Because whatever you want to label Vietnam, in terms of business what matters is that it's fairly deregulated and open for international companies, and has been for decades, offers significant tax breaks for hitech manufacturing, and has a cheap workforce and an established supply chain. India or Thailand might well also be competitive, but it's not a given they're any more attractive.

If you mean to suggest there'd be the same risks as China, consider that Vietnam has consistently kept a certain distance to China, and have shared concerns with the US over Chinese expansionism. They're not particularly ideologically close, and politically there are few potential situations where deteriorating relationships between the US and China will negatively affect US-Vietnam relations, and some where it might improve them (e.g. if the issues in the South China sea escalates).

The news reports here in India say that there’s a lot of red tape and delays in India. Ease of doing business is lower compared to Vietnam. The policies are protectionist and restrictive. The labor laws are, to some extent, protective of employees. This is something Apple has been reported as not being happy about (but things are changing).

Apple already has a growing iPhone assembly base in India, which is set to go to 25% of its total iPhone production within a few years. While Apple is still looking for low cost production, I’m sure it doesn’t want a repeat of China by concentrating a lot on one or two countries. I think the current moves are a temporary aberration, since concentrating iPhones in India, iPads and Macs in Vietnam and so on doesn’t diversify the risk as much as ensuring that every product is assembled in more than one country. I’m sure Tim Cook is spending a lot of time working on such measures to de-risk manufacturing and maintaining the company’s profit margins.

All the countries that support low cost assembly and manufacturing in Asia have different kinds of problems as far as governments, policies and stability are concerned. Apple or any other company has to figure out the right mix and plans.

Have you ever visited Vietnam? The people I've met there are highly motivated to build successful businesses, even more so than in many western countries.

Many of the countries in the region are communist. What sets China apart is that it is a world power competing with the US. Nothing to do with communism.

India is fast becoming a facist & anti-democratic anti-mi minority country, not safe to invest under Modi whois trying to be Indian Hitler 2002.

The government is communist, but the people are not.

If you've ever spent any time in Vietnam, you'd understand that.