Vietnam’s Communist Party Gives Old-Guard Leader a New 5-Year Term

International New York Times | 27 January 2016

General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong of Vietnam, left, with Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung at the Communist Party’s national congress in Hanoi, a day before Mr. Trong’s reappointment. Credit Hoang Dinh Nam/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

HANOI, Vietnam — The Communist Party of Vietnam has chosen the incumbent general secretary as the country’s top leader for a second five-year term, the official Vietnam News Agency reported Wednesday.

The reappointment of Nguyen Phu Trong, 71, could slow the pace of Vietnam’s shift to a more open, market-oriented economy, but it is unlikely to alter its strategic balance in relations with China and the United States, analysts said.

Mr. Trong is a leader of the party’s old guard, which was trained in Soviet-style economics and has long seen neighboring China, Vietnam’s top trading partner, as a critical strategic and ideological ally. Notably, Mr. Trong appeared reluctant to criticize China when it deployed an oil rig in disputed waters in 2014.

But his visit to the White House last July underlined a growing view among party elites that developing better relations with the United States is in Vietnam’s national interest, and an essential counterweight to China’s influence in the region. Mr. Trong steered Vietnam into the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an American-led trade agreement among a dozen Pacific Rim nations that excludes China.

Vu Xuan Nguyet Hong, a former vice president of Vietnam’s Central Institute for Economic Management, said the party’s 19-member Politburo, which has more power than any single politician, was in broad agreement on the need for both domestic economic changes and better relations with the United States.

“The reforms and renovation toward the market economy will continue,” and Vietnam’s relations with the United States will improve at a steady speed, she said.

But Mr. Trong’s reappointment will send the United States-friendly prime minister, Nguyen Tan Dung, a rival who had reportedly sought the general secretary job, into not-so-early retirement later this year.

As prime minister, Mr. Dung has overseen a wave of foreign investment and cultivated warm relations with top American officials, diplomats and analysts said. He has also spoken out more forcefully than other party leaders against China’s assertive claims to territory in the South China Sea and won support from ordinary Vietnamese who believe the country needs to escape China’s orbit as a way of securing its economic independence.

When China towed a giant oil rig into contested waters of the South China Sea near Vietnam’s central coast in May 2014, anti-China demonstrations erupted in Vietnamese cities, and rare riots broke out in several industrial zones. The United States later eased a longstanding ban on lethal weapons sales to Vietnam, although Russia still supplies the vast majority of Vietnam’s military equipment.

Mr. Dung, 66, is technically barred from serving another term under party rules because he is over 65 and has already served two terms as prime minister. Mr. Trong is also ineligible because he is over the age limit, but the party has apparently granted him a special exemption, for a second time.

Several analysts predicted that the pace of Vietnam’s already sluggish economic liberalization may slow further after Mr. Dung retires this year, in part because he has a better understanding than Mr. Trong of how to communicate with foreign investors and has been more eager to shake off the party’s Marxist-Leninist ideological mantle.

Tuong Vu, a political scientist at the University of Oregon, said Mr. Trong would probably be more receptive to hard-line party apparatchiks who argue against opening the country’s state-dominated agricultural and service sectors to foreign competitors and against a draft law that would codify rights for nongovernmental associations in Vietnam.

Both changes are seen as critical to bringing Vietnam into compliance with the Trans-Pacific Partnership. If approved by its member legislatures, that deal will require Vietnam to further open its economy to foreign competition and make concessions on labor rights, on intellectual property and in other areas.

“All factions agree on a need to have more trade and investment,” Professor Vu said in a telephone interview. “But the Trong faction would resist any concessions, whereas the Dung faction would try to make the gesture of reform to keep money coming in.”

Sami Kteily, executive chairman of PEB Steel, a construction company in Ho Chi Minh City, said that the country’s membership in several recent trade agreements underlined its commitment to being an active member of the global economy.

“I think it will be business as usual,” he said. “Vietnam is a country of institutions and policies not determined by one person.”

Frederick Burke, managing partner for Vietnam at the American law firm Baker & McKenzie, said that the smooth leadership transition at this week’s party congress was encouraging because it highlighted the country’s political stability and respect for the rule of law.

“For people who live here, that’s what you want,” he said. “You don’t want a virtual civil war going on.”

In recent weeks there has been a flurry of political gossip and speculation on Vietnamese-language blogs and Facebook threads — some of it fueled by reports in the foreign news media — about an intraparty turf war between reformist and conservative party factions.

But Mr. Burke said that there was far more consensus within the Communist Party than the news media or some political observers suggest and that Mr. Trong had never shown regressive or conservative tendencies as a leader.

“People are trying to make up a stage play, but the script is actually different from the reality,” he said.