In just 13 minutes, he succinctly sums up most of Vietnam’s structural and systemic challenges as seen in Chinese eyes. And explains why these guys are not heading in an ideal direction.
If you understand Mandarin you should watch his video. His diction is clear, his language is good and his analysis is sound.
If you don’t understand Mandarin, he doesn’t have a transcript or subtitles. But he always works off a summary of his points. I have cut and pasted it at the very bottom, translated by google.
I have realized how the situation is likely to play out over the next few decades.
Vietnam is not going to make it. They will miss their goals and milestones, and always be far behind China. They might even break apart again. Recurring cycles of unity and separation is very much part of Vietnamese tradition.
Too many things are wrong with Vietnam. Here are three points from me, reinforced by vlogs by people like Canyue:
1) they have a North South divide. The North generally is pro-China, and tries to copy the Chinese model. The South is generally pro-West/ pro-India, and tries to copy the Western model. This results in successive Vietnamese administrations lurching from polar opposites. Vietnam may not be a Western democracy, but their internal politics flip flops all the time all the same.
Vietnam’s North South divide has resulted in cyclic civil wars for hundreds of years.
2) they are very poor at taking responsibility for things. They have a huge number of internally generated problems that they need to roll up their sleeves and solve, but prefer to scapegoat China all the time. China is actually rescuing them periodically with issues like electricity shortages, but they don’t know how to appreciate China’s civilized conduct.
If Vietnam was located where Mexico was, they would be bullied and exploited every day and turned into a giant brothel and drug holiday resort for the United States. South Vietnamese seem to like that.
3) they daydream a lot and don’t seem to have any intelligent vision for the future. For instance, Vietnam now daydreams about becoming a developed country by 2050. But this requires a rate of growth that is extremely unrealistic. It also requires the government to have sufficient control of the country and its resources, in order to faciliate growth. But private property is sacrosanct in Vietnam, so the Vietnamese Communist Party is actually not able to exercise eminent domain. This makes it impossible to do just about any public works.
With primitive roads, poor railways, insufficient airports, backward ports, too few power plants, and so on, Vietnam needs state control of public resources. But they don’t.
Vietnam was able to grow rapidly in the last 20 years because they pivoted to both China and the US. Chinese investment and the US market are both major sources of their growth. But while they look like little China on a superficial level, Vietnamese don’t actually act like Chinese.
The Chinese government has taken responsibility for disaster preparation (including famines) for thousands of years. Stockpiling, forecasting demand and need, weather forecasts. With this cultural background, China applies the same mindset towards commodities. Even if you didn’t have a hostile United States always planning to sabotage China’s growth, China would still stockpile fuel and commodities so that it doesn’t run into shortages and panics.
This Chinese mindset of ‘being prepared’ has also influenced the way Chinese people do business. Long before Huawei was sanctioned for instance, Ren Zhengfei was already stockpiling critical components, diversifying suppliers and preparing Huawei to build vertically integrated supply chains.
But Vietnam doesn’t try very hard to ‘be prepared’. They threw all their eggs in one basket. They are so reliant on export-led production for the US market, that they were the first country to bow to Trump’s tariffs.
Vietnam actually has a lot of goodwill from across the Global South. But they don’t work hard at diversifying their markets. They never prepared for a day when the US might sanction or tariff them. So now they are very vulnerable to US bullying.
The seventy years since WW2 were marked by increasing globalization. This started to end in the past 10 years. And now we are definitely in a period of decreasing globalization. Vietnam’s economic plans are reliant on increasing or at least stable globalization at a time when trade barriers are going up. So they are unlikely to succeed.
Canyue’s summary translated:
1. Yesterday, Vietnam experienced a network outage at its border with China, leaving over 10,000 Chinese tourists stranded. The situation only began to improve gradually in the middle of the night. This is not the first time such an incident has occurred. A similar problem happened in 2024, when it was said that a typhoon caused a power outage, which in turn led to a network outage. Yesterday, there was no typhoon, but the network was still down. Also in 2024, Vietnam had five submarine cables, and they experienced problems within three days. A month ago, the visa website crashed due to a surge in traffic, which was judged to be due to transnational criminal interference.
2. Viewpoint A: Vietnam’s infrastructure has major deficiencies, which seem insufficient to support the country’s ambitions.
B. Just recently, Vietnam released an ambitious plan to become a developed country by 2050, with a per capita GDP of $38,000. Vietnam’s current per capita GDP is around $4,000. Excluding population growth, this would require an average annual compound growth rate of 9.42%. However, Vietnam’s population is still increasing, so a rate of over 10% is needed. PS: To achieve this goal, Vietnam needs to do many things: a. Solve its electricity problem; b. Improve its infrastructure; c. Enhance its technological capabilities; d. Vietnam has already entered an aging society.
C. On the Chinese internet, there are two countries that take turns becoming developed: Vietnam and Argentina. a) Argentina has no hope; it’s impossible for them to become a developed country with their economic lifeline completely controlled by the US. b) Vietnam has the potential, but I think there’s a lot of propaganda involved. The real purpose is simple: to get China to follow Vietnam’s path of political reform, i.e., complete Westernization. c) I disagree; we should follow our own path. d) Vietnam lacks experience in developing independently; it’s still wavering between East and West. In my personal opinion, the world is moving towards conservatism, increasingly valuing overall strength. Chaos is unfriendly to small countries, so avoid conflicts with China, especially by involving the US. This applies to all Asian countries.
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Luke Wang
CVD 