Pham Van Thinh can see the back of an LG electronics factory from his patio, and in his eyes, nothing is more beautiful than that bright white behemoth.
Some nights, when workers stream out after 8 p.m., their lanyards flashing ID cards with new-hire faces, he walks amid the crowd, soaking up the energy of a once-poor village near Vietnam’s northern port of Haiphong that has suddenly joined the march of global trade.
“It makes me happy,” said Mr. Van Thinh, 73, a retired police chief who fought for the Communist north in the Vietnam War. “All these young people, they have better lives.”
Six years ago, this cluster of prosperity did not exist. Then President Donald J. Trump hit China with tariffs, igniting a global search for alternatives to Chinese manufacturing.
Few nations, if any, have benefited more than Vietnam from the scramble that followed — especially north Vietnam, historically an economic laggard compared to the more cosmopolitan south. Around Haiphong, a few hours’ drive from China, factories bloomed. The LG plant expanded exponentially; the industrial park nearby filled up with Chinese companies adding production abroad. Rural hamlets like Mr. Van Thinh’s — once known for little more than rice fields and dreams — grew almost overnight into boom towns of 30,000.
Will another Trump term impede or accelerate that growth? No one knows.
Mr. Trump has vowed to punish countries that have large trade surpluses with the United States, and Vietnam now ranks third on that list, behind only China and Mexico. Officials in Hanoi say they worry about “discrimination” — that Vietnam will be singled out for tariffs while competitors avoid Mr. Trump’s blacklist.
South Korean companies (including LG and Samsung) are Vietnam’s biggest foreign investors, and some have already paused expansion plans, waiting on Washington.
Still, some analysts exude confidence, saying Vietnam will continue to flourish if Mr. Trump slaps far higher tariffs on China than on other countries, as he has threatened.
No matter what happens next, America’s once-and-future president can safely say he helped make north Vietnam great again. For the first time since France’s 19th-century rule of Vietnam from Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, the north has become Vietnam’s economic engine and gateway to the world. It leads the country in the value of exports going out, and foreign investment flowing in.
“The balance of power between these two regions has shifted radically,” said Vu Thanh Tu Anh, an economist at the Fulbright School of Public Policy and Management in Ho Chi Minh City. “It shows up in all the statistics.”
The north’s transformation, while driven in part by geography and local politics, also highlights how trade weaponization by great powers is rearranging the global economy. Industrialization is spreading to new places at a faster clip, with local fortunes defined not just by competitive advantages such as productivity, but also by distant leaders fighting for supremacy, picking winners and losers.
Put another way, the “wisdom of crowds” and markets is giving way to the whims of mercurial men — with reverberations that reach into distant nations and villages.
From China to Vietnam
In Asia, where national economies are more integrated with fewer trade barriers than almost anywhere else, what Mr. Trump started with tariffs, the pandemic advanced.
Faith in China was shaken as its government resisted investigations into Covid-19’s origins and responded to the virus with strict lockdowns and factory shutdowns. That led many governments to get more involved in weening supply chains from Chinese dominance.
Japan, for example, created a fund in 2020 to help companies diversify from China. South Korea expanded efforts to help businesses build ties to India and Southeast Asia through its “New Southern Policy,” while American and European officials have pressured companies (and their Asian suppliers) to “de-risk” from China.
Vietnam has been a huge winner. Of the roughly 120 Japanese companies using government diversification subsidies, over 50 claimed them for Vietnam, more than any other country, according to Japanese officials.
LG, the South Korean multinational, recently sold its last two screen display factories in China after adding production around Haiphong.
A Taiwanese electronics supplier has begun producing network devices for Elon Musk’s Starlink system at a factory about 60 miles from Haiphong.
They are part of a larger trend. Between 2017 and 2023, foreign investors committed $248.3 billion to Vietnam for 19,701 projects, according to an analysis by Le Hong Hiep, coordinator of the Vietnam studies program at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. That’s more than half of all foreign investment since Vietnam opened its economy in the late 1980s.
Vietnam’s growing trade surplus with the United States — reaching $104 billion last year, up from $38 billion in 2017 — has led to accusations that China uses Vietnam as a warehouse, rerouting its products to avoid tariffs. Chinese imports and investment have soared.
But in a country as wary of its neighbor as Vietnam, where 1,000 years of Chinese colonization lingers in national memory, the boom is by no means owned or operated by Beijing. From Vietnam’s economic opening in the 1980s through 2023, mainland China was the sixth-largest foreign investor in the country. With Hong Kong included, it was only fourth, after South Korea, Japan and Singapore.
A recent Harvard Business School study showed that illegal tariff avoidance was more rare than the trade imbalance might suggest — representing between 1.8 and 16.1 percent of exports to the United States in 2021.
Researchers found that most exporters were making new products with inputs from many locations and local investment, not just relabeling Chinese products as Vietnamese.
Haiphong’s Leap Forward
“No winners” come from a U.S.-China trade war, the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, declared last week in a meeting with global financiers. North Vietnam’s experience suggests otherwise.
In 1954, after separating from France to become an independent nation, it was one of the poorest and least-developed countries in Asia, relying almost entirely on subsistence farming.
Haiphong, the north’s main port, was pounded by the U.S. military with some of the heaviest bombing raids of the war, and in the decade after unification in 1975, all of Vietnam became what one scholar called “a poverty-stricken society beset by a stagnant economy.”
Today, double-digit growth rates in the north are the norm, and Haiphong is a modern metropolis of two million people connected to Hanoi by a new highway. Cranes swing like weather vanes above more than a dozen construction sites. New bridges cross a river twisting through the city, where piers at industrial parks help ships move to one of the busiest ports in the world.
Bruno Jaspaert, chairman of the European Chamber of Commerce in Vietnam and the chief executive of DEEP C, which runs industrial parks around Haiphong, said the waterway was just one regional advantage. Northern provinces have also had leaders better connected to Hanoi, yielding more infrastructure investment, plus more open, affordable land.
Compared to the south, where an industrial base left over from the war made it easier for companies like Nike to get going in the 1990s, Mr. Jaspaert said the north “started later, they can plan better and they are also much faster.”
Pointing out the window of his office to Haiphong’s new city hall, surrounded by new apartment complexes, he emphasized that none of that was there when he moved to Vietnam in 2018.
Northern Vietnam was already growing then, in a country that lifted 40 million people out of poverty from 1993 to 2014. But American tariffs became an economic accelerant — lighter fluid poured on a steady flame. And in the north, an epicenter of ancient Vietnamese civilization and Communist revolution, government officials’ quick action coincided with foreign investors’ own sense of capitalist urgency.
Mr. Jaspaert said production decisions that once took 18 to 24 months now take six to nine. And while the south stagnates somewhat (Ho Chi Minh City’s subway line remains incomplete after 20 years of construction), the north races on.
DEEP C’s revenues and profits have quintupled since the Trump tariffs.
Villages like Mr. Van Thinh’s have been transformed.
When the LG plant expanded in 2019, the narrow streets of nearby hamlets quickly turned into commercial strips with restaurants and bold-colored barbershops for workers who make a solid local wage of around $400 to $550 a month.
Every spare piece of land has been turned into worker housing. Mr. Van Thinh now manages 35 rooms with his family. Nearby, Pham Thi Cham, 55, drained a backyard pond where she raised fish to build eight rooms that she rents out for about $60 a month.
Many of the workers come from central Vietnam. Instead of going south, they came north.
Tran Van Sy, 26, a quiet young man in a knockoff Givenchy T-shirt, arrived three years ago from a poor coastal province to work for LG. He said he lives frugally enough to send 60 percent of his pay back home.
It’s a story repeated up and down the halls of boardinghouses with sneakers by the doors and motorbikes parked outside.
Mr. Van Thinh said all nine of his grandchildren were studying at universities or working at factories.
“I never could have imagined this,” he said.
Now, with defiant exuberance, he can’t imagine the progress stopping.
He emphasized that he trusted his government to keep manufacturing healthy, adding pressure for leaders in Hanoi.
Plus, would Mr. Trump really crush a boom outside China that he helped create?
“Everything is going so well,” Mr. Van Thinh said, staring at the hazy lights of the LG factory. “These companies, they’ll continue to expand.”
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