Vietnam Government and Politics
Ho Chi Minh and General Vo Nguyen Giap plan Dien Bien Phu campaign,
March 1954
THE SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM (SRV) is governed through a
highly centralized system dominated by the Vietnamese Communist
Party (VCP--Viet Nam Cong San Dang). As the force controlling the
system, the party exercises leadership in all matters. The
government manages state affairs through a structure that
parallels the party's apparatus, but it is incapable of acting
without party direction. All key government positions are filled
by party members.
Society is ruled by the party's ubiquitous presence, which is
manifested in a network of party cadres at almost every level of
social activity. All citizens are expected to be members of one
or another of the mass organizations led by party cadres, and all
managers and military officials are ultimately answerable to
party representatives.
The VCP in the mid-1980s was in a state of transition and
experimentation. It was a time when a number of party leaders,
who had been contemporaries of Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969), were
stepping down in favor of a younger generation of pragmatists and
technocrats, and a time when the prolonged poor condition of the
economy sparked discontent among grass-roots party organizations
as well as open criticism of the party's domestic policy. The
party's political ethos, which had once seemed to embody the
traditional Vietnamese spirit of resistance to foreigners and
which had known great success when the country was overwhelmingly
dominated by war and the issues of national liberation and
reunification, appeared to have changed after the fall of the
Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) in the spring of 1975 and the
reunification of Vietnam in 1976. This ethos had been at the core
of the VCP's rise to power during the struggles for independence
and unification. To a large degree, the popularity of the
communist movement remained tied to these causes; when victory
over the South was achieved in 1975, it became apparent that some
of the party's governing principles did not easily translate to
peacetime conditions. In the absence of war, the ethos changed
and the difference between what was communist and what was
popular became increasingly noticeable.
Hanoi was apparently unprepared for the scale of its victory
in the South, having anticipated that the path to complete power
would require at the very least a transition period of shared
power with the Southern communist infrastructure (the Provisional
Revolutionary Government) and even elements of the incumbent
order. Two separate governments in North and South Vietnam were
planned until the surprisingly swift disintegration of the South
Vietnamese government eliminated the need for a lengthy
transition. Following the establishment of communist control in
the South, the government immediately was placed under a Military
Management Commission, directed by Senior Lieutenant General Tran
Van Tra with the assistance of local People's Revolutionary
Committees. At a reunification conference in November 1975, the
Party's plans for uniting North and South were announced, and
elections for a single
National Assembly--the highest state
organ--(see Glossary) were held on April 26, 1976, the first
anniversary of the Southern victory. The Socialist Republic of
Vietnam was formally named at the first session of the Sixth
National Assembly (the "Unification Assembly"), which met from
June 24 to July 2, 1976.
After reunification, the focus of policy became more diffuse.
Policy makers, absorbed with incorporating the South into the
communist order as quickly as possible, were confronted with both
dissension within the North's leadership and southern resistance
to the proposed pace of change. The drive undertaken by party
ideologues to eliminate all vestiges of capitalism and to
collectivize the economy in the South was outlined in the Second
Five-Year Plan (1976-80) and announced at the Fourth National
Party Congress in December 1976. The plan, the first after
reunification, stressed the development of agriculture and light
industry, but it set unattainable high goals. The government
expected that all industry and agriculture in the South would be
state-controlled by the end of 1979. According to Vietnamese
sources, however, only 66 percent of cultivated land and 72
percent of peasant households in the South had been organized
into collectivized production by early 1985, and socialist
transformation in private industry had led to decreased
production, increased production costs, and decreased product
quality. Meanwhile, the country's leaders were finding it
necessary to divert their attention to a number of other equally
pressing issues. Besides addressing the many problems of the
country's newly unified economy, they also had to work out
postwar relations with Cambodia, China, and the Soviet Union. The
Sixth National Party Congress held in December 1986 was a
watershed for party policy in the 1980s. The party's political
mood was accurately reflected in the congress' candid
acknowledgment of existing economic problems and in its seeming
willingness to change in order to solve them. A new atmosphere of
experimentation and reform, apparently reinforced by reforms
initiated by the Soviet Union's new leadership, was introduced,
setting the stage for a period of self-examination, the
elimination of corrupt party officials, and new economic
policies.
Data as of December 1987
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