 Vietnam has no official leader, but the job of party chief has long been the most powerful in the country, a position that Nguyen Phu Trong held for a record three terms beginning in 2011. An old-school Leninist educated in the Soviet Union, a hardline true believer who, paradoxically, oversaw much of the country's increased economic and political engagement with the West. Zhang Nguyen is a visiting fellow at Singapore's Institute for Southeast Asian Studies.