Viet Communist Party Eats its Own

Party faction relentlessly sidelines erstwhile leaders

By: David Brown

Tổ Lam: last man standing? Ministry photo

What seemed eight years ago to be a commendable effort to purge the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) of its corrupted ways has morphed into a bitter factional struggle. Yet another revolution is devouring its children. National Assembly Chairman Vương Đình Huệ, arguably the ablest – or at least the ablest of those left standing – of the Vietnamese Communist Party’s government faction, is the most recent official to be forced into retirement. 

Late in 2015, just before the VCP’s 12th Congress, Nguyễn Phú Trọng fought off two-term Prime Minister Nguyễn Tấn Dũng’s attempt to replace him as the Party’s General Secretary. It was said at the time that in return for a promise that he would not be prosecuted for irregularities that he may have winked at during his tenure as prime minister, Dũng had agreed to withdraw from politics entirely.

Now, as the 14th Congress approaches, the ‘party faction’ of the VCP has weaponized the party’s rules for cadre conduct and is relentlessly sidelining the erstwhile leaders of its government faction. These party rules were promulgated by Trọng as guidelines for his ‘Fiery Furnace’ campaign to rid the party of members found to be corrupt or ideologically contaminated. Since 2016, thousands of party members have been weeded out. According to the BBC’s Vietnam service, 459 party cadres were disciplined last year for ‘corruption.’

Trong, now 80 years old and weakened by illness, is about to retire after three five-year terms at the CPV’s helm. A consensus is building that the dismissal of top government officials early in 2023 and several more this spring has been orchestrated by Minister of Public Security Tổ Lam and allies in order to clear Lam’s path to Party leadership.

These senior bureaucrats have resigned rather than face harsher punishments. These include Deputy Prime Minister Vũ Đức Đam, who had led Vietnam’s remarkably successful fight against COVID-19; Deputy Prime Minister Phạm Bình Minh, the nation’s top diplomat; State President and former Prime Minister Nguyễn Xuân Phúc; Phúc’s successor as State President, Võ Văn Thưởng, and now Vương Đình Huệ, the chairman of Vietnam’s National Assembly. 

None of these government faction luminaries have been publicly accused of corrupt dealings or other crimes. Notably, the grounds announced for their dismissal and forced retirement have been the newly prominent “failing to properly supervise subordinates” who profited from corrupt schemes. Nor, seemingly, has there been any effort to demonstrate that these leaders were aware of their subordinates’ bad behavior.

Huệ: into the furnace we go. National Assembly photo

Trained as an economist, Huệ has been in recent years successively the deputy prime minister who extricated Vietnam from a financial crisis, an able Hanoi City Party Secretary, and Chairman of Vietnam’s not entirely toothless National Assembly, Huệ has been regarded as a top contender for party/state’s top job, Communist Party Secretary General.

Now, however, Huệ seems to have been tarnished by corrupt dealings allegedly committed by his nephew and longtime aide and, incidentally, to have ‘set a bad example’ for subordinate cadre by engaging in a series of extramarital liaisons. An extraordinary meeting of the CPV’s broadly representative 200-member Central Committee was convened on April 24; it was reported to have voted unanimously to accept Huệ’s resignation.

Implications

Analysts of Vietnam’s politics have tended to view these dismissals as an extension of Party leader Nguyễn Phú Trọng’s six-year campaign to purge the CPV of “corrupt elements” and doctrinal backsliders. None seem to doubt the sincerity of Trọng’s campaign which one analyst, David Hutt summarizes as a quixotic “attempt to perfect human nature rather than look at the institutional causes of corruption.”

However, it now seems more plausible that after 13-plus years at the party’s helm, the aging general secretary has been captured by the so-called ‘party faction’ – and in particular by supporters of Minister of Public Security Tổ Lam’s candidacy to succeed Trọng as General Secretary when the 14th Party congress convenes in January 2026, if not sooner.

The dean of foreign Vietnam watchers, Carl Thayer now judges that “Trong’s anti-corruption campaign and its focus on accountability has opened the door for party hard-liners to bring down current members of the Politburo, thus clearing the path for the hard-liners to assume higher office at the fourteenth national party congress.”

Per Vietnamese journalist Dien Luong, writing for Nikkei Asia in late March, “Communist Party factions with strongholds in the country's defense, security and ideology agencies have been on the ascendance since 2016. This has put the country on a relentless trajectory of tightened controls over civil society and public discourse in the mainstream media and in cyberspace.”

Analyst Zachary Abuza told for Radio Free Asia on April 24 that, “what brought Huệ down is power politics and ambition,” and Lam, Vietnam’s top cop, “has immense investigative powers at his disposal to build a far-reaching case into his rivals’ extended business dealings and personal lives.”

Interviewed by the BBC, David Hutt adds that “The police are gradually taking power. This is not a good thing for the Vietnamese people, the business community and mutual restraint within the Communist Party… My concern is about what will happen after the 2026 Party Congress if the purges continue. The very people who can climb to the pinnacle of power like Mr. To Lam are not pure themselves.”

The rising profile of the police in CPV affairs is troubling as well, both its knock-on impacts on Vietnam’s economy as well as the chilling of political initiative. It has been evident since last year that senior bureaucrats, particularly those charged with disbursing funds for major infrastructure projects, have become unusually reluctant to take risks. Michael Tatarski, who produces the authoritative Vietnam Weekly blog has reported countless instances of erring on the side of caution, and I’ve seen the same behavior in Vietnam’s energy sector.

David Brown is a former US diplomat with wide experience in Vietnam affairs and a regular contributor to Asia Sentinel