Hoang Minh Ching Affair

In mid-1967 there is serious debate in Hanoi about the direction that the war in South Vietnam should take moving forward. North Vietnamese General Secretary Le Duan and northern “hawks” are convinced that a series of attacks on urban centers in South Vietnam will lead to a decisive victory. Le Duan and his supporters set a plan in motion to deflect any challenges to their leadership from party moderates, as well as from Soviet and Chinese allies with conflicting agendas.

On July 27, 1967 Le Duan’s Secretariat imprisons Hoang Minh Chinh, a communist theoretician who published a report criticizing the lack of democracy in the North Vietnamese Communist Party (Vietnamese Worker’s Party). Le Duan’s purges continue, and throughout the second half of 1967 several hundred individuals, including high-ranking Vietnamese Worker’s Party officials, are arrested. This affair, the military situation in South Vietnam, and an impending U.S. election all pave the way for the general offensive and uprising in early 1968: the Tet Offensive. In preparation for this offensive, the North Vietnamese military begins launching large-scale diversionary attacks in late 1967 to lure U.S. troops from urban areas.¹