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Delegates from Vietnam's Communist Party are meeting this week in Hanoi to formally choose the country's leadership and chart its economic future for the next five years. The current general secretary, To Lam, is expected to keep his post and seek that of president as well - a powerful and controversial dual role similar to that of Xi Jinping in neighboring China. NPR's former Hanoi correspondent Michael Sullivan reports.
MICHAEL SULLIVAN, BYLINE: To Lam is a career cop who made his mark as minister of public security, specifically as chief enforcer of the so-called blazing furnace anti-corruption campaign that began in 2016. He ruthlessly rooted out corruption at all levels, sidelining potential political rivals as well. In 2024, both Vietnam's president and the head of the National Assembly were snared in the anti-corruption drive and forced to resign. To Lam became president, then assumed the top job as party chief just a few weeks later, after the death of General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong. Analysts say the economic reforms To Lam has initiated since have borne fruit despite global turbulence, Vietnam's delicate balancing act between the U.S. and China and Trump's tariffs.
NGUYEN KHAC GIANG: It actually is quite a good year in terms of economic performance. Despite the tariff and despite all of those uncertainties, Vietnam's exports still grow 14% year on year. GDP grow 8%, I think - one of the highest in the world at this moment.
SULLIVAN: That's Nguyen Khac Giang, a visiting fellow at the Yusof Ishak think tank in Singapore.
GIANG: A lot of technology companies put a lot of money into Vietnam and promise to do so as well in the next few years. So I think To Lam feels quite confident going to the Congress saying that, actually, if you put me five more years, I can make it even better.
SULLIVAN: To Lam also wants to merge the jobs of general secretary and president, as China's Xi Jinping has done, in part to help hasten his reforms and make good on the party's goal of making Vietnam a high-income, developed country within two decades.
CARL THAYER: It's a one-party state. It makes perfect sense. In a modern world, having two leaders sharing that power seems, you know, a bit weird.
SULLIVAN: Vietnam expert Carl Thayer is professor emeritus at the University of New South Wales. He says it's likely To Lam will get both positions but won't have the same level of power as Xi Jinping. For one thing...
THAYER: The Central Committee in Vietnam is much stronger than the Central Committee in China. And then once Xi Jinping made himself essentially president for life, there was a kind of counterreaction in Vietnam.
SULLIVAN: With that in mind, Thayer expects a compromise from this Congress - one that gives To Lam both jobs but allows Vietnam's powerful military more control over security affairs in the one-party state as he pursues his economic agenda. And a one-party state it will remain. Human rights groups accuse Vietnam of cracking down on dissent even harder under To Lam as it pursues the same social contract with its people as neighboring China - you let us run things and we'll continue to make your lives materially better. Again, analyst Nguyen Khac Giang.
GIANG: Many Vietnamese observers put a lot of hope in To Lam as a pragmatic leader, even though he's a career policeman, kind of like a more pragmatic reformer inside the system. And they expect him to carry out the liberal reforms in Vietnam in a way that Vietnamese system would go a little bit more freer than China.
SULLIVAN: The congress runs through Sunday.
For NPR News, I'm Michael Sullivan in Chiang Rai, Thailand. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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