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Vietnam POLITICAL DYNAMICS
The VCP has been characterized by the stability of its
leadership. According to Vietnam observer Douglas Pike, Hanoi's
leadership was "forged of a constant forty-year association" in
which individuals shared "the same common experience, the same
development, the same social trauma." Because of their small
number, Political Bureau members were able to arrive at agreement
more easily than larger forums and hence were able to deal more
effectively with day-to-day decisions. As individuals, they
tended to take on a large number of diverse party and government
functions, thus keeping the administrative apparatus small and
highly personalized.
Decisions tended to be made in a collegial fashion with
alliances changing on different issues. Where factions existed,
they were differentiated along lines separating those favoring
Moscow from those preferring Beijing or along lines
distinguishing ideological hardliners and purists from reformists
and economic pragmatists. The accounts of Hoang Van Hoan, a
former Political Bureau member who fled to Beijing in 1978, and
of Truong Nhu Tang, former justice minister of the NLF verified
the existence in the early 1970s of factions identified by their
loyalty to either Moscow or Beijing. They asserted that the proSoviet direction taken following Ho Chi Minh's death in 1969, and
particularly after the Fourth National Party Congress in 1977,
was the result of the party's having progressively come under the
influence of a small pro-Soviet clique led by Party Secretary Le
Duan and high-ranking Political Bureau member Le Duc Tho, and
including Truong Chinh, Pham Van Dong, and Pham Hung. Until Le
Duan's death, these five represented a core policy-making element
within the Political Bureau. Whether or not a similar core of
decision makers existed in the Political Bureau of the mid-1980s,
under Party Secretary Nguyen Van Linh, was not clear.
Differences within the Political Bureau in the mid-1980s,
however, appeared focused on the country's economic problems. The
line was drawn between reformists, who were willing to institute
changes that included a free market system in order to stimulate
Vietnam's ailing economy, and ideologues, who feared the effect
such reforms would have on party control and the ideological
purity of the society. The leadership changes that occurred in
late 1986 and early 1987 as a result of the Sixth National Party
Congress suggested that the reformers might have won concessions
in favor of moderate economic reform. The scale of the infighting
reportedly was small, however, and the changes that were made
probably were undertaken on the basis of a consensus reached
between the hardliners and the reformers. Nevertheless, the
results demonstrated that Vietnam's leaders increasingly had come
to the realization that rebuilding the country's war-torn economy
was as difficult an undertaking as conquering the Saigon
government.
Data as of December 1987
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