Nguyễn Phú Trọng

Biography

Nguyễn Phú Trọng was born in 1944 in Đông Anh, on the outskirts of Hanoi. He studied philology at Hanoi University from 1963 to 1967 and joined the Communist Party in December 1967. He spent most of the next three decades at the party's theoretical journal Tạp chí Cộng sản, interrupted by postgraduate study at the party school and a candidate of sciences degree in history from the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1983, and was its editor-in-chief from 1991 to 1996.

He entered the Central Committee in 1994 and the Politburo in 1997, headed the party's Central Theoretical Council, and from 2000 to 2006 was party secretary of Hanoi. In 2006 he became chairman of the National Assembly.

At the 11th Party Congress in January 2011 Trọng was elected general secretary, making him Vietnam's paramount leader; he was re-elected in 2016 and, unusually, for a third term in 2021. A conservative Marxist-Leninist, he led a sweeping anti-corruption drive, the 'blazing furnace', that brought down thousands of officials including senior leaders, while balancing relations with China and the United States. From 2018 to 2021 he was also state president, and in 2019 he hosted the Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi.

Trọng handed his duties to Tô Lâm on 18 July 2024 because of illness and died in Hanoi the next day.