Communist Party of Vietnam

The party traces its history to the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League founded by Nguyen Ai Quoc in 1925 with Comintern funding. After the Kuomintang destroyed its headquarters in Guangdong in 1928 the league split: on 17 June 1929 delegates from Tonkin founded the Communist Party of Indochina in Hanoi, and late that year a rival faction in Saigon declared itself the Communist Party of Annam. A third group, the Communist League of Indochina, grew out of the New Viet Revolutionary Party. On 3 February 1930 the two parties and individual members of the league merged in Hong Kong to form the Communist Party of Vietnam. According to the Vietnamese-language source, the unification conference sat from 6 January to 8 February and the league formally joined on 24 February. At the first Central Committee meeting in Hong Kong in October 1930 the party, at the Comintern's request, renamed itself the Indochinese Communist Party and elected Tran Phu its first general secretary.

In 1930–1931 the party led the Nghe-Tinh Soviet movement, but French repression killed about 1,300 people, and Tran Phu and other Central Committee members were arrested or killed. The party was rebuilt under Le Hong Phong in 1935, and Ha Huy Tap became general secretary the following year. Nguyen Ai Quoc was removed from the leadership in the early 1930s, criticised for using nationalism. In the mid-1930s the party's Saigon cells published the paper La Lutte with the Trotskyists and ran joint election lists. After the failed Cochinchina uprising of 1940 most of the Central Committee, including Nguyen Van Cu and Ha Huy Tap, were executed, and Truong Chinh, Pham Van Dong and Vo Nguyen Giap emerged as the new leadership. Ho Chi Minh returned in February 1941 and founded the Viet Minh; party membership in 1944 is estimated at 2,000 to 3,000.

In August 1945 the Viet Minh exploited the vacuum after Japan's surrender to launch a nationwide uprising that forced Bao Dai to abdicate, and on 2 September Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Around this time Trotskyists and independent nationalists were hunted down under the direction of Tran Van Giau. Under Allied occupation the party declared its own dissolution on 11 November 1945 and operated as the "Association for the Study of Marxism in Indochina", while in reality continuing to lead the government in secret. War with France began at the end of 1946, and at the Second Congress in Tuyen Quang in February 1951 the party re-emerged as the Workers' Party of Vietnam and separated its Lao and Cambodian sections. From 1953 it carried out land reform on the Chinese model; the Vietnamese-language source says 810,000 hectares were distributed to 2 million peasant households but that many people were wrongly denounced and died. Victory at Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva Conference of 1954 left it in control of the north above the 17th parallel.

The Third Congress in Hanoi in 1960 set the tasks of building socialism in the north and "liberating" the south, and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam was founded the same year, led by the party's southern branch under the name People's Revolutionary Party. South Vietnam collapsed on 30 April 1975, the country was formally reunified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam on 2 July 1976, and at the Fourth Congress in December 1976 the Workers' Party merged with the People's Revolutionary Party and took back the name Communist Party of Vietnam; the congress represented 1,553,500 members. The Sixth Congress of 1986 launched Đổi Mới and the "socialist-oriented market economy", and in 1988 the party absorbed the Socialist and Democratic parties to become the only party. Article 4 of the constitution guarantees its leadership, and the Tenth Congress of 2006 allowed members to engage in private business.