Vietnam DEVELOPMENT OF THE VIETNAMESE COMMUNIST PARTY
Ho Chi Minh's tomb in Hanoi
Courtesy Bill Herod
Ho Chi Minh addresses the Third National Party Congress (September 1960), flanked by Le
Duan and Truong Chinh.
Courtesy Indochina Archives
The state Constitution adopted in 1980 terms the party "the
only force leading the state and society and the main factor
determining all successes of the Vietnamese revolution." The
party's role is primary in all state activities, overriding that
of the government, which functions merely to implement party
policies. The party maintains control by filling key positions in
all government agencies with party leaders or the most trusted
party cadres and by controlling all mass organizations. Citizens
belong to mass organizations appropriate to their status, such as
the quasi-governmental Vietnam Fatherland Front, the Vietnam
General Confederation of Trade Unions, or the Ho Chi Minh
Communist Youth League
(see Party Organization
, this ch.). Party
cadres leading such organizations educate and mobilize the masses
through regular study sessions to implement party policies.
Although party congresses are rare events in Vietnam, they
provide a record of the party's history and direction and tend to
reflect accurately the important issues of their time. In
February 1930 in Hong Kong, Ho Chi Minh presided over the
founding congress of the VCP. At the direction of the Communist
International
(
Comintern--see Glossary), the party's name was
changed shortly afterwards to the Indochinese Communist Party
(ICP). The designated First National Party Congress following the
party's founding was held secretly in Macao in 1935,
coincidentally with the convocation in Moscow of the Seventh
Congress of the Comintern. At the Seventh Congress, the Comintern
modified its "united front" strategy for world revolution chiefly
to protect the Soviet Union from the rise of fascism. Member
parties were instructed to join in popular fronts with
noncommunist parties to preserve world socialism in the face of
fascism's new threat. Although the Vietnamese party subsequently
adopted the strategy, the timing of the two meetings dictated
that the Vietnamese in Macao wait until after their meeting for
directions from Moscow. Consequently, the resolutions enunciated
at the ICP's first congress turned out to be only provisional
because they stressed the older and narrower concept of the
united front that divided the world into imperialist and
socialist camps but failed to account for fascism. Under the new
strategy, the ICP considered all nationalist parties in Indochina
as potential allies. The Second National Party Congress was held
in 1951 in Tuyen Quang, a former province in the Viet Bac, a
remote region of the North Vietnamese highlands controlled by the
Viet Minh (see Glossary) during the
First Indochina War
(see
Glossary--also known as the Viet Minh War). It reestablished the
ICP, which had been officially dissolved in 1945 to obscure the
party's communist affiliation, and renamed it the Vietnam
Workers' Party (VWP, Dang Lao Dong Viet Nam). Nine years later in
Hanoi, the Third National Party Congress formalized the tasks
required to construct a socialist society in the North and
carrying out a revolution in the South.
The Fourth National Party Congress, which convened in
December 1976, was the first such congress held after the
country's reunification. Reflecting the party's sense of rebirth,
the congress changed the party's name from the Vietnam Workers'
Party (VWP, Dang Lao Dong Viet) to the Vietnam Communist Party.
This congress was significant for disclosing the party's plans
for a unified Vietnam and for initiating the party's most
widespread leadership changes up to that time. The delegates
adopted a new party Statute, replacing one that had been ratified
in 1960 when the country was divided. The new Statute was
directed at the country as a whole but focused on the application
of Marxist-Leninist principles in the South, stating that the
party's goal was to "realize socialism and communism in Vietnam."
It further described the VCP as the "vanguard, organized combat
staff, and highest organization" of the Vietnamese working class,
and a "united bloc of will and action" structured on the
principle of
democratic centralism (see Glossary). Democratic
centralism is a fundamental organizational principle of the
party, and, according to the 1976 Statute, it mandates not only
the "activity and creativity" of all party organizations but also
"guarantees the party's unity of will and action." As a result of
unification, the Central Committee expanded from 77 to 133
members, the 11-member Political Bureau of the Central Committee
grew to 17, including 3 alternate or candidate members, and the
Secretariat of the Central Committee increased from 7 to 9. More
than half of the members of the Central Committee were first-time
appointees, many of whom came from the southern provinces.
Membership in the party doubled from 760,000 in 1966 to
1,553,500 in 1976, representing 3.1 percent of the total
population. Comparable figures for China (4.2 percent) and the
Soviet Union (6.9 percent) in 1986 suggest that the 1976
proportion of party membership to total population in Vietnam was
small. Nevertheless, the doubling of the party's size in the
space of a decade was cause for concern to Vietnam's leaders, who
feared that a decline in the party's selection standards had
resulted in increased inefficiency and corruption. They believed
that quantity had been substituted for quality and resolved to
stress quality in the future. In an effort to purify the party,
growth over the next decade was deliberately checked. Membership
in 1986 was close to 2 million, only about 3.3 percent of the
population. According to Hanoi's estimates, nearly 10 percent, or
200,000 party members, were expelled for alleged inefficiency,
corruption, or other failures between 1976 and 1986.
Turning to the economy, the Fourth National Party Congress
transferred the party's emphasis on heavy industry, initiated at
the Third National Party Congress, to light industry, fishing,
forestry, and agriculture. It directed attention to the Second
Five-Year Plan, which was already a year old
(see Economic Roles of the Party and the Government
, ch.3). The Fourth National Party
Congress also introduced a number of economic objectives,
including establishment on a national scale of a new system of
economic management, better use of prices to regulate supply and
demand, budgets to implement economic development programs, tax
policy to control sources of income, and banks to supply capital
for production. Finally, differences over the role of the
military surfaced at the congress, dividing party pragmatists,
who saw the army as a supplement to the labor force, from the
more doctrinaire theoreticians, who saw the military as a
fighting force, the primary mission of which would be obstructed
by economic tasks.
The Fifth National Party Congress, held in March 1982,
confirmed Vietnam's alignment with the Soviet Union but revealed
a breach in party unity and indecision on economic policy. An
unprecedented six members of the Political Bureau were retired,
including Vo Nguyen Giap, defense minister and former chief
military strategist in the wars against France and the United
States, and Nguyen Van Linh, future party general secretary who
later returned to the Political Bureau in June 1985. The six who
departed, however, were from the middle ranks of the Political
Bureau. The topmost leaders--from General Secretary Le Duan to
fifth-ranked member Le Duc Tho--remained in their posts. Thirty-
four full members and twelve alternate members of the Central
Committee also were dropped. The new Central Committee was
increased from 133 members and 32 alternate members to 152
members and 36 alternate members. Party strength had grown to 1.7
million.
The Sixth National Party Congress, held in December 1986, was
characterized by candid evaluations of the party and more
leadership changes. There was an extraordinary outpouring of
self-criticism over the party's failure to improve the economy. A
new commitment was made to revive the economy but in a more
moderate manner. The policy of the Sixth National Party Congress
thus attempted to balance the positions of radicals, who urged a
quicker transition to socialism through collectivization, and
moderates, who urged increased reliance on free-market forces.
Three of the country's top leaders voluntarily retired from their
party positions: VCP General Secretary and President Truong
Chinh, aged seventy-nine; second-ranked Political Bureau member
and Premier Pham Van Dong, aged seventy-nine; and party
theoretician and fourth-ranked Political Bureau member (without
government portfolio) Le Duc Tho, aged seventy-five
(see Appendix B).
Afterwards, they took up positions as advisers, with
unspecified powers, to the Central Committee. Chinh and Dong
retained their government posts until the new National Assembly
met in June 1987. Their simultaneous retirement was unusual in
that leaders of Communist nations tend either to die in office or
to be purged, but it paved the way for younger, better educated
leaders to rise to the top.
Nguyen Van Linh, an economic pragmatist, was named party
general secretary. The new Political Bureau had 14 members, and
the new Central Committee was expanded to 173, including 124 full
members and 49 alternate members. In continuing the trend to
purify party ranks by replacing old members, the Sixth Party
Congress replaced approximately one-third of the Central
Committee members with thirty-eight new full members and forty-
three new alternate members. It expanded the Secretariat from ten
members to thirteen, only three of whom had previously served.
Data as of December 1987
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