Communist Party of Vietnam
The Communist Party of Vietnam is the sole legal party of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Founded in 1930 by Ho Chi Minh, the CPV became the ruling party of North Vietnam in 1954 after the First Indochina War and all of Vietnam in 1975 after the Vietnam War. Although it nominally exists alongside the Vietnamese Fatherland Front, it maintains a unitary government and has centralized control over the state, military, and media. The supremacy of the CPV is guaranteed by Article 4 of the national constitution. The Vietnamese public generally refer to the CPV as simply "the Party" or "our Party".
The CPV is organized on the basis of democratic centralism, a principle conceived by Russian Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. The highest institution of the CPV is the party's National Congress, which elects the Central Committee. The Central Committee is the supreme organ on party affairs in between party congresses. After a party congress, the Central Committee elects the Politburo and Secretariat, and appoints the General Secretary, the highest party office. In between sessions of the Central Committee, the Politburo is the supreme organ on party affairs. However, it can only implement decisions based on the policies which have been approved in advance by either the Central Committee or the party's National Congress., the 12th Politburo has 19 members.
In history, the party overthrew the monarchy peacefully and clashed with opposing factions during the period 1945–46. It later fought the French Union then South Vietnam for control of the entire country. From 1941 to 1950, the party operated under the non-communist banner. During the Cold War, its power as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was challenged by existence of the pro-Western Saigon regime from 1949 to 1975, and it was also aligned with the Soviet Union and allies. After taking power in all of Vietnam, the party officially unified the country as the Socialist Republic in 1976. The party had implemented a command economy in North Vietnam and later all of Vietnam since 1954, before introducing economic reforms, known as Đổi Mới, in 1986. The party is currently known for its advocacy of what it calls a "socialist-oriented market economy" and Ho Chi Minh Thought.
While continuing to officially hold to Marxism–Leninism, most independent sources have argued that it has lost its monopolistic ideological and moral legitimacy since the introduction of a mixed economy in the late 1980s and 1990s. In recent years, the party has stopped representing a specific class, but instead the "interests of the entire people", which includes entrepreneurs. The final class barrier was removed in 2006, when party members were allowed to engage in private activities. De-emphasising Marxism–Leninism, the party has placed emphasis on Vietnamese nationalism, developmentalism, and ideas from the American and French Revolutions, along with Ho Chi Minh's personal beliefs. The CPV participates in the annual International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties. In 1988, the party became the sole political party in Vietnam when it abolished its two satellite parties. The party's regime has been opposed by the Vietnamese democracy movement, especially anti-communist overseas Vietnamese.
History
Rise to power (1925–1945)
The Communist Party of Vietnam traces its history back to 1925, when Nguyen Ai Quoc established the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League, commonly shortened to the Youth League. The Youth League's goal was to end the colonial occupation of Vietnam by France. The group sought political and social objectives—national independence and the redistribution of land to working peasants. The Youth League's purpose was to prepare the masses for a revolutionary armed struggle against the French occupation. His efforts in laying the groundwork for the party was financially supported by the Comintern.In 1928 the headquarters of the Youth League in Canton, China, were destroyed by the Kuomintang and the group was forced underground. This led to a national breakdown within the Youth League, which indirectly led to a split. On 17 June 1929, more than 20 delegates from cells throughout the Tonkin region held a conference in Hanoi, where they declared the dissolution of Youth League and the establishment of a new organization called the Communist Party of Indochina. The other faction of the Youth League, based in the Cochinchina region of the country, held a conference in Saigon and declared themselves the Communist Party of Annam in late 1929. The two parties spent the rest of 1929 engaged in polemics against one another in an attempt to gain a position of hegemony over the radical Vietnamese liberation movement. A third Vietnamese communist group which did not originate from the Youth League emerged around this time in the Annam region, calling itself the Communist League of Indochina. The Communist League of Indochina had its roots in another national liberation group which had existed in parallel with the Youth League, and saw itself as a rival to the latter.
The Communist Party of Indochina and Communist Party of Annam, together with individual members of the Communist League of Indochina, merged to form a united communist organization called the Communist Party of Vietnam, founded by Ho Chi Minh at a "Unification Conference" held in Wah Yan College in Kowloon, British Hong Kong, from 3–7 February 1930. At a later conference, per the request of the Comintern, the party changed its name to the Indochinese Communist Party, often abbreviated as ICP. During its first five years of existence, the ICP attained a membership of about 1,500 and had a large contingent of sympathizers. Despite the group's small size, it exerted an influence in a turbulent Vietnamese social climate. Poor harvests in 1929 and 1930 and an onerous burden of debt served to radicalize many peasants. In the industrial city of Vinh, May Day demonstrations were organized by ICP activists, which gained critical mass when the families of the semi-peasant workers joined the demonstrations to express their dissatisfaction with the economic circumstances they faced.
As three May Day marches grew into mass rallies, French colonial authorities moved in to quash what they perceived to be dangerous peasant revolts. Government forces fired upon the crowds, killing dozens and enraging the population. In response, councils were organized in villages in an effort to govern themselves locally. Repression by the colonial authorities began in the autumn of 1931; around 1,300 people were eventually killed by the French and many more were imprisoned or deported as government authority was reasserted and the ICP was effectively wiped out in the region. General Secretary Tran Phu and a number of Central Committee members were arrested or killed. Lê Hồng Phong was assigned by the Comintern to restore the movement. The party was restored in 1935, and Lê Hồng Phong was elected its general secretary. In 1936, Hà Huy Tập was appointed general secretary instead of Lê Hồng Phong, who returned to the country to restore the Central Committee. In the mid 1930s the party was forced publicly to abandon much of its opposition to French colonialism as Soviet leader Joseph Stalin cared more about strengthening a left-inclined government in France. Ho Chi Minh was also removed from the party leadership in the early 1930s. Ho Chi Minh was criticized within the party and by the Communist International for his use of nationalism as a means.
The French colonial apparatus in Vietnam was disrupted during World War II. The fall of France to Nazi Germany in June 1940 and the subsequent collaboration of Vichy France with the Axis powers of Germany and Japan served to delegitimize French claims of sovereignty. The European war made colonial governance from France impossible and Indochina was occupied by Japanese forces. As a result, the communists also sought the opportunity to establish a grassroots organization throughout most of the country.
At the beginning of the war, the ICP instructed its members to go into hiding in the countryside. Despite this, more than 2,000 party members, including many of its leaders, were rounded up and arrested. Party activists were particularly hard hit in the southern region of Cochinchina, where the previously strong organization was wiped out by arrests and killings. After an uprising in Cochinchina in 1940, most of the Central Committee, including Nguyễn Văn Cừ and Hà Huy Tập, were arrested and killed, and Lê Hồng Phong was deported to Côn Đảo and later died. A new party leadership, which included Trường Chinh, Phạm Văn Đồng, and Võ Nguyên Giáp emerged. Together with Ho Chi Minh, these individuals would provide a unified leadership over the next four decades.
Ho Chi Minh returned to Vietnam in February 1941 and established a military-political front known as the League for the Independence of Vietnam, commonly known as the Viet Minh. The Viet Minh was a broad organization that included many political parties, military groups, religious organizations and other factions who sought independence for Vietnam. The Viet Minh was heavily influenced by the leadership of the ICP. It was the most uncompromising fighting force against the Japanese occupation and gained popular recognition and legitimacy in an environment that would become a political vacuum. Despite its position as the core of the Viet Minh, the ICP remained very small throughout the war, with an estimated membership of between 2,000 and 3,000 in 1944. In May 1945, the Viet Minh started to operate in the Tonkin provinces bordering China no longer under the banner of the Viet Cach, a pro-Chinese nationalist organization in exile founded in 1942 of which they were then a member.
Left opposition
The party, particularly in the south, was rivalled by other nationalist and left-wing groups, notably Trotskyist organisations. In November 1931, dissidents emerging from within the party formed the October Left Opposition around the clandestine journal Tháng Mười. These included Hồ Hữu Tường and Phan Văn Hùm who, protesting a leadership of "Moscow trainees", had formed an Indochinese group within the Communist League, the French section of the International Left Opposition, in Paris in July 1930. Once considered "the theoretician of the Vietnamese contingent in Moscow", Tường was calling for a new "mass-based" party arising directly "out of the struggle of the real struggle of the proletariat of the cities and countryside". Tường was joined in endorsing Leon Trotsky's doctrines of "proletarian internationalism" and of "permanent revolution" by Tạ Thu Thâu of the Annamite Independence Party. Rejecting the Comintern's "Kuomintang line", Thâu argued against a nationalist accommodation with the indigenous bourgeoisie and for immediate "proletarian socialist revolution".Recognizing the Trotskyists' relative strength in organizing Saigon's factories and waterfront, the ICP cells in the city maintained a unique pact with the Trotskyists for four years in the mid-1930s. The two groups published a common paper, La Lutte, and presented joint "workers' lists" for Saigon municipal and colonial-council elections. After they rallied in August 1945 with other non-Communist forces demanding arms against the French, the Trotskyists were systematically hunted down and eliminated by their former party collaborators under the direction of Tran Van Giau, a fate shared by large numbers of Caodaists, independent nationalists and their families.