This is political infighting. They aren't actually cracking down on corruption.
The faction Truong My Lan supported has basically been purged by Nguyen Phu Trong and To Lam's factions
There's been a political purge happening in Vietnam since COVID happened
An internal conflict began brewing between the Northern VCP (supported by the VinGroup billionaire who is also from Vietnamese Military royalty), Southern VCP (supported by this billionaire), the Army (they own Vietnam's largest telco and most of the PSUs), and the Ministry of Public Security (they have the dirt on everybody and are the actual enforcers in Vietnam) around 2021-22
this is just like the fusion of monopolists and military lineage in South Korea in the 60s up until early 90s. They marry each other, one group controls violence, the other group controls market and produces stuff the West wants which in turn looks away from the violence. It was never about democracy but control.
This is why Korean boomers love investing and living in Vietnam.
It's literally how Korea used to feel in the 1970-80s.
The entire economy in VN is basically owned by Korean Chaebols like Lotte after they were kicked out of China in 2015-17 due to a trade war.
It's 60-40 Chaebols-Local Oligarchs
And the VCP is fairly worried that a 1980s SK or 1990s PRC style democracy movement might arise, because unlike China today, the Vietnamese government is very incompetent and pays their civil servants shit ($200/mo for senior govt doctors for example, $600/mo for the head of the Politburo, most soldiers are abused and unpaid conscripts), and western services like FB cannot be cracked down because it will scare western investors away and because most of the country is still dependent on the remittences of the 2nd-3rd gen diaspora living in North America and Eastern Europe, and the migrant workers in JP/SK/TW/CN.
There's a reason why KDramas are so popular in VN. It isn't just because of Hallyu wave (though that plays a role too) but also because the exact same kind of problems and mentality that Koreans have going from third world to first world are faced by Vietnamese as well.
Vietnam is at the same position as Korea was in the 1970s-80s essentially.
> Over the nine-year period of South Korean troop commitments to Vietnam, 40% of the country's overall export earnings during this period came from the money combat personnel were paid, making an average of $200 million each year.
> The total cost to the United States of paying for Korean participation was "peanuts compared to what it would be for a comparable number of Americans," but those payments are estimated to account for 4 percent of the GNP in 1967 and totalling more than one billion dollars.
The 5 year economic model was created in Manchukuo which existed decades before Pakistan. Pakistan did not come up with it they executed it rather very poorly.
Corruption purges in Leninist states are always political. In many cases, the officials and executives purged are, in fact, corrupt, and breaking domestic law. But the political element is really unavoidable. These serve as demonstrations of the state's power, and its legitimacy. Sort of a paradox there - if the state is so powerful and legitimate, how did such a massive scale of embezzlement go on for so long? Never mind that, let's watch the execution.
One might even say, particularly at the highest level, that these matters are also political in constitutional republics, like the USA. How aggressively CEOs get prosecuted, does depend on the executive investigating and prosecuting offenders, and whether Congress wants to pass stricter laws. One interpretation, is that the American state, does not feel the need to demonstrate its authority in such a dramatic way.
> One interpretation, is that the American state, does not feel the need to demonstrate its authority in such a dramatic way
Punishing crimes isn’t about demonstrating authority, it’s about creating incentives against committing those crimes. If anything, the message the US tends to give is that corruption is an acceptable cost of doing business.
Is embezzling billions of dollars a technicality? The fact that Vietnam might even execute a businesswoman for stealing a huge amount of money doesn’t make me any less interested in doing business there.
Over several years. From a bank she held a controlling interest in. With 85 other defendants. It's nice to imagine the buck stops with her. Apparently the people who've passed this sentence are hopeful for this outcome.
So.. "you won't be murdered to cover up state incompetence." If you like.
It's a great investment pitch for actual conmen, too.
But you can't just invest your way in a successful fraud, in either system. You generally need to also have the political machine protecting you, otherwise the thing will eventually unravel, and 'your' plunder might get clawed back.
> Punishing crimes isn’t about demonstrating authority, it’s about creating incentives against committing those crimes.
Some might believe it is, but at its core society leverages punishment because it's a convenient outlet for socially sanctioned sadism, and it's wired to believe this measured malignance is beneficial in some capacity. Reasons and justifications (pun intended) vary wildly from person to person, implying that it's all post hoc justification. We punish crimes because it's what the people before us did, and they did it because it's what the people before them did, and so on. To say it's about anything is to miss the point, it's pararational monkey behavior. Implying more than that is to give ourselves too much credit, frankly. Or at the very most delves into evopsych sophistry.
> Corruption purges in Leninist states are always political.
This is true to a certain extent.
But this is actually truer here in democracy country than authoritarian country.
Think about it. In authoritarian country, corruption is part of the system that has internal regulation.
While here in democratic country, corruption has no explicit definition. It's just a matter of if your enemy sees corruption attackable. That makes punishing corruption in democratic country entirely political driven.
This phenomenone happens on industry: like Boeing, it has doged punishment until political resentment is no longer containable. It happens to high power, as epstain's case; and government officials Trump and Biden's family for example.
> While here in democratic country, corruption has no explicit definition. It's just a matter of if your enemy sees corruption attackable. That makes punishing corruption in democratic country entirely political driven.
Some democratic countries have independent apolitical anti-corruption agencies. For example, the Australian state of New South Wales has an Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) which is headed by a judge. Few seriously argue it is politically motivated, although it has caused controversy by destroying the careers of politicians over what some see as relatively minor offences (e.g. in 2014, the state Premier was forced to resign because he gave it false testimony over a $3,000 bottle of wine, although he insisted the falsehood was due to forgetfulness not intentional lying)
It also has an official definition of corruption, and subjects of investigation can challenge in the courts whether the investigation is consistent with that definition. In 2015, a senior prosecutor succeeded in getting a ruling from Australia’s highest court that ICAC had overstepped its authority in investigating her for a personal matter unrelated to her job as a prosecutor (she had been recorded on a wiretap giving advice to her son’s girlfriend on how to evade a police investigation into a traffic accident). However, legislators subsequently amended the definition, effectively overturning that court judgement.
Some mad hybrid that doesn’t really fit the neat little capitalism-good/communism-bad binary that is very comforting and beloved by tech workers here on HN? The modern world is complex and doesn’t often fit into neat little simple boxes, attempts to do so will fall flat and they shouldn’t be the crux of a discussion like this.
The article in question is relating to crime and capital punishment. It is worth analyzing and understanding, not merely swatting aside as a mere “Leninist” political purge.
Vietnam is ruled by a Marxist-Leninist party. One-party rule, vanguardist, officially Marxist, ruling allegedly for the benefit of the workers. Similar to contemporary China, Cuba, or the late USSR. What term would you prefer, if not (Marxist-)Leninist, to describe this type of state?
If you look at modern day Vietnam and say “ah yes, this is a Marxist-Leninist state” then I am sorry but you are very naive or dishonest. Presumably the same literal interpretation isn’t extended to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and I sincerely hope by now that you don’t think the Chinese Communist Party govern anything other than a state-capitalist country.
I don’t know what to call these countries, but selectively taking these states descriptions of themselves at face value is very silly indeed, and doesn’t really contribute much to the conversation. In my experience, the “X is communist/socialist/leninist/whatever” is most often deployed online as shorthand to indicate to (and then naively repeated by) credulous, sheltered or otherwise ignorant Americans that the country in question is bad and that even if it’s imperfect the USA is still #1, baby.
Marxist-Leninist, Communist. It's what they were always described as. There's historical context here. You have offered no objection to the use of the term "Leninist" other than it being what these states describe themselves as. What's wrong with that? Does "Leninist" have some other competing meaning that would be confusing? (Like with the "Democratic" of the DPRK?) Accepting self-terminology does not endorse it. Or everyone who called the USSR Communist back in the day was accepting that they were, in fact, on the way to communism. (That's not usually what someone means when they called these states communist, and such people aren't usually being naive or dishonest either. Nice dichotomy, by the way.) Would you have preferred capital-C Communist? That's basically a synonym for Marxist-Leninist.
I mean I’m mostly objecting to dismissing it as just something that happens in “Leninist” countries. No interaction with the story, no attempt to understand it - just the same old “ah that’s what happens in the nasty foreign places we don’t like” that is just as wrong as it is boring. We’re talking about a property tycoon for god’s sake, that really should make you pause and question your understanding of the situation.
> Corruption purges in Leninist states are always political... How aggressively CEOs get prosecuted, does depend on the executive investigating and prosecuting offenders, and whether Congress wants to pass stricter laws
Do you have a source for these ideas, or are they your own? I can't speak for everyone of course but for myself and any of the many people I've had in-depth conversations with, none of us generally wonder how embezzlement happened in the first place, regardless of length, instead we marvel at the utter lack of any consequences for the convicted individual. In this way the state's power is far, far more illegitimized by the fact that it's apparently fine with people stealing incredible sums of money either from itself or from it's citizens and seems content to levy meaningless fines on the perpetrator after the fact, if even that.
(or, in my leftier and more conspiratorial groups, that the weakness of the state to prosecute financial crimes is a direct result of the system being designed by rich people to facilitate the activities of other rich people, but I digress)
The only ones in recent memory I can recall are Sam Bankman-Fried, which is still ongoing, and Elizabeth Holmes, both of whom seemed to have committed the proper crime of stealing from other rich people, whereas the ones who steal from the working/middle class are left largely untouched. A coincidence I'm sure. Where Government funds land in terms of "is this rich people's money or poor people's money" is up to the reader of the comment to determine, that one's prosecution rate does seem to trend more political, as tons of incredibly wealthy people are milking the government cow for absolutely mind-bending amounts of money and delivering basically nothing.
> One interpretation, is that the American state, does not feel the need to demonstrate its authority in such a dramatic way.
Maybe it should feel that need, since the lion's share of it's population on either side of the political spectrum thinks of the government as largely a joke. But they've also dis-empowered us to such a degree that our opinion on them largely doesn't matter anyway, so, on it goes.
Add Bernie Madoff, who, of course, was also stealing from other rich people. The capitalist state makes more sense when you see it as the Central Committee of the bourgeoisie. They may take action against individual capitalists, but only in the interest of the capital class as a whole.
A journalist was recently jailed. What was their crime? Reporting on government corruption. This very well regarded journalist did a ton of research, uncovered corruption and identified 12 government officials.
The journalist was then told to stop talking about because "the criminals were caught". The journalist said "no they haven't been, there are eight others you ignored". And continued to report on it.
The journalist was eventually sentenced to 3.5 years in prison for "abusing democratic freedoms".
If you're connected to the right people, you won't be treated with kid gloves, the government won't even consider it a crime.
In these countries, you reward your agents heavily when they get you into power. Likewise, when you’re in power, you whack your opposition’s agents. These tools are just weapons in a political struggle usually.
Seeing how the US operates, I believe the same happens here, but in a much more sophisticated manner using tools available for those channels (allocating no-bid contracts, Supreme Court seats, issuing laws to protect incumbents).
Unlike the US, where the battle lines are static because defenders are well entrenched, many of these countries have political wars that involve far reaching forays into each others’ territory so they get to whack crucial lieutenants of the other side.
I don't think you can make generalizations like that from one case.
Given the nature of one-party states, it is plausible that the hammer swung hard on her because she was at the losing end of some power struggle, or closely associated with some high politician who lost in a power struggle.
really? An American was recently sentenced to 25 years in feds, which means no parole. His name may be familiar: SBF . I would say that white collar crime is not being ignored in the US.
SBF, like Bernie Madoff, made the unforgivable mistake of stealing from other rich people. White collar crime that preys on middle class or working class people is generally ignored in the US.
