All events · Cold War Proxies

Vietnam's New Economic Zones

1975–1990 · East & Southeast Asia

Displacement

Displaced

1 million

Jacqueline Desbarats's study of Vietnamese population redistribution, the standard source, estimates that between 750,000 and more than a million people were moved from southern cities to New Economic Zones between 1975 and 1980, with a comparable northern movement southward; the state's own target of 10 million resettled by 1990 was never met. Vietnamese official figures for the programme exist but were not independently verified, and many of those sent returned to the cities unofficially.

Share of the population affected

5.1%

of the population of southern Vietnam, the former Republic of Vietnam, at the end of the war, 1975

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What happened

After 1975 the Vietnamese government sought to reduce the population of southern cities swollen by the war and to bring uncultivated land into production by establishing New Economic Zones in the Central Highlands, the south-west and border provinces. Families were assigned to zones by neighbourhood committees; those associated with the former South Vietnamese state, ethnic Chinese and households without residence or ration entitlement were disproportionately selected, and refusal carried the loss of registration, work and food rations, so participation is best described as coerced rather than voluntary. Conditions in the zones were often extremely poor: cleared forest without infrastructure, malaria, crop failure and, in some areas, unexploded ordnance. Large numbers returned unofficially to Ho Chi Minh City, where they lived without residence papers. The programme, alongside re-education detention, property confiscation and the treatment of the ethnic Chinese, contributed to the exodus of boat people that the atlas records separately; Hanoi presented the zones as economic development and land settlement.

Parties

The Socialist Republic of Vietnam moved southern city populations to cleared land in the highlands and border provinces under a state resettlement programme

Disputed

Whether the programme is properly described as forced relocation or as incentivised resettlement is disputed between Vietnamese official accounts and refugee and Western scholarship; the death estimates in circulation vary enormously and rest on weak methods.

The denominator

Southern Vietnam held roughly 19.5-20 million people in 1975; the first census of the reunified country in 1976 counted 47.6 million nationally. The New Economic Zones programme moved people out of Saigon and other southern cities to cleared land in the highlands and border provinces, with figures usually given as one to 1.5 million by the early 1980s, though many left the zones again.

Estimates of those resettled range from about one to 1.5 million and include people who moved under economic pressure rather than direct compulsion, and a substantial share returned to the cities.

Where the baseline comes from

New Economic Zones program — Wikipediaopen-edited
Demographics of Vietnam — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

No reliable toll exists. R. J. Rummel's estimate of 20,000-155,000 deaths from hard labour in the zones is frequently cited but rests on extrapolation from refugee reports rather than records, and no independent measurement of mortality in the zones was ever made.

Documented forms of violence

Forced Labour

Refugee testimony collected in the early 1980s and Desbarats's analysis of Vietnamese population policy document compulsion through rationing and residence registration and unpaid clearance labour in the zones.

Movements mapped

Saigon residents sent to New Economic Zones in the Central Highlands

Countries touched, on present-day borders

Vietnam

Related entries

Overlaps with: Vietnam War Wartime Displacement
Many people sent to Vietnam's New Economic Zones after 1975 were wartime refugees from the swollen southern cities.
Overlaps with: Expulsion of Ethnic Chinese (Hoa) from Vietnam
Ethnic Chinese were disproportionately assigned to the New Economic Zones, and some later left Vietnam in the 1978-79 exodus.

Sources

This entry rests only on reference, press or open-edited sources. Treat its figures as indicative and follow the links before relying on them.

New Economic Zones programopen-edited