land distribution when the communists came to power

Communists lessons in land redistribution before 1949

• In both the Jiangxi Base Area, and later in Yanan, landlords had been driven out and their land redistributed, but richer peasants (those who owned land, but did not rent it out to tenants) were not targeted because they were the most productive

• Whether or not this approach was too moderate had caused arguments inside the Party, but this was the basis of the approach followed once the whole country was under Communist rule

Attacks on landlordism and the redistribution of land: Agrarian reform law

• The 1950 Agrarian Reform Law laid down the legal framework under which land reform took place, claiming that it would eradicate exploitation of peasants by 'the landlord class' as a first step towards industrialisation

• It was hoped that the legislation would restrain overzealous activists from taking the law into their own hands, which is what had begun to happen during the civil war

• It also made it clear that land reform meant redistribution, not lower rents or low interest loans, which the Communists had been experimenting with earlier.

Attacks on landlordism and the redistribution of land: the army

The army played a crucial role in the land reform process by silencing those who might have been hostile to the new government and helping the local Party officials organise work teams.

Attacks on landlordism and the redistribution of land: work teams

• The first job of the work team was the unpopular task of calculating how much land people owned so that they could be taxed accordingly

• They then organised meetings to decide how each villager should be labelled: landlord, rich peasant, middle peasant, poor peasant' or labourer

• Landlords' were publically humiliated and accused of exploitation

• If they were found guilty, as was usually the case, their land and possessions were confiscated and divided up among the other villagers

• The victims were then beaten up, and executed, often by the villagers themselves

Attacks on landlordism and the redistribution of land: stats about landlords

By the end of 1951, some ten million landlords had lost their land and about 40 percent of the land had changed hands. Official figures put the number of deaths at 700,000, while Chang and Halliday's estimate is as high as three million.

Attacks on landlordism and the redistribution of land: anti landlord paranoia

Party-led work teams put considerable time and effort into whipping up anti-landlord paranoia in villages, by digging up old grievances against better-off individuals and by offering the prospect of a share in the confiscated spoils of those found guilty of being landlords.

Attacks on landlordism and the redistribution of land: peasant led revolution

Putting power in the hands of the poor and middle-ranking peasants, who had conducted these 'speak bitterness' meetings and passed the sentences against landlords, enabled the Party to underline its claims that this was a peasant-led revolution against the old landlord class. By making sure that it was the villagers themselves who carried out the killings, the Communists were implicating them to such an extent that there was no turning back.