How Communism Nearly Starved Vietnam

The 1975 collapse of the Republic of Vietnam - commonly referred to as South Vietnam - ended

a three decade struggle to reunify the country.

The victorious North Vietnamese - led by the Communist Party of Vietnam or CPV - then embarked

on a series of economic measures to wipe away colonialist influence and bring socialism

to the country.

However, these measures failed to achieve their goals and the country tilted dangerously

close to a famine.

In this video, we are going to take a look at Vietnam’s economic struggles with land

reform and collectivization.

And how they regained their footing afterwards.

## Agriculture

At the founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, commonly known as North Vietnam,

it would be hard to argue that the country wasn't in need of land reform.

Nearly every Vietnamese lived via agriculture.

And CPV documents found that 3% of the people owned 22% of the farmable land.

The CPV's economic policies at the time were in line with contemporary Communist doctrine

- dictating the collectivization of agriculture to eventually industrialize the economy and

solidify the party’s state power.

Land reform was considered a first, intermediate step towards this.

Theoretically, it would cleanse colonial-era exploitation, give land to the landless, and

eliminate the social bases of Communist resistance.

So in 1953 - about the same time Taiwan was carrying out its land reform program - the

CPV announced a land reform program where local land reform councils seized and redistributed

land owned by individuals it classified as "rich" or "landlords".

They were advised by members of the Communist Party of China.

North Vietnam's land reform measures did lead to paddy rice yields improving by 60% and

an expansion of cultivated land from 1954 to 1958.

But these gains came at the cost of social upheaval.

Mao's flavors of land reform pushed for struggle between the classes, leading to violence.

Furthermore, the definitions of who was "rich" were not very solid which encouraged arbitrary

punishments.

Estimates of how many "reactionaries" were killed vary.

One Politburo document from the time set a goal of about one execution per thousand people

- so around 15,000.

Western estimates generally cluster around that number - with additionally over 20,000

imprisonments.

We will probably never know the real number.

But in 1956, CPV officials made concessions in their speeches that "errors", "excesses",

and "injustices" occurred during their implementation.