Why not just plain "developmentalist state", and possibly more akin to Suharto's in, e.g., corruption than, say, Japan's or Korea's? Where is the "socialist" in the current Vietnamese version, or -- even more so -- in the Japanese and Korean one?
From some friends, the 'young turks' in Vietnam are more rosy-eyed about neo-liberalist prescriptions than those in China. A friend who worked in an advisory capacity in China said that the Chinese economists would all listen carefully, nod their heads, then go off and do whatever it was they decided, being attentive to developments elsewhere in the world; hence also the hubris about having invented something distinctively Chinese in the current developments. The Vietnamese economists apparently bought into the Chinese rhetoric without noticing the discrepancy between that and their actions -- which could be quite a disaster for them.
kj khoo