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Banning Imports Will Not Solve Vietnam's Problems

I agree with you, but have a slightly different interpretation.

China and Viet Nam are practicing mercantilism. The trouble with mercantilism is that it views "winning" as having all the production instead of having all the consumption. It assumes economics is a zero sum game and trade should only flow one way. So what is happening here is they are debasing their currencies so that they can continue to play the game they want to win (the wrong game, in my opinion). What they should be doing is allowing their currencies to float as the US $ declines. This increases their domestic consumption capability and allows them to displace exports with internal consumption. By doing this, they don't lose growth and they don't devalue their currency. It also creates social stability. If the pendulum swings too far to domestic consumption, their currency devalues and they can't consume as much. That is, this is a negative feedback loop, so it is self correcting.

This is what should be happening to the US, (actually should have happened over the past 20 years or so). Unfortunately, our status as the world's reserve currency doesn't allow this to happen, and so allows us to consume beyond our means. Thus our huge deficits without any immediate economic repercussions.

Our response seems to be to devalue our currency rather than reduce consumption. Politically easy, but dire consequences down stream. It seems the art of politics today is to push problems into the future by borrowing from the future. Maybe it always has been. If you want to know who's to blame, all you have to do is realize that we elect the politicians, so collectively, we are. We too would rather push the problems into the future.

I suspect Rome was like this in the time of the decline.