Nguyen Phu Trong, who has died aged 80, was the general secretary of the ruling Communist party of Vietnam for the past decade, and he succeeded in bringing three US presidents to the country. He oversaw unprecedented economic growth, yet endeavoured to preserve the socialist regime by stamping out corruption and suppressing dissent.
Launched at the start of his second term of office (2016-21), his anti-corruption campaign of “blazing furnaces” took down the party chief of Ho Chi Minh City, Dinh La Thang, in 2017, and the deputy prime minister, Hoang Trung Hai, in 2020. Over the next four years, more than 200,000 party and government officials were disciplined, expelled or charged with criminal offences.
Trong promoted a Vietnamese path to socialism, rooted in nationalism, sustained by economic development and trade, while silencing dissent, in the party and society at large. Under his watch, Vietnam enacted a new press law in 2016 and a cybersecurity edict in 2018 to tighten control of the media and to sanitise cyberspace. Hundreds of human rights activists, independent journalists and online critics were jailed or sent into exile in the US and western Europe.
A communist ideologue without wartime experience, revolutionary credentials or a power base like his predecessors, Trong rose to the top position of party general secretary in 2011 with the task of uniting regional factions while pursuing the economic liberalisation begun 20 years before. In his first five-year term, Trong, a northerner, consolidated his power by creating internal rules and enforcing them to keep checks on the prime minister, Nguyen Tan Dung, a southerner of more liberal instinct.
At the 12th party congress in 2016, Trong shrewdly bent the retirement rules and secured for himself an age waiver, dispatching Dung, who was five years younger than him – and who harboured his own ambition to become party chief – into retirement.
His second term was marked by a continued effort to assert personal authority. Despite his crackdowns on activists and journalists, his image as a clean man, and his skill at blending communist rhetoric with proverbs and Vietnamese classic poems, earned him popularity. He once compared punishing his own comrades to “chopping off a worm-eaten branch to save the whole tree”.
But poetry and party discipline alone were deemed insufficient to ensure regime survival. To sustain a flow of foreign investment, crucial to Vietnam’s economic growth and social stability, Trong chose partnership over confrontation with world powers. Under his watch, Vietnam hedged its bets, cultivating ties with China and Russia as well as the US, the UK, the EU, Japan, South Korea, India and Australia.
Known for his skilful adaptation of “bamboo diplomacy”, a concept first used to describe Thailand’s position during the cold war and representing a strong yet flexible foreign policy, Trong became the first Vietnamese communist chief to hold talks with a US president in the Oval Office when he visited President Barack Obama in 2015. Obama reciprocated by visiting Hanoi the following May.
In 2018, Trong also became the country’s president for two years when the incumbent, Tran Dai Quang, died in September that year, prompting concerns that he had consolidated too much power. While Vietnam’s political leadership is shared among the Communist party general secretary, the president, the prime minister and the chair of parliament, the party chief holds the most power.
Already head of the Communist party, Trong now held a dual role, in which he received the next US president, Donald Trump, in Hanoi in February 2019, when Vietnam hosted the first US-North Korean summit. In 2021, Trong was re-elected as party general secretary for a third term, but relinquished the post of president.
In September last year, President Joe Biden’s Vietnam visit upgraded bilateral relations to a comprehensive strategic partnership. But Trong’s bamboo diplomacy also brought Xi Jinping of China to Vietnam within three months of Biden’s visit and Vladimir Putin to Hanoi last month, despite the latter’s pariah status in the west because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Those ties with authoritarian regimes were a reminder to the west that Vietnam under Trong had not changed politically. A politburo secret directive in July last year warned the party of external and internal threat, reflecting Trong’s fear that NGOs, foreign investors and even western-educated young Vietnamese people could eventually join forces to ignite a revolution against the regime.
While the anti-corruption drives earned him popularity, Trong’s zeal to cleanse the party of “rotten wood” also exposed the cancer of corruption at all levels of the Vietnamese state. Ministers, army generals and mayors were charged with taking millions of dollars in bribes.
In December last year, a $12.4bn banking scandal rocked Vietnam, implicating hundreds of officials in Ho Chi Minh City. Between January 2023 and last month, the purge brought down many politburo members, including two presidents, two deputy prime ministers and a chair of parliament.
But in poor health after a stroke in 2019, Trong lost control over the direction of the wide-ranging anti-bribery drives that had been weaponised by the minister of public security, General To Lam, amid party infighting.
In March this year, To Lam replaced Vo Van Thuong, a Trong protégé, as state president. Thuong was brought down by the revelation of an old bribery case. In Trong’s last days, To Lam had assumed the party leadership.
Born into a peasant family in Dong Hoi, near Hanoi, Trong studied Vietnamese literature at Hanoi University and joined the Communist party at 22 after graduating in 1967. He served in various roles in the party, including as editor of its journal and mouthpiece, the Communist Review, as well as taking a postgraduate course, and then a PhD in Moscow (1983).
The work of the Soviet author Nikolai Ostrovsky, How the Steel Was Tempered, about a fictional Bolshevik hero, Pavel Korchagin, made a deep impression on the future communist strongman. In his long career, Trong often quoted from the book to illustrate his concern with leading an “honourable life, above wealth and money”.
In 1997, he entered the politburo as head of the theoretical council, charged with safeguarding party ideological purity. In May 2002, he was made deputy chair of the national assembly, then chair in 2006.
Known for an austere lifestyle, he lived with his wife, Ngo Thi Man, a retired police officer, in a 25 sq metre flat in Hanoi. On becoming party chief, he moved to a government-built compound but kept his old Toyota Crown car.
He is survived by Man, his son, Truong, and daughter, Ngoc.