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Shortly after taking office as general secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party in July 2024, General To Lâm proclaimed “a new era of national prosperity.” He pledged to push the country’s economic growth to double digits by 2030, up from 8% currently. More striking still, he rapidly translated these statements into concrete steps, promising to chart a new course for Vietnam, faithful to his own maxim: “Time does not wait for us.”
His initial moves targeted the simplification of the country’s administrative and political system. Several ministries were dissolved or merged. All district-level administrations were also abolished, with their officials transferred to the provincial level, reassigned at the communal level, or encouraged to retire. While regions traditionally anchored factions within the Party, the sixty-three provincial and provincial-level units were merged into thirty-four new entities, almost halving the number in a matter of months.
Breaking with his predecessor, To Lâm urged making the private sector the main growth engine of the economy. He authorized the launch of large-scale infrastructure projects, such as high-speed rail and nuclear power plants, some of which were awarded to privately held conglomerates with strong political connections.
He has also been very active on the international front, visiting around twenty countries over the past two years. Under his leadership, Vietnam has elevated its diplomatic relations with several states to the highest level possible. The country appears to be thriving economically and, despite tariffs imposed by Trump, its trade surplus with the United States has continued to widen.
Who is General To Lâm?
The Economist describes To Lâm as “a hard man, a capitalist, and a hedonist” . These words may be apt, but many other facets of the man remain hidden from view. Born in 1957 in Hung Yen province, in the North of the communist-ruled Vietnam, he came of age in 1975, when the war between the North and the South ended in a victory for the North.
To Lâm’s father, Colonel To Quyền, was a security services officer who spent most of those war years in the South, far from his family in the North, to support the communist revolution. He would later become director of the penitentiary department within the Interior Ministry (the ancestor of today’s Public Security Ministry), overseeing the vast prison system that extended into Vietnam’s most remote corners.
Trained at the Public Security School in his youth, To Lâm spent his entire career within the security apparatus, climbing to the rank of major general at age 50, then to minister at 58. Family origins are a major driver of professional advancement for Vietnamese officials, and he is no exception. Little is known about his private life, as is traditionally the case for the country’s leaders. Although he has been in power for decades, the Communist Party continues to operate in secret, as it did when it was only a clandestine revolutionary group. At the same time, the regime promotes collectivism and regards individualism as a vice of decadent bourgeois capitalist societies. Ambitious officials must learn to stay quiet and feign humility, or risk never reaching the top.
To Lâm’s life has nonetheless been more colorful than that of most of his peers: he divorced his first wife after having two children and later remarried, a rarity among officials of his generation. His second wife, Ngô Phương Ly, is thirteen years his junior and the daughter of an artist and an actress. She trained in painting, worked as a television presenter, and became the youngest First Lady of communist Vietnam. He is also known to be an avid collector of antiques.
As Minister of Public Security, he oversaw the construction in 2023 of the sumptuous and ultramodern Ho Guom Opera House, located in central Hanoi. It remains unclear whether Ngô Phương Ly wielded any influence, but this prominent arts venue is run jointly by the ministry and the city and will likely be used to spotlight “arts” sponsored by the security apparatus or, at the very least, tailored to his tastes.
Another less-known episode occurred in 2017, also under his supervision: the installation of the bust of Félix Dzerzhinsky, nicknamed “Iron Felix,” in his alma mater (renamed since the Popular Academy of Security Services). Dzerzhinsky, a close comrade of Lenin, had founded and led the Cheka (the predecessor of the KGB) and played a key role in the creation of the early concentration camps that would later become the Gulag.
Can one be both a capitalist and an admirer of Dzerzhinsky?
To answer this, one must examine the political, social, and economic trends in Vietnam since the start of market reforms more than three decades ago. The apparent contradictions in To Lâm’s profile fit those developments quite well.
From a serious crisis to a timid reform
The Soviet model, which the communist Vietnam faithfully followed until the mid-1980s, caused a severe economic crisis and threatened a massive famine. It was then that a younger generation of leaders drew inspiration from Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms in the Soviet Union from 1986 onward and launched an economic program of “renovation” (Đổi Mới). But after witnessing the collapse of the Communist states in Eastern Europe in 1989, and the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, Vietnamese leaders largely pivoted toward the Chinese model, prioritizing economic reforms without political reforms.
They liberalized prices and permitted market activities and private enterprises, abandoned the collective farms that had condemned Vietnamese farmers to chronic hunger for decades, opened the country to trade and investment, allowed Vietnamese to travel abroad, and allowed the diaspora to return to the country.
Nevertheless, the government retained public ownership of land and control of the key economic sectors. It did not allow independent press or private organizations, whether social, cultural, or political. As the economy liberalized, the state—including its constitution, laws, and institutions such as the army and police—equipped itself with the most modern technologies to control society. Vietnam may appear capitalist from the outside, but it remains communist in its internal functioning.
More than three decades have passed since that crisis, and the country has transformed considerably. It is no longer the poor, defenceless state it once was. Each year, foreign investors pour tens of billions of dollars into the economy and employ millions of local workers. The rise in living standards has allowed the emergence of an urban middle class and a nascent civil society that has grown under tight police supervision.
The annual value of Vietnam’s exports now equals its gross domestic product. In addition to natural resources and agricultural products, manufacturing remains a large share of exports, creating the illusion that the country is rapidly industrializing and will soon become “an Asian tiger.” In reality, Vietnam’s manufacturing exports rely on a low-skilled workforce that essentially assembles products whose components are mostly produced abroad—in countries such as China, South Korea, and Taiwan. This places Vietnam in the global value chain as a low-value-added production hub. To Lâm publicly lamented this state of affairs, and his policies aimed at accelerating growth through greater centralization of power appear to reflect his desire to imitate Xi Jinping’s China.
The era of strongmen
To understand General To Lâm, one must go back a little in time. Since the 1990s, the government has tolerated private companies, but, with the exception of a few favored or politically connected, it has prioritized state-owned enterprises as the symbols of the country’s “socialist orientation.” After long internal debates, the Party allowed its members to run profitable businesses, an activity once considered “exploitative.” Since the state still owns all land, whose value continues to rise, party members and their families have used their political connections to obtain land-use rights for nominal sums. Once these lands were developed, they could reap enormous profits. Because political connections were lucrative, positions within the government and the Party became commodities, frequently bought and sold for amounts ranging from thousands to millions of dollars. Corruption reached all levels of government, stripping it of much of its legitimacy. If Vietnamese leaders share a desire to monopolize power and perpetuate the Party-state regime, a parallel system of rival personal networks has grown, built on power and wealth, fiercely competing for key posts within this Party-State.
It is in this context that Nguyễn Phú Trọng emerged in the mid-2010s as an ideologue eager to purge the Party. He had gradually strengthened central authority and launched an anti-corruption campaign modeled on Xi Jinping’s approach in China, nicknamed the “burning furnace” (đốt lò). To unmask corrupt officials, he relied on the Ministry of Public Security, which has the authority and the means to investigate and prosecute.
Under To Lâm’s leadership, the Ministry of Public Security thus became one of Vietnam’s most powerful institutions, rivaled only by the Ministry of Defense. It was tasked with overseeing communal police and the base-security forces. Equipped with cadres partly advised and trained by the East German Stasi during the Cold War, it employed millions of people, from village-level to national, including not only uniformed officers but also infiltrated agents who operated in schools, religious institutions, artistic circles, NGOs, and diaspora communities around the world.
In Vietnamese politics, it is well known that most officials maintain close ties to certain “private” companies, often—but not always—run by relatives. These firms leverage these connections to gain land at prime locations, generous loans from state banks, operating licenses, and lucrative government contracts. In return, they provide funds to officials to finance their lavish villas and their children’s expensive education abroad, and also to gift luxurious presents to their superiors when promotions are under consideration. Officials may refrain from making these links public, but companies must disclose them to their partners to obtain favorable treatment: these relationships are thus “well-known secrets.” It was therefore easy for To Lâm, if he wished, to quietly gather information about people he wanted to target and disclose it at the right moment. At the same time, he could learn more about his political rivals than they did about him.
A man in the right place at the right moment
The General To Lâm found himself precisely in the right place at the right moment and proved to be a valuable auxiliary in the crackdown led by Trọng. The arrests, including of activists who acted strictly within the law, sowed fear within civil society.
Trọng’s anti-corruption campaign allowed, in a decade, thousands of high-level party cadres to be ousted, including several sitting members of the Politburo. To illustrate, to apprehend Trịnh Xuân Thanh, a corrupt leader of PetroVietnam who had fled to Germany and sought asylum there, To Lâm organized a secret operation that culminated in his dramatic kidnapping in a Berlin park, followed by his repatriation to Vietnam via the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Despite his assurances that no corrupt official would escape, Trọng pursued only those he wished to discard, not members of his own network. As head of the security apparatus, the country’s most corrupt government body, To Lâm was far from spotless. Although there has been no public disclosure of any corruption allegations against him, he drew attention in a viral video where the famous Salt Bae serves him a piece of beef wrapped in gold leaf at a luxury London restaurant.
Perhaps that video earned To Lâm the nickname “the Hedonist.” Yet that did not end his career. As Trọng’s health deteriorated rapidly in 2023, To Lâm launched an offensive against senior Politburo members, some of whom were potential successors. In the first six months of 2024, he managed to sideline five Politburo members.
One might almost imagine a scene from imperial times in Vietnam or China, where an usurper blocks access to the palace and forges the will of a dying emperor to seize the throne. When Trọng died in July, To Lâm was indeed first in the line of succession.
More power for a single man
The rise to power of General To Lâm was not only unexpected, but also unprecedented. He is the first police general, head of the security apparatus, to occupy the highest post in the Party. Contrary to the Party’s official rules for this post, his professional trajectory was limited to a single central ministry. While he could not have executed this maneuver without the collaboration of other key leaders, he appears to have outpaced his main rivals.
Nevertheless, he did not stop there in his pursuit of greater personal power. After briefly serving as President of the Republic from May to October 2024, he yielded it to General Lương Cường, thus respecting the unwritten rule that reserves the two highest offices to two different people, ensuring collective leadership. Once he had consolidated his authority over the Party, re-elected secretary-general at the 14th Congress in January 2026, he was elected president in April, for the 2026–2031 term. By cumulatively holding these two posts, To Lâm became the most powerful party leader since its founder, Ho Chi Minh.
The question of whether one person should simultaneously hold the offices of Party secretary and State president had been debated for some time within the Party leadership, and it can be justified on grounds of efficiency and effectiveness. Vietnamese leaders draw inspiration from China, where Xi Jinping holds both roles. Yet the steps To Lâm took to install trusted loyalists, drawn from the security apparatus or from his home province of Hung Yen, are sure to provoke resentment. No fewer than a dozen—all men—hold positions across various state and Party administrations, as well as across many provinces of the country.
What about the “new era”?
Politicians like to make promises they may not keep. But in Vietnam, Communist officials do not need to campaign to win voters’ support and generally make no promises at all.
If To Lâm makes an exception, it may be due to the exceptional circumstances surrounding his rise to power. The deficit of legitimacy would have been too obvious without some extraordinary promises. At the same time, promising a new era of strong economic growth probably aimed to secure the assent of political elites to the concentration of personal power and to his radical policies, such as administrative rationalization.
Nevertheless, To Lâm and the regime take very substantial risks. In repressing civil society, Vietnamese leaders have stifled democratic aspirations that could have emerged peacefully, as in South Korea or Taiwan. Now that they can no longer express themselves peacefully, those aspirations could lead to violent confrontations.
Economically, Vietnam simply does not have the capacity to deliver double-digit growth without fueling inflation and debt. When costly projects are entrusted to a few privately controlled conglomerates lacking expertise and experience, it is hard to avoid massive corruption, long delays, astronomical cost overruns, and a huge public debt. The concentration of power in the hands of a single man also poses a significant risk to succession within the regime. Now nearly seventy, the general may not remain in office for more than another decade.
The Vietnamese Communist Party will celebrate its centenary in 2030. Will General To Lâm have brought it renewal, or will he merely have accelerated its downfall?