After the reunification, Vietnam had to confront many fierce challenges including the prolonged economic blockade and sanction of hostile forces, which aggravated the country’s poor and backward economy and wounds of war and national partition. Food and essential consumer goods were lacking. In 1979, Vietnam had to import 1.8 million tonnes of food but could not meet the people’s needs, particularly those in urban and industrial areas. Inflation and prices galloped and some State-owned agencies and enterprises could even not pay their employees for some months. The people, particularly employees and pensioners led an extremely difficult life. The defence budget increased suddenly, domestic accumulation reduced, foreign loans and financial assistance went down while the needs of socio-economic infrastructure restoration and development were big and urgent. Meanwhile, employees and other working people were not fully dedicated to their work, many social resources were left to waste, farmers left their cooperative land uncultivated and only concentrated on the five percent of land reserved for themselves after they joined the coops. As a result, the productivity of crops on coop land was very low, and less than half of the capacity of many enterprises’ equipment was utilised. Waste of public property, the abuse of power and the taking advantage of price differences to steal State property, authoritarianism and bribery were very popular in many localities. The population worried and lost confidence. In this situation, Mr. Truong Chinh strongly supported new ways of working and positively contributed to this process. After the 8^th meeting of the Party Central Committee (CC) the State repeatedly conducted three major tasks in a short period of time, namely changing money and the total adjustment of prices and salaries in a hurried and rather careless manner. These activities were not properly prepared, and the money changing process in particular saw many mistakes committed. All these further aggravated the socio-economic situation in the country at the end of 1985 and early 1986.

At that time, our Party urgently prepared for its 6^th National Congress. In his speeches at Politburo and Party CC meetings in early 1986, Mr. Truong Chinh made many analyses and affirmed that Resolutions issued by the 6, 7, and 8^th meetings of the 5^th Party CC which had decided to “eradicate centralism, bureaucracy and subsidy and change economic activities to socialist business accounting” was absolutely correct and “marked an important turning point in the Party’s economic leadership. Mr. Truong Chinh opinions made an important contribution to help the Party maintain its correct economic renewal orientation. The successful 6^th National Party Congress opened up our people’s comprehensive renewal process. In this glorious cause of the Party and the nation, Mr. Truong Chinh deserved the credit for reviewing realities, respecting and promoting creative ideas and practices of officials at the grassroots level to establish the Party’s comprehensive renewal process with guidelines for economic renewal as the foundation.