Entry for May 25, 2007

Một trong các mailing list tôi tham gia (thực ra chỉ để thỉnh thoảng đọc) là Vietnamese Studies Group, gồm những người làm việc liên quan hay quan tâm tới Vietnamese Studies.
Địa chỉ list này ở đây.
List này hiện đang nóng với những tranh cãi quanh Hồ Chí Minh giữa một số bác Việt kiều (anti- Hồ) và một số bác học thuật Mỹ. Thậm chí hai bên còn xỏ xiên, nhạo báng nhau đủ kiểu. Thế mới biết Hồ Chí Minh vẫn còn là một nhân vật nhạy cảm thế nào, không chỉ với người Việt.
Bài này không liên quan tới cụ Hồ mà là về cải cách ruộng đất, tớ thấy có nhiều tư liệu mới nên copy ra đây:
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Dear list,

Just to piggyback on the comments from my dear
Mongolian comrade Balazs, I have run into two recently
released Party documents which are relevant to the
topic. Before I discuss these documents, let me say
that I am focusing on the particular issue of executed
and persecuted people during the land reform. I am not
trying to assess all the good and bad things about the
land reform, which is a different topic. 

1) “Chi Thi Cua Bo Chinh Tri Ve May Van De Dac Biet
Trong Phat Dong Quan Chung” (Political Bureau’s Decree
on Special Issues in Mobilizing the Masses), May 4,
1953. Van Kien Dang Toan Tap v. 14 (2001), 201-206,
wrote:

Quote—

“In this campaign, [we] will have to execute [xu tu] a
number of reactionary or evil landlords. In our
current situation, the ratio of executions [xu tu] of
these landlords to the total population in the free
areas is fixed at the rate of 1/1000 in principle.
This ratio will be controlled by the leadership and is
to be applied for the rent and interest reduction
campaign this year and next year; it does not mean
only for this year, and it does not mean that every
village will execute landlords according to this
ratio. (Thus there may be communes that execute 3-4
people, others that execute only one or none at all).

The lives of people are an important matter. It is not
that we don’t want to execute those who deserve
execution. But the number of executions should not be
too many; if so, it would be difficult [for us] to win
popular support. 

[The document went on to mention several mitigating
factors (such as “dia chu tre tuoi co hoc thuc va co
hy vong cai tao duoc”) and special cases such as
Catholic priests that require special treatment].

“[The executions of] criminals [pham nhan, referring
to landlords to be executed]  who were local cadres
from district level up, who were soldiers from the
company level up, must be approved [in advance] by
central leaders [Trung Uong]. [The executions of]
local cadres at the commune level [and below] must be
approved by Interzone Party Committee. [The executions
of] soldiers from the platoon level [and below] must
be authorized by the Central Party Committee of the
Army [Tong Quan Uy].

At the central level, an executive committee will be
formed....This Committee is authorized to collect and
protect information about criminals, make
recommendations to the Chairman of the Government [Chu
Tich Chinh Phu—Ho Chi Minh himself, who was also a
member of the Politburo which issued this decree] for
approval, and deliver the decision to the special
people’s court for ruling on the cases.”

Unquote—

I am not sure if this document had ever been released
before—I would appreciate any information on this. In
all the five volumes that contained documents on the
land reform (1953-1957), this was the only document
that mentioned the issue of executions in specific
terms. Now what is the value of this document?

First, one often hears the argument that the central
government did not intend to kill so many people
during the land reform. This happened only during the
implementation of the policy and was the acts of some
zealous low-level cadres. Perhaps this was true to
some extent. The question is how much of the mistake
was the responsibility of the central government?

On the one hand, the document shows that Politburo
members (or at least some of them) were concerned
about indiscriminate killings. This caution, if not
for humanitarian reasons, was driven by political
concerns for popular support for the policy as the
document explicitly mentioned. The Politburo also
suggested that the ratio or quota was to be applied in
a flexible manner depending on local situations.

On the other hand, the Politburo had calculated and
decided in advance, before launching the campaign, a
targeted ratio of 1/1000, or 0.1% of the total
population, to be executed. If we take the population
of North Vietnam in 1955 to be 13.5 million (Nguyen
Tien Hung, Economic Development of Socialist Vietnam,
1955-1980, Praeger 1977, p. 98), about 13,500 people
were to be executed. The population in “the free
areas” that this execution ratio was meant for were in
fact much fewer, perhaps about 10-11 million people.
In this case, the number of executions planned for for
1953-1954 was 10,000-11,000. But after 1954 the
campaign was extended to most of North Vietnam, so the
figure of 13,500 was perhaps within the expectation of
the Politburo.

The document (together with many others in the same
volume) also demonstrates the careful planning of the
campaign. There was a clear process of required
approval for executions that could go all the way up
to the Chairman of the Government. I am sure that
there were many cases (persecutions out of personal
revenge) in which local committees did not report the
executions (against central order), but I doubt that
this was widespread. It seems more plausible that
those local committees would rather fabricate crimes
to get their requests for executions approved than to
kill people without approval from above. I am also
aware that the campaigns moved left and right a few
times during 1953-1956, but the dominant trend was the
fear of committing rightist rather than leftist
errors. Given this fear, and the way these political
campaigns were run in North Vietnam (read To Hoai’s
new novel Ba Nguoi Khac [Three Different Characters]
for a sense of campaign-style politics; To Hoai served
as a land reform cadre), local committees must have
had greater incentives to over-report than
under-report executions. The central government, and
its Chairman, must have approved most, if not all,
executions. Central leaders could blame local
officials for fabricating
 charges and for
overreporting, but it was they who gave the final
approval to most executions. At the very least, the
document suggests that, besides the fact that the
central government was responsible for the overall
supervision of the campaign, it must bear sole
responsibility for at least 10,000-11,000 deaths that
it planned to carry out. 

To be sure, this was the number planned for, not the
actual number of executions. But the intention to kill
was there, and the percentage of the population to be
killed was calculated and fixed in principle, before
any verdict had been made on those to be executed.
Furthermore, there is no reason to expect, and no
evidence that I have seen to demonstrate, that the
actual executions were less than planned; in fact the
executions perhaps exceeded the plan if we consider
two following factors. First, this decree was issued
in 1953 for the rent and interest reduction campaign
that preceded the far more radical land redistribution
and party rectification campaigns (or waves) that
followed during 1954-1956. Second, the decree was
meant to apply to free areas (under the control of the
Viet Minh government), not to the areas under French
control that would be liberated in 1954-1955 and that
would experience a far more violent struggle. 

Thus the number of 13,500 executed people seems to be
a low-end estimate of the real number. This is
corroborated by Edwin Moise in his recent paper “Land
Reform in North Vietnam, 1953-1956” presented at the
18th Annual Conference on SE Asian Studies, Center for
SE Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley
(February 2001). In this paper Moise (7-9) modified
his earlier estimate in his 1983 book (which was
5,000) and accepted an estimate close to 15,000
executions. Moise made the case based on Hungarian
reports provided by Balazs, but the document I cited
above offers more direct evidence for his revised
estimate. This document also suggests that the total
number should be adjusted up some more, taking into
consideration the later radical phase of the campaign,
the unauthorized killings at the local level, and the
suicides following arrest and torture (the central
government bore less direct responsibility for these
cases, however). 

Second, the decree suggests that the campaign in
Vietnam was proportionally just as murderous as the
one launched in China after 1949. Viviene Shue
(Peasant China in Transition, University of California
Press 1980, 80) who is very sympathetic to the Chinese
revolution quotes Benedict Stavis, who estimates the
number of executions in China during 1949-52 based on
official sources to be between 400,000 and 800,000
(These executions may also have come from other
campaigns besides the land reform in the same period,
and if unofficial deaths are added, the total number
could reach more than a million). If 500,000 deaths
(officially and unofficially) can be assumed to be
specifically related to land reform, then the
proportion was also about 0.1% in the total population
of 572 million Chinese in 1952 (Dwight Perkins, ed.
China’s Modern Economy in Historical Perspective,
Stanford University Press 1975, 122). Given that
Chinese advisors were heavily involved in the
Vietnamese campaign, a relationship may have existed
between this Chinese ratio and the Vietnamese decree,
but this hypothesis needs further research to confirm.

2) “De cuong bao cao cua Bo Chinh tri” (Draft Report
of the Politburo), Van Kien Dang Toan Tap v. 17
(2001), 432-474.
(This was Party Secretary General Truong Chinh’s
report at the Tenth Central Committee Plenum, August
25-October 5, 1956, which ordered the Error
Rectification Campaign [Sua Sai]. Truong Chinh was to
resign from his post after this Plenum). I am very
certain this document had never been released before.
This document offers the most details as yet about the
number of punished cadres but unfortunately it
contains no information on those who were executed (or
the number may have been removed before publication). 

In this document, Truong Chinh cited statistics about
the land reform “yet to be confirmed.” He said that
three-quarters (2,876) of all Party cells (3,777) in
16 provinces had been rectified in the rent reduction
and land reform campaigns by the time these campaigns
were suspended (some time in May 1956). 84,000 members
in these cells were punished [xu tri] among the total
of 150,000, or 56%. “Punishment” usually meant being
expelled from the Party after torture, and could
amount to execution. As Truong Chinh (ibid., 435)
frankly but belatedly admitted, “most cadres and party
members who were arrested were subject to brutal and
barbaric torture [nhuc hinh rat tan khoc, da man].”
The goal of the Party was to purge only members of
exploitative class backgrounds but in practice those
of working classes were purged as well. In the Ta Ngan
Zone (provinces to the left of the Red River), it was
found out that 7,000 of the total 8,829 persecuted
party members belonged to “peasants and other
[non-exploitative] classes.” While the persecutions of
these working-class cadres based on fabricated charges
were clearly not intended by central leaders, they
could not have been carried out without their prior
approval. 

According to the same document, in the 66 districts
and seven provinces where the party rectification
campaign was carried out (the campaign at the
provincial level was directed by none but the Party’s
Central Organizational Department headed by Le Van
Luong), 720 were “punished” out of 3,425 cadres and
employees (80% of these 3,425 were party members). The
ratio was 21%. If only cadres from provincial
department level up were counted, 105 were punished
out of 284, or 37%. Among 36 incumbent members of
provincial party committees who were subjects of the
campaign, 19 (or 57%) were persecuted. Among 61 former
members of provincial party committees who were
subjects of the campaign, 26 were punished. At the
district level, 191 out of 396 district party
committee members were punished, or 48%. In an extreme
case (Ha Tinh province), all 19 members of the
provincial party committee, police department, and
district militia commanders were branded
“counter-revolutionaries” and purged during the
campaign (all were later found to be innocent by
central authorities).  

To conclude, both documents are not to be taken as
truths but they seem to be the best available sources
about this complex topic. I expect documents to be
released in the future will improve substantially on
what we know. Also it should be reiterated that,
whether some of those executed landlords deserved to
die, and whether the benefits of the campaign for the
peasantry justified or outweighed the sacrifice of
these landlords, are questions that require a
different debate. 

Tuong Vu
Naval Postgraduate School