Lu Phuong was born Le Van Phuong in 1938 in Ha Nam Ninh province. He graduated from the Saigon University in 1960 and worked for the Tin Van magazine. In 1968, he joined the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam and served as Cultural Deputy Minister of its Provisional Revolutionary Government. After the war, he worked for a few years at the Culture Ministry in Hanoi and retired to Saigon, earning his living by tutoring and writing. In 1979, Lu Phuong began to publicly question the Vietnamese Communist Party's major wrong-doings. But after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, he spent great effort in studying the cause of the general collapse of the communist world. Understandably, most of his writings were only printed in the overseas press.

Despite his membership to the Vietnamese Communist Party, Lu Phuong has been willing to let scientific thinking dictate his reasoning and conclusion. In the essay "Conversation on Socialism," he wrote: "According to author Tran Dan Tien, who many believe to be the pen-name of Ho Chi Minh himself, when Ho chose to follow the Socialist path, he did not understand much about this doctrine. He had no idea what were class struggle, exploitation, strategy, policy, etc.... Indeed, that fact has played a tremendous role in the plight of our people in the last century. He chose Socialism despite his ignorance about it ... He did not know that he had tied the fate of the people to an international organization and an ideology that could not liberate human beings ... The fundamental cause of these sufferings, helplessness, backwardness, and autocracy is nothing but the slavery to ideology ... It makes people afraid to look at reality and look inward to find their own thought ... It creates the mechanism to turn the brave into cowards, the intelligent into stupid, the idealistic into indulges. It drags the nation down a quagmire, paralyzed and brushed aside while the world is speeding into the future ... Socialism is simply an "illusion that never comes true"... Therefore, any attempts to "reform" according to the "socialist" direction, using Lenin's methodology, or based on the proletarian dictatorship to carry out a market economy (or its opposite), are just patching excuses to stay in the Marxist illusion..."

In the essay "Culture and a Policy to Develop Culture," Lu Phuong was even bolder: "The current leadership, having no ability to create their own, borrowed foreign ideology first to take over power and later to protect their position in power. They did not have the vision to self-correct. Their reform policy was the result of looking outward for solution. And the outside world collapsed, they panicked and found no foundation except the political manipulation learnt during the struggles to take and to keep power."

Lu Phuong believes Vietnam can only stably advance in a pluralistic democracy. In the essay "Socialist Vietnam: heritage, reform, and economic development," he insisted: "The building of a legalistic government is the basis to establish a multi-party, pluralistic system ... The Party must relinquish all power to the government, return to a civil society, place itself under the laws and on equal footings with other social, political organizations."