On the 17th of December, 2025, Hanoi convened a youth dialogue themed “Unleashing aspirations – Pioneering innovation – Acting responsibly”, chaired by Vũ Đại Thắng, chairman of the Hanoi People’s Committee. The event was meant to project a familiar promise: Hanoi would build pathways for young people into a modern, innovation-led economy.
Trần Anh Tuấn, then head of the Hanoi Department of Science & Technology, presented a multi-tier human-capital plan to train young people into a tightly managed workforce. At the broadest level, the city would train roughly 50,000 digital workers selected through strict criteria. It would fund universities to train them in priority technologies, then require a period of service in return. A second track would fund a smaller pool of outstanding graduates to study abroad, again with return-of-service obligations. In isolation, this reads like modern industrial policy: target skills, subsidise training, retain talent. But what made the moment controversial was how quickly the moral borderline between “investing in talent” and simply “sorting people” was blurred.
Eugenics or efficiency?
The controversy erupted when the proposal shifted from building capacity to filtering human worth. The “elite talent” pathway had two levels. The first would take exceptionally talented lower-secondary students and place them in an accelerated programme supported by artificial intelligence (AI), digital-learning tools, and domestic and foreign experts. The second went further, proposing selection “by genes” to cultivate elite talent into adulthood, and even extending selection to the prenatal stage through research on thai giáo (prenatal education).
Critics read this as more than an overzealous idea. In Vietnam, where selective public schools and “schools for the gifted” already create educational hierarchies, the proposal struck a chord. It echoed eugenic logic, where society is “improved” by categorising individuals according to presumed genetic value, as framed in Vietcetera’s coverage. In subsequent reporting, a Mass Mobilisation Department representative, responsible for the propaganda of the Hanoi Party Committee, said that Mr. Tran’s remarks on “selecting genes to train elites” was his personal opinion, not city policy, according to Saigon Giai Phong. Reports also said he “personally retreated” from his official position after the controversy.
What it reveals about the global economy
Hanoi’s proposal sparked public backlash partly because it made the logic of selection explicit — “by genes” — as if human potential were a biological inventory the state could scan and rank. The inclination to sort is not solely Vietnamese; in the global economy, talent is constantly sorted, with resources and investments flowing to a small set of dominant firms.
Think about the ambitions children start with: curing disease, building art that makes people feel less alone, protecting ecosystems, working in public service, and participating in Model United Nations (MUN). Slowly these dreams shift through market incentives. In 2024, The Economist reported that roughly half of Harvard University graduates entering the workforce took jobs in finance, consulting, or Big Tech — not necessarily because the bundle is the highest social value use of intelligence, but because it is the safest.
The point is not that these jobs are inherently evil, but rather that the economic system pays so well for certain kinds of “talent” that other forms of ambition start to look irrational. And this supposed “optimisation” has done the opposite of supporting an innovative society — it has pushed our most talented towards careers Simon van Teutem calls it the “Bermuda Triangle of Talent”: consulting, finance, and corporate law. Fields that absorb disproportionate shares of high-achieving students because they offer status and a clean narrative of success, even when their social value is harder to defend. IBISWorld estimates that the global management consulting industry employed approximately 6.63 million people in 2025, following several years of steady growth. In the European Union alone, businesses in “financial and insurance activities” employed about 4.9 million people in 2022.
The lesson about innovation
The gene-selection controversy matters — even if it never becomes policy — because eugenics is a recurring temptation in societies that, if ignored, leads to atrocities. It is also self-defeating. Nations do not become innovative by narrowing the definition of talent. When opportunity is concentrated, fewer people get to invent. And when prestige is the biggest reward, smart people rationally chase prestigious jobs, even if that means fewer minds working on problems that actually move society forward.
A serious innovation strategy would do the opposite of gene selection. It would invest in early-childhood health, baseline school quality across districts, affordable technical training, and dignified pay for essential professions that take care of society (teachers, nurses, carers). This is the work that “competitiveness” rhetoric tends to treat as secondary. That is slower than manufacturing an “elite”, but it is how an economy moves into higher-value activity without hollowing out its legitimacy.
Hanoi’s proposal collapsed because it made the logic of sorting explicit. The lesson is not that Vietnam is uniquely tempted by eugenic reasoning. The lesson is that any system, state-led or market-led, that measures human value too closely by output will keep drifting towards sorting. The only real safeguard is to treat education and skills not as a pipeline for “high-value labour”, but as a democratic infrastructure — messy and universal, and the only kind of modernisation that does not require sacrificing our humanity to call itself progress.
