The Ideological Debate in the DRV and the Significance of the Anti-Party Affair, 1967–68

Abstract

This essay examines the links between the ideological debates in the communist world and the events surrounding the decision to stage the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam. It is based on memoirs, documents from the Public Record Office in London, and some documents from edited Vietnamese collections, as well as Vietnamese journals from the period in question. For analysts of DRV politics in the 1960s, there is still comparatively little in the way of documentary evidence to shed light on the nature of the communist leadership and its decision-making processes. This is true of the year leading up to the Tet Offensive of 1968: as David Elliott has shown in his recent study of the war in My Tho province (2003), Vietnamese accounts of this period present a contradictory and confused record. At the same time, the political events in Hanoi during the latter half of 1967, when what came to be called the `Anti-Party Affair' was revealed, have only been elucidated in unofficial memoirs and open letters from party veterans to the leadership. We know that this period was one of high tension in the communist world, when the Cultural Revolution in China was reaching its peak and relations between the USSR and China had sharply deteriorated. Yet we still know very little about how this tension may have affected policy decisions within North Vietnam. The author concludes that ideological conflicts within the North Vietnamese leadership had a strong bearing on events in 1967–68, and that they influenced not only military decisions but alsoVietnam's post-war development.