The recent purge of several apparently Western-leaning officials in Hanoi has led to some trepidation among foreign diplomats about whether Vietnam’s broader foreign policy is shifting decidedly toward Beijing.
Deputy prime ministers Pham Binh Minh and Vu Duc Dam were removed (though it was said they “resigned”) from the Politburo and then their government posts in January over graft allegations linked to the government’s handling of Covid-19-related procurement contracts.
Weeks later saw the near-unprecedented departure of a state president, Nguyen Xuan Phuc, who felt a “personal desire” to resign for his failings to curb graft during the pandemic.
All this has led to some Casandra-like calls that the United States – perceived to be a security guarantor for Vietnam in its disputes with Beijing over territory in the South China Sea – is not just losing important friends in Hanoi but also the trust of the broader Communist Party establishment.
One Western diplomat confirmed to Asia Times that certain foreign governments are concerned about how the recent purges of senior leaders will impact Vietnam’s overall policy, although most embassies are believed to be taking a wait-and-see approach.
Minh, a former foreign minister, was widely seen as a driving force behind closer cooperation with Washington. Phuc, the prime minister between 2016 and 2021 before becoming state president, was trusted by the foreign business community at a time Vietnam was benefiting from US “decoupling” from China.
“I would say we should be concerned in the sense of monitoring developments closely while avoiding jumping to conclusions,” Scot Marciel, a former US ambassador to several Southeast Asian countries, told Asia Times.
Asked how American officials may respond to the developments in Vietnam, Marciel said he expected the US Embassy in Hanoi would be “talking to lots of people and relaying both the facts of what’s been happening as well as its own analysis.”
“State Department officials,” he added, “will rely heavily on the Embassy’s reporting, while also listening to and taking into consideration the views of independent analysts.”
Most of those independent analysts, though, say fears are exaggerated that a conservative-leaning reshuffle in Hanoi will fundamentally alter Vietnam’s foreign policy away from the West and toward China and Russia.
To be sure, the moves come amid a certain lull in US-Vietnam relations. There was optimism that bilateral relations would be upgraded to a “strategic partnership”, but that has not happened for unclear reasons.
At the same time, there has also been something approaching “detente” between Vietnam and China for several years, especially after a particularly hostile year in 2014 when China moved to install an oil rig in disputed waters near the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea.
Last October, Trong became the first foreign leader to visit China after President Xi Jinping secured an unprecedented third term in office. However, the leaders of other ruling communist parties, including from Laos and Cuba, were also invited around the time.
“Vietnam reaps more benefits from a continuation of a friendly relationship with China than an upgrade in the relationship with the US, for it is China that ultimately determines the level of Vietnam’s security,” Khang Vu, a doctoral candidate at Boston College, told Asia Times.
“The stall in US-Vietnam relations thus reflects Hanoi’s attempt to signal to China that if Beijing does not provoke, Hanoi will not upgrade ties with the US and hurt China’s interests in the process,” he added. “Any major changes in US-Vietnam relations depend more on the state of Vietnam-China relations than on US initiatives.”
To categorize Vietnam as either pro-US or pro-China misses the complexity of the situation.
On the one hand, the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) has more in common politically with Beijing, while several Vietnamese officials still think the West wants to help foment “peaceful evolution”, or regime change, in Vietnam.
They view Western attempts at human rights “dialogue” with particular suspicion.
On the other, China, the perennial invader of Vietnam for millennia, is viewed as the bete noire of Vietnamese nationalists. Hanoi is deeply insecure about China’s military threat to Vietnam itself as well as Beijing’s influence in neighboring Cambodia and Laos, Hanoi’s recent sphere of influence.
Whether the leadership reshuffles and purges impact this is another matter. Much comes down to interpretations of how foreign policy is made.
On the structuralist front, there is little to suggest that the dismissal of a few individuals from the party’s upper echelons will fundamentally alter Vietnamese foreign policy. After all, that policy is set by material conditions.
US-Vietnam trade was worth almost US$140 billion last year, with Vietnam enjoying a trade surplus of $94.9 billion, the highest on record, according to official data.
While America is Vietnam’s largest export destination, China is its main provider of Vietnam’s imports, including intermediary goods used in exports sent to the US and Europe. Vietnam’s trade deficit with China widened to a record $60.2 billion in 2022.
Economically, then, Hanoi has to maintain cordial ties with China and the West. But an alternative interpretation sees foreign policy as being made by individuals, not structural forces.
The VCP is a highly-centralized “network” and there are various branches, like ministries and geographical factions, within that network. There are also “nodes”, key conduits who shape the information that passes within the network.
In this understanding, politicians like the purged Minh and Phuc were perceived as important nodes for US or Western diplomats. They’d meet informally, provide information privately and on occasions go to bat for Western interests within party discussions.
In his memoir published last year, Ted Osius, the former US ambassador to Hanoi, tells the story of Washington campaigning for the release of Nguyen Cong Chinh, a pastor who had been arrested in 2011 by Vietnamese authorities. “Prime Minister Phuc’s May 2017 visit to Washington is what finally led to some movement,” he wrote.
But the importance of individuals is discounted by some analysts in such a hierarchical and consensual decision-making behemoth like the Vietnamese Communist Party.
Carl Thayer, an emeritus professor from the University of New South Wales in Australia, wrote recently in the Diplomat: “The two deputy prime ministers [Minh and Dam] were only doing their jobs by interacting with the ‘Western countries’ that collectively make up over half of Vietnam’s strategic partners.”
It was also Trong who, in 2015, became the first general secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party to make an official visit to Washington.
There is a myriad of other explanations for the recent happenings in Hanoi. The most obvious is that Trong and his governing clique felt the need for scapegoats for the blatant corruption during the Covid-19 pandemic. The two deputy prime ministers as well as Phuc all “resigned” because of their alleged incompetence at preventing the graft.
Vietnam was one of the best performers in the world in managing the pandemic in 2020, but utterly failed to adapt in 2021, and there remains considerable anger on the streets about officials who profited from the tragedy.
More than 140 officials have reportedly been arrested or indicted because of pandemic-related scandals. And Vietnam wouldn’t be the first country in the world to search out politicians to blame for the pandemic.
Le Hong Hiep, of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, has argued that recent dismissals had much more to do with domestic politics than foreign policy.
All were purged as part of Trong’s ongoing anti-corruption campaign, which is now in full-steam mode in fingering ministers and prominent businesspeople.
The so-called “burning furnace” anti-corruption campaign began in 2016 after Trong won a second term as party chief and saw off his main political rival, the individualist and non-ideological former prime minister Nguyen Tan Dung.
At first, the campaign appeared to be about purging Dung’s allies from the party, including several prominent party bigwigs aligned with his southern factions, not least those in the economic hub Ho Chi Minh City. However, the anti-corruption campaign is much more than a political power play.
Trong, a committed socialist ideologue who spent much of his life editing the party’s turgid theoretical magazines, wants to restore socialist “ethics” and ideology within a communist party that, at least until 2016, seemed to derive its only legitimacy from overseeing a fast-growing economy.
But economic-based legitimacy necessitated, in many ways, a withering of the party’s power. That’s been seen in the growing number of Western investors in Vietnam that have demanded rule by law in the courts, which the party dominates.
Hanoi had to at least promise to allow independent trade unions to get a free-trade agreement with the European Union.
As the party’s only claim seemed to be as a technocratic manager of the economy, many ordinary Vietnamese began to ask why it needed to maintain its monopoly of power in a one-party state.
The majority of Vietnamese stopped believing in party propaganda of a socialist ideal by the 2000s, and some within the party now blame the past leadership for turning its back on Marxism.
Neither is the party any longer the main articulator of Vietnamese nationalism, which is imbued by hatred and suspicion of China.
In fact, the party often tries to tamp down public displays of ultra-nationalism, wary that anti-China protests can quickly turn against the VCP itself, as it did during demonstrations in 2016 and 2018.
Anti-corruption, therefore, is existential to Trong. He believes the campaign gives the party ethical reasoning and legitimacy, and is key to winning back support from a public that by the mid-2010s had grown openly hostile to systemic official graft.
Trong has thus surrounded himself with committed ideologues and officials who spent their entire careers in the party ranks – notably not like Phuc, who rose through the quasi-independent government apparatus.
Similar to Xi Jinping in China, although to a far lesser extent, Trong has also clamped down on the private sector, which may have become too demanding of reform if left unmolested.
Another element of Trong’s crusade is to assert the will of the party over the government apparatus, which had grown somewhat independent during the 2010s, especially during the reign of former prime minister Dung.
The recent purges suggest a continuation of this reassertion of power, analysts say, especially ahead of the next major party reshuffle at the next Party Congress in 2026.
It was most likely that Phuc and Vuong Dinh Hue, the current National Assembly chair, would have be in line to take over the Party General Secretary post from Trong. Hue is a known Trong protege, so getting rid of Phuc made sense in pure power-play terms.
“Perhaps Trong feared that as the next Congress approached, ‘government faction’ members of the CPV Central Committee might rally around Phuc,” David Brown, a former US diplomat, wrote in Asia Sentinel.
Be that as it may, one concern is that Western responses to the recent power-play might not conform to what’s actually happening within the Communist Party’s corridors of power.
An opinion is consolidating in Western capitals that now reckons authoritarian states like Russia and China won’t be made more peaceful and democratic through trade and engagement.
The so-called “change through trade” theory of the post-Cold War era has all but been discredited by Russia after its invasion of Ukraine last year, and by China amid the “New Cold War” rivalry.
If the US begins to think that it has lost influence in Hanoi, the Biden administration could act accordingly. In reality, though, it appears as though Trong might have realized the limits of his anti-corruption campaign, including on how it is impacting other areas of economic life. In that view, Phuc was probably the last big casualty.
After Phuc’s resignation, Trong stressed that different punishments must be found. Some analysts say the party is creating a “culture of resignation,” so that tainted officials jump before they are purged. As Trong put it earlier this year, “it is not good to have all severely punished, or to remove all from office.”
This indicates, the journalist Quynh Le Tran has opined, “a recognition that not all officials who have engaged in corrupt practices should be punished severely, and that it may be in the best interest of the party and the country to allow those who willingly come forward to take responsibility for their actions to do so without facing harsh consequences.”
According to some observers, this was Trong’s way of announcing a winding down of the anti-corruption campaign that has panicked the Vietnamese business community and made executives and government officials alike wary of making mistakes, leading to foot-dragging and even more government inefficiency.
Such concerns about the country’s reputation are probably the reason why Prime Minister Pham Binh Chinh still has a job. There were rumors in December and January that he would follow Phuc out of office. But it’s likely Trong now knows he overplayed his hand with the anti-graft campaign and the hand brakes are seemingly now being applied.
Follow David Hutt on Twitter at @davidhuttjourno
