UC Berkeley

In this dissertation, I examine the controversial land reform campaign carried out by the Vietnamese Workers' Party (VWP) in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) from 1953 to 1956. The VWP leadership based the campaign on Maoist models and, indeed, planned and executed it with the help of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) advisers. As with land reform in China, the VWP's version involved sending thousands of hastily trained cadres into rural communities to teach villagers about class struggle, to organize public trials of alleged class enemies (followed in many cases by public executions), and to oversee the redistribution of land and personal belongings confiscated from those targeted by the campaign.

A few weeks after the completion of the land reform in the summer of 1956, the VWP leaders apologized publicly to the North Vietnamese people, stating that "errors" had been committed during the campaign's implementation. The public apology included a promise that these "errors," where possible, would be "corrected" in a new campaign. The key idea of this official explanation was that the negative phenomena of the campaign (primarily its extraordinary violence) had been an unfortunate accident, and not what the Party leaders had intended to happen when they formulated the land reform policy. Something had gone awry during the campaign's implementation, with cadres committing "leftist deviations," which were not "discovered" by the Party leaders until it was too late.

Using a range of different sources that have become available to scholars in the last two decades, I test the validity of this official VWP explanation for what had happened during the land reform. I also test the validity of the VWP leadership's original justification for carrying out the campaign, which was the notion that peasant misery in the countryside in early 1953 stemmed primarily from "feudal exploitation." I argue that both narratives do not stand up to close scrutiny and that the land reform unfolded largely as planned by the Party leaders.