thought reform: the curriculum of vietnamese reeducation
DESCRIPTION
This paper pulls from the limited amount of source material on the subject of Vietnamese Reeducation. It outlines the various facets of the Reeducation Camp System and tries to organize the methods used within these camps, while also looking into some of the reasons for their use.I apologize for the way that Scribd has formatted the paper.TRANSCRIPT
Thought Reform
The Curriculum of Vietnamese Reeducation
Gregg NevilleHST 4854/23/09
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After the end of the Vietnam War, some soldiers and civilians of the former Republic of
Vietnam found themselves in a dangerous situation as communist forces walked into Saigon,
changing not only the name of the city, but the ideological framework in which its inhabitants
lived. In order to effectively integrate the former Republic of Vietnam supporters into the
newly unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the communists chose to use a system of
Reeducation modeled after thought reform methods from China and tailored to the
Vietnamese experience. The designers of the Reeducation program created a curriculum that
hoped to effectively reeducate both non-threatening civilians and blacklisted RVN supporters.
This curriculum sought to indoctrinate detainees with communist policy and theory delivered
through forced learning sessions, regular nightly meetings, and post-release courses.
While originally being portrayed to the public as political training courses where RVN
supporters would learn communism and its ideals in order to live within the new society,
Reeducation Camps soon became forced labor camps where starvation, torture, extreme
punishment, and execution were commonplace. The number of prisoners who were interned
in these camps numbered several hundred thousand, with estimates varying from 250,0001 to
2.5 million.2 In order to round up such large numbers of prisoners, the SRV forces required all
civilian contractors, policemen, soldiers, and party members who had supported the RVN
1 Metzner, Edward P. Reeducation in Postwar Vietnam: Personal Postscripts to Peace. College Station: Texas A&M
University Press (c2001), pg. xiii.2 Vo, Nghia M. The Bamboo Gulag: Political Imprisonment in Communist Vietnam. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland (2004), pg. 55.
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regime to register for and then attend a short 3-10 day training course. Once there, the RVN
cadres loaded the men onto trucks and drove them to the camps. Here their original 3-10 day
stay would be indefinitely extended, leaving men in the camps anywhere from a few months to
several years before their official release. Over the course of the reeducation system, hard
labor amid extreme conditions was used to reinforce the lessons of political learning sessions.
While political indoctrination was heavily emphasized early on and became less prevalent
overtime, it continued throughout the duration of the prison camps and served as one of the
main rationales for the camps.
The model for the Reeducation Camp program lay in China, where methods of
communist education and prison camps were observed by Vietnamese communists and
brought to Vietnam. In 1948, General Nguyen Son wrote pamphlets about “correctional
training,” which he had observed in Yunan, China, while serving with the Chinese Communist
Party.3 The original ideas of General Nguyen were influential, but rejected because of political
infighting between the General and party leaders. However, this method of thought reform
was eventually implemented in communist Vietnam in 1953 by Chinese advisors.4 Correctional
training usually begins with a lecture, after which “the student body is divided into small
groups, usually three members, and the material is thoroughly discussed along with examples
and explanations. The students discuss all the material paragraph by paragraph, and if it is
necessary countless repetition follows…When lessons are completely mastered, the student
makes a partial confession, i.e., each student admits in front of his group his previous errors
3 Hoang, Van Chi. From Colonialism to Communism; A Case History of North Vietnam. New York: Praeger (1964), pg.
126. 4Ibid.
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and demonstrates before the group how “smart” he is now by having had the opportunity of
acquiring an education.”5 Through this description of correctional training we can see that the
method contains important foundations of the Reeducation Camp program such as discussion,
self-criticism and self-evaluation.
During the pre-war period, leaders of the communist party used correctional training
and its foundations to reform the thoughts of Viet Minh fighters who, while strong nationalists,
found themselves struggling with the growing focus on communist ideas. As communist
programs expanded within the North after independence, these methods of thought reform
helped unify the party and the state. With the fall of Saigon, the communists found themselves
now needing to unite the whole of Vietnam. The task of handling former RVN supporters was
left to the SRV Defense Ministry, but was eventually handed over to the Ministry of the Interior
because it already maintained a network of detention camps in the North and could expand
that into the South.6 Bui Tin, a former cadre, claims that as a result of this change “men who
had been regarded as prisoners of war became transformed into political criminals, needing to
be punished.”7 This hand over and transformation may explain the change of emphasis from
Reeducation to prison labor that occurred during the early days of the program. For it was
during this period that the prison camp system was combined with the methods of corrective
training to create the Reeducation Camp and when the curriculum for these camps was
designed.
5 King, Edmund J. Communist Education. London: Methuen (1963), pg. 437.6 Bui, Tin. Following Ho Chi Minh: The Memoirs of a North Vietnamese Colonel. Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press(1995), pg. 90.7 Ibid.
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This Reeducation Camp curriculum can be split into two general categories: Civilian and
Blacklisted. This distinction was made based on a person’s perceived threat to the SRV. Civilian
reeducation courses were created in order to indoctrinate prominent civilians, such as teachers,
with communist ideology so that they could spread it to the general populace. The blacklisted
prisoners were sent to the reeducation prison camp system in order to politically indoctrinate
them in communist ideals, while at the same time, keeping these prisoners out of the public
arena, where they could potentially undermine the new government through disobedience,
crime, spreading discontent, or rebellion. Civilian reeducation courses were roughly a month
long and contained much of the same theoretical content as that of their blacklisted
counterparts. The important difference was that they were allowed to reintegrate with the
community after the completion of the course while their counterparts were moved to labor
camps for indefinite periods of time.
The initial Reeducation courses for civilians were designed to rid prisoners of their
capitalist and democratic ideals, while also forcing them to confess their participation in RVN
activities. These courses were held at local Saigon schools and lasted 20-24 days and they were
titled “Officer Government Official Course.”8 The communists forced local doctors, pharmacists,
engineers, and teachers to attend because of their ability to influence the public opinion within
their neighborhoods. Through taking one of these courses they would be versed in communism
and be able to help push communist agendas within their communities. These courses
consisted of lectures and speeches given by provincial leaders, security service chiefs, and
political commissioners. The speeches focused on praising Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, and the 8 Lu, Van Thanh. The Inviting Call of Wandering Souls: Memoir of an ARVN Liaison Officer to United States forces in Vietnam ho was imprisoned in communist re-education camps and then escaped. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland (c1997), pg. 50.
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revolutionary spirit of the communists who had defeated the U.S.9 The lectures included
instruction in communal living and forced condemnations of U.S. atrocities, bombings, and
gasings of North Vietnam. Nguyen Thi Kim-Anh, a Saigon high school teacher, explained that
during these lectures, prisoners “just copied everything down and made it into a very nice
paper to turn it back in. If you said exactly what they said, agreed with them one hundred
percent, you got a perfect score.”10 Following these lectures, students were expected to write
papers on topics such as “Why We Like Ho Chi Minh.”11 Lu Van Thanh, a liaison to the U.S. army,
points out that once having completed such papers, each student stood before the class and
expressed his “own opinion concerning his antirevolutionary activities, and acknowledged his
past mistakes in thus impeding the liberation of South Vietnam.”12
At the end of the course, each student was required to write self evaluations reports
“relating to his biographical sketch, past activities, education, results of the course, along with a
confession and a promise he would be loyal to the revolution.”13 These self-evaluation reports
were a distinctive feature of all Reeducation courses. Prisoners would spend days writing these
evaluations which were expected to run about 100 pages.14 Once they had written these
lengthy reports they were then made to copy them several times. They included minute details
about name, rank, service unit and declarations about wives, parents, brothers, wife’s parents,
as well as histories of occupation, employment, the ways in which family members had died,
9 Ibid.10Engelmann, Larry. Tears Before the Rain: An Oral History of the Fall of South Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press (1990), pg. 330.11 Ibid.12 Lu, Van Thanh. The Inviting Call of Wandering Souls, pg. 51. 13 Ibid.14 Ibid.
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promotions, and military activities.15 Not being detailed enough was considered proof of guilt
and the cadres positively reinforced the act of admitting to crimes against communists and
claimed that the men who did so were sincere in their reeducation efforts. Unfortunately for
many who fabricated crimes these reports were secretly used to create justification for their
further incarceration within the camps. Some prisoners in the civilian program found this out
the hard way. Thanh explains that “as a result of this course, we were placed on their special
blacklist, and were then considered to be harmful opponents of the new regime.”16 Once having
been blacklisted they were transferred to the indefinite captivity of the Reeducation Camps.
Many prisoners were blacklisted due to their perceived danger to the SRV and placed
within the Reeducation Camps, where their experiences became heavily influenced by intense
labor and harsh working conditions. Within these camps, as in the civilian courses, political
training was still a part of daily life and continued throughout their imprisonment through
learning sessions, nightly meetings, and post-release courses.
Throughout their experience in Reeducation camps, prisoners were forced to attend
learning sessions every three to four months.17 These consisted of varying numbers of
prisoners listening to cadres or special guests giving lectures either outside or within a main hall
structure within the camp. The length of these sessions could vary from a few hours to 15 days,
during which prisoners were made to study and discuss the session and then to critique their
responses to the content. The curriculum of these learning sessions can be broken down into
two content groups: policy sessions and theory sessions. Sessions devoted to communist policy
15 Tran, Tri Vu. Lost Years: My 1,632 Days in Vietnamese Reeducation Camps. Berkeley, Calif.: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California (c1988), pg. 20.16 Lu, Van Thanh. The Inviting Call of Wandering Souls, pg. 51.17 Metzner, Edward P. Reeducation in Postwar Vietnam, pg. 12.
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focused on camp rules and regulations as well as important communist programs to which
prisoners were expected to contribute. Sessions devoted to theory focused on political
indoctrination of communist ideals and were the only real attempt at reeducating former RVN
supporters to integrate them with the communist public. Together these two content aspects
of the curriculum were the basis of Reeducation.
Soon after their arrival at the Reeducation camps, prisoners found themselves gathered
into a conference hall for their first learning session. This session often focused on learning the
camp rules and regulations. A political officer would inform them of the basic rules which they
were to follow. These rules included not being allowed to go outside the gate or visit other
camps, not being allowed to beat each other, being forced to participate in nightly meetings
where they would critique their work day and sing revolutionary songs, not being allowed to
sing old regime songs, being forced to plant a vegetable garden and to do calisthenics every
day, and being made to attend a weekend meeting where they would critique each other’s
work and elect one person who was most “progressive.” 18 These rules became the framework
for everyday life within the camp. They also included rules for clean and neat living, having to
write home to families in order to boost morale and having to watch a movie once every
quarter year.19 Through these rules the cadres were able to control the prisoners and force
them to participate in further thought reform and labor. Reeducation policy created the
“progressive” award throughout all camps. It was an award given to a prisoner who was elected
by his peers for working and studying the hardest and making the most strides toward
reeducation. The cadres informed the prisoners that the people who won this award would be 18 Le, Huu Tri. Prisoner of the Word: A Memoir of the Vietnamese Reeducation Camps. Seattle, WA: Black Heron Press (2001), pg. 27-28.19 Tran, Tri Vu. Lost Years, pg. 13.
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the first to be released. It worked very effectively to encourage good behavior up until the
point when prisoners began to see that no one was going home. Le Huu Tri, a prisoner,
described his feeling after this session, “I knew that if I wanted to return home soon I would
have to obey the camp rules and work hard.”20 Prisoners were also lulled into a sense of trust
by the communists through other sessions.
One such session that the communists designed to create this sense of trust was one in
which they explained the “Act of Clemency.” The act of clemency was the policy that “South
Vietnamese were guilty of betrayal, and therefore, owed a blood debt.”21 A political officer
explained that, “Your crimes deserve the death penalty. But the revolution, out of clemency,
has permitted you to be reeducated.”22 This lesson tried to play toward a communist image of
being merciful. Prisoners were expected to trust and thank the cadres for allowing them to live
after they had betrayed the SRV by fighting against it. Later on, as time went by, they were
taught Reeducation Policy and what it entailed. This caused many to lose hope as they now
realized how long they would remain in the camps.
The cadres eventually came to give learning sessions on the policy of Reeducation itself.
The cadres explained how this policy was used to deal with the former RVN supporters in a
session titled: “The Thirteen Points of Reeducation.”23 These points were little more than a
breakdown of groups of the RVN supporters in order to give them a sentencing of years in the
camps. Examples of these group break downs are: policemen, noncommissioned military
officers and soldiers, commissioned military officers and soldiers, civilian contractors for the
20 Le, Huu Tri. Prisoner of the Word, pg. 28.21 Nghia M. The Bamboo Gulag, pg. 144.22 Tran, Tri Vu. Lost Years, pg. 13.23 Le, Huu Tri. Prisoner of the Word, pg. 73.
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RVN government, public servants, and civilian RVN party members.24 For each group the
political officer would read out the sentence and number of years they would remain in the
reeducation program. Providing a sentence and justification for punishment to the prisoners
ended the original motivation of early release for prisoners to work hard and receive the most
“progressive” award.
To encourage prisoners to work hard once they knew that release was far off, the cadres
created a policy called The Labor Production and they made this policy the focus of learning
sessions. The labor production consisted of “The Production Battle” and the knowledge that
those who participated in it would receive extra food.25 The battle consisted of a competition
held over three days, where the most “progressive” men would compete to see who could hoe
the fastest. If they were lucky, they were chosen as part of the “Golden Hoe Group” which
would go on to work at a new camp, which they had been informed had homes, running water,
and free visitation.26 Unfortunately for the prisoners, the goal of this policy was to identify hard
working prisoners in order to transfer them to an area where they would build a new camp in
the middle of the jungle. This learning session while completely devoted to a policy of creating
new camps and not to reeducation was in many ways similar to another session that was more
tailored to reeducation and reintegration with society.
One of the final policy oriented learning sessions prisoners received had to do with New
Economic Zones (NEZ). The NEZ program forced people from the underemployed and crowded
cities onto unused areas of land in order to calm tensions in the cities and to boost agricultural
output for the country. The learning session explained this policy to the prisoners by showing
24 Le, Huu Tri. Prisoner of the Word, pg. 73.25 Ibid., pg. 80.26 Ibid., pg. 83.
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that the NEZ policy was the right response to the needs of the country, explaining past
experiences of organizing labor forces and how to establish a NEZ the right way, and explaining
the duty of each individual in relation to the NEZ policy.27 These session lasted one week and
finished with a discussion of “How should reeducation camp inmates respond to the question
of setting up NEZs?” In response to this question they were eventually forced to sign a pledge
saying they would go and work at NEZs upon release. One inmate explained that a cadre had
“read directives from the Central Committee on Reeducation, telling us to write home and urge
our folks to apply for resettlement in new economic zones. Only if his family registered to go
would a prisoner’s case be reviewed and might he be discharged.”28 It is very likely that this
learning session did not contain information about the true conditions of the NEZs, nor did it
point out that reeducation prisoners were in many ways already doing this kind of hard labor
and were perhaps intended by the communists to be pushed into these areas after release to
remain away from the general public.
The content of these learning sessions was not all policy related. Throughout their time
in the camps and especially during their first months, prisoners had to participate in learning
sessions designed to indoctrinate them with communist theoretical content. These learning
sessions included lessons on general communist/Marxist theory, the glory of labor, American
Imperialism, and the idea that the RVN had been America’s pawn. These lessons were
ideological in nature and were designed to truly reeducate the prisoners in communist doctrine
in order to reeducate them and provide them with the necessary view of society for
reintegration with the rest of the country. 27 Tran, Tri Vu. Lost Years, pg. 122.28 Huynh, Sanh Thong. To Be Made Over: Tales of Socialist Reeducation in Vietnam. New Haven, CT: Council on Southeast Asia Studies, Yale Center for International and Area Studies (c1988), pg. 140.
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The prisoners’ first encounters with Reeducation learning sessions were classes focused
on educating them in communist and Marxist ideology. The cadres presented the origins of
the communist part in Vietnam, the rise of Ho Chi Minh, and how the party’s only goal had
been Vietnamese independence.29 They also spent time teaching “the Maxist-Leninist
principles that led to a better life with equality, freedom, and justice.”30 These sessions were
usually the prisoners’ first wake up call to the new world in which they found themselves. They
were forced to pretend to agree with everything the cadre were telling them about
communism and to vow that they would follow it as best as they could. They were expected to
know these lessons throughout their stay in the camps and were often lectured on ridding
themselves of individualism and family ties.31 The cadres often informed them that the best
way to rid themselves of these things was through hard labor for the good of the country.
In many ways the most important of all lessons that the Reeducation camp would
reinforce within the camps through not only learning sessions, but daily labor, was the idea that
“Labor is Glory.” They would be lectured on the glory of labor and production for the country
and how all labor contributed to the cause of the country. During these sessions it was
explained to prisoners that Reeducation was a manual-labor training course and that cadre
would train them to be masters of different manual skills.32 The rationale behind this training
for prisoners that was that, “under the former regime, they [the prisoners] represented the
upper strata of society and got rich under US patronage. They could but scorn the working
people. Now the former social order has been turned upside down, and after they have finished
29 McKelvey, Robert S. A Gift of Barbed Wire: America's Allies Abandoned in South. Seattle: University of Washington Press (c2002), pg. 153.30 Lu, Van Thanh. The Inviting Call of Wandering Souls, pg. 82.31 Ibid., pg. 67.32 Le, Huu Tri. Prisoner of the Word, pg. 46.
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their stay in camps they have to earn their living by their own labour and live in a society where
work is held in honor."33 Thus through the glory of labor they would be able to reintegrate and
participate in a communist society of working class people. Only by throwing off their ties to
American ideals of individualism and wealth, could they expect to be released.
In order to remove these ideals from the minds of the prisoners, the cadres used several
learning sessions which detailed the imperialist ambitions of America and the ways in which
they had been working against the betterment of the Vietnamese people. The content of this
session focused on the idea of Americans as imperialist and as the main enemy of Vietnam and
communism. With titles such as “The American Imperialists are the Number One Enemy of Our
People and the People of the Entire World,”34 the cadres would begin by presenting “The Five
Steps of Aggression of the American Imperialists.”35 They would explain that the American
imperialists had had designs on Vietnam ever since they had sent their first military mission into
the country in 1945, going on to “pull the rug” from under the French, creating the civil war
between the RVN and the communists, invading Vietnam in the “War of Aggression,” and
creating what the “Special War” after their withdrawal. 36 Through these five steps of
aggression, prisoners were made to believe that American interests had always included the
occupation and subjugation of Vietnam from the beginning of their presence in the country.
They outlined American imperialist ambitions by claiming that Nixon had made statements
declaring the American frontier to end at the 17th Parallel.37 Working to show SRV power and
33 Sagan, Ginetta. “Reeducation in Unliberated Vietnam: Loneliness, Suffering, and Death.” The Indochina Newsletter, Oct.-Nov. 1982. 34 Hawthorne, Lesleyanne. Refugee: the Vietnamese Experience. New York: Oxford University Press (1982), pg. 143.35 Ibid.36 Ibid.37Hawthorne, Lesleyanne. Refugee, pg. 147.
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glory through their defeat of the Americans, they studied the “Great Victory in the Spring of
1975” over the Americans and how the North hadn’t beat the U.S. militarily, but by crushing
their will to fight.38 The cadres also made sure to point out such facts as that “the American
presence reached its peak when 600,000 troops, including those of “satellite states,” fought
alongside 1 million nguy soldiers, that at one time, 90 percent of American war industry had
been put at the service of the war in Vietnam, and 80 percent of American scientists had been
given the task of devising plans and finding means to conquer Vietnam.”39 These lessons were
expected to be unquestionably believed by the prisoners, even though many of them had been
a part of the RVN military and knew them to be false. These men questioned problems in the
cadre thinking such as the idea that America had been defeated, when as far as the prisoners
were concerned, it was the RVN that had been defeated after the Americans had pulled out.40
These questions were quickly answered with more propaganda and those who asked them
were disciplined for performing poorly in the session. In order to further convince the prisoners
to stop such questioning the regime, the cadres also sought to paint the RVN as having been
used by the Americans.
Having discredited the Americans, the cadres set their sights on the RVN regime. Under
such titles as “False Military Men and False Government Officials Were Slaves of the U.S.
Imperialists,”41 these sessions laid out the ways in which the RVN had been tools of the
Americans. They explained that the former administration was the political tool of American
Imperialism because the nguy army was the war machine of American Imperialism and the
38 Ibid., pg. 143.39 Tran, Tri Vu. Lost Years, pg. 52.40 Ibid., pg. 55.41 Metzner, Edward P. Reeducation in Postwar Vietnam, pg. 12.
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political parties and those who chose to live under and work for the former regime were
reactionaries, and in an indirect way, the servants of American Imperialism. 42 This session was
used not only to undermine support for the RVN, but to make clear that those who had
supported it were guilty of aiding the American Empire. One cadre explained to a prisoner that
“Any antirevolutionary activity is, without a shadow of a doubt, planned or instigated by the
Americans.”43 The session went on to explain ways in which the Americans had betrayed the
RVN, such as claiming that the coup against Diem, the American puppet, had been instigated by
the distribution of pictures showing perceived attacks against Buddhist monks by Diem’s
soldiers, which were actually pictures taken by the CIA of the Chinese punishment of Tibetan
counter-revolutionaries.44 By showing the former regime to have been a pawn of the
Americans, the cadre could combine such lessons with those of the “Act of Clemency” in order
to show justification for the containment of prisoners while at the same time undermining the
accomplishments of the former regime even further, causing the prisoners to lose hope in
being saved by some remnant of the RVN. Having presented their content of reeducation, the
sessions often concluded in assessment tasks.
Most learning sessions concluded with some form of assessment designed to monitor
prisoner’s responses to the content. These would often include group discussions in which
prisoners were made to voice their opinions on topics and critique each other’s ideas. 45 These
discussions could last for several days and were led by cadres and statements within them were
highly monitored and susceptible to punishment. At the end of each session prisoners were
42 Tran, Tri Vu. Lost Years, pg. 63.43 Ibid., pg. 63.44 Hawthorne, Lesleyanne. Refugee, pg. 143.45 McKelvey, Robert S. A Gift of Barbed Wire, pg. 91.
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made to write a report that had five parts.46 The first part was a viewpoint and opinion section
that had to explain how the prisoners would adopt and apply the lessons to help the revolution,
as well as reaffirm their belief in reeducation and communist principles. The next part centered
on labor and had to describe the highest forms of physical labor, telling whether the prisoners
were fulfilling them, and if not why, in order to show that they were cleansing themselves of
the old ways through hard work. The third section focused on regulation and cooperation and
had to list the rules of the camp and then confess whether or not the prisoners had broken any
of them since the last session. This was followed by a reeducation section which had to list
what activities the prisoners had participated in to be actively involved in reeducation, such as
studying, singing, newspaper reading, film watching, etc. The final section was to explain future
plans and was required to describe what they would do in the future, how they would change,
and how they would improve themselves. Once written, these papers would then be critiqued
the following day where prisoners were scolded for writing too much and using good
handwriting, as these were seen as habits of bourgeoisie classes and were not needed in
communism.47 Following the writing and critiquing of these reports, prisoners would return to
their barracks and continue with everyday life within the labor camps. After the first few
months of intensive Reeducation, the gaps between learning sessions would grow larger and
larger, but this didn’t mean that prisoners stopped receiving reeducation; instead they were
forced to participate in regular nightly meetings to review the participation within the camps.
Throughout their detention in Reeducation camps, prisoners were forced to attend
regular nightly meetings after working 12 hour days. During these sessions prisoners would be
46 Ibid., pg. 91.47 Metzner, Edward P. Reeducation in Postwar Vietnam, pg. 59.
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taught proper methods for harvesting, sowing, planting and plowing, as well as how to further
understand the communist party line and the goals of reeducation.48 These could last several
hours and their main purpose was “to evaluate the workday for each individual who in turn,
should personally discuss his own strong and weak points.”49 They would stand before each
other and recite a self-criticism of themselves based on the same five points that they were
made to write reports on following learning sessions. Each person would then repeat this same
mundane criticism and criticize each other’s performances for the day. They would then
choose a “most progressive” person for the day. The cadre would then comment that everyone
had not worked hard enough and usually conclude the meeting with a quote from Ho Chi
Minh.50 The nightly meetings were usually used as a way for cadres to set up the work for the
next day and explain camp announcements, while using the criticism to maintain a fear among
the prisoners of being called out by their fellow prisoners for not working hard. The prisoners
were forced to participate in these meetings almost every night for the duration of their time in
the camps and they were forced to work hard and hope that one day they would finally be
Reeducated and eligible for release.
After finally being granted release after many years spent in reeducation camps,
prisoners found themselves required to attend a final course. This began within the camp and
was a sort of curriculum review as prisoners spent two days going over “chapter after chapter,
document after document, and then directives and new instructions from the government.”51
Once being released back into the public, prisoners were still required to attend courses at local
48 Lu, Van Thanh. The Inviting Call of Wandering Souls, pg. 82.49 Ibid., pg. 65.50 Ibid., pg. 66.51 Lu, Van Thanh. The Inviting Call of Wandering Souls, pg. 118.
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hamlet chief offices every night for three and a half hours.52 During these post camp courses
they would relearn all the things they had been taught before and engage in self-evaluations
once more to prove that they were working hard and trying to reintegrate, hoping to show that
reeducation had changed them.
The curriculum of reeducation influenced prisoners in many different ways. Thanh
explains that during the original civilian courses “our minds were strained to the maximum
during those days.”53 And afterwards he pointed out, “I began to realize then that it would be
difficult for me to adjust to this new life…because of this “bamboo curtain.””54 For those within
the prison camps the physical daily labor added to the emphasized the curriculum. Once having
been moved to the camp system, Thanh described how prisoners “were worn out with fatigue.
In addition, we were mentally depressed because we were being inundated daily with foolishly
corroded reasoning, the so-called communist logic, and we had hardly a moment of peace,
even in our sleep.”55 Le Huu Tri, a prisoner, detailed how he and his fellow prisoners came to
realize that the cadres often lied to them, that “the more we believed the cadre, the more we
were tricked by them,” and because of this “I became depressed about the communist policies
and I lost my enthusiasm for our work.”56 Col. Tran Van Phuc explained that, for him, the time
spent in the camp was “clearly burned into my memory because of the great and constant pain
endured during the separation of my family.”57 The mental and physical exhaustion that
resulted from the combination of labor and content within the reeducation curriculum worked
52 McKelvey, Robert S. A Gift of Barbed Wire, pg. 157.53 Lu, Van Thanh. The Inviting Call of Wandering Souls, pg. 50.54Ibid., pg. 52.55 Lu, Van Thanh. The Inviting Call of Wandering Souls, pg. 82-83.56 Le, Huu Tri. Prisoner of the Word, pg. 89.57 Metzner, Edward P. Reeducation in Postwar Vietnam, pg. 10..
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hand in hand to indoctrinate the prisoners. Yet, for many, the lying and harsh treatment
practiced by the cadres turn them away from communism early on, undermining the goals of
reeducation and leading many to attempt escape.
By rounding up the RVN supporters, the SRV cadres sought to separate non-threat
civilians from blacklist threats to their unification of Vietnam. They attempted to do this
through short reeducation courses that would indoctrinate those influential civilians, while at
the same time, creating the Reeducation Camp system in order to indoctrinate dangerous
prisoners, while keeping them out of the general populace. Within the camps, the cadres
forced the prisoners to attend learning sessions in which they learned communist policy and
theory. Policy courses on camp rules, the Act of Clemency, Reeducation, the Labor Production
Movement and New Economic Zones were coupled with theory lessons on the history of
communism, the Glory of Labor, the threat of American Imperialism, and the manipulation of
the RVN by the Americans. The physical labor of the prison camps demoralized prisoners and
set them up for thought reform. It was in this way that the reeducation curriculum sought to
indoctrinate and influence the political views of hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese
that would one day reintegrate and help a unified Vietnam rebuild.
Works Cited
Bui, Tin. Following Ho Chi Minh: The Memoirs of a North Vietnamese Colonel. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, c1995.
Engelmann, Larry. Tears Before the Rain: An Oral History of the Fall of South Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Hawthorne, Lesleyanne. Refugee: the Vietnamese Experience. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Hoang, Van Chi. From Colonialism to Communism; A Case History of North Vietnam. New York: Praeger, 1964.
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Huynh, Sanh Thong. To Be Made Over: Tales of Socialist Reeducation in Vietnam. New Haven, CT: Council on Southeast Asia Studies, Yale Center for International and Area Studies, c1988.
King, Edmund J. Communist Education. London: Methuen, 1963.Le, Huu Tri. Prisoner of the Word: A Memoir of the Vietnamese Reeducation Camps. Seattle,
WA: Black Heron Press, c2001.Lu, Van Thanh. The Inviting Call of Wandering Souls: Memoir of an ARVN Liaison Officer to
United States forces in Vietnam ho was imprisoned in communist re-education camps and then escaped. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, c1997.
McKelvey, Robert S. A Gift of Barbed Wire: America's Allies Abandoned in South. Seattle: University of Washington Press, c2002.
Metzner, Edward P. Reeducation in Postwar Vietnam: Personal Postscripts to Peace. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, c2001.
Sagan, Ginetta. “Reeducation in Unliberated Vietnam: Loneliness, Suffering, and Death.” The Indochina Newsletter, Oct.-Nov. 1982.
Tran, Tri Vu. Lost Years: My 1,632 Days in Vietnamese Reeducation Camps. Berkeley, Calif.: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, c1988.
Vo, Nghia M. The Bamboo Gulag: Political Imprisonment in Communist Vietnam. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004.