S09: Land Reform
History of China Since 1800
July 23, 2026
The Good Earth: Synopsis
- Wang Lung, a poor farmer in rural China, marries O-Lan, a slave who becomes his partner.
- Through hard work, he becomes prosperous and buys more land, but his sons are influenced by their wealth.
- A famine forces the family to leave their land for city work, and upon returning, Wang Lung struggles with changes in his family.
- His sons’ focus on luxury causes conflicts and disconnects them from their roots.
- In the end, Wang Lung realizes that wealth does not guarantee happiness and reflects on the importance of the land.
The Good Earth
Reflecting on the Nanjing Decade
- Relative degree of consolidation, but fiscally weak & politically vulnerable
- Not a monolithic state under Chiang Kai-shek leadership, but divided and contested
- Uneven development: growth limited to urban China, little rural reform
Reflecting on the Nanjing Decade
Templates for state building:
- Propaganda state: mass campaigns, patriotic education
- Developmental state: creation of national planned economy, work unit system, military-oriented heavy industry, building of national infrastructure
- Campaign state: New Life Movement
Revolutionary Nationalism…
- Confucian-culturalist, or nativist, shift within the GMD (Kuomintang) right wing from the mid-1920s until the 1937 Japanese invasion.
- “Nativist” refers to the identification of Confucianism as the central component of Chinese cultural and national identity.
- Chiang Kai-shek led the GMD right wing and was supported by the CC Clique and the Blue Shirts.
… or Confucian Fascism?
- National self-confidence as essence of fascism
- Combining military discipline with classic Neo-Confucian view of community hierarchy and lineage solidarity
- Fascist militarization as a way of teaching Confucian citizenship to the people
- Unlike European fascism, inability and/or unwillingness to create a mass movement
Is revolutionary or counter-revolutionary?
- Fascism borrowed symbols, organization, and mass appeal from Marxism, but it lacked transformative substance and reinforced capitalist structures.
- At the same time, labeling fascism as merely counterrevolutionary overlooks the genuine desire of some fascists to create a new social order as an alternative to liberalism, communism, conservatism, and capitalism.
Morality campaigns in contemporary China
Key Questions
- What is land reform? Is land redistribution the main goal?
- Creation of a label: How was one classified as a landlord?
- State-society relationship: What is the source base of CCP legitimacy?
Agrarian revolutions
- New party branches in border regions and largely semi-autonomous from party center
- Beginning of land revolution: Shift from urban proletariat to rural peasantry
- Creation of Red Army: “Political power comes out of the barrel of a gun”
Mao: A Revolution is not a Dinner Party
A revolution is not the same as inviting people to dinner, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing fancy needlework; it cannot be anything so refined, so calm and gentle, or so mild, kind, courteous, restrained, and magnanimous. A revolution is an uprising, an act of violence whereby one class overthrows another. A rural revolution is a revolution by which the peasantry overthrows the authority of the feudal landlord class. If the peasants do not use the maximum of their strength, they can never overthrow the authority of the landlords, which has been deeply rooted for thousands of years.
Peng Pai: Real Pioneer of Agrarian Movement?
- Educated at Waseda University in Tokyo
- Pioneer of the Chinese agrarian movement
- Partitioned off his own land to local farmers and formed a farmers union
- 1926: Report on the Haifeng Peasant Movement
- Nov 1927 to Jan 1928: Hai-lu-feng Soviet, the first Chinese Soviet territory in the mountainous Hakka speaking parts of Haifeng, Lufeng and Luhe counties in Guangdong
A forgotten base area: Hai-lu-feng Soviet
Building a rural insurgency
- Role of provincial patriots: Not metropolitan elites, but rural educated youth
- Not simply local peasants demanding justice and overthrowing existing communities
- Party penetration depended on social capital of local, rural elites
- Departure from orthodoxy: No base area, no Leninist organization, and little coherent ideology
Donggu vs. Jinggangshan base areas
Donggu Base Area
- Established in Sep 1927 in Western Jiangxi
- Led by locals: Lai Jingbang and Li Wenlin
- Majority Hakka migrants during late Ming and early Qing
- Instead of land reform, reliance on peasant associations and building local economy
- Alliance with local bandits and secret societies
What is Land Reform?
- Major social platform of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and a key founding principle of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
- Between 1946 and 1950, the CCP redistributed 47 million hectares of farmland to 100 million peasants.
- One of the largest redistributions of property and power in history.
How did land reform become central to the Communist revolution?
Significance of Land Reform
- Land reform deemed necessary to achieve social and political equality and modernization.
- In practice, land reform required redistributing political power first: state penetration to grassroots society.
Land reform in global history: Property over power
- Private property rights seen as fundamental for the development of industrial capitalism, democracy, and other defining features of the modern world.
- This property-based modern state is the result of a historical process of commercialization: shift from land to money as the basis of power; land as an investment.
Enclosure Movement
- The English gentry seized communal lands in the name of agricultural improvement and economic progress.
- The gentry, along with other economic elites, used their wealth and power to take control of the English state.
- Privatization of communal lands paved the way for private property rights and economic power to dominate state building in the West.
Land ownership vs. Political Power in Pre-modern China
- Since Song Dynasty (960-1279), political power was based on education and civil service degrees controlled by the state, unlike Europe where it was rooted in hereditary landed property.
- As the economy commercialized, wealth in China continued to be invested in education and officialdom rather than capital and markets. The roots of political power remained unaffected.
- In late Imperial China, political power and status were primarily derived from generational seniority and social relationships at the community level, rather than property ownership.
Lineages
- Single-surname village or multi-surname community bound by marriage alliances
- Genealogy of descent from common ancestor
- A single corporate body, made up of male kinsmen
- Collective rituals of ancestor worship
- Corporate group with common land, property, and income
- Source of mutual aid and social support
Limited State
- Tension between local self-governance and central vigilance against local accumulations of power
- Elite voluntarism and local activism: Gentry as community leaders
- Governance on the cheap: no magistrate below county level
- End of Qing: growing population but declining tax base and bureaucracy
The Great Transformation
- Rise of the modern state and modern market economies were closely interconnected in history.
- The transition from a premodern economy to a market economy involved shift from allocating factors of production, like land and labor, based on tradition, redistribution, or reciprocity, to selling them in the market.
- Competitive capitalist economy was driven by the powerful modern state, which enforced changes in social structure in pre-modern times.
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2nd edition (Beacon Press, 2001).
History of Land Reform in China
- Sun Yat-sen: “Land to the Tiller!” as objective since 1905
- Even after the split between the KMT and the CCP in 1927, both parties implemented land reforms.
- The KMT passed a land law in 1940 to limit land rents, but it was not fully enforced.
- After Civil War, the focus shifted in Taiwan towards increasing agricultural productivity to address rural issues.
Dekulakization in Soviet Union
- Dekulakization was part of Stalin’s “second revolution” and involved the liquidation of the kulaks as a class.
- The economic backwardness and political estrangement of the peasantry as obstacle to Soviet modernization.
- Initially, the peasants supported the Bolshevik revolution: 1917 Decree on Land, granting ownership of the land and fulfilling the dreams of rural Russia since the peasant uprisings of the 17th century.
Dekulakization in Soviet Union, continued
- During civil war, their support waned as forced grain collections and attempts to collectivize the countryside alienated them.
- In 1921, the New Economic Policy (NEP) was introduced, which allowed peasants to accumulate and trade in grain products.
- The dekulakisation campaign, starting in 1930, had two objectives: to collectivize millions of peasant households and to colonize inhospitable regions like Siberia, the Northern Region, the Urals, and Kazakhstan.
Discuss: Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan
- What is China’s “peasant problem”? Why does it matter?
- Who should be the vanguard of the revolution? Why?
- What should be the relationship between the party and the peasants?
- What explains Mao’s shift in thinking?
- Explain: “A revolution is an uprising, an act of violence whereby one clas overthrows another.”
Mao Zedong: Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan
- Landlords as oppressive figures running feudal strongholds.
- Peasants gained power by settling accounts and leveling fines on landlords.
- Violent public rituals: public rallies and speak bitterness sessions, combined with economic expropriation, was the most effective method against class enemies.
- Class struggle as imagined reality: Not all villages had clear examples of economic exploitation, challenging the universality of Mao’s justifications for agrarian revolution.
Jiangxi Soviet: Most Radical Land Law
- Communist leaders flocked to the Jiangxi Soviet in 1931, either escaping from Shanghai or returning from study in Moscow.
- Under the influence of Soviet returnees like Wang Ming, the Jiangxi Soviet passed a radical land law in December 1931.
- The law called for the confiscation and distribution of land owned by wealthy peasants and landlords.
- Rich peasants were given the poorest-quality land, while landlords were left destitute without a share of land.
- Chiang Kai-shek’s fifth encirclement campaign forced the CCP to abandon Jiangxi – and its draconian land policy.
Shaan-Gan-Ning Base Area: Moderation First, Land Equalization Second
- In 1940, the CCP implemented the double reduction campaign in its Shaan-Gan-Ning base area.
- The campaign aimed to lower rents and interest paid to village elites before expansion to other base areas.
- The majority of landlords were patriotic, leading the party to insist on limited, private, and nonviolent class struggle.
- Only the most stubborn landlords faced public rebuke, while others were dealt with in a more restrained manner.
After the WWII, a new push
- In the fall of 1946, the CCP organized work teams to implement the May Fourth Directive through an “Anti-Traitor and Settling Accounts” campaign.
- The campaign aimed to identify and publicly denounce local elites, confiscate and redistribute their land, and establish peasant associations and local militias for protection. Most of the targets were former officials of Manchukuo.
- Incomplete land reform: Continued power held by local elites, lack of political mobilization among villagers, and ineffective or nonexistent land redistribution.
Land Reform in Stages
- After the First United Front (1927): Donggu and Jinggangshan
- After the Long March (1934): Revolutionary base areas
- After WWII (1945): Taking over of North China (where we are)
- After the Communist Revolution (1949): 1950 Agrarian Reform Law
Land Reform Simulation: Instructions
- We will first study the Agrarian Draft Law.
- Each character will then do a self-report for about 2 minutes.
- Pay attention to identifying characteristics with whom you share interests. Think about your own place in this social matrix.
- After each self-report, the other villagers will debate the character’s class label among themselves.
- The only acceptable outcome is consensus – there is no voting.
Land Reform Simulation: Political Study
- How should class labels be assigned? Landlord, Rich peasant, Middle peasant, Poor peasant, Worker
- Who should get what, and why?
- Are there any considerations for deciding class labels and land distribution?