Crossing Communist Borders: The Impacts of Global Protests and Liberalization Movements on North Vietnam

1956 was a tumultuous year in the communist world. A series of events revealed the tension between the communist states and their people. The most shocking was Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ denouncing Josef Stalin at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February. In China, the Hundred Flowers Campaign followed in May, Poland’s Poznań protests in June, and finally the Hungarian uprising in late October. In Vietnam, the violent land reform campaign was coming to an end, preparations in anticipation of a general election for the reunification of Vietnam began, and a peasant rebellion erupted in Quỳnh Lưu, Nghệ An Province.

In Vietnam, 1956, however, is prominently associated with the most famous and forthright intellectual dissent and reformist-criticism movement against the Vietnamese party-state, known as the Nhân Vân Giai Phẩm movement. This movement, in modern Vietnamese historiography, is often perceptively and representatively compared to the movements in China and Eastern Europe. This paper examines if and to what degree the dissent movement in Vietnam was influenced by comparable events in other communist states. It will examine key effects of the secret speech, the protests in Poland and Hungary, and the liberalization policies in China on the Vietnamese government and the intellectual dissidents. The emphasis is to understand how the flow of people, information, and ideas was viewed, accepted and or rejected by Vietnamese political leaders and intellectuals. More importantly, it explores the ways in which those aspects affected the relationship between the party-state and its people. The paper argues that domestic events in North Vietnam can only be understood in a wider, even global, context. This paper draws upon English, Chinese and Vietnamese archival sources and print media.