Truong Chinh

Truong Chinh (born Feb. 9, 1907, Ha Nam Ninh province, Vietnam—died Sept. 30, 1988, Hanoi) was a Vietnamese scholar and statesman, a leading North Vietnamese communist intellectual.

While a high school student at Nam Dinh, Truong Chinh became an activist in the anticolonialist movement; he joined Ho Chi Minh’s organization, the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth Association, in 1928, taking part in student demonstrations against the French. Arrested and expelled from the local high school, he continued his education in Hanoi, where he received his degree and supported himself as a teacher while pursuing a political career within the recently formed Indochinese Communist Party (PCI). While editing a Communist Party newspaper in Hanoi, he was arrested by the French in 1932 and spent the next four years in prison. Paroled in 1936, he was a well-qualified candidate for command in the PCI, most of whose earlier leaders had been executed or exiled. About this time he adopted the name Truong Chinh (“Long March”), after Mao Zedong’s famous march.

The Communist Party was banned in Indochina during World War II, and Truong Chinh and his associates continued their work underground. In 1941 Truong Chinh became secretary-general of the PCI, in charge of the dissemination of communist doctrine in Vietnam. With General Vo Nguyen Giap, Truong Chinh planned the tactical strategy that led to victory by the Vietnamese over Japanese occupation forces in August 1945 and to the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, headed by Ho Chi Minh. Truong Chinh described these events in his book The August Revolution. The PCI was disbanded but reemerged as the Alliance for the Dissemination of Marxism, with Truong Chinh as its chairman and leading theoretician. In 1951 the Vietnam Workers’ Party (Dang Lao-Dong Viet-Nam) was born, with Truong Chinh as secretary-general.

Truong Chinh’s power was eclipsed briefly in 1956, when he was held responsible for failures of the Central Reform Committee. He lost his post as secretary-general of the party, but by April 1958 he had again become a public figure and was appointed vice premier of North Vietnam and president of the Scientific Research Council. Following the death of Ho Chi Minh in 1969, Truong Chinh, Le Duan, and Pham Van Dong formed the controlling triumvirate of North Vietnamese politics. He was chairman of the Standing Committee of the National Assembly from 1960 to 1981 and was president of the State Council from 1981 to 1987.

Truong Chinh sought to organize North Vietnam along lines similar to those of the People’s Republic of China. He won recognition as a writer and poet and as a leading dialectician; he wrote The Resistance Will Win (1947), an explicit set of directives for guerrilla warfare.