Vietnam shuts down ‘land reform’ exhibit
Show on post-WWII revolutionary land policy causes online outrage and is soon closed, reports Asia Sentinel’s David Brown
In Hanoi this week, a short-lived exhibition at Vietnam’s National History Museum, Land Reform 1946-57, triggered a national moment to relive a long-ago trauma.
On September 5, the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Sports website posted an announcement saying that the History Museum would hold an exhibit from September 8 until December assembled from the archives of the central government, the Communist Party and various provincial museums. It was an exhibit “pregnant with valuable historical contents never shown before,” the ministry said.
Scholars outside Vietnam and (very quietly) inside the country have debated for 60 years how many landlords ‑ large, small, kind, wicked, pro or anti-Communist — perished in the paroxysm of class warfare that followed France’s expulsion from the northern half of Vietnam in 1954.
A few Vietnamese who remember that period intimately, notably the economic historian Dang Phong and, very recently, the journalist Tran Dinh, have said openly that the ideologically driven land reform campaign was a complete failure. For younger generations, however, the gory details ‑ at least 100,000, and perhaps two or three times that many, landlords were shot, beheaded or beaten to death by peasant mobs incited by Party cadres – have been lost from view.
The curators at the National History Museum certainly did not intend to arouse doubts about the correct management of affairs long ago. The exhibit was designed to “educate… especially youth to comprehend more deeply and correctly the agricultural revolution… and strengthen belief and pride in the Party, government and revolutionary achievements of the People.” They didn’t reckon with the Internet.
