Truong Nhu Tang

Trương Như Tảng
Trương Như Tảng in 1976 as the Minister of Justice
Minister of Justice
In office June 8, 1969 – 1978
Personal details
Born	(1923-05-19) May 19, 1923 (age 93) Cholon, French Indochina
Nationality	Vietnamese
Political party	Provisional Revolutionary Government

Trương Như Tảng (born 1923, Cholon, French Indochina) is a Vietnamese lawyer and politician living in France. He was active in many anti-South Vietnamese organizations before joining the newly created Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam as the Minister of Justice. He spent many years in the jungles near and in Cambodia until the Fall of Saigon in 1975. He quickly became disillusioned with the newly imposed North Vietnamese regime and escaped the reunited Socialist Republic of Vietnam via a boat in August 1978. He was sent to a refugee camp in Indonesia before moving to Paris, France, to live out his life in exile.

Tảng grew up in Saigon as one of six sons of a rich father who owned a rubber plantation and a printing house and taught ("for pleasure") at the Collège Chasseloup-Laubat; since his father intended him to be a pharmacist, after studying (exclusively in French) at the Collège Chasseloup-Laubat, Tảng was sent to Hanoi University for a year and then (after a delay caused by the violence attendant on the end of World War II in Vietnam) to France in 1946 to study pharmacy. While in Paris, however, Tảng was introduced to the movement for Vietnamese independence, met Hồ Chí Minh, and transferred to the École des Sciences Politiques, where he focused on military and diplomatic subjects and was especially drawn to Marxist writings on colonialism. When he refused to return to Saigon at his father's command, he was cut off and had to work as a dishwasher to earn his living. By 1951, he had completed his studies, having earned a master's degree in political science and having gone on to take a licentiate in law at the University of Paris. However, at the end of the year, he returned to Vietnam at his father's urgent request to help put his brothers through school. To avoid draft into the South Vietnamese army, he joined the newly created French School of Naval Supply in 1954. At the end of 1955, he took a job as Controller-General of the Viet-Nam Bank for Industry and Commerce, but he also became involved in opposition to the Ngô Đình Diệm government.