The East and Southeast Asian countries that have been successful have attributed much of their achievement to tenets of Confucianism and its respect for order and authority. This philosophy and its variants have served these economies well in the mission of absorbing and adapting modern methods of industrialization, technology, science and agriculture. However, it will be argued, open societies like the advanced nations of the West, may still hold advantages in terms of creativity, ingenuity, and industriousness where they permit their knowledge workers unlimited opportunity for creating, debating, designing and synthesizing new ideas. Authoritarian systems may be as self-limited in this new phase of development as were totalitarian systems in planned economies based on massive additions of resources and manpower. How Vietnam will adapt its higher education system in the service of development will depend on how tensions are resolved between the contradictory roles its universities and related tertiary institutions have been historically asked to play.
Universities tend to reflect the conflicts of their societies.
In order to examine the interaction between economic development, technology development and higher education requires analyzing the structure and function of universities as social institutions. Higher education becomes the lens through which to examine the development process historically. Ancient influences borrowed from China, such as Confucianism gave rise to a Mandarin ethic. It characterized Vietnam's earliest efforts in advanced classical studies for the perpetuation of a ruling bureaucratic elite. Later, European contact, particularly French Colonialism introduced rapid changes into these ancient traditions of higher education.