Mass killings of landlords under Mao Zedong

The Land Reform Movement, also known by the Chinese abbreviation Tǔgǎi (), was a mass movement led 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, which achieved land redistribution to the peasantry. Landlords had their land confiscated and they were subjected to mass killing by the CCP and former tenants, with the estimated death toll ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions. The campaign resulted in hundreds of millions of peasants receiving a plot of land for the first time.

By 1953, land reform had been completed in mainland China with the exception of Xinjiang, Tibet, Qinghai, and Sichuan. From 1953 onwards, the CCP began to implement the collective ownership of expropriated land through the creation of "Agricultural Production Cooperatives", transferring property rights of the seized land to the Chinese state. Farmers were compelled to join collective farms, which were grouped into People's communes with centrally controlled property rights.

Origins

China's land reform was not only an economic or administrative process of taking and redistributing deeds or legal ownership of land. It was a party-led mass movement which turned peasants into active participants and which pushed for political and ideological change beyond the immediate economic question of land ownership.

It had historical antecedents in China. 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. 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. In Mao's view, peasant uprisings were organic events, and as a "revolutionary party," the Communists should choose to lead them rather than stand in their way or to "trail behind them" and criticize. He concluded that " thout using the greatest force, the peasants cannot possibly overthrow the deep-rooted authority of the landlords, which has lasted for thousands of years."

In a speech at the Second National Congress in 1934, Mao addressed the significance of land reform in the context of the struggle against the civil war against the Nationalists:

Peasant land holdings prior to reform

During China's feudal period, a small number of landlords owned vast amounts of farmland, while the majority of Chinese were landless peasants. Land concentration continued after the 1911 Revolution overthrew the Qing Dynasty. By 1934, 4% of the population owned half of the land, while 70% of peasant households owned only 17% of the land. Frequently, poor peasants who rented land were required to pay more than half of their income to landlords.

Process of land reform

Land reform progressed unevenly by region. In northern China, which had been governed by Communists since 1935, the peasants were more radical. Land reform was undertaken more quickly and more violently than in the south, especially beginning in 1950. Landlords had their lands seized and redistributed to peasants. They were rounded up and subjected to brutal public "struggle sessions" organised by the CCP where they were accused of crimes against the peasants and sentenced to death, often being killed in public by peasents at these mass meetings. In the north, Communist Party cadre often tried to restrain excessive violence from peasants, however, Mao seemingly approved of the violence.

Land reform proceeded more slowly and less violently in the South. There, land was owned by extended clans rather than individual landlords and poor peasants were sometimes part of the same kinship networks. In contrast to the north, the CCP had difficulty convincing poorer peasants that land should be expropriated at all.

By 1952, land redistribution was generally completed. Many landlords had been killed, although most had been permitted to retain plots of land after admitting to historical crimes. The amount of cultivated land had grown, along with related infrastructure projects and availability of fertilizers and insecticides. By 1952, rural agriculture had become hugely more productive in China.

Initial campaign (1946–1948)

Land reform issues were a matter of debate within the Communist Party, and 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 37.5% 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.

On May 4, 1946, the Party’s Central Committee issued its ''Instructions on Land Issues''. It required local party committees to support landlords who approved of land acquisition by the peasantry. As part of an effort to address some concerns of some landowners and those connected to them, the May 4th Instructions stated that landlords who “had earned merit for resisting Japan” would be left the more land and that the land holdings of wealthier peasants would be mostly unchanged.

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.

From July to September 1947, the Communist Party held a National Land Conference to formulate the Outline of the Chinese Land Law. Issued in October 1947, the Outline identified the goal of “ e abolition of feudal and semi-feudal exploitation of the land system and the implementation of the cultivator owning the field.” According to Historian William H. Hinton, it "played the same role as did Lincoln's Manifesto of Liberating Black Slaves during the American Civil War."

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. In one village in southern Hebei, foreign observers recorded that four people were stoned to death, and Hinton reported that at least a dozen purported rich peasants or landlords were beaten to death in the village he called Longbow.

Land reform was a decisive factor in the result of the Chinese Civil War. Millions of peasants who obtained land through the movement joined the People's Liberation Army or assisted in its logistical networks. According to Chun Lin, the success of land reform meant that at the founding of the PRC in 1949, China could credibly claim that for the first time since the late Qing period that it had succeeded in feeding one fifth of the world's population with only 7% of the world's cultivable land.

Height of the landlord purge (1949–1953)

Shortly after the PRC's founding, 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 who were on the lower end were fully protected. In this vein, Mao insisted that the people themselves, not the public security organs, should become involved in enacting the Land Reform Law and killing the landlords who had oppressed them, in contrast to the Soviet practice of dekulakization. Mao thought that peasants who killed landlords who had oppressed them would become permanently linked to the revolutionary process in a way that passive spectators could not be.

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. 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". An official reported 180 to 190 thousand landlords were executed in the Kwangsi province alone, in addition a Catholic school teacher reported 2.5% of his village was executed. Some condemned as landlords were buried alive, dismembered, strangled or shot. In many villages, landlords' women were "redistributed" as concubines or daughters for peasants or pressured into marrying their husband's persecutors.

Mass killings of landlords

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.
xxv-xxvi
/ref> Class-motivated mass murder continued almost throughout the 30 years of social and economic transformation in Maoist China, and by the end of the reforms, the landlord class had largely been eliminated from Mainland China or it had fled to Taiwan.

In his Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan, Mao addressed Party members who were concerned with violence by the peasants against landlords, arguing that these concerns were a tool for continuing the oppression of the peasants. In this context, Mao coined his famous comment that "revolution is not a dinner party." Mao wrote in response to objections to violence:

Estimated number of deaths

Estimates for the number of deaths range from a lower estimate of 200,000 to 800,000, and higher estimates of 2,000,000Lee Feigon. ''Mao: A Reinterpretation.'' Ivan R. Dee, 2002. p. 96: "By 1952 they had extended land reform throughout the countryside, but in the process somewhere between two and five million landlords had been killed."Maurice Meisner. ''Mao's China and After: A History of the People's Republic, Third Edition.'' Free Press, 1999. p. 72: "... the estimate of many relatively impartial observers that there were people executed during the first three years of the People's Republic is probably as accurate a guess as one can make on the basis of scanty information." to 5 million executions for the years 1949–1953, along with 1.5 million to 6 millionBenjamin A. Valentino.
Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century
'' Cornell University Press, 2004. pp. 121–122. sent to "reform through labour" (''Laogai'') camps, where many perished. 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. Zhou Enlai estimated 830,000 had been killed, while Mao Zedong estimated as many as 2 to 3 million were killed. Deng Zihui, Vice Chairman of the Central South Military and Administrative Council, estimated that 15% of China's 50,000,000 landlords and rich peasants had been "sentenced to death", 25% had been "sent to labor reform camps for remolding through manual work" and 60% to "participation in production work under supervision". Not all of those sentenced to death were actually executed and therefore there is no way of knowing the exact number of performed executions.

Retaliation by landlords

During the Chinese Civil War, the Kuomintang established the "Huanxiang Tuan" (), 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. 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.

Economic effects

An example of a people's commune collective farm.
As an economic reform program, the land reform succeeded in redistributing about 43% of China's cultivated land to approximately 60% of the rural population. Poor peasants increased their holdings, while middle peasants benefitted most because of their strong initial position. 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.

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 (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". 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. 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. 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.

See also

* Dekulakization
* Land reform by country
* Mass killings under communist regimes
*List of massacres in China

Notes

References

Bibliography and further reading

*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*

External links

{{Library resources box

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.

Political repression in China
Campaigns of the Chinese Communist Party
Communist repression
Political and cultural purges
Massacres in China
Human rights abuses in China
Class discrimination
Politicides
Cold War history of China
Mass murder in 1947
Mass murder in 1948
Mass murder in 1949
Mass murder in 1950
Mass murder in 1951
1950s murders in China
1940s murders in China
1947 murders in China
1951 murders in China
Chinese landlords
Mao Zedong
Land reform
Man-made disasters in China
Massacres committed by the People's Republic of China