To Lam has been unanimously elected as the president of Vietnam by the country’s National Assembly. The election comes after his ascension to the position of general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) nearly two years ago. Holding both positions gives him unprecedented power over Vietnam’s one-party state. So, what does To Lam’s ascension tell us about the state of Vietnam today?
Lam owes much of his rise to power to the “blazing furnace” anti-corruption campaign led by the late former general secretary Nguyen Phu Trong. Trong and his allies vigorously pursued a campaign to ostensibly root out corruption in the CPV. Campaigns like this are golden opportunities for ambitious ladder-climbers like Lam because they allow them to remove political rivals in a way that seems virtuous rather than Machiavellian.
The CPV is notoriously opaque, so it is difficult to account for precise factional manoeuvres, but Lam’s auspicious rise from cabinet minister to the most powerful politician in the country was undoubtedly aided by his role in leading anti-corruption efforts. Vietnam has had four presidents over the last three years, with Nguyen Xuan Phuc and Vo Van Thuong resigning due to corruption investigations in 2023 and 2024, respectively. It’s ironic that Lam became the main face of the anti-corruption drive. Before becoming general secretary, he was probably best known for scandalous pictures of him being fed gold-crusted steaks by the 2010s internet-meme chef Salt Bae while millions of Vietnamese barely scraped by from one meal to the next.
Internal party politics weren’t the only force behind the anti-corruption campaign. Excessive corruption in the state bureaucracy, such as extortion for preferential treatment, can significantly increase the cost of doing business. This is particularly problematic for countries like Vietnam that rely on foreign direct investment.
As a nation ravaged by a century of colonisation and war, Vietnam did not have the capital infrastructure to independently industrialise after it defeated the US invasion in 1975. So, in 1986, the government launched a strategy of sweeping privatisations, land reform and opening up to foreign capitalists. To make the country more attractive to foreign companies, Trong’s anti-corruption campaign intended to reduce graft-related costs and delays. This is why it was not just top party leaders who got burnt in the furnace. A 2023 report by Singapore’s Yusof Ishak Institute found that more than 200,000 party officials had been disciplined for corruption since 2016.
But Lam has come to power at a time when the blazing furnace is cooling. The campaign’s scale and intensity created two notable problems. First, it promoted its own type of inefficiencies. In a context where mistakes or risks could be construed as corrupt behaviour, state officials were encouraged to act conservatively. They either denied additional funding requests or spent more time perfecting the paperwork, both of which resulted in centrally allocated funds being held up longer or not fully invested in their intended purpose.
In his time as party secretary, Lam has sought to resolve this problem. He has reduced the number of provincial administrative units from 63 to 34, eliminated five central government ministries and fired or retired tens of thousands of bureaucrats. By slashing red tape and eliminating entire layers of bureaucracy, Lam is likely hoping to counteract the inefficiencies engendered by the party-state’s culture of fear.
The second problem was the limited democratic accountability it promoted. Vietnam does not have basic democratic rights like freedom of the press, independent trade unions, election campaigns or many other means for citizens to publicly express their discontent. But the anti-corruption campaign put high-profile political figures under intense public scrutiny. State media not only covered each case in great detail but also encouraged people to report instances of corruption they might have witnessed.
This could create a dangerous norm for an authoritarian state: a legitimate avenue for the collective discussion of political grievances with members of the ruling party. As part of Lam’s rise to power, he has restricted the democratic space by aggressively targeting independent journalists, artists and social media activity critical of the government. For dictatorships like Vietnam, any space for political critiques to combine with broader popular frustrations is a major threat.
Where there have been protests and resistance in Vietnam over the past few decades, the ruling party has sought to contain or deflect them. For example, an inflation-fuelled strike wave from 2009 to 2011 swept across the country spontaneously. Local media outlets and party officials would often sympathise with the strikers’ grievances, posing as their champions. What they would not tolerate, though, were demands for independent unions or criticisms of the Communist Party. The party could successfully contain workers’ grievances to just an economic focus until the worst of the inflation crisis abated, but working conditions and living standards in the cities continued to cause frustration.
That discontent finally exploded into massive riots in 2014, when President Nguyen Tan Dung allowed street demonstrations for citizens to protest China’s aggressive moves against Vietnam in the South China Sea. Allowing the initial demonstration might have been a useful way to deflect class anger into nationalist, anti-Chinese sentiments, but Dung could not predict the scale of the riots which followed. Anti-China sentiment flared back up in 2018 with protests against proposed special economic zones legislation that was to grant Chinese firms exemptions from existing Vietnamese labour laws. When the ruling party was under scrutiny for its profit-driven dealings, anti-China sentiment could no longer be stoked as a deflection. Repression, once more, became the order of the day.
So, To Lam has come to power, offering the slowdown of anti-corruption campaigns, significant cuts to the state bureaucracy and greater censorship. His success is a triumph of personal ambition. But why would workers feel any hope in his victory? What does Lam’s rise deliver for the millions of small farmers who have been forced to move from the Mekong Delta to Ho Chi Minh City, where they have little access to jobs or services? What does Lam’s rise deliver for the hundreds of thousands of textile and garment workers being paid poverty wages in slave-like conditions? What does Lam’s rise do for women still earning 10 percent less than their male counterparts and subjected to degrading sexist treatment, or for migrant workers systematically put in dangerous working conditions, or for ethnic minorities persecuted by the state?
Well, Lam promises “a new historical starting point, a new era, and the rising era of the Vietnamese nation”. Lam’s “era of national rise” will supposedly herald annual growth rates of more than 10 percent, something every Vietnamese citizen should apparently be proud to aspire to. But this is a difficult promise to deliver in such an unpredictable global environment, already being squeezed by the impacts of Trump’s war on Iran. And even if it were achieved, the promise of economic growth is first and foremost a promise to the capitalist rulers of Vietnam. Let them eat gold-crusted steak.
