Reddit reviews Vietnam: Rising Dragon

I lived and worked in Vietnam for 4 years recently, my wife is from there, I will also give my input despite not being OP.

Vietnam is increasingly capitalistic. The national government does heavily control the economy and there are massive SOEs there, but most businesses are definitely capitalistic, with a small number of owners running the business like a typical feudalistic Western corporation and likewise taking massively inequal pay from it.

Businesses where an owner lives in a million dollar villa and the typical employee makes $250 a month and has 0 say in the management of the business is 100% a capitalist structure. And that's basically every business, except I don't know much about the SOE structures. I do know that Vietnam recently went through a similar "financialization crisis" due to similar financial hijinks with some of their SOEs as you'd expect with any old corrupt capitalist industry to have.

Most businesses are indeed small, family-run enterprises, something of a fuzzy middle ground between socialism and capitalism, but any successful business is basically capitalist in structure.

Vietnam is a (heavily corrupt) market economy where wealth begets wealth and private ownership (technically via the state) allows for runaway inequality.

This is a pretty good book on the situation: https://www.amazon.com/Vietnam-Rising-Dragon-Bill-Hayton/dp/030017814X

Rising Dragon ?

Also kicked the Chinese.

(Vietnam is Socialist only in name....)

These two are quite interesting:

https://www.amazon.com/Its-Living-Work-Vietnam-Today/dp/9971696983

https://www.amazon.com/Vietnam-Rising-Dragon-Bill-Hayton/dp/030017814X

Working life/attitudes and economic growth actually tell you a lot about a country.

Also here's a long list of recommended books. Quite a few of them aren't war books.

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/8440.Best_Books_on_Vietnam