LETTER TO ADDRESSEE FROM IREA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75B00380R000600010016-2
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
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• Document Page Count: 66
• Document Creation Date: December 15, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 17, 2003
• Sequence Number: 16
• Publication Date: December 8, 1972
• Content Type: LETTER

CORNELL UNIVERSITY
75 B00380 R000600010016-2
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS OF EAST ASIA
-CA, N.Y. 14550
,-6 cc;,nber 8, 1972
Addressee:
XMftXDCXVX
140 Uris Hall
Enclosed please find a preliminary draft
of "The Myth of the Bloodbath: North.Vie.tnam's
Land Reform Reconsidered"--b-y Q r,th Pore
Research Associate of the Cornell International
Relations of East Asia Project (IREA)..
In view of the statements and charges
regarding the "bloodbath" (e.g., President
Nixon's July 2.7 news.conference) the contents
of Mr. Porter's documented analysis deserve
immediate, widespread public attention. For
this reason, advanced copies of it are being
released simultaneously to press, radio, .tele
vision and members of Congress.
Inquiries for Mr. Porter, or additional
copies of his study,which will be published
by IREA later this month, should be addressed to:
IREA
140 Uris Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14850
607/256-6222
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Advance Copy: Not for Publication
THE MYTH OF THE BLOODBATH:
NORTH VIETNAM"S LAND REFORM RECONSIDERED
D. Gareth Porter
Research Associate
Interim Report: Number 2
International Relations of East Asia Project
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York
1972
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() 1972 by CORNELL International Relations.of East Asia Project
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AC KNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author wishes to acknowledge with gratitude the assis-
tance of Prof. Benedict Anderson and George McT. Kahin, who read
earlier drafts of this paper and made helpful comments. The
author owes special debt to Prof. David Mozi.ngo, who has.taken.so
much of his time to read and criticize earlier versions. These
comments and criticisms have saved the author from many pitfalls.
The author remains solely responsible, of course, for the con-
tents of this paper.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
EajLe
:I
INTRODUCTION. . . . ?
.
1.
THE LITERATURE OF THE LAND REFORM . . . . . . . . .
. :3
II.
WHY LAND REFORM? . . ?
?
III. LAND REFORM POLICIES: MYTHICAL. AND REAL . . .
.20
IV.
ERRORS: MYTHICAL AND REAL . . . .
.37
V.
THE "ESTIMATES": QUANTIFYING THE MYTH . .
? 51
CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . .
.57
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INTRODUCTION
American intervention in Vietnam has been justified increas-
ingly in recent years by portraying the North Vietnamese leaders
as ideological fanatics who would carry out a massive "bloodbath"
against former foes if allowed to gain power in South Vietnam.
In particular, this argument, which has been promoted'-in a series
of Presidential speeches, draws on allegations concerning the
North Vietnamese land reform program which was carried out from
1953 to 1956. The essence of these allegations is that the land
reform was a deliberate reign of terror aimed at eliminating.whgle.
economic classes and that tens or even hundreds of thousands of
innocent people were killed.
This view of land reform has been broadly accepted by Ameri-
can scholars and public alike as an established fact. Yet there
has never been a careful study of the land reform which makes use
of all the available documentation. Instead,`.opinions about the
North Vietnamese leadership and the land reform have been formed
on the basis of propaganda and careless scholarship. Fictions
about the land reform in the North have been repeated and ampli-
fied year after year, shaping American perceptions of and responses.
to the Vietnamese revolution. U. S. policymakers,.journalists and
academics continue to view the D. R. V.'s `leaders through this
distorted lens as bloodthirsty and fanatical rather than as
responding rationally to complex problems and real conditions.
'[f U. S. policy is to be based on a realistic assessment of
the Vietnamese revolution instead of a caricature of it, a neces-
sary first step must be to set aside the popular notion of the
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land reform as a "bloodbath". It is hoped that this essay may
serve not only to unravel a central myth about the Democratic
Republic of Vietnam, but also to reveal some of the "scratches on
our minds" which underlie American policy in Vietnam.
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CHAPTER I
THE LITERATURE OF THE LAND REFORM
While the U. S. government has made the myth of the blood-
bath in North Vietnam an important weapon in its propaganda
arsenal, the myth could not have received wide acceptance without
a body of literature which supports it.l The specifics of the
argument will be examined in detail in later sections, but it is
important to note at the outset the intellectual background of
the myth, which goes a long way in explaining its genesis and
development.
The literature on North Vietnam's land reform is, first of
all, a reflection of the low level of American scholarship on
Vietnam in general and North Vietnam in particular. After more
than twenty years of heavy involvement in Vietnam's destiny and
more than ten years of warfare against Vietnamese revolutionaries,
there is still no respectable body of scholarly work on the Demo-
cratic Republic of Vietnam. For many years, the late Bernard
Fall was virtually the only academic specialist on Vietnam who
1The secondary sources referring to the North Vietnamese land
reform which will be cited in this study are the following:
Joseph Buttinger, Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled, vol. II. Vietnam
at War (New York: -Praeger,--1967); George Carver, "The Faceless.
Viet Gong", Foreign Affairs, vol. 44 (April 1966); Bernard Fall,
The Viet Minh Regime, revised and enlarged edition, (New York:
nest t:ute of Pacific Relations, 1956); Fall, The Two Vietnams
(New York: Praeger, 1963); J. Price Gittinger, "Communist Land
Policy in North Vietnam", Far Eastern Survey, August 1959; P. J.
Honey, Communism in North Vietnam (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1963);
Honey,, North Vietnam Today (New York: Praeger, 1962).
More recently, two staff members of the Rand Corporation have
referred to the land reform in the context of discussing the
subject of political reprisals; see Stephen T. Hosmer, Viet Cong
Repression and its Implications for the Future (Lexington, ass.:
Heath Lexington Books, 1970, pp. 46-99, and nita Lauve Nutt, On
the Question of Communist Reprisals in Vietnam, Rand Corporation,
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was independent of the U. S. government, and he commanded corres-
pondingly great attention and respect for his views. But Fall's
analysis of the D. R. V.'s land reform was limited severely by
his failure to consult authoritative French sources on landhold-
ing in Tonkin as well as by his inability to read Vietnamese.
Like other authors who wrote about North Vietnam's land
reform, Fall was unable to do research in the original Vietnamese
sources, particularly the Lao Dong Party's official organ Nhan
Dan (The People). In trying to analyze a government and society
on which virtually no journalistic or other non-official sources
of information were available, this handicap was critical For
meant that important documents were either not-read at all or
were obtained in summary translation from the U. S. or South
Vietnamese governments. And those documents could have been
distorted in the process of selection, translation and summariza-
tion so as to influence substantially the interpretation of devel-
opments in the North. This is precisely what happened in the
case of certain documents used by American authors to characterize
the land reform as an ideologically-motivated "bloodbath".
An even more significant consequence of the generally low
level of knowledge of the D. R. V. even among those considered
specialists and the dearth of information available to them was
that they made it possible for a Vietnamese claiming to have per-
sonal knowledge of the D. R. V. to have an extraordinarily great
influence on the interpretations of specialists as well-as general
public. Thus the individual who has probably done the most to
shape American attitudes toward the land reform is a native of
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The American literature on the North Vietnamese land reform
has' relied heavily on his book, From Colonialism to Communism, as
a primary source.2 Its influence derives from his claim to have
authoritative, first hand knowledge of the land reform campaign
down to April 1955, when he left North Vietnam for Saigon. He
makes: frequent assertions implying detailed and intimate know-
ledge of Lao Dong party policy. Indeed, a CIA official, George
Carver, who recommends the book to the public, refers to Hoang
Van Chi as a "former Viet Minh cadre".3 But in fact he was never
a party member and, by his own account, he was only a teacher in
a pre-college school in Thanh Hoa province from 1950 to 1955.4
Thus he was not connected either with the Viet Minh government or
the Lao Dong party during the entire period of the land reform--a
fact which appears nowhere in the book.
Moreover, Mr. Chi was himself a relatively wealthy landowner,
having inherited 20 acres from his parents.5 As will be shown
below, this constituted a large landholding in the North Vietnam-
ese context. His account of the land reform, therefore, is far
from being objective and dispassionate. His antagonism to the
2Hoang Van Chi, From Colonialism to Communism (New York:
Praeger, 1964).
3Carver, o . cit., p. 355. Carver's attempt to promote Hoang
Van Chi's account of the land reform is especially significant in
that Carver tried to conceal his own affiliation with the U. S.
government in writing the article. The fact that Carver was a
CIA official was revealed only later by Senator J. William Fuibright.
4See the interview with Hoang Van Chi published in the Agency
for International Development's in-house newsletter, front Lines,
February 24, 1972.
SInterview with Hoang Van Chi, AID Washington Training
Center, May 26, 1972.
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D. R. V. and to agrarian revolution led him, as we shall see, to
ake a number of assertions of fact where he actually lacked
~rst-hand information.
Equally important in assessing his credentials as a primary
source on the land reform is the fact of his direct involvement
-.;.th Vietnamese and American propaganda organs after his arrival
Ln South Vietnam in 1955. Mr. Chi worked for the Saigon govern-
--ant's Ministry of Information for some eight months in 1955 and
1)56 and as a translator for the U. S. Information Agency.6 In
1958, ,Diem's Ministry of Information partially subsidized the
publication of his book, The j,w Class in North Vietnam,? in
-rxi,ch he first presented his account of the North Vietnamese land
reform.8
In 1960, Hoang Van Chi re:eived a grant from the Congress
for Cultural Freedom to spend a year in Paris writing a book
which would reach American and European audiences with his attack
on the D. R. V. land reform. For many years, the Central Intel-
ligence Agency channeled funds to the Congress for Cultural Free-
con as part of its global program of supporting anti-Communist
in5.ellectual grouDs.9 U. S. I. A. subsidized the publication in
1964 of From Colonialism to Communism, as later admitted by U. S. I. A
Director LeonardMarks in September 1966.10 Hoang Van Chi then
61bid.
7lloang Van Chi, The New Class in North Vietnam (Saigon:
Gong Dan, 1958).
ginterview with Hoang Van Chi.
9See New York Times, April 27, 1966.
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to the U. S. to work for the U. S. I.. A., and he now lectures
ll
at A. 1. D.-s- Washington Training Center.
it is thus no accident that Hoang Van Chi's account of the
land reform has.been used in U. S. propaganda against North Viet-
nam. For it was American money which made possible both the writ-
ing and the publication of his book, which has been a very. success-
ful long-term investment in the development of American public
opinion about the D. R. V.
Although other authors have contributed to the making of the
"bloodbath" myth by abusing important documentary evidence, it is
Hoang Van Chi who has committed the most serious and most numerous
offenses in this regard. His account is based on a series of
falsehoods, non-existent documents and slanted translations which
leave no doubt that his purpose was propaganda rather than accu-
rate history. Much of the analysis which follows will therefore
deal with Mr. Chi's assertions and the documentation used to.sup-
port them.
One of the common characteristics of the literature of the
land reform in North Vietnam is the denial of its economic and
social rationale. Any objective analysis of the land reform must,
however, begin with the question of why the leaders of the D. R. V.
carried out radical land reform. It is to this question that we
now turn.
11F'ront Lines, February 24, 1972.'
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The land reform in North Vietnam is commonly portrayed as an
essentially political campaign carried out to fulfill abstract
ideological requirements which conflicted with the real needs of
Vietnamese society.' But none of the analyses of the land reform
which have put forward this argument deal thoroughly or objectively
with the social, economic and political conditions in Vietnam at
the end of the French colonial period. The decision to carry out
land reform cannot be properly understood apart from the land
tenure system of North Vietnam and the political and military
requirements of the struggle for :independence.,
Colonial Tonkin and Northern Annam, which together constitute
the present territory of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, have
been treated by the literature on the land reform as-regions of
small farmers owning the land they tilled, with little tenancy. or
inequality of landownership. This view seriously misrepresents
the! well-documented realities of the land tenure system in the
North during the colonial period. The Red River area had an extra-
ordinarily high ratio of population to land, and while. most peasants
'The land reform program is sometimes confused with the
later phase of North Vietnamese agricultural policy in which co-
operatives were established; hence the alleged "bloodbath" may
be associated in some minds with the later "collectivization" pro-
graam in the rural areas. But that phase did not begin until
November 1958, nearly two and a half years after the end of the
land reform process. The allegations of a "bloodbath," therefore,
have nothing to do with the "collectivization" of agriculture.
In contrast to the land reform, the campaign to establish co-
operatives was gradual and non.:oercive. This analysis concerns
only thRpiJr d ~~rfl l a r j? /~1 1 - ~0~ 80 2~~10~6 2 completed
in 1956.
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did own some land, they owned so little that they were forced to
work on additional land belonging to someone else.
According to French geographer Pierre Gourou, about 62 per-
cent of the farming families owned less than one acre, while 200
owned less than one-half acre.2 As Gourou pointed out in 1936,
the owners of such minute plots "cannot live on their property
and must hire themselves out, or else rent farms ".3 And by the
same token the farmer with even a few hectares of land inevitably
became a. landlord, renting it out to a number of small tenants.
"In Tonking"., Gourou said,."the description 'large property' must
be given to farmlands of truly unimpressive size (from 3.6 hec-
tares!)"4 According to Yves Henry, there were some 21,000 land-
owners with between 3.6 and 18 hectares, while 1,000 more owned
more than 18 hectares.5 But these figures certainly underesti-
mated the number of large and middle landowners. Many of them,
especially government officials, successfully hid their wealth by
various devices, including the dispersal of plots among several
villages and false land title registration under the names of
their tenants.6
2Pierre Gourou, Land Utilization in French Indochina, trans-
lation of L'Utilization du sol en In oc ine Francaise, ew York,
1945) Part !I, pp. 276 ff. cited in Erich H. Jacoby ' Agrarian
Unrest in Southeast Asia, 2nd ed. (London: Asia Publishing House,
1961), p. .
3Gourou, The Peasants of the Tonkin Delta (New Haven: Human
Relations Area Files, 1955), p.7-218 .
4Ibid.
SYves Henry, Economie Agricole de L'Indochine (Hanoi: Gouver-
nement Genreale de 'Indochine, 1932), pp. 108 and 110.
6See Pham Cao Duong, Thuc Trang cua Gioi Non Dan Viet Nam
duoi Thoi 'Phap Thuoc (The Trituation of the Vietnamese Peasants
under F Ayu e6 d=boft 1 bie 2 9Q3/1PQ2i g6 -RDRY , - 9 6 5) ,
pp. 104-5.
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Gourou estimated that 90 percent of the landowners (not tak-
ing into account the families without any land at all) owned only
36.6% of the total cultivated land area in Tonkin, while
10% of the landowners controlled 43.2% of it.7 And data
collected by the 1). R. V. on all of the 3653 villages which went
.through land reform confirm Gourou's estimates.8 As of 1945,
according to these figures, 89% of the rural population, compri.s=
ink; landless laborers, poor peasants and middle peasants, owned
only 40% of the cultivated land. The poor peasants and landless
laborers, who rep:resented 60% of the population, owned only 10
percent of the land. At the same time, the Z.5% of the rural
families who lived by renting out land, owned 24.5% of the land
outright and controlled much more indirectly. Although in theory
the needs of the landless and landpoor were supposed to be assuaged
by a share of communal lands, which constituted an estimated 25%
of the total cultivated farm land in the North, the reality was
that these lands were usually monopolized by local notables, who
exploited them for their own profit.9
These statistics convey the picture of a social and economic
structure which kept the majority of poor peasants in permanent,..
economic bondage to the landlord and on the margin of survival.
Rents usually ranged from 50 to 75% of total yields. Constantly
in debt to his landlord or another usurer and often forced to'
71bid., p. 286.
STran Phuong, ed., Cach Nib Ruon Dat (Agrarian Revolution
in Vietnam), Hanoi: Khoo Hioc: Xa Hoii,1968), table no. 8, p. 14.
9See Henry, a cit., p. 112; Pham Cao Duong, o p. cit., pp.
74-83; Nguyen Huu La Ccmmune Annamite (Paris: i rarie du
Recueil Sirey, 1946), p. specific cases of such exploita-
tion-of communal lands by :[oca.l notables under the French see the
' 1 Lap, first
richly Ay ~ et~eta~d~Ob3'/1 /~2~o13gA-~~P~~ B( 3~0 ~0
14, 1" -1, (
published in 1937. Van De Dar.. Cay (The Peasant ro em Hanoi:
Nha Xuat Ban Su That, 1959), second printing pp. 122-3.
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beg enough rice to feed his family from one day to the next, the
poor peasant was completely at the mercy of the landlord.. When
famine struck after flood or drought, it was the poor peasants
who were most likely to starve.10
The revolution of August 1945 and the war of resistance
against the French which followed did not fundamentally alter.the
land tenure system of North Vietnam, despite the fact that many
large landowners who worked for the French had their land confis-
cated and redistributed. By 1953, according to a D. R. V. survey
of 93 villages and 31 hamlets in 16 provinces, landlords still
controlled 17% of the cultivated land while the poor peasants
still controlled only 18% of the land. 11 Although the D. R. V.
introduced limited reforms aimed at reducing the rents from the
former 50 to 70% of the crop to 25% and reducing the interest on
loans to poor peasants, compliance by the landlords was limited,
even in areas which had long been liberated.
The reasons for the failure of these partial reforms were
both political and economic. With the emphasis during the resis-
tance on the need to maintain tight unity of all social strata to
oppose the French, peasants frequently were not informed by local
cadres of their new rights or of the necessity to struggle for
them.12 In fact, the official Lao Dong Party. organ made it clear
10See Ngo Vinh Long, Before the Au ust Revolution, TThhe Living
Conditions of the Vietnamese Peasant under French Colonialism (Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 1972), see also Ph-am ao 15uong, op. cit., p. 116.
11Tran Phuong, loc. cit.
12Le Hoai Tuyen, "Complete the Reduction of Rents, Carry out
the Reduction of Debts", Su That (The Truth), no. 135, June 15,
1950, in uoc Khang Chien Thanes anh cua Nhan Dan Viet Nam (The
Magnif' t nce t - Vietnam-Qse Peo 1e0b1 Hanoi: Su
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12
that, although peasants should demand their rights, the method to
be used was negotiation with the landlord,.not coercion.13. As
one article in a party organ put it, "If the peasants are not
tactful, it will harm the spirit of unity of the resistance".14
With the peasants thus discouraged from taking direct action
against them, many landowners simply used their much greater eco-
nomic power to intimidate tenants who might 'hesitate to pay the
rent demanded of them. This was done by refusing to rent a buf-
falo or loan paddy to the tenant when they were urgently needed
or by threatening to throw uncooperative tenants off the land in
favor of more submissive ones. is Since tenants could not afford
to run these risks, the early reform decrees pprob"ably.",c id not help
most of the poor peasants to any significant extent. The realiza-
tion by the'party leadership that little progress had been made
in rent reduction is indicated by a 1950 article in a party organ
which asked,, "What has the August Revolution brought for the
peasants?" and answered, "Very little".16
D. R. V. leaders felt that this situation could not be
allowed to continue. For it was the poor and landless peasants
who constituted the bulk of the recruits for the People'.s Army as
the war entered its final stage; it was they who had made the
heaviest sacrifice in lives to challenge the French presence.
13Tran Phuong, "The Land. Reform", Pages of History, 1945-54
Vietnamese Studies, No. 7, 1966, p. 187. --
14"Improving the Life of the Peasants". Sinh Hoat Noi Bo
(Internal Activities), No. 7, April 1948, in Quoc -"an Chien,
Vol. II, p. 34.
15Le Hoai Tuyen, op. .cit.. , p. 392.
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General Vo Nguyen Giap had an urgent need to continue the rapid
buildup of his army for the major battles which still lay ahead
in the North. As Ho Chi Minh declared to the National Assembly
in December 1953:
The more the Resistance War develops the more
manpower and wealth it requires. It is the
peasants who have contributed the main force
of the resistance. We must liberate them
from the feudal yoke and ensure the conditions
for them to develop their potentiality in order
to be able to mobilize this huge force in the 17
service of the resistance until final victory.
Thus it was the urgent need to mobilize the poor peasants
for a final push to victory over the French which determined the
precise timing of the beginning of the land reform. But it is
clear that a radical agrarian reform would ultimately have been
necessary in any case. For the land tenure system in North Viet-
nam was not only economically regressive and an obstacle to in-
creased production but prevented the poor peasants who comprised
the majority of the population from achieving the status and
dignity promised by the Vietnamese Revolution.
But those writers who have portrayed the land reform as eco-
nomically and socially unnecessary and as the product of the
ideological fanaticism of the Vietnamese leaders have brushed
aside the social and economic conditions which made it imperative.18
From his first study of the D. R. V. until his death in 1967,
17Quoted in Doan Trong Truyen and Pham Phanh Vinh, Building
an Independent National Economy in Vietnam (Hanoi: Foreign Lan-
guages Publishing House, 1964), p. 120.
18The only exception to this generalization is the detailed
study by Christine Pelzer White, Land Reform in North Vietnam,
Agency for International Development spring Review, Country Taper,
June 1970.
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Bernard Fall argued consistently that the land reform was unneces-
sary and therefore; a doctrina:i:re political exercise. His unwavering.,
disapproval of the land reform was based on the erroneous assume ..
tion that the problem of inequality of land ownership was "acute"
in South Vietnam but not in the North. l9 In his first analysis
of the-land reforn, Fall asserted that 98.7% of the "total farm
lar,.d area" in Tonkin was "tilled by owners"-??a statement which
would lead one to believe that only 1.3% of the'farm land was
worked by tenant Farmers.20 If true, it would indeed have made
Tonkin's landholding system, almost ideal. But-the source from
which he took the figure warned that 98.7% referred not to the
percentage of farming units tilled by the owner (much less the
"total farm land area" tilled 'Jy their owners.)-'but to the percen-
tage of landowners who did not rent out all their land. 21 In
other words 1.3% of all those who owned land were landlords whose
only income was from renting it to others. Fall's statement com-
pletely misrepresented the real situation, which was that the
majority of the peasants either owned no land or so little that
they had to rent additional land from a landlord"to,survive. Yet
the statement that 98.7% of the land was owned by those'who tilled
it was later used by the Saigon government in attacking....-the North
Vietnamese land reform as economically needless.Z2
20Ibid.
Bernard Fall, The Viet_linh Regime, p. 118.
21The Agriculture of French Indochina, U. S. Department of
Agriculture, August 1950 mimea_T,__p. 11. Despite this caveat, the
sane source nevertheless ventures the opinion that Tonkin could be
considered as a country of "small peasants who till their own land"
-- a comRplpe-t~c'F E1gh~ 3/r12~r19 U,a-~%O~ ORD606uuu 6 re system .
22See Land Reform Failures in Communist North Vietnam, Special
Frl' ti nn P-4%rI ,r M,ri -P nnc ~~ rrnn n
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Fall should have been aware of the very high proportion of
the landowners who did not own enough land to support their families,
for he mentioned in the same study the fact that 61 percent of the
landowners held less than one acre--an amount which his own calcu-
lations showed to be too small to support an average-sized peasant
family of five.23 Yet, as late as 1963, he was still asserting
that in Tonkin, more than 98 percent of the tilled land was owned
by small-holders and concluding that, "To speak of 'land reform'
is farcical" . 24
Hoang Van Chi, dismissing the need for radical land redis-
tribution, cites figures from Henry showing that 91 percent of
the landowners held less than 5 hectares in pre-revolutionary
Tonkin.25 His purpose is obviously to portray North Vietnam as
a region of small-landowners. But this figure also misleads the
reader, since it does not say anything about the landless and
landpoor peasants who made up the majority of the population. In
this manner, statistical data has been misused to make the distri-
bution of land in the North appear more equitable.
The idea that the land tenure system in North Vietnam was
one of contented small landowners was eagerly seized upon by
official American spokesmen to discredit the North Vietnamese
d Fall, loc. cit. Even this statistic was used by another
writer hostile to the land reform to show that there were few land-
lords to be confiscated in the North. Joseph Buttinger writes that
"more than 60 percent of all land was in the hands of peasants
owning around one acre", a statement which was wrong on two counts:
first the statistic cited by Fall does not refer to land area but
to landowners, and secondly, it specifically states that 61 per-
cent of them owned less than one acre, not "around" one acre. But-
tinger seems to have men unaware of the economic significance of a
plot of less than one acre. See Joseph Buttinger, Vietnam, A Dragoons
Embattled, Vol. II. Vietnam at War (New York: Praeger,39blj, p. 912
24Bernard Fall, "A 'Straight Zigzag': The Road to Socialism
in No :r P '~O I'ale(G OQ tXOZte RlRP BM88AI d(o6o6o10DgM Barnett,
ed. (New York: Praeger, 1963), p. 216.
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land reform. The CIA's George Carver, in a 1966 essay_in Forei n
Affairs, wrote, "Though there were inequities in land ownership
in North Vietnam, the Red River delta had the most extensive'`pat-
tern: of private ownership to be found anywhere in Asia. "26 phis
"extensive pattern of private ownership" did not, of course-,,,
that the peasants had sufficient food for subsistence, nor
did it prevent the exploitation of peasant labor through oppres-
sive tenancy arrangements. But. Carver was either unaware of the
basic data on the landowning system in the North or choose to
ignore it. This misleading statement was only, the'prelude to his
conclusion that the rationale for the land reform was "rooted in
the dogmatic fanaticism of the Vietnamese Communist leadership,;
The same authors who have attempted to portray the land tenure
system in North Vietnam in such a way as to deny,the need for land
reform have also attempted to minimize the actual economic bene?-
fits which the poor peasants derived from the reform. Here -aga:in,
it was Fall who took the greatest pains to prove the point with
statistical evidence, and agai:Z that evidence was seriously abused.
Scorning the results of t:ie land reform as "economically._
absurd", Fall argued that the resulting parcels of land were hope-
lessly inadequate. According to official D. R. V. statistics
which he used in The Two Viet-Nams, the average share of'land dis-
tributed to agricultural workers, poor peasants and some middle
peasants was about one acre, which increased the total holding of
the-average poor peasant family of five to 1.75 acres and that of
the average agricultural laborer's family to 1.80 acres.27 Fall
26 a, ftse'~~br1/8g ~D~O$I~Eooo6exez,gn ,,Af fa i rs~,
Vol. 44, No. 3 (April 1966), p. 353.
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asserts that at least one hectare,(2.47 acres) was required by an
average family for subsistence farming, without explaining how he
reached this conclusion. 28 It appears that his 2.47-acre minimum
derives from the figure of 800 grams of rice per day per person,
which he had cited elsewhere as the minimum necessary for adequate
nutrition. 29
But an investigation of the data on rice consumption in Viet-
nam reveals that this standard was quite extravagant: the average
rice consumption per person per day in the much wealthier Mekong
Delta region of South Vietnam, according to an official survey in
1959, was only about 470 grams per day.30 Another survey of six
different South Vietnamese provinces and Saigon carried out at
about the same time discovered that the province with the highest
average daily consumption of rice per person was Phong Dinh, with
472 grams, while the poorest provinces had an average-of less than
400 grams.31 These figures compel us to look more closely at the
alleged inadequacy of the plots distributed under the land reform
program in the North.
As of 1960, just over half of the cultivated rice land in
North Vietnam produced two crops annually. However, even those
parcels which grew only one crop per year appear to have been
28Ibid.
29Fall, The Viet Minh Regime, p. 116.
.30Re ublic of Vietnam Nutritional Survey, October-December
1959, S. IInterdepartmental Committee on Nutrition for National
Dense, Saigon, July 1960. Cited in Timothy Hallinan, Economic
Prospects of the Re ublic of Vietnam, Rand Corporation Paper,
P November , p?
31En uete sur la Consummation du Riz et des Conditions Sani-
taires nstitute de la tatistique epu is of Vietnam, August
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capable of producing enough rice to feed each. family member as
well as the average Mekong Delta peasant--even using an extremely
conservative estimate of paddy production per acre.
The average per acre rice production in the 1956, 1957 and 1958,.
according to official D. R. V. statistics, was 752,729 and 828
kilos respectively. 32 But even if we take a figure as low as 600
kilos of paddy as the annual production of one acre, we find that
1.75 acres would produce 1050 kilos of paddy per year, or 2875 grams
per day. After subtracting twenty percent for loss of weight .in
the milling process, the 1.75 acres would provide roughly 2300
grams per day, or 460 grams for each member of an average peasant
family of five.
The real meaning of this statistic can best be'understood
by comparing it not with Fall's arbitrary requirement of 800
grams of rice per- day but with the 264 grams which Yves Henry's
more detailed study reported a:s the average daily,consumption of
rice per person in Tonkin in 1.932.33 Since there had been no in-
crease in the productivity of ric:eland in the two decades which
preceded the land, reform, it is likely that this figure repre-
sented the approximate level of consumption for the majority:of_
peasants when the land reform program began. In dismissing thet
land reform program as "economically absurd", Fall simply ignored
the evidence of a fundamental. improvement in the nutrition of the
average poor peasant family. In fact, it would appear that after
32Agricultural Economy of North Vietnam, Economic Research
Service, gn Regional t nnalysis Division, U. S. Department of
Agriculture (Washington, D. C., 1965), p. 19.
33Henry, op. cit., p. 334.
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the land reform North Vietnamese peasants were at least as well
fed as peasants in the much more fertile Mekong Delta, where the
exploitative land tenure system had not yet been abolished.
A careful examination of the available data concerning the
land tenure system in North Vietnam before the land reform as
well as the actual economic benefits derived from the reform by
the peasants indicates that there,were sound social and economic
reasons for a radical redistribution of land by the D.. R. V. The
land reform cannot be accurately portrayed,. therefore, as merely
the product of abstract ideology or as an "excuse" for the liqui-
dation of social and political opponents.
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CI-IAPTER III
LAND REFORM POLICIES: MYTHICAL AND REAL
Secondary sources which have portrayed the North Vietnamese
I-and reform as an ideologically-inspired campaign of mass murder
?_iave based their case almost entirely on Hoang Van Chi's supposedly
authoritative account. An examination of the truth or falsity of
,;he "'bloodbath" allegation, must begin, therefore, with Hoang Van
:ni' s description of the objectives and methods of the land reform.
That description can be briefly summarized in three basic
~asertions: 1) the Vietnamese Communist leaders, following the
lead of their Communist mentors, used land reform as a means of
.iys'i:Illy liquidating the landlord and rich peasant classes; 2)
in order to insure the completeness of the liquidation, they esl:ab-
lished arbitrary quotas of landlords to be discovered and executed
in-each village;';) the murder and terror required to accomplish
the task went so far as to engulf party members, resistance vet--
erans and innocent people, with the result that tens or even hund-
reds of thousands of people were killed in a massive "bloodbath".
The central allegation in Chi's account is that the aim of
D,? R. V. leaders was the "liqu=idation of the defenseless landown-
irg class". 1,
In support of this charge, Chi quotes what he calls
the famous slogan" of the Lao Dong Party regarding rural classes:
"Depend,completely on the poor and landless peasants, unite with
the middle level peasants, seek an understanding with the rich
peasants and liquidate the landlords."2 The slogan in question
1Hoang Van Chi, From Colonialism to Communism, p. 158.
7
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was indeed "famous," since it represented the general policy of
the party during the land reform,which every cadre was expected
to understand thoroughly. But Mr. Chi misquotes the slogan and
in the process completely misrepresents the D. R. V.'s policy
toward the landlord class. The slogan actually said, "abolish
the feudal regime of land ownership in a manner that is discriminat-
ing, methodical and under sound leadership".3 There was, in fact,
no slogan calling on the people to "liquidate landlords".'
This egregious misquotation puts in sharp relief Hoang Van
Chi's attempt to distort the real objectives of the land reform,
which were to abolish the hold of landlords over peasants and
bring about a more equitable sharing of North Vietnam's agricul-
tural resources. Although Hoang Van Chi's account puts great
emphasis on the public denunciation and trial of landlords, it
falsely portrays their actual function in the-context of the
D. R. V.'s basic policy toward the landlords.
Contrary to Mr. Chi's allegations, only those landlords who
had committed serious crimes were to be publicly denounced by
local peasants and put on trial. At the very beginning of the
land reform process, in 1953, when peasants were first encouraged
to denounce landlords who had committed crimes, Nhan Dan empha-
sized the need to avoid any indiscriminate attack on landowners.
"The object of the struggle is not all the landowners but only
those who refuse to abide by the policy, who refuse to reduce
3See the communique of the Lao Dong Party Central Committee
Vietnam News Agency, Radio Hanoi, October 29, 1956. The slogan
"Overthrow the reactionary traitors and cruel notables" was also
used until after the Geneva Agreement, but this is quite different
from "Liquidate 1thhe landlords". See Tran Phuong (ed.), Cach Mang
Ruong Toved*Forllelease 2003/12/02 : CIA-RDP75B0038OR000600010016-2
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rents and debts", it stated. Those who essentially abided by the
law, it added, "even though they have a few shortcomings", would
be "pardoned".4
The August 1953 resolution of the Lao Dong Party Political
Bureau, which set forth the political line to be followed during
the land reform program, also makes clear the fundamental impor-
tance attached by the Viet Minh leaders to distinguishing among
different kinds of landowners in order to avoid needlessly alien-
ating those who had supported. the resistance. "We must pay atten-
tion to distinctions in our actions regarding landowners," it
stated, "fundamentally dividing the landowning class and patroniz-
ing in the correct manner those who have participated in the
resistance, because the fewer enemies we have, the better."5
Policies toward the landlord. class were to be based on a.
three-fold distinction, depending, on both the past political
attitudes and behavior of 'the landlord and whether or not he re-
sisted the land reform program. Those who had actively partici-
pated in the struggle against the French were to be considered
"resistance landowners" and were to receive special consideration
and compensation in the redistribution of their excess land.
Those who were not active in the Viet Minh but who did not resist
the D. R. V.'s laws and had committed no serious offenses against
peasants were to be classified as "ordinary landowners". They
were to retain a piece of land to till themselves and could change
their class status after three to five years of honest labor.6
4Nhan Dan, June 1-5, 1953, in guoc Khang; Chien, pp. 57-58.
STran Phuong (ed.), Cach Mang Ruong Dat, p. 144.
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A final category of landowners was reserved for "traitors,"
"reactionaries," and "dishonest and wicked notables"--those who
had committed more serious crimes. As a pamphlet issued in 1954
by the National Peasants' Association explained "A severe punish-
ment is reserved for traitors, criminals,.notorious citizens
hated by local people, and reactionary elements who try to destroy
our resistance and land reform movements." Those who received
hard labor sentences of more than five years, it said, would not
receive any land, but their families were entitled to enough land
for subsistence provided they were not accomplices in the land-
owner's crimes.?
The sentences which could be meted out to landowners who
violated various laws in connection with the rent reduction and
land reform campaigns were fixed by Decree number 151 of April 12,
1953. Lesser offenses, such as demanding illegal rent or attempt-
ing to disperse land to evade the new law, were liable to punish-
ments ranging from a warning to imprisonment up to one year. The
destruction by a landowner of his own property "for the purpose
of injuring the peasants or sabotaging production" was considered
more serious and was punishable by imprisonment for a term from
one to five years. Those actions aiming at disrupting the land
reform through bribery, threats, rumors or other means were
punishable by prison terms of from three to ten years. And the
most serious crimes, punishable by prison terms ranging from ten
7La Ruong Cua Ai? Chia Ruong Cho Ai? (Whose Land Will Be
Taken? To Whom i it e Given?), National Peasants' Liaison
Committee, Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Hanoi, 1954.. Translated
in Planning for Land Reform, Translation Series No. 21, Institute
of fiance Projects, East-West Center, Honolulu, 1967, p. 52.
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years to life or by death sentence, included "organizing armed
bands and directing them in agreement with the imperialists and
puppet administration in order to commit acts of violence; at-
tempts upon the lives of peasants and experienced workers; arson
and destruction of dwellings, warehouses, foodstuffs, crops, or
irrigation works; instigation or direction of disorders."8
After the restoration of peace in 1954, in conformity with
the Geneva Agreement's provision forbidding reprisals, the slogan
"Overthrow traitors, reactionaries, and dishonest and wicked not-
ables" was replaced by the slogan "Overthrow dishonest and cruel.
notables." The procedures in ,.he mass mobilization campaign were
also changed to forbid: any general accusations of political crimes
any,, to allow only civil and criminal charges to be brought against
landlords. 9
Far from assuming all landlords to be guilty of some crime,,
the party's expec--ation clearly was that the vast majority of them
would be classified as "ordina-ry" landowners and would therefore
be able to redeem themselves through labor on their own land. As
8The complete text of the decree may be found in td. A. Gel'fer,
Criminal Leslat:ion in Foreiz Socialist States (State Publishing
House of Juria tai Literature, -17T7), pp. 88-8 Translated by
Joint Publications Research Service, December 5, 1958 (DC-408).
9Tran Phuong (ed.), Cach KMng Ruong Dat pp. 129-130. Anita
Lauve Nutt of the RAND Corporation-has argue that the land reform
program was merely a cover for political reprisals against those
who had worked for the French. On the question of Communist
Reprisals in Vietnam, RAND Corporation P-4416, August 1970, p. 4.
But ll~e Hoang Va::n Chi and Bernard Fall, she seriously distorts a
major document of the land reform. She asserts that the Population
Classification Decree of 1953 "clearly indicated that all 'wicked
landowners' who had to be eliminated were also 'traitors', i.e.,
French collaborators." The reader will find no such indication
in the decree, which is published in full in 'Fall, The Viet Minh
Regime, Appendix IV, pp. 172-78.
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the same government pamphlet explained, "The reason we give land
to landlords is to open the way for them to work for a living and
to reform. This is the humane policy of our government.1110 This
basic policy, widely publicized in the Lao Dong party organs
throughout the land reform, is far removed from the bloodthirsty
objectives attributed to the party by Hoang Van Chi and others.
One of the standard allegations about the land reform, found
in a number of. sources, is that the D. R. V.'s leaders established
in advance a "quota" of landlords to be denounced and executed in
each village, which put pressure on cadres to "discover" landlords
to be punished even where none in fact existed. The story first
appeared in a July 1957 Time magazine article which clearly
reflected the work of official propagandists in Saigon. Dramati-
cally entitled, "Land of the Mourning Widows", it described how
the land reform had turned into a "bloodbath" because "the prestige
of each Communist cadre was made dependent on the number of land-
lords sent to the gallows" 11
It seems to be more than coincidence that at about the same
time as the Time article appeared, Hoang Van Chi was working on a
book,.published in January 1958, in which he claimed that the Lao
Dong Party Central Committee had established a quota of five death
sentences in every hamlet in North Vietnam. He further asserted
that Chinese advisers not only had "taught the peasants how to
classify the population" but had also controlled the whole land
reform "point by point",12
10Lay Ruong Cua Ai?, loc. cit.
11 Time, July 1, 1957, p. 27.
12ftgpr Ve~ForChleas( e03~1ew0 C:lass RQn75 No0rthOT0.006na0m0016-2 5-7.
g an 1, V , pp.
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to -
In his later book, Mr. Chi carried the story further, and
;n the process, contradicted his earlier version. Chinese advis-
.rs, he alleged, had insisted on a second classification of popu-
:.ation,.after the first one did not produce enough landowners to
~uLt them. The result, he claimed, was that five times more land-
lords-were found in each village, and that the Central Committee
,'peen gave orders for an increase in death sentences from one to
fire per village. 13 Since the Vietnamese village is made up of
ialist in Asian and Communist agrarian problems"--the usual words
used to conceal the identity cf U. S. intelligence analysts--
wrote, 99A predetermined number of landlords had to be found in
working to-discredit the North Vietnamese leadership as blood-
thirsty and dogmatic. Even before Mr. Chi's book was published
in the U. S., a certain William Kaye, identified only as a "spec-
3.: eral hamlets, this revised. version of the "quota" allegation.
:.represented a significant retreat from his earlier claim that the
ouota was set at five per hamlet.
koang Van Chi's unsubstantiated account of landlord quotas
was quickly picked up and presented as fact by other propagandists
each village, even if they did not, in fact, exist."14 The CIA's
George Carver similarly charged that "each land reform team had a
prrp-assigned quota of death sentences and hard labor imprisonments
to mete out and these quotas were seldom underful#illed".15
13Hoang Van Chi, From Colonialism to Communism, p. 166.
14William Kaye, "A Bowl of Rice Divided: The Economy of
North Vietnam", in Honey (ed., NIorth Vietnam Today, p. 107.
isCarver, op. cit., p. 353.
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A more important voice in swaying American public opinion was
that of Bernard Fall. Apparently drawing upon Hoang Van Chi's
account, he wrote, in The Two Viet-Nams, "Local party officials
began to deliver veritable quotas of landlords and rich peasants,
even in areas where the difference between the largest and smallest
village plots was a quarter of an acre"
Thus the legend of the
."landlord quotas" was well on its way to becoming history.
Scholarly objectivity, however, surely required more evidence
than Hoang Van Chi's undocumented account before presenting the
landlord quota story as fact. No one who was familiar with the
concepts and methods employed by the Lao Dong Party or had studied
the basic party and government documents of the land reform period
could have seriously entertained the notion that Hanoi would call
for the classification, arrest or execution of an arbitrarily high
number of people.
In fact, the most comprehensive account of the land reform
program available provides detailed evidence that the Party's
policy was precisely the opposite of that attributed to it by Mr.
Chi. Far from having demanded a "quota" of "dishonest and wicked
notables" to be executed in each village, the party leadership
acted at the beginning of the campaign to limit the number of
landlords which could be brought before the public for denuncia-
tion and trial in any one village. The reason for this action,
according to this account, was that during the preliminary phase
16Fall, The Two Viet-Nams, p. 155. Although Fall did not
cite any source for his an ord quota" charge in this popular
American work, he had cited Mr. Chi's The New Class in North Viet-
nam as a primary source on the land reform in North Vietnam in
earlier work in French. See Fall, Le Viet Minh (Paris: Librarie
Armand Colin, 1960), p. 291, note. 35.
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of the rent reduction campaign, carried out in a few selected
villages in 1953, the peasants were denouncing on the average
from 10 to 15 landlords for crimes in each village.17
Fearing that the denunciation of this many landlords in the
villages would complicate and. lengthen the land reform campaign
and arouse unnecessary opposition among potential allies in the
landlord class, the Political Bureau decided in August 1953, to
"narrow the attack". During the second phase of the rent reduc-
tion campaign the land reform cadres were ordered to bring only
those landlords with the most serious or the most numerous charges
against them before these public denunciation sessions. Specifi-
cally, each village was permitted to bring no more than three
landlords before such denunciation sessions.18 The other land-
lords accused of crimes were to be allowed to undergo self-criticism
before the Province Administr~:tive Committee. and then to admit
their mistakes before the village Congress of Peasants Representa-
tives, which would then demand that the landlords make restitution
for any wrongs done to peasants.
As a result of this procedure, according to this D. R. V.
account, each village in which the rent reduction campaign was
carried out had an average of 2.1. landowners publicly denounced
aped tried. An average of 3.8 others were brought before the Congress
17 Tran Phuorcg (ed.), Cac_h Kiang Ruong Dat_, p. 125.
18Ibid. Only those villages which had a population of more
than 10,000 people were allowed to bring four or five landlords
before public denunciation sessions. (The average population of
a village in North Vietnam is approximately 3,000 people.)
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of Farmers Representatives on lesser charges. 19 In 1875 villages
the number of landowners tried for serious crimes was 3938 or 8.8
percent of the total number of those classified as landowners.20
But, as we have already seen, only those crimes involving
conspiring with the "imperialists and puppet administration," at-
tempts on the lives of peasants or cadres or destruction of public
or peasants' property were punishable by prison terms longer than
ten years. And the figures released by the D. R. V. after the
completion of the 1953-54 phase of the land reform in August 1954
show that death sentences represented under ten percent of the
total number of sentences handed down by the land reform courts.
The statistics for 836 villages which had gone through the process
of mass mobilization for land reform showed that a total of about
1350 landowners had been denounced for their crimes of whom 135
had been given death sentences, while about 1,200 were given
prison terms.21
The story of "landlord quotas", therefore, is contradicted
by the official documentary evidence concerning both the procedures
19Ibid., p. 126. The figure of 2.1 public denunciations for
the average village during the mass mobilization for rent reduc-
tion is consistent with figures for several provinces published at
the time. In Thanh Hoa province, where Hoang Van Chi was teaching
school in 1954, it was reported that in 78 villages a total of
187 ".dishonest and wicked notables" had been denounced for their
crimes", while in Nghe An and IIa Tinh, a total of 189 landowners
were denounced publicly. Dividing the total numbers of landlords
denounced by the number of villages, we get averages of 2.4 per
village in Thanh Hoa and 2.2 per villages in Nghe An and Ila Tinh.
Nhan Dan, April 1-3, 1954 and August 1-3, 1954.
20Tran Phuong, loc cit;
21Radio Hanoi, August 25, 1954, cited in J. Price Gittinger,
"Communist Land Reform in North Vietnam", p. 116. Nhan Dan,
August 13-.18, 1954, reported figures of 1,215 landowners denounced
publicly in 826 villages.
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for handling these landowners accused of crimes, and the actual
number of landlords tried, sentenced and. executed.
fdang Van Chi's effort to portray the "quotas" as a result
3fChinese Communist direction of the program must be seen in the
;arttext of the propaganda campaign carried out by the Diem gove,cn-
merit's 'psychological warfare organs during this period. Diem
.ranted to convince his own people and the American public that
North Vietnam had fallen under the control of the Chinese Commu.-
nists, hoping to exploit politically the animosity toward the
Chinese prevalent in both countries. As early as August 1954,
the newly-created Diem regime was already broadcasting a wholly
fabricated story of 50,000 Communist Chinese troops in North Viet-
nam, along with Chinese advisers who, in the words of the anonymous
scriptwriter, ','demanded grand receptions with beautiful young
girls to entertain them, rice and meat of quality, and so forth".22
The same broadcast linked the supposed Chinese menace to North
Vietnam with the :land reform program, citing reports of 5,000
Chi'.nese administrative cadre preparing to go to Vietnam to train
Viet Minh land reform teams.
But in 1956, Saigon's propaganda began claiming that the
}}nese advisers were actually running the North Vietnamese gov-
ernment. In August 1956, Diem's embassy in Washington carried an
article in its weekly bulletin, News From Viet-Nam,which claimed
reports by refugees from the North of great resentment on the
part of North Vietnamese people toward the "bellicose, arrogant
attitude of Red Chinese cadres who are entering North Vietnam in
22Saigon Radio, August 6, 1954.
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 ;,rear nt ~~edtlaor4 ~askl~20~~~Q 1 %A ~@ it ions,,. 23
Thus Hoang Van Chi's first published account of the land reform,
written in 1957, put the Chinese advisers in charge of the program
.from the beginning and controlling it "point by point", and not
merely training Viet Minh cadres.24
Hoang Van Chi's account of Chinese supervision over the land
reform was promoted enthusiastically by certain American and Bri-
tish authors interested in portraying the D. R. V. as being under Chines
influence. The mysterious William Kaye, for example, wrote that
.the landlords were tried "under the watchful eye of Chinese ad-
visers".25 P. J. Honey, the British specialist on Vietnam who
had introduced Hoang Van Chi's book to American. readers, asserted
that "each of the agrarian reform teams were (sic) advised and
supervised by Chinese instructors".26 George Carver of the CIA
repeated the argument, although with some qualification, stating
that "some" of the land reform teams "almost certainly had Chi-
nese advisers".27 By that time, American propagandists were giving
greater emphasis to the theme of supposed Chinese influence over
the D. R. V., but even Carver apparently felt that Hoang Van Chi's
allegation of the Chinese "point by point" control of the land
reform program was going too far.
3News From Viet-Nam, August 4, 1956.
.
25Kaye, loc. cit.
26P. J. Honey, Communism in North Vietnam, p. 12.
27Carver, loc. cit.
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24.Cf. note 12.
 Another class said to have been included in the $ V,
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plan for liquidation is the rich peasant class. According to
Hoang Van Chi, this was accomplished simply by classifying all
rich peasants and even "strong middle level peasants" as.
Bernard Fall made the same charge, writing that rich
peasants, to whom he referred as "kulaks", were "disposed of in
The assertion that rich peasants as well as landlords were
targetted for liquidation again misrepresents basic D.
policies toward the wealthier strata of the rural popul:ation.
During the resistance against the French,
the rich peasants, like
elements of the landlord class, were viewed by the party leader
ship as basically "anti-imperialist" and were thus allies of the
party within the "National United Front" 30 But there was a
second reason for a conciliatory policy towards the rich peasant
class, even during the land reform campaign. For the rich peasants
were, in Marxist-Leninist terms, essentially "capitalist" rather
than "feudal" in character, since they exploited other peasants
31
primarily by hiring their labor rather than renting land to them.
For both of these reasons, therefore, the rich peasants were not.
a target of the land reform campaign.
"Chi, From Communism to Colonialism, p. 166.?
29Fall, "A 'Straight Zigzag'', p. 217.
30
A major party document dated 1948, described the party's
policy toward rural classes during the resistance with,-the follow-
ing slogan: "Rely on the middle poor peasants, unite with the
rich peasants, isolate the landowners and oppose the French imper-
ialists". See "Tinh Hinh va Nhiem Vu De CuongDua Ra Dai'Hoi Toan
Quoc" (Situation and Tasks to be Presented to the National Congress
in Documents on Vietnamese Communism, Wason Film, 2584, Cornell
University Library.
31Tran Phuong (ed.), Cach Man Ruong Dat,pp. 142-3; Tran
Phuong, A~A%v&&fidr 1g 2bA3 : (ill - a80J t 0ID )31 O1mrl 2 Dan,
S
b
eptem
er 11-15, 1953, in Quoc Khang Chien, p. 121.
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on the contrary the policy during the land reform was sum-
marized by the slogan "ally with the rich peasant". Even though
some rich peasants had collaborated with the French, and like
landlords, had abused poor peasants in the past, the Party Central
Committee ordered that no rich peasants be brought before the
public to be denounced. Again the purpose was to "narrow the
struggle" and to concentrate exclusively on the "dishonest and
wicked notables" of the landlord class.32 No land belonging-to rich
peasants was to be confiscated unless it was rented out to poor peasant
while the hiring of labor was to be allowed to continue. More-
over, rich peasants were to be allowed to vote and to be elected
to village people's councils.'33
Hoang Van Chi's final charge about the land reform program
is that it was accompanied by a "deliberate excess of terror"
which would "annihilate" any adverse reaction.34 As evidence of
this intention, Mr. Chi alleges the land reform campaign used the
slogan "Better kill ten innocent people than let one enemy escape".35
This alleged slogan, which bears no resemblance to any public
statement by the D. R. V. or the Lao Dong Party, was first
published in 1957, not in Hanoi, but in the official newspaper
of Ngo Dinh Diem's National Revolutionary Movement, Cach Mang
Quoc Gia.36 It was said to have been quoted in a speech
32Tran Phuong (ed.), Cach Mang Ruong Dat, p. 125.
33Ibid., p. 144; Nhan Dan, June 1-5, 1953, in Quoc Khang
Chien, p. 58.
34Hoang Van Chi, From Colonialism to Communism, p. 211.
35Ibid., p. 167 and 213.
01%-2 134.
YARC~AAU
K
36d 8 , 9 e d V O & & eta'sc bat 962
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delivered in Hanoi by Professor Nguyen Manh Tuong of the Faculty
of Pedagogy of the University of Hanoi.
The authenticity of this document, however, is doubtful, for
the evidence indicates that its was fabricated by the Saigon regime
for psychological. warfare purposes.37 In publishing the text of
the alleged speech in The New Class in North Vietnam, Hoang Van
Chi explained that it "fell into the hands of a Vietnamese corres-
pondent in Rangoon, who sent Lt to Saigon where it was published
in full in many papers".38 In response to questioning about this
story, however, Mr. Chi admitted that he received his own original
copy of the document not from a Vietnamese correspondent or a
newspaper but from an official of the psychological warfare office
of the Ministry of Information several months before it was ever
published in the Saigon press,. 39 In fact, the "document" appears
to have been used with great effectiveness by Diem's psychological
warfare specialists in selling Time magazine the idea that the
3.7
The fabrication of documents attributed to the Communists
is normal practice in South Vietnam. In 1970, the Ministry of
Information distributed a leaflet comparing land reform programs
in North and South Vietnam which quoted Truong Chinh as saying
over Hanoi Radio on October 30, 1956: "The total number of inno-
cent people who were killed after each phase of denunciation was
200,000". Republic of Vietnam, Ministry of Information, "Compar-
ison of Land Reform Policies of South Vietnam and North Vietnam",
December 1, 1970. (English translation by the Ministry). A check
of Nhan Dan, Radio Hanoi and Vietnam News Agency confirms that
no suc statement was made.
38Hoang Van Chi, loc. cit_.
39Interview with Hoang Van Chi, May 26, 1972. Tran Van Dinh,
who was South Vietnamese Consul General in Rangoon in 1957 and is
now living in Washington, D. C., says that the document originated
in Dr. Tran Kim Tuyen's "Office of Social and Political Research",
a cover for Diem's secret police and counterintelligence agency.
According to Dinh, it was sent by Dr. Tuyen's office to all Em-
bassies. Interview, Washington, D. C., April 27, 1972.
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- 35 -
land reform was carried out with a "deliberate excess of terror".
Time used the "better kill ten innocent" slogan and attributed it
to Politbureau member Truong Chinh himself, apparently without
checking on the quotation's origin.40 Finally it found its way
into official U. S. propaganda: the CIA's George Carver. cited
this alleged slogan as the one which guided the land reform pro-
gram.41
Hoang Van Chi's portrayal of the land reform as a dogmatic
plan to liquidate landlords by means of arbitrary quotas and a
"deliberate excess of terror" thus completely misrepresents both
the policies and procedures of the D. R. V. land reform program.
The allegations which form the core of the myth of the "bloodbath"
turn out upon investigation to be based on misquotation, a crucial
document emanating from the Diem government rather than from Hanoi,
and his own self-contradictory testimony.
None of these allegations is supported by a single authentic
document. On the contrary, the documents which are available tell
a completely different story. They show that the D. R. V. policy
was to punish only those landlords who had committed the most
serious crimes and to make it possible for the vast majority of
the landlords to become productive citizens. They show that the
death sentence was used in only a small fraction of the trials of
"dishonest and cruel notables".
The land reform policy which thus emerges from the evidence
is one characterized by caution, practicality and the desire to
40 Time, July 1, 1957, p. 26.
41 Carver, o cit., p. 355.
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prevent unjust and. needless loss of life or liberty. It must be
considered a major failure of Western scholarship that the widely-
used sources on the land reform fail to reflect this well-
documented reality.
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CHAPTER IV
ERRORS: MYTHICAL AND REAL
Hoang Van Chi has put great emphasis on the supposed public
admissions by D. R. V. leaders and press of massive and indis-
criminate executions during the land reform as irrefutable evi-
dence that there was indeed a "bloodbath" in the North. He
quotes from what he claims are D. R. V. documents which appear to
make such admission, and Bernard Fall and J. Price Gittinger have
cited other-such documents in characterizing the land reform.
These alleged admissions have played an important role in causing
American readers to accept uncritically the "bloodbath" myth.
Mr. Chi and other authors have capitalized on the fact that,
three months after the land reform was completed, the Lao Dong
party leadership launched a major campaign for the "rectification
of errors" committed during the land reform. That unprecedented
campaign, which followed months of open criticism in Nhan Dan of
the implementation of the land reform program in many areas, was
begun with a series of statements by party and governmental
leaders admitting that "serious mistakes" had been committed.
But it is important to examine carefully what the documents
admitting these mistakes actually did say and what they did not
say. For it will be seen that these statements do not confirm
Huang Van Chi's charges of indiscriminate killing of innocent
people. Like his description of the party's policies regarding
land reform, Mr. Chi's account of the admission of errors of the
land reform systematically distorts key D. R. V. documents.
- 37 -
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Well before the land reform was completed at the end of July
:956, the process, of correcting the mistakes of the land reform
,as aiready,begun, though in an unsystematic fashion.l Three
months after the end of the ]land reform campaign, however, the
party leadership decided that the correction of the errors had to
b-,A top. priority program, and that it had to be based on clew-
directives from the top. At the end of October 1956, therefore,
:n.e party Central. Committee began the campaign for "rectification
-f errors" of the land reform,, formally admitting the mistakes
-;nd placing primary responsibility for the errors on the officials
assigned to supervise the whole process. As Nhan ])an editorial-
zed, "The mistakes were due to shortcomings in leadership as it
ccnsequence of which a number of policies advocated either were
not sufficiently concrete or were not carefully woxked out." Be-
cause of "shortcomings in the guidance of the application of
policies", it continued, them. was "insufficient understanding of
many policies of the Central Committee", and the land reform admin-
istration "formed a separate system with excessively broad powers".2
Responsibility for guidance and control of the land reform
and the party reorganization which accompanied it :Fell upon cer-
taain members of the Central Committee, and as a result of "the
errors,.those members were forced to step down from their posi-
tions. The Ministers of State for Agriculture and Interior,
respectively, were forced to resign, and Truong Chinh, said by
1See for examples, Nhan Dan, June 29, 1956; August 20, 1956;
.August 24, 1956, September 6 S6; September 8, 1956.
2Nhan Dan, October 30, 1956, carried by Vietnam News Agency,
Hanoi Radio n t-obier 30 }9156.
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the Central Committee to bear overall responsibility for the mis-
takes as Secretary General of the Party, submitted his resignation
after undertaking self-criticism before his colleagues.3
According to the party's own account, the failure of leader-
ship had left the way open for the least politically conscious
and least reliable elements of the poor peasant class to control
the conduct of the land reform program in many villages. The
cause of this development is easily explainable: throughout the
resistance war the tendency of party cadres had been to compromise
with the wealthier rural strata, even at the expense of the poor
peasants' interests. When the rent reduction and land reform
campaign began, therefore, land reform cadres were urged by the
party to avoid this "right deviation".4 As a result, the cadres
swung to the other extreme of "left deviation", giving complete
freedom to the poorest peasants to satisfy their immediate eco-
nomic and political interests, often at the expense not only of
landowners but of rich and middle peasants, including resistance
fighters and party members.5 The cadres were guilty of "follow-
ing the masses", in the words of a later D. R. V. account, "rather
than standing solidly on the position of the party."6
Often this meant that the land reform teams sent to the vil-
lages did not rely on local party cadres who had been trained
during the resistance--even those from the poor peasant class--but
3 Ibid.
4See for example, the article "Correct Mistakes of Rightist
Thinking" in Nhan Dan, January 13, 1956.
STran Phuong (ed.), Cach Mang Ruong Dat, p. 197.
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turned instead to poor peasant elements who had previously been.
relatively inactive in the revolution.7 These peasants, given a
significant political role in. their villages for the first time.,
apparently abused it in a variety of ways: guidelines put out by
the Central Committee for dea.ling.with landowners, rich peasants
and middle peasants were systematically violated; proper distinc
tions were not made among landowners on the basis of their poli-
tical attitudes; rich peasants were treated as landowners, and
middle peasants were discriminated against; crop areas and land!
yields were overestimated and peasants often classified in a
higher social stratum than was justified. Poor peasants not only
denounced landowners who had committed crimes against them but
also unjustly classified landowners as "dishonest and wicked not-
ables" in order to make more land available for distribution.8
Similar political tendencies created serious problems for a
parallel effort to reorganize local party branches by taking in
large numbers of poor peasants.. Many of the older,, better trained,
party cadres were! attacked by newcomers as reactionaries, forced
out of the party and even jailed, with the result that some of
the oldest party cells were left in disarray and same. even dis-
solved completely .9
As if the combination of land reform and party reorganization
were not enough, beginning in late 1955, the land reform cadres
were also given the task of uncovering "counterrevolutionaries"
7 Ibid., p. 1.89.
8Ibid., pp. 190-191. Nhan Dan, August 24, 1956 and October
30, 1956.-
9 or 1 Ll~l s~ 20013~fhd2 ~1lkQO19IFly~oo F!00 l%b -2 2 2 , 195 6.
Vietnam ews Agency, Radio Hanoi, November 1, 19561,
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in the villages. Convinced that the Diem regime and its American
sponsors would try to leave espionage and sabotage organizations
in the North after the departure of the French Union Forces, the
Central Land Reform Committee decided in August 1955 to combine
the land reform campaign with "repression of counterrevolution-
aries".10 And this decision exacerbated the existing tendencies
of the newly powerful groups in the villages to attack already
established party members as well as ordinary citizens. As the
Central Committee of the Party said in its communique, "Land re-
form cadres wrongly estimated the force of the enemy. Many of.
them failed to distinguish the stubborn reactions of.the most
refractory elements of the landlord class from the strained and
intricate situation due to the bad application of the party's
line and policies."11 In other words, protests against abuses by
the land reform cadres too often resulted in the protesters' being
jailed merely on suspicion of being "counterrevolutionaries" or
"saboteurs". By September 1956, the Central Committee realized
that the combining of land reform and "repression of counter-
revolutionaries" had been a major error which had increased the
level of confusion and conflict in both land distribution and
party reorganization. 12
10Tran Phuong (ed.), Cach Mang Ruong Dat, p. 187. This cam-
paign to uncover subversive tie newly liberated areas, while
exaggerated and ultimately self-defeating, was based on real fears
of sabotage of the land reform campaign by agents of the Diem
government or the Americans. In March 1956, Nhan Dan reported
that in Ha Dong province someone was "spreading the rumor that
U. S.-Diem troops are about to come, and you'll have to move again,
so the land reform is not final." Nhan Dan, March 2, 1956.
11Communique of the Central Committee, October 29, 1956,
Vietnam News Agency, Radio Hanoi, October 29, 1956.
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Cach Mang Ruong Dat, p.
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But although grievances caused by the errors of the land re-
form were widespread in the countryside, the only documented case
of open violence against the D. R. V. which has been linked.to
the land reform program actually occurred more than three months
after the land reform was completed. The violence involved four
predominantly Catholic villages in Quynh Luu district, Nghe An
province, in which violations of party policy respecting freedom _
of worship may have further strained already tense relations be-
tween the D. R. V. and Catholics. l3 But there is solid evidence
from International Control Commission reports on the district
that, although there was probably widespread resentment among
Catholics at having been prevented from emigrating to the South,
there was no pattern of violence against Catholics during the
period of the land reform. The I. C. C. reported in 1957 having
received nearly 1,000 petitions from individuals in Quynh Luu
who had applied unsuccessfully for permits to move to the South.
But not one petition was received alleging political reprisals in
the form of imprisonment or execution.14
13Little reliable information is available concerning the
so-called "Quynh Luu Revolt" of November 1956. The versions--of`'
the incident given by Fall and. by the Diem government agree in
emphasizing that the denial of permission to move to the South
was a major factor in the revolt. See Fall, The Two Viet-Nams,
p. 156; News From Viet-Nam, December 1, 1956, p:' 3 The D. R..'V.
version admits that "reactionaries" had "availed themselves of
the mistakes committed in the Agrarian Reform in the Catholic
compatriots area to arouse dissatisfaction among a-number of
compatriots . . . . " VietnairL News Agency, Radio Hanoi, November
16:, 1956. The Diem government claimed that "several hundred"
people were killed by government troops during the fighting,
while the D. R. V. version claimed "a few" persons were killed or
wounded. The truth is undoubtedly somewhere in between.
14 Eighth Interim Report of the International Commission. for
Supervision ancGontrol in Vietnam Vietnam No. 1 1958 Commanirf
~r F ~P~ 0 3~ b~0? ~ 6~ ~1ona1
a 26('~9 0
IF
Pa e r Paper, XX dg4
P Aar ec~ 37 , P. P.
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The Party leadership clearly viewed the implementation of
the land reform as an administrative disaster which had caused
a serious political setback in the short term. It had seriously
damaged many local party branches as well as harming the prestige
of the party in general. But the admission of these errors and
their consequences, embarrassing though it was, provides no
support to the "bloodbath" myth. For the.documents of the period
contain no indication that the party had ever wavered from its
original objectives, or that the execution or imprisonment of
innocent people had been officially encouraged.
Moreover, although the D. R. V. government pledged to make
full restitution in cases of unjust imprisonment or execution, is
there is no documentary evidence that there had been the kind
of indiscriminate execution of innocent people so often alleged.
Hoang Van Chi and others have not, in fact, used the actual
texts of documents relating to the errors of the land reform
campaign but have used instead gross mistranslations and mis-
representations of these documents.
The most serious case of such misrepresentation is Hoang
Van Ch:i's translation of General Vo Nguyen Giap's speech of
October 29, 1956, in which he discussed the resolution of the
Tenth Central Committee Congress. 16 This document is especially
15See the statement by the D. R. V. government before the
6th Meeting of the National Assembly, Nhan Dan, January 4,
1957.
16floang Van Chi, From Colonialism to Communism, pp. 209-
210. Mr. Chi inaccurately refers to it as a speec read before
the 10th Congress of the Central Committee. In fact, it was
read before a public meeting of the citizens of Hanoi, according
to the official text.
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significant, because it was the first major discussion by a high.
)arty official of the mistakes committed during the land reform
='rogram. As translated by HHoa.n.g Van Chi, the most important
passages in the speech, are these in which Giap appears to admit
i-.ot only that the mistakes outlined above had been committed but.
::hat. the use of terror,-.as well as torture and murder of innocent
people, were normal practices which had simply been carried "too
f r" in the land reform.
According to Mr. Chi's translation, Giap said, "We made too
many deviations and executed too many honest people. We attacked
on too large a front, and, seeing enemies everywhere, resorted
to-terror, which became far too widespread". And in another
passage, General Giap is quoted as saying, "Worse still, torture
came to be regarded as a normal practice during party reorganiza.-
Lion" Mr. Chi's translations imply that the execution of inno-
cent people was part of the plan, since the error is said to lie
in'(sxceduting "too many honest people." Likewise, the impression
is conveyed that terror was tolerated, if not encouraged, but
that it became "too widespread", going beyond the bounds set by
the party leadership.
But a careful study of the original text of Giap's speech
reveals that Mr. Chi's translation is one of his most flagrant
abuses of documentary evidence. When translated accurately, what
Gia said in the place cited by.Mr. Chi was this: "We committed.
deviations in not emphasizing the necessity for caution
and for avoiding the unjust disciplining of innocent
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people. We attacked on too wide a front, and used excessive
repressive measures on a wide scale. ,17 And the later passage,
should have been translated, "Even coercion was used in order to
carry out party reorganization".
Thus Mr. Chi's translation contains no less than eight sig-
nificant mistranslations in three crucial sentences, which have
the cumulative effect of substantially altering the meaning of
Giap's statement. (See exhibit opposite) Giap is made to appear
as admitting that the party had used murder and terror against
innocent people in the implementation of land reform.18 This
distortion by mistranslation has undoubtedly convinced those who
could not translate the original Vietnamese text that the party
did indeed use a "deliberate excess of terror". Hoang Van Chi's
translation provided such good anti-Hanoi propaganda, in fact,
that the Department of State, in drawing up its March 1966 legal
brief to justify U. S. intervention in Vietnam, cited it as evi-
dence that "Communist leaders were running a police state in
which execution, terror and torture were commonplace . . .
1119,
In his attempt to find party documents showing evidence-of
mass executions of innocent people, Hoang Van Chi also quotes a
1/The complete text of Giap's speech is published in Nhan
Dan, October 31, 1956. The translation is my own, but has been
cFe cked with several Vietnamese for accuracy.
18
When I interviewed Hoang Van Chi in May 1972, I questioned
him about his inaccurate and misleading translation of several
words. He defended his translations by saying, "I tried to con-
vey the real meaning more than the literal translations". He
asserted, moreover, that this was the practice followed by all
Vietnamese working for the Voice of America in translating Commu-
nist documents.
19 Department of State, Office of the Legal Adviser, "The
March14yApv~ndi~~ "se300 P J2/02 ~tA R64P~5380 0600010016 of Vietnam",
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G:[AP'S SPEECH ON LAND REFORM ERRORS
Mistranslat:io~ns of Key Passages
VIETNAMESE TEXT* ACCURATE 'TRANSLATION CHI'S 'TRANSLATION
"(d) . . . da phong "committed deviations "we committed. too
lerh lac . . " . . . " many deviations . "
. khongg nhan " . . . in not empha- (Omitted)
manhphai.4 than sizing the necessity
trong, tranh . . ." for caution and for
avoiding .
" xu~ tri oa:n
nhirng ngu~?i
ngay . . "
. . . the unjust dis- "and executed too
ciplining of innocent many honest people
people . "
(not in original) (not in original)
dung nhung
bii3n phap tran ap
qua ding .
if
mot each
phi bin."
(;) . . than
chi di1ng phtidng
phap truy biic
d4 loam
5 ngt6c chinh
n. ,1
. . .. used exces-
sive repressive
measures . . . of
on a wide
scale. ".
it even coercive
measures . . . it
. . . were used to
carry out party re-
organization."
from Nhan Dan, October 31, 1956.
seeing enemies
everywhere
resorted to
terror . . . "
. which became
far too widespread."
. worse still,
torture . . . "
. . . came to be
regarded as normal
practice during party
reorganization."
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46 -
Nhan Dan article as saying,
Nghe An is the province in which party organ-
izations existed as early as 1930. But it is
in the same province that the most serious
mistakes have been made, and the greatest
number of party members }~ave been executed
during the land reform.,
But the only article in Nhan Dan which'refers to land reform in
Nghe An says merely that "serious mistakes" had been.committed in
Interzone Four which had caused "heavy losses.and pain" to the
party branches in that region. The article continued:
There are party branches established in 1930
in Nghe An and Ha Tinh, or challenged during
the resistance in newly liberated villages
in Quang Binh, or matured in the movement _to
serve the front linen in Thanh Hoa, which
l
have been dissolved.
Nowhere in this discussion of the mistakes committed. in Nghe An
and other provinces of Interzone Four--or in any other article of
the period--is there any sentence remotely resembling the one
quoted by.Hoang Van Chi, nor is there any reference to executions
of party members. One is forced to conclude, therefore, that Mr.
Chi's quotation is fraudulent.
Other American scholars misrepresented the documents dealing.,.
with the correction of errors because they could not translate
the documents themselves and relied on translations provided in
Saigon. It is now apparent that from the 1956-57 period a., number
of the articles in Nhan Dan were seriously "doctored" in the process
of translation and summarization by Vietnamese personnel.
20From Colonialism to Communism, p. 225.
21Nhan Dan, November 22, 1956. There was no article even
vaguely re s-embblling~the one described by Hoang Van Chi in the
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Bernard Fall's brief account of the North Vietnamese land
reform in The Two Viet-Nams is marred by his use of one such
translation. He cites a Nhan. Dan article which, in his words,
"openly admitted that loyal party members, including UBKC [resis-
tance committee] chairmen, had been executed and besmirched".22
But the text of the article to which he refers--a long, detailed
and critical account of the implementation of land reform in To
Hieu village, Ha Dong province--does not support this character-
ization. 23 It discusses the injustices done to many peasants,
including party members and leaders, who were arrested on suspi-
cion of sabotaging the land reform program, as well as other mis-
takes, but it makes no mention: of executions of these persons.
As for the.local party secretary in To Hieu, (not the Chairman
of the resistance committee as, stated by Fall), he was indeed
unjustly convicted of being a "dishonest and cruel notable", and
of having led an "organization of saboteurs". But he was not
executed. On the contrary, after it was discovered. by higher
officials that his arrest was a mistake he was elected to repre-
sent the village in the province conference on land reform.
The fact that the substance of this Nhan Dan article was
completely misrepresented does not mean, of course, that no
party member or resistance veteran was unjustly executed. But it
is indicative of the way in which the popular image: of the land
reform has been shaped by nonexistent or distorted documents that
this same article was later cited by historian Joseph Buttinger as
22Fall, The Two Viet-Nam:;, p. 158.
23Nhan Dan, August 24, 1956.
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- 48 -
evidence for his charge that the Lao Dong party did nothing to
control the "murderous momentum" of the land reform program.24
Another American source which. has contributed to the "blood-
bath" myth by distorting the documents of the "mistakes correction"
campaign is the 1959 study by J. Price Gittinger, U. S. land re-
form adviser in Saigon at the time. Gittinger's article is often
cited as an authoritative work on the North Vietnamese land reform
because it cites numerous articles from Nhan Dan. But, like Ber-
nard Fall, Gittinger could not read Vietnamese himself, and so he
relied on the translations made available by the U. S. mission.
Unfortunately, some of the reports from Nhan Dan which he uses to
prove jndiscriminate executions had been substantially altered in
the translation.
The most serious of these cases involves an August 1957
article in Nhan Dan which according to Gittinger admits that "30
percent of the persons convicted as landlords were erroneously
condemned".25 As stated by Gittinger, the statement makes no
sense, since individuals were not "convicted" or "condemned"
solely because they were landlords, but only for having committed
specific crimes. But the Nhan Dan article does not refer either
to erroneous classifications or to erroneous convictions. What
it says is, "The reclassification of those wrongly classified as
landlords is being carried out rather fundamentally. Every vil-
lage has corrected some mistakes. Some have corrected their mis-
takes relatively less, about thirty percent, while others have
24 Joseph Buttinger, Vietnam: A Political History (New York:
Praeger, 1967), p.
196.
qq roved For
25
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G]tttinger,
oc. ci~.
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corrected over fifty percent of them."26 But like the story of
"'_a.ndlord quotas" this alleged 30% innocent victims of execution
as to become part of the off:iccial "bloodbath" myth: William
Kaye drew on Gittinger's citation to write in 1962, "Some years
Later it was admitted [by the D. R. V.] that nearly one-third of
persons tried and convicted as landlords had been condemned
in error".27
Still other frequently-cited "facts" about the correction of
errors campaign also turn out, on closer examination, to be with-
out foundation. According to 1ioang Van Chi, in his'September 1956
speech, General G:Lap referred to 112,000 party members wrongly in-
p,risoned or sent to concentration camps in the course of the land re-
form,whowouid be released. 28 Carver cites the same figure and
source.29 But a careful reading of the original text reveals
that Giap made no mention of the number of people unjustly jailed
and about to be freed.
Coincidentally, George Chaffard reported that the D. R. V.
Council of Ministers announced on November 1, 1956 the release of
1.2.,,000 civil and military detainees.30 But, once again, a close
reading ofwthe lengthy government statement issued on that day
discloses no mention of any such number.31 Time magazine carried
2 Nhan Dan, August 13, 1957.
27Kaye, o cit. , p. 108.
Z8 Chi, From Colonialism to Communism, p. 214.
2gCarver, loc. cit.
30George Chaffard, Indochine, Dix Ans d'Independence (Paris:
Calmann-Devy, 1964), p. 141.
3Fojr e x2j0.Wj2/@A a Ct# Wf$B@ 81$gfiQ4f9Q@1PU1 %sng thy
statement on steps to be taken to correct errors committed in the
land reform, see Nhan Dan, November 2, 1956.
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yet a third version of the phantom 12,000 figure in July 1957:
12,000 "peasants", it reported, were about to be freed, but did
not attribute the figure to any specific source.32 The same arti-
cle included the undocumented and unsubstantiated statement that
"some 15,000" people had been killed in error during the land re-
form, a figure which was then picked up by Gittinger in his 1959
article.33 Journalist Tibor Mende evasively cited "estimates
worthy of confidence" in claiming that from 12,000 to 15,000 per-
sons were killed in error.34 These recurring figures, no doubt
come from some common source, but it certainly was not the Hanoi
government.
32Time, July 1, 1957, p. 27.
33Ibid., Gittinger, op. cit., p. 118.
34Tibor Mende, "Les Deux Vietnams: Laboratories de 1'Asie",
Esprit (June 1957), p. 941.
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THE "ESTIMATESTI: QUANTIFYING THE MYTH
By his systematic distortion of the basic facts of the land
reform, Hoang Van Chi laid the basis for the public acceptance of
certain irresponsible figures on the number of deaths caused by
the land reform. These figurer, for which neither concrete evi-
dence nor explanation have ever been offered, were based in each
case on wholly subjective judgment, false information and assump-
tions, or simple propaganda. Yet they represent virtually the
only data available to most Americans on the D. R. V.'s land
reform.
The most frequently used figure has been the one given by
Bernard Fall, who wrote, "The best-educated guesses on the subject
are that probably close to 50,000 North Vietnamese were executed
in connection with the land reform and that at least twice as
many were arrested and sent to forced labor camps".' Over the
years, this 50,000 figure has taken on an authoritative aura
which was wholly unwarranted. For it was strongly influenced by
his erroneous assumption that the D. R. V. leaders had the objec-
tive of liquidating whole economic classes. It may not be merely
coincidence, moreover, that if Time magazine's mythical 15,000
landowners killed in error were combined with Gittinger's mythical
30% of all landowners "erroneously condemned" one would come up
with the figure of 50,000 dead.--all based on fiction rather than
fact.
1Fall, The Two Viet-Nams, p. 159.
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Other estimates which have been put forward have been more
consciously political in character. The figure of 100,000 was
given by a French history teacher, Gerard Tongas, who remained
in Hanoi after the Geneva Agreement. Tongas returned to Paris in
1959 to write a heavy-handed diatribe entitled, I Lived in the
Communist Hell in North Vietnam and I Chose Freedom.2 Like Hoang
Van Chi, he makes no pretention of objectivity, nor does he claim
to have made a serious study of the objectives and procedures of
the land reform, which he calls a "vast and fantastic swindle".3
His information on the land reform appears to have been acquired
from the francophile members of the Vietnamese bourgeoisie in
Hanoi, who, according to Tongas, longed for the overthrow of the
D. R. V. so that they could send their children to French schools.4
His claim of 100,000 deaths thus represents the figure circulated
by those who still hoped for a return to the status quo of the
colonial period.
But it remained for FIoang Van Chi himself to provide Amer-
ican propaganda on the land reform with its most shocking "esti-
mate". After asserting that "nobody has been able to assess
accurately the exact number of deaths" from the land reform,5 he
2Gerard Tongas, J'ai Vecu dans 1'Enfer Communiste au Nord
Vietnam et J'ai Choisi la Liberte (Paris: Nouvelles itio s
Debresse, 196-0).
3Ibid., p. 221.
4Ibid., p. 353. Not only is affinity for the French-speaking
bourgeoisie but his undisguised contempt for non-francophile Viet-
namese colored Tongas' attitude toward the D. R. V. Tongas once
commented, "The cultural level of North Vietnam is undoubtedly
one of the lowest imaginable". Tongas, "Indoctrination'Replaces
Education", in Honey (ed.), North Vietnam Today, p. 93.
5 HRpprovea 'i-orlReldaser
0 101 6=26 6
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casually refers in a later chapter to "the massacre of about 5
percent of the total population".6 Based on a total estimated
opulation of about 13.5 million in 1956, this would have repre-
sented a total of 675,000 people.
Mr. Chi offers no justification for this allegation, but he
suggests at one point that most of the deaths were those of child-
ren who starved "owing to the 'isolation policy "'.7 This is yet
another of the many wholly unsubstantiated charges put forth by
;ir. Chi, for there was no such policy of isolating families, even
of those landlords sentenced for serious crimes during the land.
reform. As the official party organ, Nhan Dan, stated in June
1956, '' . . if the family is one of a dishonest and wicked not-
able, who has been sentenced to imprisonment, there should be no
contact with the person imprisoned, but there can be visits with
the other members of the family."8 The picture of hundreds of
thousands of innocent children being systematically starved to
death is so absurd, in fact, that no secondary source has dared
to use it. Yet it is mainly on the basis of Mr. Chi's totally
unreliable account, the intension of which was plainly not his-
tbrical accuracy but propaganda against the D. R. V., that the
President of the United States himself has hold the American people
6ibid., p. 212.
71bi:d.. p. :166.
8Nhan Dan, August 6, 1955. This allegation is further con-
tradictea byHoang Van Chi's own admission, thirty pages later,
that there were few landlord families who could not get money from
friends or relatives who were tradesmen or officials. From
Colonialism to Communism, p. 196.
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 that "aA~6vei Fmo~he?easd 20K3/~i/Bie8YAah6~%590s03t ~SA000100'16-ere mur-
dered or otherwise exterminated by the North Vietnamese . . .
119
As against the subjective "guesses" cited above, the statis-
tics which have been published by the D. R. V., though admittedly
incomplete, provide a better basis for estimating the number of
executions. We have already mentioned the directive of the Lao
Dong Political Bureau of August 1953 which limited the number of
landlords who could be publicly denounced and tried in each vil-
lage to a maximum of three. The average number of landlords de-
nounced and tried per village in the 1875 villages covered by the
rent reduction campaign was 2.1, according to the D. R. V. study,
for a total of 3938.10 It has also been pointed out that a radio
broadcast at the time reported 135 of the first 1350 landowners
denounced and tried, or about 10%, received the death sentence.
If this proportion were generally applied in all 1875 villages
covered by the rent reduction campaign, the total number of death
sentences would have been about 400.
In 1778 other villages, the land reform was carried out
without the intervening phase of mass mobilization for rent reduc-
tion. No data is available from D. R. V. sources on the number of
landlords sentenced in these villages or the proportion of these
President Nixon's Press Interview, April 16, 1971 (official
White House text). President Nixon has escalated his own rhetoric
on the "bloodbath" in North Vietnam, by multiplying the number of
deaths, as the argument became increasingly crucial to the ration-
ale for American policy in Vietnam. In 1969, he used Bernard Fall's
figure of 50,000 deaths (President Nixon's Radio/TV address, November
3, 1969, official White House text). In 1971, he used the 500,000
figure cited above. But on July 27, 1972, the President reached a
new level of rhetoric, declaring that more than one half million
people were assassinated and another half a million died in "slave
labor camps" in North Vietnam (New York Times, July 28, 1972). An
inquiry to the National Security Council pro uced only a list of
references of which Hoang Van Chi's "S percent" figure was the only
primary source. His own staff was thus unable to explain how he
arrived at his new total of one million deaths from the North Viet-
namese App dvei Forrtelease 2003/12/02: CIA-RDP75B00380R000600010016-2
10See notes 19 and 20, Chapter III, p. 29.
 - 55 -
senttence Pf%ve&F r}#2eleaMd-101)1/1 WQ2VCf~R?@d6HdR'3861ROR08M0Q 642eform
suggests that the most numerous mistakes of classification and ofm
accusation were committed after June 1955 as the Party's super-
vision of land reform teams began to lag behind the pace of imple-
mentation in newly liberated areas.ll It is worth noting, however,
that even if the number of death sentences in these 1778 villages
was three times more than the number of the first 1875, the total
for the entire land reform would still have been less than 2,501).
The available official documentation thus suggests from 800 to
2,500 executions during the land reform as a realistic estimate.
Further support for this estimate comes from a surprising
source--an official document :i:;su(.-d by the Diem government in
July 1959. In its formal atta+:k on the D. R. V. with regard to
the Geneva Agreement, the Repu:)lic of Vietnam published figures
which it claimed were the total number of sentences to death and
hard labor for life in several provinces during North Vietnam's
land reform. The figures were as follows:12
Phu Tho: 88 death sentences; 72 hard labor for life
Bac Giang: 54 death sentences; 27 hard labor for life
Thai Nguyen: 25 death sentences; 52 hard labor for life
Thanh Boa: 98 death sentences; 134 hard labor for life
The totals for all of these four provinces, including Thanh
Hopi, the most populous province in the North,13 were thus 265
death sentences and 275 sentences of hard labor for, life, or an
11Tran Phuong (ed.), Cac1 Mang Ruong Dat, p. 1.31.
12Violations of the Geneva Agreements by the Viet-Minh Commu-
nists, - x~Tnistry o In ormation, Republico Vietnam aigon,J T
1959), pp. 94-95.
131960 Population Figures by Province (from Central Census
Steering Committee, 1961), Nhan I)an, November 2, 1960 (translated
by JPRS, 6570, January 13, 1Stlf.-
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 average c p6 eddwtC R eAQX12/0,&dCb RIDQFSB0 88Rfl0I00(ltooda42h prov-
ince. If these figures were indicative of the situation in the
other eighteen provinces affected by the land reform, the totals
would have been in the neighborhood of 1,500 executions and 1,500
life sentences, totals which would be entirely consistent with
the statistics released by Hanoi.
It is not possible to judge the authenticity of the figures
released by the South Vietnamese government,since no source was.
cited. But it is striking that the Information Ministry of a
government so obviously hostile to Hanoi as the Diem government
would give such low figures which are so consistent with the
D. R. V.'s figures and so inconsistent with the myth of the
"bloodbath".
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American attitudes toward. the North Vietnamese land reform
:ampaign in particular and the Vietnamese revolution, in general
have been formed in almost total ignorance of the actual historical
record. The purpose of this ar.alysis has been to show how that
historical record has been systematically ignored or distorted in
the sources available to the American public. The existing docu-
mentary evidence, however, indicates clearly that the objectives
and policies, as well as the consequences of the land reform,
were totally different from those portrayed by Hoang Van Chi and
the secondary literature which has relied so heavily on his writing.
That evidence shows that, although the land reform program
was marred by administrative failures, its aims were to liberate
the poor peasants from the throat of famine and from their total
subordination to the landlords? The main objective regarding the
landlords was to transform thew into productive citizens by their
own. labor, and not to liquidate them, as has so often been charged.
The! evidence further indicates that the land reform policies were
conceived with the aim of minimizing injustice and unnecessary
suffering and not, as has been alleged, to murder innocent people
with a "deliberate excess of terror".
The benefits of the land reform to the poor peasants, who
made up the majority of the rural population, were a substantial
increase in food for subsistence and an improved social and poli-
tical status in the villages. Hitherto powerless elements were
encouraged for the first time to assert themselves, and although
the short term consequences were widespread abuses and conflict,
- 57--
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 even wi ht pipri?~iFtra5e~~~?feg2~~2i.tCgg1,P74)0;WW964pSf2 other
nations suggests that bringing the poor peasants into the political
process would be a positive development over the long run.
The determined propaganda attack against the land reform pro-
gram launched in 1957 by the South Vietnamese government, with
American support, succeeded in portraying it as an excuse for
ideologically-inspired mass murder. The central figure in that
attack was Hoang Van Chi, and by 1960, certain Americans.had, taken
an active interest in helping his version. of the land reform
reach the American public His account employed techniques which
distinguished it from a legitimate historical study of the period.
Where no evidence existed to support the "bloodbath" myth, it was
created. Official documents were twisted to conform to the myth.
Reports and statistics were. quoted which. did not in fact exist.
The American academic community did not have the resources
to recognize Hoang Van Chi's writing as propaganda, while the
official U. S. government community had an obvious interest in
promoting it. As it became more deeply involved in the attempt
to control events in Vietnam, the U. S. government found the myth
of the "bloodbath" increasingly useful and finally almost neces-
sary. By the late 1960's, having been repeated in so many dif-
ferent places, the myth of the "bloodbath" in North Vietnam had
gained nearly universal acceptance. The President.. was then able
to use it as a major rationale for maintaining the U. S. military
presence in Vietnam.
Apart from the self-interest of officials and the incapacity
of academics to do the necessary original research, however, it
seems evident that the myth of the "bloodbath" in North Vietnam
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 fit de o*aglEbr gasbia0@8/19.MmCA-MR'76600 '6 DmA+6Y2ID8'1001Pe lerations
of Americans have been led to believe that revolutionaries guided
by Marxist-Leninist concepts must be fanatical and cruel. The
tendency of so many Americans to accept that stereotype in total
ignorance of real nature of the Vietnamese revolution made it
easy for the myth of the "bloodbath" to gain popular credence,
and helped to stifle the search for truth. But that same stereo
type which belittled the intelligence, the patriotism and the
humanity of Vietnamese Communists also made it easier for Americans
to assume that they were no match. for our power and. our techniques.
It should now be clear that the U. S. can delay but cannot ulti-
mately avoid coming to terms with the Vietnamese revolution., The
abandonment of the crudely distorted portrayal of the Vietnamese
Communists still prevalent in the U. S. should be the first step
in that process.
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J IARY OF MAJOR CONCLUSIONS
1. The long-standing charge, most recently raised b'y.Pres.
dent Nixon in his July 27 news conference, that the land reform,
carried out from 1953 to 1956 in North Vietnam was,a "bloodbath",
in which massive and indiscriminate killing of innocent people
took-place, is shown by careful investigation to be a myth
2. This "bloodbath" myth is the result of a delibera-te.
propaganda campaign by-the South Vietnamese and U. S..-governments
to-discredit the D. R. V. The central piece in.that campaign has
been a book by Hoang Van Chi, which has been the basis for the
allegations made by President Nixon and others. Mr. Chi, who has
been employed in the past by both the South Vietnamese.Ministry.._
of Information and the U. S. Information Agency, now works-for AID.
3. The major allegations comprising the myth are: that- the
land reform was intended to liquidate whole social classes;,.that
the D. R. V. assigned "quotas" of landlords to be executed in._
each village; that the D. R. V. used a "deliberate excess of.
terror"; and that hundreds of thousands of innocent people were,--
killed. Close examination of these charges reveals that they-,'.are
based on gross misquotation, fraudulent documentation,.and l-oang
Van Chi's own self-contradictory testimony.
4. The documentary evidence actually shows there was no.
D. IC V. policy of liquidating classes, no "landlord quotas".,,.and
no "deliberate excess of terror". The evidence also indicates
that probably no more than 2500 landlords were sentenced to death
--not "a minimum of 500,000" as asserted by President Nixon on
July 27.
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