With the 10th National Party Congress looming up in mid-April, communist leaders are burying their differences to formulate a plan capable of lifting Vietnam out of underdevelopment while ensuring that the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) retains full control.

Convened every five years, the congress elects top party leaders in the central committee and politburo, and fills top government jobs starting with those of president, prime minister and national assembly chairman. The congress, scheduled from April 18 to 25, is taking place at a time when Vietnam is negotiating WTO membership and making efforts to integrate better with the global economy. Vietnam is also preparing to host a summit of the ASEAN bloc, which includes economic successes such as Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia. Other members are Indonesia, the Philippines, Brunei, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar.

Members of the CPV central committee and politburo are divided into two camps. Although all agree that economic restructuring is the way forward, some favour China’s formula of an open economy run by a tight political dictatorship while the others think that a market economy in a more democratic setting will deliver the goods. The divergence has been serious enough for the central committee to put the issue before the people and ask them to contribute ideas to a draft report that will be presented to the congress. Since February, officials, cadres, revolution veterans, intellectuals, students, and overseas Vietnamese have been responding to generate more than 1,500 ‘ideas’.

The central committee will incorporate these ideas into a 22-page political report, that may help the Congress draw up sound policies and measures capable of pulling the country out of a morass of underdevelopment and corruption.

Despite the achievements of the last five years, seen in the 7.5 per cent annual GDP growth rate and commendable progress in hunger and poverty eradication, Vietnam remains one of the world’s poorest countries, notorious for its red tape, corruption and transparency deficit. To address these problems, the CPV draft report suggests that in the next five years there should be efforts to “improve the party’s leadership capacity and fighting spirit; develop the strength of the whole nation and accelerate the reform process’’. The goal should be to lift the country out of the underdeveloped group and create the foundations for ‘’an industrialised nation by 2020’’.

In an article published in the Nhan Dan, the CPV organ, former politburo member and leading theorist Nguyen Van Binh reaffirmed that in order to carry out its “historic mission”, the CPV should ‘’firmly follow the path of Marxism-Leninism and remain the pioneering force of the working class.” But Le Hong Ha, a former high-ranking CPV member, remarked that terms like “building a socialist country with market orientation” did not make sense because ‘’the country is in reality neither socialist nor market oriented’’.

One word that recurs in the ideas is ‘democracy’. The word also appears in several articles written by former prime minister VoVan Kiet who charges the CPV with undemocratic practices and diverging from the late Ho Chi Minh’s ideal of building Vietnam into a democratic country. The 10th Congress will decide which way Vietnam will now head. — IPS