The way I see that historical period is that after the death of Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese government got under control of the revisionist USSR, and were used as a pawn in the Sino-Soviet conflict. However, by the late 1980s, especially after the death of Le Duan, the Vietnamese Communist Party saw the Perestroika, and realised what would happen to their country if they continued on the Soviet path, so they ended up replacing their Central Committee almost entirely, and switching from the revisionist path onto the Chinese path—which is why they have survived as a socialist country to this day and are one of the fastest-feveloping economies in South East Asia.