By Sergio Rodriguez Gelfenstein *
“Our mountains will always exist, our rivers will always exist, our people will always exist. With the American invaders defeated, we will rebuild our land to make it ten times more beautiful […] Our Homeland will be reunified. Our compatriots from the North and South will meet under the same sky,” President Ho Chi Minh wrote in his political testament on May 10, 1969.
Years earlier, on September 2, 1945, before hundreds of thousands of people who gathered in Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi, representing the people, President Ho read the Proclamation of Independence, declaring the birth of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
Fifty-three years after Ho Chi Minh made his promise for the future and when the 77th anniversary of the founding of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam is commemorated, its people can show the world the certainty of such a premonition. In 1970, Le Duan, who was the first secretary of the Workers’ Party of Vietnam, which became the Communist Party of Vietnam (PCV) in the 4th. Congress in 1976, already with the country reunified, considered that the PCV and President Ho Chi Minh brought the people “to the world arena as one of the first former colonial and dependent countries whose national liberation revolution has triumphed and achieved the seizure of power in the whole country”.
The defeat of the US military intervention in 1975 marked the beginning of a new stage in the construction of socialist Vietnam. But the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the socialist camp strongly caused a major socioeconomic crisis to hit the country just as work was being done to heal the deep wounds left by 67 years of French colonial rule and 20 years of US imperialist military intervention. In the West, they rubbed their hands thinking that the Vietnamese people were not going to resist this new onslaught and the country was going to succumb to the avalanche of foreign capital, which this time would not had to me imposed through elements of war. Under the leadership of the Communist Party, once again, Vietnam resisted, as it prepared to chart its course in the new conditions created.
The VI Congress of the PCV, held in 1986, set out to face reality, adopt a self-critical position in the face of errors, revamp and modernize the organization and working methods, and begin the process of renewing the country (Doi Moi). The achievements made since then allowed the country to come out of the crisis, while promoting industrialization and innovation.
In this perspective, the PCV and the Vietnamese government determined the objectives for this stage. They were: to satisfy the basic needs of the population; create an adequate economic structure to develop production; build and perfect the new relations of production in accordance with the characteristics and the level of development of the productive forces; generate positive changes in the social aspect and guarantee the need to consolidate defense and national security.
In these last 36 years of work, the country has unleashed a new development model, based on its own political and economic thinking and on a management system relying on socialist ideas.
In the year 2021, Vietnam achieved “the double goal” of successfully controlling the Covid19 pandemic and reviving the economy. Despite the difficult conditions, the country had a GDP growth of 2.58%, managing to adapt safely and flexibly to the situation in order to effectively control the calamity that ensued throughout the world, helping to maintain activity until reaching a trade surplus of four billion dollars that placed it among the top 20 economies in terms of international trade.
The impact of Covid19 caused serious damage to global supply chains in 2021. However, the Vietnamese agricultural sector came out ahead with a record volume in the export of agricultural, forestry and fishery products that reached 48.6 billion dollars, surpassing the goal of 42 billion dollars established by the Government.
To this day, the successes are in sight. In the first half of this year 2022, in the midst of the global economic crisis caused by the pandemic and Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, GDP increased by 6.42%. In the same period, the country recorded a trade surplus of 710 million dollars, while Foreign Direct Investment in the first seven months of the year totaled 15 thousand 541 million dollars, showing the confidence in the stability of the country’s economy. With a year-on-year increase of 9.2%, Vietnam is among the top twenty foreign direct investment destinations in the world.
In the same period, the Industrial Production Index grew by 8.8%. Similarly, it should be considered very positive that inflation between January and July of this year was only 2.54% and that more than 954 million tourists arrived in the country, which meant an increase of 10% in the number of visitors.
In this context, the latest World Bank (WB) report on the economic outlook for Vietnam predicted that the country’s economy will expand by 7.5% this year, and 6.7% in 2023 thanks to the recovery in the production and services. Likewise, the financial institution predicts that inflation will reach an average of 3.8% during the year.
On the 77th anniversary of Vietnam’s independence and looking back over the long years of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist struggle and the fight for the renewal of the country, one could say – without hesitation for a moment – that the Vietnamese people, at every moment, have been fulfilling the task of emancipation and development.
If President Ho Chi Minh could see the Vietnam of today, overflowing with pride, he would see fulfilled the dream of his life expressed in his testament that ends by saying: “My greatest wish is that our party and our people, closely uniting their efforts, build a Vietnam peaceful, reunified, independent, democratic and prosperous, and make a valuable contribution to the world revolution.”
* Sergio Rodríguez Gelfenstein is a Venezuelan international relations expert, who was previously Director of the International Relations of the Presidency of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, his country’s ambassador to Nicaragua and an advisor for international politics for TELESUR. Gelfenstein has written numerous books, among them “China in the XXI Century – the awakening of a giant” which has been published in several Latin American countries.