Land Reform Movement (China)

The Land Reform Movement, also known by the Chinese abbreviation Tǔgǎi (土改), was a campaign by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Mao Zedong during the late phase of the Chinese Civil War and the early People's Republic of China.^[1] The campaign involved the mass murder of landlords by tenants and land redistribution to the peasantry.^[2] The estimated number of casualties of the movement ranges from hundreds of thousands to millions.^[3][4][5] In terms of the CCP's evaluation, Zhou Enlai estimated 830,000 had been killed and Mao Zedong estimated as many as 2 to 3 million were killed.^[6]

Those who were killed were targeted on the basis of their social class rather than their ethnicity; the neologism classicide is used to describe the killings.^[7] Class-motivated mass murder continued almost throughout the 30 years of social and economic transformation in Maoist China, and by the end of reforms, the landlord class had been largely eliminated from Mainland China or had fled to Taiwan.^[8] By 1953, land reform in most parts of mainland China was completed except in Xinjiang, Tibet, Qinghai, and Sichuan. From 1953 onwards, the CCP began to implement collective ownership of expropriated land through the creation of "Agricultural Production Cooperatives", transferring property rights from the former landlord class to the Chinese state.

Origins

In the mid-19th century, the Taiping Rebellion had a short-lived program of land confiscation and redistribution and after the Xinhai Revolution in 1911, the founder of the Chinese Nationalist Party Sun Yat-sen advocated a "land to the tiller" program of equal distribution of land which was partly implemented by the Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek.

As early as 1927, Mao Zedong believed that the countryside would be the basis of revolution. Land reform was key for the CCP both to carry out its program of social equality and to extend its control to the countryside. Unlike in Russia before the revolution, peasants in imperial China were not in feudal bondage to large estates; they either owned their land or rented it. They marketed their crops for cash in village markets, but local elites used their connections with officialdom to dominate local society. When the central government began to lose control in the late 19th century and then disintegrated after 1911, the local gentry and clan organizations became even more powerful.^[9] Mao's 1927 Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan advocated a then heretical strategy of mobilizing poor peasants to carry out "struggle" (douzheng). Mao from that point on rejected the idea of peaceful land reform, arguing that peasants could not achieve true liberation unless they participated in the violent overthrow of the landlords.^[10]

Mass killings of landlords

Destruction of the Chinese landlord class (1949–1953)
Part of Early Mao era of China
A farmer confronting a landlord, 1946
Location	China
Date	1946–1953
Attack type	Massacre, classicide
Deaths	830,000[6] – 3,000,000[6] Up to 7,500,000[11] (CCP figures) 200,000 – 5,000,000 (academic estimates)
Injured	1.5[12] – 6[13] up to 12.5[11] million sent to Laogai camps
Victims	Landlords, better-off peasants
Perpetrators	Chinese Communist Party and radicalized peasants
Motive	Maoism, economic inequality

Initial campaign (1946–1948)

Over the following decades, the party went back and forth on strategy. Leaders fought over such questions as the level of violence which was to be used; whether to woo or target middle peasants, who farmed most of the land; or to redistribute all of the land to poor peasants.^[14] During the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Second United Front, the party emphasized Sun Yat-sen's moderate "land to the tiller" program, which limited rent to ​37 ¹⁄₂% of the crop, rather than land redistribution. At the outbreak of the Chinese Civil War in 1946, Mao began to push for a return to radical policies to mobilize the village against the landlord class, but protected the rights of middle peasants and specified that rich peasants were not landlords.^[15] The July 7 Directive of 1946 set off eighteen months of fierce conflict in which all rich peasant and landlord property of all types was to be confiscated and redistributed to poor peasants. Party work teams went quickly from village to village and divided the population into landlords, rich, middle, poor, and landless peasants. Because the work teams did not involve villagers in the process, rich and middle peasants quickly returned to power.^[16]

The Outline Land Law of October 1947 increased the pressure.^[17] Party central sent the work teams back to the villages to put poor and landless peasants in charge, mandating the elimination of land rent, which it compared to feudal exploitation, and the elimination of landlord status. The work teams mobilized poor and landless peasants to take direct and violent action against the leading clans and families of neighboring villages to ensure that family loyalties not interfere with the campaign.^[18] In one village in southern Hebei, foreign observers recorded that four people were stoned to death,^[19] and William Hinton reported that at least a dozen purported rich peasants or landlords were beaten to death in the village he called Longbow.^[20]

Height of the landlord purge (1949–1953)

Shortly after the founding of the PRC in 1949, land reform, according to Mao biographer Philip Short, "lurched violently to the left" with Mao Zedong laying down new guidelines for "not correcting excesses prematurely."^[1] Beatings, while not officially promoted by the party, were not prohibited either. While landlords had no protection, those who were branded "rich peasants" received moderate protections from violence and those who were on the lower end were fully protected.^[21] In this vein, Mao insisted that the people themselves, not the secret police's security organs, should become involved in enacting the Land Reform Law and killing the landlords who had oppressed them, which was quite different from the Soviet practice of dekulakization.^[1] Mao thought that peasants who killed landlords would become permanently linked to the revolutionary process in a way that passive spectators could not be.^[1]

Jean-Louis Margolin argues that the killings were not a pre-condition for land reform, because in Taiwan and Japan, land reforms were launched with little violence. Rather the violence was a result of the fact that the land reform was less about redistribution (because within a few years of the reforms, most of the land had to be surrendered to collective farms) than it was about eliminating "rural class enemies" and the assumption of local power by the communists. Margolin observes that even in very poor villages (which covered half of Northern China) where nobody could qualify as a landlord, some landlords were "manufactured" so they could be persecuted. In Wugong village, 70 households (out of a total of 387 households) were converted from middle peasants into rich peasants, making them acceptable targets for class struggle.^[22] There were policies in certain regions of China (not necessarily obeyed)^{[citation needed]} which required the selection of "at least one landlord, and usually several, in virtually every village for public execution".^[4] An official reported 180 to 190 thousand landlord were executed in the Kwangsi province alone, in addition a Catholic school teacher reported 2.5% of his village was executed.^[11] Some condemned as landlords were buried alive, dismembered, strangled or shot.^[21] In many villages, landlords' women were "redistributed" as concubines or daughters for peasants or pressured into marrying their husband's persecutors.^[23][24]

Estimated number of deaths

Estimates for the number of deaths range from a lower range of 200,000 to 800,000,^[25][3][4] and higher estimates of 2,000,000^[3][26][27] to 5 million^[28][26] executions for the years 1949–1953, along with 1.5 million^[12] to 6 million^[13] sent to "reform through labour" (Laogai) camps, where many perished.^[13] Philip Short wrote that such estimates exclude the hundreds of thousands driven to suicide during "struggle sessions" of the three-anti/five-anti campaigns, which also occurred around the same time.^[29] Estimates abroad for the number of dead reach as high as 28,000,000.^[11] Zhou Enlai estimated 830,000 had been killed, while Mao Zedong estimated as many as 2 to 3 million were killed.^[6] Teng Tzu-hui, Vice Chairman of the Central South Military and Administrative Council, reported that 15% of China's 50,000,000 landlords and rich peasants had been executed, and 25% had been sent to Laogai camps.^[11]

Retaliation by landlords

During the Chinese Civil War, the Kuomintang established the "Huanxiang Tuan" (Chinese: 還鄉團; pinyin: Huán xiāng tuán), or the Homecoming Legion, which was composed of landlords who sought the return of their redistributed land and property from peasants and CCP guerrillas, and the release of forcibly conscripted peasants and communist POWs.^[30] The Homecoming legion conducted its guerrilla warfare campaign against CCP forces and purported collaborators up until the end of the civil war in 1949.^[30]

Land redistribution

Land seized from Landlords was brought under collective ownership, resulting in the creation of "Agricultural production cooperatives".^[31] In the mid-1950s, a second land reform during the Great Leap Forward compelled individual farmers to join collectives, which, in turn, were grouped into People's communes with centrally controlled property rights and an egalitarian principle of distribution. This policy was generally a failure in terms of production.^[32] The PRC reversed this policy in 1962 through the proclamation of the Sixty Articles. As a result, the ownership of the basic means of production was divided into three levels with collective land ownership vested in the production team.

Economic effects

thumb|right|An example of a people's commune collective farm.

Historian Walter Scheidel writes that the violence of the land reform campaign had a significant impact in reducing economic inequality. He gives as an example the 1940s campaigns in village of Zhangzhuangcun, made famous by William Hinton's book Fanshen. Although poor and middle peasants had already owned 70% of the land:

In Zhangzhuangcun, in the more thoroughly reformed north of the country, most "landlords" and "rich peasants" had lost all their land and often their lives or had fled. All formerly landless workers had received land, which eliminated this category altogether. As a result, "middling peasants," who now accounted for 90 percent of the village population, owned 90.8 percent of the land, as close to perfect equality as one could possibly hope for.^[2]

By 1958 private ownership was entirely abolished and households all over China were organized into state-operated communes. Chinese leadership required that the communes must produce more grain for the cities and earn foreign exchange from exports. These reforms were generally unpopular with the peasants and usually implemented by summoning them to meetings and making them stay there for days and sometimes weeks until they "voluntarily" agreed to join the collective. ^{[citation needed]}

Great Leap Forward

During the Great Leap Forward, the state introduced a system of compulsory state purchases of grain at fixed prices to build up stockpiles for famine relief and meet the terms of its trade agreements with the Soviet Union. Together, taxation and compulsory purchases accounted for 30% of the harvest by 1957, leaving very little surplus.^[34] Rationing was also introduced in the cities to curb "wasteful consumption" and encourage savings (which were deposited in state-owned banks and thus became available for investment), and although food could be purchased from state-owned retailers the market price was higher than that for which it had been purchased. This too was done in the name of discouraging excessive consumption.

During 1958–1960 China continued to be a substantial net exporter of grain, despite the widespread famine experienced in the countryside, as Mao sought to maintain face and convince the outside world of the success of his plans. Foreign aid was refused. When the Japanese foreign minister told his Chinese counterpart Chen Yi of an offer of 100,000 tonnes of wheat to be shipped out of public view, he was rebuffed. John F. Kennedy was also aware that the Chinese were exporting food to Africa and Cuba during the famine and said "we've had no indication from the Chinese Communists that they would welcome any offer of food".^[35] With dramatically reduced yields, even urban areas suffered much reduced rations; however, mass starvation was largely confined to the countryside, where, as a result of drastically inflated production statistics, very little grain was left for the peasants to eat.

Land reform in Taiwan

After its retreat to Taiwan, the Nationalist government carried out a program of land reform under the Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction.^[36] The land reform law removed the landlord class, and created a higher number of peasants who, with the help of the state, dramatically increased Taiwan's agricultural output.^[37] Land reform also succeeded because the Kuomintang's members were mostly from mainland China and, as a result, had few ties with the remaining indigenous Taiwanese landowners.^[38]

See also

• Collectivization in the Soviet Union
• Dekulakization
• Land reform by country
• Land reform in Vietnam
• Mass killings under communist regimes
• List of massacres in China
• Socialist ideology of the Kuomintang

Notes

References

Bibliography and further reading

• "Land reform in rural China since the mid-1980s". Land Reform (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations). 1998. http://www.fao.org/3/x1372t/x1372t10.htm. 
• Crook, Isabel; Crook, David (1979). Ten Mile Inn: Mass Movement in a Chinese Village. New York: Pantheon Books. ISBN 0-394-41178-1. https://archive.org/details/tenmileinnmassmo0000croo. 
• DeMare, Brian James (2019). Land Wars: The Story of China's Agrarian Revolution. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-1-5036-0952-5. 
• Hinton, William (1966). Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village. New York: Monthly Review Press. https://archive.org/details/fanshendocumentahintrich. 
• Li, Huaiyin (2011). Village China under Socialism and Reform : A Micro History, 1948-2008. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-7657-8. https://books.google.com/books?id=Re4YLsESWjoC. 
• Moise, Edwin E. (1983). Land Reform in China and North Vietnam : Consolidating the Revolution at the Village Level. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 9780807874455. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Land_Reform_in_China_and_North_Vietnam/lAg1DgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=moise+land+reform&printsec=. 
• Mühlhahn, Klaus (2019). Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-73735-8. https://books.google.com/books?id=uxN-DwAAQBAJ&pg=PP1. 
• Shue, Vivienne (1980). Peasant China in Transition: The Dynamics of Development toward Socialism, 1949-1956. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-03734-2. https://archive.org/details/peasantchinaintr0000shue. 

External links

• Land Reform and Collectivization (1950-1953) Posters from the Stephan Landsberger collection. There are other posters on the topic in other sections of the site.

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