Nguyen Phu Trong, who led Vietnam’s outreach and crackdowns, dies at 80 (2024)

On the world stage, Mr. Trong was seen as an artful practitioner of Vietnam’s “bamboo diplomacy” — called so for bending in different directions — as the country navigated ties with its most important economic partners, China and the United States, while also building bonds with nations such as India and Russia.

His hold within Vietnam was less finessed. His anti-corruption drive attempted to burnish public trust in the Communist Party and its stewardship of Vietnam’s economy, one of the most dynamic in the region, with sectors that include a growing start-up culture.

At the same time, Mr. Trong tightened the state’s grip on other freedoms. He oversaw hard-line Communist Party directives aimed at the media, civil society groups and internal political challenges.

In May, police arrested Nguyen Van Binh, an official in the Labor Ministry who had advocated for independent trade unions. He was charged with disclosing state secrets during talks with U.N. envoys, but many rights activists interpreted the prosecution as punishment for his reformist views.

Since the Vietnam War era, the country’s political leadership (then North Vietnam) developed as a collective system among the Communist Party general secretary, the president, prime minister and the top-ranking member of the National Assembly. Mr. Trong asserted his influence in ways rarely seen.

He was elected as the party’s general secretary in 2011 and reelected five years later. After the death of President Tran Dai Quang in 2018, Mr. Trong took on the presidency as well — making him head of the party and state. Only a few others, including North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, held both titles at once.

In 2021, Mr. Trong left the presidency but was reelected by the party as general secretary for a third term, the first leader in more than three decades to serve more than two terms. After the vote by party members, the 76-year-old Mr. Trong said he was “not in great health” and preferred to rest but would honor the decision to have him remain party head.

When Mr. Trong hosted President Biden in Hanoi last September, the White House carefully calibrated its talks. Both nations value their economic links — the United States is Vietnam’s top export market — and U.S. policymakers regard Vietnam as an important regional buffer against Chinese power in Southeast Asia.

Amid the outreach, however, Biden called attention to Mr. Trong’s strongman style. “I also raised the importance of respect for human rights as a priority for both my administration and the American people,” Biden told journalists. “And we’ll continue … our candid dialogue on that regard.”

Human rights advocates and others have been more outspoken. Project 88, a watchdog group that monitors Vietnam, portrayed Mr. Trong as presiding over a “police state [that] has imprisoned scores of human rights activists and dissenters, while shutting down the only independent journalists’ association” in a country of nearly 100 million people.

Project 88 estimated nearly 200 people had been jailed for political reasons under Mr. Trong’s rule, including environmental activists, journalists and trade unionists. Mr. Trong’s one-party state also successfully pressured tech companies such as Meta to scrub criticism of party leaders from its platforms.

Still, for many in Vietnam, Mr. Trong’s gains in foreign policy and the anti-corruption campaigns are viewed with favor as the centerpieces of his legacy, said Khang Vu, a scholar of Vietnamese affairs at Boston College.

“You cannot deny that there were political motivations behind some of the corruption cases as a way to keep the party in line and Trong in control,” he said in an interview. “Yet it’s also clear that many officials and businesspeople act with far more caution now, knowing that there can be consequences.”

The corruption-hunting began after Mr. Trong started his second term as party leader in 2016. Within four years, more than 100 Communist Party members, including some top Politburo figures, had been disciplined or criminally charged on counts of graft, illegal business deals and other misdeeds.

In a speech, Mr. Trong compared the purges to a “burning furnace,” which was adopted as the name of the anti-corruption drive. Probes touched military officers, banking magnates and highly placed political figures.

The information minister, Truong Minh Tuan, was fired in 2018 and sentenced to 14 years in prison for behind-the-scenes dealmaking in the purchase of a television station. His predecessor, Nguyen Bac Son, received a life sentence in 2019 for receiving an estimated $3 million in kickbacks.

One case reached as high as the president’s office.

Top deputies of President Nguyen Xuan Phuc were placed under criminal investigation for alleged power abuse during the pandemic, including claims they took bribes for seats aboard chartered flights to repatriate Vietnamese citizens stranded abroad during lockdowns.

Phuc was ordered by the Communist Party to resign in January 2023 and was replaced by Mr. Trong’s ally, Vo Van Thuong. Thuong resigned a year later following a terse Communist Party statement saying he “had shortcomings which affected public opinion and the reputation of the party, state and himself.”

In another inquest backed by Mr. Trong, the chief executive of a health-care company, Viet A, acknowledged bribing officials for contracts to sell substandard coronavirus test kits to hospitals. The scandal led to the arrests in June 2022 of the health minister and a former government minister of science and technology.

Zachary Abuza, a professor at the National War College in Washington, described the corruption-fighting as a way for Mr. Trong to consolidate power and quash other centers of influences.

“This is bare knuckled politics, as elites seek to consolidate their wealth and power,” Abuza wrote in a commentary for Radio Free Asia. “The days of collective leadership are gone.”

‘Peasant’ upbringing

Nguyen Phu Trong was born in a rural district outside Hanoi on April 14, 1944. His official state biography described his early years as those of a “poor peasant.”

In 1967, he received a degree in linguistics from Vietnam National University in Hanoi and then applied for membership in the Communist Party. He was accepted into the party in 1968 as the Vietnam War was escalating.

He served in various roles involving enforcement and interpretation of Communist Party doctrine over the next three decades, including editor of a top party mouthpiece, the Communist Review, from 1991 to 1996. Earlier, he had been sent to study in Moscow, receiving a doctorate in history from the Academy of Sciences in 1983.

He was groomed for leadership after becoming part of the Politburo in 1997 and served as chairman of the National Assembly from 2006 to 2011.

Soon after being named party general secretary, he made a visit to China that included talks with President Hu Jintao. Mr. Trong attempted to avoid friction with Beijing while also noting his efforts to strengthen ties with the United States. Mr. Trong urged dialogue over the South China Sea, which Beijing claims as its territory but is seen by Washington as part of China’s efforts to expand its military reach in the region.

Then, in the span of four months in 2015, Mr. Trong made officials visits to China and the United States, where he met with President Barack Obama in talks that included greater economic cooperation.

Mr. Trong struck a tone of realpolitik in an address to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, saying he recognized the interpretations of political freedoms and expression differed between the two countries. “But we should not let human rights issues hinder the relationship between the two countries,” he said.

In a further diplomatic straddle between East and West, Mr. Trong hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin in June in a show of Vietnam’s efforts to strike a neutral position on the war in Ukraine.

Mr. Trong was married to Ngo Thi Man, and they had two children. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.

Nguyen Thanh Giang, a Vietnamese analyst at the Singapore-based ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute think tank, said Mr. Trong’s zeal to fight corruption also forced a hard look at Vietnam under one-party rule.

The campaign “was meant to repair the system,” Giang said, “but in fact has exposed the cancer of corruption and political decay of the regime.”

Rebecca Tan contributed to this report.