The head of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) will travel to North Korea this week, the first visit of a Vietnamese leader to the country in nearly 20 years.
In a statement yesterday, the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported that To Lam, the CPV’s general secretary, would pay a state visit to the isolated nation during October 9-11 at the invitation of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, during which he will attend a “ceremony marking the 80th founding anniversary of the Workers’ Party of Korea.” Lam’s visit was also confirmed by North Korean state media.
The visit, which was first reported by the Reuters news agency last month and coincides with the 75th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two nations, is the first by a Vietnamese leader since the trip undertaken by CPV chief Nong Duc Manh in 2007. During the three-day trip to the country, Manh met with the then-leader Kim Jong Il, with state media reporting that the visit was “aimed at fostering the traditional friendship and economic ties between the two countries.”
While Vietnam’s then-President Tran Duc Luong visited North Korea in 2002, Manh’s visit was the first by a communist party leader since Ho Chi Minh’s trip to the country in 1957. Kim Il Sung, the grandfather of Kim Jong-un, paid return visits to North Vietnam in 1958 and 1964, traveling from North Korea by armored train. According to a Vietnamese state media report published in 2019, when Kim Jong Un visited Hanoi for his second summit with U.S. President Donald Trump, the friendship between Kim Sr. and Ho laid a “strong foundation for friendly ties” between the two nations. Like China, North Korea would go on to provide military and economic support to North Vietnam during its war against U.S.-backed South Vietnam in the late 1960s.
Wartime cooperation represented the high-water mark of relations between Hanoi and Pyongyang. The two nations endured periods of disagreement following the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s, on which they found themselves periodically on opposite sides. For instance, in 1978, North Korea opposed Vietnam’s invasion of Khmer Rouge Cambodia, describing it as a “violation of international law and betrayal of socialism.”
Relations have further faded since the end of the Cold War, when Vietnam began its sharp economic ascent, and North Korea entered a phase of dysfunction and economic paralysis. Eager to integrate itself into the prevailing international order, Vietnam established relations with South Korea in 1992 and later agreed to comply with United Nations sanctions on North Korea, while supporting “a dialogue-based solution to the North Korean nuclear issue.” Trade between the two nations largely came to an end in 1996.
However, as fellow communist nations, Vietnam and North Korea maintain a vestigial diplomatic and political relationship that remains symbolically important – even if they have no economic relationship to speak of.
Despite the lack of high-level state visits, Reuters reported yesterday that multiple lower-ranking officials have met in either Hanoi or Pyongyang in recent years, according to a list of meetings published on the website of the Vietnamese embassy in North Korea. This list reportedly showed that meetings resumed last year after a five-year pause.
