Late last week, Vietnam awarded new 5G contracts to Chinese telecoms giants Huawei and ZTE, signaling a shift in a region where telecoms infrastructure has become entangled with wider geopolitical expectations. Hanoi, which has spent years balancing its economic engagement with China against expanding ties with the United States and Europe, had previously avoided leaning too heavily on any single supplier. However, its latest handshakes with Chinese firms suggest that the balance is changing.

Procurement records reviewed by Reuters show that a consortium including Huawei won a $23 million 5G equipment contract in April, just weeks after the White House introduced tariffs on Vietnamese exports. ZTE has also picked up at least two antenna contracts worth more than $20 million combined, the first of which appeared in September. The timing has left the West unsettled over what could be interpreted as China’s growing role in Vietnam’s digital infrastructure. While Ericsson, Nokia and Qualcomm remain key suppliers for Vietnam’s core 5G systems, Chinese firms are beginning to win a growing share of smaller, but strategically significant, auxiliary contracts.

Patrick Donegan, the founder of telecoms and IT security research firm HardenStance, says Western pressure has produced mixed results. “The US has led Western efforts to curb investment in Huawei’s networking equipment, especially 5G networks,” he notes. “This has been largely successful in the other Five Eyes countries — the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — some parts of the EU and one or two other countries. Elsewhere in the world, Huawei continues to enjoy good market share.”

Vietnam sits in that “elsewhere”. It’s a country with its own calculus, wary of dependence on Beijing but increasingly shaped by economic pragmatism. For years, the Southeast Asian nation kept Chinese equipment at arm’s length, shaped by a history of cultural exchange punctuated by conflict, most recently the 1979 border war. That instinct to diversify suppliers is now weighed against the demands of rapid economic modernization. Over two decades, the country has become a major manufacturing hub for companies such as Apple, Samsung and Nike, and the need to expand its digital infrastructure at speed and at manageable cost has made Chinese-made systems increasingly attractive.

Taken together, these developments help explain why the country’s long-held wariness is beginning to ease. Earlier this year, Vietnam’s National Assembly greenlit an $8.3 billion railway project, with part of the funding expected to come from Chinese loans. More recently, the country’s 80th National Day parade saw a visiting Chinese military contingent greeted with cheers from the crowd, hinting at a broader shift in public sentiment.

From a national-security angle, Donegan argues that while Chinese-built systems can introduce risks, they sit within a much wider field of vulnerabilities. “Huawei equipment could most certainly be used to enable surveillance by the Chinese state,” he says. “However, China’s state-sponsored hackers are having tremendous success without even needing that kind of help.” Consider the “Salt Typhoon” intrusions into major US and international telecoms operators last year, in which Chinese groups exploited weaknesses in the system to gain entry.

These developments have not gone unnoticed in diplomatic circles. As reported by Reuters, a US representative warned in recent meetings that expanding the use of Chinese suppliers could complicate future access to advanced US technologies, while others raised questions about whether parts of the network using Chinese equipment could be isolated to limit exposure.

Vietnam’s dilemma now rests on a calculation that weighs the limits on both sides, since avoiding Chinese technology does not ensure safety and exclusive reliance on Western suppliers does not ensure affordability or timely rollout.

The broader implications — of a state which long kept Chinese tech at bay now embracing it across key sectors — are unlikely to reassure Washington. The result may be a landscape where Western hopes for coordinated resistance to Beijing’s growing influence are overtaken by domestic needs.