Computers undermine communism. In the 1960s there were those who thought that computing would strengthen centralized economies through greater efficiency in state planning. The microchip destroyed those expectations and instead reinvigorated decentralized capitalism. One who personifies the tension between computing and communism is the Vietnamese mathematician Phan Dinh Dieu. He is one of the few tolerated outspoken critics of party dictatorship inside Vietnam.
Before the party congress in 1991, Dieu wrote a petition to the leadership pleading for democracy and suggesting that the party abandon Marxism-Leninism. The petition was not published, but was widely circulated. In September 1992 Dieu gave the following interview at his research institute in the suburbs of Hanoi.