Failure (re-)framed: The Vietnamese Land Reforms through the lens of recapitulation reports

The Vietnamese Communist Party adopted a rigid Maoist-model to foment class struggle to eradicate all traces of ‘feudalism’ and ‘capitalism’ across the northern countryside during the 1950s. The mass campaign began in late 1952 then ended abruptly in late 1956 due to the violent chaos it unleashed. A growing body of critical scholarship exists on this campaign; however, the importance of the final step in the campaign's model remains largely overlooked — namely, the ‘reorganisation’ of local Party cells, the goal of which was to extend Party control, especially in areas only recently liberated from French colonial rule. Lengthy, detailed, and confessional in nature, the reports present not only the mobilisation team's achievements, but also include extensive discussions of the failures arising from the team's efforts to assess, purify, and then consolidate the cells. The analysis focuses the ‘story-telling devices’ the report authors used to frame these outcomes. The findings contribute not only to the critical historiography of the tumultuous period, but also the emerging sub-field of failure studies.