Hoàng Minh Chinh

Hoàng Minh Chính (born November 16, 1922 in Nam Ha Province, † February 7, 2008 in Hanoi ) was a well-known Vietnamese dissident .

Chinh joined the revolution in 1937. He was once a leading figure in the Communist Party and held several important posts there. In the Vietnamese government he was Vice Minister of Education, Vice Director of the Nguyen Ai Quoc Party School and Director of the Marxist-Leninist Philosophy Institute. Until the 1960s he was considered one of the most important ideologues of the regime. However, he soon became increasingly disillusioned with communist ideology and called for more democracy . He also criticized some of the party decisions. He spent many years in prison and under house arrest .

For the last decade of his life, Chinh was actively involved in the democracy movement in his home country, including the founding of the Democratic Party. In an unprecedented concession, Chinh was allowed to travel to the United States in 2005 by the Vietnamese government to receive treatment for pancreatic cancer . While there, he appeared before a congressional committee to report on the situation in Vietnam. He called for more pressure on the Vietnamese government. The speech sparked an aggressive campaign against Chinh in the Vietnamese media, but was allowed to return. In 2006 he took part in the largest democracy campaign to date, but younger Democrats called for a clean cut with the past. This is not possible due to Chinh's communist past.

Chinh's health deteriorated in 2007. He has since suffered from a number of illnesses and has spent much of his time in the hospital. He died in early 2008 at the age of 85 on the first day of the Lunar New Year.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7234214.stm Famous Vietnamese dissident dies

Web links

• Obituary for Hoàng Minh Chính in www.unser-vietnam.de of February 21, 2008, accessed on May 7, 2011