On the morning of 21 March, the National Assembly of Vietnam passed a resolution to dismiss Vo Van Thuong from his post as president and resign as a deputy to the National Assembly. According to the Vietnamese Constitution, the President of the People's Republic of China is the Chairman of the National Defense and Security Committee, and when the National Assembly dismisses the President of the People's Republic of China, Vo Van Thuong will no longer be the Chairman of the National Defense and Security Committee. Therefore, in terms of official positions, Vu Van Thanh is only a party member, and it is basically certain that he will leave the core decision-making circle in Vietnam.
Vo Van Thuong has only been in the presidency for just over a year, and his resignation is also the record for the shortest tenure of a Vietnamese president. As the second driver of Vietnam's "troika" power structure, the Vietnamese president seems to have a bad feng shui after Tran Dai Quang died of illness, Nguyen Xuan Phuc was not able to land safely, and now Vo Van Thanh has a quick accident, resulting in Vietnamese Vice President Vo Thi Anh Xuan also set a record of two consecutive temporary succession as president.
All of this has something to do with the relatively loose power structure of the Vietnamese Party, which has a deep natural and historical foundation and a relatively unique influence.
Vietnam itself has two major geographical tectonic plates, the Red River Delta in the north and the Mekong Delta in the south, with the Truong Son Mountains in the middle as a natural geographical barrier. The northwest and west are mostly high mountains and plateaus, so they are naturally suitable for the formation of two independent social plates.
The reunification of Vietnam was actually due to the fact that Vietnam was organizationally sinicized, so that the north of Vietnam could gain a tighter organizational capacity, and eventually it could gradually seize the Hindu states in the south by relying on agricultural areas. Of course, it took more than 700 years for Vietnam to cross this natural geographical divide until the complete extinction of the Cham in 1697. The arrival of the French in modern times did not interrupt this unity, and they even relied heavily on the more "educated" Vietnamese to control Laos and Cambodia, so that Vietnam itself as a cultural community was not weakened by the colonizers.
After independence, the Workers' Party of Vietnam established a socialist regime in the north, while the southern party was more guerrilla activities due to the repression of the United States and the South Vietnamese government, and in this process, the Workers' Party of Vietnam formed two major power centers with the Long March in the north and Le Duan in the south as the core, and thus until the reunification of Vietnam in 1975, the Workers' Party of Vietnam formed a relatively clear factional division, and the southern faction gradually gained the upper hand after the death of Ho Chi Minh under the general righteousness of reunification, until Le Duan died of illness in 1986. At this stage, the power of the southern faction was won by Le Duan's opposition to the Geneva Accords and his active preparations for reunification.
The international environment also has a profound impact on Vietnam's political factions. The active promotion of reunification was the main basis for the southern faction to control the situation, and there were many pro-Chinese factions in the Vietnamese party who participated in the revolution in China. The Southern faction was more pro-Soviet at the time, which naturally made the internal faction of the Workers' Party of Vietnam more pronounced after the Sino-Soviet conflict. By 1986, Vietnam's reform and opening up was in fact the main sign of the revival of the northern faction, and the proponent of this policy, Nguyen Van Linh, was selected by the Long March. As the Soviet Union, which was closely followed by the Southerners at that time, began Gorbachev's "new thinking", many Southerners also transformed into pro-American factions while accepting reform and opening up.
To this day, although the outside world often uses the North and South factions to divide Vietnamese politics, in reality Vietnamese politics is much more complicated than that. In fact, Vietnam's main leaders have interests in both the North and the South, both have their resumes and experiences, and they all have supporters. A typical example of Vu Van Thanh was born in Ho Chi Minh City, but he was heavily used by Nguyen Phu Trong from the "north", and the Phuoc Son Group (Tập đoàn Phúc Sơn), which caused him to have an accident, was actually mainly in the central part of the country. In the final analysis, the difference between the Southern and Northern factions is actually limited and not absolute, it is only a reference invented by outsiders, and this difference will become smaller and smaller as the construction of the Vietnamese state is perfected.
This nested model can provide a stable foundation for the Communist Party of Vietnam, which has a good effect on maintaining the unity of Vietnam itself. Otherwise, given the geography of Vietnam, if a political faction has its own economic space, population clusters, and social networks, it will undoubtedly divide the political community. It should be said that Vietnam really avoided this kind of problem, and this is their solution.
Of course, the Communist Party of Vietnam has historically lacked a core, and Ho Chi Minh is just a role similar to the "co-leader", and the internal factions have always been relatively prominent, and the "four troikas" of core power are relatively unique. This structure also implies some characteristics that are different from others.
First, the Communist Party of Vietnam will have more voices, because there is no more authority to suppress. There is also a greater institutional need within the party to ensure the balance of power between factions and to avoid people trying to upset the table. This is also the reason why some "Viet et Cong" people have said that Vietnam seems to be following the "road of democratization", although in fact Vietnam is far from following the liberal democratic system of the United States, and a little more freedom of speech will not be exchanged for substantive benefits.
Second, it is more difficult to form a joint force within the Vietnamese party, so many problems are actually difficult to solve. For example, there is the issue of corruption, and there are some macroeconomic policies. Vietnam has not yet industrialized and entered the real estate boom, which is actually very bad for the economy in the long run, but the fragmentation of the Vietnamese party will make this problem unsolvable, and it will be easier for external forces such as international capital to penetrate. Everyone knows that there is a problem, but it is easy for no one to solve the dilemma.
Third, having more factions makes the policy more unstable. The previous political feud between Nguyen Phu Trong and Nguyen Tan Dung led directly to the 2014 South China Sea crisis and the massive destruction of Chinese companies, and there is no guarantee that such incidents will not happen again in the future. With Wu Wenxian's resignation, it is uncertain whether there will be a deeper struggle.
The factions within the Viet Cong are far beyond the simplistic division between the North and the South, but the relative dispersion is clear. The question of how to choose the presidency is still an interesting question, and it is unclear how it will go. If the "Troika" returns to the "troika" structure, it will be a more noteworthy change in the power structure.