Nguyễn Văn Linh
Nguyễn Văn Linh was the general secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party who launched doi moi, renovation, at the sixth congress in December 1986, the turn from the collectivised, rationed, hyperinflating economy of the decade after victory to the market socialism that made Vietnam one of the fastest-growing countries in the world. He was seventy-one, had been the party's man in the south through the American war, had been dropped from the politburo in 1982 for the same ideas, and was the compromise the party turned to when Le Duan died and the old guard admitted the country was going hungry. He was born in the north in 1915, joined the youth movement at fourteen, and spent ten of the years before 1945 in the French prison on Con Dao, where the party ran its school. After 1945 he was sent south and stayed there for thirty years, running the party's underground in Saigon and the Mekong delta and, in the war, the Central Office for South Vietnam that directed the Viet Cong. After 1975 he was the party chief of Ho Chi Minh City and watched the socialist transformation of the south, the nationalisation of the Chinese traders' businesses in 1978 and the boat people who followed, and then, in the early 1980s, the fence-breaking by which the city's factories and cooperatives quietly went back to the market. He protected it, lost his politburo seat for it, and was brought back in 1985 when the currency reform of that year produced inflation of seven hundred per cent. Doi moi as the congress adopted it was cautious on paper and radical in effect. The family farm was restored, prices freed, state enterprises made to pay their way, private business and foreign investment legal, and Vietnam a rice exporter by 1989 after being an importer in 1987. He wrote a column in the party newspaper under the initials N.V.L., things that must be done now, attacking corruption and bureaucracy, and let the press loose for two years before the Tiananmen killings and the fall of the European regimes frightened the party. He pulled the army out of Cambodia in 1989 and began the normalisation with China that the 1991 congress completed. He retired at that congress, at seventy-six, to be an adviser, and died in Ho Chi Minh City in 1998.
- Lived: 1915 CE – 1998 CE
- Nationality: Vietnamese
- Roles: general secretary, politician
