As the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) slowly turned the tides in the First Indochina War with both USSR and CCP support, each patron began pressuring DRV leadership, including Ho Chi Minh, to implement a land reform program that aligns with their own communist policies. The goal, in theory, was to purge the “pre-revolutionary elite” and redistribute wealth amongst the peasants. Despite a stark contrast between the stated “peasant empowerment” and the brutal social reality of the program, the DRV did accomplish the simultaneous goal of using class struggle as a tool to break traditional structures, eliminate potential opposition, and rapidly consolidate the worker’s party into absolute political control.

Ho Chi Minh was initially resistant to implementing land reform before the end of the war. However, “Stalin and Mao continued to pressure [him] to act as they had.” In December 1952, he wrote an article for the party’s The People, which supported such a program and signaled the beginning of the new DRV policy. In several subsequent speeches, he outlined the objectives, notably “the landlord class is a feudal remnant,” and thus “is a target of the revolution.” Redistributing their land would be “the people’s liberation,” encouraging conscientiousness and organization.

Early on, there were signs of what was to come. The extent to which Ho Chi Minh advocated for peasants to act on their own volition and become enthusiastic supporters foreshadowed their “theatrical role.” Additionally, the DRV also began planning a simultaneous “reorganization” of the current party structure—which quickly became obvious was more of a purge. The disorder in bureaucracy while implementing land reform inherently hindered the extent to which the program could maintain any semblance of impartial classification.

The joint measures of both dropping resistance to land reform while also planning the party purge indicates that Ho Chi Minh saw an opportunity to consolidate power within the North Vietnamese state. In many of the public reports and speeches it is apparent the goal was to remain in the “good graces of Stalin and Mao,” though none of the party’s rural policies since taking power in 1949 had been effective in stimulating an increase in productivity. Under the claims of “devious landlords,” party leaders expected the coupling of the land campaign would aid otherwise baseless claims against “uneducated” local cadres. There was, of course, an attempt to create a revolutionary peasant identity—Ho Chi Minh argued the peasant class was the “largest revolutionary force against feudalism and imperialism”—though there probably would have been a better result after the political organization had stabilized.

The process of the land reform program was simple: penetrate local communities with specially trained cadres, take up residence, and sow class resentment while surveying socioeconomic conditions and classifying the villagers. Subsequently, those identified as landlords would have their possessions—including their land—dissipated amongst the community and then would be jailed or executed. In some way or another, the program grew to eventually impact the lives of over 10.5 million people. The main intention was to mobilize the peasants to achieve “political predominance.” However, party leadership also saw poverty as a cause of villagers purchasing imperialistic goods. Thus land reform was also intended to serve the abolishment of imperialism and as a result the consolidation of communist leadership.

In practice, the land reform campaign was rife with false accusations, excessive violence, and widespread fear. For one, many “manipulated the campaign to pursue local vendettas,” exaggerating the wealth of their neighbors. Confusion and rapid changes in cadre organization often resulted in poor peasant education and prevented mitigating the unexpected degree of impassioned villager behaviour. Furthermore, classification was biased, notably being “especially hard on Catholic communities” and too broadly targeting landlords who had supported the revolution during the war.

The social unrest was also taken advantage of by the supposedly “specially trained” cadres. In Three Others, a fictional narrative based heavily on the author’s experience as a classification cadre, most of the notable female characters are peasants in some way sexually related to one or various cadres. At one point a cadre hosts a public ceremony to admit three women into the Communist party, though “each of whom is sexually linked” to him. The book also relates how one wealthy villager was able to escape to Hanoi and open a Pho shop. By the end, most of the main characters—both cadres and villagers—die, lose their job, or simply disappear. However, the Pho shop does very well.

This tale offers a variety of reasons for the failure of the classification system, from the wealthy’s ability to avoid the sole purpose of the campaign to the cadres’ abuse of their positions of leadership and exploitation of villagers, counter to the proposed peasant empowerment. Additionally, land reform teams “strove to fill quotas” even in villages that had no abusive landlords, further undermining goals of winning peasant loyalty or establishing stable governance. In an unprecedented move for the Communist world, General Võ Nguyên Giáp publicly acknowledged the mass misclassification and excessive punitive measures in 1956, leading to the DRV announcing a reclassification effort. However, these measures were introduced in a similarly “hasty and uneven way [that] sowed further discord in the countryside.”

In the party’s short-sighted pursuit of ideological goals, there was little concern for social stability or agricultural production. The campaign disrupted field work and heavily impacted yields. Many of those offered land were reluctant to accept it as well, since taxes were based on an expected production irrespective of current weather or labor conditions. These factors are correlated with an ensuing famine—full blown by mid 1953. The “cruel landlords” were also found to be significantly overclassified: the DRV’s own Bureau of Statistics had found, based on a “typical village,” an average 0.3% landlord population—party leaders and land reform enacters instead classified about 5%, punishing over fifteen times as many as intended. All said, the party’s prestige and unity was seriously shaken. The emphasis on finding “loyal and zealous elements of the masses” was clearly incompatible with the establishment of an informed peasant organization, though it is undeniable in its success towards overthrowing reactionary “Vietnamese traitors.”

In the party’s list of six successes of the land reform program—though several were likely exaggerated—the DRV included “the reorganization of party and state political bodies at the local level.” As one example of this success is the village of Sơn-Dương, in which the party purge expelled 46% of its rich members and admitted 13 new peasant members including one woman who became party leader. Both the shift in leadership affluence and village gender dynamics contributed to the worker-peasant alliance that strengthened Communist control over the region—despite embittered surviving landlords; by 1957 “the traditional…hierarchy was seriously undermined in favor of a radical egalitarian and collectivist ideology.”

Furthermore, the DRV’s adoption of the policy succeeded in strengthening their relationship with their foreign patrons, presenting itself as “the model student of the Soviet Union and China” (both of which had similar outcomes of mass famine and tumultuous hierarchies). As a result, after the collapse of the 1954 Geneva Accords, the Chinese Communist Party donated vast quantities of economic resources and military aid. Though Stalin died in 1953, some relations with Kruschev were established, and the DRV remained heavily dependent on Soviet-bloc aid.

Overall, there were major key discrepancies between the stated political objectives and the actual social outcomes of land reform in the DRV. Ho Chi Minh spoke, in short, of destroying the landlord class and eliminating the influence of the wealthy and uneducated from local party leadership while mobilizing the peasants and pushing “democratic reforms.” The country ended up with thousands—many innocent—dead or displaced. Inherent bias in the classification system decisively fractured society, despite later attempts at reclassification. As a result, the gap between these failures and the success of the nonpublic upheaval of local power dynamics and maintenance of foreign relations indicates the primary goal was the rapid consolidation of power, and the use of class struggle was a powerful, albeit destructive, means to an end.