The New Economic Zones program ( vi, Xây dựng các vùng kinh tế mới) was implemented by the Vietnamese communist government after the

Fall of Saigon The Fall of Saigon, also known as the Liberation of Saigon by North Vietnamese or Liberation of the South by the Vietnamese government, and known as Black April by anti-communist overseas Vietnamese was the capture of Ho Chi Minh City, Saigon, t ...

. Between 1975 and 1980, more than 1 million northerners migrated to the south and central regions formerly under the

Republic of Vietnam South Vietnam, officially the Republic of Vietnam ( vi, Việt Nam Cộng hòa), was a state in Southeast Asia that existed from 1955 to 1975, the period when the southern portion of Vietnam was a member of the Western Bloc during part of t ...

. This program, in turn, displaced around 750,000 to over 1 million Southerners from their homes and forcibly relocated them to uninhabited mountainous forested areas. Properties of evicted southern Vietnamese were confiscated, collectivized, and then redistributed by the communist authorities, and the recipients of these confiscated properties were often former

Viet Cong , , war = the Vietnam War , image = FNL Flag.svg , caption = The flag of the Viet Cong, adopted in 1960, is a variation on the flag of North Vietnam. Sometimes the lower stripe was green. , active ...

, and members or affiliates of the North Vietnamese communist party or

People's Army of Vietnam The People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN; vi, Quân đội nhân dân Việt Nam, QĐNDVN), also recognized as the Vietnam People's Army (VPA) or the Vietnamese Army (), is the military force of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and the armed wi ...

. Conditions in the "New Economic Zones" were poor. After a 1976 visit to a new economic zone for former Saigon, French journalist Jean Lacouture wrote that it was "a prefabricated hell and a place one comes to only if the alternative to it would be death."

R.J. Rummel Rudolph Joseph Rummel (October 21, 1932 – March 2, 2014) was an American political scientist and professor at the Indiana University, Yale University, and University of Hawaiʻi. He spent his career studying data on collective violence and war w ...

, an analyst of political killings, estimated that between 20,000 and 155,000 Vietnamese died performing hard labor in New Economic Zones Since 1975, Southern Vietnamese use the term "

Bắc 54 ''Bắc 54'', or ''Bắc Kỳ 54'' (both meaning ''"Northern ietnamese of1954"''), refers to Northern Vietnamese people living in (or from) southern Vietnam, who migrated there from North Vietnam in 1954 and early 1955, mostly through Operation ...

" ("Tonkin 54") to refer to Northern Vietnamese who migrated to the South in 1954 (as part of Operation Passage to Freedom, who were mainly political and religious refugees fleeing impending communist rule), and "Bắc 75" ("Tonkin 75") to refer to Northerners who migrated to the South in 1975 onward, many under this economic program. This program, combined with various other factors like government persecutions, grave

human rights Human rights are moral principles or normsJames Nickel, with assistance from Thomas Pogge, M.B.E. Smith, and Leif Wenar, 13 December 2013, Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyHuman Rights Retrieved 14 August 2014 for certain standards of hu ...

violations and lack of civilian freedoms, oppression, lack of economic freedom, poverty and starvation resulting from governmental mismanagement of the

centrally planned economy A planned economy is a type of economic system where investment, production and the allocation of capital goods takes place according to economy-wide economic plans and production plans. A planned economy may use centralized, decentralized, p ...

caused a

mass exodus Human migration is the movement of people from one place to another with intentions of settling, permanently or temporarily, at a new location (geographic region). The movement often occurs over long distances and from one country to another (e ...

of 1-3 million Vietnamese fleeing communist rule, the majority of whom were from

South Vietnam South Vietnam, officially the Republic of Vietnam ( vi, Việt Nam Cộng hòa), was a state in Southeast Asia that existed from 1955 to 1975, the period when the southern portion of Vietnam was a member of the Western Bloc during part of th ...

References

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See also