The Struggle for Land in Vietnam

The French colonized Vietnam in the late 1800s. Before this time, land in Vietnam had been communally owned, in the sense that individual households had access to it by membership to the village. "Every family had land to till that it could call its own"(Gettleman 8). Many peasants had inherited the land because their ancestors had farmed it for generations before them. The land was available for the people of Vietnam, but they did not own it in a capitalistic sense. Everything the Vietnamese had known was altered by French conquest.
When the French took over Vietnam, they had certain objectives to accomplish. The main focus was to provide capital accumulation and high profits for investors. They also aimed to obtain raw materials for the French industry. The French outlined specific methods for achieving their goals. They seized the public lands of the Vietnamese people and gave the lands to investors. "They confiscated the land belonging to the locals and gave this land to themselves and their Vietnamese collaborators. Tens of thousands of acres of peasants' lands changed hands this way"(Gettleman 8). This was the French intention, helping them achieve another method of success, to transfer wealth from the peasants to landowners. …