Developing Vietnam’s socialist-oriented goal and model (Part 3)

Part 3: Developing a diverse and unified culture: The foundation and driving force for sustainable development

Experiences from developed countries show that if a nation wants to move fast, it must rely on science and technology; but if it wants to develop in a humanistic way, there is no other path than culture.

Musical performance during the art program “Dong Nai – Welcoming a new era,” held on the evening of September 3. Photo: My Ny

For thousands of years, at historic turning points of survival and extinction, the nation has endured by nothing other than its own culture; and the country’s vigorous development has likewise been propelled by that same culture.

“Culture lights the way for the nation”

The culture of nation-building and nation-preservation has shaped Vietnamese culture – the face, status, strength, and prestige of Vietnam. Culture is the spiritual foundation, the driving force, and the goal of development, in the sense that it creates needs, motivations, values, qualities, capacities, conditions, and opportunities for the people to comprehensively build and advance all aspects of politics, economy, society, national defense, diplomacy, and even culture itself through culture; Moreover, culture helps to overcome or even eliminate anything that hinders development – that is, anti-culture.

When “culture lights the way for the nation,” it becomes the spiritual foundation of society, the goal and driving force for sustainable national development, and an essential internal strength to ensure sustainability and firmly safeguard the Fatherland, for the goals of prosperity, strength, democracy, equity, and civilization. Therefore, culture must always be placed on par with economy, politics, and society, as President Ho Chi Minh affirmed.

Promoting cultural values and the strength of the Vietnamese people

The decisive factor for the success or failure of the renewal process lies in people, in the quality of human resources, and directly in the training and nurturing of strategically capable talents who can carry out rapid and leapfrogging development.

Metaphorically speaking, “the mindset of an explorer must be placed in human beings rather than artificial intelligence (AI) or any machine. Leveraging technology requires combining humans with AI to solve major problems. People are the top priority. Human perception is crucial; everything that follows does not depend on technology but on us”.

Therefore, it is imperative to promote cultural values and the strength of the Vietnamese people, to inspire aspirations for a prosperous and thriving nation, and to create the collective strength of the entire people. In summary, developing culture means building people, which is also the ultimate goal of national development. Along with science and technology – as vital driving forces, sustainable and humanistic development cannot exist without culture, and must stem from culture.

In short, “…facing new opportunities and challenges, the objective requirement of our revolution is to continue building, preserving, and developing an advanced Vietnamese culture imbued with national identity, truly a “spiritual foundation,” a “driving force for development,” and a “light guiding the nation”; to promote cultural values and the strength of the Vietnamese people, to arouse aspirations for a prosperous and thriving country, and to create the collective strength of the entire nation to seize opportunities, overcome challenges, and successfully achieve the goal of making our country a developed nation oriented toward socialism by the mid-21st century”.

During his lifetime, Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong emphasized: “Culture is the soul of the nation, expressing its identity. As long as culture endures, the nation endures”.

This reflects the humanistic and sustainable development needs of the 40 years of renewal and of the future.

These are inevitable steps, both strategic and urgently pressing, in the vision toward 2045.

Therefore, in the orientations for building Vietnamese socialism, if the Party identifies three pillars: First – socialist democracy as the essence of our regime, both the goal and driving force for national development; Second – the socialist-oriented market economy as the tool and means to unleash productive forces, develop the economy, and build the material and technical foundations of Vietnamese socialism, with the state economy as the foundation leading the national economy and the non-state economy, particularly the private sector, as an important driver and strategic lever for development; Third – the socialist rule-of-law state as the optimal form to ensure the people’s state power and to realize and protect the people’s democratic rights, then the fourth dimension (the fourth pillar) must be culture, and the fifth dimension (the fifth pillar), essential for the future, must be science and technology. Together, these five pillars guarantee Vietnam’s rapid, strong, and sustainable socio-economic development.

That is the development mandate of the comprehensive and synchronous renewal in the vision toward 2045.

(To be continued)

Dr. Nhi Le, former Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Communist Review

Translated by: M.Nguyet-Thu Ha