Police General Rising to Top Amid Viet Party Chaos

Vietnam’s Communist Party central committee met again last week for the 16th time in 40 months – counting some informal sessions – with at least 12 of those sessions convened merely to sack and replace senior cadres, according to a blogger who keeps count. At last week’s session, Trương Thị Mai’s resignation was accepted. She had been the only female member of the Party Politburo, head of the party’s executive secretariat, and perhaps – who knows? – an obstacle to Police General Tô Lâm’s climb to the top. 

Like the five other politburo members ousted since January of 2023, it was reported that “Ms Mai had a number of violations and shortcomings in implementing the regulations on what party members cannot do, and the regulations on the responsibility to set an example for cadres and party members…”

It has also been reported that Tô Lâm was introduced to the 200-member Central Committee as the Politburo’s choice to assume Vietnam’s “State Presidency.” That’s a job with mainly protocolary duties but is said to be a better launching pad than the Ministry of Public Security for someone who’s intent on being named the CPV’s next General Secretary.

In the normal course of events, Lâm would have another 20 months to cut deals and then, as the last man standing, to accept his elevation to CPV leadership. However, if there’s truth to rumors that Nguyển Phú Trọng, who’s been General Secretary since 2011 and the Party’s undisputed boss since 2016, is now “old and weak, sleeping in an ICU unit in Military Hospital 108 and ever less often seen in public,” then there’s good reason for Tô to make his move now.

Will the Fiery Furnace Still Burn Hot?

General Secretary Trọng will be remembered as the architect of an anti-corruption campaign of singular intensity and duration. Whether the “fiery furnace” campaign will be remembered as a success is another matter altogether. Trọng aimed to cleanse the party of members who’ve taken bribes and of members who no longer are true believers. He chose to do it by using party, not government institutions.

Researcher Nguyễn Khắc Giang posted a well-documented assessment of Trọng’s campaign here in January 2023. According to Giang’s report, nearly 200,000 party members (one in 25, roughly) were disciplined between 2013 and 2022. Surveys confirm that “the informal costs of doing business” (that is, payoffs to greedy officials) decreased substantially during this period and “the anti-corruption campaign has broken down parts of the politics-business nexus, especially in the property sector.” At the same time, there was a “slowdown in the administrative process,” as public officials, worried that they might be investigated, hesitated to approve projects or issue licenses. 

Giang’s report notes “a cooling effect on the real estate sector” in particular. Also “the Ministry of Public Security…often regarded as the enforcer of the anti-corruption campaign, has been immensely empowered” and “province-level officials, very aware that their promotions depend on local success or failure of anti-corruption measures, neglect other duties such as economic development.”

The report concludes that “solving corruption is not something the Party alone can accomplish.”

At this late stage of Trọng’s tenure, the anti-corruption campaign has acquired a distinctly manic quality. Party members can be faulted for having failed to comply with rules that were unknown at the time and only subsequently promulgated. They can be punished for failing to detect and prevent a subordinate’s malfeasance. They are pressed to disburse project funds but sanctioned if the funds are misspent. Officials’ salaries remain remarkably low compared to pay in Vietnam’s private sector, so it’s no surprise, says Giang, that there’s been “a mass exodus from the bureaucracy since 2020.”

Provinces and agencies have become much more than usually cautious in disbursing funds for public infrastructure projects. Vietnam Express reported on May 2, for example, that although disbursements in Ho Chi Minh City were three times greater than in the first four months of 2023, the total spent was only 10 percent of the 2024 goal. Public infrastructure projects lag far behind projections. Notable examples are the light rail systems in Hanoi and HCM City and the reconstruction of the national electricity grid to move solar and wind power to Vietnam’s northern provinces. Not all the news is bad, however: HCM City’s long-awaited new airport is at last under construction.

“Securitization,” or Growth Isn’t Everything

Foreigners who engage with Vietnam have been particularly concerned by the incarceration of a handful of Vietnamese energy policy experts beginning with the February 2022 arrest of Ngụy Thị Khanh, the head of Green ID, a policy advocacy NGO that worked closely with foreign missions and also with energy policy reformers in Vietnamese government agencies. Khanh was accused of income tax evasion. That has also been the charge leveled at leaders of other NGOs engaged wholly or in part in energy policy advocacy.

The takeaway from this, in short, is that as the Hanoi regime reorients its energy sector away from coal toward renewables, it doesn’t want any non-party Vietnamese joining the conversation with foreign governments, particularly with the US and EC group that’s promised US$15.6 billion worth of loans and credits and expertise.

Recently, moreover, foreign scholars with a long history of constructive engagement with Vietnamese counterparts are discreetly raising alarms as they confront a thicket of red tape last seen in the 1980’s.

Another observer with long experience in Vietnam detects “a closing space for civil society.” Last summer, Hanoi announced its decision to upgrade its nominal relationship with the US, Australia, South Korea, and a few other trading partners. However, in the realm of ideas and national security, the regime seems more intent on “securitization,” that is, implementing policies that keep liberal institutions from taking root.

That outcome will frustrate would-be foreign investors. It could cost Vietnam a percent or two of annual economic growth, but it’s also a program that’s congruent with the forced retirements we’ve seen recently, and with how we suspect Tô Lâm and his allies see their world. It’s already a good bet that Tô will bring a clutch of regressive proposals to the Party’s 14th Congress, now just 19 months away, where some 2000 delegates will give them a ringing endorsement.

David Brown is a former US diplomat and regular Asia Sentinel contributor with wide experience in Vietnam