Vietnam’s cautious acceptance of chinese 5G technology

Recent agreements with Huawei and ZTE reflect economic pragmatism rather than a shift in strategic trust.

A recent report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace placed Vietnam among the top recipients of Chinese foreign police training, third after Laos and Myanmar. This comes as no surprise since both countries, and their ruling communist regimes, share common anxieties about “hostile” external forces and domestic dissent.

For years, Vietnam has looked to China for its public security expertise, while implicitly shunning its hardware and technology due to domestic security concerns. However, on November 28, Reuters reported that a consortium including the China-based telecom equipment provider Huawei had won a $23 million contract to supply 5G equipment in Vietnam. ZTE, another major Chinese firm, secured at least two additional deals for 5G antennas worth more than $20 million. This decision to allow Huawei and ZTE’s 5G technology to operate in Vietnam marks an apparent break with this traditional approach.

For both Beijing and Hanoi, national security is regime security. In China, Xi Jinping’s “comprehensive national security concept” has driven massive public investments in surveillance infrastructure, led to the restructuring of the security apparatus, and positioned the country as a leading global provider of policing expertise and technology.

Vietnam has a less aspiring global ambition, but similar domestic goals. To Lam is the first leader with a career background in public security to be appointed general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), the country’s most powerful position. Unlike his predecessors, most of whom were ideologues, Lam is a pragmatist. As minister of public security, he expanded the ministry and enforced the celebrated “Burning Furnace” anti-corruption campaign. In 2017, his ministry allegedly abducted a Vietnamese political asylee in Germany, sparking a diplomatic crisis. It also drafted a new Cyber Security Law, expanding governmental authority over user data.

Lam was trained to protect the ruling regime, using any measure necessary. Now, as the CPV leader, he is continuing to pursue this vision.

Security cooperation has been a recurring topic of agreement at Sino-Vietnamese summits. Publicly, Vietnam has endorsed China’s Global Security Initiative (GSI), which aims to establish Beijing as a major global security player, and has attended the Ministry of Public Security-hosted Global Public Security Cooperation Forum every year since its inauguration in 2022. The frequency of bilateral police training, however, is difficult to determine, as both Beijing and Hanoi disclose little about these activities. According to the Carnegie Endowment’s summary of verifiable exchanges, Vietnam participated in roughly 50 bilateral and multilateral police training events hosted by China between 2000 and 2024. There are mutual benefits to this relationship. China provides Vietnam with expertise in policing, while Vietnam’s engagement with Chinese training programs provides diplomatic wins for Beijing and signals ideological solidarity.

Despite all of this, however, Vietnam remains cautious. The last war Vietnam fought was against China, and the ongoing dispute in the South China Sea is Hanoi’s primary security concern and a major driver of its military modernization. Vietnamese officials, according to the United States Institute of Peace, are wary that China seeks to transform Southeast Asia’s “strategic traditions” from “rely on China for economics, rely on the United States for security” to relying on China for both economics and security.

This is a sentiment shared also by Vietnam’s general public. A 2023 survey by the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute found 66.2 percent of Vietnamese expressing little or no confidence that GSI would benefit the region, the second-lowest level of trust in Southeast Asia.

Vietnam’s Quiet Abstention from Chinese Hardware

While police training and intelligence sharing are mutually beneficial to Hanoi and Beijing, the Vietnamese government has been more conservative when it comes to the adoption of Chinese hardware.

For two decades, Vietnam has experienced high-profile cyberattacks attributed to China. In a rare confrontational 2020 op-ed, one Vietnamese cybersecurity expert urged Vietnam to “counter China’s cyber thuggery,” documenting multiple China-sourced attacks, including the deletion of a database at a major news agency, the display of China’s flag on a Vietnamese government website, and the disruption of operating systems of Vietnam’s two largest airports.

Such concerns have led Vietnam to avoid sourcing critical hardware from China. In a 2020 Brookings Institution report, Vietnam is listed among the few countries in Asia – alongside traditionally China-critical countries like South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan – without Chinese surveillance and public security technology platforms integrated into government infrastructure.

Yet, even in Vietnam, the prevalence of Chinese security cameras has increasingly raised security concerns. Ninety percent of security cameras in Vietnam come from China, and the country is the largest international client of HikVision, a Chinese state-owned surveillance tech firm sanctioned by the United States. Vietnamese manufacturers are now encouraged to produce “Made-in-Vietnam” cameras to win back market share.

Vietnam’s telecommunications infrastructure similarly reflects this security concern. For years, Vietnam has implicitly excluded Huawei technology from its 5G network, despite its cost advantages. The country’s core network relies on the European firms Ericsson and Nokia, with network equipment from the American company Qualcomm.

The Future of Chinese Technology in Vietnam

The recent contracts between Huawei and ZTE for supplying 5G equipment in Vietnam appear to mark a deviation from established policy. However, the shift might not be as dramatic as it appears; this move might be purely economic rather than a policy shift.

Vietnam’s confidence in its homegrown technology and the core of Western infrastructure of the country’s 5G providers, all of which are state-owned enterprises, might have led them to convince the authorities that they could safely add Chinese components for cost efficiency. The timing should also be taken into account: as the government rushes to achieve 99 percent nationwide 5G coverage by 2030, the Chinese equipment’s low-cost advantage becomes compelling.

In the meantime, Vietnam is building its own surveillance technology. MobiFone, a state-owned telecom company under the management of the Ministry of Public Security, recently announced ambitions to develop a multi-layer physical security ecosystem that can be deployed nationwide and eventually in international markets.

Hanoi’s balancing act with Beijing is first and foremost intended to protect the CPV’s s legitimacy and security. Vietnam accepts Chinese training and intelligence sharing because it offers flexible authoritarian tools that can be selectively deployed. Hardware, which is installed and permanent, presents fundamentally different risks.

It took more than half a decade of domestic 5G technological advancement, building technical capacity across every development stage and constructing core infrastructure using Western technologies, before Hanoi felt confident enough to accept some peripheral Chinese components. Similar precautions will likely be required before other Chinese security hardware is accepted for governmental use.

The training, however, will continue.

By Minh Tran – The Diplomat – December 4, 2025