As nearly a thousand hectares is cleared for a Trump family golf resort in Hưng Yên province, farmers in the Red River Delta are being told to surrender their livelihoods for as little as $12 per square meter, roughly one year's income from the same land. The project needed just three months from inception to groundbreaking: in a bid to expedite a trade deal with Washington, the Vietnamese government bypassed many of its own planning laws. Yet five months after a lavish ceremony attended by Vietnam's Prime Minister and Eric Trump, the site remains fields of banana and orange trees, as farmers contest compensation offered by local authorities.
For farmer Nguyễn Thị Hương, told to vacate her plot for $3,200 and rice provisions, the financial equation does not add up: "What can someone like me do after that?" For others, the costs extend beyond money: Le Van Truong worries about the uprooting of a local cemetery that has held five generations of his family.
The Trump resort is a well-publicised case, but not an exceptional one. Since Vietnam's economic transformation in 1986, land disputes have been a major source of discontent. In 2017, tensions in Đồng Tâm, a commune on the edge of Hà Nội, boiled over when the government handed fifty hectares of contested land to Viettel Group, a state-owned military company. In defiance, the villagers took 38 anti-riot police hostage. Following a negotiated release, police returned three years later to enforce annexation: the final clash killed three military officers and Lê Đình Kình, the village leader and a fifty-year Communist Party member.
Of the twenty-nine who stood trial, twenty-two were charged with murder and two sentenced to death. State media branded the villagers as traitors and terrorists. But the villagers had initially pursued every available administrative channel, and violence only broke out once those channels failed to produce results. Rather than engage the grievance, authorities protected their authority over the land.
Vietnam remains an outlier in scale: seventy percent of all administrative complaints received by government offices in recent years concerned land. And as Đồng Tâm shows, it is also an outlier in how violent such disagreements can get. This anomaly occurs because land sits at the heart of Vietnam's deepest contradiction: between socialist principles and market-oriented development.
Ideological Foundations of Land Ownership
Decisions around land have historically shaped a society's institutions and subsequent development. In feudal times, it served as the foundation for a complex web of political obligations. Parcels were granted by the monarch to vassals in exchange for taxes, services and loyalty. Despite strict hierarchies, no individual or entity had exclusive purview over one another. Overlapping rights and obligations meant that land had yet to become "private property" in the modern sense.
The notion that individuals have an exclusive right to use land emerged alongside the birth of capitalism. Capitalist development was intimately connected to a physical "enclosure" process, where land previously held in common was fenced off and allocated to individual landowners. Productivity did increase. Yet so did the mass displacement of commoners who previously depended on the land for sustenance. As Karl Marx observed, these "freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production."
In his vision of a post-capitalist order, Marx recognised the abolition of private land ownership as essential, arguing that modern agricultural techniques could only be applied effectively at scale, based upon collective rather than individual needs. This theory would be adapted by twentieth century revolutionaries, serving the dual function of building popular support and entrenching party power.
The First Land Reforms: Vietnam Pre-1986
Land redistribution campaigns served as the ideological foundation for socialist movements in the largely agrarian societies of Russia, China and Vietnam. Learning from the Chinese and Soviet experiences, the Land Reform Campaign in North Vietnam deepened communist control at the village level and was crucial in the mass mobilisation of peasants.
The human costs were high. In North Vietnam, the Land Reform Campaign of the early 1950s established village-level tribunals to identify and prosecute landlords, often on flimsy evidence. Many public executions were reported. By 1956, the scale of the errors had become so apparent that Hồ Chí Minh issued a rare public apology, followed by a "Rectification of Errors" campaign. Yet the underlying commitment to collective land ownership remained.
Combined with American sanctions and military overextension in Cambodia, Vietnam's economy was on the brink of collapse by the 1980s. It had one of the lowest standards of living in the world and became a net food importer, despite presiding over large swathes of fertile agricultural land. At the Sixth Party Congress in December 1986, the leadership formally acknowledged what the people had known for years: the command economy was not working. The reforms that followed, colloquially known as Đổi Mới, or "Renovation," returned control of land to individual households. Within a decade, Vietnam went from food importer to one of the world's leading rice exporters.
Land Laws and Disputes Post-1986
The effectiveness of Đổi Mới was an implicit admission that Marxist foundations no longer held, yet the party retained control. Political scientist Martin Gainsborough argues that what occurred was not retreat but repositioning. As growth surged, access to land, licences and capital remained dependent on state permission. Đổi Mới preserved the state's grip on power and on the economy's most valuable asset.
Under the 1988 Land Law and its landmark 1993 revision, all land in Vietnam formally belongs to "the entire people" through the state. Individuals receive land use rights for a fixed period, but never outright ownership. These rights can in principle be revoked at any time, the state retains authority to recover land for purposes of "national defence, security, or socioeconomic development," with compensation set by authorities rather than through the market.
According to Đỗ Thanh Huyền of UNDP (2020), what distinguishes the Vietnamese case is a combination of three compounding problems: compensation mismatch, firm favouritism, and the absence of legal recourse.
The first issue is compensation. Rates are set by the same provincial authorities who approve the projects requiring the land, a structural conflict of interest. Local governments have a direct financial incentive to keep compensation low: they acquire land cheaply, then lease or sell it to developers at market prices, capturing the windfall as revenue. In some provinces, receipts from land transactions have accounted for over 40 percent of the local government budget.
The second is the systematic favouring of firms over citizens. PAPI and PCI data tracking both citizen and business experiences with land between 2011 and 2019 show two diverging trends: the risk of expropriation reported by firms fell steadily over the period, while the proportion of farming households reporting seizures rose.
The third is the absence of meaningful legal recourse. A farmer who believes they have been wrongfully dispossessed cannot seek relief from an independent judge. According to the World Justice Project, Vietnam ranks 83rd out of 143 countries in the Rule of Law Index. Đồng Tâm illustrated the endpoint of this logic: a system in which the state is simultaneously legislator, executor and adjudicator of land disputes leaves the other party with no legitimate exit. The remaining options are resignation or escalation.
The Road Forward
The case for reform is not merely moral but practical, and Vietnam's own history demonstrates this. Following the 1993 Land Law, studies found significant increases in land devoted to long-term crops and in labour devoted to non-farm work. Farmers who felt secure in their tenure invested more. Across more than 2,000 rural communes, greater tenure security correlated with measurable improvements in local economic development.
Three reforms would make a real and immediate impact. The first is greater transparency around land planning and compensation. Publishing land use plans, making compensation methodologies public, and giving residents genuine input before projects are approved would reduce the information asymmetry that lets local officials exploit the gap between administrative and market prices.
The second is an independent valuation mechanism. Compensation rates should not be set by the same authorities who approve the projects that require the land. Some degree of separation between the roles of developer and compensator, even within the existing state ownership framework, would go a long way.
The third, and perhaps most difficult for the Party, is judicial reform. As long as courts answer to the party rather than the law, dispossessed farmers have nowhere credible to go. Specialist land tribunals with meaningful procedural independence would not require the party to relinquish ownership of land, but they would give disputes an off-ramp before they reach the boiling point of Đồng Tâm. That is ultimately in everyone's interest, including the party's.
None of these solutions requires completely abandoning the principle of state land ownership. But it does require modifications — for the Party, the solution to improving both economic growth and socialist credentials might be to loosen its grip over the country's land. The structural roots of Vietnam's land disputes are already well understood, and the tools to address them still remain. The cost of inaction, not least in the number of lives lost or failed investments, is mounting.