rescue when reality could no longer be denied.

  Yet market reform was not accompanied by a corresponding reform of governing power providing for the rule of law and accountability for officialdom. Economic growth, however, created a middle class and new resources, but it also generated inequality, crony capitalism, environmental destruction, and insecurity among workers. When the market is opened but regulatory power remains off-limits to citizens, initiative and agency may be liberated in the economy while continuing to be restricted in politics and intellectual life.

  The development of overseas Vietnamese communities, the internet, smartphones, artificial intelligence, and Generation Z is now extending the Vietnamese space beyond national borders and the state’s monopoly over information. Ordinary people possess unprecedented capacities to learn, speak, create, and connect, but they must also confront surveillance, disinformation, and increasingly sophisticated forms of manipulation. The state is no longer the only actor capable of producing and disseminating knowledge; yet society does not automatically become wiser merely because more information is available.  All this shows Vietnamese Endurance, once again, adapting, repositioning, and overcoming.

  Modern day Maturation for Vietnamese is therefore not an outcome already achieved. It is an ongoing undertaking: integrating the memories of the two Vietnams without equalizing responsibility; recognizing overseas Vietnamese as part of the national community; giving younger generations the right to participate; and building institutions through which society can detect and correct obvious errors without waiting for a crisis to destabilize elite practices

  After many repetitive cycles of repression followed by Openings Up, the question is no longer merely how the Vietnamese have survived the centuries. The more important question now is how far the capacities that have enabled Vietnam to survive can carry the nation.

  CONCLUDING NOTE TO PART I

  Looking back across these historical cycles, there is no formula according to which “a people oppressed for long enough will automatically open itself.” Challenges may generate solidarity, but they may also generate fear; acculturation under pressure may expand a culture, but it may also produce dependence; centralized power may rescue a community in times of upheaval, but it may also suffocate creativity when it becomes the normal condition.

  History does not automatically transform suffering into wisdom. A people may endure for a very long time while continuing to repeat old cycles of suffering under new names.

  Endurance is therefore not a capability, which, once possessed, keeps on serving a people’s deepest needs as circumstances for them change. Every age poses a different question of survival. When the principal danger is foreign invasion, the capacity to contract, disperse, and then reunite may save the community. But when the danger lies in stagnation itself, in technological dependence, in the exhaustion of public trust, and in a structure of power incapable of correcting itself, old methods of survival may no longer be sufficient and may even become obstacles to finding happiness.

  Only when memory is subjected to reflection, knowledge encounters institutions, and power accepts limits can the experience of Endurance become the starting point for Maturation. The past then ceases to be either a burden to be carried or a glory to be worshiped; it becomes a repository of experience out of which paths to the future may be thoughtfully chosen.

  The history examined in this part has identified the sources, turning points, and wounds of Vietnam’s journey from Endurance to now having a chance for Maturation to bring about its good works. The next part of this essay will examine more deeply the capacity for Endurance itself: what created the exceptional resilience of the Vietnamese people, and why the resilience that once saved them may sometimes become a limitation preventing them from moving toward Opening.