Vietnam's current embrace of Chinese cultural exports—from hit dramas to Mandarin classes—is often framed as a new phenomenon driven by social media and economic opportunity. But as Hoang Thi Ha and Pham Thi Phuong Thao note in a recent ISEAS Fulcrum commentary, this attraction is better understood as an intensification of a centuries-old pattern, not a rupture.
The authors correctly observe that this bottom-up pull is happening alongside renewed official efforts to boost people-to-people ties, and that deep-seated sensitivities about China have not vanished. Yet the ease with which Chinese content lands in Vietnam owes much to a shared civilizational heritage that predates the internet by millennia.
A Sinospheric foundation
Vietnam is arguably the most deeply Sinospheric society outside China itself. It endured over a millennium of direct Chinese rule, and literary Chinese served as the principal official script for centuries, even after the emergence of the vernacular chu Nom in 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 honor 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 bedrock of the Vietnamese state.
This civilizational depth means Chinese cultural products do not have to cross the same cognitive distance in Vietnam as they do elsewhere. Vietnamese audiences can decode the moral grammar of Chinese historical dramas with an ease that outsiders cannot. Cultural proximity here rests on a shared repertoire as much as on geography.
That repertoire has carried Chinese cultural products into Vietnam across every political period, including times of acute hostility. Even after the 1979 border war, wuxia novels and Hong Kong dramas circulated 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, and the 1993 drama Kewang 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 TikTok.
New delivery, old resonance
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, but they amplify an existing pattern rather than create it. The civilizational substrate is resilient to political disruption, yet the scale and pace of cultural transmission at any given moment are driven by deliberate decisions in both Hanoi and Beijing. Since its inception, the Communist Party of Vietnam has considered culture a major battlefront, issuing 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 leadership, 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 current openness reflects specific political conditions, not 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. That move underscores that even as cultural flows deepen, Vietnam's red lines remain firmly drawn. For a deeper look at how Hanoi manages its broader relationship with Beijing, see Vietnam's BRICS partner status and To Lam's risky overhaul.
