‘Escape from China’ is the watchword in Vietnam for businesses offering an alternative to Beijing’s communist encroachment, says Rainer Zitelmann

Vietnam played an important role in my youth. I was a Maoist back then, and of course all my sympathies lay with the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam. I first visited Vietnam in 2014, then returned in September 2022 and again in December 2024. It is immediately obvious how the country is growing from year to year and, during my conversations with entrepreneurs, I witnessed their incredibly strong entrepreneurial spirit first-hand.

What does Vietnam think of America now?

There is probably no other country in the world where the pursuit of wealth is as important as it is in Vietnam. I commissioned the opinion research institute Ipsos to conduct a survey in 13 countries to find out more about popular attitudes toward wealth. One of the questions was: “How important, if at all, is it for you personally to be rich?” In Europe and the US, an average only 28 per cent of respondents said it was important for them to be rich. Nowhere did so many people say it was important for them to be rich as in Vietnam, where the figure was 76 per cent. Another survey I commissioned showed that the Vietnamese associate the word “capitalism” primarily with positive terms such as freedom, innovation and prosperity.

Given the destruction and suffering of the Vietnamese people in the war with the United States, it would not be surprising if Vietnam was a hotbed of anti-Americanism. But anti-Americanism is far more pronounced in many other parts of the world. It is something you encounter far more often in Arab countries and........

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