Launched in December 1986, Vietnam’s “reform” era (đổi mới) came to an end in August 2024. Domestic political events in the ensuing months ushered the country into a new era, although the coming period may turn out to be a Gramscian interregnum, when “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.”
A “political earthquake” last spring and the death of Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong in July enabled this change of era. Trong had been ill since early 2024, leaving a power vacuum at the top of the party-state. In March, President Vo Van Thuong, a protégé of Trong, resigned after he was found to be entangled in a corruption case that took place more than a decade before. A month and a half later, in early May, National Assembly Chair Vuong Dinh Hue, who was believed to have been the leading candidate to succeed Trong, also resigned in a similar situation.
Two weeks after Hue’s resignation, CPV Executive Secretary Truong Thi Mai, who held the second-highest position in the Party apparatus, followed suit at an extraordinary plenum of the CPV Central Committee. The same meeting also nominated Public Security Minister To Lam to be Vietnam’s new president. These four individuals and Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh were the major candidates for the country’s highest post – that of the general secretary of the CPV – according to the Party’s rules of succession. Thus, after Trong passed away, the CPV had almost no choice but to elect Lam as the Party chief.
Ten days after taking office as the CPV’s top leader in August, Lam proclaimed a new era, which he characterized as the “rise” (vươn mình) of the Vietnamese nation. With dizzying speed and forceful actions, several political decisions started to shape the new era. The contents of these decisions were not new – they had been discussed for years, even decades – but a lack of either consensus or political will had hampered their materialization. In November, the National Assembly rubber-stamped a September CPV Politburo decision to revive a controversial high-speed rail project that it voted down in 2010. The megaproject was planned to cost about $67 billion and generate billions of dollars in revenue from the sale of land in the railway’s neighborhood. The same parliament session also restarted the building of two nuclear power plants that were halted in 2016 after the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
These infrastructure and energy projects were part of a larger plan. Earlier that month, echoing Lam, Prime Minister Chinh vowed to target double-digit rates of annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the coming decades. The January 2025 plenum of the CPV Central Committee enshrined this goal as a key objective of Vietnam’s economic policy for the years 2026-2030. In support of this long-term goal, the CPV meeting revised the growth target for 2025, approved by the National Assembly last November, from 6.5 to 8 percent. Never before had the Vietnamese government been so ambitious. Vietnam’s economic policies in the reform era were aimed primarily at macroeconomic stabilization rather than rapid growth. The highest rate of GDP growth Vietnam has ever registered was 9.5 percent, in 1995, and the average annual rate in the reform era (1987-2024) was 6.5 percent.
Vietnam’s new leadership was fully aware that double-digit growth rates required a technology-driven economy and a competent public administration. In November 2024, it kicked off a process to radically streamline the party-state’s bureaucracy at all levels, referring to it as a “revolution.” According to the plan, at least one in five of existing government positions will be eliminated in order to boost efficiency and relieve the burden on the state budget. This plan, which was endorsed by the January 2025 CPV Central Committee plenum, has resulted in the biggest government restructuring in decades.
In late December, the CPV Politburo passed Resolution No. 57 on “breaking through to advance science, technology, innovation, and digital transformation.” For several decades, Vietnam’s leaders had emphasized that science and technology are the keys to economic development, but the political commitment had amounted to little more than lip service. More than any previous policy guidance, Resolution 57 calls for the removal of “all mindsets, conceptions, and barriers [that are] impeding [economic] development” and “turning the institutional framework into a competitive advantage in fostering science, technology, innovation, and digital transformation.”
Also unprecedentedly, it stipulates that the CPV general secretary chair the Central Steering Committee for the Development of Science, Technology, Innovation and Digital Transformation and that at least 3 percent of the government expenditures be allocated to these tasks. Lam’s closing remarks at the CPV plenum on January 24 reported that the steering committee, which he chaired, had already identified the urgent tasks in 2025 for the government and would apply a set of indicators to evaluate the implementation by each government agency of Resolution 57.
However, the turning point in Vietnam’s domestic politics has yet to be accompanied by any major shift in the state’s foreign policy. After assuming the top job as CPV chief, Lam traveled to France and Malaysia where he elevated these countries to the circle of Vietnam’s “comprehensive strategic partners.” These decisions are consistent with Vietnam’s decades-long multidirectional foreign policy, though France is the first Western European country, and Malaysia the first Southeast Asian country, among Vietnam’s nine comprehensive strategic partners, which include all the major powers in the Asia-Pacific.
Still, the new priorities in domestic politics have provided new parameters for foreign policy. In contrast to fellow ASEAN members Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, Vietnam stopped short of becoming a “BRICS partner country,” despite joining a BRICS summit at Russia’s invitation. The hesitation reflected mainly Hanoi’s concerns about Washington’s attitude towards this grouping. In Hanoi’s thinking, Vietnam’s ambition to become a high-tech hub in the global supply chains hinges on U.S.-Vietnam relations.
The “rise” of Vietnam will be largely a function of domestic power arrangements and global supply chains. The ongoing government restructuring is changing the internal balance of power, but the largest test of this effort will be the 14th CPV Congress in January 2026. The China-centric configuration of the global supply chains has been one of the biggest obstacles to Vietnam’s rise in the last decades as the “China boom” has disincentivized Vietnam’s economic structure from pursuing technological progress. It is still unclear, however, whether or not the rearrangement of the global supply chains as a result of the end of the “China boom” and the advent of the U.S.-China rivalry will favor Vietnam’s technological upgrading. These conditions may make or break the “rise” of Vietnam.
