linguistic:translation, structural:reformatting
The Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) is the founding and sole legal party of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Founded in 1930 by Hồ Chí Minh, the CPV became the ruling party of North Vietnam in 1954 and then all of Vietnam after the collapse of the South Vietnamese government following the Fall of Saigon in 1975. Although it nominally exists alongside the Vietnamese Fatherland Front, it maintains a unitary government and has centralized control over the state, military, and media. The supremacy of the CPV is guaranteed by Article 4 of the national constitution. The Vietnamese public generally refer to the CPV as simply "the Party" (Đảng) or "our Party". The CPV is organized on the basis of democratic centralism, a principle conceived by Russian Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. The highest institution of the CPV is the party's National Congress, which elects the Central Committee. The Central Committee is the supreme organ on party affairs in between party congresses. After a party congress, the Central Committee elects the Politburo and Secretariat, and appoints the General Secretary, the highest party office. In between sessions of the Central Committee, the Politburo is the supreme organ on party affairs. However, it can only implement decisions based on the policies which have been approved in advance by either the Central Committee or the party's National Congress. As of 2017, the 12th Politburo has 19 members. The party is known for its advocacy of what it calls a "socialist-oriented market economy" and Hồ Chí Minh Thought. The CPV was aligned with the Soviet Union and its allies during the Cold War, and implemented a command economy in Vietnam, before introducing economic reforms, known as Đổi Mới, in 1986. While continuing to nominally hold to Marxism–Leninism, most independent sources have argued that it has lost its monopolistic ideological and moral legitimacy since the introduction of a mixed economy in the late 1980s and 1990s. In recent years, the party has stopped representing a specific class, but instead the "interests of the entire people", which includes entrepreneurs. The final class barrier was removed in 2006, when party members were allowed to engage in private activities. De-emphasising Marxism–Leninism, the party has placed emphasis on Vietnamese nationalism, developmentalism, and ideas from the American and French Revolutions, along with Hồ Chí Minh's personal beliefs. The CPV participates in the annual International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties.