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significant changes to the membership of Party committees. Between 30 and 40% of Party committee members were newly elected, many of them were young, and some 20- 30% had postgraduate degrees or were college graduates.20 From 1982 to 1985, the Party promoted or reassigned as many as 40% of the ministers, vice-ministers and other cadres holding senior positions. Among leading cadres in enterprises, corporations, staff departments, line departments and institutes, the replacement rate ranged between 40 and 50 per cent.21 Perhaps such changes in the state apparatus represented efforts by the top leadership to achieve a better match between the skills of individual leaders and their area of responsibility. However, if one looks at the Soviet practice, especially under Krushchev, of regularly reshuffling officials to create dependency on the top leadership and prevent challenges to that leadership, one could well ask whether the Vietnamese leadership also had such ulterior motives for regular reshuffles.
In conclusion, by the mid-1980s, the Party was undergoing a process of leadership change directed from the top but also responsive to pressure from increasingly powerful interest groups below.
Recruitment
Parallel with efforts to ensure a smooth leadership succession at the top, the Party was also concerned to ensure that a sufficient number of new recruits were coming into the Party at the grassroots level. According to Le Due Tho, more than 375,000 people joined the Party in the five years before the Fifth Congress in 1982. Over 85% of them came from the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union. Altogether, 39,766 new Party chapters had been formed since the Fourth Party Congress in 1976, taking the total to almost
150,000 Party chapters.22
The Party was particularly keen to increase its recruitment of women, manual labourers, members of ethnic minorities and young people. Of course, the Party's ability to increase its representation amongst these sectors in the community would enhance its legitimacy. As a Marxist-Leninist party committed to the vanguard role of the working class, the Vietnamese Communist Party must have been embarrassed by the fact that workers comprised only a small proportion of its membership. Accordingly, it took every opportunity to publicise any progress in the recruitment of workers. A newpaper article on the recruitment of 5,000 people into the Party in Ho Chi Minh City in 1984
20 NhanDan, 8 April 1983 (BBC SWB FEf7337/B/6, 19.3.83).
21 Tap Chi Cong San, No.6, (June 1985), pp. 39-46 (JPRS-SEA-85-130, 27 August 1985), pp. 3040. 22 Hanoi Home Service 0400 gmt, 2 April 1982 (BBC SWB FE/7001/C/6, 14.4.82).
focussed on the fact that 67.5% of the recruits in industrial enterprises were workers directly involved in production.23
The Party had a credibility problem as far as Vietnamese youth were concerned. While most of the new Party members came from the Communist Youth Union, the Party was finding that the younger generation did not share the same revolutionary fervour as their forebears and they did not seem as interested in the Party's work. It may not be stretching the point to say that they just did not care much for the Party itself. Essentially, the youth were disillusioned. Many of them could not find jobs, even when they had university qualifications and the Party seemed to offer little prospect of future improvements in their situation. They tended to be cynical about the reasons why other youth entered the Party, believing them to be opportunists, and they were careful not to "appear to be too thick with the party members".24 Even within the Party, younger members did not see eye to eye with their elders, a situation which was attributed to the age gap and the very different contexts within which the two groups had grown up. No doubt, the older members believed that their younger colleagues did not appreciate the sacrifices that they and the Party had made to achieve Vietnam's independence and reunification. For their part, the youth probably felt that the sacrifices were to no avail if the Party could not now "manage the peace" and deliver tangible improvements in the people's standard of living.
There was resentment amongst young people about the Party entry requirement that they provide full details on personal history forms of any "errors" committed against the Party by their parents or relatives. They felt that they should not be held responsible for their relatives' actions. Predictably, this problem arose frequently in the south. Recruitment of Party members there was obstructed by very rigorous analyses of candidates' political background. For example, the Party theoretical journal Tap Chi
Cong San reported in 1978 on the complex process that recruits to the Party's Youth
Union had to go through:
23 NhanDan, 31 January 1985 (JPRS-SEA-85-061, 16.4.85), pp. 122-123. According to Vietnam News Agency,
12% o f the 5000 new recruits were workers (VNA, 3 February 1985; BBC SWB FE/7867/B/5, 5.2.85). Elsewhere, it was reported that by 1985 Ho Chi Minh City had 1,953 basic Party organisations and nearly 54,000 Party members, more than 50% of whom had been admitted recently in various localities of the city. This compared with about 4,000 Party members in 102 Party chapters in the early days after the end o f the war in 1975 (Hanoi Home Service 2205 gmt, 3 June 1985; BBC SWB FE/7967/B/5, 13.6.85)
24 Hoang Ngoc Ha, "Some Opinions on Training and Educating Youth Union Members and Recommending them to the Party."Thanh Nien, N o.2 (February 1983), pp. 13-15.
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In some localities, new Youth Union members must go through six levels of scrutiny — Youth Union subchapter, youth group chapter, party chapter, village youth chapter committee, village party committee and district youth union chapter . . . The responsible comrades in those localities usually argue that they must be very vigilant and careful because the political and social situation in the south is very complicated; there are too many people related to the former regime and the time for testing them since liberation is still insufficient.2^
In 1983, 50 per cent of basic Party organisations at the precinct and district level and one third of the Party organisations in the various enterprises in the south did not admit any new members. When this was brought to the notice of senior Party leaders, they confirmed that the "wrong concept" of political involvement had been used. A subsequent organisation congress in Ho Chi Minh City Party in early 1984 criticised the "conservative" and "narrowminded" thinking behind this approach and called for the stepping up of the recruitment effort.26 Nevertheless, the Party's tendency to screen out individuals who were even remotely suspect politically probably turned away many people who could have brought considerable skills and capability to bear on Vietnam's socioeconomic problems.
There was, indeed, a continuous tension between the Party's desire for members who were politically reliable and the country’s desperate need for officials with economic management and other specialist skills. Ideally, the Party wanted new Party recruits to have specialist skills as well as the revolutionary qualities of a "good" cadre."27 This combination was not easy to achieve in practice. Certain elements in the Party believed that revolutionary qualities were more important and they complained when recruitment practices emphasised the cadre's level of knowledge and capability while neglecting these other qualities.28 As earlier statistics on the changing composition of the Central Committee show, however, gradually the proportion of high-ranking cadres with economic management or other technical skills did grow.
Tension between the centre and periphery
Historical factors have created a continuous tension in the Vietnamese Communist Party between the central organisation and its branches in the provinces. During the long years of resistance against the French, the Party was forced to operate clandestinely. It was often difficult for widely dispersed groups of Party members to remain in contact and this
Tap Chi Cong San, (November 1978), pp. 93-95, cited in Turley, Vietnamese Communism in Comparative Perspective, p. 196.