Leadership Quote by Tran Duc Luong

Globalization is framed here less as a tide that lifts boats than as a sluice gate that channels wealth toward whoever already controls the valves. Tran Duc Luong’s wording is careful, bureaucratic, and politically loaded: “under the process of ongoing globalization” makes it sound like an unstoppable system, not a set of policy choices. That passive framing is the point. It lets him criticize outcomes without directly naming culprits in a way that could provoke retaliation from major powers or investors.

The sentence’s moral center is the phrase “in the main,” which does quiet but crucial work. It concedes exceptions while insisting the dominant pattern is inequality: benefits concentrate in “a minority of countries and development centres” and in “powerful transnational companies.” “Development centres” is especially telling. It’s a map of the world drawn by supply chains and capital flows, where prosperity clusters in hubs while peripheral states are invited to compete for scraps through cheap labor, deregulation, and export dependency.

As a president speaking from a postwar, rapidly integrating Vietnam, Luong is navigating a double bind. Vietnam needed trade, foreign direct investment, and market access; it also carried historical suspicion of external domination and corporate leverage. The quote signals a negotiating posture: we will join the global economy, but we refuse the story that integration is automatically fair. The subtext is a warning about sovereignty-by-contract, where decisions shift from parliaments to boardrooms, and “open markets” becomes another way of saying “open season” on weaker economies.