Vietnam’s Communist Party leader To Lam has consolidated power and set ambitious growth targets for the country’s future. While reforms have unlocked momentum, centralisation, debt, corruption and geopolitical pressure raise questions about sustainability.

As Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi dominated headlines last week with her election win, another Asian leader is tightening his grip on power.

Vietnam’s Communist Party General Secretary To Lam has emerged from the recent party congress embodying what former US ambassador to Vietnam Ted Osius terms a “new era of the nation’s rise”.

The ambition is vast. Vietnam grew at 8.2 per cent last year: To Lam wants to reach, then sustain, a 10 per cent annual growth rate. The goal? For Vietnam to be in the top 20 highest-income countries per capita by 2045 – the centenary of Ho Chi Minh’s Declaration of Independence – and to beat the middle-income trap by 2030, the centenary of the founding of Vietnam’s Communist Party.

To Lam honours the system even as he reinterprets socialism. Indeed, “socialism” has been neatly packed away, and with it the shibboleths of the proletarian revolution, replaced by new homilies of the digital, green and cultural economy.

These are the sort of growth numbers that made fiscal eyes water in the 1980s with Asia’s “flying geese” economies – Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. But the aspirations are not without risk, and scepticism harries the optimism.

Most agree that To Lam has unshackled Vietnam’s growth potential. Osius refers to the recent streamlining of the nation’s bureaucracy as a “thoughtful, intelligent version of [Elon Musk’s] DOGE”. Others confirm that the country is like a coiled........

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