In the late 1950’s, Ngo Dinh Diem implemented Law 10/59, which created the Strategic Hamlet Program, uprooting or “resettling” the peasant population away from their ancestral homes within the countryside, and into thousands of fortified tent cities. Diem described the transformation as reshaping,” the foundation of the Vietnamese society where values are reassessed according to the “personalist revolution” where social, cultural, and economic reform will improve the living conditions of the large working class down to the remotest village." The Strategic Hamlet Program, along with its predecessor, the Rural Community Development Program, was more strategically used as a means to control and protect the rural population from communist influence. It was believed that within the guarded walls, potential informants could be persuaded and ideas more readily controlled.

According to the Saigon government, 8,700,000 people, about two thirds of the population, were moved into strategic hamlets during a one year period. Diem’s control over the hamlet program was often defined by nepotism and corruption- installing central leadership, thwarting the long-standing Vietnamese tradition of, “the authority of the Emperor stopping at the village gate.” Furthermore, this transformation would help lead to success for communist opposition groups (i.e. NLF and Viet Cong), who stood in stark contrast against the “present leaders, bureaucrats and province and district officials” who did not “come from, think like, know much about, or respond to the wishes of the rural population.”