Chinese Land Reform
The Chinese Land Reform Movement, also known by the Chinese abbreviation Tǔgǎi, was a campaign by the Communist Party leader Mao Zedong during the late phase of the Chinese Civil War and the early People's Republic of China. The campaign involved mass killings of landlords by tenants and land redistribution to the peasantry. The estimated death count of the movement ranges from hundreds of thousands to millions.
Those who were killed were targeted on the basis of their social class rather than on the basis of their ethnicity; the neologism "classicide" is used to describe the killings. Class-motivated mass killings 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. By 1953, land reform in most parts of mainland China was completed except in Xinjiang, Tibet, Qinghai, and Sichuan. From 1953 onwards, the Communist Party of China 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 afterthe Xinhai Revolution in 1911, the founder of the 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 Communist Party of China 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. 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". 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.
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. 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, however, 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. 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, however, rich and middle peasants quickly returned to power.
The Outline Land Law of October 1947 increased the pressure. 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 termed "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. In one village in southern Hebei, a foreign observer recorded that four people were stoned to death, and William Hinton reported that at least a dozen people were beaten to death in the village he called Longbow.
The "Land Reform Law of the People's Republic of China" of June 1950 coincided with campaigns against Nationalist troops and local resistance. Implementation began in the fall, usually preceded by campaigns of rent reduction.
Mass killings of landlords
Initial campaign (1947–1951)
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." 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 on the lower end were fully protected.In this vein Mao insisted that the people themselves, not the 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. Mao thought that peasants who killed landlords would become permanently linked to the revolutionary process in a way that passive spectators could not be. Some condemned as landlords were buried alive, dismembered, strangled or shot.
Estimates for the number of deaths range from a lower range of 200,000 to 800,000, and higher estimates of 2,000,000 to 5 million executions for the years 1949–1953, along with 1.5 million to 6 million sent to "reform through labour" camps, where many perished. There were policies in certain regions of China not necessarily obeyed which required the selection of "at least one landlord, and usually several, in virtually every village for public execution". Philip Short noted 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.
Retaliation by landlords
During the Chinese Civil War, the Kuomintang helped establish the "Huanxiang Tuan", or Homecoming Legion, which was composed of landlords who sought the return of their redistributed land and property from peasants and CCP guerrillas, as well as forcibly conscripted peasants and communist POWs. The Homecoming legion conducted its guerrilla warfare campaign against CCP forces and purported collaborators up until the end of the civil war in 1949.Land redistribution
Land seized from Landlords was brought under collective ownership, resulting in the creation of "Agricultural production cooperatives". 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. 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.| Classification | Number of households | Proportion of households | Population | Population ratio | Farmland | The proportion of cultivated land | The average cultivated land | Per capita cultivated land |
| Poor Farmer | 6062 | 57.44 | 24123 | 52.37 | 21503 | 14.28 | 3.55 | 0.89 |
| Middle Peasants | 3081 | 29.20 | 15260 | 33.13 | 46577 | 30.94 | 15.12 | 3.05 |
| Rich Farmer | 325 | 3.08 | 2144 | 4.66 | 20566 | 13.66 | 63.24 | 9.59 |
| Landlord | 400 | 3.79 | 2188 | 4.75 | 57588 | 38.26 | 144.11 | 26.32 |
| Other | 686 | 6.49 | 2344 | 5.09 | 4300 | 2.86 | 6.27 | 1.83 |
| Total | 10554 | 100.00 | 46059 | 100.00 | 150534 | 100.00 | 14.26 | 3.27 |
| Classification | Number of households | Population | Cultivated land | Per capita cultivated land | Large livestock |
| Poor Farmer | 54.5 | 52.2 | 47.1 | 12.5 | 46.73 |
| Middle Peasants | 39.3 | 39.9 | 44.3 | 19.0 | 90.93 |
| Rich Farmer | 3.1 | 5.3 | 6.4 | 25.1 | 114.86 |
| Landlord | 2.4 | 2.6 | 2.2 | 12.2 | 23.19 |
| Other | 0.7 | -- | -- | -- | -- |
| Total | 100.00 | 100.00 | 100.00 | 15.3 | 64.01 |
Economic effects
Historian Walter Scheidel writes that the violence of the land reform campaign had a significant impact on economic inequality. He gives as an example the village of Zhangzhuangcun, made famous by William Hinton's book Fanshen: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.
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. Rationing was also introduced in the cities to curb 'wasteful consumption' and encourage savings, 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." 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.