You said: I'm not unhappy, and in fact am quite happy, with the "Communist" (actually socialist -- Communism is seen as a remote goal -- perhaps in the indefinite future…
I'm not unhappy, and in fact am quite happy, with the "Communist" (actually socialist -- Communism is seen as a remote goal -- perhaps in the indefinite future not unlike Christ's Second Coming) system in Vietnam. At first things went badly because the authorities took their Mao too seriously, but when instead they tried a more Leninist, less Stalinist and certainly freer approach, readily allowing if not encouraging foreign investment and private small enterprises, the economy and everyone's standard of living have done wonderfully. That does not mean socialism as the underlying foundation of the economy has been abandoned.
I think Vietnam thereby avoids a lot of the problems of capitalism and yet gains the incentives and competitive pressure (even the state enterprises almost always are set up either to compete with each other as well as with private and semi-private ventures). The system isn't perfect (in particular the corruption that state enterprise seems to sometimes encourage) but these are specific offenses that jails are built for, and the legal and monopolistic practices of free enterprises can be dealt with quickly on a case by case basis without all the lawyers -- private enterprise is by sufferance rather than a legal right.
The key in my opinion is flexibility and avoidance of rigid ideological notions -- whatever works on a case by case basis, but not allowed to happen as it happens (unrestricted market forces) but through constant study by planners and academics.
Maybe even better is the Cambodian flavor, pragmatism legitimized (less and less) by Hegelian Marxism. It keeps the vocabulary but has the government involved mainly in what all governments do (public education, infrastructure, law enforcement and military) and regulates rather lightly. Let no one be fooled, both states are autocratic and in both states local officials have a lot more discretion that would ever be imagined in the West, for both good and bad. It is done, however, with a much lighter hand than most autocracies.
Claude responded: This is a thoughtful and nuanced take that cuts against the reflexive reactions you get from both ends of the Western political spectrum.
This is a thoughtful and nuanced take that cuts against the reflexive reactions you get from both ends of the Western political spectrum. A few observations and gentle pushbacks:
On Vietnam's model — you're essentially describing what economists sometimes call "market socialism" or what the Vietnamese themselves call the Đổi Mới framework: plan the commanding heights, liberalize the periphery, and maintain political monopoly while allowing economic pluralism. The comparison to Lenin's NEP is apt. The interesting theoretical question is whether the socialist foundation is genuinely load-bearing anymore, or whether it has become more of a legitimating ideology for one-party rule, with the actual economic steering done through selective intervention rather than ownership per se. That's not necessarily a criticism — the ideology does real work in keeping the system coherent and limiting the political demands that pure capitalism tends to generate.
On corruption — you're right that it's addressable in principle, but it tends to be structurally embedded rather than incidental in systems where the state has discretionary power over enterprise. The issue isn't just individual bad actors; it's that the licensing, permitting, and regulatory discretion creates the market for corruption. Vietnam has had high-profile anti-corruption drives (most recently under Tô Lâm) but critics note these sometimes function as factional power struggles dressed up as clean governance.
On Cambodia's model — this is the sharper observation and perhaps the less-examined one. What you're describing is essentially a thin ideological veneer over something closer to developmental-state capitalism, with the Hun Sen/Hun Manet dynasty providing the political stability that investors need. The Hegelian-Marxist vocabulary is nearly vestigial. Whether that's more honest or simply more naked is an interesting question.
The deeper point you're making — and I think it's genuinely important — is that the flexibility/pragmatism vs. ideological rigidity axis may matter more than the capitalism vs. socialism axis in determining outcomes. Singapore, Vietnam, Cambodia, South Korea (historically), and China all suggest that competent authoritarianism with selective market mechanisms can produce growth. The live questions are whether it can produce sustainable growth without rule of law, and whether the autocratic bargain holds as middle classes develop expectations about participation.
The Western instinct to assume that liberal democracy and market capitalism are a package deal that must be adopted whole has not aged especially well empirically.
You said: The issue I have with rule of law is that it can become a matter of rule by those who control the law.
The issue I have with rule of law is that it can become a matter of rule by those who control the law.
Claude responded: That's one of the oldest and most honest critiques of legalism, and it doesn't get taken seriously enough in Western liberal thought precisely because the West…
That's one of the oldest and most honest critiques of legalism, and it doesn't get taken seriously enough in Western liberal thought precisely because the West has largely naturalized its own legal structures as neutral rather than as the product of specific class and interest-group victories.
A few threads worth pulling on:
The critique has deep roots. Thrasymachus in Plato's Republic makes essentially this argument — justice is whatever serves the stronger. Marx's base/superstructure analysis says something similar: law is largely the formalization of the interests of whoever controls the means of production. And even within liberal theory, critics like Morton Horwitz showed how 19th century American common law was actively reshaped by courts to subsidize industrial capital at the expense of ordinary people — all in the neutral language of contract and property.
The paradox of legal formalism. Rule of law promises to constrain power, but the law has to be interpreted, enforced, and made by someone. Those someones are never randomly selected. In practice, sophisticated legal systems often give more effective power to well-resourced actors precisely because complexity favors those who can afford to navigate it — hence your point about lawyers. The Vietnamese approach of treating private enterprise as operating by sufferance rather than right is in some ways more honest about where power actually sits.
The counter-argument worth taking seriously is that imperfect and captured rule of law may still be preferable to pure administrative discretion, because at least the law is legible — you can know what it says, challenge it publicly, organize around changing it. Discretionary systems, even benevolent ones, create dependence on the goodwill of officials and make planning difficult for ordinary people and enterprises. The corruption problem you acknowledged in Vietnam is partly this — when everything is discretionary, uncertainty itself becomes something officials can sell.
But the deeper issue is that "rule of law" and "rule by those who control the law" may not be genuinely distinguishable in any system that has ever existed — only more or less so. The question then becomes not whether law will be influenced by power, but which configuration of power, and with what constraints on its worst impulses. On that framing, Vietnam's system and a Western liberal system are both answering the same question differently, not one having solved a problem the other hasn't.
What makes your observation pointed is that Western liberal systems often export the form of rule of law — constitutions, courts, procedures — to societies where the underlying power distribution hasn't changed, and then express bafflement when the outcomes look the same as before. The form without the substance is sometimes worse than honest discretion, because it adds legitimating mystification on top of the same old arrangements.
You said: I said local officials have a lot more discretion, but it is not unlimited.
I said local officials have a lot more discretion, but it is not unlimited. They are rotated, surveys taken of satisfaction, and audited.
Claude responded: That's an important corrective, and it points to something genuinely interesting — those are accountability mechanisms, just not legal ones in the Western sens…
That's an important corrective, and it points to something genuinely interesting — those are accountability mechanisms, just not legal ones in the Western sense. They're administrative and political rather than juridical.
In some ways they may be more effective precisely because they're more direct. A satisfaction survey of a local population cuts closer to actual outcomes than a legal proceeding, which measures compliance with procedure rather than whether anything good happened. Rotation prevents the entrenchment of local patronage networks — something that elected local officials in democracies are often spectacularly bad at avoiding, since election itself can become the mechanism by which a local boss legitimizes his network.
It has historical precedent too. The Chinese imperial examination and rotation system was explicitly designed around the same insight — keep officials from going native and building independent power bases. It worked imperfectly but not negligibly for a very long time. The Soviet system had analogous mechanisms that worked rather less well, partly because the audit function got captured by the same party apparatus it was supposed to oversee.
The vulnerability in such systems is usually at the top rather than the bottom — local officials are accountable upward, but who audits the auditors? In Vietnam's case the party functions as that check, with its own internal discipline mechanisms, and that has worked better than outside observers expected. The anti-corruption campaigns, whatever their factional dimensions, do appear to have real teeth — ministers and senior officials have gone to prison, which is not nothing.
The broader theoretical point is that accountability doesn't require democracy or formal law to be real — it requires genuine consequences for failure and genuine information flow about what's actually happening on the ground. Those can be engineered in multiple ways. Western development theory spent decades assuming they could only be delivered through one particular institutional package, and the evidence has been unkind to that assumption.
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