Tn c Thng
In this Vietnamese name, the family name is Tn. of the Communist Party of Vietnam.
According to Vietnamese custom, this person should
properly be referred to by the given name Thng.
Tn c Thng (August 20, 1888 March 30, 1980)
was the second and nal president of North Vietnam and
the rst president of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam
under the rule of L Dun. The position of president is
ceremonial and Thng was never a major policymaker or
even a member of the Politburo, Vietnams ruling council.
He served as president, initially of North Vietnam from
September 2, 1969, and later of a united Vietnam, until
his death in 1980. He was a key Vietnamese nationalist
and Communist political gure, was chairman of the Na-
tional Assemblys Standing Committee 19551960 and
served as the vice president to H Ch Minh from 1960
to 1969. At the time of death at age 91, he was the old-
est head of a state with the title president (subsequently
surpassed by Hastings Banda).
1 Early life
Thng was born to Tn Vn and Nguyn Th Di on
ng H Island along the Mekong River, roughly four
kilometres from Long Xuyn, the capital of An Giang
Province .[1] From 1897 to 1901, Thng received his ed-
ucation in Chinese script, history and philosophy from
a private tutor in Long Xuyn. This tutor, an anti-
colonialist, carried a heavy inuence on the early devel-
opment of Thngs political beliefs .[1] Afterwards, he
learned French at an elementary school in Long Xuyn.
Thng lived with his parents until 1906, when he moved
to Saigon.[2]
In 1919, in the Black Sea when he was with the French
Navy, Thng claimed to participate in a plot with fellow
sailors to turn over the French armored cruiser Waldeck-
Rousseau to the enemy Bolshevik revolutionaries. He
continued to participate in rebellious activities against the
French, was member of Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth
Association since 1927; and in 1929, he was imprisoned
by the French at Sai Gon, deported to Cn Sn Prison.
He remained there until 1945 and immediately rose again
into the public eye. After H Ch Minhs Viet Minh came
into power in August 1945, Thng became the member
Cochinchina Party Committee of CPV, member Admin-
istration Resistance Committee of Cochinchina and since
1946, the presiding member of the National Assembly.
In 1947, he became a member of the Central Committee
1.1 Alternative version of events
Christoph Giebel, Associate Professor of International
Studies and History at the University of Washington and
author of the book, Imagined Ancestries of Vietnamese
Communism: Ton Duc Thang and the Politics of His-
tory and Memory, relates the basic outline of the mutiny
and determines from his examination of historical evi-
dence, such as ship logs, that Thng did not participate in
a mutiny on a French ship sent to the Black Sea in 1919 to
help defeat Bolsheviks, those fabricated story that linked
Vietnamese communism with the October Revolution in
Russia and recounted across the Communist world in the
1950s. Giebel highlights disagreements over Thngs in-
volvement with a Saigon labour union in the 1920s and
the naval-yard strike there in 1925.[3][4]
2 Years with North Vietnam
2.1 Becoming a gure
Thng also served as president of the Lien Viet during the
rebellion against the French from 1946 to 1954. How-
ever, the organization was dissolved after the Geneva
Convention in 1954 which gave the Viet Minh sole con-
trol over North Vietnam. Thng then took over another
organization, the Vietnamese Fatherland Front, a Com-
munist pro-government nationalist group. Thng led the
Fatherland Front in its conquest to draw supporters from
South Vietnam. He received the Stalin Peace Award in
1955 as a result.
Thngs work with trying to win over South Vietnam also
helped lead him to becoming the Vice President of North
Vietnam under H Ch Minh in 1960. In 1967, when he
was still vice president, Thng won the Lenin Peace Prize,
a yearly prize similar to the Nobel Peace Prize, but given
out by the Soviet Union. After H Ch Minhs death in
1969, Thng served as the nal president of the indepen-
dent socialist state of North Vietnam.
2.2 Fall of Saigon
With the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, Thngs North
Vietnam captured the capital of South Vietnam, thus al-
lowing for the future reunication of North Vietnam and
1
2 5 NOTES
South Vietnam as one entity collectively known as the So-
cialist Republic of Vietnam which was formalized on July
2, 1976. Presently, April 30 is recognized as a public
holiday in Vietnam known as Reunication Day, even
though it was not until July 2 that the two countries be-
came ocially united as one nation.
3 Thng as president of Vietnam
With the end of the Vietnam War and with the South
Vietnamese government ousted, Thng was easily able
to keep his control over the unstable new nation during
the middle and late 1970s. The unied Vietnam un-
der Thng experienced early troubles, as political and
economic conditions were deteriorating and millions of
South Vietnamese were eeing the country as boat peo-
ple. As the leader of the united Socialist Republic of
Vietnam, Thng worked hard for several years on a mas-
sive reconstruction eort to rebuild both former North
and South Vietnams which were left devastated by years
of war which included special projects such as rebuilding
the industry, infrastructure, and economy.
3.1 Deposing of the Khmer Rouge
Main articles: Khmer Rouge and Sino-Vietnamese War
Troubles with the newly formed Vietnamese government
further progressed in early 1978 when Thng approached
the Soviet Union for help in deposing the Khmer Rouge
in Cambodia, which was aligned with Peoples Republic
of China (PRC). The situation seemed like a golden op-
portunity for the Soviet Union because they knew that the
Vietnamese army could easily defeat Cambodian forces.
A Vietnamese victory would weaken the only aligned na-
tion with the Peoples Republic of China in Southeast
Asia and demonstrate the superiority of being aligned
with the Soviet Union. The growing tensions between the
PRC and the Soviet Union had drastically escalated the
situation in the area. The Soviet Union was anxious about
the future outcome of a war by proxy between Vietnam
and Cambodia.
On December 25, 1978, after months of growing bor-
der conicts and an inux of Cambodians seeking refuge
in Vietnam, the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia.
By January 7, 1979, the Vietnamese had easily cap-
tured the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, and deposed
the Khmer Rouge rgime. However, the Soviet Unions
diplomatic victory was short-lived. The PRC was now
being backed by the United States, and they increasingly
showed signs of being close to war with Vietnam. The
Soviets knew that they could not go help the Vietnamese
if the PRC decided to invade Vietnam.
Not surprisingly, on February 15, 1979, the Peoples Re-
public of China ocially announced plans to invade Viet-
nam, thus ending the crucial and signicant Sino-Soviet
Treaty of Friendship, which had been signed just on the
previous day in 1950. The PRC claimed that the invasion
was as a result of mistreatment of ethnic Chinese and the
Vietnamese presence on the PRCs Spratly Islands.
On February 17, a PRC force of about 200,000 troops
had crossed into Thngs country, and they immedi-
ately started to invade Vietnamese cities and towns along
Vietnams northern border. Thng had left an army of
100,000 men to ght o the PRC, and heavy casualties
were reported from both sides. With the Chinese not
wanting to linger in Vietnam any longer, they started to
move out of the country less than a month later, on March
16. Chinas early exit from the country drew up much
confusion to who was the victor of the Sino-Vietnamese
War. Thng proclaimed that Vietnam had won the war,
while his counterpart in China, Ye Jianying, proclaimed
a Chinese victory. However, one thing is sure about the
Sino-Vietnamese Wars outcome: Thngs Vietnam was
able to successfully depose the Khmer Rouge from power
in Cambodia.
4 Death and legacy
Thng died on March 30, 1980, in Hanoi, a little more
than a year after the conclusion of the Sino-Vietnamese
War, at the age of 91 from a heart seizure and respiratory
failure. He was the oldest ever president of a country in
the world. He was succeeded by one of his vice presi-
dents, Nguyn Hu Th. He is buried in Mai Dch Ceme-
tery in the section reserved for the graves of government
leaders and famous revolutionaries.[5] Even though Thng
had been the rst president of the reunited Socialist Re-
public of Vietnam, he has not attained the same reverence
as his predecessor, H Ch Minh, had received from the
Vietnamese people. Thng served as the nations leader
during the pivotal time when North Vietnam and South
Vietnam were reunied as one. However, it was also a
time when the country showed signs of exhaustion from
30 years of wars, with the Vietnam Peoples Army en-
gaged in a long, costly war in Cambodia and Northern
border. The economy collapsed in the wake of a failed
attempt to collectivize the southern economy, some key
party members such as Bi Tn and Hong Vn Hoan de-
fected. It was under his rule that Vietnam survived the
subsidy period. Later in 1986, the Sixth Partys Congress
passed the Renovation policy which recognized the fail-
ure of collectivization and liberalized the economy, open-
ing a new chapter in Vietnams history.[6]
5 Notes
[1] Giebel, Christoph (2004). Imagined Ancestries of Viet-
namese Communism: Ton Duc Thang and the Politics of
History and Memory. Seattle: University of Washington
 3

Press. p. 168. ISBN 0-295-98429-5.

[2] Giebel, p14.

[3] (Vietnamese) Trng hp ng Tn c Thng. BBC.

2003-09-05. Retrieved 2007-12-08.

[4] Christoph Giebel (2004). Imagined Ancestries of Viet-

namese Communism. University of Washington Press.
ISBN 0-295-98429-5.

[5] Christina Schwenkel - The American War in Contempo-

rary Vietnam: Transnational ... - Page 218 2009 As
stated, this practice is generally not found in war ceme-
teries in contemporary Vietnam, with two important ex-
ceptions: Hanois Mai Dch Cemetery, which contains the
hierarchically arranged graves of government leaders and
other famous revolutionaries, including Phm Vn ng,
L Dun, and Tn c Thng. A separate section of the
cemetery is reserved for common martyrs who ...

[6] http://phapluattp.vn/2010063011282794p0c1013/
nguyen-van-linh-nguoi-cua-thoi-doi-moi.htm

6 See also
Sino-Soviet border conict

History of Vietnam
Vietnam War

7 References
Ton Duc Thang Infoplease
Ton Duc Thang Encyclopdia Britannica

Ton Duc Thang HighBeam Encyclopedia

Kelley, Liam, Book review: Imagined Ancestries of
Vietnamese Communism: Ton Duc Thang and the
Politics of History and Memory Canadian Journal of
History, Autumn 2006

8 External links
i hc Tn c Thng (Tn c Thng Univer-
sity)

Interview: Christoph Giebel on BBC

Kelley, Liam, Book review: Imagined Ancestries of
Vietnamese Communism: Ton Duc Thang and the
Politics of History and Memory Canadian Journal of
History, Autumn 2006
4 9 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

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