Phan Van Khai

Phan Văn Khải (born December 25, 1933 in Cu Chi, Saigon) is the Prime Minister of Vietnam since September 24 1997, and was re-elected in August 2002.

Prime Minister Phan Van Khai was born on December 25, 1933 in Tan Thong Hoi village in Cu Chi district, now a suburban ward of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon).

He began his activist career at a very early age, when he was admitted to the village's chapter of the Vietnam revolutionary children's movement at the age of 14. Just before he turned 21, Mr. Khai was among the anti-colonial resistance fighters and revolutionary sympathisers from the southern battlefields who regrouped to northern Vietnam under the Geneva Agreement on Indochina signed in July 1954.

Shortly after his arrival in the North in October of 1954, Mr. Khai took part in a land reform drive launched in northern Vietnam to reallocate land from landlords to the landless peasants.

Mr. Khai attended a special training school for workers and peasants and obtained a secondary-education diploma before being admitted to the Foreign Languages College in Hanoi. Thereafter, Mr. Khai was sent to the former Soviet Union for five years to study economics at the Moscow National University.

After returning home, Mr. Khai worked as an economist and was later promoted to the post of deputy chief and then chief of a section attached to the General Department of the State Planning committee. In 1972, Mr. Khai became a researcher of southern Vietnam's economy. One year later he travelled to the southern battlefields to work for the liberation administration (referred to as the "Vietcong" by the Americans).

He returned to Hanoi in 1974 and was appointed deputy director of the aid planning department of the Government's National Reunification Committee. One year after, when the "Vietnam War" (called the American War in Vietnam) ended in April 1975, Mr. Khai became deputy director of the planning department of the People's Committee of Ho Chi Minh City. He was promoted to director of the same department and vice mayor of HCM City over the next three years.

Then, in 1981 he was appointed HCM City permanent deputy mayor. Mr. Khai was elected to the post of HCM City Mayor in 1985 and remained in that job for five years when he was appointed chairman of the State Planning Committee in 1989.

He was appointed to the post of permanent deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers (i.e. the central government) in 1991 and to the post of permanent deputy prime minister the following year. He remained in the post until 1997 when he was elected the new Prime Minister of Vietnam. Prime Minister Phan Van Khai was re-elected in August, 2002.

Mr. Khai was admitted to the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) when he was 26 years old. His first position in the Party organisation was established in 1979 when he was elected as executive member to the HCM City Party Committee.

He was elected as alternate member to the CPV Central Committee at the fifth National Party Congress in March 1982 and became full member to the CPV Central Committee in July 1984. He remained a full member of the Party Central Committee for eight years until the seventh National Party Congress was convened in June 1991 when he was elected as member to the Political Bureau of the CPV Central Committee. He was re-elected as member to the Political Bureau of the CPV Central Committee at the Eighth National Party Congress in June 1996 and at the Ninth National Party Congress in April 2002. He met President Bush June 21, 2005. (This is a re-write of the article from the Embassy of Vietnam cited in the external link below. It is an effort to make the piece more understandable to English-speaking readers)

External link

• Vietnamese Embassy biography (http://www.vietnamembassy-usa.org/learn/gov-officials-khai.php3)

Template:Politician-stub gl:Phan Van Kha ja:ファン・ヴァン・カイ vi:Phan Văn Khải zh:潘文凱