Diplomatic developments
The year of 2024-25 has been politically intensive, historic, and ironic to Vietnam domestically and internationally. On April 2nd this year, when the US President, Donald Trump, announced a 46% tariff rate on major Vietnamese export products, Vietnam became the only country which he described as follows: “Great negotiators, great people! They like me, I like them. The problem is they charge us 90%. We’re going to charge them 46% tariffs.” Shortly afterwards, Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade policy advisor, came out in a televised interview with Fox News denouncing Vietnam as being “essentially a Chinese colony” which was “ripping and cheating us off” through its $125 billion trade surplus with the US.
Although the Vietnamese government had expected to be hit by Trump’s unilateral and expanded trade war during his second presidential term, a tariff rate as high as 46% sent shockwaves throughout the country. This shock was partly rooted in how Trump’s first presidential term had become a source of rocketing economic optimism in Vietnam and “Trump-mania,” as characterised by widespread local admiration for Trump, his oligarchic values, and his containment policies against China.
The initial shocks felt from Trump’s tariff war on Vietnam, as part of an escalated proxy war with China, disclosed a sense of local self-denial and called for a return to sanity and clarity. Public sentiments towards the tariffs have been dominated by disbelief, anger, and disappointment. Official and popular memories of the Vietnam War and revolutionary wartime nationalism have continued to rise ever since. An academic friend of mine, who researches Vietnamese memories of US chemical warfare and South Korean war crimes during the Vietnam War, expressed his rage on social media: “After waging a war on Vietnamese war memories, they are now waging another war against Vietnam 50 years later.”
Only five days after Trump launched his tariff war, the first country that the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, visited in 2025 was Vietnam. At the airport in Hanoi, Xi was received by Vietnam’s president, Lương Cường, and the Standing Secretary of the Secretariat of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) and Vietnam’s anti-corruption tsar, Trần Cẩm Tú. No such top-level airport reception of any Chinese leader had been given by Vietnam since 1991, the year when the China-Vietnam rapprochement took place amid the collapse of the Soviet Union. 1991 was also when Vietnam felt most vulnerable in the world and sought closer ties with China: when Vietnam proposed to China to resume an ideological alliance to salvage socialist internationalism, China rejected it.
The top-level airport reception alone signalled that Vietnam is refusing US pressures to fundamentally turn away from China. In fact, similar dynamics already played out in 2023-24, when Vietnam was the only country in the world to receive the leaders of the US, China, and Russia. When Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, visited Vietnam in September 2023, the US and Vietnam made the historic move to upgrade their relationship to a ‘Comprehensive Strategic Partnership’ (CSP). Excluding Laos, Cambodia, and Cuba, which remain Vietnam’s most important former ideological Cold War allies and which enjoy “a special relationship” category only reserved by Vietnam for these countries, the CSP is the highest-level categorisation of Vietnam’s hierarchy of diplomatic relations with the world. Previously, in 2021, when then-US Vice President, Kamala Harris visited, Vietnam initially rejected US pressures to upgrade their relationship to CSP; by 2023, the relationship had been upgraded.
To dilute the political significance of the US-Vietnam diplomatic upgrade, Vietnam also upgraded their ties with South Korea, Japan, and Australia to CSP in the same year. In the past, the CSP had only been enjoyed by China, Russia, and India. Therefore, its expansion represented Vietnam’s premature break with high-level diplomacy confined to its former ideological Cold War allies. Nonetheless, shortly after Biden’s departure from Vietnam, Xi visited in December 2023. During Xi’s visit, Vietnam at last agreed to embrace China’s “Community with a shared future of humanity” following years of sustained Chinese pressure. However, in Vietnamese declarations, Vietnam continues to subtly refuse evoking the Chinese proposal’s other name, “Community of common destiny for mankind”.
Cautious revolutionary re-kindling?
The fact that Trump launched a tariff war on Vietnam in April this year, the month of the 50th anniversary since the end of the Vietnam War, served both as a historic and ironic reality for many Vietnamese. Coincidentally, before and after Trump’s tariff war was launched, Vietnam had already made many unprecedented moves in its political and military diplomacy towards its former Cold War allies.
In August 2024, when Vietnam’s new communist party general secretary, Tô Lâm, visited China, he did something that had not been done by any Vietnamese leader since 1979: in Beijing, he paid respect at the Mao Mausoleum, while in Guangzhou, he paid respect at several former headquarters, bases, and memorials where many of the first generation of Vietnamese communist and patriotic revolutionaries, including Hồ Chí Minh (1890-1969) and Phạm Hồng Thái (1896–1924), operated or were sacrificed. This was a rare and open recognition of China as an indispensable political and geographical rear base to Vietnam’s 20th century revolutions. At the same time, in February this year, Tô Lâm became the first ever Vietnamese communist party general secretary to pay respect at the Vị Xuyên Martyrs’ Cemetery, where around 2,000 Vietnamese soldiers from the Sino-Vietnamese War (1979-1989) are buried.
On April 30th this year, the date of the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) marched for the first time ever in Ho Chi Minh City alongside the armies of Laos and Cambodia as part of Vietnam’s military parade for the occasion. Ahead of these celebrations, state media disclosed to the Vietnamese public for the first time ever the extent of past Chinese assistance during the Vietnam War, including the presence of over 300,000 Chinese military personnel in North Vietnam. Although Vietnam’s recognition of past Chinese assistance has been a standard diplomatic protocol since 1991, the move to disclose a specific number of Chinese military personnel present during the Vietnam War was unprecedented.
On September 2nd this year, when Vietnam celebrated the 80th anniversary of its independence from Japanese and French rule, the PLA marched once again in Vietnam’s largest-ever military parade in Ba Đình Square in Hanoi, alongside the armies of Russia, Laos, and Cambodia. On this occasion, Vietnam’s Ministry of Defence also inaugurated the construction of a 3,000 square-meter park inside Vietnam’s new Military History Museum, commemorating past advisors and volunteer soldiers from the USSR, China, Cuba, Laos, and Cambodia. This park project had been “urgently” requested by Vietnam’s defence minister, state media reported.
These moves would have been impossible only a decade ago, when official and popular Vietnamese nationalism together openly targeted China. Back then, the competition between the party-state and discourses of popular Vietnamese nationalism, once shaped by liberal nationalist dissidents, intellectuals, and civil society, was about who stood for the most ferocious “anti-China patriotism”. Therefore, these latest moves signalled the Party’s increasing but complex internationalization of its official historiography of the Vietnam War, in which past contributions by other communist states, especially China, have become more openly and widely acknowledged. This also shows how the Party has become more confident in controlling popular anti-China nationalism and quelling historical narratives that challenge its official historiography of its revolution and wars. However, due to the lingering memories and legacies of the Sino-Vietnamese War (1979-1989), any official recognition of past Chinese contributions to Vietnam’s reunification and its politics remains a sensitive aspect of the Party’s official historiography and ruling legitimacy.
Intra-party line struggles
Are these diplomatic shifts purely driven by external pressures from great powers? Many are already familiar with the historical and contemporary tensions between China and Vietnam on a wide range of issues. I would therefore like to dedicate some attention to the role of Vietnam’s domestic politics in recent years behind recent diplomacy.
In 2024, in the months before and after the passing of the late communist party secretary, Nguyễn Phú Trọng (1944-2024), a dramatic power struggle took place: since the 13th CPV national party congress in 2021, six members of the original 18-member Politburo, the highest-level political body in Vietnam, have been purged, with four members purged only months before the passing of Nguyễn Phú Trọng. Two of them alone were incumbent presidents purged within a year. Many of the purged members were close to Nguyễn Phú Trọng.
While Nguyễn Phú Trọng passionately advocated for Vietnam’s “Path towards socialism”, Tô Lâm, upon assuming the CPV leadership from August 2024, has rapidly replaced Trọng’s doctrine with his own slogan of Vietnam’s “Era of national rise”. Formal evocations of socialism have drastically diminished ever since. Moreover, these latest power transitions and struggles have given way to the public security and the military, two competing forces, to dominate Vietnam’s most important political leadership positions.
This situation has amounted to an unprecedented take-over of the CPV leadership by the Party’s security arms, which represents a deviation from the CPV’s leadership structure which has historically been led by figures hailing more directly from a combination of ideological, party-building, and military work. This current situation stems partly from how the Party has become ever-more divided about the party-line on various issues, including on its ideological directions and foreign policy. While these divisions had already grown deep by the end of Nguyễn Phú Trọng’s second term in power (2016-2021), when he failed to promote his preferred successor to the CPV leadership, the divisions have only escalated since his sudden demise in July 2024.
The Party has been unable to conceal these divisions. For instance, while Tô Lâm hails from public security, Lương Cường, the current president (2024 – present), hails from the military and it is he who has been mostly tasked with political work and party-building within the military throughout his life. At the 80th session of the UN General Assembly in September 2025, Lương Cường was surprisingly seen accompanied by Major General Hoàng Kiền at a gathering of American and Vietnamese war veterans, which celebrated the acclaimed success of post-war reconciliation between the US and Vietnam.
Since 2018, Major General Hoàng Kiền has been the face of a vigorous intra-party struggle that has been openly and vocally waged by prominent generals and war veterans. They do not regard themselves as dissidents, but rather as party members and sympathizers who struggle over what they believe should be the ideologically correct party-line. They commonly rail against the deepening US influence in Vietnamese politics and society, and against a growing sense of official deviation from socialism. They often accuse these processes of being facilitated by powerful segments within the party-state. They also advocate for increasing ties and solidarity with old Cold War allies as Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, Russia, and China.
Up until 2024, these prominent generals and war veterans had mostly been silenced. Therefore, Hoàng Kiền’s presence at the UN with the President affirmed the growing influence and assertiveness of party “conservatives” within both the Party and the military. This has also become more manifest in the ever-rising popular online nationalism that increasingly targets the US, in part to exert pressure on Tô Lâm’s leadership.
For instance, amid the 79th Session of the UN General Assembly in September 2024, Tô Lâm toured the US and affirmed his support for Fulbright University Vietnam (FUVN), Vietnam’s first US-affiliated university based in Ho Chi Minh City, as a symbol of deepening cooperation between the US and Vietnam on education. Domestically, military-affiliated media fomented a large-scale online nationalist backlash against FUVN. These military-affiliated sources and their supporters accused the FUVN of negating the Party’s official historiography of the Vietnam War. Suspicions of the official historiography of the Vietnam War being changed and altered by the deepening diplomatic relationship between the US and Vietnam in recent decades has been the most long-standing subject of party-line struggle waged by prominent generals and war veterans in recent times. Shortly after the struggle against FUVN, however, military-affiliated media were forced to roll back on their nationalist campaigns against the university and instead to express fondness about the deepening cooperation between the US and Vietnam on education. This episode disclosed growing rifts within the public security and military-dominated CPV leadership now in power.
The rise of red youth nationalism
Public sentiments in Vietnamese society towards China and the US in the 2020s are drastically different from the 2010s. Throughout the 2010s, when liberal nationalist dissidents and intellectuals dominated public debates, many in the Vietnamese public and diaspora called for Vietnam to move towards a formal alliance with the US to contain China, especially in relation to China’s steady expansion into the South China Sea. The Party was often criticized for not moving closer and quickly enough towards the US. These years were marked by extremely high pro-US sentiments throughout society. Trump’s latest tariff war has even been regarded by some Vietnamese as an opportunity for “liberation” from China.
Since 2020, the broader trend has nevertheless been that of rising red nationalism throughout society. Following Nguyễn Phú Trọng’s visit to China after the latter’s 19th Party Congress in November 2022, which was hailed by both the CCP and the CPV as a new “historical milestone” in the bilateral relationship, and with the ongoing ramifications of the Russia-Ukraine War reverberating widely, Vietnam has accelerated its rapprochement towards China and Russia while maintaining strong ties with the US. Red nationalism, which views the Vietnamese revolution and the leadership of the CPV overall more favourably than in previous times, has manifested especially sharply among Vietnamese millennials and Gen Z. This nationalism is both critical of and selectively embracing towards both China and the US. In this ambiguity, the 2020s contrasts greatly with the 2010s, when anti-party, anti-China, and pro-US nationalism once proliferated.
And yet, the dramatic rise in red nationalism has not been monolithic in its ideological composition. Left-wing political discourses, activism, and solidarity campaigns by segments of Vietnamese Gen Z have emerged quite energetically in recent times. This has been especially triggered by the genocide in Gaza and the latest youth uprisings in Indonesia against capitalist inequalities. The ongoing Vietnamese youth activism against the genocide in Gaza is the first and most sustained practice of anti-war activism in Vietnam since the end of the Vietnam War.
These emerging Vietnamese left-wing youths do not only question and criticize China and the US’ treatments of Vietnam, but they also question the party line on various political issues from both a class and national perspective. Unlike the more plentiful state-affiliated red young nationalists these days, who often adopt whatever position the Party endorses and implements, the red left-wing youths are evoking and re-invigorating Vietnam’s historical legacy of socialist internationalism.
As part of my own research on the intimate afterlives of the Vietnam War and the Sino-Vietnamese War, as historical events that symbolize the politically violent transition from communist to intra-communist warfare, I visited a Chinese martyrs’ cemetery in the outskirts of Hanoi for the first time ever in December 2023. Beforehand, I had been cautioned by friends to not tell anyone that I had visited the cemetery. In fact, I found no written sign at the entrance of this cemetery which might have indicated that this is where around 40 Chinese martyrs from the wars against France and the US are buried. These enduring sensitivities remind me of the question a former member of Vietnam’s parliament once asked: “Vietnamese war veterans often meet with American and French war veterans. Why can’t such take place between the Vietnamese and Chinese war veterans?”
As scholars and students, we ought to bypass naturalised “enemy lines” through our own works and everyday lives, politically and empathetically. This is the silent message behind each incense I offered to the deceased and for the ideals that stubbornly continue to awaken us.
Note: This was originally delivered as a talk at the Verso China Conference in London, October 2-4, 2025. We asked Chelsea to adapt and revise for publication on praxis, which she had obligingly done. RK & FL
Chelsea Ngoc Minh Nguyen is Postgraduate Student in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge