Inside Vietnam’s Communist Party

On July 19, Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported that Vietnamese Defense Minister Phung Quang Thanh had died while receiving treatment for lung cancer at the Georges Pompidou Hospital in Paris. State media published reports the following day denying Thanh’s demise, which if true would have had profound implications for the country’s politics and policy, including its strategic position towards China in the South China Sea.

DPA initially stood by its story but issued an apology after Thanh was apparently photographed by state media upon arriving at a Hanoi airport on July 25. Thanh’s sudden hospitalization with an uncertain lung ailment in late June had already motivated high-level rotations in the army, signaling rising factional competition for influence among the armed forces. On July 3, two of Thanh’s top army commandants who oversaw some 20,000 troops responsible for security in Hanoi were inexplicably transferred, according to independent local language news reports.

The soldiers, Major General Phi Quoc Thanh and Major General Le Hung Manh, were instrumental in protecting crucial Communist Party institutions in the national capital and viewed as trusted lieutenants in Thanh’s conservative, pro-China party faction. Their replacements, Lieutenant General Nguyen Doan Anh and Lieutenant Nguyen The Ket, are viewed as more closely aligned with Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung’s ascendant party faction.

The changing of Hanoi’s guard, long a bastion of conservative power and influence, underscores the steady marginalization of the party’s pro-China faction ahead of next year’s 12th Communist Party Congress, where top government appointments and central policies will be decided for the following five years. It also comes amid spiking tensions with China in the South China Sea and shifting sentiment within the party on how best to counter Beijing’s perceived aggression. 

Dung’s reformist and increasingly pro-U.S. faction seems poised to take the lion’s share of top posts at the next congress, with Dung widely tipped to become the Communist Party’s next all-powerful secretary general. The lightning reshuffle of Hanoi’s top commanders and General Do Ba Ty’s chairing of a Party Army Central Committee meeting in Thanh’s stead on July 7 signaled to some analysts that Dung’s faction was angling to seize control over the army in Thanh’s absence.

Thanh, the second highest ranking official on the 16-member politburo and a decorated war hero, has served as defense minister since 2006. Party conservatives recently proposed Thanh as a potential counterweight to Dung’s rise. But Thanh’s bid for the presidency was struggling to gain traction even before he was hospitalized, according to analysts who closely track party dynamics. Others put forward by conservatives for leadership positions, including Propaganda and Education Commission chief Dinh The Huynh, have stalled with the Central Committee due to their ideological backgrounds and lack of economic credentials, the analysts said.   

Dung’s and Thanh’s divergent handling of China’s deployment of a massive oil exploration rig in Vietnamese-claimed waters last summer underlined the party’s sharp factional divisions. While Dung took a strong nationalistic line, calling publicly on Beijing to remove the rig and respect Vietnamese sovereignty, Thanh’s comparatively cautious diplomacy avoided a potential confrontation but smacked of appeasement among Dung’s supporters and grassroots nationalists.   

Those perceptions of passivity under Thanh have intensified in recent weeks, in June China redeployed its oil exploration rig, passed a new security law that allows leaders to use any means necessary to protect “core” interests, and hosted a delegation led by Cambodian Defense Minister Tea Banh on a five-day visit to Beijing that some observers believe contributed to a recent skirmish along Vietnam’s southwestern border with Cambodia.

Reports appearing in social media noted the movement of heavy artillery, including tanks and armored personnel carriers, from Vietnam’s central to southern region; the foreign ministry later denied the reports. China and Vietnam fought a brief but bloody border war in 1979 after Vietnam invaded and occupied Cambodia upon ousting the murderous Khmer Rouge regime. China and Vietnam supported opposing sides in the latter phase of Cambodia’s long and debilitating civil war and currently compete for political and economic influence in that country.

At the same time, Beijing seems to sense the potential shift of Thanh’s fading influence and Dung’s impending domination. On July 16-17, Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli, a member of China’s elite Politburo Standing Committee, met with Dung and other senior party leaders in Hanoi. The visit aimed ostensibly to enhance bilateral cooperation in various spheres, including the South China Sea. But Zhang’s invitation to Dung to visit China this year is unlikely to ease tensions, particularly as Dung consolidates more power at the expense of his party’s pro-China faction.