Land reform in North Vietnam was done between 1953 to 1956. It followed the program of land reform in China from 1946 to 1953. China sent an advisory group led by Qiao Xiaoguang to help North Vietnam implement the reform.

The aim of the land reform program was to break the power of the traditional village elite, to redistribute wealth to poorer peasants, and to consolidate the power of the new regime.

The reform led to allegations of many villagers being executed, land being taken away from middle peasants, and of paranoia among neighbors. Several foreign witnesses testified to mass executions.^{[1][2][page needed]} Following the official condemnation of the excesses of Land Reform, the party newspaper Nhan Dan reported that 30% percent of all convictions were erroneous.^[3] By 1957, some 12,000 wrongly convicted prisoners were released.^[4]

On July 9, 1953, the first landlord executed was the woman Nguyễn Thị Năm, who had in fact been an active supporter of the Vietnamese Communist resistance.^[5]

Land reform teams were required to uncover a certain number of landlords according to an arbitrary quota system that targeted at least 5% of the population, and a minimum percentage of accused landlords had to be executed as a lesson to the others.^[6] Declassified Politburo documents confirm that 1 in 1,000 was the average quota targeted for execution during the earlier "rent reduction" campaign.^[7] The scale of the ensuing repression has proved difficult to quantify, with estimates of the number of executions ranging from 8,000 to 60,000. Testimony from North Vietnamese witnesses suggested a ratio of one execution for every 160 village residents, which extrapolated nationwide would indicate nearly 100,000 executions. Because the campaign was concentrated mainly in the Red River Delta area, a lower estimate of 50,000 executions became widely accepted by scholars at the time.^[8][9] A Saigon communique put the figure at 32,000 executions (12,000 party members and 20,000 others), based on the testimony of an ex-party member involved in the campaign.^[10] Economist Vo Nhan Tri reported uncovering a document in the central party archives which put the number of wrongful executions at 15,000. From discussions with party cadres, Vo Nhan Tri concluded that the overall number of deaths was considerably higher than this figure.^[11]

Gareth Porter wrote The Myth of the Bloodbath, where he estimated that the death toll was only in the thousands^[12] 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."^[13] Historian Edwin Moise, who estimated that over 8,000 people were executed during the land reform,^[14] has defended this practice, noting that newspapers North Vietnamese sources publicly discussed and condemned the repressive measures, even before they became a casus belli for the South.^[15] According to Balazs Szalontai, declassified statistics provided by the North Vietnamese government to Hungarian officials generally support Moise's lower estimates.^[16] János Radványi, who visited Hanoi in 1959 as a member of the Hungarian Party-State delegation, was told that 60,000 people had been executed during the campaign.^[8]

This land reform (1953–1956) redistributed land to more than 2 million poor peasants,^{[citation needed]} but at a high cost. Western sources reported that between a few hundred thousand to several million North Vietnamese were prevented from leaving by Viet Minh soldiers, while Ho Chi Minh's regime maintained that "French colonialists" had "coerced or bribed" many of the refugees.^[17]

• Land reform in South Vietnam

• Bernard B. Fall, The Two Vietnams: A Political and Military Analysis (London: Pall Mall Press, 2nd rev. ed., 1967)
• The History of the Vietnamese Economy (2005), Vol. 2, edited by Dang Phong of the Institute of Economy, Vietnamese Institute of Social Sciences.
• Gittinger, J. Price, "Communist Land Policy in Viet Nam", Far Eastern Survey, Vol. 29, No. 8, 1957, p. 118