ABSTRACT
With nearly 90 percent of the population living in rural areas during the mid-1970s North Vietnam remained a society largely dominated by people from peasant backgrounds. The various positions in the communes and cooperatives were the base upon which the party and state structures rested. Their occupants, the rural cadres, were responsible for such essential tasks as tax deliveries and troop mobilization. The strength of their position and their close relationship with other peasants helps to explain the stability of the society during the war against the United States. The state farms, which employed only 2 percent of the agricultural labor force in 1975, 1 were peripheral to this system and were mostly concentrated in the upland plantation areas. The most important problems arising from rural society came from the collectivized communes of the delta ricegrowing regions.
