🇻🇳Vietnam-style governance under General Secretary Tô Lâm

📌Vietnam has undergone a major overhaul of “streamlining the bureaucracy.” Streamlining is directly tied to administrative capacity, data-driven governance, decentralization, and real responsibility for implementation, with the ambition to shorten decision-making time.
During bác Trọng’s era, from 2011–2024, the focus of power was on restoring political discipline, rectifying the Party, fighting corruption, maintaining ideological foundations, and stabilizing the system. The biggest mark was the anti-corruption campaign to the extent of “no exceptions, no forbidden zones,” while also maintaining the foreign policy of “bamboo diplomacy” to balance between major powers.
Under General Secretary Tô Lâm, the focus is shifting toward state efficiency, faster execution, streamlining the bureaucracy, restructuring administrative space, and building data-driven administrative capacity.
Precisely these steps are preparations for a “Vietnam-style governance” model. That model is unlike Singapore because its scale and complexity are far greater; it is also unlike China because it lacks a massive domestic market and is not subject to comprehensive control. Hanoi wants to build a version of a “data-enabled developing state” with three conditions at the same time: truly interconnected data, real authority linked to real responsibility, and evaluating officials based on real results.
📌Governance is a way of organizing power in which the legitimacy of decisions relies more on professional expertise, evidence, measurement, and execution effectiveness than on mobilizing public emotions. Leaders set major goals, and an expert bureaucracy optimizes how to carry them out. The market does not wait for the “invisible hand,” but instead operates under the state’s centralized coordination.
Therefore, governance is especially optimized for late-industrializing countries. When the technological gap is large, resources are scarce, and international competition is fierce, growth cannot be expected to rely on favorable timing alone. The state will have to decide which infrastructure to build first, which industries need preferential support, which data must be standardized, and which officials must be held responsible if policies fail to achieve their goals. This is the underlying logic behind models like Singapore, post-reform China, and to some extent Vietnam today.
📌Singapore is the most complete and perfect governance model in Asia—indeed, even globally. “Meritocracy” has evolved from a slogan into a mechanism for selecting and rewarding officials.
- Singapore assigns the PSC a constitutional role in appointing, confirming, promoting, transferring, and disciplining civil servants, and in controlling scholarships and public-sector talent. Valuing talent is not only a moral idea; it is something enshrined in the constitution.
- Second is salary. Singapore maintains that paying high enough wages is necessary to retain capable people in the public sector and reduce incentives for rent-seeking. The salary structure for top leaders, senior civil servants, and elite administrators is always among the highest in the world. The essence here is not that high pay equals governance. Singapore is willing to pay fiscal costs to purchase administrative capacity and reduce the cost of corruption.
- Third is planning. Singapore does not manage land through administrative allotments. They use planning to design society as a whole: housing, transportation, seaports, public services, and living space within a unified system. Land is not fragmented according to short-term interests. Singapore can do this only because its land area is so small, which suits centralized planning.
- Finally, Singapore’s greatest advantage that other governance states do not have is its extremely small land area. With fewer local tiers, it becomes easier to standardize data, synchronize policies, and clearly assign responsibility.
📌In China, the concept of governance changes over time. The most useful way to understand it is to separate it into two phases. The first phase is developmental governance, initiated by Deng Xiaoping, which researchers have described as a “governance movement.” China began to take economic development as the main measure of legitimacy. Leaders not only need political credentials; they also must know how to operate industry, do planning, attract investment, and generate growth. At the local level, officials are also driven by GDP, infrastructure projects, and the pace of industrialization.
Under Xi Jinping, China is gradually shifting toward “control governance,” where administrative skills and technology must go together with ideology, Party discipline, and information control. This differs from Singapore’s model because China’s territory is far too vast and its domestic market enormous; when the state’s intervention in economic coordination is excessive, it can inadvertently grant too much power to a small number of leading officials. Without strict ideological control, a governance model can easily become a breeding ground for corruption.
📌General Secretary Tô Lâm took office in a context where Vietnam needs a central hub of authority that can handle three problems at the same time: a bloated bureaucracy, slow disbursement–slow approvals, and geopolitical competition that puts the old growth room at risk. Starting in late 2024, the Party’s official language has shifted to “streamlined–strong–powerful, efficient–effective–efficient,” emphasizing the building of a political system with a governance flavor like what Singapore once did.
- By late 2024, Vietnam began a strong reform of the bureaucracy: merging many large ministries, streamlining agencies, and reducing the layers that process policy.
- By February 2025, the National Assembly approved a plan for streamlining (reducing nearly 20% of the state apparatus). The focus is not only on saving costs, but on increasing efficiency and reducing the problem of projects getting stuck in approvals.
- In June 2025, Vietnam still had 34 provincial-level units, eliminating the intermediate district level.
- Implementing electronic identification and VNeID is a crucial link in the governance model.
During bác Tô Lâm’s tenure, Vietnam expanded its diplomatic corridor with Singapore. In the official visit of General Secretary Tô Lâm to Singapore from 11–13/3/2025, the two countries upgraded their relationship to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. One year later, bác Tô Lâm returned to Singapore at the end of May 2026, along with cooperation content such as agriculture–trade, renewable energy, science and technology, and human resource development. This is perhaps the time when Vietnam had stabilized its organizational model and administrative boundary structure, continuing to learn from Singapore about technology and how to develop, and to allocate talent in a governance-driven way.
📌During the era when Lý Quang Diệu implemented governance to build Singapore, that was the golden period:
- The world needed a stable trading hub in Southeast Asia right after World War II.
- Singapore is directly on the most important maritime route in Asia.
- A small scale helps a governance state be easier to control, easier to measure, and easier to implement.
-> It was a matter of timing, geographic advantages, and favorable human conditions, not development out of thin air.
Vietnam does not have those favorable conditions, so the prospects for a Vietnam-style governance model will depend on whether reforms can be transformed from “streamlining in form” to “truly increasing productivity.” Favorable conditions are already in place: the state is decisively prioritizing growth and clearly recognizes that a slow bureaucracy is eroding the advantages of an economy still dependent on investment, exports, and business confidence. The government has also signaled to investors that administrative reforms will not interrupt project approvals.
📌The biggest risk after reform is the “transition cost” of reform: public assets, unemployment caused by resolving excess personnel, overlapping old and new procedures, and delays in carrying out the operations of newly merged units.
- The successful scenario is that after merging, Vietnam creates larger planning space; uses population data to reduce administrative costs; uses streamlining to push responsibilities down to the right people who actually carry out public duties; and uses a new evaluation framework to reward the right people. Then, Vietnam will not only be the second Singapore—it will create a new version of a developed state: open to FDI, retaining the state’s strong coordination role, but without falling into the deep shadow of China’s full-population control.
- The failed scenario is that there are bigger provinces but planning is not reformed; district-level units are removed but cumbersome procedures are not reduced; communes/wards take on more work but cannot retain talented people; officials’ evaluations remain a mere formality; and businesses continue to navigate a maze of paperwork. In that case, governance becomes just a name without substance, a flattering term without real impact.
📌South Korea and Taiwan are the two countries that have applied Singapore’s model most successfully. South Korea took about ~25 years, and Taiwan about ~30 years, to escape the middle-income trap. But governance is not a magic key; the lessons of past failures in governance-based management still exist:
- Iran under the Shah—modernization through governance but losing social legitimacy
- Brazil during military rule—governance development, but default due to the 1973 oil shock
- Malaysia stuck with the national car strategy (Proton), with protectionism reducing R&D incentives and causing loss of international competitiveness (copying South Korea’s chaebol model but failing); companies that should have become engines ended up becoming national burdens.
- Egypt under Mubarak—governance reforms failed due to corruption and vested interests
- Mexico under PRI—financial governance still powerless against the debt crisis and peso exchange-rate fluctuations
There are even more lessons from failures. Successful countries are only a few. We still have many challenges ahead; if we can overcome them, Vietnam will turn into a dragon.