During a meeting with voters from 10 wards of Hanoi on May 4, Party General Secretary and President To Lam suggested a new mindset in urban governance and social engineering: Hanoi needs to research and pilot the model of "socialist wards" or "socialist communes."

This grassroots administrative unit is shaped at an unprecedented level in Vietnam’s territorial organization, with an expected population of 500,000 to 1 million.

From platform to revolutionary practice

There has been an important question over the last many decades: How long will the transition period last, and what will socialism look like when perfected? 

At the meeting with Hanoi voters, Lam gave a decisive, strategic answer: by 2045, the 100th anniversary of the country’s founding, Vietnam will become a developed, high-income nation, and that could be the point where the transition period ends to advance to socialism.

Thus, the proposed "socialist ward" model is not a repetition of previous commune or cooperative models, but a convergence of the quintessence of the modern market economy combined with the humanistic values of socialism.

Revolution in planning and administrative governance

Special public attention is also drawn to the administrative scale of the ward level, which currently in Vietnam usually fluctuates from 15,000 to 50,000 residents. A "ward" with 1 million people would be equivalent to the scale of a small province in the past.

Professor Zachary Abuza from Georgetown University remarked that Vietnam’s policy to merge a series of ministries, reduce the number of provinces by nearly 50 percent (from 63 to 34), and especially eliminate an intermediary administrative level (district level) is a historic reform.

Lam emphasized a vital requirement: all issues must be resolved conclusively at the commune and ward level; citizens must not be required to petition beyond their level to the city or central ministries.

With the foundation of the Capital Law (amended), Hanoi has enough legal basis to create visionary planning.

The General Secretary and President posed a question: If structures built by the French over a century ago are still in use, what legacy will today’s Vietnamese generation leave  for the next 100 years?

A socialist ward with a scale of 1 million people, if newly built from scratch, must be an almost perfect planning. It requires an infrastructure system designed synchronously from the start, thoroughly overcoming modern urban issues such as traffic congestion, flooding, and environmental pollution. Exploiting underground space to develop high-volume public transport systems, integrated with ecological landscapes on the ground, will transform this area into a smart city of global standards.

The core difference between a capitalist megacity and a "socialist ward" lies in the purpose of development. In the new model, economic growth or the greatness of infrastructure works is not an end in itself but a means to create happiness for people. Socialism must be felt through how children go to school, how the elderly are cared for medically, and whether the living environment is truly safe.

A revolutionary highlight is that each citizen in the ward will own an "electronic health record" established right from the moment of their first cry at birth. This record would integrate all medical history, vaccination data and treatment plans throughout a person’s life, allowing the healthcare system to provide proactive, personalized and comprehensive care.

To maintain a "super-ward" with a massive social security system and smart infrastructure, the economic foundation must be extremely solid. This sets the requirement to shift from a mindset of extensive growth to intensive growth, based on labor productivity, science and technology, the knowledge-based economy, and a strong private sector.

Urban space would also need to be used more efficiently through smart planning; citizens’ time would be saved by eliminating cumbersome administrative procedures; and public resources would be conserved by removing ineffective or delayed projects.

The practicality of a vision

There is a perspective suggesting that classical socialism requires the total abolition of private ownership, replacing it with public ownership, and questioning whether applying this model to urban spaces means abolishing the private economy or returning to the old-style cooperative period.

It is clear that building socialist wards is absolutely not a step back toward a command economy, nor is it the deprivation of people’s means of production. The Party's Platform has affirmed that the socialist-oriented market economy is the general economic model, in which the private sector is an important driving force.

Nguyen Phuoc Thang (Hoa Binh University)