Being there

HUNDREDS of thousands lined the streets of Vietnam’s capital on October 13th as Li Keqiang, China’s prime minister, arrived for a three-day visit. They were not there for him, though. It was a state funeral for Vo Nguyen Giap, a legendary general, second only to Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam’s pantheon of national heroes. Indeed, many Vietnamese found the timing of Mr Li’s arrival rather offensive and thought that he should have postponed it to avoid intruding on their grief. “Disrespectful” and “arrogant” were two adjectives used. “Typical” was another.

Unperturbed, Mr Li (pictured above, left) was able to portray his meeting with his Vietnamese counterpart, Nguyen Tan Dung (above, right), as a “breakthrough”. It capped a fortnight of high-level Chinese diplomacy in South-East Asia, intended to repair ties frayed in recent years by China’s extensive and disputed territorial claims in the South China Sea.

Xi Jinping, China’s president and leader of the Communist Party, visited Indonesia, Malaysia and the summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum (APEC). Mr Li attended a summit in Brunei with leaders of the ten-member Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and went on to Thailand. That Barack Obama was due at both APEC and ASEAN, but withdrew because of the budget stand-off in Washington, gave the Chinese leaders’ tours even more prominence.

Vietnam is the ASEAN country where suspicion of China is strongest. After centuries of animosity and a brief, bloody war in 1979, a territorial dispute still simmers, the most extensive of the four China has with ASEAN members in the South China Sea (the others being Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines). Not only do both China and Vietnam claim the Spratly Islands to the south, but Vietnam regards itself as having been illegitimately evicted from the Paracel islands to the north, when China seized them in 1974 from the dying regime of the former South Vietnam. Confrontations over fishing and oil and gas exploration are frequent.

Yet in June, during a visit to China by Vietnam’s president, Truong Tan Sang, the two countries signed a new “strategic partnership”. China is Vietnam’s largest trading partner—not even counting a flourishing illegal trade over the border—as it is for ASEAN as a whole. Mr Li’s breakthrough was to go further in parking the territorial dispute so that it does not get in the way of other business. He even agreed to a “maritime co-operation” work group.

In China, this helped smother unpleasant memories of 2010, when, at a meeting in Hanoi, Hillary Clinton, America’s secretary of state at the time, waded into the South China Sea dispute, declaring an American “national interest” in it. China blames American interference for emboldening Vietnam and the Philippines to stand up to it over the sea. Now China Daily, an official newspaper, has quoted a Chinese analyst: “Hanoi has already realised that it is unrealistic to count on Washington to give public support to its claims on some islands.”

That analysis is a stretch. But Mr Li’s tour, like Mr Xi’s, was a reminder of how big a regional power China has become, and of how absent Mr Obama was. Everywhere they displayed their economic clout. In Thailand, for example, Mr Li delighted the government by offering help in two areas of self-inflicted economic harm, by agreeing to buy more rice and rubber. Mr Xi had already floated the idea of a Chinese-led “Asian infrastructure bank” to help meet one of the region’s most pressing needs. In Brunei, Mr Li had earlier proposed a new treaty with ASEAN, to realise his vision of a “diamond decade” in its relations with China.

Not that alluring

If this was a charm offensive, however, one ASEAN country still gets the offence without the charm. China is incensed that the Philippines is challenging its ill-explained, expansive claim in the South China Sea at the international tribunal of the United Nations’ law of the sea. It suits China to try to isolate the Philippines. Vietnamese scholars, however, say their government is fully aware of this—and has not ruled out joining the Philippines’ legal action.

A few weeks of diplomatic activity have not changed the fundamental reality—that South-East Asia looks to China as its main trading partner and America as the prime guarantor of its security. They have, however, heightened a perception that power in the region is shifting. A commentary in the Jakarta Post, an English-language newspaper in Indonesia, argued bluntly that “it is China, not the United States, who is the leader of the Asia-Pacific region in the 21st century.” Pointing to Mr Obama’s no-show and the government shutdown, it concluded that his “much touted ‘pivot’ to Asia feels more like a pirouette with an overemphasis on military engagement.”

The Chinese press is happy to foster the impression of a power shift, taking the argument beyond South-East Asia. Its official news agency, Xinhua, published a commentary calling for a “de-Americanised world”. It argued that, with the possibility of a sovereign default by the superpower, “such alarming days when the destinies of others are in the hands of a hypocritical nation have to be terminated.”

That notion attracts some sympathy in South-East Asia but few would want an American-led international order to give way to one dominated by China. Some Vietnamese officials thought the criticism of the timing of Mr Li’s visit to Hanoi was unfair. After all, he was there in time to offer condolences at a time of national grief. But it is not just in Vietnam that many are prepared to think the worst of Chinese motives.

General Giap

Vo Nguyen Giap, who drove both the French and the Americans out of Vietnam, died on October 4th, aged 102

AFTER his great victory at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, which pushed the French colonial power to the peace table in Geneva, Vo Nguyen Giap (above, top left) took a tour of the battlefield. The red earth was dark with enemy blood. Cartridges, barbed wire and fragments of shells lay all over it; unburied corpses were busy with yellow flies. In one of the artillery posts the mess of papers on the floor included a letter from the defending general to his wife. General Giap, once a history teacher, thought it would be worth preserving in the records of a free Vietnam.

This victory had been a long time in the making. The French had fortified the valley, in north-west Tonkin on the border with Laos, so he had taken his troops into the mountains that encircled it. The French thought the hills impassable: craggy, forested, foggy, riddled with caves. General Giap recalled the words of his hero Bonaparte, whose battle plans he was sketching out with chalk when he was still at the Lycée in Hue: “If a goat can get through, so can a man; if a man can get through, so can a battalion.” Slowly, stealthily, in single file, 55,000 men took up positions there, supplied by 260,000 coolies with baskets, 20,000 bicycles and 11,800 bamboo rafts. Artillery was carried up in sections. From this eyrie, trenches and tunnels were dug down until they almost touched the French. The enemy never stood a chance.

Here were Bonaparte’s maxims again: audace, surprise. A dash, too, of Lawrence of Arabia, whose “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” General Giap was seldom without. And plenty of Mao Zedong, whose three-stage doctrine of warfare (guerrilla tactics, stalemate, offensive warfare) he had fully absorbed during his brief exile in China, for communist activity, in the early 1940s.

The key to all his victories, as Mao advised, was his people’s army. The French might be professionals straight out of Saint-Cyr, but they did not know what they were fighting for. The Americans who came in later—when Vietnam had been divided and an anti-communist regime had been set up in the South—might bomb his forces from B-52s and poison them with defoliants, but the GIs did not want to be there. His men, by contrast, were fighting to free their own land. From the start, in 1944, he had drilled his tiny musket-and-flintlock resistance army in the ideology of the struggle, setting up propaganda units to indoctrinate peasants in their villages. The result was a guerrilla force that could live off the land, could disappear into it (as along the labyrinthine Ho Chi Minh trail that supplied, through jungle paths and tunnels, communist fighters in the South from the North) and was prepared, with infinite patience, to distract and harry the enemy until he gave in. This was fighting à la vietnamienne. It took the general 30 years, from Vietnam’s declaration of independence from France in 1945 to the fall of Saigon, the southern capital, in 1975, to make his vision reality.

A volcano under snow

Not that he was a populist, exactly. His father had been a lettré, a local scholar, as well as a farmer; he himself had a law degree. He was dapper, reviewing his troops in a white suit, trilby and club tie; even in a mountain cave, diminutive and smiling, he looked fresh as a flower. He wrote poetry, and his French was impeccable. The French, though, could see through that to the hatred that burned beneath, ever since the deaths of both his father and his first wife, after brutal torture, in French prisons. They called him “a volcano under snow”.

Nonetheless, he made an improbable soldier. He had no training, and would never have become a military commander, he said, if Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Vietminh forces and later of North Vietnam, had not decided it for him. He first met Ho (above, top right) in China, realised they had been to the same school, and idolised him, from his tufty beard to his white rubber sandals. He called him “Uncle”; Ho called him “beautiful as a girl”.

In government, where he was in charge of “revolutionary order” as well as the troops, the political and military progress of the revolution were strictly co-ordinated. Both Dien Bien Phu and the multi-target Tet offensive of 1968 (which he still masterminded, though he was in eastern Europe at the time) were meant to inflict massive demoralisation on the enemy, and to turn the French and American people against the war itself. In both battles the Vietnamese too took huge casualties, which he did not dwell on. He was proud, hot-tempered, blustered into a number of unnecessary pitched battles—but won his two wars, just the same, demonstrating irresistibly to the rest of the colonised world that a backward peasant country could defeat a great colonial power.

After Ho’s death in 1969 he lost influence, and envious colleagues pushed him aside. Some said he was an indifferent communist; he disliked the hardline clique that ran the country, and in old age publicly attacked the party for corruption and bauxite-mining. He remained a huge hero in Vietnam, whose re-emergence as a united and prospering country gave him great joy. Revolutionary work, he wrote once, was largely foresight: knowing not just what the enemy might do tomorrow but also how, in future, the world was going to change. On the bloody field of Dien Bien Phu, he saw that with absolute clarity.

Blowing in the trade winds

BY SOME measures, Vietnam’s economy is moving at a brisk clip. The double-digit inflation that prevailed in 2011 has subsided, and exports of textiles and electronics are booming. Foreign direct investment is up by 36% year-on-year, according to Fitch, a ratings agency.

Yet GDP growth is rumbling along slowly: just 5% last year, the slowest pace since 1999. The trouble stems in large part from the ruling Communist Party’s failure to discipline state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and clean up the bad debts lurking in the banks. As in neighbouring China, party bigwigs and their chums are loth to tamper with a status quo that serves their interests well.

Yet the government’s legitimacy hinges on making life better for the country’s 90m people. In recent months, officials have started to plan substantial economic reforms. Encouraging signs include an April resolution by the party’s Politburo that made economic integration its top priority, and recent debates among Vietnamese lawmakers over how to “equitise”, or partially privatise, SOEs. Nguyen Tan Dung, the prime minister, also pledged in September to treat the country’s 1,300 SOEs like private companies and raise from 30% to 49% the share in any local bank that foreign investors may own.

One Western diplomat says the question now isn’t whether real reform will happen, but how fast. If that is true, the pace of change may depend on the fine print of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a planned American-led free-trade agreement among a dozen countries. TPP would, among other things, require its members to curb the excesses of SOEs.

TPP’s focus on SOEs has provided political cover for reform-minded Vietnamese legislators to pursue their agenda, says Phung Duc Tung, an economist. Just how far they will get is an open question, but Mr Tung thinks privatising most SOEs would boost the economy and lay the foundations for a better corporate tax base.

SOEs, which account for 40% of economic output, are dangerously entwined with state-run banks—the same lenders that financed the SOEs’ high-risk expansion into property during the boom that accompanied Vietnam’s 2007 accession to the WTO. The failure of some of those investments forced a downgrade of Vietnam’s sovereign debt and left the property market in tatters.

Today the SOEs are actively “restructuring”, says the state-controlled press. No one expects a repeat of their massive credit binges. Yet the SOEs remain inefficient; some are so saddled with debts that they cannot afford to pay their employees.

None of this bodes well for the hundreds of thousands of young people wading into Vietnam’s anaemic job market, much less those who are fed up with corruption and rising inequality. Combined with widespread frustration over education, health-care and land-tenure policies, such issues could some day fuel an explosion of social unrest.

Meanwhile, American trade negotiators are itching to close the TPP negotiations. The attraction for Vietnam is better access to the American market for some of its labour-intensive industries such as clothes and shoes. But the American ambassador to Vietnam, David Shear, has said the country needs to show “demonstrable progress” on human rights to help kindle support for TPP in America. In this respect it did not help that Vietnam this month jailed Le Quoc Quan, a human-rights lawyer, on spurious charges of tax evasion. In spite of that, it is likely both sides will sign the agreement some time next year.

Across the party wall

IF THE following pressing themes remind you of China, spare a thought for Vietnam: a debate over the constitution; efforts to curb the privileges of state-owned enterprises; fury over official corruption; poorly compensated land-grabs; new restrictions on online dissent; a recognition that further economic reform is not just desirable but essential; and, in politics, evidence of fierce factional struggles among high leaders.

China and Vietnam have two of the few Communist Parties still in power, so it is hardly surprising that they face many of the same problems. What might alarm them most, however, is the shortage of obvious solutions. Both parties scheduled meetings of their central committees this autumn. Both plenums were seen in advance as important in the evolution of national reforms. China’s plenum is due next month. Vietnam’s has come and gone, producing few apparent signs of new thinking. The Communist Party of Vietnam seems in more of a pickle.

High on the Vietnamese communists’ agenda were proposed changes to the country’s constitution. The current version, adopted in 1992 and last tweaked in 2001, no longer reflects the more open economy and society that Vietnam has become. A revised draft was distributed for public reaction early this year. The result was startling: more than 26m comments were received. Many were not ones the party wanted to hear.

Three clauses in particular attracted attention. Liberals hoped the constitution might guarantee an independent judiciary. At present it promises that the state “shall unceasingly strengthen socialist legality”. Some had also hoped for a change to Article Four, which enshrines the role of the Communist Party as “the force leading the state and society” in a one-party system. And third, many people argued that Article 19, which declares that “the state economic sector shall play the leading role in the national economy”, is both obsolete and damaging. Vietnam is suffering from the effects of a debt crisis brought on partly by the profligacy of its state-owned enterprises. Economic growth of around 5% a year is too slow to provide jobs for a young population, and the economy is unlikely to do much better next year.

Cleaning up the state sector, perhaps by privatising the profitable bits (brewers, for example) and trimming the loss-makers (most of the rest), is a prerequisite for returning to faster growth. It may also be essential if Vietnam succeeds in joining an American-led free-trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But dismantling the “state economic sector” is terrifying for many. Not only are officials corrupt beneficiaries of business links. The system also helps to justify single-party rule.

After the plenum, committees will continue tinkering with the constitution’s wording. But it seems clear that much will be dodged. Vietnam will still be saddled with a charter that barely recognises the profound transformation it underwent with doi moi (“renovation”) in 1986, let alone the rapid changes since.

China’s example is not much help here, even though it too has been debating its constitution. The crucial difference is that, in China, the party’s critics want it simply to respect the present constitution. That document promises equality, freedoms of speech, assembly and religion, and an independent judiciary, all of which the Communist Party ignores. Even the party’s leading role is mentioned only in the preamble rather than in the body of the document. So recent months have seen China’s official press rail against “constitutionalism”—ie, the outrageous notion that the constitution should be respected—as the latest way in which the West is seeking to undermine the country by sneaking in dangerously subversive liberal notions.

Article Four would be less of an issue in Vietnam if the party were not held in such disrespect. Partly this is a consequence of the economic mismanagement of recent years. Partly it reflects disgust with official corruption, seen as pervasive, especially at the very heart of government. This is one reason why, in a vote in the spring in the National Assembly, which shows more gumption than China’s equivalent parliament, nearly one-third of members expressed low confidence in the prime minister, Nguyen Tan Dung. Anger at a corrupt government also explains why Doan Van Vuon, a northern fish farmer jailed for five years in April, became a folk hero. His crime was to defend his land, with homemade guns and explosives, when officials came to confiscate it. Land-grabs are a common cause of protest in China, too, and reforms to the land-ownership system that fosters the abuses could (or, rather, should) be one of the big decisions announced at its party plenum.

Take me to your leader

In China, too, those who stand up are often lionised through social media. In Vietnam, as in China, a crackdown has taken place this year on vocal online dissent, with dozens locked up and new limits to online discourse. In Vietnam only “personal information”, and not news articles, may be exchanged online. This seems to be a doomed attempt to reclaim the monopoly on sources of mass information that the party enjoyed before the internet arrived. Even if the crackdown were enforceable, it would be too late to extinguish the cynicism about party and government that is smouldering in Vietnam, as in China.

That cynicism is fuelled by the perception that party leaders are less interested in the national good than in protecting their own power from attacks by envious rivals. In China the downfall of Bo Xilai, an ambitious provincial leader, drew rare, public attention to the bareknuckle fights in elite politics. In Vietnam Mr Dung, the prime minister, seems the target of a campaign by more conservative party leaders, such as President Truong Tan Sang. The difference is that in China, factional struggle has produced a clear winner in Xi Jinping, the party leader. Part of Vietnam’s problem is that nobody seems sure who is really in charge.

The great decompression

FEW countries have done better than South Korea over the past half-century. Within the span of a single working life, its economy has grown 17-fold, its government has evolved from an austere dictatorship into a rowdy democracy, and its culture, once scarred by censorship, now beguiles the world with its music, soap operas and cinema. Scholars enthuse about the speed and precocity of its “compressed development”.

The only people unimpressed by South Korea’s accomplishments may be South Koreans themselves. As our special report notes, the prosperity they enjoy has not relieved the competitive pressure they endure. To them, the country’s development is compressed in a different way. Its success is confined to a few big employers and industries. The country’s manufacturers are more impressive than its service firms, although these now generate most jobs. And in manufacturing its big, family-owned conglomerates (the chaebol) do far better than their small, hard-pressed suppliers.

Unsurprisingly, ambitious young South Koreans crave employment in the thriving bits of the economy. Medicine, law, finance and government remain popular, but the chaebol now take the cream. Like the civil service and the professions, Samsung, Hyundai and their peers tend to hire people straight from the best universities, with little chance of entry later in life. This creates a double bottleneck in the labour market. There are only a few appealing employers to choose from, and only one realistic chance to join them. So youngsters spend ages padding out their CVs and prepping for exams—especially for the test taken at 18 which determines your university.

This seems like a small thing, and many Western countries would kill to have South Korea’s problem: it is hard to imagine British or American parents fretting that their teenagers work too hard. South Korea comes at or near the top of most international comparisons of reading, maths and science. But there are costs. A lot of effort goes into costly credentialism, rather than deep learning. The system excludes late-developing talent: blossom at 25, and it’s too late. And in the very long term it means a smaller country. The expense of educating children for the test is one reason why South Korean women give birth to so few of them. With the lowest fertility rate in the OECD rich-country club, South Korea’s greying threatens to be as rapid as its growth.

The indirect cure for education fever

Other education-obsessed countries in Asia face a version of the same problem. In the past South Korea’s government tried to help parents by banning out-of-class tutoring. (The president of Seoul National University had to resign after letting his own child dodge the ban.) But such pedagogical prohibition is illiberal, and was anyway ruled unconstitutional in 2000. The answer lies not in the schools but in the overall economy—and in creating a more open labour market where more firms are interested in hiring people later.

The government should do three things. First, scrap regulations that divide the jobs market into permanent employees, paid more than they are worth, and temporary workers, paid less. Second, it should encourage more firms, including foreign ones, into industries now dominated by the chaebol, expanding the range of alternative employers. And third, it should push the chaebol to expand into services, which they have diplomatically refrained from doing. Retailing, tourism, local transport: all these need some chaebol clout and efficiency.

South Korea has astonished the world with its compressed development. For the benefit of hard-pressed parents and hard-working youths, it needs a bout of decompression.

Guest post: TPP is a remedy but of a different kind

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By Nguyen Van Phu of the Saigon Economic Times

Activists in Vietnam fight tenaciously for many things. They’ve advocated land ownership for farmers, equal footing for the state-owned and private sectors and the suspension of a costly bauxite project that is neither financially viable nor environmentally friendly. And yet, they have never raised their voices against the dark sides of free trade agreements as have their peers in other developing countries.

Granted, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a comprehensive free trade agreement that Vietnam is negotiating with 11 other countries including the US, will bring Vietnam some obvious benefits. However, these activists also understand very well the negative aspects of joining this “high standard” trade agreement at a time when their country is at the bottom of the global value chain. They know that local farmers will be exposed to new competition with their richer and heavily-subsidised counterparts; that Vietnam will get stuck with low-wage, environmentally costly labour-intensive industries like textiles and garments where local manufacturers can’t move beyond subcontracting jobs; and, most of all, that stricter intellectual property rights will likely translate into more expensive drugs for the Vietnamese people.

Not only have Vietnam’s liberals kept their mouths shut about these issues, they have tried to sell the TPP to the people as something inevitable, a remedy for all economic woes.

The reason is simple: these liberals want to use the requirements imposed by the TPP on its members as leverage on the government to implement much-needed reforms. They hope that once within the TPP framework, Vietnam’s government will have no option but to abide by transparency in policy-making, cease giving preferential treatment to state-owned companies, open government procurement to the private sector and pay more attention to environmental requirements… In short, do those things that their government is supposed to do but does not.

These omissions are seen especially in the case of Vietnamese workers’ well-being. Vietnam is a “socialist” country where workers are supposed to be the leading political and economic force. Ironically, however, it is the “capitalist” US that is putting pressure on Vietnam to protect workers’ interests by setting up independent labour unions. It is exactly such TPP requirements that induce many Vietnamese liberals to give their strong support to joining the trade agreement.

Among the requirements that the US will impose in return for greater access to its market, especially for Vietnamese textiles and footwear, is better treatment of workers. In a stark reality check, US Representative George Miller, a Democrat from California, has written to US Trade Representative Michael Froman questioning whether Vietnam can comply with its TPP commitments because, Miller wrote, there is evidence that export industry workers in Vietnam are “routinely denied basic labor standards.”

Froman’s written reply is also to the point: “By including Vietnam in the TPP negotiations, we have [a] mechanism to improve adherence to labor rights and working conditions in Vietnam that would not exist otherwise.”

The proposed TPP text would apply the International Labour Organization’s principles of freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining, as well as the elimination of all forms of forced labour, child labour and gender discrimination.

People may ask if Vietnamese workers aren’t protected by their government and point to an extensive network of labour unions. The sad fact, however, is that the labour unions are mostly for show. They are used as instrument of state control, and union representatives are more like officials than workers’ representatives. They are normally the ones who prevent workers from going on a strike, rather than organizing it.

A recent scandal involving four public utilities companies in Ho Chi Minh City is so far the strongest evidence of this collusion. The directors of these state-owned companies draw salaries ranging from $100,000 to $130,000 annually in a country where the per capita income is just $1,500. How could they pay themselves such high salaries? They resorted to the very basic trick of “exploiting” their own workers: instead of signing on workers as full-time employees who would enjoy full wages and benefits, they hired them as seasonal workers who were paid as little as $250 to $350 a month.

Arguably, if the workers had an independent labour union, such a scandal would not have happened. If the labour union representatives at these companies did not receive perks from the directors, they would not keep their mouths shut as they did in this case.

Such scandals make people in Vietnam wonder if it is a blessing in disguise that the US seems to be really pushing for better working conditions. Foreign investors, including those from the US, seem to like the way labour unions in Vietnam operate now. The Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry, which represents domestic enterprises, has complained that “Vietnam is not ready for such high requirements on labour standards and implementation, which would increase costs for entrepreneurs, risk workers’ unemployment, and have high implementation costs.”

So whether liberals in Vietnam should regard the TPP as a remedy or just an irony, or even a double irony, remains to be seen.

Nguyen Van Phu is the Managing Editor of Thoi Bao Kinh Te Sai Gon (Saigon Economic Times)

Vietnam's 'Red Napoleon' Vo Nguyen Giap dies, aged 102

(Reuters) - Vo Nguyen Giap, the self-taught Vietnamese general who masterminded the defeats of France and the United States to become one of the 20th century's most notable military commanders, died on Friday. He was 102.

The victories of the "Red Napoleon" over vastly better equipped Western armies helped to usher the end of European colonialism worldwide and to entrench communist rule in Vietnam.

Short and slightly built, Giap was a legend in Vietnam, with a standing second only to that of revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh. To historians, he was a general who ranked with giants such as Montgomery, Rommel and MacArthur.

Critics saw him as ruthless: willing to accept immense losses among his own forces. His defenders said his strategic ability and astute tactics won wars against enemies whose resources dwarfed those of a peasant army.

"Surrender" is not a word in my vocabulary, he once said. In Giap's words, any army fighting for freedom "had the creative energy to achieve things its adversary can never expect or imagine."

The Vietnamese humiliation of the French army at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 not only doomed the world's second largest colonial empire, it helped bring an end to colonialism worldwide.

Two decades later, Giap forced the retreat of the even bigger military machine of the United States from what was then South Vietnam, starting 38 years of communist rule over the country that are unbroken to this day.

LAST SURVIVOR

Giap had been the last survivor of Vietnam's generation of revolutionary leaders.

For leftist and other insurgents worldwide, his textbooks on guerrilla warfare were required reading.

Giap died of natural causes after several years in a Hanoi military hospital. Family members and a hospital source confirmed his death. It was not expected to be formally announced until Saturday.

Born in central Vietnam on August 25, 1911, Giap was the son of a peasant scholar and at 18 he was imprisoned by French rulers for communist activities.

He was later freed and gained a law degree at Hanoi University. To the end, his appearance was always more that of the scholar and teacher that he had first set out to be.

Giap helped organise resistance to Japanese occupation during World War Two. When the French returned to their colonies in Indochina after the war, Giap fought them too.

Millions of Vietnamese were killed in the wars and Giap's foes said his effectiveness had been down to his readiness to sustain such human losses.

HUGE LOSSES

"Any American commander who took the same vast losses as General Giap would have been sacked overnight," his old enemy, the late U.S. General William C. Westmoreland, was quoted as saying in a 1983 book.

Giap's response to such accusations, according to Vietnam War correspondent Joseph L. Galloway, was that "I would have gladly sent 5 million or 10 million if that is what it took to rid our country of the foreigners; to gain our freedom."

Giap is nonetheless known to have opposed some costly military decisions, including the move in 1968 to delay the withdrawal of forces from impossible to defend positions in South Vietnam during the Tet Offensive, which became a turning point in the war.

After the U.S. defeat and 1975 retreat from Saigon - renamed Ho Chi Minh city - came another war with a superpower. When neigbouring China invaded in 1978, Giap helped organise the defense, driving back the Chinese with heavy losses.

Then his political and military influence started to wane.

Some members of the establishment resented him and he was replaced as defense minister in 1980 and dropped from the all-powerful politburo two years later.

The old warrior mellowed.

He switched from revolutionary rhetoric to preaching peace. Before retiring, Giap headed state committees that oversaw development of science and technology and family planning.

Giap's first wife died in a French jail in 1943. He remarried, having three daughters and two sons, one named Vo Dien Bien after the location of the French defeat.

In a 2004 interview with Reuters at his spacious colonial-era villa, Giap recalled that on a visit to the United Nations in Geneva, he was handed a book to sign.

"I wrote...and signed Vo Nguyen Giap, General of Peace."

(Writing by Martin Petty; Editing by Matthew Tostevin)

Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, Who Ousted U.S. From Vietnam, Is Dead

Vo Nguyen Giap, the relentless and charismatic North Vietnamese general whose campaigns drove both France and the United States out of Vietnam, died on Friday in Hanoi. He was believed to be 102.

The death was reported by several Vietnamese news organizations, including the respected Tuoi Tre Online, which said he had died in an army hospital.

General Giap was among the last survivors of a generation of Communist revolutionaries who in the decades after World War II freed Vietnam of colonial rule and fought a superpower to a stalemate. In his later years, he was a living reminder of a war that was mostly old history to the Vietnamese, many of whom were born after it had ended.

But he had not faded away. He was regarded as an elder statesman whose hard-line views had softened with the cessation of the war that unified Vietnam. He supported economic reform and closer relations with the United States while publicly warning of the spread of Chinese influence and the environmental costs of industrialization.

To his American adversaries, however, from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, he was perhaps second only to his mentor, Ho Chi Minh, as the face of a tenacious, implacable enemy. And to historians, his willingness to sustain staggering losses against superior American firepower was a large reason the war dragged on as long as it did, costing more than 2.5 million lives — 58,000 of them American — sapping the United States Treasury and Washington’s political will to fight, and bitterly dividing the country in an argument about America’s role in the world that still echoes today.

A teacher and journalist with no formal military training, Vo Nguyen Giap (pronounced vo nwin ZHAP) joined a ragtag Communist insurgency in the 1940s and built it into a highly disciplined force that ended an empire and united a nation.

He was charming and volatile, an erudite military historian and an intense nationalist who used his personal magnetism to motivate his troops and fire their devotion to their country. His admirers put him in the company of MacArthur, Rommel and other great military leaders of the 20th century.

But his critics said that his victories had been rooted in a profligate disregard for the lives of his soldiers. Gen. William C. Westmoreland, who commanded American forces in Vietnam from 1964 until 1968, said, “Any American commander who took the same vast losses as General Giap would not have lasted three weeks.”

General Giap understood something that his adversaries did not, however. Early on, he learned that the loyalty of Vietnam’s peasants was more crucial than controlling the land on which they lived. Like Ho Chi Minh, he believed devoutly that the Vietnamese would be willing to bear any burden to free their land from foreign armies.

He knew something else as well, and profited from it: that waging war in the television age depended as much on propaganda as it did on success in the field.

These lessons were driven home in the Tet offensive of 1968, when North Vietnamese regulars and Vietcong guerrillas attacked scores of military targets and provincial capitals throughout South Vietnam, only to be thrown back with staggering losses. General Giap had expected the offensive to set off uprisings and show the Vietnamese that the Americans were vulnerable.

Militarily, it was a failure. But the offensive came as opposition to the war was growing in the United States, and the televised savagery of the fighting fueled another wave of protests. President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had been contemplating retirement months before Tet, decided not to seek re-election, and with the election of Richard M. Nixon in November, the long withdrawal of American forces began.

General Giap had studied the military teachings of Mao Zedong, who wrote that political indoctrination, terrorism and sustained guerrilla warfare were prerequisites for a successful revolution. Using this strategy, General Giap defeated the French Army’s elite and its Foreign Legion at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, forcing France from Indochina and earning the grudging admiration of the French.

“He learned from his mistakes and did not repeat them,” Gen. Marcel Bigeard, who as a young colonel of French paratroops surrendered at Dien Bien Phu, told Peter G. Macdonald, one of General Giap’s biographers. But “to Giap,” he said, “a man’s life was nothing.”

Hanoi’s casualty estimates are unreliable, so the cost of General Giap’s victories will probably never be known. About 94,000 French troops died in the war to keep Vietnam, and the struggle for independence killed, by conservative estimates, about 300,000 Vietnamese fighters. In the American war, about 2.5 million North and South Vietnamese died out of a total population of 32 million. America lost about 58,000 service members.

“Every minute, hundreds of thousands of people die on this earth,” General Giap is said to have remarked after the war with France. “The life or death of a hundred, a thousand, tens of thousands of human beings, even our compatriots, means little.”

A Student of Revolution

Vo Nguyen Giap was born on Aug. 25, 1911 (some sources say 1912), in the village of An Xa in Quang Binh Province, the southernmost part of what would later be North Vietnam. His father, Vo Quang Nghiem, was an educated farmer and a fervent nationalist who, like his father before him, encouraged his children to resist the French.

Mr. Giap earned a degree in law and political economics in 1937 and then taught history at the Thanh Long School, a private institution for privileged Vietnamese in Hanoi, where he was known for the intensity of his lectures on the French Revolution. He also studied Lenin and Marx and was particularly impressed by Mao’s theories on combining political and military strategy to win a revolution.

In 1941, Ho Chi Minh, the founder of the Vietnamese Communist Party, chose Mr. Giap to lead the Viet Minh, the military wing of the Vietnam Independence League.

In late 1953, the French established a stronghold in the northwest at Dien Bien Phu, near the border with Laos, garrisoned by 13,000 Vietnamese and North African colonial troops as well as the French Army’s top troops and its elite Foreign Legion.

After an eight-week siege by Communist forces, the last French outposts were overrun on May 7, 1954. The timing was a political masterstroke, coming on the very day that negotiators met in Geneva to discuss a settlement. Faced with the failure of their strategy, French negotiators gave up and agreed to withdraw. The country split into a Communist-ruled north and a non-Communist south.

In the late 1950s and early ’60s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and later President John F. Kennedy looked on with rising anxiety as Communist forces stepped up their guerrilla war. By the time Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963, the United States had more than 16,000 troops in South Vietnam.

General Westmoreland relied on superior weaponry to wage a war of attrition, in which he measured success by the number of enemy dead. Though the Communists lost in any comparative “body count” of casualties, General Giap was quick to see that the indiscriminate bombing and massed firepower of the Americans caused heavy civilian casualties and alienated many Vietnamese from the government the Americans supported.

With the war in stalemate and Americans becoming less tolerant of accepting casualties, General Giap told a European interviewer, South Vietnam “is for the Americans a bottomless pit.”

A Turning Point

On Jan. 30, 1968, during a cease-fire in honor of the Vietnamese New Year (called Tet Nguyen Dan), more than 80,000 North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops hit military bases and cities throughout South Vietnam in what would be called the Tet offensive. For the Communists, things went wrong from the start. Some Vietcong units attacked prematurely, without the backing of regular troops as planned. Suicide squads, like one that penetrated the United States Embassy in Saigon, were quickly wiped out.

Despite some successes — the North Vietnamese entered the city of Hue and held it for three weeks — the offensive was a military disaster. The hoped-for uprisings never took place, and some 40,000 Communist fighters were killed or wounded. The Vietcong never regained the strength it had before Tet.

But the fierceness of the assault illustrated Hanoi’s determination to win and shook the American public and leadership.

“The Tet offensive had been directed primarily at the people of South Vietnam,” General Giap said later, “but as it turned out, it affected the people of the United States more. Until Tet, they thought they could win the war, but now they knew that they could not.”

He told the journalist Stanley Karnow in 1990, “We wanted to show the Americans that we were not exhausted, that we could attack their arsenals, communications, elite units, even their headquarters, the brains behind the war.”

He added, “We wanted to project the war into the homes of America’s families, because we knew that most of them had nothing against us.”

The United States government began peace talks in Paris in May 1968. The next year, Nixon began withdrawing American troops under his policy of Vietnamization, which called for the South Vietnamese troops to bear the brunt of the fighting.

In March 1972, the North Vietnamese carried out the Easter offensive on three fronts, expanding their holdings in Cambodia and Laos and bringing temporary gains in South Vietnam. But it ended in defeat, and General Giap again bore the brunt of criticism for the heavy losses. In summer 1972, he was replaced by Gen. Van Tien Dung, possibly because he had fallen from favor but possibly because, as was rumored, he had Hodgkin’s disease.

Although he was removed from direct command in 1973, General Giap remained minister of defense, overseeing North Vietnam’s final victory over South Vietnam and the United States when Saigon, the South’s capital, fell on April 30, 1975. He also guided the invasion of Cambodia in January 1979, which ousted the brutal Communist Khmer Rouge. The next month, after Hanoi had established a new government in Phnom Penh, Chinese troops attacked along the North Vietnamese border to drive home the point that China remained the paramount regional power.

It was General Giap’s last military campaign. He was removed as minister of defense in 1980 after his chief rivals, Le Duan and Le Duc Tho, eased him out of the Politburo. Too prominent to be openly denounced, he was instead made vice prime minister for science and education.

But his days of real power were gone. In August 1991, he was ousted after Vo Van Kiet, a Western-style reformer, came to power.

In his final years, General Giap was an avuncular host to foreign visitors to his villa in Hanoi, where he read extensively in Western literature, enjoyed Beethoven and Liszt and became a convert to pursuing socialism through free-market reforms.

“In the past, our greatest challenge was the invasion of our nation by foreigners,” he told an interviewer. “Now that Vietnam is independent and united, we can address our biggest challenge. That challenge is poverty and economic backwardness.”

Addressing that challenge had long been deferred, he told the journalist Neil Sheehan in 1989. “Our country is like an ill person who has suffered for a long time,” he said. “The countries around us made a lot of progress. We were at war.”

General Vo Nguyen Giap obituary

General Vo Nguyen Giap, who has died aged 102, was a self-taught soldier who became one of the foremost military commanders of the 20th century. He used his charisma and tactical skills to transform a tiny band of Vietnamese guerrillas into an army that defeated both France and the US.

In 1944 he founded the Armed Propaganda Brigade for the Liberation of Vietnam, gathering together 31 men and three women armed with flintlock rifles. By 1954, he had turned this ragtag group into the Vietnamese People's Army that defeated the French at the battle of Dien Bien Phu. The surrender of French forces after a 55‑day siege in this valley in north-western Vietnam was the coda for colonialism in Indochina.

The victory took Vietnam to the negotiating table but it did not bring peace. Instead the Geneva Accords divided the country into the communist north and US-backed south, setting the stage for another war that was to last until the defeat of the US and the Saigon government in 1975.

Giap, an elfin lawyer with an intellectual bent, was an unlikely warrior. He often claimed his only military lesson came from an encyclopedia entry describing the mechanism of a primitive hand grenade. The reality was a little different. As a child his sense of nationalism had been nourished with stories of heroic Vietnamese generals and their victories against the Chinese and Mongols. At the Lycée Nationale in Hue, the same school that produced the North Vietnamese president Ho Chi Minh and the South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem, he became involved in the anti-colonial movement.

He earned a degree in law at the University of Hanoi and began teaching history. By the time he founded his army, posing at the first swearing-in wearing a white suit with a Mauser pistol in his belt, he was well versed in Marx and had read Mao Zedong's writings on guerrilla warfare. He would always deny the obvious influences of Mao and Napoleon, saying: "We fought our wars in a Vietnamese way. My only influences were the great strategists of Vietnamese history."

In 1940 Giap joined Ho Chi Minh in China. They returned to Vietnam a year later and founded the Viet Minh, which briefly took power in the August Revolution of 1945, when the Vietnamese communists filled the vacuum left by the defeated Japanese forces. Giap began talks with the French on independence, but they were determined to return to Vietnam and in December 1946 the Viet Minh began an eight-year war.

Poorly armed and trained, the Viet Minh made little headway until after 1949, when Mao had taken control in Beijing. China began sending advisers and supplies to help the Vietnamese. For the first time Giap had access to heavy weapons but his first direct confrontation with the French forces was a 1950 battle in the Red River Delta that proved disastrous for the Vietnamese, who lost some 20,000 men. His luck turned in 1954, when General Henri Navarre decided to set up camp in Dien Bien Phu to protect Laos from the guerrillas. The French settled into the broad valley, confident that the surrounding mountains would protect them from the Viet Minh.

They had not accounted for Giap's skill in mobilising forces and keeping them supplied. Tens of thousands of farmers were drafted to carry dismantled artillery and weapons into the hills around Dien Bien Phu. Reinforced bicycles were loaded with hundreds of pounds of supplies and pushed up muddy tracks. Giap would later recall that it would take 21kg of rice for the porters for each kilogram of the staple that arrived to feed soldiers laying siege to the French.

Viet Minh artillery rained hell down on the French troops from the surrounding hills. After the airfield was closed, provisions could only be dropped in by parachute. On 7 May the French surrendered. On the same day talks opened in Geneva to end colonialism in Indochina.

The cost of Giap's victory at Dien Bien Phu had been extremely high. His forces suffered massive casualties, many times the toll inflicted on the French. A horrendous loss of life marked all Giap's victories, but he was coldly unapologetic, saying the number of dead was small compared with the number who died each day of natural causes.

After 1954, Giap became defence minister in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Almost immediately the government ran into serious problems when the population turned against a brutal Maoist campaign of land reform in which thousands of people were killed after being condemned as landlords. With their political base shaken, the Communist party sent out Giap to restore order. His apologies for the party's excesses were grudging at best, but using his popular support as the hero of Dien Bien Phu he was able to calm the angry crowds, which included many of the soldiers who had fought under him.

In 1960 the politburo decided to launch the fight for reunification of North and South Vietnam. It was a time of increasing tensions and disagreements in Hanoi. After straddling the Sino-Soviet split that ripped apart the communist world in 1960, Hanoi turned towards Beijing and relations with the Soviet Union were strained. Giap had always harboured a streak of resentment against the Chinese, whose advice at Dien Bien Phu he claimed to have ignored. He became staunchly pro-Soviet at a time when his comrades were leaning towards Beijing. In the midst of the power struggles and purges that afflicted the elite of Vietnamese communism, Giap was even accused of trying to foment a coup d'etat with aid from Moscow.

General Vo Nguyen Giap (top left, smiling) with Ho Chi Minh (second right) during a military campaign in Vietnam in 1950. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Giap was an unusual figure in the anonymous hierarchy in Hanoi. He had not forged links with the others in French jails where revolutionaries earned their political stripes. He had escaped to China ahead of the French in 1939, his tracks covered by his wife Quang Thai, with whom he had a daughter, and who later died in prison. He could be imperious and frosty, which, combined with his aggressive temper, earned him the nickname "the snow-covered volcano". He was often querulous and rudely didactic, traits that come across in his many books on warfare. With his well-cut uniforms, curtained Russian limousine and grand French villa in the centre of Hanoi, Giap did not even pretend to follow the puritanism that the leadership affected.

Tensions were exacerbated when Giap's tactics against the US forces after 1965 achieved only mixed results. He was kept off guard by the mobility of American helicopter cavalry and his forces suffered an enormous number of casualties in battles they might have avoided. General William Westmoreland, commander of the American forces, once remarked that any US general that suffered Giap's losses would have been sacked instantly.

His skills lay less in military tactics and more in managing the logistics and politics that were so vital to sustain the war in the south. His diplomatic skills kept open supply lines from China and the Soviet Union, while at home he organised the movement of troops and material down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a vast web of tracks stretching into Laos and Cambodia. "People should not be overawed by the power of modern weapons," Giap wrote. "It is the value of human beings that in the end will decide victory."

On 30 January 1968, tens of thousands of communist troops launched the Tet offensive, striking across South Vietnam during what was supposed to have been a truce to mark the lunar new year holiday. A suicide squad stormed into the US embassy compound in Saigon. The Viet Cong took over the former imperial capital of Hue. In Hanoi, the leadership had expected the South Vietnamese to rise up and overthrow the government but instead the VC suffered a huge military defeat. Their troops and command structures were nearly wiped out when the US forces regained control.

The offensive was a severe military setback for the North, but they did win a psychological victory. Dramatic news coverage of the offensive in the US damaged claims in Washington that an end to the war was in sight. Support for the conflict and for President Lyndon B Johnson slumped. Once again, Giap had suffered enormous losses but had still managed to declare victory. "After the Tet offensive, the Americans moved from the attack to the defence," he said. "And defence is always the beginning of defeat."

That defeat would take another seven years of fighting, less time than Giap had expected. The South Vietnamese army collapsed precipitously as the North Vietnamese pushed down the coast. Saigon fell on 30 April 1975.

Giap was the first general to defeat the forces of the US in a war. Flushed with the arrogance of their massive victory, the leadership in Hanoi pushed for an immediate reunification of North and South, and expanded its experiment in Soviet-style economics across the country. But although well-suited to winning a war, the government was inept at running a peace. Giap was said to have opposed the extreme economic measures, but his power was at a low. In December 1978, against Giap's advice, Vietnam invaded Cambodia to oust the Khmer Rouge. Although the initial victory was rapid, Vietnamese forces were to get bogged down fighting a guerrilla war against the Khmer Rouge that would last more than 10 years.

Giap's opposition to that war earned him a period in the wilderness. He was replaced as defence minister in 1980 and two years later lost his seat in the politburo. He remained a deputy prime minister in charge of science and technology, and was given the job of heading a national birth control campaign.

For most of the 1980s, Giap was a political outcast, occasionally wheeled out on ceremonial occasions but stripped of all real power. He did, however, command loyalty in the military, particularly among those officers disaffected by the war in Cambodia and angered by the economic collapse in the 1980s.

In 1986, in the runup to a Communist party congress, a group of officers urged Giap to take control and launch sweeping changes to the economy and political system. Giap refused, terrified of what might happen if he failed. Bui Tin, an army colonel who had been a protege, urged him again in 1990 to take over and provide a new direction for Vietnam. Giap demurred, preferring a comfortable retirement. Tin later condemned him bitterly, quoting an old Chinese saying that "the reputations of generals are built on the bodies of 10,000 men".

General Vo Nguyen Giap in 1994, the 40th anniversary of the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu. Photograph: Catherine Karnow/Corbis

Giap's political timidity came as a crushing disappointment to many. His last years were spent polishing his image as the "red Napoleon". He adored giving interviews, charming his hagiographers and fawning journalists with the same gestures and stories told in a fluent but outdated French of which he was immensely proud. He was always careful to avoid the real questions that hung over his increasingly contested career. He could not, however, stop many people from reconsidering his versions of history and heroism. Many Vietnamese also began to question whether the sacrifices of war had been worth it. Others saw too many moments in Giap's career where he had refused to stand up to hardliners or had failed to capitalise on his popular support to force through political and economic changes.

In 1991 Giap stepped down as vice premier. In a sign of his political disfavour, his 80th birthday passed without celebration and it was not until the 40th anniversary of Dien Bien Phu that he was given a measure of rehabilitation. He spent his retirement travelling and meeting foreign dignitaries, including, in 1995, his opposite number during the war, the former US defence secretary Robert McNamara.

In 1946, Giap married secondly Dang Bich Ha. They had two sons and two daughters.

• Vo Nguyen Giap, soldier, born 25 August 1911; died 4 October 2013