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7 Kerkvliet and Porter, Vietnam's rural transformation; Vietnam Communist Party, Strategies for socio-economic development 1996–2000.

8 Throughout this article, I use pseudonyms for the village and all informants to protect their anonymity.

9 According to the 1993 Land Laws, villagers were granted a 20-year title over the new holdings, which they could sell, transfer, give to others and cultivate at will. However, officially villagers only have use-rights (quyền sử dụng), and all land belongs to ‘the entire people’ and is managed by the state, which retains absolute power to decide how land should be used and allocated. See Kerkvliet, ‘Agricultural land in Vietnam’.

10 Initially the households were happy to accept the compensation and give up the land, for an amount set by the district government. However, three years later, when the construction of the industrial park was nearly completed, virtually every household involved launched a much-publicised protest to pressure the district authorities to increase the compensation. Villagers said that they had learned that villagers in land appropriation projects elsewhere in Vietnam had received larger compensation. The protest ended when the district government gave villagers an additional compensation fee. Every household who had land appropriated was also granted title to a piece of unused state-owned land, equal to 5 per cent of the appropriated holdings, on a site next to the industrial park. The villagers were told to use the land for opening stalls to sell goods to workers in the industrial park as a replacement for the income they previously got from the appropriated land.

11 The idea of đa gi năng is not only embraced by older household members, but also by the younger villagers working in the industrial park. Most Xuan factory workers I know prefer to have a portfolio of livelihood strategies rather than to commit to factory work as a single livelihood. Most of them utilise the time outside factory working hours to tend their households’ arable fields and participate in other household livelihoods. See Chau, Lam Minh, ‘Actively cautious: Industrialization and rural livelihood choices in contemporary northern Vietnam’, South East Asia Research 26, 1 (2018): 21–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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22 I do not suggest that households in Vietnamese craft villages have all sold their arable land and exited agriculture altogether. It is common for craft-making households to retain agricultural holdings. See Fanchette, Sylvie and Stedman, Nicholas, Discovering craft villages in Vietnam (Hanoi: IRD, 2009)Google Scholar. It does not mean, however, that they pursue a strategy of livelihood diversification comparable to the đa gi năng model. These craft-producing households still rely predominantly, and often exclusively, on craft production for income, and the arable land is retained not as an active income source. Instead it is common for craft-producing households to hire others to handle the farming, even incurring a loss to have their fields cultivated.

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28 The fear of losing their landholdings originates not only from villagers’ understanding of the contemporary state land policies, but also from painful memories of the fragility of land possession in the pre-Renovation period, notably during the land reform (late 1950s) and the establishment of agricultural cooperatives (early 1960s). See Chau, Lam Minh, ‘Negotiating uncertainty in late-socialist Vietnam: Households and livelihood options in the marketizing countryside’, Modern Asian Studies 53, 6 (2019): 1701–735CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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30 The colloquial name for Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome.

31 US$1 was roughly VND24,000 at the time of writing.

32 Hart, ‘The dynamics of diversification in an Asian rice region’.

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