Take Everything, Give Everything: Việt Nam’s Escalating Land Seizure Crisis

On an October evening in Vĩnh Hưng Ward, the late autumn weather in Hà Nội remains dry and muggy. The heat of the day soaks into the roads and walls, seeping back out in waves when night falls, carried by weary gusts of wind.

Despite the stifling heat, it is not hard to come across lines of people walking one after another through the nighttime streets of Vĩnh Hưng Ward. [1] Men and women, both old and young, walk calmly in neat rows wearing shirts of the same color. Some faces are lined with worry, while others display a mixture of anxiety and hope.

Rather than resting at home after a hard day, these citizens believe that taking to the streets is the only way to bring about change. This is no simple evening stroll for exercise; these residents are marching to protest a project that will soon take their land, their homes, and their livelihoods. The proposed development threatens to transform their entire neighborhood, endangering many old landscapes and historic sites.

In Early Autumn

“We oppose taking residents’ existing homes and land to build high-rise row houses for a commercial project.” “We ask that the people’s stable lives be respected.”

Whether by day or by night, it is easy to read these words on the streets of Vĩnh Hưng Ward. They are slogans printed on matching shirts worn by residents marching against Sun Group’s commercial apartment project. 

Instead of raising their voices through blaring loudspeakers, the crowd walks in silence. Mothers hold the hands of their small children, while elderly couples walk side by side. No one speaks, as their presence already communicates their demands.

The unrest began in late August. While torrential rains had already left many anxious and on edge, nothing compared to the devastating news that struck without warning: authorities and Sun Group had suddenly broken ground on an urban renovation project covering all of Vĩnh Hưng Ward, threatening many families with the loss of their homes. [2]

Vĩnh Hưng covers 4.47 square kilometers and is home to more than 80,000 people. The authorities plan to hand this entire area over to Sun Group, dedicating half to infrastructure upgrades and the other half to residential construction. [3] This project is expected to affect more than 7,200 households and over 20,000 people.

A paradox has emerged. While the government claims the project will upgrade the area and create a more spacious, attractive landscape, residents have not welcomed the development. Instead, it has sparked confusion and fear.

Journalist Lê Tiến Vượng, a Vĩnh Hưng resident, explained the paradox:

“One of the biggest concerns residents have raised is the difference between existing residential areas and vacant land, riverbank land, or farmland that hasn’t been used efficiently. People are worried about the zoning plan. Long-settled residential areas, which have developed roads, homes, and community life over many years, are at risk of being carved up and consolidated for commercial projects and luxury apartments.” [4]

Another Vĩnh Hưng resident told Luật Khoa Magazine that if authorities took land to build roads, schools, or clinics, “people would fully support it.”

“But this proposal just drives people into a corner to benefit a business. We have homes now, and we don’t know where we’ll go. It’s only the people who suffer,” the resident said.

Despite this, neither the authorities nor the company has offered a proper explanation for ambushing tens of thousands of people with a plan that makes so little sense. Even as protests swell, local leaders merely reiterate why the project was approved in the first place, citing run-down infrastructure, poor traffic flow, population pressure, a lack of parks, and poor drainage that causes flooding. [5]

As Autumn Fades

Autumn is fading as the rains slowly ease, leaving clear, dry skies in their wake. The full moon of the eighth lunar month has passed, and the festival’s drums and horns have fallen silent. In these last days of autumn, all that echoes through Vĩnh Hưng are the weary, frustrated voices of residents responding to the authorities’ indifferent statements.

The ward leaders’ rhetoric seems designed to stress that the project is a done deal. To those in power, Vĩnh Hưng is merely an old, frayed shirt that they must mend and renovate. However, to the people, the land beneath their feet is not a blank canvas for magnificent skyscrapers or broad boulevards.

To the residents, this land represents the life savings of multiple generations. It encompasses their gardens, shops, and workshops—the very sources of their livelihood. It is a familiar world where children grow up, the elderly rest, and ancestors are buried; a place where neighborly bonds are forged and traditional craft villages once took shape. Taking this land means taking the entirety of a community’s life.

Even without a complete clearing of the area, any major upheaval shatters the peaceful order built over many years. This renders the government’s redevelopment efforts meaningless, as it simply burdens the people with starting over.

Furthermore, residents have long lost faith in the government’s compensation and resettlement policies. It is a well-known reality that compensation is never adequate, with state-imposed prices falling far below actual property values.

Recently, National Assembly deputy Đàng Thị Mỹ Hương from the Khánh Hòa delegation admitted that state compensation rates are often lower than market prices, leaving displaced citizens with insufficient funds to purchase equivalent plots in resettlement areas. [6] 

Lê Hoàng Châu, chairman of the Hồ Chí Minh City Real Estate Association, echoed the above, noting that residents in many localities are forced to pay several hundred million đồng extra just to secure a resettlement home. [7]

This systemic failure has created a paradox: in 2024, Hà Nội and Hồ Chí Minh City alone had roughly 13,000 resettlement apartments sitting empty, while families cleared from their land struggled to find housing. [8] Securing a resettlement home has become an ordeal born of endlessly discussed, unresolved policy failings. 

Resettlement does not mean that you can rebuild an old life; you cannot easily replace jobs, neighbors, and the familiarity of a lifelong home.

Take Everything 

The usual rule of life is that you pay before the porridge is served. But when citizens trade with the government, the bowl is often filled before the payment ever arrives.

The 2024 Land Law requires that “the approval of compensation, support, and resettlement plans and the arrangement of resettlement must be completed before a land seizure decision is issued” (Clause 6, Article 91). [9] In practice, however, residents on many projects spend months drifting between temporary homes while “resettlement” remains a distant, unfulfilled promise.

This is what happened to thousands of households in Gia Bình starting in late May 2026. According to figures released by authorities in July, approximately 1,700 households—or 6,800 people—were forced to hand over their homes and land for the Gia Bình airport project and relocate to temporary housing.

One family told Luật Khoa that they had to abandon the home they built with their life savings just three years prior, moving into a makeshift shack on a relative’s land. [10] Others reported handing over their properties to live with acquaintances, noting that they had not received compensation or seen any resettlement land.

“I haven’t heard anything about compensation; there’s been no support at all,” one resident said. “there’s still no resettlement land,” they added, explaining, “we rely on our sisters, and if anyone in the village has land or a lean-to, we stay there.” [11]

Harsh targets and timetables worsen this storm of clearance. Pressure flows from the top down, squeezing the residents. In early August, Gia Bình Commune authorities ordered residents of Trại Quỳnh Bội and Đỗ Xá to vacate ahead of schedule, threatening to cut off electricity, water, and telecommunications if they did not hand over their land. [12]

Is the government simply breaking the law in broad daylight? In reality, Resolution 254/2025/QH15 legalized the practice of taking land first and arranging resettlement later. 

Taking effect on Jan. 1, 2026, the resolution was ostensibly issued to “remove difficulties and obstacles in implementing the Land Law.” [13] This provision permits authorities to seize land prior to completing resettlement for specific projects, provided they arrange or fund temporary housing. The stories from Gia Bình, Bắc Ninh Province, demonstrate that even temporary housing is disastrously makeshift.

Hà Nội recently accelerated this process further by issuing Decision 130 on Sept. 25. [14] The decision introduces a mechanism allowing land seizure before resettlement is complete, provided residents “voluntarily accept temporary housing.”

For the hundreds of thousands of people along the Red River anticipating displacement for the Red River Scenic Boulevard Project, this new mechanism landed like a gunshot. Residents expressed outrage at the rule, recognizing it as yet another legal tool designed by the government to squeeze them. [15] 

With every new regulation, the ground beneath the people’s feet slips a little further away.

Give Everything

Just three days before issuing Decision 130, Hà Nội Party Secretary Trần Đức Thắng confidently declared, “Only when all resettlement with synchronized infrastructure has been completed will land at people’s current homes be seized.” [16]

However, as an old saying goes, “An official’s word is as reliable as a child’s bottom.” A folk rhyme from the subsidy era that many still remember echoes this sentiment: [17]

“When the ministry comes down, it cares so much. Halfway home, the ministry has forgotten.”

Public anger over land seizures is not confined to the present moment, nor is it limited to places like Vĩnh Hưng, Gia Bình, and the Red River. Over the past two decades alone, there have been numerous bitter cases, including Văn Giang, Dương Nội, Thủ Thiêm, and Đồng Tâm.

More than 70 years ago, Hồ Chí Minh championed redistributing land to the people. In his “Report to the Fourth Plenum of the Party Central Committee (Second Term) on the Current Situation and the Tasks of Land Reform,” he sharply criticized how citizens lost their fields because land was concentrated in the hands of feudal landlords. [18]

Decades later, long after the revolution eradicated the landlord class, the people are still losing their land. The very criticisms that Hồ Chí Minh and national historians once leveled at colonial and feudal systems over extraction and exploitation now seemingly point back at the state itself.

More than two years ago, at a news conference after becoming general secretary on Aug. 3, 2024, Tô Lâm confidently declared that he would give “all my heart, all my strength, and all my devotion” to the cause of the Communist Party of Vietnam, to a prosperous, democratic, fair, and civilized Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and to ensuring the Vietnamese people have a comfortable and fulfilling life. [19]

While his declaration was as beautiful as those of his predecessors, the total devotion of top leaders remains much harder to witness than the total devotion of ordinary citizens. It is the people who must surrender their land and homes for the grand schemes of those at the top.

Having already given up their homes and land, many citizens recently reacted with extreme alarm to a proposal allowing children to donate organs. [20] Public anger over the Health Ministry’s new proposal erupted reflexively. Having lost trust in the government after enduring so much taking, many people did not even need to know the specific details of the policy. They objected simply to stress that they do not want to give up anything more, especially when it concerns their children.

When countless laws and policies are enacted without genuinely prioritizing the people or their happiness—despite endless promises to the contrary—even well-intentioned reforms will inevitably be met with wariness and suspicion. Once everything has been taken and everything has been given, the bees whose hive has been broken open by the beekeeper will surely have to consider building a new home.

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Tịch Dạ wrote this op-ed article in Vietnamese and published it in Luật Khoa Magazine on October 28, 2026. The Vietnamese Magazine translated it into English. The Vietnamese Magazine’s op-ed articles do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of its editorial board.