No. China currently is a very bad model. Have you seen Chinese stepping onto each other on New Year's Eve? Their characters are as lousy as Vietnamese today, if not worse.
The hugest damage the communist government did to Vietnam was not the destruction of the economy, that is very easily repairable, but it was the destruction of Vietnamese characters, culture, values and work ethics. Without these ancient pillars as foundation of our country, we are completely lost.
My friends in Vietnam joked about this. "After Lê, there was no more thuần phong (pure customs). After Nguyễn, there was no more mỹ tục (fine practices). After Land Reformation, there was no more văn hoá (culture)."
What this means is that after the end of the Lê dynasty, Vietnamese customs were no longer as "purely Viet" (supposedly) as it used to be. It absorbed in elements from Cham, the Europeans, and many other peoples, but the "fine practices" were still there. However, after Reformation of 1954, which could be considered the Cultural Revolution of Vietnam, the culture of Vietnam was dead.
What happened in the Land Reformation of 1954 was that the Communist Officials encouraged peasants to destroy all items that belonged to "landlords" or items that symbolized extravagant lives of the capitalists.
The uneducated peasants, instigated by the communists, stomped the ancestral halls of many Vietnamese families and destroyed all relics, all of our cultural items. Many middle class families supporting the Viet Minh and Viet Cong before also fell victims to this. One famous case was Ms. Nguyễn Thị Năm, she was a strong Viet Minh supporter and also the foster mother of 3 prominent Communist Officials. She donated 100 taels of gold to the cause of Communism before. But in the Land Reformation of 1954, she was sentenced to death and executed because others labeled her as a "landlord".
For their own interests, the Communist regime condemned the feudal lords and kings as oppressive forces. They brainwashed the commoners into believing that Vietnamese history had been a history under oppression, from the Chinese to the French and the Japanese and the Americans. And that the communists were a liberating force, liberating Vietnamese from millennia of oppression by either foreign forces or by domestic kings and lords. They make good use of patriotism to praise themselves and make themselves the sole party legitimate to rule Vietnam.
From here on, generations of Vietnamese were born under the communist narrative of history, believing in the glory of poverty and believing that their nation had always been poor like this.
But that's not it. The leaders have tremendous influence on the people. If those in power don't set themselves as models to the commoners, how do you think the commoners will behave? If corruption is viewed as okay at the topmost level, then corruption will trickle down to even the lowest level. Soon enough the entire nation will be corrupted. If you have listened to speeches from Vietnamese leaders, you'll see how ridiculous they are. The General Secretary of Vietnamese Communist Party said in a televised meeting in 2014 that corruption must be fought but it should not come at the cost of "harmony". He then said even Xuanzang (The monk in Journey to the West) needed to bribe Buddha, so it should not be surprising to see ordinary men engaging in bribery. The entire point of the speech was that we should let corruption slide if it meant to investigate top ranking officials because such act would lead to disharmony within the party and the country.
When a communist official makes a mistake, no matter how extraordinary it is, he/she is not dismissed from his/her position. This leads to a common phenomenon that Vietnamese call "thick faced". No matter how incompetent you've been proven to be, you cling on to your office like a leech clinging on to a person's skin. They feel no shame, no responsibility to the nation whatsoever. This is in great contrast to the characters of Vietnamese leaders and Vietnamese in the feudal time, the kings/emperors would devote their hearts to the nation, and the subjects would devote themselves to the kings, they would resign or even commit suicide if they proved to be incompetent or failed to carry out an important task for the country.
We know that Confucian values of Vietnamese society had already been destructed in the Land Reformation of 1954 with the burning of ancestral tablets, books, and cases of Vietnamese children turning against their parents for ideals propagated by the communists. Now with leaders that are thick-faced, irresponsible, and incompetent, what do you think Vietnamese society will turn into? Vietnamese commoners today are just as lazy, irresponsible, cowardice, and greedy beyond dignity as their leaders. The old values of self-respect, faithfulness, devotion and commitment have all lost. When a society degenerates, when the roots and foundations are all lost, you can't build anything. How many times have economics expert talk about tremendous potentials of Vietnam? And how many times have anyone wondered why Vietnam never reached even 1/10th of its supposed potentials?
It's not a coincidence that Vietnamese in general admire Japanese. I think they see in the Japanese their old values, their old and more admirable selves. The Vietnamese detest their current selves, but there is nothing they can do, because they believe things have always been like this.