Do we like them?

Do we like Vo Nguyen Giap?

Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing harmful of his own turned up on the groups we track, and he took a public stand at a cost late in life, but the record on his wartime and 1950s roles is contested.

Giap was a former history teacher who became the founding father of the Vietnam People's Army. His forces beat the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, a battle still studied in military schools. In Vietnam his standing was second only to Ho Chi Minh's.

Being a hero didn't keep him in power. He lost the defence ministry in 1980, and in 1982 he was dropped from the Politburo in a purge that also demoted five other older leaders. Historian Lien-Hang Nguyen argues he was less the mastermind than a sidelined figure. She says party chief Le Duan and Le Duc Tho saw him as a threat, and that he opposed the plan that became the 1968 Tet Offensive.

The harm check comes up fairly clean. We found no words or campaigning from him against LGBTQ+ people, women or migrants, nothing on vaccines or conspiracies, and no history of keeping harmful company. He was a communist soldier and officer, so the war and its human cost are the real argument. Historians disagree on how much of that cost was his strategy and how much was the leadership over his head.

We couldn't open a solid source on his role in the 1950s land reform, and the numbers and blame there are heavily disputed, so we're not pinning that on him either way. That's a genuine gap in this file, and it's the main reason for the asterisk.

The best chapter for this page came in his late 90s. He wrote open letters to the prime minister and then to the Central Committee and Politburo against the Chinese-backed bauxite mine in the Central Highlands. He warned of environmental damage and of hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers in the mines, and asked for a full study first. He wrote that he preferred not to implement the project, and a former colonel said he wrote the letters himself.

When he died in October 2013, hundreds of thousands lined the streets of Hanoi for his funeral procession. The state tried to claim his legacy, but plenty of mourners seemed to be there for him. He was never a campaigner against the party, but he did speak up when the planet was at stake.