Responses and Consequences: The Impacts of the 1954 Geneva Accords on North Vietnam’s Land Reform, 1954-1956

• In Event: 58. Transcending the Seventeenth Parallel: Exploring Common Features, Patterns and Interactions in North and South Vietnamese State-Civil Society Relations, 1955-1975. Sponsored by the Vietnam Studies Group

Abstract

The Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s (DRV) six-wave Maoist-inspired land reform program, including the pilot campaign, began in April 1953 and ended in July 1956. The implementation was modest during the first four waves, with 735 communes undergoing reform, but then accelerated during the period from July 1955 to July 1956, with implementation being carried out in 2,579 communes. The escalated speed and expanded scope increased the amount of violence, with many in the countryside having been falsely accused, prosecuted and executed. This forced the Vietnamese communist government, for the first and only time in its history, to apologize to the people and to take corrective measures. What accelerated the speed of implementation?



Using archival sources and newly-released Communist-Party documents, I explore how the pace of the land reform from July 1954 to July 1956 was determined in large part by the 1954 Geneva Accords and the overall situation in South Vietnam. Evidence indicates that Hanoi’s moderate application of the program was due to its anticipation of a potential national unification as provisioned in the Accords. However, when such prospects dissolved by mid-1955, the DRV reverted to a more radical implementation of the land reform program in order to hastily transform the country’s rural society, consolidate political power, and prepare for conflicts against South Vietnam and the United States. These changes demonstrate how the DRV could operate as shrewd and calculating political entity, willfully making drastic adjustments to achieve its primary goals—sometimes at a horrific cost to its own people.

Author

• Alex-Thai D. Vo, Cornell University