Land reform in Vietnam was a program of land reform in North Vietnam from 1953 to 1956. It followed the program of land reform in China from 1946 to 1953.
The aim of the land reform program was to break the power of the traditional village elite, to form a new class of leaders, and redistribute the wealth (mostly land) to create a new class that has no ownership. It was an element of the Communist revolution.
The reform was very radical. It led to allegations of many villagers being executed, land being taken away even from poor peasants and of creating paranoia among neighbours and kin. Many peasants were falsely labeled as landlords and executed.
Former Hanoi government official Nguyen Minh Can, told RFA’s Vietnamese service: “The land reform was a massacre of innocent, honest people, and using contemporary terms we must say that it was a genocide triggered by class discrimination”.
Some reports said that up to 50,000 people were killed and another 500,000 died gradually in labor camps or from starvation. Almost 1 million of the North Vietnamese people uprooted and left the North to move South because of this event.
By the end of 1956, the Communist Party announced their land reform was a mistake, and a campaign to rectify the error lasted till 1958.
The land reform in North Vietnam was documented by Hoang Van Chi in From Colonialism to Communism, first published in 1962 by the Congress of Cultural Freedom, in New York, London, and New Delhi. P. J. Honey wrote the Introduction for this work.
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