Vietnam sets off down the path of institutional ‘Revolution’
To Lam, the new chief of the Communist Party of Vietnam, has pledged to lead the country into a “new era.”
On December 1, the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV)’s Politburo organized a hybrid national conference on streamlining the apparatus within the political system. The event followed a decision made by the CPV Central Committee at a meeting on November 25. At the conference, Le Minh Hung, chairperson of the Central Commission for Personnel Affairs and a rising star in the party, outlined a plan to streamline the Vietnamese “political system.” CPV General Secretary To Lam closed the meeting by emphasizing the need to implement the plan, which he described as one part of a package of institutional reforms aimed at improving national governance efficiency and creating breakthrough economic development that can drive the country into “a new era.”
The concept of the “political system” was first officially used by the CPV in 1989 to describe the parallel state-party political structure, which consists of party-affiliated agencies, state agencies, and mass socio-political organizations under the CPV’s control. This structure creates a duplicative apparatus, whereby for each state management agency there is a near-corresponding agency on the party side. Under the principle of “party leadership, state management,” party agencies in many cases even intervene in activities that by law should be implemented by agencies in the executive branch.
This creates a welter of overlapping functions and authorities, causing executive activities to become sluggish and sometimes even creating inconsistencies in policies and policy implementation between Party and state agencies. More importantly, there has been an increasing disparity between this mechanism and the doi moi economic reforms that Vietnam has been pursuing since 1986. There have been many voices, including those from former high-ranking Party officials, calling for reform of these organizational and institutional mechanisms.
Institutional reform is an elegant way of referring to political reform, a concept that is generally avoided in Vietnam due to its semantically sensitive nature, as well as the party’s fear that this concept could be easily abused to call for a transition to a multi-party system. Therefore, institutional reform according to the CPV’s approach is limited to amending laws and policies, merging or splitting public agencies, and innovating the working methods of these agencies in order to enhance the effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity of the apparatus. In other words, institutional reform is essentially about streamlining and improving the efficiency of the state apparatus and reducing layers of management.
After nearly 40 years of doi moi, Vietnam has become a lower-middle-income nation and is now viewed in other parts of the world as a development model, but its institutional framework is seen as a “bottleneck” that hinders further economic development. When compared to other Asian economic “tigers” like South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia – or even China, the giant northern country with many similarities in political regime and shared communist ideology – Vietnam is considered to have developed more slowly within the same timeframe.
However, in terms of resources, by all indications, Vietnam should have developed faster and stood at a higher level of development. Recently, To Lam pointed out that “institutions are the bottleneck of bottlenecks,” while calling for institutional reforms that will make the party-state “lean, compact, strong, efficient, effective, and impactful”. Lam emphasized that “streamlining organizational structure is a particularly important task” – one that must be “promptly implemented” at all levels.
So far, Vietnam has conducted several reforms to its organizational structure. For example, in the executive branch, during the period of 1992-1997, Vietnam had 36 ministries and ministerial-level agencies. In the following 10 years, from 1997-2007, the number of ministries reduced to 26. From 2007 to 2021, the number of ministries continued to decrease to 22. Currently, Vietnam has only 20 ministries and ministerial-level agencies. On the CPV side, during the 2007-2012 period, eight party departments were reduced to five, with the dissolution of the Commission for Economic Affairs and Commission of Internal Affairs. However, in 2013, these two agencies were re-established, bringing the number of Party departments back up to eight. The CPV even developed a proposal to combine the general secretary and president positions into one, though this was never implemented.
An internal source has disclosed to this author that under To Lam, the party will make the following changes to the political system. (i) the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Planning and Investment will be merged into a new “Ministry of Finance and National Planning”; (ii) the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment and Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development will be merged into a “Ministry of Sustainable Resources and Agriculture”; (iii) the Ministry of Construction and Ministry of Public Transport will become a new “Ministry of Infrastructure and Urban Development”; (iv) the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Family Affairs will be renamed the Ministry of Culture, Arts and National Tourism; (v) the Ministry of Science and Technology will be merged with the Ministry of Information and Communications into a new “Ministry of Innovation and National Information”; (vi) the Ministry of Education and Training and part of the Ministry of Labour, War Invalids, and Social Affairs (MOLISA) will be collapsed into a new “Ministry of Education and Human Resource Development”; (vii) the Ministry of Health and the remainder of MOLISA will become the “Ministry of Health and Community Welfare”; (viii) the CPV’s Central Commission for External Affairs and the National Assembly Committee for Foreign Relations will be dissolved and merged with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; (ix) the Central Commission for Internal Affairs, the Central Commission for Mass Mobilization, and the Central Commission for Communication and Education will all be merged into a new “Central Commission for Communication and Internal Affairs”. In addition, four functional National Assembly Committees will be merged.
These mergers are expected to be completed by the end of the first quarter of 2025, following which there will remain only 15 government ministries, four party commissions, and five National Assembly committees. Consequential changes in personnel at the senior level will follow. The internal source says that Le Hoai Trung, who is currently head of the Central Commission for External Affairs, will become the minister of foreign affairs; Nguyen Thi Hong, the current governor of the State Bank of Vietnam will be promoted to the rank of deputy prime minister. She will then be replaced by the current party secretary of Hung Yen province, the home province of To Lam.
Describing the coming institutional reforms as a revolution, To Lam has called on government and party officials to sacrifice their personal interests in its pursuit. In his closing remarks at the meeting on November 25, he said the Central Committee reached a high agreement on the proposal for institutional streamlining. Many officials in the government and party could well be unhappy with the changes that Lam seems set on ushering in. However, he said that the convening of the national conference shows that the institutional reform will move forward.
It is understood that this revolution has been driven and led by To Lam, who is clearly the most powerful leader in the country at the moment. But nothing in the institutional reform is inevitable, and the success of its implementation will be a test of To Lam’s power in the lead-up to the 14th party congress in early 2026. If Vietnam’s new party chief can bring about this institutional “revolution,” it will buttress his power and ensure that he will be re-elected as CPV general secretary for a further five-year term.
By Hai Hong Nguyen – The Diplomat – December 3, 2024