You are aware that Vietnam was eventually reunified under the North right? And that it's nothing like North Korea today?

Yes, Vietnam is awesome - and there's a lot of capitalism going on even if it's not official.

But it's also no South Korea or Taiwan as far as development.

The Vietnamese people are smart, clever, hard-working, and I really do appreciate them and I hope their government gets out of their way so they can shine.

I must have missed the parts where South Korea and Taiwan were bombed into the stone age for years and then forced to repeatedly fight their neighbors for continued survival.

From the virtually complete annihilation of civilian infrastructure in the north to the widespread deforestation, poisoning, and unexploded ordinance in the south, the US barely left a country behind. Such comparisons are incredibly disingenuous without a view of how long Vietnam had to spend just rebuilding functioning infrastructure, education, etc and all without wealthy foreign investment. The Vietnamese people and government should be applauded for everything they have achieved.

It is hard to make a comparison between South Korea or Taiwan and Vietnam.

South Korea was the recipient of one of the largest and most consistent foreign aid packages for decades. From 1946-1978 South Korea received as much foreign aid from the US as all of Africa combined over the same period. (South Korea has a population of 50 million; Africa has a population of 1.3 billion.)

And then on top of that was the military aid from the US, which made up 20-40% of all aid. Half a billion dollars just under the CRIK program from 1950-1956. Even today, the US spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on its military presence in South Korea.

And that's just from the US. Japan also contributed billions of aid and development money.

Meanwhile Vietnam received no foreign aid and was instead under a 30-year trade embargo until 1995. Unsurprisingly, as soon as the embargo was removed, the Vietnamese economy began growing strongly (9.5% growth in 1995).

A similar story can be told about Taiwan and the massive economic and military aid it received from the US.

Plus South Korea and Taiwan were both single-party dictatorships with state-directed economies for decades, so it isn't really clear what was so great about them being "state capitalistic but not democratic". See the 228 Massacre in Taiwan, for instance.

Different leaders, different flavors of communism, different time.