It’s all fine until it’s not.
I’d sure never want to live in a communist country.
It’s a risk but I guess everything is. We do the best we can.
Việt Nam is nominally a Communist country but the government is Vietnamese and after the old hard core revolutionaries died off the government has been characterized by Vietnamese practicality. Unlike the Russians, when Vietnamese see that something is not working they stop doing it. When they see successful practices in other societies they adopt them. It is much more like rule by an enlightened Mafia than by traditional Communists. Vietnamese culture is family and clan based and as such is not up to Democracy. In such a culture voting for your government officials is silly and doesn't work. We have not figured that out in the Middle East or Central Asia and as a nation, may never figure it out so we get bogged down in hopelessly trying to bring Democracy to the natives. In a clan based society if there is an election as we know it everyone votes for the candidate most closely related to family and clan. Officeholders are expected by everyone to use their positions to benefit primarily their clan. The Vietnamese government is relatively efficient and benign and probably the best such a society, just beginning to emerge socially and economically from traditional structures can expect.
There is no constitutional freedom in Việt Nam as there is no Constitution. It is an authoritarian government that is far more economically literate than almost all other such governments. The Vietnamese leaders determiined in the 80s that Việt Nam had to grow rich as a country in order to stave off becoming a province of China. Liberalization of the economy began slowly until the last of the old guard died off then picked up steam.I was there between 2003 and 2007 when the corner was turned. In 2003 everybody wanted to go to America where money grows on trees. By 07 everybody wanted to go to America where they could work hard and send their children to University. When I went back in 2011 everybody wanted to visit America but then return to Việt Nam because they saw the future as being there.
There is corruption in Việt Nam, of course, but there is a whole lot of corrruption in America, too. We are seeing that with the fear of the Democrats and Republicans about a serious Ukraine investigation. My buddy in Cam Đức who has read a lot about America contrasts the systems in the matter of building a house.He paid out a total of a couple of hundred dollars in bribes to various officials and police and built his house. In America the bribes are still required but they are institutionalized and one must pay out many thousands of dollars to government offices before one may stick a shovel in the ground. Then the government tells you what you can build and makes you pay for the information. At every turn there are more such legal bribes to government offices to get each facet of building permitted. Thông's house cost him about $4000 in materials. It is about 1800 square feet. If the wind blows hard and knocks it down well, ya shoulda built better. We here have to build everything to government standards and the Hurricane comes and blows your house away and you cannot rebuild with the 100% insurance payout because the government has changed all the building codes in the week after the storm. Vietnamese approximation of private property in land and structures is de facto much closer to actual than it is here.