Ideology as Scaffolding: Vietnam’s Socialist Rhetoric Under To Lam

The language coming out of Hanoi has an unfamiliar ring to outside observers. Vietnam’s General Secretary and State President To Lam has spoken of the “transitional period to socialism” ending by 2045, proposed piloting a “socialist ward” of up to one million residents in Hanoi and framed the country’s current development phase as the beginning of a new era. To those accustomed to reading Vietnam as a pragmatic market economy inside a one-party state, the terminology sounds like a lurch backwards. What is driving this intensification?

Vietnam’s 1991 Party Platform codified the concept of a transitional period to socialism while explicitly accommodating market mechanisms. The “socialist-oriented market economy” formula was designed to simultaneously encompass market dynamics driving growth and the party charting the course. The 2045 deadline, pegged to the centenary of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, emerged across several Politburo resolutions from 2018 onwards before being consolidated into an overarching national development target at the 13th National Party Congress (NPC) in 2021. To Lam inherited the endpoint and has escalated the deadline’s prominence and ideological weight.

The consolidation of power is the most immediate driver. To Lam consolidated power at the 14th NPC in January 2026 to a degree without precedent. No general secretary has held both the party leadership and the state presidency as a planned arrangement from the start of a full term. Analysts have described him as the most powerful Vietnamese leader since Ho Chi Minh. The ideological intensification serves the consolidation: an “era of the nation’s rise” with a defined socialist endpoint frames the centralisation of power as a historic mission rather than a political choice. Nguyen Phu Trong, the party ideologist, briefly held the dual role and ran a sweeping anti-corruption campaign, but without escalating ideological language to this degree. To Lam’s development agenda is more ambitious and his institutional restructuring more sweeping than anything his predecessors attempted, and that scale demands a bigger story.

This points to something that a purely instrumental reading may miss. The Communist Party of Vietnam’s (CPV) identity as a revolutionary party and as the embodiment of the nation’s historical trajectory are inseparable. National liberation and socialism have been fused in CPV doctrine since 1930 and the 2045 date carries weight within the party because it closes a narrative arc that begins in 1945. If Vietnam reaches high-income status by the centenary, the CPV can claim it delivered on Ho Chi Minh’s lifelong aspiration across a full century. That is an identity claim about the party’s reason for existing, not just a policy benchmark. In March 2026, To Lam launched a formal review of the past century of party leadership, which includes 40 years of implementing the transitional period’s platform. This narrative casts the party as guiding Vietnam from its independence struggle to what the CPV frames as a defining historical milestone.

To Lam’s development agenda is more ambitious and his institutional restructuring more sweeping than anything his predecessors attempted, and that scale demands a bigger story.

The “socialist ward” proposal is where these dynamics are the most visible. What To Lam is proposing for Hanoi is a model urban district encompassing 19 projects across infrastructure, digital transformation, economic development, social welfare and environmental management, with citizen satisfaction and quality of life as key performance indicators. In substance, that is a ‘smart city’ district. The ‘socialist’ label serves as a convenient bridge between party ideology and socio-economic development, allowing the CPV to present material progress as evidence that the transition to socialism is advancing. The operational content remains undefined, which cuts both ways: it could acquire genuine policy substance or remain aspirational.

The widening gap between rhetoric and economic reality is where this framework faces its hardest test. Market-centred economic policy alongside socialist rhetoric is nothing new in Vietnam, and the CPV’s own theoretical framework treats it as perfectly coherent. What is distinctive about the current moment is the scale of the gap. Politburo Resolution 68, issued in May 2025, explicitly designates the private sector as “the most important driving force of the national economy”, a significant upgrade from the 2017 formulation that called it merely “important”. To Lam has acknowledged that the total social investment capital needed for 2026-2030 is approximately 38.5 quadrillion VND (roughly USD1.5 trillion), of which the state can provide around USD330 billion. The remaining trillion-plus dollars must be mobilised from private and foreign sources, including through instruments like infrastructure bonds.

That does not make the ideology insincere. What it reveals is that socialism in Vietnam today functions less as a guide to economic policy and more as the connective tissue holding together the party’s legitimacy, historical narrative and its claim to lead the nation into developed country status. The CPV can run a trillion-dollar private capital mobilisation under a socialist banner because, within its framework, socialism is not defined by the economy’s ownership structure but by the party’s authority to define the national direction. For most Vietnamese, the ideological framing is largely beside the point; what matters is whether the growth delivers material improvement in their lives.

Whether the 2045 narrative can carry the weight being placed on it is another matter. Vietnam’s 10 per cent growth target faces serious headwinds: the World Bank forecasts 6.3 per cent for 2026, the IMF 5.6 per cent. As Vietnam’s Finance Minister noted, since 1946, only 13 economies worldwide have sustained double-digit growth for over a decade to transition from developing to developed status; Vietnam has not achieved it in its 40 years of reform. The socialist vocabulary filling Hanoi’s political space serves both as an instrument and an identity. The question is whether the structures being built inside it can bear the load.

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