NEWS ANALYSIS, MAY 12, 2001.

The Vietnam Communist Party (VCP) Ninth National Congress was over, leaving red banners and banderoles along with large posters praising the Party and welcoming the 9^th Congress on Hanoi streets for a few more days. Party committees at all levels are conducting conferences for planning to implement the 9th Congress' Resolution.

The congress had been scheduled for late March. Because of disagreement within the party leadership, it was rescheduled for late April. The situation is open to conjectures based on tidbits from sources close to the innermost circle of the Party.

Most of the Vietnamese in working class do not pay much attention to the party congresses. Old farmers have been living through at least 7 congresses with their humble hopes that have died away not long after each congress. This time, the young in post-war generations might have the same hopes, but once again the dim glow of expectation quickly disappeared.

The 9th Congress does not respond to the people's simplest hopes. No new policies or changes that the poor have wished for decades were initiated. The most significant decisions of the Congress are on the VCP top posts.

The Party Central Committee shrank from 170 down to 150 members. Its Politburo size was reduced to 15 from 19 members. The Politburo's Standing Committee of five powerful members, an institute holding authority sometimes even larger than the whole Politburo, was replaced by the newly designed Politburo's Secretariat with much less competence. And seen as the more significant, the "Board of Advisors" that had existed since the 8th Party Congress in 1997 where the three former leaders Do Muoi, Le Duc Anh and Vo Van Kiet enjoyed the true supreme authority, was abolished.

It seems that the VCP is seeking for the new size of Party top leadership with fewer members and a smaller Politburo without granting too much power to a small group of leaders in it standing committee. All is done probably to facilitate and to simplify the decision making. The party statistics showed increasing number of its members. So top organizations should have expanded instead. Since 1950, VCP Politburo has grown from the original 13 to 19 members prior to this 9th Congress.

The new General Secretary Nong Duc Manh selected by the 9th Congress, is from an ethnic minority, the Tay. He was born and grown up in a remote village of the mountainous province of Bac Can where the Tay tribes outnumber the others. He was born in 1940. In the last decade or even further back, rumors in North Vietnam are running that Manh is an illegitimate son fathered by Ho Chi Minh.

So far, there have been no independent sources supporting the widely spread rumors, but many Vietnamese are saying "no smoke without fire."

Probably because the VCP feels necessary to "furbish" the image of the its new leader, articles praising Nong Duc Manh have appeared on many Hanoi state-controlled publications. The articles were written with rhetoric that the VCP had not granted to Phieu or his predecessor. The VCP may be doing so to deny the rumor of Manh's real father.

In one of the articles, Manh said he his father hadn't allowed him to go to school. He needed his son to help him make a living for the family after his mother passed away when Manh was a toddler. He started his education when he was 11 years old. He was learning to read and write while taking care of his baby brother outside the classroom of a seniors' course of the so-called "Mass Education" where illiterate adults in the area were taught to read and write Vietnamese. He attended the class by "peeping and eavesdropping" and he practiced writing on the ground with a stick of wood.

Four years later, he was one of the only two students to be directly selected to the next level or 5th grade without taking a compulsory exam for admission to junior high schools. At that time, North Vietnam education system adopted the ten-grade system of Red China. He completed 7th grade and dropped out to attend a forestry school to become a kind of ranger.

It should be noticed that at the time Manh was a school boy, the ten-grade curriculum provided more political than other matters. Quality of basic education was very poor, especially in the specially reduced curriculum for the montagnards.

He was known as an intelligent worker, a music and singing talent while serving the provincial forestry department as a controller of lumbering in the province. From the job, he was sent to the Soviet Union to attend a course in the Forestry Institute after one-year Russian course.

He continued serving the Bac Can province later as a VCP cadre, leaving the forestry career. He was promoted to the rank of provincial party leader before elected to the Politburo and holding the post of Speaker of the National Assembly.

That Nong Van Manh was selected general secretary did not flash a bright flaring light in the minds of the great majority of the Vietnamese. However, he looks as if he might be more active to the economic reform.

For the last few years, the market-oriented economy has been slowing down and growing rate is at less than 6 percent. At the same time, pressure from outside for further economic and political reforms has been growing but the Communist old guard and hard core keep resisting more inclination towards market economy.

Meanwhile, the protesting movement of ethnic groups with a demonstration of 20,000 montagnards at its peak in the Central Highlands in early March this year is still worrying the VCP leaders. Besides, Washington is harder on Hanoi's poor human rights records.

The most serious problem to the VCP leadership, however, is emanating from the party internal conflicts. So far, internal conflicts were silent and kept top secret, but lately any secret could be leaking to the ever inquisitive foreign journalists. This is the best evidence of moral deterioration in all ranks of the party.

Nong Duc Manh was welcomed with little popularity. He looks intelligent, more than his top rank comrades. He has done nothing notorious, or any great merits, either. But that does not assure people that he won't follow the corrupt paths of his predecessors. Everyone, even a president of a power, could be bought off. The only question is "how much?"

Western people might think that Nong Duc Manh and Phan Van Khai the prime minister, Tran Duc Luong the state president, would do better because they were schooling in the Soviet Union. A Vietnamese does not see the Communist personages that way.

Anyone who lives in Vietnam and has met with those who had been trained in the Soviet Union before 1975 could have the different opinion. The majority of them, and Nong Duc Manh is one, had learned Russian only a year before arrival in the Soviet Union. One year studying Russian, one of the most difficult languages in the world, might have only helped the student to count to million and to buy common articles in a state-run department store or grocery.

But whether the students from North Vietnam were doing well of not, Soviet schools always awarded them the "Friendship" diplomas or certificates. It is not surprising if an automobile engineer graduated from the Soviet Union is unable to explain the function of the differential gear. There are others who graduated as able engineers and specialists. However, most are not given good jobs except for some who bow to the Party and its ill-educated but greedy leaders at all levels.

Nong Duc Manh was given the top post because of many possible reasons. He has a clean background and is a fence-sitter. His ten years in the national assembly proves that he is totally obedient to the party leadership. He has not adhered to either side in the party internal conflict smoldering for the last many years. He might have been the choice that would not harm either side while awaiting a better selection to satisfy most of the central committee members.

People are waiting to see how he will deal with problems from outside as well as domestic troubles.