Having faced an extremely difficult situation in the fourth year of the French-Indochina War, in December 1949, Hồ Chí Minh dispatched two representatives, Lý Bích Sơn and Nguyễn Đức Thủy, to Beijing with a request for Chinese assistance and for diplomatic recognition for his government.
As for Chinese assistance requested by Hồ Chí Minh, Liu Shaoqi, with authorization given by Mao while the latter was visiting Moscow, selected Luo Guibo as the liaison representative of the CCP Central Committee.
[11] By 1952 these advisors had become instrumental in helping Hồ Chí Minh and his government introduce the legal apparatuses and policies to consolidate military and socio-political power.
Both Chinese and Vietnamese communist leaders believe that a victory in such a campaign would enable the Viet Minh's base areas to be directly backed by the PRC.
[14] Encouraged by the victory in the Border Campaign, the Viet Minh's military commanders (General Giap in particular), as well as the Chinese advisers, believed that it was the time to lead the war to the Tonkin delta area.
However, the Viet Minh's troops suffered heavily from three offensive campaigns in the delta area and finally decided to give up head-on attacks against fortified French positions by mid-1951.
The whole plan for the northwest campaign was followed closely in Beijing, and Luo Guibo's strategies were approved by CCP Central Military Commission before the Vietnamese went into action.
[18] From October to December 1952, the Viet Minh's troops successfully conducted the north-west campaign, which resulted in their occupation of Sơn La, Lai Châu, Nghĩa Lộ, and western Yên Bái.
In the fall of 1953, the Vietnamese Workers Party (VWP) leadership realized the potential turning point of the war, and asked the Chinese to provide advice in a cable to the CCP Central Commission on 13 August 1953.
However, in the initial years of the First Indochina War, the VWP's policies on the farm sector were confined to reducing rents and taxes, because it feared that more radical agrarian reform would undermine the unity of the united front against the French by alienating the landowning class.
According to Alex-Thai D. Vo, this initial strategy caused that the party could only push more radical policies in zones that were directly under its military control, such as Thái Nguyên, Tuyên Quang, Phú Thọ, Thanh Hóa, Nghệ An and Hà Tĩnh.
In terms of the purposes, it suggests that the principal objective of the proposal was to ignite the masses to attack and overthrow landowners, to gain political control of rural areas, to appease the peasants, to increase agricultural production and to build support for the resistance against the French.
[21] In order to achieve the goal, it was written from the viewpoint of the Chinese advisors that Vietnamese leadership had to adopt a "firm political stance" and "determined attitude" to overcome its fear that mobilizing the masses would startle and divide the united front and cause the landlord class to retaliate.
[24] However, Alec Holcombe disagrees 3 September 1952 as the beginning of the move to land reform because Luo's document does not answer whether his ideas about mass mobilization were received by Hồ Chí Minh and Trường Chinh or not.
Thus, Alec argus that even in September 1952, Hồ probably still hoped to follow Lenin's classic two-stage formula of expelling the imperial power first and carrying out major socialist transformation subsequently.
[25] Besides, unlike Vo's opinions of the voluntary attitudes of VWP's leaders towards this change, Alec prefers the "three-stage strategy" was implemented under the pressure from Stalin and Mao.
The "Indochina" trend was tightly linked with the preponderant role played by the Comintern in the life of Vietnamese communism during this whole period (1930–41) by the intermediary of the French Communist Party.
Based on the method of training and cultivation of the CCP introduced by Luo Guibo, the Central Committee of the VWP carried out a comprehensive party reorganization campaign.
According to Wen Zhuang, this reorganization and education laid the ideological foundation for the VWP and raised the awareness of the cadres to be united in the struggle for victory.