My article in Revue Conflits: Asian Communists — is the East still red?
I have just published an article in Revue Conflits, titled “Asian Communists: is the East still red?”. Revue Conflits is a leading French magazine on geopolitics, international relations and strategic analysis.
The thesis
Three regimes in Asia still claim to be communist — Vietnam, Laos, North Korea — but they share so little, ideologically and economically, that the label has lost all analytical value. Lumping them together under the same red flag prevents us from understanding what is actually at play in each of these countries.
- Vietnam: a developmental state that pursues growth, courts foreign investors, and has seen its per capita income rise from $96 in 1989 to nearly $5,000 in 2025. Hanoi takes its cues from Park Chung-hee and Lee Kuan Yew, not from Marx.
- Laos: follows in Vietnam’s wake under heavy Chinese financial dependence, with public debt brought down to 82% of GDP at the end of 2025.
- North Korea: the songbun — a hereditary caste system — and the rise of the donju, the merchant class that prospers in the regime’s shadow, make plain what we are actually dealing with: a far-right racial nationalism, not a variant of Marxism-Leninism.
Why it matters
Continuing to speak of “communism” for these three countries masks the ethno-nationalist nature of the Pyongyang regime and blurs our reading of Hanoi’s and Vientiane’s trajectories. Without an accurate diagnosis, there can be no lucid foreign policy — whether on economic cooperation, Indo-Pacific strategy, or human rights.