Land reform in Vietnam was a program of land reform in North Vietnam from 1953 to 1956. It followed the program of land reform in China from 1946 to 1953.

The aim of the land reform program was to break the power of the traditional village elite, to form a new class of leaders, and redistribute the wealth (mostly land) to create a new class that has no ownership. It was an element of the Communist revolution. The reform led to allegations of many villagers being executed, land being taken away even from poor peasants, and of paranoia among neighbors. Several foreign witnesses testified to mass executions.^[1][2] A number of sources have suggested that about 30% of the "landlords" executed were actually communist party members.^{[3][4][5][6][7]} Former North Vietnamese government official Nguyen Minh Can, told RFA’s Vietnamese service: "The land reform was a massacre of innocent, honest people, and using contemporary terms we must say that it was a genocide triggered by class discrimination".^[8]

Between 50,000 and 172,000 perceived "class enemies" were executed.^[9][10][11] Reports from North Vietnamese defectors at the time suggested that 50,000 were executed. A Hungarian diplomat was told that 60,000 were executed.^[12] Declassified Politburo documents confirm that 1 in 1,000 North Vietnamese (i.e., about 14,000 people) were the minimum quota targeted for execution during the earlier "rent reduction" campaign; the number killed during the multiple stages of the considerably more radical "land reform" was probably many times greater.^[13] Lam Thanh Liem, a major authority on land issues in Vietnam, conducted multiple interviews in which communist cadres gave estimates for land reform executions ranging from 120,000 to 200,000. Such figures match the "nearly 150,000 houses and huts which were allocated to new occupants".^[14] Landlords were arbitrarily classified as 5.68% of the population, but the majority were subject to less severe punishment than execution. Official records from the time suggest that 172,008 "landlords" were executed during the "land reform", of whom 123,266 (71.66%) were later found to be wrongly classified.^[11] Victims were reportedly shot, beheaded, and beaten to death; "some were tied up, thrown into open graves and covered with stones until they were crushed to death".^[15] The full death toll was even greater because victims' families starved to death under the "policy of isolation."^[16] As communist defector Le Xuan Giao explained: "There was nothing worse than the starvation of the children in a family whose parents were under the control of a land reform team. They isolated the house, and the people who lived there would starve. The children were all innocent. There was nothing worse than that. They wanted to see the whole family dead."^[17] Hoang Van Chi wrote that as many as 500,000 North Vietnamese may have died as a result of the land reform.^[18]

Gareth Porter wrote The Myth of the Bloodbath, claiming that the death toll was only in the thousands^[19] but was criticized by historian Robert F. Turner for relying on official communist sources. Turner argued that the death toll "was certainly in six digits."^[17] Nevertheless, historian Edwin Moise has defended this practice; asserting that the official communist newspapers of North Vietnam were "extremely informative" and "showed a fairly high level of honesty" when compared to those of other communist states.^[20] Former North Vietnamese government official Hoang Van Chi also responded to Porter, stating that "Mr. Porter studies....a few propaganda booklets published by Hanoi....I lived through the whole process, and I described what I saw with my own eyes."^[21] Both Hoang and Turner noted that Porter could barely speak Vietnamese (despite his claim that sources about the land reform were mistranslated), and that he relied on sometimes inaccurate English translations of Nhan Dan done by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (as well as English-language propaganda meant to encourage anti-war groups).^[21][17] Moise himself estimated that at least 8,000 were executed.^[22] Moise's denial that China played an important role in the reform is no longer accepted by modern scholarship.^[23] Porter's view was also consented by Noam Chomsky; he gave that Chi, as a former substantial landholder in North Vietnam who was later employed and subsidized by South Vietnam's Ministry of Information, CIA, and other official US sources, has made his conclusions based on many falsehoods, nonexistent documents, as well as deceptive translation of real documents. Moreover, Chomsky also cited from Colonel Nguyen Van Chau, head of the Central Psychological War Service for the South Vietnamese army from 1956 to 1962, who admitted that figures for the land reform were "100% fabricated" by the intelligence services of Saigon, as part of a campaign of vilification carried out in the mid-1950s to justify Ngo Dinh Diem's refusal of the general elections originally scheduled in 1956.^[24] However, it should be noted that recent scholarship from Vietnam also suggests that a larger number of landlords were persecuted than previously believed.^[11]

More than 1 million North Vietnamese people fled to the South, due in part to the land reform.^[25] It is estimated that as many as two million more would have left had they not been stopped by the Viet Minh.^[26]

The land reform in North Vietnam was documented by Hoang Van Chi in From Colonialism to Communism, first published in 1962 by the Congress of Cultural Freedom, in New York, London, and New Delhi. P. J. Honey wrote the Introduction for this work.

• Bernard B. Fall, The Two Vietnams: A Political and Military Analysis (London: Pall Mall Press, 2nd rev. ed., 1967)