Vietnam’s new ruler: hardman, capitalist, hedonist

What should you make of To Lam, the enigmatic new leader of Vietnam’s Communist Party, who has emerged victorious from a savage power struggle over the past year? On his first trip abroad Mr Lam (pictured, left) met his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, on August 19th. The two signed 14 documents on everything from Communist Party schools to crocodile exports. Mr Lam reaffirmed the importance of Vietnam’s biggest trading partner. Next month he will head to America. It is a sign that he intends to continue Vietnam’s “bamboo diplomacy”, swaying between the two.

Nothing new there. The more striking aspect of Mr Lam’s trip came the day before. En route to Beijing, he retraced the steps of a revolutionary known as Ly Thuy, who in 1924 arrived in the port city of Canton, then the seat of the Republican government in China. Better known today as Ho Chi Minh, he set about establishing the forerunner of the Communist Party of Vietnam in Canton, now Guangzhou.

Mr Lam’s pilgrimage notionally commemorated the centenary of Ho’s time there. Revolutionary ancestor-worship is a prerequisite for the top job in Vietnam. His predecessor, Nguyen Phu Trong, was a Marxist theorist until the day he died in July. Yet Mr Lam, who became general secretary on August 3rd, is no revolutionary or intellectual. A former policeman, he cut his teeth in the fearsome Ministry of Public Security. The choice of Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, as his first port of call was intended to signal a revival of Vietnam’s capitalist animal spirits. Its trade with Guangdong accounts for more than 20% of its total with China (see chart). Vietnam trades about as much with the province as it does with the whole of Japan.

Mr Lam was implicitly celebrating capitalism, not socialism. To understand why, you have to grasp Vietnam’s troubled past decade. The country is a burgeoning powerhouse, with 100m people, a young population and labour costs that are half those of Chinese coastal areas. It is being wooed by China and America. Vietnam has benefited from America’s effort to “de-risk” supply chains. And facing higher tariffs in America, many Chinese firms are relocating some stages of production and assembly to Vietnam, which has become integrated into the supply chains of suppliers in Guangdong, and through them, to the rest of the world.

Yet Vietnam’s potential has been throttled in a wave of crackdowns. As general secretary from 2011 until his death, Trong implemented a “blazing furnace” anti-corruption drive that has paralysed officials. Some 200,000 were disciplined; from 2021 to 2023 another 60,000 resigned. Public services have suffered, from health to education. Proposals for new infrastructure or industrial projects have languished on the desks of officials who are terrified their decisions will be scrutinised by graft-busters.

Though the campaign was devised by Trong as a means of preserving the party’s legitimacy through a cleansing fire, it has instead begun to consume its most important source of legitimacy: economic growth. Delays to power-sector projects have meant that factories looking to increase capacity cannot get reliable electricity. Improvements to transport infrastructure have been too slow to keep up with the increase in industrial output.

Mr Lam was Trong’s enforcer. But he appears to have craftily used the anti-corruption campaign as an opportunity to purge the party of his rivals, not just rid Vietnam of graft. Earlier this year, the burning furnace claimed its second president in two years, Vo Van Thuong; Mr Lam succeeded Mr Thuong. Vietnam’s presidency is mostly symbolic, but capturing it put Mr Lam in prime position to become general secretary when Trong died two months later.

In his first meeting as general secretary with the party’s graft-busters on August 14th, a newly ascendant Mr Lam told them that the anti-corruption push must not stand in the way of the country’s development, even as he pledged that it would continue. Perhaps it will, as a means of extending his control of the party.

But Mr Lam’s connections to the private sector suggest that he may be sensitive to the concerns of the bourgeoisie. The austere Trong developed few links with business, preferring his ideological obsessions. In contrast the Ministry of Public Security that Mr Lam ran until recently is a player in the economy, owning several conglomerates and a telecoms firm. And To Dung, Mr Lam’s brother, is a business owner who has acquired interests in several industries including property, energy and rare earths, as well as the Piaggio distributorship in Vespa-mad Vietnam.

Mr Lam also has an epicurean streak. In his early years as a minister, he was little known outside political and business circles. But on a visit to London in 2021, after inevitably paying respects at the gravesite of Karl Marx, the Das Kapital-devouring corruption-buster was captured on video being fed a steak wrapped in gold leaf by Nusret Gokce, a celebrity chef better known as Salt Bae. Mr Gokce deleted social-media posts featuring the video, but it led to a backlash. During Mr Lam’s time as Vietnam’s top cop, his ministry built a concert hall in Hanoi that opened to the music of Chopin, one of his favourite composers.

The new leader needs to keep the army at bay. It is concerned about the number of policemen at the head of government. The prime minister, Pham Minh Chinh, is another alumnus of the Ministry of Public Security. As vacancies in the Politburo created by the anti-corruption campaign have been filled this year, the armed forces have unexpectedly claimed three of the fifteen seats, second only to the police, with six. Usually the army gets only one; three is their highest total since Vietnam’s Doi Moi reform era began in 1986, according to Nguyen Khac Giang, at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, a think-tank in Singapore. One savvy move may be to promote a loyal army general to keep the peace between the two security forces.

Mr Lam, having spent a career focused on internal security, could be less attuned to external threats than a rival from the armed forces might have been. He might therefore look towards a fellow communist and authoritarian superpower on Vietnam’s northern border more than to America, even as Chinese and Vietnamese ships occasionally square off in the South China Sea. But Mr Lam will be mindful that the party’s legitimacy also demands that it should defend Vietnam’s sovereignty against aggression from the north. The two fought a brief border war in 1979, and China remains unpopular in Vietnam. Le Kha Phieu, who was general secretary from 1997 to 2001, was removed by the Politburo, in part for getting too close to Beijing.

China was an unavoidable first stop in the new job for Mr Lam; going to America before China would have given his comrades in Beijing a fright. But he will visit America in September for the UN General Assembly. While there, he is likely to raise the decision by America’s commerce department on August 1st to deny Vietnam “market economy” status. (America imposes higher penalties on non-market economies in trade disputes.)

American officials, for their part, are likely to push for stronger security co-operation. Last year, the two signed a comprehensive strategic partnership. They are unlikely to raise Mr Lam’s history of repression. While the new general secretary may unleash a new era of economic dynamism, the crackdown on civil society is likely to continue. He had more than 330 activists and journalists rounded up during his time as minister for public security, according to the 88 Project, a rights group. With his experience of repression, conspicuous consumption and diplomatic balancing, Mr Lam is well qualified for his new job. ■