Beyond the Points: Vietnam’s Digital Citizen Score Is About Power

Use an online public service, earn points. Book a medical appointment digitally, earn points. Submit feedback on a draft regulation, earn points. Log in regularly, update your data, transact online, earn more points. Accumulate enough, qualify for fee waivers, tax discounts, and faster access to public services.

So reads Vietnam’s proposed “digital citizen score”, embedded in VNeID, the government’s national digital identification application.

Officials insist the system carries no penalties, with non-participation framed as simply forgoing the rewards. This logic underpins the new initiative, which takes the form of a draft government resolution spearheaded by the Ministry of Public Security, outlining a national framework for promoting digital citizenship through incentives linked to platform use. The resolution creates a simple hierarchy: citizens who use digital services more often receive more benefits. Instead of one-off incentives, participation is tracked over time and translated into tiered status. Because activity is counted across multiple services, digital participation becomes a standing condition of how citizens interact with government, not just an optional add-on.

Vietnam’s digital citizen score is being billed as a harmless incentive scheme. But the policy signal is larger. It uses rewards to accelerate a security-led shift towards VNeID as a national digital gateway, through which identity, transactions, and participation increasingly flow. The resolution reinforces this shift by positioning VNeID as a national digital super-platform, extending beyond identification into payments, official communications, and mandatory integration with private digital services. The score is not the objective. It is the adoption mechanism for consolidating digital life onto a single, state-run platform overseen by the security apparatus.

The timing of the scheme reflects a convergence of strategic pressures rather than a single policy goal. It is not a single-purpose reform. It is designed to address several objectives at once: closing a stubborn adoption gap despite heavy investment in digital infrastructure, advancing a data-economy strategy built on real-time participation data, and aligning with security priorities by consolidating activity through a verified gateway.

The initiative is also being advanced at an unusual speed, routed as a draft government resolution released for public feedback for roughly three weeks through the end of 2025, a move that bypassed parliamentary debate in favour of executive control and underscores the political urgency surrounding the initiative.

Proponents frame the digital citizen score as a service-modernisation tool, emphasising efficiency gains, fraud reduction, and incentives rather than sanctions. Critics, however, focus less on stated intent than on design and distribution. They warn that tying benefits to cumulative digital engagement risks creating soft coercion, penalising those who lack skills, access, or trust in state platforms.

Comparisons to China’s “social credit system” are inevitable, but they are often misplaced. Where Vietnam mirrors China is not in punishment, but in architecture and ambition. Both systems centre governance on real-name, all-encompassing platforms that aggregate behaviour across domains and use data feedback loops to shape conduct.

When scoring drifts from service delivery into social discipline, it can trigger backlash and legitimacy costs, prompting retrenchment rather than compliance.

Where Vietnam diverges is in method and institutional design. China’s system is fragmented, built around blacklists, redlists, and cross-domain enforcement tools rather than a single omniscient score. Vietnam’s scheme, by contrast, introduces a centrally coordinated, nationwide scoring framework focused narrowly on digital participation, relying on incentives rather than sanctions to drive uptake.

Still, China’s local experiments offer a cautionary lesson. When scoring drifts from service delivery into social discipline, it can trigger backlash and legitimacy costs, prompting retrenchment rather than compliance. The point is not that Vietnam is copying China, but that once such systems are embedded, their scope is no longer governed by technical design alone. Managing expansion becomes a political choice, shaped by incentives, institutional power, and public trust.

It is also worth noting that digital ID systems and incentive-led uptake are not unique to authoritarian settings. In strong governance contexts, Singapore’s Singpass and Estonia’s national e-ID anchor everyday access to public and private services, while frameworks such as the EU’s eIDAS and Sweden’s BankID show how trusted digital identity can become routine infrastructure. India’s Aadhaar, the country’s national digital ID system, highlights both the state-capacity gains and the governance controversies that emerge when identity systems scale rapidly, prompting sustained legal and public debate over scope and safeguards.

The lesson for Vietnam is not that digital ID plus incentives are inherently “authoritarian” but that outcomes hinge on governance choices. In a system where legitimacy rests on outcomes rather than consent, high-profile governance experiments carry unusually high stakes if they are seen as invasive, unfair, or imposed without sufficient scrutiny.

If governed carefully, the digital citizen score could strengthen service delivery, but that outcome depends less on incentives than on limits. The score must remain narrowly confined to digital service uptake, insulated from punitive or cross-domain uses, and paired with meaningful offline alternatives for those unable or unwilling to participate, with independent oversight to enforce those boundaries.

The compressed consultation and decision-making phase — via an executive resolution with limited debate, even as implementation remains more than a year away — has already drawn criticism from legal experts and activists, underscoring how quickly trust can fray. Should participation become de facto compulsory or early missteps signal overreach, the resulting backlash could erode state credibility far more than any gains in convenience or efficiency.

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