More than manufacturing: Vietnam has hopes to become Asia’s next cultural powerhouse

When Justin Bieber headlined Coachella in April, his first concert in four years, the stripped-down performance style made global headlines. Yet in Vietnam, excited social media chatter also focused on the singer’s “Puffa shorts” from Lu’u Dan, an Asian-influenced label founded by Vietnamese American Hung La. Bieber’s outfit is part of a larger story: Vietnam’s export-dependent economy is beginning to leverage intellectual property to move up the value chain. Vietnam’s booming cultural scene is sitting between a top-down drive by the government to elevate culture to a policy priority, and a bottom-up push by a generation of young creators empowered by rising consumer spending and cheap internet access. The companies that manage this talent hope that culture, like everything else in Vietnam, can be reengineered as an export product. Last Year’s Resolution 68 affirmed the private sector as Vietnam’s “most important driving force.” It dominates commentary about General Secretary To Lam’s reform push, dubbed Doi Moi 2.0, a reference to Vietnam’s 1980s economic transformation. Yet Resolution 80, passed in January, could end up being just as important to the growing cultural economy. The measure established culture as an indispensable foundation of Vietnam’s sustainable development, a coequal pillar alongside the economy, society, and the environment. “The resolution emphasizes the role of cultural industries in the economic development of the country,” says Duc Khuong Nguyen, a senior fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Land Economy and an advisor to the government. Hanoi has long used culture to encourage patriotic feelings and build some cohesion across the country’s 54 ethnic groups, but “recognizing culture as a business is quite recent,” he notes. Vietnam’s government wants the cultural economy to grow by 10% every year, and make up 7% of GDP by 2030. In the past 12 months, To Lam’s government has announced a new public holiday to celebrate c