Why Chinese culture lands so fluently and freely in Vietnam

A recent ISEAS Fulcrum commentary by Hoang Thi Ha and Pham Thi Phuong Thao offers a useful mapping of how Chinese culture and economic opportunity are drawing in young Vietnamese. The authors are right that this bottom-up attraction is unfolding alongside renewed official promotion of people-to-people ties, and that long-standing sensitivities about China have not disappeared. The current wave of Chinese cultural and consumer influence, from hit dramas, trendy brands to a surge in Mandarin study and growing student flows to Chinese universities, however, is better understood as an intensification of a much older pattern than as a new phenomenon. And the reasons should shape how we read both its reach and limits. Vietnam is arguably the most deeply Sinospheric society outside China itself. It experienced over a millennium of direct Chinese rule. Literary Chinese remained the principal official script for centuries, even after chu Nom emerged as a vernacular script by the 13th century. The Confucian examination system was adopted wholesale and operated until 1919. The Ly dynasty built the Temple of Literature in 1070 to worship Confucius and established the Imperial Academy six years later to educate Vietnamese elites along Confucian lines. By the Le dynasty (1428-1789), Confucianism had become the ideological framework of the Vietnamese state and society. This civilizational depth means Chinese cultural products do not need to cross the same cognitive distance in Vietnam that they do elsewhere. Vietnamese audiences can decode the moral grammar of Chinese historical dramas with an ease that audiences from outside the Sinosphere cannot. Cultural proximity here rests on a shared civilizational repertoire as much as on geography. That repertoire has carried Chinese cultural products into Vietnam across every political period, including periods of acute hostility. Even after the 1979 border war, wuxia novels and Hong Kong drama continued to circulate on VHS tapes as an underground stream. Vietnam was one of the earliest overseas markets for Chinese television content from the late 1980s. The 1986 adaptation of Journey to the West became a cultural touchstone nowhere more durably than in Vietnam. The 1993 drama Kewang (Yearning) reportedly drew ratings as high as 90.78% on Vietnam Television. Costume dramas have been the most popular genre in Vietnam for three decades. None of this required the likes of TikTok. The underlying cultural resonance was already doing the work, albeit at a slower pace. What is new is the delivery infrastructure. TikTok counts over 70 million monthly active users in Vietnam. Chinese streaming platforms including iQIYI, Tencent Video and Youku are carried on Vietnamese platforms such as VieON and FPT Play. The labor market reinforces the cultural pull: in 2025, Vietnam recorded the highest number of HSK test takers in the world, with 146,000 people sitting the exam. Job postings seeking Chinese speakers reached nearly 13,000, up 49% from 2024. In northern industrial zones, workers with Chinese proficiency command salaries 30-50% higher. Since 2021, Chinese has been one of the approved first foreign languages in Vietnamese schools from grade 3. The number of Vietnamese students in China has roughly doubled since 2018 to about 25,000. These are significant developments, amplifying an existing pattern rather than creating it. What counts as cultural “proximity” or “distance” from China is itself politically mediated. Since its inception, the CPV has considered culture a major battlefront. And it has issued a steady stream of directives framing culture as a strategic resource, most recently Resolution 80-NQ/TW in January 2026. After the 1979 border conflict, the party actively constructed distance from Chinese cultural influence, even as wuxia circulated underground. After normalization in 1991, Chinese content gradually re-entered through state television. Under the current CPV leadership, the facilitation has become more ambitious: the ‘Year of Vietnam-China Humanistic Exchange’ in 2025 and Tourism Cooperation Years 2026-2027 point to active state choices to lower barriers. The civilizational substrate is resilient to political disruption, but the scale and pace of cultural transmission at any given moment are driven by deliberate decisions in both Hanoi and Beijing. The current openness reflects specific political conditions, rather than the default setting of the relationship. Cultures are fluid, and Vietnam’s is no exception. Chinese civilizational influence, deep as it is, constitutes one layer in a cultural identity that has never been reducible to it. Indigenous Vietnamese norms and folk traditions predate Sinospheric borrowings. Southeast Asian, French colonial and more recent globalized cultural flows have all left their own sediment. The Sinospheric layer is what allows Chinese cultural products to land with unusual ease in Vietnam. But Vietnamese culture as a whole retains its own center of gravity. This helps explain why Vietnamese audiences have long maintained a sharp distinction between cultural consumption and political alignment. Anti-China sentiment and enthusiastic Chinese cultural consumption have coexisted for decades. The same holds for consumer products: political aversion to Beijing does not govern purchasing behavior. The line falls at sovereignty. In January 2026, Hanoi had Netflix pull the Chinese drama Shine On Me over a scene showing China’s nine-dash line claim over the contested South China Sea. Recent scholarship has shown that the narrative of perpetual Vietnamese resistance to Chinese cultural influence is largely a modern nationalist construction. Pre-colonial Vietnamese elites actively claimed membership in Sinic civilization, adopting its political models, literary traditions and moral frameworks as markers of legitimacy, while resisting Chinese political control. The cultural “resistance” framing emerged with 20th-century nationalism and was consolidated by the CPV. China’s cultural appeal in Vietnam is not a new soft power gain. It runs deeper than algorithms and bubble tea franchises, and it has coexisted with political wariness for centuries. For the ordinary Vietnamese, sharing a civilizational grammar with China has never precluded the political will to resist it. Lam Duc Vu is a Southeast Asia-based risk analyst writing on Indo-Pacific security and regional affairs.