There were various aspects of Sun Tzu's approach that appealed to Ho Chi Minh: a) to learn to understand both the enemy and yourself, to seek out his weaknesses and your own strengths, and act accordingly, b) to make ample use of subterfuge and stratagem in order to defeat or disarm your adversary, and c) to use outright violence only when absolutely necessary in the belief that political struggle was more effective than military struggle.

The influence of Sun Tzu on other North Vietnamese military strategists is harder to answer. Certainly many of the key leaders in Hanoi were aware of Sun Tzu and made use of his ideas - Vo Nguyen Giap applied many of these ideas in seeking out weak elements in the enemy's defenses, as did Truong Chinh, whose famous treatise, The Resistance Will Win (1947), cited the ideas of Mao Zedong as a model for the North Vietnamese to follow.

I see no reason to believe that the Vietnamese Communist Party will lose control over the reins of power in Vietnam. There is no organized force in the country that is capable of competing with the VCP for power. And the party still believes that it must rule by intimidation and by dominating the political scene In effect, it has abandoned that part of Ho Chi Minh's legacy that the people must be won over by persuasion rather than by force - a dictum that Ho Chi Minh did not always follow himself.

Finally, in 1954 [Ho Chi Minh] agreed to the Geneva Agreement, which divided the country temporarily into two zones, in the hope that national elections might unify the country under his leadership.

[Ho Chi Minh] was always conscious that conditions in China and Vietnam were not always the same. He "kowtowed" to the Chinese - as he had to the Soviet Union - in order to receive their assistance, but he quietly worked to limit those forms of influence of which he did not approve (such as the harsh forms of land reform and the Great Leap Forward). Unfortunately, he was not always successful in fending off those forms of external advice that he didn't agree with.

When the advice of Moscow ran counter to [Ho Chi Minh's] own ideas - as in the 1930s - he kept his head down and waited until the situation changed in his favor with the beginning of the Pacific War.

Ho Chi Minh preferred to use the tactics of negotiation and compromise, primarily because of his recognition that the revolutionary movement was militarily weaker than its adversaries.