Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0403/04039.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 38KB | 582 lines

$Unique_ID{COW04039}
$Pretitle{232}
$Title{Vietnam
Chapter 4A.   Government and Politics}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Ronald J. Cima}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{party
political
congress
members
vietnamese
national
communist
party's
central
committee}
$Date{1987}
$Log{Ho Chi Minh*0403901.scf
}
Country:     Vietnam
Book:        Vietnam, A Country Study
Author:      Ronald J. Cima
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1987

Chapter 4A.   Government and Politics

[See Ho Chi Minh: And General Vo Nguyen Giap Plan Dien Bien Phu campaign,
March 1854.]

     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 unattainably 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.

Development of the Vietnamese Communist Party

     The state Constitution adopted in 1980 describes the party as "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, t