A Cambodian political leader, Hun Sen (born 1951) early in 1985, at the age of 33, became the then youngest premier of any country in the world.

Hun Sen was born the second son of a family of poor peasants on April 8, 1951, in a hamlet in Cambodia's southeastern Kompong Cham province, which borders Vietnam. The location of the area of his birth was to prove significant for his career in the 1970s, as it early on was to bring him in contact with nearby Vietnamese political and military leaders and their Cambodian allies.

Hun Sen's formal schooling was haphazard. Reportedly he received primary education in Phnom Penh while living with relatives. But he did not go beyond this, and instead was soon swept up as an adolescent participant in various revolutionary youth movements. These movements themselves reflected the turbulent power struggle among Cambodian communists, including Hanoi-oriented leaders, during the middle 1960s...