DRVN National Assembly, 1954-75
From: Pierre Asselin
Date: Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 4:30 PM
Dear List:
Were the representatives of southern constituencies in the DRVN national assembly northerners based in Hanoi, southerners based in Hanoi, or southerners traveling back and forth between Hanoi and the southern provinces they represented?
Thanks & best,
Pierre
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Pierre Asselin
Associate Professor of History
Hawai'i Pacific University
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From: David Brown
Date: Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 7:36 PM
Pierre: I imagine you've seen the Vietnamese language Wiki's recap of the early legislatures. The first QH was constituted in 1946,with 333 'elected' representatives including 100 or so 'representatives of the South' plus 70 seats reserved for VN Quoc Dan Dang and popular front non-Communists (Dong Minh Hoi) who were subsequently booted out and mostly liquidated. The first QH endured until 1960, when it went out of business after passing revisions to the 1946 Constitution. In the second (1960-64) and third (64-70) QH, the increasingly superannuated 'representatives of the South' in the first QH were simply carried over (their numbers diminished from 91 (QH II) to 87 (QH III)). In QH IV (71-75) and QH V (75-79) there's no mention of southern representatives, presumably because the PRG of South Vietnam had been formed with its own legislative facade. Then in 1980, there's a new constitution that cleans up loose ends from the merger of south into north, an expansion of the number of representatives to 493, and nationwide elections.
What this suggests to me is that the 'southern representatives' were, at least from 1954 onward, resident in the north, presumably filling various administrative jobs as well (as continues to be the case with about half the members of the current (XIIth) QH). It will be interesting to learn what people with better memories or access to historical records can contribute on this subject.
David Brown
VietNamNet
Hanoi
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From: Balazs Szalontai
Date: Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 7:36 PM
Dear Pierre,
the information I found in the Hungarian diplomatic documents suggests that the southern deputies were partly (or probably mostly) southerners based in the DRV, but some of them may have been southerners traveling back and forth between Hanoi and the southern provinces they represented. In the second half of the 1950s, a very high number of southern cadres resided in the North, to the extent that several ministries were overstaffed because of the need to create jobs for them. Thus there was no need to "repaint" any northerners as southerners (as the North Korean regime seems to have done when it could not find enough genuine southern revolutionaries). On the other hand, during the Vietnam War the names of a substantial number of southern CC members were not made public on the grounds that they were actively involved in underground operations in the South. Thus I am inclined to believe that not many southern NA deputies were moving back and forth between Hanoi and the southern maquis, since their two roles (the public one and the clandestine one) would have been rather incompatible.
All the best,
Balazs
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From: Steve Denney
Date: Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 12:15 AM
Regarding QH V, the first elections to a National Assembly officially
representing all of Vietnam took place on April 25, 1976. There were 492
representatives chosen.
The Vietnam embassy in the U.S. says the country was renamed on the same
day as the elections: "On 25th April 1976, the Democratic Republic of
Vietnam was renamed into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, which governs
both northern and southern parts in its territory." See:
http://www.vietnamembassy-usa.org/learn_about_vietnam/history/
However, I think the formal reunification took place in July 1976.
Steve Denney
library assistant, UC Berkeley