On the world stage, Mr. Trong was seen as an artful practitioner of Vietnam’s “bamboo diplomacy” — called so for bending in different directions — as the country navigated ties with its most important economic partners, China and the United States, while also building bonds with nations such as India and Russia.
His hold within Vietnam was less finessed. His anti-corruption drive attempted to burnish public trust in the Communist Party and its stewardship of Vietnam’s economy, one of the most dynamic in the region, with sectors that include a growing start-up culture.
At the same time, Mr. Trong tightened the state’s grip on other freedoms. He oversaw hard-line Communist Party directives aimed at the media, civil society groups and internal political challenges.
In May, police arrested Nguyen Van Binh, an official in the Labor Ministry who had advocated for independent trade unions. He was charged with disclosing state secrets during talks with U.N. envoys, but many rights activists interpreted the prosecution as punishment for his reformist views.
Since the Vietnam War era, the country’s political leadership (then North Vietnam) developed as a collective system among the Communist Party general secretary, the president, prime minister and the top-ranking member of the National Assembly. Mr. Trong asserted his influence in ways rarely seen.
He was elected as the party’s general secretary in 2011 and reelected five years later. After the death of President Tran Dai Quang in 2018, Mr. Trong took on the presidency as well — making him head of the party and state. Only a few others, including North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, held both titles at once.
In 2021, Mr. Trong left the presidency but was reelected by the party as general secretary for a third term, the first leader in more than three decades to serve more than two terms. After the vote by party members, the 76-year-old Mr. Trong said he was “not in great health” and preferred to rest but would honor the decision to have him remain party head.
When Mr. Trong hosted President Biden in Hanoi last September, the White House carefully calibrated its talks. Both nations value their economic links — the United States is Vietnam’s top export market — and U.S. policymakers regard Vietnam as an important regional buffer against Chinese power in Southeast Asia.
Amid the outreach, however, Biden called attention to Mr. Trong’s strongman style. “I also raised the importance of respect for human rights as a priority for both my administration and the American people,” Biden told journalists. “And we’ll continue … our candid dialogue on that regard.”
Human rights advocates and others have been more outspoken. Project 88, a watchdog group that monitors Vietnam, portrayed Mr. Trong as presiding over a “police state [that] has imprisoned scores of human rights activists and dissenters, while shutting down the only independent journalists’ association” in a country of nearly 100 million people.
Project 88 estimated nearly 200 people had been jailed for political reasons under Mr. Trong’s rule, including environmental activists, journalists and trade unionists. Mr. Trong’s one-party state also successfully pressured tech companies such as Meta to scrub criticism of party leaders from its platforms.
Still, for many in Vietnam, Mr. Trong’s gains in foreign policy and the anti-corruption campaigns are viewed with favor as the centerpieces of his legacy, said Khang Vu, a scholar of Vietnamese affairs at Boston College.
“You cannot deny that there were political motivations behind some of the corruption cases as a way to keep the party in line and Trong in control,” he said in an interview. “Yet it’s also clear that many officials and businesspeople act with far more caution now, knowing that there can be consequences.”
The corruption-hunting began after Mr. Trong started his second term as party leader in 2016. Within four years, more than 100 Communist Party members, including some top Politburo figures, had been disciplined or criminally charged on counts of graft, illegal business deals and other misdeeds.
In a speech, Mr. Trong compared the purges to a “burning furnace,”…
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