Party General Secretary Le Duan devoted his life to the struggle for national liberation, development and protection

Then Party General Secretary Le Duan (center) meets with workers in former Nghe Tinh province on April 22, 1979

President Tran Dai Quang wrote an article on the occasion of the 110th birth anniversary of Party General Secretary Le Duan (April 7, 1907), reviewing the late leader’s almost six decades of revolutionary activities and affirming the value of his creative mindset and strategic vision.

“Party General Secretary Le Duan was one of the unyielding revolutionary predecessors and preeminent leaders of the Party, the State and people, and also an excellent disciple of great President Ho Chi Minh,” President Quang wrote, adding that Le Duan devoted his life to the struggle for national liberation, development and protection.

He, together with the Party Central Committee led by Ho Chi Minh, applied and developed Marxism-Leninism and implemented revolutionary guidelines and strategies, which helped diversify the theory of Vietnam’s revolution and create glorious chapters in the country’s history, heralding an era of independence, freedom and socialism.

In the position of Secretary of the Party Committee in the southern region, Le Duan contributed to the second National Party Congress in February 1951, devising the strategy for the people’s war that later led Vietnam to the historic Dien Bien Phu victory against the French colonialists in 1954.

According to President Quang, with the mindset and vision of a great strategist, Le Duan drafted the outline for the revolution in the south, which analysed and predicted the situation in the south after the two-year implementation of the Geneva Accords, issued in 1954. This outline affirmed that people in the south had to fight the US and its puppet regime led by Ngo Dinh Diem to save the country and themselves.

From the third National Party Congress in September 1960, during the 26 years he served as the First Secretary and then General Secretary of the Party Central Committee, Le Duan, together with the Party Central Committee and the Politburo, developed revolutionary guidelines, strategies and methods, steering the struggle for the southern liberation, national reunification and socialism building.

His creative mindset was on show in the Ho Chi Minh Campaign in the spring of 1975, President Quang wrote.

Regarding international communist and workers’ movements, Le Duan always paid attention to enhancing solidarity among parties and revolutionary forces around the world in the struggle for peace, national independence, democracy and socialism.

He made important theoretical contributions to seeking a path to socialism suitable for Vietnam. They include the viewpoints on national independence associated with socialism, the mechanism of the Party’s leadership, the State’s management and people’s ownership and promoting socialist-oriented industrialisation.

When the Party launched the reforms of economic management at the sixth meeting of the fifth Party Central Committee, Le Duan underlined the Party and State’s efforts to address bureaucratic management and the state-subsidy mechanism, complete a new management mechanism and improve labour productivity and economic effectiveness.

In a fluid global and domestic situation, “Party General Secretary Le Duan’s creative mindset and strategic vision remain valuable in both theory and reality and are correct orientations for the planning and guidance of the successful implementation of the Party’s reform policy in the new stage of revolution,” President Quang concluded.