A farmer in some village in the large interior of China in the spring of 1950 may have awoken to a world upside down. This was the land that had belonged to another man, and that he had farmed for years, which was to become his. The landlord, who now collected half or more of each harvest, was now termed an enemy of the people. The land reform that swept across the nation of China in the early years of the People’s Republic was the most dramatic change in the lives of hundreds of millions of rural Chinese. It was also the foundation on which everything else in China’s economic story was built, for better and for worse.
A Countryside of the Few and the Many
To appreciate the significance of the change, one has to understand what went before it. At that time, about 9 out of 10 Chinese were rural residents and farming was the primary source of income. But the land ownership was highly skewed. A small minority of the rural population, namely landlords and rich peasants, owned a considerable proportion of the land, in many parts of the country more than half. Mostly the poor peasants and hired laborer’s owned little or nothing. In most cases the tenants gave a substantial amount of produce as rent. However, borrowing from moneylenders was prevalent and a poor crop would result in the loss of a plot, or a child might be sold off to pay debts. Rural life was fragile, due to decades of civil wars, Japanese occupation, floods and famines. Tools were crude, investment in the land was limited as those who worked the land did not see much need to improve what they did not own, and productivity was low.
The CCP knew that it had gained strength from the peasants. It had already tried land redistribution in areas that it was responsible for during the civil war and an outline land law, issued in 1947, advocated to remove landlord ownership. The offer of land to the tiller was both a moral call and a practical one – promising loyal soldiers, reliable supporters and a bedrock of rural legitimacy.
The Law of 1950
As the new government centralized power, it began to expand land reform to all parts of the country. In June 1950 it promulgated the Agrarian Reform Law. The law took away the feudal system of land ownership and required the expropriation of landlords’ property and draught animals and farm implements and surplus grain, to be distributed to landless and land-poor peasants. Notably, the law was relatively moderate towards rich peasants whose land they cultivated and employed some labor. The bulk of their holdings were to be retained as proof of their production, to ensure the preservation of food when the country had an acute need for food. Realistically, as the campaign grew in strength, the divide between landlord and rich peasant became increasingly indistinct. The process was carried out village by village. The cities sent work teams, as did higher levels of government. They carried out a series of activities, including the organization of the poorest villagers, a classification of all the households according to class status and public meetings in which the landlords were denounced. The deeds of land were burned. The plots were surveyed and, frequently by committee, reallocated, families being allotted plots based on the number of mouth to feed.
Numbers that Changed Lives
By approximately 1953 the campaign had been done throughout most of the country but for some minority areas where it had been done later and more slowly. According to official statistics, a vast area of several hundred million mu (a traditional measure, approximately one-sixth of an acre) was turned over to the ownership of some 300 million peasants who owned none or very little land. The change was real to those who received it. This family, which gave up half its harvest, now has almost all of it. Surplus grain equated to extra food, tools or a draught animal and for some, a school for a child. There were better incentives and farmers had good reason to invest in their plots. Economic results were promising in the early years. Production of cereals, which had been severely affected by the war, resumed steadily, from approximately 113 million tons in 1949 to approximately 164 million tons in 1952 (figures commonly cited). The recovery that helped provide the new government with a welcome economic base, and food to feed expanding cities and the beginnings of industrialization, was partly due to good weather, but much due to land reform.
The Human Cost
However, the revolution in the countryside was not just an economic change. It was a political campaign and it was violent. Class struggle was the basis of organization. The landlords were not just to lose their land, they were to be publicly ridiculed and politically undermined. Peasants were urged to express grievances at an accusation meeting in the village, and sometimes, this led to violence. There were some landlords who were beaten, jailed or executed. Some people even committed suicide. The death toll is not exactly known. The estimates range from several hundred thousand to more than a million, and some scholars say it could be even more. There are gaps in and sensitivity to official documentation from that time. It is evident that the aim of the campaign was to challenge the social status of the old rural elite and its effect was to do so. For decades another label was attached to these families, that of landlord, and there were consequences for their children both in the way they were educated and in their opportunities for employment and marriage. But not all of those who were considered ‘landlords’ were much better off than their neighbors, and the categories not always applied fairly. Sometimes, personal vendetta and local animosities influenced who was denounced. What was left was a countryside changed, but also fearful.
A Short-lived Ownership
The irony of the land reform was short-lived because land ownership was supposed to be to those who worked the land, which proved to be the most ironic aspect. The government had already started urging the peasants to pool resources in nearly every aspect as soon as the redistribution was finished. Mutual aid teams first were made up of people from neighboring households who shared labor and tools. Next, came elementary cooperatives, where families pooled land but still owned it, and shared in the crop. In the middle of the 1950s these were replaced by sophisticated co-operatives in which the land was collectively owned. The leadership contended that small, scattered tracts were not large enough to carry modern agriculture and that they would not be able to produce the surplus necessary for the financing of industry. Collectivization would boost efficiency and promote socialism, it said. It was not without some hesitation that many peasants had their land for the first time. However, the political pressure was high and by 1956, most rural households had been incorporated into collectives. This route eventually resulted within a few years in the people’s communes of the Great Leap Forward, which we will pick up next week – and again the following week. In less than a decade the man who had been so proud of having his own land in 1950 would be one of many who, in a great collective, had a say on what to sow and how to operate, away from their village.
Why it Still Matters?
More than seven decades later, the land reform of the early 1950s still shapes how China thinks about its countryside. It provided the Communist Party with its roots among the poor of the countryside and with a liberationist narrative. It also laid down a precedent that has followed all the reforms since then: who owns the land is of crucial importance to the nation’s stability. It was partly a return to the principles of 1950, namely that the ones who work the land should have some share of the harvest, when farmers broke up the communes and started faring the land by individual households, contracting land to individual households. But land in China is still state property in the cities and collective property in the countryside, and the farmers do not own the land, but only the use rights. The issue of land transfer and the rights of villagers and rural migration is still a topic of debate today. At that time, the revolution in the countryside was far from being an act of the past in 1953. It was the first episode in a lengthy debate over land, equality and growth that China is still engaged in.
Coming Next week
Week 3: “Five Years to Build a Nation: The First Five-Year Plan”.
