ABSTRACT
Before the collapse of the Saigon government in 1975, both the government in Hanoi and the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) in the South had often stated that they envisioned the reunification of Vietnam to proceed step by step over a period of from twelve to fourteen years. However, in September 1975 the Central Committee of the Communist Party declared at its Twenty-Fourth Plenum that Vietnam had entered a “new revolutionary phase” and that the task at hand was: “To complete the reunification of the country and take it rapidly, vigorously and steadily to socialism. To speed up socialist construction and perfect socialist relations of production in the North, and to carry out at the same time socialist transformation and construction in the South . . . in every field: political, economic, technical, cultural and ideological.” The Plenum Resolution stressed that collectivization in the South first had to go hand in hand with the establishment and reinforcement of Party infrastructures as well as state and popular organizations.1
