A Meiji-Era Lesson for Việt Nam's High-Speed Rail

Phạm Văn Lừng wrote this article in Vietnamese and published it in Luật Khoa Magazine on December 17, 2024. Đàm Vĩnh Hằng translated it into English for The Vietnamese Magazine.

"To build a thousand warships, Britain must have at least ten thousand merchant ships. To have ten thousand merchant ships, it needs at least one hundred thousand sailors. To train one hundred thousand sailors, it must have maritime science." — Fukuzawa Yukichi, "An Outline of a Theory of Civilization" (1875)

In Việt Nam, the enthusiasm for modernization seems to come most vividly alive when tied to expensive, grand-scale projects like the North–South high-speed railway. Yet, a crucial factor is often lost in the fanfare: Việt Nam still lacks the capacity to master the core technologies behind such undertakings.

While the nearly $70 billion project is being hailed as a symbol of the nation's “rising era,” and a “driving force for development in a new epoch,” purchasing a modern railway system does not, in itself, make a nation modern—not if the country still lacks what the Japanese thinker Fukuzawa Yukichi once called “the spirit of civilization.” [1][2]

Fukuzawa, a leading intellectual of Japan’s Meiji Restoration, told his students in 1874:

“One cannot assess a nation’s civilization merely by its outward appearances. Schools, industries, the army, and the navy. These are all external forms of civilization. It’s not difficult to construct such forms; they can all be purchased with money.

Beyond these external factors, there exists something spiritual: intangible, inaudible, invisible. It cannot be bought or sold, lent or borrowed. Yet its impact on a country is immense. Without it, schools, industries, and military power become meaningless.

That is the spirit of civilization. It becomes, in turn, the spirit of a people’s independence. That is the most important value.”

The Spirit of Civilization

What exactly did Fukuzawa Yukichi mean by the "spirit of civilization"? Above all, it was the civic spirit of the free individual within a free society. 

He criticized Japan's Meiji Restoration for being a top-down, state-led endeavor, contrasting it with Western societies, where he observed that civilization often advanced from the bottom up, led by citizens. In his view, Japan would only become truly civilized when its people matured in their sense of liberty, allowing each individual to freely innovate and contribute to the nation’s modernization. [4]

Applying this thinking to Việt Nam’s high-speed rail project raises the concern: Even if Việt Nam were to purchase its advanced railway technology from China, Fukuzawa's lesson is that this action alone would not be enough. 

He made a similar comparison in the late 19th century, arguing that while the Qing dynasty in China focused on acquiring Western "hardware" like warships, Japan needed to understand the "spirit"—the principles that underpinned the technology—so it could build its own unique social and political institutions.

He elaborated on this in his 1875 foundational work, An Outline of a Theory of Civilization, using a powerful analogy: [5]

“In Japan, many people think that because Britain has a thousand warships, Japan must also have a thousand warships. That line of thinking is shallow... More must be done.

To have a thousand warships, Britain must first have at least ten thousand merchant ships. To have ten thousand merchant ships, there must be at least one hundred thousand sailors. To create one hundred thousand sailors, there must be maritime science.

And that’s not all. To support ten thousand merchant ships, one hundred thousand sailors, and the science of navigation, you need a class of talented scholars, a class of capable merchants.

Still not enough. Japan must also have a developed legal system and a thriving commercial economy.

When all these social conditions mature, when Japan has all the prerequisites that would necessitate a thousand warships, then, and only then, can we truly possess a thousand warships.”

First the Spirit, Then the Steel

Suppose Meiji-era Japan, with its feeble foreign trade, had decided to buy a thousand warships and poured its national resources into maintaining them. The answer is not hard to guess: such a nation would have withered from exhaustion.

What would Fukuzawa Yukichi say about Việt Nam today? If he were alive, what might he think of the plan to build a 1,500-kilometer high-speed railway? He would likely have no hesitation in saying: Just because Japan, China, or France have high-speed trains does not mean Việt Nam must have one too. Spending nearly $70 billion on a railway system does not automatically make a country “modern.”

To build such a railway, Việt Nam must first possess the necessary economic, social, technological, legal, and political foundations to support it. A nation cannot pour its limited resources into acquiring high-tech hardware when, as one domestic expert pointed out, the nearby Gia Lâm Railway Factory has a workforce of only about 50 employees. In light of this, the expert asked, "Can we honestly say we have the capacity to sustain high-speed rail technology?” [6]