Is the Communist Party of Vietnam Set to Establish a ‘Core Leadership’ Position?
The consolidation of power under communist party chief Nguyen Phu Trong has some striking parallels to past patterns in Chinese politics.
On February 2, the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) awarded a medal to its General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, marking the fiftieth anniversary of his joining the party. In his speech at the award ceremony, Vo Van Thuong, a member of the CPV Politburo and standing member of the party Secretariat, praised Trong as embodying the virtue of “core leadership.”
In his speech, Thuong borrowed a range of phrases used by Trong in the past, such as “the back-runners follow the fore-runner, one voice is echoed by others,” to describe Trong’s “core leadership” role, which he said had helped build “solidarity” and “unity in thinking” within the party. He also praised Trong for leading “the entire party, the populace, and the armed forces to overcome difficulties and challenges to gain paramount achievements in all fields.”
Adulatory words applied to Trong have frequently appeared in the state media since 2016, and particularly since he was elected to an unprecedented third term at the 13th Party Congress in 2021. However, this was the first time that Trong, who has also been leading the Central Steering Committee for Anti-Corruption and Negative Practices (CSCAN) for more than 10 years, was described as a leader “at the core.” Is this a sign that the CPV will be following the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in formally establishing a “core leadership” role for Trong amid the current turbulence in Vietnamese politics and the uncertainty about whether he will step down at the mid-term plenary this year, or remain in the job until the end of the term in 2026? Does this have further implications for the leadership of the CPV in general and the position of the general secretary in particular?
The term “core leadership” has been used by the CCP since the Mao Zedong era to designate one position as the highest authority within the collective leadership of the Central Committee and the party. Though the CCP has always vowed to uphold Marxism-Leninism and the tenets of democratic centralism, Deng Xiaoping once said that “a collective leadership must have a core; without a core, no leadership can be strong enough.”
Mao was established as the “core” of the first generation of the CCP’s collective leadership, and was better known as “Chairman Mao” among the Chinese people. Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin were designated as the cores of the second and third generations of collective leadership, respectively. Hu Jintao succeeded Jiang to become the CCP general secretary in 2002, but was not designated a “core” leader during his two terms in power. Read More…
