Major exhibition on 1946-1957 Land Reform

Major exhibition on 1946-1957 Land Reform

Nearly 150 original photographs, documents, and artefacts on the Land Reform campaign that abolished feudalism and heightened peasants’ ownership power in North Vietnam between 1946 and 1957 are being exhibited in Hanoi from September 8.

The historic campaign, one of the most important periods in North Vietnam , redefined the northern region by redistributing agricultural land amongst the general population with the revolutionary motto of “return land to the peasants“.

The exhibition is structured around two main themes. The first, “Rural areas in Vietnam before the Land Reform campaign“, portrays the difference between the life of landlords and peasants in the country before 1945. The second, “the Land Reform campaign 1946-1957″ features Vietnam Government and Party documents that highlight the reform’s errors, corrections, progress and its eventual achievements.

Before Vietnam ‘s August Revolution in 1945, the Vietnamese peasantry, which accounted for 95 percent of the northern region’s population, owned a meagre 30 percent of the region’s agricultural land.

By the end of the campaign, 810,000 ha of agricultural land were redistributed to around 2.2 million Vietnamese peasants (72.8 percent of the northern rural population), according to the Vietnam National Museum of History.

Among original documents exhibited are President Ho Chi Minh’s speech at the 5 th National Conference on Land Reform, the 1957 National Decree on Land Reform, and a certificate of land ownership issued to peasants in Ninh Binh province.

“Only with land reform that returns the land to our peasants and frees the workforce from the landlords’ chains and shackles, can we end the sickening poverty and backwardness of our peasants,” President Ho Chi Minh wrote in a report to the National Assembly’s third meeting in December 1953.

Thanks to the numerous measures implemented, by the end of 1957 the land reform campaign was a complete success, strengthening Party leadership, fuelling agricultural production and fostering the worker-peasant alliance.

The exhibition, organised by the Vietnam National Museum of History, will run till the end of 2014.-VNA

Major exhibition on 1946-1957 Land Reform Related image(s)