former General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam (1907–1988)
Trường Chinh (born Đặng Xuân Khu; 9 February 1907 – 30 September 1988) was a Vietnamese communist political leader and theoretician. He was one of the key figures of Vietnamese politics. He played a major role in the anti-French colonialism movement and finally after decades of protracted war in Vietnam, the Vietnamese defeated the colonial power. He was the think-tank of the Communist Party who determined the direction of the communist movement, particularly in the anti-French colonialism movement. During the transitional period in Vietnam between 1941 and 1956, Trường Chinh was the General Secretary of the Communist Party as well as the real leader of the communist party in terms of designing strategies as well as implementing them. In 1957, after the failure of the Land Reform program, he was dismissed from his post of General Secretary and had less power. Hồ Chí Minh selected Lê Duẩn to succeed him as the General Secretary and he became the most powerful person after the 1960s. However, Trường Chinh was still an influential thinker in the Party during the Second Indochina War and after the reunification of Vietnam; he was head of state of Vietnam from 1981 to 1987. Following the death of Lê Duẩn in 1986, he succeeded Duẩn as top party leader. His last vital role was to carry forward the Đổi Mới renovation that still affects Vietnam to this day.
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Our agrarian policy in the present revolutionary stage is aimed at abolishing imperialist and feudalist land ownership, in order to wipe out the feudal regime of exploitation of the landlord class. For this reason, apart from the land and property of the imperialists which we must confiscate, our policy is to confiscate, requisition, and forcibly purchase the land of the landlord class, but not to confiscate, requisition or forcibly purchase land in general upward of a certain area.
The French reactionary colonialists hoped to solve the Vietnamese problem by armed force according to their own will. But the Resistance war carried out by the Vietnamese people has shattered their illusions, The Vietnamese people are ready to wage a long struggle to overcome all difficulties and obstacles and resolutely fight all brutal plunderers and their stooges until they recover the integrity of their territory and gain complete independence, liberty and happiness.
The Machiavellian machinations of the US imperialists against Vietnam and Indochina betray a passive character on the strategic plane, being conceived in a posture of weakness and defeat and fraught with insolvable contradictions. They arouse increasing opposition from the peoples of Vietnam, Indochina, the United States and the world. They have met with initial setback and are bound to fail completely.
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Our people's patriotic war of resistance against US aggression has achieved great victories in all fields, compelling the American imperialists to unconditionally end their war of destruction against the North, withdraw part of their troops from the South and come to the four-party conference in Paris.
Since the beginning or French imperialist rule in Vietnam, the Vietnamese landlord class has relied on the imperialist forces to oppress and exploit the Vietnamese peasants still more harshly. A considerable number of peasants toil all the year round and yet do not ·have enough to eat and to wear. Under the colonialist and semi-feudal regime, when any natural calamity occurred enormous· numbers of labouring peasants would die of starvation. At the end of 1944 and early in 1945, two million of our peasants died of starvation not only due to savage exploitation by the feudal landlord class, but also because the Japanese fascists and the French imperialists brutally robbed them of their resources. This has aroused deep hatred in. the hearts of every peasant in our country.
We should ally ourselves not only with the French people, but also with all peace-loving and democratic peoples, particularly with the Chinese people, our great neighbours who are resolutely struggling for democracy, unification and independence. In a word, we must unite with all the oppressed peoples who are fighting to liberate themselves.
We admit that, because of the extremely intricate situation of our country and the relatively limited strength of the Vietnamese Revolution, it was not possible to carry out a systematic elimination of the counter-revolutionary elements on Jacobean or Bolshevik lines. The Vietnamese Revolution was not opposing only the counter-revolutionary forces at home; other forces were intervening from abroad in favour of the French reactionaries and other traitors. It was due to this that the latter were able, in certain places, and at certain moments, to equal, and even to overpower the revolutionary forces (in Saigon, for example).
Besides, the August Insurrection was a real revolution. The Vietnamese people, in bloody combat and with arms in their hands, had to struggle against the Japanese fascists to regain their freedom and independence. Immediately after this, to defend these rights, they had to shed more blood. It is by the August Revolution that the dictatorial and fascist monarchical regimes have been overthrown and the democratic republican regime set up.
The more democratic the power, the more dictatorial it must be – that is, it must exercise the democratic dictatorship of the whole people against the very small reactionary minority ready to grab back their age-old domination and hinder the march of the revolution. Not being firmly repressed, the reactionaries at home have been used by the French and international reactionaries to create difficulties for the revolutionary power and to divide our people.