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² Taylor, P., ‘Poor Policies, Wealthy Peasants: Alternative Trajectories of Rural Development in Vietnam’, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 2(2), 2007, pp. 3–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; MacLean, K., The Government of Mistrust: Illegibility and Bureaucratic Power in Socialist Vietnam, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 2013Google Scholar; Kerkvliet, B., ‘Protests over Land in Vietnam: Rightful Resistance and More’, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 9(3), 2014, pp. 19–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ Luong, H. V. and Unger, J., ‘Wealth, Power, and Poverty in the Transition to Market Economies: The Process of Socio-Economic Differentiation in Rural China and Northern Vietnam’, The China Journal, 40, 1998, pp. 61–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁵ There has been some work done on household domestic life and livelihood choices in Vietnam since the onset of economic reform. Yet the focus has either been on intra-household relations, particularly the gendered configuration of work and care (see Barbiéri, M. and Bélanger, D. (eds), Reconfiguring Families in Contemporary Vietnam, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2004Google Scholar; Nguyen, M. T. N., ‘Translocal Householding: Care and Migrant Livelihoods in a Waste-trading Community of Vietnam's Red River Delta’, Development and Change, 45(6), 2014, pp. 1385–408CrossRefGoogle Scholar) or on the family as an arena from which to explore topics of kinship and village politics (see Shibuya, S., Living with Uncertainty: Social Change and the Vietnamese Family in the Rural Mekong Delta, ISEAS, Singapore, 2015CrossRefGoogle Scholar) rather than on how the household as a whole has negotiated state pressure to pursue livelihood options that today's officials consider to be rational and ‘modern’.

⁶ Although land consolidation and commercialization of farming only became official policy in the early 2000s, this idea had been hinted at since the start of Renovation and was made increasingly explicit throughout the 1990s. For the party-state's modernizing agenda from the onset of Renovation, see Vietnam Communist Party, Final Resolution of the Communist Party's National Congress, Number VI (1986); Number VII (1991); Number VIII (1996), and Number IX (2001), National Politics, Hanoi. For the modernization scripts for agriculture and the countryside specifically, see Party, Vietnam Communist, Resolution on Speeding up the Industrialisation and Modernisation of Agriculture and the Countryside 2001–2010, National Politics, Hanoi, 2002Google Scholar.

⁷ Although the state allocated land to rural households, officially villagers only have land use rights (quyền sử dụng), not ownership rights (quyền sở hữu). According to the 1993 Land Laws, revised in 2003, all land belongs to ‘the entire people’ and is managed by the state, which retains absolute power to decide how it should be used and allocated. On the nature of land use rights, see Kerkvliet, B., ‘Agricultural Land in Vietnam: Markets Tempered by Family, Community and Socialist Practices’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 6(3), 2006, pp. 285–305Google Scholar; Sửu, N. V., ‘Contending Views and Conflicts over Land in Vietnam's Red River Delta’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 38(2), 2007, pp. 309–34Google Scholar.

⁸ Verdery, K., The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania. Culture and Society after Socialism, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2003Google Scholar.

⁹ Kerkvliet, B. and Selden, M., ‘Agrarian Transformation in China and Vietnam’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 30, 1998, pp. 139–61Google Scholar.

¹⁰ As economists Ravallion and van de Walle argue, the Vietnamese government has been more eager to promote large-scale capitalized farming than its Chinese counterpart. This has made it easier for Vietnamese households either to accumulate land or to sell it and relocate to other sectors. By contrast, throughout the 1980s and 1990s land in China was legally owned by collectives and hence it was much harder to transfer. See Ravallion, M. and van de Walle, D., Land in Transition: Reform and Poverty in Rural Vietnam, Palgrave Macmillan and the World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Deininger, K. and Jin, S., ‘Land Sales and Rental Markets in Transition: Evidence from Rural Vietnam’, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper no. 3013, 2003CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ Lipton, D. and Sachs, J., ‘Privatization in Eastern Europe: The Case of Poland’, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2, 1990, pp. 293–341CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² Popkin, S., The Rational Peasant—The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1979Google Scholar.

¹³ Hann, C., ‘From Production to Property: Decollectivization and the Family-Land Relationship in Contemporary Hungary’, Man, 28(2), 1993, pp. 299–320CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Kerkvliet, B. and Porter, D. (eds), Vietnam's Rural Transformation, Westview, Boulder, 1995Google Scholar.

¹⁵ All households with land included in the appropriation scheme received compensation set by the district government. Initially no households whose holdings were appropriated were hostile to the scheme, and everyone recalled that they happily took the compensation and released their holdings to the officials. However, three years later, when the construction of the industrial park was nearly completed, virtually every household whose holdings were appropriated in 2007 launched a much-publicized agitation to pressure the district authorities into increasing the compensation. Villagers said that although they considered the original compensation generous for their holdings, they later learned that villagers in land appropriation projects elsewhere in Vietnam had received even larger sums and therefore they protested to claim justice. The protest came to an end when the district government decided to give villagers additional compensation. Every household who had land appropriated was granted title to a piece of unused state-owned land, equal to five per cent of the appropriated holdings, on a site next to the industrial park. The villagers were told that they could use the land to open retail stalls to sell goods to workers in the industrial park to replace the income they had lost from cultivating rice on the appropriated holdings. For more details of the protest, see L. M. Chau, ‘“Extremely Rightful” Resistance: Land Appropriation and Rural Agitation in Contemporary Vietnam’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, doi:10.1080/00472336.2018.1517896.

¹⁶ During my fieldwork, I observed the daily routines of the villagers at their homes and workplaces, and helped them with their economic practices: weeding the paddy fields, feeding the chickens, making rice-noodles, managing the sales of Mrs Han's retailing stall in the village market, and visiting the factories in the industrial park. I also accompanied villagers on their translocal business trips to neighbouring villages, the district centre, and even Hanoi to obtain inputs and sell products. I took particular pleasure in the friendly but informative discussions I had in the villagers’ homes, in various village dining and drinking outlets, and during numerous ceremonial events in the village: weddings, funerals, death anniversaries, house-building celebrations, and rituals at the village pagoda and other temples of folk religion.

¹⁷ ‘Government set to relax farmland ceiling’, in Vietnam News, 18 March 2017, http://vietnamnews.vn/society/373093/govt-set-to-relax-farmland-ceiling.html#8s1ocQAfZeKGsx3X.97, [accessed 18 March 2019].

¹⁸ Do, T. and Iyer, L., ‘Land Titling and Rural Transition in Vietnam’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 56(3), 2008, pp. 531–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ For China, see Luong and Unger, ‘Wealth, Power, and Poverty’, p. 68; Zhang, J., Marketization and Democracy in China, Routledge, London, 2008CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For India, see Walker, K., ‘Neoliberalism on the Ground in Rural India: Predatory Growth, Agrarian Crisis, Internal Colonization, and the Intensification of Class Struggle’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 35(4), pp. 557–620CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mohanty, B., ‘“We are Like the Living Dead: Farmer Suicides in Maharashtra, Western India’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 32(2), 2005, pp. 243–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For post-socialist Eastern Europe, see Burawoy, M. and Verdery, K. (eds), Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World, Rowman and Littlefield, New York, 1999Google Scholar; Pine, F., ‘Retreat to the Household? Gendered Domains in Postsocialist Poland’, in Postsocialism: Ideas, Ideologies and Local Practices in Eurasia, Hann, C. (ed.), Routledge, London, 2002, pp. 95–113Google Scholar; Verdery, The Vanishing Hectare.

²⁰ Deininger and Jin, ‘Land Sales and Rental Markets’.

²¹ Akram-Lodhi, A., ‘Vietnam's Agriculture: Processes of Rich Peasant Accumulation and Mechanisms of Social Differentiation’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 5(1), 2005, pp. 73–116CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² Byres, T. J., Capitalism from Above and Capitalism from Below. An Essay in Comparative Political Economy, Macmillan, London, 1996CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Byres, T. J., ‘Neo-Classical Neo-Populism 25 Years on; Déjà Vu and Déjà Passé. Towards a Critique’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 4(1 and 2), 2004CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Special Issue on Redistributive Land Reform Today, pp. 17–44. Although Byres has never discussed the case of Vietnam in detail, he does mention post-collectivized Vietnam in his critique of Griffin, Khan and Ickowitz's works, notably Griffin, K., Khan, A. and Ickowitz, A., ‘Poverty and Distribution of Land’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 2(3), 2002, pp. 279–330CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Griffin et al. put Vietnam in the same category as Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and China as countries that have successfully transformed their agrarian structure into a system of individual peasant farming with highly egalitarian access to land. Yet Byres challenges this view, arguing that the model of egalitarian, redistributive land reform that Griffin et al. advocate might ‘lay the basis for capitalism from below; might create structures within which processes of differentiation flourished and a class of capitalist farmers emerged’: Byres, ‘Neo-Classical Neo-Populism’, pp. 30–41.

²³ The issue of rising inequality and differentiation among rural farming households in today's Vietnam has also been highlighted by Luong, and Unger, , ‘Wealth, Power, and Poverty’; Taylor, P. (ed.), Social Inequality in Vietnam and the Challenges to Reform, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 2004Google Scholar. For a typology of diverse pathways of agrarian transition to rural capitalism, see Hall, D., Hirsch, P. and Li, T. M., Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia, NUS Press and University of Hawai‘i Press, Singapore and Manoa, 2011Google Scholar.

²⁴ Banfield, E., The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, The Free Press, Illinois, 1958Google Scholar.

²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ Burawoy and Verdery (eds), Uncertain Transition.

²⁷ Hann, ‘From Production to Property’.

²⁸ Vietnam did not have collective farms of the kind instituted under socialism in China and the former Soviet Union. Rural cooperatives in Vietnam were much smaller in terms of population and the size of arable holdings under the centralized authority of cooperatives: see Kerkvliet and Selden, ‘Agrarian Transformation in China and Vietnam’. Another key difference was that under Vietnam's cooperativized economy, there was more space for households’ private economic activities than that in collective farms in the former Soviet Union and China: see Luong and Unger, ‘Wealth, Power, and Poverty’.

²⁹ Mr Nham's father was initially sentenced to death as a class enemy. However, when the Party launched the 1956 Rectification Campaign, he was classified as a ‘resistance landlord’ (địa chủ kháng chiến), the most acceptable category of landlords, referring to those who supported the revolution and provided shelter to guerrillas in the 1945–1954 anti-French war. The holdings and assets taken from him, however, were never returned. On the different classifications of landlords in the 1950s land reform in northern Vietnam, see Malarney, S., Culture, Ritual, and Revolution in Vietnam, University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2002, p. 36Google Scholar.

³⁰ In the land redistribution scheme in 1993, having a ‘bad-class’ family background was ignored and no longer criminalized by the state, thus the entire village was included in the scheme, regardless of their family history.

³¹ Hann, C. et al. , The Postsocialist Agrarian Question, Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia, Lit Verlag, Münster, 2002Google Scholar.

³² Patnaik, U., ‘New Data on the Arrested Development of Capitalism in Indian Agriculture’, Social Scientist, 35(7–8), 2007, pp. 4–23Google Scholar.

³³ Gupta, A., Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India, Duke University Press, Durham, 1998CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ The new role of the cooperative as a marketizing agent for rural farming households is widely seen across Vietnam under Renovation: see Kerkvliet and Selden, ‘Agrarian Transformation in China and Vietnam’, p. 54. This is a good example to show that Renovation in Vietnam is very different from the ‘structural adjustment’ that has taken place in post-socialist Eastern Europe or neo-liberal reforms in India. The Vietnamese government under Renovation does not consider farming and agriculture an unprofitable zone to be abandoned and state investment to be focused on high-value sectors like financial services and industries. In the early Renovation days in particular, when the state needed rural families to farm to bring the country out of the 1980s food shortage, the Vietnamese government deliberately avoided the full privatization of the market for agricultural inputs products, a policy that has hit farmers hard in India and Eastern Europe.

³⁵ Luong and Unger, ‘Wealth, Power, and Poverty’, p. 68.

³⁶ Kerkvliet, B., The Power of Everyday Politics: How Vietnamese Peasants Transformed National Policy, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2005Google Scholar.

³⁷ The ‘five-per-cent’ plot (đất năm phần trăm) was equal to five per cent of the households’ collectivized holdings. It was granted by village authorities to households in Xuan and across northern Vietnam in the early 1960s to subsidize their everyday subsistence needs.

³⁸ Verdery, The Vanishing Hectare.

³⁹ Mohanty, ‘“We are Like the Living Dead”’.

⁴⁰ The VND or Vietnamese Dong is Vietnam's currency unit. Roughly 30,000 VND equal £1.

⁴¹ Levien, M., ‘The Land Question: Special Economic Zones and the Political Economy of Dispossession in India’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(3–4), 2012, pp. 933–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁴³ Deininger and Jin, ‘Land Sales and Rental Markets’.

⁴⁴ Ibid. Ravallion and van de Walle, Land in Transition.

⁴⁵ Akram-Lodhi, ‘Vietnam's Agriculture’.

⁴⁶ The issue of rural households’ reluctance to purchase large holdings for fear of unexpected land appropriation schemes has been widely addressed in the scholarly literature on land use and agrarian transformation in contemporary Vietnam. See Taylor (ed.) Social Inequality in Vietnam; Ravallion and van de Walle, Land in Transition; Kim, A., ‘Land Taking in the Private Interest: Comparisons of Urban Land Development Controversies in the United States, China and Vietnam’, Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research, 11(1), 2009, pp. 19–31Google Scholar; Kerkvliet, ‘Protests over Land in Vietnam’.

⁴⁷ According to the new 2013 Land Laws, effective since 1 July 2014, Vietnamese rural households still do not have ownership title to land. However, tenancy was automatically extended from 20 to 50 years.

⁴⁸ Akram-Lodhi, ‘Vietnam's Agriculture’; Byres, ‘Neo-Classical Neo-Populism’.

⁴⁹ Burawoy and Verdery (eds), Uncertain Transition.

⁵⁰ Yep, R. and Fong, C., ‘Land Conflicts, Rural Finance and Capacity of the Chinese State’, Public Administration and Development, 29, 2009, pp. 69–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁵² Deininger and Jin, ‘Land Sales and Rental Markets’.

⁵³ Byres, ‘Neo-Classical Neo-Populism’.

⁵⁴ Ravallion and van de Walle, Land in Transition.

⁵⁵ Akram-Lodhi, ‘Vietnam's Agriculture’.