‘Billions and the Retrogression of Knowledge’?

While Vietnam’s Đổi mới policy, officially introduced three decades ago, had the clear-cut aim of restructuring the economic sector, its impact on morality was not as readily palpable. The standing of merchants in Vietnam has been, and continues to be, particularly ambiguous, as they were able to quickly seize the benefits of Đổi mới, albeit without embodying the state’s ideas of modernity. Using Sheri Lynn Gibbings (2016) framework of ‘citizenship as ethic’, the chapter takes a close look at the traders’ performance of moral identities as a way of dealing with the paradoxical economic and political situation they find themselves in.