Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
- during the period 1924–26, when the communists and Chang Kai-shek collaborated in China's nationalist movement.
- "The Viet Minh Executive Committee, or Tongbo, is the real repository of power in Vietnam territory. The influential government paper, National Salvation (Cuu Quoc), is the organ of the Tongbo and reflects the line of the government. A majority of the Tongbo members are believed to be former members of the dissolved Indochinese Communist Party. Within the mass nationalist movement, the communists are undoubtedly the most cohesive political factor. President Ho Chi Minh is a communist but has great prestige as a nationalist leader among the mass of Vietnamese. He is the outstanding political personality in Indochina. He plays down his past communist connections, emphasizes the nationalistic aspects of his program, and is popularly considered a man above parties.
- "The Viet Minh exercises its control over the mass nationalist movement through a variety of 'national welfare' organizations of women, youth, peasants, soldiers, etc., which in their totality embrace most of the population of Vietnam. Hoang Quoc Viet, the General Secretary of the Viet Minh, claims that the organization has a total membership of nine million..."
The collapse of the Chinese nationalists in 1949 reverberated within the Vietnamese nationalist movements. The Kuomintang-oriented parties — principally the VNQDD — were severely discredited, and the exile movements in China dispersed. The DRV began to shift into the communist bloc in search of material support, and there was a concomitant further leftward movement within the Viet Minh. By 1951, the Communist Party was "legalized," The Lao Dong Party (Dang Lao Dong Viet Nam, or Vietnamese Workers' Party) thereafter became the dominant political power within the DRV, The Lao Dong Party was expressly Marxist-Leninist, and proudly claimed an unbroken lineage to the Indochinese Communist Party founded by Ho Chi Minh, including leadership of all the major nationalist "front" movements through 1951. Vo Nguyen Giap explained in 1961 that:
- "The Vietnamese people's war of liberation was victorious because we had a wide and firm National United Front...organized and led by the Party of the working class: the Indochinese Communist Party, now the Viet Nam Workers' [Lao Dong] Party. In the light of the principles of Marxism-Leninism...the Party found a correct solution to the problems..."60
The Lao Dong Party official history has credited communist machination for the key developments in Vietnamese history through 1951:
