The Land Reform Movement, also known by the Chinese abbreviation Tǔgǎi (土改), was a mass movement led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Mao Zedong during the late phase of the Chinese Civil War during and after the Second Sino-Japanese War and in the early People's Republic of China, which achieved land redistribution to the peasantry. Landlords – whose status was theoretically defined through the percentage of income derived from exploitation as opposed to labor – 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 launched further "socialist transformation" and 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.
Background
Ideological basis 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. In addition to breaking the political control of traditional rural elites and pursuing Communist views of justice through land redistribution to the peasantry, the Communist Party's motivations also included an expectation that land reform would liberate the productive forces by channeling peasant labor into greater agricultural production and put surpluses to better use than rural elites' wasteful consumption. Mao's 1927 Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan advocated a strategy of mobilizing poor peasants to carry out struggle (douzheng); a position which differed from the classical Marxist focus on the urban proletariat as the revolutionary class. 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 "[w]ithout 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:
If we only mobilize the people to carry on the war and do nothing else, can we succeed in defeating the enemy? Of course not. If we want to win, we must do a great deal more. We must lead the peasants' struggle for land and distribute the land to them [...] If we attend to these problems, solve them and satisfy the needs of the masses, we shall really become organizers of the well-being of the masses, and they will truly rally around us and give us their warm support. Mao's analysis divided rural society into five classes: landlords, rich peasants, middle peasants, poor peasants, and farm laborers. This analysis was based on a person's relationship to the means of production. Landlords and rich peasants were defined as those who derived income from the exploitation of others' labor and had income exceeding their needs. Landlords owned land but did not work it themselves (instead either renting it to tenants or hiring laborers). Rich peasants rented out land or hired laborers but did also work the land themselves. Middle peasants were those who owned their own land, earned income from their own labor, and were neither in debt nor had significant surplus. Poor peasants were defined as those who owned some land but had to also work for landlords or rich peasants in order to survive. Laborers owned no land at all.
Prior Communist Party campaigns In the 1920s, the Communist Party began experimenting with land reform. The CCP launched various rural campaigns as precursors to the land reform movement. These mass campaigns adjusted rent and interest to be more favorable to tenants, returned excessive deposits to renters, and overall served to weaken the traditional rural elites.
In Minxi In 1928, Deng Zihui began land reform experiments in Minxi. Deng's efforts included a bottom-up method of policy development through consultation with locals and adopting their practical suggestions while reserving broader policy questions and expansion for Communist Party evaluation. Some scholars view Deng (as opposed to Mao) as the first to experiment with land reform through establishing model villages and disseminating model experiences. By 1930, the experiments with land reform in Minxi had been widely disseminated in Communist Party publications and became an important point of reference for the Jiangxi Soviet's land policies from 1931 to 1934.
In the Chinese Soviet Republic In the Chinese Soviet Republic (CSR), the CCP issued the 1931 Land Law of the Chinese Soviet Republic. It required:
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