A veteran of the Vietnamese nationalist struggles against France in the 1940s and 1950s and the US from the early 1960s until 1975, Vo Van Kiet was active in politics after the end of the Vietnam War, and made his name as Communist Party chief in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). As leader of the faction that stood for economic reform in Vietnam he campaigned for resistance to the centralising tendencies of the capital Hanoi.

He continued this process when elected Prime Minister of Vietnam in 1991, and was regarded by many as the chief architect of the doi moi (renewal) market reforms that attempted to replace the command economy that came naturally to the Communist regime. The general secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party throughout his premiership was the conservative Do Muoi, and with the equally conservative General Le Duc Anh as President during the same period, liberalising tendencies on both the economic and political fronts found plenty of internal opposition.

Nevertheless, within a few years Do Muoi announced himself impressed by the country’s economic achievements, and by the improved relations with other states. This process, for which Kiet could undoubtedly take much of the credit, included the normalisation of relations with the old enemy America, billions of dollars in foreign investment and a greatly expanded foreign trade.

Vo Van Kiet was born Phan Van Hoa into a poor peasant family in the southern Mekong delta, in what was then French Indo-China, in 1922. He joined the anti-French revolutionary movement in 1938 at 16, and the Indo-Chinese Communist Party the following year. In doing so, he changed his birth name to Vo Van Kiet.

After an abortive nationalist uprising in 1940 he fled into the jungle, where he spent the rest of the war, during which French Indo-China was under Japanese control with the acquiescence of the Vichy Government. By 1945 he was a member of a cadre of the Vietminh, a Communist-led nationalist movement, and took part in the resistance to the French colonial Government that developed into full-scale war and resulted in the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

However, this led, at a Geneva confernce that year, to the division of the country, after which Kiet went not to the Communist North but to the south where he became the party’s political commissar for Saigon in 1958, in the early years of the armed resistance against the Government of Ngo Dinh Diem. By 1960 he was a leading member of the party central office in South Vietnam, the Politburo arm running the Vietcong insurgency against the Government of South Vietnam, which was from that year increasingly supported and controlled by American military might. Kiet’s wife and children were killed in an American bombing raid while on their way to one of their clandestine meetings with him.

In 1976, with the Communists having achieved the withdrawal of American forces and the overthrow of the Government of the South, Kiet became Mayor of Saigon, renamed Ho Chi Minh City, and a non-voting alternate member of the Politburo.

In the late 1980s he and his mentor, the former party chief Nguyen Van Linh, broke with the central planning and rigid dogma of the old revolutionaries. This had transformed Vietnam into a regional military giant (Chinese forces had invaded Vietnam in February 1979 but had been forced to retreat with a bloody nose in less than a month) but had made no concerted effort to expand an economy that remained chronically weak.

With his southern background Kiet opposed the Hanoi Government’s drive to bring private business there under state control, and in 1982 became a full Politburo member and was briefly vice-chairman of the Council of Ministers in Hanoi. But the conservative spirit soon prevailed in Hanoi’s councils and within three months Do Muoi had taken over the position.

Kiet was first elected to the acting premiership in 1988, but his tenure of the office was brief, and he was succeeded later in the year by Do Muoi. It was only in 1991, with the party journal Tap Chi Cong San publishing a series of articles from prominent figures expressing deep unease about the effectiveness of a command economy, that an irresistable drive towards reform carried Kiet again to the premiership, which he was to hold until 1997. A new draft constitution, published in December that year, reaffirmed the primacy of the Communist Party but, interestingly, stipulated that it must be subject to the rule of law.

In the climate of tension between reformist tendencies and the continuing sway of the hardline Communist Party, Kiet’s path was never going to be easy. But by travelling widely in Asia and Europe he was able to demonstrate that this previously somewhat inscrutable, introverted country had a human face, and was capable of a pragmatic approach to international trade. Close relations with the ebullient economy of Singapore were established and in 1994 President Clinton lifted the US trade embargo with Vietnam, establishing diplomatic relations the following year.

But there was never any shortage of internal opposition to these reforms, and Kiet finally stepped down in 1997. He died in hospital in Singapore.

He is survived by his second wife.

Vo Van Kiet, Prime Minister of Vietnam, 1991-97, was born on November 23, 1922. He died on June 11, 2008, aged 85