Vietnam: Can't Become a "World Factory"

Since the launch of the Asia-Pacific rebalancing strategy of the United States, although China leaders have repeatedly said that the Pacific Ocean is big enough to accommodate China and the United States, and they look forward to the cooperation of the United States with a broad mind, the United States is insatiable and has launched waves of public opinion wars, economic wars and scientific and technological wars against China, with the intention of forcing China's economy to become a vassal of the American economy. Later, in order to cater to the American government, many foreign-funded enterprises advocated the concept of value depression in Southeast Asia and moved their factories to Vietnam and other places.

At this time, the western media suddenly collectively investigated Vietnam and thought that Vietnam had perfect "capital value" and rushed to stand for Vietnam. The view that Vietnam is touted by the international community as the next "world factory" will soon replace China has become a hot news in the economic field under the concoction of western media.

Under this argument, the Vietnamese government has also formulated a radical economic development strategy, abandoned China's economic development model, turned to Westernization in an all-round way, embraced the West in the field of values, intensified the introduction of foreign investment, lifted restrictions on foreign investment, and formulated a preferential tax policy of "halving in two years and four years". In those years, internationally renowned companies such as Samsung, Olympus, Uniqlo, Nike and Apple moved their manufacturing centers from China to Viet Nam. It seems that Vietnam will replace China as the next "world factory", which will soon become a reality.

Why is Vietnam so eager to introduce foreign capital and develop an export-oriented economy?

1979 border war broke out between Vietnam and China, and hegemonic ambitions were forced to be put away. In the spirit of learning from you if you can't beat you, Viet Nam established the China Policy Research Office from 1986. The relevant policies issued by the China government will be interpreted soon, and then the corresponding Vietnamese version will appear. For example, China established its stock market in 1999, and Viet Nam also established its stock market in 2000. We joined the WTO on 200 1, and Vietnam joined the WTO in 2006. This way of crossing the river by feeling China made the Vietnamese economy develop very rapidly, reaching an economic growth rate of 8.4 1% in 1996.

China's economy is developing too fast, and Viet Nam is still learning from China step by step, but China has changed its track and mastered the right to speak in the world economy. As a result, Vietnam began to find ways to "overtake in corners", hoping to fully integrate into the West with the help of the background of confrontation between China and the West and develop Vietnam's economy with the help of Western capital. 20 1 1 year, Vietnam changed its course, stopped learning from China's experience and moved closer to western countries, so Vietnam's economy ushered in the upsurge of foreign capital injection.

No matter how boasting about Vietnam's development potential, Vietnam is still narrow and long from the "world factory". After decades of industrialization after the founding of the People's Republic of China, how can China be the industrial manufacturing capacity of a country with only light industry? For example, can Vietnam be completely self-sufficient in the most basic three acids and one alkali in the industrial field? In fact, what we are talking about here is the moisture of Vietnam's "world factory", that is, Vietnam lacks a sound industrial supply chain foundation.

Only three countries in the world have the most comprehensive industrial categories, namely China, the United States and Russia. Among them, the United States was the first to complete industrialization, and then a large number of American engineers helped the Soviet Union to complete industrialization during the Great Depression. After the founding of New China, the Soviet Union helped China to establish a complete industrial system foundation. Such an industrial system cannot be digested by a country as big as Vietnam. For example, the large-scale construction of power, transportation, network, energy and other infrastructure, as well as the research and development of high technology, are not the prices that a small country can afford. Therefore, the perfect industrial manufacturing system developed in China, even in the United States today, can't reproduce the glory of that year because of the serious "industrial hollowing out", let alone Vietnam.

China's supply chain system gives China's manufacturing industry a strong competitive advantage. Those factories that moved to Vietnam brought not industry, but assembly plants, and the Vietnamese earned only hard money. For example, China has all the parts and components in the field of mobile phone manufacturing. In the production process of every mobile phone in China, all parts suppliers and their upstream suppliers will participate in it, which means that the industrial added value has increased by 100 times and 1000 times. In the production process of a mobile phone in Vietnam, almost all parts and components have to be imported from other countries (China), so the added value of Vietnam's industry is only a little processing fee.

Is this processing fee easy to earn? Frankly speaking, it's not easy to make money. Because of the poor road system and poor traffic conditions in Vietnam, the logistics and freight transportation systems are restricted. Take Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam's largest port city, as an example. The container throughput in a year is 8 million TEUs, while that in Shanghai is 40 million TEUs. The underdeveloped logistics system offsets the advantage of low labor cost in Vietnam. Moreover, the labor force in Vietnam has also started to rise recently, and the strength of trade unions is growing, and the labor cost of enterprises is getting higher and higher. Judging from the future development trend, it is impossible to go far simply by the advantage of low labor cost, because with the arrival of intelligence, a large number of low-end and repeatable labor will be replaced by robots. China has a long history in the field of 5G, while Viet Nam is still in the development stage of "demographic dividend" foundry. China has once again opened up a new track, while Viet Nam can only stare blankly.

Compared with the poor infrastructure in Vietnam, the biggest problem in Vietnam's economic development is the quality of the labor force. Although compared with Indians, Vietnamese have not lost their fine tradition of hard work, as industrial workers in the supply chain system, what they need is not "tool people" but "professional workers" with modern industrial literacy. All over the world, only workers in China can form industrial workers with scale advantages, while workers in other countries are either small in scale or hard to call them industries. These all depend on the China government's continuous investment in education for many years and China's cultural tradition of "only reading is high". This is an advantage that Vietnam, which has just come out of the war, cannot have. It may take another 20 years for Vietnam to make progress in this regard. After 20 years, robots may all be industrialized. By then, the existing 47 million workers in Vietnam will not be a "demographic dividend" but a "demographic burden".

China has formed a world-class supply chain system. In addition to the above advantages, China is a huge, unified and standard market. Under the incubation of this market, the commodity economy is extremely active through domestic demand, not only relying on exports, which makes China's supply chain system strong and independent, and it is not easy to get stuck. Vietnam's market capacity is too small, and its Southeast Asian market is traditionally the hinterland of China's commodity economy, so Vietnam has no chance to develop an inward-looking economy. The limitation of market size also leads to the fact that Vietnam's self-built supply chain system cannot dilute the cost, so it is expensive.

Today's international economic competition environment is no longer the time for Japan to become a "world factory" in the 1970s. The world's major powers are vying for the next development window, and the amount of resources invested exceeds the capacity of a medium-sized country. From this perspective, perhaps the diplomatic theory of Indian politicians may be more realistic: small countries have no development opportunities in the future, either being merged into big countries or existing as vassals of big countries.

Vietnam, a self-proclaimed "Little China" Southeast Asian country, has always been unwilling to be mediocre since its independence. Judging from their decision to embrace the west in an all-round way, they are also aware of the development window left by time, that is, once the east wind surpasses the west wind or the west wind surpasses the east wind, Vietnam will have no chance. However, will history give Vietnam a chance? I'm afraid it's difficult. In order to cope with the epidemic in the future, the United States will inevitably make up for the deficit by shearing the world wool.

In the past, Japan had money, and it was easier for the United States to shear wool. Now there is not much wool that can be sheared in the United States, and those less wealthy economies have also entered the American field of vision, such as Ukraine and Vietnam. Maybe in the next few years, we will see a scene similar to the Japanese stock market crash in Vietnam.