Nguyễn Phú Trọng
Nguyễn Phú Trọng was general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam from January 2011 to his death in July 2024, thirteen years and three terms, the last against the party's own rules on age and tenure, and president as well from 2018 to 2021, the first to hold both since Ho Chi Minh. He was the party theorist and editor of its journal whom the reformers had taken for a harmless conservative, and he ran the largest anti-corruption campaign in the country's history, the blazing furnace, which he said would spare no one. Into it went a politburo member, two deputy prime ministers, two presidents, Nguyễn Xuân Phúc in January 2023 and Võ Văn Thưởng in March 2024, the chairman of the national assembly, dozens of ministers and generals and thousands of officials, so that by his last year the party's five-man leadership had been made and unmade twice and the survivor, the police minister Tô Lâm, succeeded him. The economy meanwhile grew at six and seven per cent a year on the factories that left China, Samsung, Apple's suppliers and the rest. The foreign policy, which he called bamboo diplomacy, firm at the root and bending in the wind, received Biden and Xi in Hanoi in the same autumn of 2023 and raised the United States to the highest tier of partnership, beside China and Russia, in the year he was too ill to travel. He was born in a village outside Hanoi in 1944, studied philology at Hanoi University and Marxism-Leninism in Moscow, spent thirty years at the party's Communist Review, editing it from 1991. He was the party's secretary for Hanoi from 2000 and chairman of the national assembly from 2006. He beat the prime minister Nguyễn Tấn Dũng, whose people and whose family's businesses were the campaign's first targets, for the leadership in 2011 and again at the congress of 2016, when Dũng was forced into retirement. He took the presidency on Trần Đại Quang's death in 2018 until a stroke in April 2019 made him give it up. The party under him was the party of the ideological campaigns of the 1950s in its language and of the WTO in its economics, with a hundred and sixty political prisoners and a cyber-security law modelled on China's. He died in a military hospital in Hanoi on 19 July 2024 at eighty. The country was given two days of mourning, and Tô Lâm was general secretary within a fortnight.
- Lived: 1944 CE – 2024 CE
- Nationality: Vietnamese
- Roles: head of state, politician
