Land reform in North Vietnam (Vietnamese: Cải cách ruộng đất tại miền Bắc Việt Nam, IPA: [kâj.kǎʲk ʐuə̂ˀŋ.ɗʌ̌k tâˀj miə̀n.ɓɐ̌k viə̂ˀt.nām]) was a major campaign by the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) between 1953 and 1956, during the final year of the First Indochina War and its aftermath, when the DRV came to be known as North Vietnam. The goal was to take land from landlords and give it to poor farmers. Influenced by and with direct advisement from China, the reform included land redistribution, rent reduction, and class struggle.
Many landlords were accused of crimes, publicly criticized, imprisoned, or executed. The campaign resulted from and caused further division in rural North Vietnam, and the government later admitted and attempted to rectify its mistakes. In 1956, a "Rectification of Errors" campaign was launched to correct these problems. Despite its violence, the reform changed rural society and helped the government gain control over the countryside.
Background
The land reform project in North Vietnam was a product of the complex interplay of internal and external factors. On 9 March 1945, several years after occupation in Indochina, Japan instigated a military coup, overthrew the Vichy French administration in Indochina and established a puppet indigenous government headed by Tran Trong Kim and Bảo Đại. However, five months later, Japan unconditionally surrendered. Taking advantage of the political vacuum, the Viet Minh seized power by launching a nationwide revolution and founding the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV; later North Vietnam) in Hanoi on September 2.
Soon after that, Vietnam saw an influx of foreign power. The Kuomintang Chinese armies accepted the surrender of Japan in Vietnam North of the 16th parallel, with the British in the south. Both of them negotiated and facilitated the French return. After negotiations between the Viet Minh and the French broke down, the war between them started from late 1946 until 1954; this is called the First Indochina War (1946–1954).
Throughout the 1940s, the Viet Minh fought solely against the French army. In terms of military capability, the Viet Minh was in a position of clear-cut disadvantage; this did not change until the establishment and involvement of the People's Republic of China.
During this period, the DRV government was dominated by the Viet Minh, who were popular among indigenous political forces; its domestic policy was to unite all possible forces for resistance and an independent war. It also embraced peasants, workers, students and some merchants and intellectuals. On 11 November 1945, the ICP declared its dissolution, aiming at downplaying the role of communist ideology by dissolving and forcing the ICP underground to garner more support from the masses.
In October 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established the People's Republic of China by winning its political rivalry with the KMT during the Chinese Civil War, which had a major impact on the political landscape of the region in general and Vietnam in particular.
From the CCP's perspective, the Chinese revolutionary model was intended to be exported to Asian countries, including Vietnam. Moreover, the increasing influence in its southern periphery was also for national defense and security. From the perspective of the DRV, communist China was a good ally and paradigm that shared the same ideology and similar approaches to complete the communist revolution. They were glad to conduct a binary revolution at the same time: externally, anti-colonialism; internally, anti-feudalism. Thus, Ho Chi Minh actively sought Chinese aid. Stalin, the Soviet leader and head of the communist world, was also displeased with the Vietnamese communists' temporary suspension of class struggle and urged them to quickly implement land reform. After establishing formal diplomatic relations with the PRC in early 1950, Luo Guibo became the first Chinese ambassador to the DRV, and Chinese aid also flooded into the DRV, the most significant of which was the Chinese advisory group, which was later sent to Northern Vietnam in the same year.
Essentially, Chinese advisory groups had a double mission. The most important one was to provide advice on military affairs. After winning victories in a series of military campaigns, with considerable assistance from August 1950 onward, the DRV not only gradually turned the war situation around but also expanded its controlled areas. This conducive environment facilitated the DRV to carry out its land reform plan.
As a government dominated by the communists, land reform was an integral part of its revolution. After its first trial failed in the 1930s, Vietnamese communists never had a real chance to carry it out, even for a long time after the foundation of the DRV. For the sake of war, communist slogans were even diminished. Instead, they needed support from landowners and landlords. However, Chinese assistance outweighed domestic support from feudal classes, and communism was re-emphasised. The Indochinese party was divided along national lines, and the Vietnamese Workers' Party (VWP) was officially formed in early 1951. Simultaneously, land reform was put on its agenda. More comprehensive and stricter land policies were formulated, and class struggle was emphasized as inseparable from the military struggle for the first time.
On the other hand, the French and American-sponsored State of Vietnam (later South Vietnam) emerged in 1949 and was recognized by Western powers. Particularly after the Bao Dai interval, the DRV faced a competent rival regime which contested its monopolistic representation of the Vietnamese people. In this situation, Truong Chinh, in his report to the party Congress in 1951, pointed out that as soon as the Bao Dai regime was set up, the landlord class aligned itself with the State of Vietnam.
Excepting international and domestic political factors, as Bernard B. Fall pointed out, land reform was also necessary for economic reasons. 90 per cent of the population lived by agriculture, but the problem was the enormous population pressure put upon the relatively small fertile areas. In the Red River delta, 9 million people were crowded into an area of 5790 square miles. The majority of the population under the DRV were peasants but did not have land to till, which was an unjust situation.
After the end of WWII in Indochina, people suffered greatly from famine and a lack of sufficient food due to ongoing conflict. Improving their welfare would consolidate the Viet Minh's regime by garnering more support. Collective ownership as a palliative to landlessness has been a century-old practice throughout Vietnam, and individuals were deprived of rice fields and had to turn to communal land for support.
In Vietnam, there is a saying called "Phép Vua Thua Lệ Làng", literally meaning that the emperor is secondary to village customs and implicitly indicating that national rule at the village level was giving way to autonomous rule by the village itself. This was also true for the DRV government; their influence at the grassroots level was relatively weak. Land reform served as a good way to cement its power at the grassroots level.
Implementation
Land reform in North Vietnam was a grand project. At first, it was a relatively mild campaign; later, it radicalized and had serious consequences. When the top leaders noticed the side effects, they tried to rectify the errors caused.
Pre-1953 communist land policy in DRV
Social revolution is part of the Communist Party-led revolution. However, for a long time, the regime failed to grasp the essential tasks of the Vietnamese national democratic revolution, placing too much emphasis on unity with landlords in the interest of national resistance, and paid little attention to the peasants and land issues. A more mild reform was adopted: landlords agreed to decrease the land rent, and the peasants still needed to pay rent, but with a lower rate. The land rent reduction was formulated in July 1949. The failure to initially implement land reform was one of the reasons why Stalin was unhappy with the Vietnamese communists. To ensure the support of the Soviet Union, which agreed to let China directly help in the war, the Vietnamese Communist Party decided to carry out land reform even before they defeated the French.
All pre-1953 policies had failed to break through the landlords' economic and political power and to serve the interests of the peasants. According to VWP's mouthpiece Nhan Dan, even landlords were allowed to join the party, which somehow dominated the party chapters in many areas. DRV gradually abandoned its former policy toward landlords and peasants. From 14 to 23 November 1953, VWP organized a national conference, in which anti-feudalism was given much emphasis. The most important change was that a new approach was adopted, which was mass mobilization for class struggle.
Land reform constituted two successive campaigns: the land rent reduction campaign (1953–1954) and the land reform campaign proper (1954–1956). The first campaign included eight waves and the second had five waves. According to Hoang Van Chi, who was a former member of DRV and fled to South Vietnam in the mid-1950s, these two campaigns had but one purpose, namely the liquidation of the landowning class and the subsequent establishment of a proletarian dictatorship in the countryside. The only notable difference between them was the degree of violence and the nature of the wealth confiscated.
Land Rent Reduction Campaign
After being trained by a Chinese consultant through the local party cell, Vietnamese cadres were sent to villages in order to live with landless peasants. They practised the "Three Together System", namely, working together, eating together, and living together. By doing so for two to three months, they had amassed much information about the peasants and the village, and also raised awareness of social class by asking the peasants questions, such as why they were poor.
After this survey was conducted by professionally trained cadres, the reduction campaign officially began, with six successive stages. The first stage was to classify the population, during which peasants were categorized according to their possession. This was followed by the classification of landlords. Theoretically speaking, there were three classes of landlords: traitorous, ordinary, resistance and "democratic personalities". Those landlords found non-compliant with the rent reduction decree would be arrested. In this case, they had to pay back the excess land rent within the time limit; this is the third stage of extortion of money and valuables. The fourth stage is crime revelation, the peasants were made to attend a special course and taught how to publicly reveal crimes of landlords, and they would have a role of denouncing crimes in the front of a number of people in the fifth stage, but the problem was that they denounced for appearing faithful and obedient to the party, so they may denounce as much as they can rather than considered the reality.
On 12 April 1953, a special people's tribunal, composed of peasants who knew nothing of law, was formed by decree 150/SL. Sentences varied from the death penalty to years' hard labor, for this point, the most well-known case was Nguyen Thi Nam, a patriotic landlord who joined the resistance war against the French but was sentenced to death.
The label of landlord is dangerous. According to Hoang's memoir, as soon as a man was defined as a landlord, he and his family were isolated from their fellow human beings, and no one was permitted to speak to them or even have any contact with them. This policy of isolation even caused a number of deaths.
Land Reform Campaign Proper
In the year of 1953, a series of decrees and laws on land reform were released. VWP central committee assessed the possibility of moving on to the last phase of land revolution: redistribution of agricultural land, which was followed by the most crucial land reform law publicized on 19 December 1953, which can be regarded as the platform and premise for land reform. Very soon after the law was passed in the national congress, the experimental wave of land reform took place between December 1953 and March 1954 in Thai Nguyen province. This experiment was fruitful according to the official, and a Central Land Reform Committee was established on 15 March 1954, which was headed by Pham Van Dong.
Land reform then expanded to larger areas by five waves (see the table below).