To Lam, the leader of the Vietnamese Communist Party, became the country’s president this month following a unanimous vote in the National Assembly.
The move went against informal norms that long shaped elite politics in Hanoi. For decades the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) sought to avoid concentrating too much power in one person.
Unlike China, where since the 1990s the top party leader has usually also served as state president, Vietnam generally preferred a more collective leadership style — the so-called “four pillars” system — with authority divided among the party chief, state president, prime minister and National Assembly.
That arrangement was never the full separation of powers seen in liberal democracies. But within the confines of one-party rule, it created a measure of internal balance and reduced the risk of one individual dominating the system.
Now analysts say that balance may be shifting. “It brings the Vietnamese political system closer to the Chinese one, which is dominated by [China’s President] Xi Jinping,” Alfred Gerstl, an Indo-Pacific expert at the University of Vienna, told DW. “Given his concentration of power, To Lam may be able to implement his ambitious reforms more quickly, but there is a risk that the established checks and balances will cease to function and that dissenting opinions within the party will be heard less and less.”
Leaders dying in office
Vietnam’s political system has relied as much on convention as on formal rules. In addition to the “four pillars” model, retirement-age norms once helped regulate turnover in the elite.
Both guardrails have become easier to bend. The VCP is now more willing to let aging leaders stay on and even grant them new powers. Former party chief Nguyen Phu Trong secured a third term in 2021, breaking the two-term norm. He combined party leadership and the presidency from 2018 until 2021 after the previous president died in office, and he remained Communist Party leader until his death at 80 in 2024.
Looking to China for surveillance tools
To Lam, a former public security minister, rose as a key enforcer of Trong’s anti-corruption campaign, which removed hundreds of officials and reordered the political hierarchy. Like Trong, To Lam briefly held both top posts before stepping back as president. In January he was confirmed for another five-year term as party leader and a few months later secured a five-year term as president.
Under To Lam, Vietnam is showing greater interest in elements of China’s security and surveillance model, Gerstl said, arguing this trend “goes hand in hand with new bilateral agreements and would further restrict freedom of expression in Vietnam.”
AI camera networks coming to Vietnam
Vietnam was already one of the region’s most restrictive states before Lam rose to the top; it ranks 173rd out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index. Rights groups say the government has intensified pressure on civil society, narrowing the space for dissent.
Hanoi plans state-run data-trading exchanges overseen by the public security ministry, “mirroring China’s centralized data model,” Reuters reported. The country is expanding a national electronic identification system and rolling out AI camera networks nationwide, enabling authorities to identify individuals — another parallel with China. Government documents have referenced building a “national firewall,” and new laws have increased internet providers’ capacity to collect user data.
To Lam hosted by Xi Jinping
This week To Lam visited China, his first official diplomatic trip since taking the presidency, following a tradition of prioritizing Beijing and reflecting Hanoi’s stance that the countries are socialist “comrades and brothers.”
In Beijing, Xi Jinping emphasized ideological solidarity and strategic coordination. According to Chinese state media, Xi framed defending socialism and Communist Party rule as a shared strategic interest. Security was high on the agenda: with Lam in Beijing, Vietnam’s public security minister met three of China’s top security officials, suggesting deepening ties between the institutions both systems rely on to preserve control.
Two paths ahead for Vietnam’s new president
There are limits to the China comparison. Vietnam has not pursued “Xi Jinping’s Stalinist elimination of senior generals and the pervasive state of fear that Xi has injected into Chinese society more broadly speaking,” Hunter Marston, a non-resident fellow with the Institute for Global Affairs, told DW. “Vietnam is far from a progressive democracy, but it lacks some of the totalitarian repression that China relies on more regularly for the Chinese Communist Party and Xi Jinping’s political survival,” he added.
While Vietnam remains an authoritarian one-party state, it has not built the same level of all-encompassing repression, ideological control or cult of personality seen under Xi. Nor has To Lam yet demonstrated that he can dominate the system to the same extent as China’s leader.
Now, with To Lam both party head and president, Vietnam’s future hinges on how he uses his broader powers. If he governs pragmatically, supporters may view the merger of the two posts as a way to push through reforms more quickly and give Vietnam’s paramount leader a stronger formal role internationally. But if the trend moves toward tighter repression, weaker internal checks and a stronger security state, Vietnam may begin to look less like the collective authoritarian system it once claimed to be and more like its giant northern neighbor.
Edited by: Darko Janjevic