Taking the political vacuum, Viet Minh seized power by launching a nationwide revolution, and founded the DRV in Hanoi on September 2.
In terms of military capability, the Viet Minh was in a position of clear-cut disadvantage; this did not change until the establishment and involvement of the People's Republic of China.
After winning victories in a series of military campaigns with considerable help from August 1950 onward, the DRV not only gradually turned around the war situation but also expanded its controlled areas.
After its first trial failed in the 1930s, Vietnamese communists never had a real chance to carry it out, even during a long time after the foundation of the DRV.
[9] On the other hand, the French and American-sponsored Quoc Gia Viet Nam (the State of Vietnam) emerged and was recognized by western powers.
Particularly after the Bao Dai interval, the DRV faced a competent rival regime which contested its monopolistic representation of the Vietnamese people.
In this situation, Truong Chinh in his report to the party Congress in 1951 pointed out that as soon as the Bao Dai regime was set up, the landlord class aligned itself with the State of Vietnam.
[12] After the end of WWII in Indochina, people suffered a lot from famine and lack of sufficient food due to continuous conflict.
Collective ownership as a palliative to landlessness has been a century-old practice throughout Vietnam and as for individuals, they were deprived of rice fields and had to turn to support from communal land.
[17] According to Hoang Van Chi who was a former member of DRV and fled to South Vietnam in the mid-1950s, these two campaigns had but one purpose, namely the liquidation of the landowning class and the subsequent establishment of a proletarian dictatorship in the countryside.
[18] Land Rent Reduction Campaign After being trained by Chinese counsultor, through the local party-cell, Vietnamese cadres were sent to the village and lived with a few landless peasants.
In this case, they had to pay back the excess land rent within time limit, this is the third stage of extortion of money and valuables.
According to Hoang's memoir, as soon as a man was defined as landlord, he and his family were isolated from their fellow human beings and nobody was permitted to talk to them or even have any contact with them.
Very soon after the law was passed in national congress, the experimental wave of land reform took place between December 1953 and March 1954 in Thai Nguyen province.
[24] This experiment was fruitful according to the official, and a Central Land Reform Committee was established on 15 March 1954 which was headed by Pham Van Dong.
Chinese military advisory group was headed firstly by Wei Guoqing (July 1950 – May 1951) providing directly consultation to the top commander of DRV.
Under political advisory group, a financial team was established in early 1951 to help North Vietnam formulate regulations on how to collect tax and rice.
[31] Since 1953, for facilitating mass mobilization and rent reduction campaign, more than 100 North Vietnamese cadres was sent to China to participate training class.
Cadres were trained to practice Vietnamese version of Chinese "three together system" (三共, san gong) while peasants were mobilized and encouraged to "pour out grievances suffering from landlords and French collaborators" (诉苦, su ku).
In February 1953, Luo Guibo sent a report to the Chinese leadership proposing a political consolidation campaign (整军, zheng jun) to make them aware of class distinction.
However, it also produced significant negative consequences for the party due to that Mao's pattern of land reform emphasized the excessive class struggle and repression.
[35] Executions and imprisonment of persons classified as "reactionary and evil landlords" were contemplated from the beginning of the land reform program.
[36] On July 9, 1953, the first landlord executed was the woman Nguyễn Thị Năm [vi], who had in fact been an active supporter of the Vietnamese Communist resistance.
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.
[43] In 1990, economist Vo Nhan Tri reported uncovering a document in the central party archives which put the number of wrongful executions at 15,000.
[45][46] According to Vu Tuong (2007), declassified documents from the Vietnamese and Hungarian archives indicate that the number of executions was much lower than reported at the time, although likely greater than 13,500 if taking into account the suicides following arrest and torture.
[47][48][49] Scholar Balasz Szalontai wrote that declassified documents of Hungarian diplomats living in North Vietnam at the time of the land reform provided a number of 1,337 executions and 23,748 imprisonments.
The first phase was a crash operation to survey the damage done and release from prison incorrectly classified peasants and falsely accused cadres.
[55] It also constitutes a considerable part of oversea Vietnamese political dissents criticizing today's communist party of Vietnam and its dependence on China.
The regime opened the door to enlightenment by completely altering the existing patterns of production; but also provided the masses with an ideology which would modify their attitude to work even before the economic conditions were fundamentally changed.