Introduction
It is easy to feel optimistic about Vietnam's prospects these days. The country is projected to surpass Thailand in total GDP by the end of the year. GDP per capita is on the cusp of reaching $5,000 dollars, the threshold for being an upper-middle income economy. Sweeping political reforms are underway: from cutting the bloated state bureaucracy, incentivising private enterprise to reducing corruption, the government is serious about the country's development, at least on paper. It is no wonder that the Economist spotlighted Vietnam as one of the countries best placed to get rich.
Yet this rising economic and political heft has also brought about a tide of nationalist sentiment. In 2024, following a series of pro-democracy protests in Bangladesh, jingoistic Facebook pages accused Fulbright University, a US-aligned liberal arts university in Vietnam, of fomenting similar sentiments at home. When the actress Châu Bùi expressed condolences over the death of Queen Elizabeth II, she was widely condemned as an imperial apologist. Tifosi, a particularly popular Facebook page among ardent patriots, fueled further discontent by claiming that the Queen had personally granted medals to New Zealand and Australian soldiers who fought in Vietnam (these were, in fact, handed out independently by those countries). Anger has also been directed at foreign targets. In 2022, shortly after Vietnam abstained from a vote condemning Russia's invasion, the page defamed the Ukrainian embassy by claiming it had previously called Ho Chi Minh a dictator who "killed millions for his Bolshevik ambitions". Even as the Ukrainian Embassy in Vietnam later clarified that the quote was from a 2014 opinion piece with no connection to the Ukrainian government, it did not result in a later retraction.
As identified by Giang and Luong (2024), surging nationalism reflects both genuine sentiment and state efforts. In the Fulbright controversy, the military aligned television network, Vietnam National Defence Television, ran with the story, specifically creating a report titled "Do Not Let 'Color Revolutions' Recolor Education". The authors also identified that most online comments were "uniform, echoing propagated narratives and suggesting artificially amplified support, likely by cyber troops, to create an illusion of widespread consensus." Vietnam is the only country in Southeast Asia to proudly acknowledge having a cyber-police force. Force 47 (Lực Lượng 47) is estimated to be 10,000 strong, whose functions include squashing dissent and managing public perception. Online nationalist sentiments, while appearing as a wholly natural consequence of bourgeoning Vietnamese strength, has and continues to be partially synthetic.
Understanding the (in)authenticity of Vietnamese nationalism naturally leads to a more practical question: should any Vietnamese person feel national pride? Nationalism and pride are distinct, and some contend that we ought to personally feel proud of our country even if we concede a societal lurch towards nationalism is dangerous. This author believes that pride, at least the nationalist variation, is misguided. Firstly, the object of pride — Vietnam as a nation — is a far more recent and contested construction than nationalists assume, built on exclusions that continues to go unacknowledged. Secondly, even setting aside historical complications, pride should be reinterpreted as an act, contributing to a real and ongoing project, rather than being a passive and inherited feeling.
Vietnam as a Temporal Invention
What does it mean to be a good Vietnamese citizen? The Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) provides some official answers. In the National Congress of Patriotic Emulation (Đại hội Thi đua Yêu nước), held every five years, the VCP brings together a wide array of citizens, workers, soldiers, and collectives to be recognised for "exemplary contributions to national development".
In reality, it is a state-administered system for defining acceptable models of citizenship. The Emulation and Commendation Councils, which exist from grassroots to the national level, work closely with mass media agencies to promote the success of the congress, publicising exemplary deeds so that they can be repeated throughout the country. Where nationalism might in other countries be a spontaneous feeling, in Vietnam, it is a state-backed ritual. The concept of emulation (thi đua) further frames patriotism as not just quiet, personal love, but a competitive striving for recognition.
According to state narratives, Vietnam is not a political construction but the culmination of thousands of years of civilisation (Tuong Vu, 2016). Official historiography traces a continuous chronology from the semi-divine Hùng kings of the Hồng Bàng dynasty, through a millennium of Chinese domination, through the successive dynasties that pushed southward, through the anti-colonial struggle against France, to the liberation of 1975 and the socialist republic that followed. In this telling, the Vietnamese Communist Party is not just an entity competing to rule the country, but the rightful heir to a civilisation that always had a quintessential essence (Pelley, 2002).
Yet for most of its history, the territory today called Vietnam has been divided geographically, politically and culturally. The Nguyễn and Trịnh lords had split the country along the Gianh River for over two centuries, producing what were effectively two separate nations. Đàng Trong in the south and Đàng Ngoài in the north had distinct economies, administrative cultures and senses of belonging. The Tây Sơn rebellion of the late eighteenth century, which briefly reunified the territory, was not a nationalist movement in the modern sense, but was driven primarily by economic grievances (Dutton, 2006).
The truth is that for most of its history, a "Vietnamese" identity did not exist. People understood themselves more through dynastic loyalty, village belonging or regional affiliation. As Anderson argued in Imagined Communities (1983), nations are not organic facts but imagined: all their members will never meet most of one another, yet they all share something in common in their minds.
It is deeply ironic then that it was the French colonial project, more than any indigenous force, that planted the seed for the creation of Vietnamese identity. The French administered Indochina through a single bureaucratic apparatus that for the first time imposed one analytical container upon its people. French-sponsored print media produced in quốc ngữ, which was the romanised script developed by Jesuit missionaries, created a simpler written language that could now be used to articulate shared grievances against a colonial oppressor. The new nation, in other words, was not discovered, but assembled by political entrepreneurs out of the tools provided by the colonial state.
Vietnam as an Imperial Project
The existence of Vietnam has not only been in flux across time but space as well. The borders of the country have consistently expanded southwards since its early days. Starting in 938, Vietnamese lords began forcefully acquiring land from its southern neighbour, the Champa Kingdom, when the latter refused to pay tributes. This southward march would continue for nearly a millennium, by the seventeenth century completely absorbing the remaining Cham territories and pushing further into the Mekong Delta, then populated by Khmer communities. Today it is officially described as the "Southward Expansion" (Nam Tiến), underplaying the brutal consequences faced by the Champa and other conquered people, over centuries decimated and reduced to an ethnic minority at the periphery of a new kingdom.
As the anthropologist James C. Scott argued in The Art of Not Being Governed (2009), this expansion project not only affected other budding states. The peoples living in the vast upland zones of Southeast Asia, what Scott calls "Zomia," also bore the brunt of territorial consolidation and resource extraction. These minority ethnic groups, including the H'mong, Dao Tay and Bahnar, have historically viewed the lowland Kinh people with deep suspicion, actively choosing to live beyond reach.
The peoples who bore the cost of this history — the Cham, the Khmer Krom, the Degar, the Bahnar, the Jarai — do not appear in the nationalist narrative except as a footnote in a heroic tale of southward expansion. As Tran and Reid write, in Vietnamese nationalist historiography, their history simply ended where Kinh history began.
The nationalist story of Vietnam is in many parts genuinely authentic. Its emotive core of fighting foreign invaders, against China, Japan, France and the United States, was well documented for its brutality. The suffering was real, and the bravery it showcased provided a blueprint for resistance movements around the world. Yet being proud of shared persecution and fighting domination also means being reflective of the ways the Vietnamese nation too has been capable of inflicting pain. To acknowledge this is not to dishonour the sacrifice of those who fought for independence, but to insist that their sacrifice be honoured with honesty.
Defining Pride
Setting aside the idea that Vietnam, the object of pride, is constructed and often exclusionary, the personal question remains: should we as Vietnamese people feel proud? To answer this, we should first qualify pride. Pride specifically involves the positive interpretation of oneself (Prinz 2004; Lazarus 1991b) on the basis of something else. For pride to be coherent, there must be a genuine connection between the person feeling pride and what is being celebrated (Taylor, 1985).
That connection becomes strenuous when it concerns nationality. Except in cases of naturalisation, citizenship is not earned but given at birth. Things that are pointed out to be sources of pride, including historical resistance, ancient civilisation, military victories, belong to people who are dead, through efforts that the person being born played no part in.
Here, it is important to make the distinction between authentic and hubristic pride. As psychologist Jessica Tracy outlines, authentic pride is specific and earned: I worked hard on this particular thing and succeeded. Hubristic pride, on the other hand, is abstracted and unearned. I am superior even as I have been given the thing I am proud of. The latter correlates with narcissism, fragile identity, and the need for external validation and enemies.
Nationalist pride is almost always hubristic in Tracy's sense. It is not pride in specific achievements but a claim of superiority that requires no particular effort to maintain. The emotional logic of Vietnamese nationalist pride is that we suffered and therefore we are exceptional. Putting aside that our suffering is not unique, neither strength nor suffering is a moral achievement worth conferring superiority.
What remains then is asking what sort of pride remains for those who have understood the country's history. Pride, I argue, can still be rescued, but requires a different foundation; instead of being a passive feeling, it must be an authentic act. Pride involves being reflective of Vietnam's history, in all its contingencies, its exclusions and imperial history, alongside genuine achievements of anti-imperialism and resilience, and to take responsibility for it. It means helping to move the country forward and becoming part of a constantly evolving project, rather than looking backwards and conferring worth assigned at birth. To honour the history of the country means to maintain the tradition of being unbowed to unjust authority, both abroad and at home.