In a speech in January 1949, Ho said that Party members had to remould and cleanse themselves, and stressed the role of self-criticism and criticism in achieving ideological unity and inner cohesion.46 At the Second National Congress of the Party in February 1951, he emphasised the need to use self-criticism and criticism to correct the mistakes made by the Party. He criticised the insufficient attention given to ideological training and inner party democracy and bemoaned the fact that self-criticism and criticism had not yet become regular habits.47 Ho pointed out that during its many years of underground activity, the Party had grown ever stronger due to the effective use of self-criticism and criticism,48 and suggested the expansion of their use to the public domain, but always under Party control:
The Party must widen the movement for criticism and self-criticism within the Party, the State organs, the mass organizations, in the press and among the people. Criticism and self-criticism must be conducted regularly, in a practical and democratic way, from top to bottom and from the bottom upwards. Lastly, there must be close control by the Party. 49
During the long years of the resistance against the French, the Party had relied for its existence on the continued support of the populace, especially peasants in rural areas. The Party made special efforts to protect the relationship by ensuring that Party cadres and members were responsive to the people's needs and by minimising Party action that might threaten this public support. One possible threat to the relationship was the arrogance and bureaucratism of some Party officials. Another was the tendency of certain cadres to use coercion instead of persuasion in dealing with matters affecting the public. To prevent these problems from damaging its credibility, the Party encouraged public criticism of the offending cadres. For example, in 1951 the Party directed basic level cadres to submit themselves to mass criticism and allowed the public to observe the cadres undergoing self-criticism.50
The manifesto of the Vietnam Workers' Party, issued in February 1951, enshrined self-criticism and criticism as the Party's law of development. The Party's statutes confirmed this and ascribed an important role to public criticism, as we can see from the following excerpt: 46 47 48 49 50
Ho Chi Minh, Selected Writings, p. 89.
Ibid., p. 119. Ibid., p. 204. Ibid., p. 119.
William Turley, "Political Participation and the Vietnamese Communist Party",
Comparative Perspective, p. 182.
30
The Vietnam Workers' Party makes criticism and self-criticism the law of its development. The Party continually develops criticism and self-criticism and encourages its members to practise it, especially criticism of high echelons by low echelons. The Party also bans all actions aimed at thwarting criticism. The Party struggles without compromise against all rightist and "leftist" [no quotes around word rightist - Ed.] tendencies and all bourgeois, petty bourgeois, feudal and other non-proletarian thoughts. The Party requires that all its members adopt the Communist philosophy o f life, stick fast to the working class standpoint and combat all manifestations of individualism. The Party encourages the masses to criticize its activities, its cadres, and its members and welcomes this criticism. The Party sincerely accepts the correct criticisms of the masses.51
From this same passage, it is also clear that the public criticism would be circumscribed by what the Party deemed to be acceptable.
The Party turned again to a campaign involving self-criticism and criticism after the Seventh Plenum of the Central Committee in March 1956. That Plenum had taken a major policy decision to shift the Party's focus from the fight for national reunification to the consolidation of the North. The decision meant that the Party would now commence the process o f socialist transform ation. This issue had generated great debate and disagreement within the Central Committee and the subsequent self-criticism and criticism drive can be interpreted as an attempt by the top leadership to build commitment to the new policy and to neutralise potential opposition.
The documents circulated for study during the campaign were Secretary-General Truong Chinh's report to the Seventh Plenum and the Plenum Resolution. These documents criticised many of the ideas and policies which had prevailed after the Geneva Agreement was signed, even describing them as "rightist".52 Yet, the policies which they criticised, including the national front policy and its em phasis on reaching an accommodation with sympathetic landlords, had been long-standing Party positions. The campaign was aimed at ensuring that cadres and members at all levels o f the Party accepted the policy reversal and implemented the associated changes. As it turned out, in calling for action against "rightists" within the Party, the campaign contributed to the turmoil and excesses of the last major phase of the land reform.
Perhaps some of the ruthlessness of the land reform can be attributed to the fact that Chinese advisers helped the Party plan and im plem ent the reform . The Chinese Communist Party was not known for its velvet glove approach to this issue. Indeed, one 51 Robert F. Turner, Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press,
1975), p. 396.