Thought Control in Vietnam: The Party and Its Intellectuals

By D. R. Ashworth · November 26, 2024 · Updated October 18, 2026 · 4 min read

• Vietnam and Laos
• Censorship and Propaganda
• Camps and Repression

Vietnam is “a one-party state, dominated for decades by the ruling Communist Party of Vietnam,” and its authorities “have engaged in one of the widest-ranging crackdowns on dissent in decades.” Freedom House rates the country Not Free and gives it 1 point out of 4 for academic freedom (Freedom House, 2025). The Party’s control of what scholars, writers and students may think is not new. It runs from the first years of communist rule in the North to the jailing of university lecturers today.

Nhân Văn–Giai Phẩm, 1956–1960

In 1956, in the wake of Stalin’s death, intellectuals in North Vietnam formed a political protest movement known as Nhân Văn–Giai Phẩm. The historian Peter Zinoman, who has studied its publications closely, describes it — in fact a relatively timid strain of the “reform communism” seen elsewhere in the bloc, not the robust dissident force it is often thought to be (Zinoman, 2011).

The regime treated it as a threat all the same. On 19 January 1960 the People’s Court of Hanoi staged a show trial of five people accused of taking part in the movement. The activist Nguyễn Hữu Đang and the writer Thụy An were found guilty and sentenced to fifteen years in prison (Zinoman, 2016).

“Re-education” without trial

In 1961 the Standing Committee of North Vietnam’s National Assembly adopted Resolution 49, which allowed people the authorities did not charge with any specific crime to be sent for “re-education” for three years, a period that could be extended. The decision was taken by a People’s Committee; “no judicial bodies are involved in making this decision” (Amnesty International, 1981).

The Party’s own philosopher

Even loyal Marxists were not safe. Hoàng Minh Chính was trained at the higher Party school in Moscow and in 1960 became head of the Institute of Philosophy in Hanoi. His support for peaceful coexistence between East and West marked him as a “revisionist.” Between July and December 1967 he and about thirty other Hanoi officials and military officers were secretly arrested in what became known as the “anti-Party affair.” The charges were never made public; a seven-man Party committee with no legal status tried and convicted them. Chính spent twelve years in prison and six more under house arrest or restricted residence before his death in 2008 (Quinn-Judge, openDemocracy).

After 1975: the camps

After the fall of South Vietnam in April 1975, tens of thousands of former members of South Vietnam’s armed forces and administration were detained without charge or trial for “re-education,” many still held years later. When Amnesty International visited in December 1979, its delegation also raised the cases of writers and scholars detained without trial: Hồ Hữu Tường, a 70-year-old “nationalist politician, scholar and writer” arrested in 1977 and held in a re-education camp; and the writer and journalist Nguyễn Trần Huyến, held since June 1978 without formal charge. The delegation was not allowed to meet Hồ Hữu Tường, or Duyên Anh, another prisoner held in the same camp (Amnesty International).

Today: lecturers in the dock

Vietnamese university students must still take courses in Marxism-Leninism, Ho Chi Minh Thought and the Party’s revolutionary doctrine, which “serve as ideological and methodological foundations” for their studies. In a 2024 survey by the historian Huy Trieu Ha, 64 percent of history students reported that, although they read a range of views on the Vietnam War, they reached their conclusions from a Marxist-Leninist perspective; students, Ha writes, “are obligated” to do so. Students who voice dissent risk being labelled “anti-government” and may face “loss of academic opportunities, or even arrest and imprisonment” (Ha, 2025).

Lecturers face the same risk:

• Phạm Minh Hoàng, a former mathematics lecturer in Ho Chi Minh City, spent 17 months in prison for writings critical of the government. In May 2017 the president stripped him of his citizenship, and in June he was deported to France — the first known case of Vietnam revoking citizenship for political views. Human Rights Watch called it “a blatantly illegal, rights violating act” (RFA).
• Phạm Xuân Hào, a lecturer at Cần Thơ University, was sentenced in 2019 to twelve months in prison for “abusing democratic rights and freedoms to infringe upon state interests.” According to prosecutors, he had used Facebook to “publish pessimistic information about Vietnam” (Endangered Scholars Worldwide).

Why it matters

Much in Vietnam has changed since 1975, but not the Party’s claim to decide what may be thought. The pattern set in 1960 still holds: intellectuals may work, teach and publish within limits the Party draws, and those who cross them, whether loyal Marxists or critics, are tried, re-educated, imprisoned or expelled. A university system in which students must reach the Party’s conclusions is not a system of free inquiry.

Further reading on this site

• The Hundred Flowers Campaign — China’s purge of intellectuals in 1957, a year after Vietnam’s.
• Cuba’s exodus and Leaving Cuba — another communist state that drove its critics abroad.
• North Korea’s information blockade — the extreme of thought control.
• All articles on Vietnam and Laos and on censorship and propaganda.