NVN Agrarian Reforms

Vietnam Indochina Tours <info@indochinatours.com>

date May 24, 2007 6:41 PM

subject [Vsg] NVN Agrarian Reforms

Dear Balazs,

Thank you for the information and the excellent rending of your views on your 24 May posting. The landreforms and the issue of land are of keen interest to me.

Here’s what I have on dates/laws:

14 July 1949 – Initial rent reduction decree

2 March 1953 - Population Classification Decree

12 April 1953 – Mobilization Decree (reduction of land rent)

20 May 1953 – Land Reform Decree issued

12 December 1953 – Land Reform Law promulgated by National Assembly

My understanding is that Troung Chinh conceived the entire campaign as a singular campaign carried out in three successive steps: (1) confiscation of land belonging to collaborators, distribution communal land, disposal of absentee landlord lands; (2) Reduction of land rents and usury; and (3) Achievement of land reform.

Overlaying your data with the above, roughly half [?] of the total population of Bac Bo and north Trung Bo (7,775,386) had progressed through step-two by December 1955. Am I correct in assuming that the 4,079,000 people who passed through step-three by December 1955 are in addition to the number 7,775,386? i.e., that these people had passed through both step-two and step three? Or were the 4,079,000 included in the 7,775,386 number? I assume both numbers of course reflect gross family members.

On the basis of the above, from 12 April 1953, the date of the Mobilization Decree, to December 1955, roughly half of the total population (assuming a population 14m) had progressed through step-two and nearly 30% through step-three. This would yet leave a very substantial amount of the population to begin step-two (approx. 20%) and to begin step-three (approx. 50% [+ 20%] ) prior to the cessation of the campaign in August 1956 (of course these numbers do not consider city dwellers, armed forces members, minorities, etc.). That is still a formidable number yet with 32,000 trained land reform cadre a doable task.

I ask your review on the above and note of my errors no matter how numerous they may be.

Mieczyslaw Maneli, a Polish member of the International Commission for Supervision and Control notes that there was a famine in 1954-1955 in which thousands of people perished in Bac Bo. Do you know how extensive this famine was? Or if it was a famine only in the Catholic areas? And for what reasons would it have occurred: (1) the disruption of production in 1953/1954 due to the mass mobilizations/land reform? (2) The failure to attend to the 1955 10th month crop due to anticipated regroupment to the south? (3) the aftermath effects of the war?

There is a Sword of Damocles which cuts through Troung Chinh’s words in his address to the Dang Lao Dong during the Party conference of November 14-23: he speaks eloquently of the ethos, pathos and logos of land reform yet rails against the landlords (“To smash the political power of the feudal landlords . . .”). You noted in your posting that the VWP ‘may have placed greater emphasis on mobilization than on the elimination of real and potential opponents’ . . . I have been persuaded by my readings that there was at least an equal (perhaps even more?) emphasis on the elimination of opponents during steps one, two and three as there was on implementing and achieving agrarian reform; and when the synthesis of the landreforms is analyzed using the five-percent figure which Chinh estimates the percentage of landlords to be along with the resultant amount of land which the rich peasant (before 0.21:after 0.21 ha.), middle peasant (.12:.17), poor peasant (.05:.14) and landless peasant (.02:.15) received, few achieved sufficient land to obtain anything but a subsistence existence; certainly there was a decisive propaganda benefit to theagrarian reforms, but were they done to prove that the casier landscape was an unproductive way of farming? What is your view on this beyond what you indicated as noted above? Do you feel that the destruction of a class was/could have been all along a primary object of the VWP’s agrarian reform program?

Is your source for the 23,748 political prisoners released by September 1957 also Moise?

It is odd, as you note, that that the number of revealed to executed landlords did not remain constant . . . especially since crescendo of the campaigns reached a higher level of violence as they progressed over time one would expect the inverse.

Soldier killed by “rioters”: most certainly this did occur (and more than one) during the Nghe-Tinh 1930 Soviets. I have not yet read anything which describes any 325th Division or any other soldier’s death by rioters in the 1956 uprisings.

The 6,000 peasants killed is not described by Karnow on pg. 241 when he describes what he calls the “Nghe An” incident. If you ever recall the source I’d certainly appreciate the notation. FYI Karnow on pg. 240 describes the rice received from Burma in 1955 as being courtesy of the Soviet Union; M. Maneli pg. 39, War of the Vanquished, notes that to his knowledge the first ship to bring the rice was the Polish ship Boleslaw Bierut, courtesy of Poland. Nothing that Karnow writes is footnoted so nothing can be verified.

I do not have access to “Cold War History” but e-mailed them and requested the November 2005 issue or a copy of your article. Especially interested in reading it.

Thank you for sharing your insight with me.

Courtney Frobenius

Balazs Szalontai <aoverl@yahoo.co.uk>

date May 25, 2007 11:54 PM

subject [Vsg] Re: NVN Agrarian Reforms

Dear Courtney,

thanks a lot for your long reply! I must check both my notes and Moise's book to give an answer to your question about the stages of the campaign. The famine described by Maneli (and also by Moise) was real enough. This is what I wrote about it in my article:

Paradoxically, the economy of northern Vietnam was badly hit both by the long and immensely destructive Franco-Vietnamese War and by the conclusion of the Geneva agreements. The war caused a considerable reduction of rice production, hindered trade between French-controlled

and ‘liberated’ areas, and left irrigation systems seriously damaged. As if this had not been disastrous enough, in 1954 Vietnam was troubled both by extensive floods and scarce rainfall. As a consequence, a serious famine occurred in Central Vietnam and the Red River Delta. By the end of 1954, over 12,000 persons had starved to death, or died for related reasons, in these areas. At its peak, in the spring of 1955, the famine affected approximately one million people, mostly Catholic villagers.The land

reform also produced a negative effect on the food supply of the urban population, since it deprived customers of the rice previously marketed by landowners and well-to-do peasants.

The aims of mobilizing the population and eliminating potential opponents were actually in close connection with each other. In my view, the regime's emphasis on mass mobilization played a very important role in the high number of "wrong classifications" and even in the decision to find and eliminate a fixed percentage of landlords in each district. These rigid guidelines had nothing to do with any careful sociological analysis of local rural conditions. Nor were they compatible with the aims of efficient security and counter-intelligence operations, since a great number of loyal cadres were also caught in the dragnet. But if one is determined to reveal "enemies" literally everywhere, down to the smallest and most reliable xa, one will fabricate such "enemies" if real ones are difficult to find. Destruction of landlords "as a class" was clearly an aim, but this does not explain why so many persons were wrongly classified as exploitative landlords.

The fluctuation of the number of revealed and executed landlords is a very interesting phenomenon, all the more so because there was no strong correlation between the two. One would indeed expect an exponential growth of executions, yet this was not necessarily the case.

Moise mentioned 12,000 released political prisoners in his book; my figure was based on a Hungarian diplomatic report.

I don't think I would confuse the French army with the North Vietnamese one, let alone 1930 with 1956. However, I may have confused the Quynh Luu protests with another Catholic riot in Central Vietnam, which occurred in early 1955, in the context of the mass Catholic emigration to the South. I must check the data after my return to Hungary.

All the best,

Balazs Szalontai

Stephen Denney <sdenney@ocf.berkeley.edu>

date May 26, 2007 1:51 PM

subject Re: [Vsg] Newly released documents on the land reform

Thanks to Tuong Vu for the very interesting and detailed information on

the land reform and rectification campaigns, and its victims, based on

documents from Van Kien Dang Toan Tap. We also have that multi-volume work

here at the UC Berkeley library. It has been published by NXB Chinh Tri

Quoc Gia since 1998 and its call number here is JQ898.D253 D33 1998.

I am surprised these documents would contain such revealing information,

particularly the 1953 Politburo decree which set a quota on the number of

people to be executed during the land reform campaign, 1 in 1,000.

- Steve Denney

vu tuong <vhtuong@yahoo.com>

date May 27, 2007 1:01 AM

subject Re: [Vsg] Newly released documents on the land reform

Comrade Balazs,

Your points are well-said and well-taken. The two

documents clarified some issues but there are still

numerous others.

In response to your point and Courtney’s question

below:

“certainly there was a decisive propaganda benefit to

the agrarian reforms, but were they done to prove that

the casier landscape was an unproductive way of

farming? What is your view on this beyond what you

indicated as noted above? Do you feel that the

destruction of a class was/could have been all along a

primary object of the VWP’s agrarian reform program?”

the existing literature tends to look at the event

known as the land reform as a land reform and fails to

capture its full dynamics. Ostensibly land

redistribution was for the good of poor peasants but

given what we know

1)about how Vietnamese communist leaders generally and

consistently disdained small-scale agriculture (not

surprising; this disdain is traceable to Marx’s

comparison of the peasantry to a bag of potatoes; “san

xuat nho, le, manh mun” is their perjorative phrase

that one hears repeatedly then and still hears now in

2007 from some Bo Nong Nghiep officials), and

2)that they would soon launch collectivization by the

late 1950s

one should not regard economic or technical rationale

as a significant leadership motive in land

redistribution (land rent reduction to alleviate the

exploitation of tenants was different).

Rather, land redistribution was primarily motivated by

politics. It was simultaneously (1) a China-inspired

wartime strategy of mobilizing peasant labor and

taxes, (2) a reaction to the Bao Dai government’s land

reform initiatives, (3) a rural class struggle (to

eliminate landlords as a class and to build new, loyal

local governments), and (4) a tool for organizational

purge. Regarding the last item which I discuss in my

manuscript yet to be published, there was a strong

suspicion among many top party leaders that the Party

at local levels had been thoroughly infiltrated by

“reactionary” elements, including French spies. More

broadly, there was the concern that the Party had been

contaminated by bourgeoise elements (constituting

about 60% of membership by 1950) due to earlier lax

membership policy.

Clearly there must have been party leaders who were

more concerned about the broad struggle with the

French and the Bao Dai government. There were others

such as Truong Chinh and Le Van Luong who were more

worried about the class integrity of the Party. There

were bureaucrats such as Pham Van Dong and Le Van Hien

who were concerned about tax receipts and rice

supplies. Hoang Quoc Viet and Nguyen Chi Thanh can be

assumed to care more about mass mobilization and troop

recruitment. And so on, but we still know almost

nothing about politics at this level. My hypothesis is

that the priority of different elements changed with

time: the first two elements perhaps triggered the

land reform campaign and explained its timing (thanks

for pointing this out), the second two became more

important after 1954. This was only the broad trend,

because the campaign also shifted daily or monthly

within the limits defined by the balance among the

four elements, and the limits set by organizational

and institutional capacity.

Since late 1954, one can add to the four elements

above the long-term goal of reunification (meaning the

rural struggle should not cause people to defect en

mass to the Ngo Dinh Diem government in case of

general elections under Geneva’s terms), emerging

opposition in the North (that would later become the

Nhan Van-Giai Pham affair and the Quynh Luu protests),

and the rising prominence of Southern-based leaders

such as Le Duan (officially made number 3 since 1951),

Le Duc Tho, and Pham Hung. These were elements that

affected the dynamics of the campaign and imposed new

limits on it but did not change its main goals or

character substantially. Events in the Soviet bloc in

early 1956 (Khrushchev’s speech, etc.) belonged to a

special class, however. The suspension of the land

reform and organizational purge, I believe, was more

or less caused by those events.

To be sure, as Prof. Tai noted, a full study of the

land reform requires perspectives from below. You

don’t have to look for these only in Orange County;

they can come from the most unexpected places. A few

years ago I was quite taken aback when a retired

Vietnamese professor in Hanoi suddenly reacted angrily

to my argument that the Vietnamese communist regime

was “more moderate” than its counterpart in China. It

turned out that the family of this professor (when he

was still a young man) had been persecuted and then

reinstituted during the land reform but his life and

career ever since had been subject to constant

suspicion and bitterness. Academic arguments stop

making sense when we talk about particular lives and

deaths. 10,000 or 13,500 doesn’t matter much to the

victims who just wanted to have their innocent youths

(or their dead fathers) back.

Thanks to Stephen Denney for giving the full

bibliographic reference for the documents, which I

forgot. I used the printed volumes but many volumes

are now downloadable from the party website.

Best,

Tuong Vu

Balazs Szalontai <aoverl@yahoo.co.uk>

date May 27, 2007 2:07 AM

subject Re: [Vsg] Newly released documents on the land reform

Dear dong chi Tuong,

I completely agree with you in that "one should not regard economic or technical rationale

as a significant leadership motive in land redistribution." In fact, as both Moise's book and theHungarian documents show, the land reform campaign produced a negative, rather than positive, effect on the economic situation.

In my view, it is worth putting the leadership's suspicion that "the Party at local levels had been thoroughly infiltrated by “reactionary” elements, including French spies," into a broad international context. As Georges Boudarel correctly pointed out, this intra-party witch-hunt seems to have been patterned upon an earlier CCP purge, the so-called "campaign against the AB-tuan." This purge, having peaked in 1930-32, was gradually re-examined in the mid-1930s, resulting in numerous rehabilitations. Interestingly enough, in 1933 the CCP leadership launched another irrational witch-hunt, but this time the targets were the Korean members of the Manchurian CCP organizations. While in 1930-32 the CCP had laid a great emphasis on recruiting Koreans (and other minorities), and the purges carried out in these years seem to have affected mainly Han Chinese party members, in 1933-34 the leadership changed course, and started to persecute Koreans, charging them with collaborating with the Japanese. It is particularly remarkable thatthe anti-Korean campaign closely coincided with an anti-Buryat campaign in Soviet-controlled Mongolia. Since the Soviet security organs were heavily involved in the anti-Buryat purges, one may assume that the anti-Korean campaign was also at least partly influenced by Soviet guidelines. Another interesting point is that the anti-Korean campaign, similarly to the "anti-AB-tuan campaign," was eventually re-examined, resulting in another wave of rehabilitations.

In other words, we can observe the repetition of the same pattern on at least three occasions: irrational witch-hunt, then re-examination and rehabilitations. I wonder what recent research have unearthed about the motives behind the "anti-AB-tuan purge." Since this was clearly the mother and model of the subsequent purges, it deserves great attention, all the more so because it predated Stalin's Great Terror by at least four years.

All the best,

Balazs Szalontai

"Dr. Martin Grossheim" <martingrossheim@online.de>

date May 30, 2007 3:12 AM

subject Re: [Vsg] Re: NVN Agrarian Reforms

Dear all,

I think that most of us would agree that ".....it is our duty to listen to a wide range of perspectives and try to distill from them a sense of the different ways

in which the past has been represented." (Janet Hoskins) and that this also also means that we should take Viet Kieu perspectives seriously.

I have two comments on this:

1. While accepting divergent opinions we should also check the accuracy of certain views on Vietnamese history put forward by Viet Kieu or non-Viet Kieu.

In this respect, I would like to come back to one topic that has been widely discussed on the VSG-list in the last few weeks: the land reform campaign.

Since the end of 2005, certain Viet Kieu websites have claimed that 172,008 persons were killed during the land reform campaign. Obviously, this new claim is based on calculations made by Vo Xuan Minh in his article „172,008 nan nhan trong cai cach ruong dat (172008 victims during the land reform), in: http://www.thongluan.org/vn/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=291

As a source Vo Xuan Minh refers to the same book that is also cited by Calvin Thai in his second posting (though Calvin Thai claims that 150,000 persons were killed):

Dang Phong (ed.) (2005). Lich su kinh te Viet Nam (1945-2000), Tap 2 (History of Vietnam’s Economy, 1945-2000, Vol.2, 1955-1975), Hanoi: NXB Khoa hoc xa hoi.

See the excerpt from C. Thai’s posting:

"3. On Ho's fight for "people's happiness and freedom", land reform program:

"Tren Nhung Chang Duong Cach mang (Hoi ky)", Vo Chi Cong, Hanoi, 2001,

pp. 138-146

Vo Chi Cong was VCP Poliburo member and Vietnam President in the early 1990's

"Lich su Kinh te Viet Nam 1945-2000, Tap II: 1955-1975", Vien Khoa hoc

Xa hoi Viet Nam, Hanoi, 2005, pp. 83-88

Dang Phong, Dean of the Institute of Economics at the National Centre

for Social and Human Sciences of Vietnam, was the head-editor of this

thick-and-heavy volume.

Previously, when talking about Hanoi's land reform program, people

often cited Edwin Moise's "Land reform in China and North Vietnam" as

the authority on the subject. The figure of more than 150,000 victims

in "Lich su Kinh te Viet Nam 1945-2000, Tap II: 1955-1975" clearly

indicates that Moise's estimate is way off!"

(end of excerpt)

A statistics on page 85 of the Lich su Kinh te Viet Nam actually mentions a figure of 172,008, but this is the sum of all persons classified as landlords (including dia chu cuong hao gian ac, dia chu thuong, dia chu khang chien) and rich peasants (phu nong) during the land reform, not the number of people executed!!

2. I would emphasize one phenomen that we also should take into account if we want to understand Vietnamese history from multiple Vietnamese perspectives.

In Vietnam itself, in the last few years private memories increasingly present alternatives versions of the past and challenge the Party’s re-presentation of events such as the land reform campaign. One prominent example is the fact that last year the diaries of Vietnamese writer Nguyen Huy Tuong (1912-1960) were published in three volumes.

The first edition of his diaries appeared on the bookshelves of state bookstores in Hanoi in mid-September 2006 and was sold out within two weeks. The third volume covers the years from 1954 to 1960 and offers fascinating new insights and perspectives to understand the situation in North Vietnam during that period. For example, the diary offers gruesome details about excesses committed during the land reform and about problems that the Party faced when implementing the rectification campaign.Another example would be the novel "Ba nguoi khac" by To Hoai, published in 2006 as well (already mentioned by Hue-Tam Ho Tai). This is not the first Vietnamese novel on the land reform, but certainly one of the most outspoken so far.

Dr. Martin Grossheim

Balazs Szalontai <aoverl@yahoo.co.uk>

date May 30, 2007 2:21 PM

subject Re: [Vsg] Re: NVN Agrarian Reforms

Dear Martin,

it is good to hear of you again, years after our meeting in Paris. I am very grateful for your insightful comment. I just wonder why on earth the Viet Kieu websites distorted the original text of "Lich su Kinh.." so blatantly. After all, one expects the contributors of a Viet Kieu website to be able to read and understand Vietnamese, and thus the aforesaid misinterpretation may reflect either a great degree of unfamiliarity with the terminology and practices of the land reform campaign ... or possibly intentional falsification of the same type that Moise described in his book. May you mention a few of the Viet Kieu websites which you referred to?

All the best,

Balazs Szalontai

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