In June 1950, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) decided to launch the Land Reform Movement. With a single command, the entire countryside was engulfed in a red terror, a bloody storm, resulting in the execution of over 2 million landlords. Why did the CCP initiate this land reform, and why did they kill so many landlords? The primary goal of the CCP’s land reform was to seize the wealth of the landlords.
Seizing landlord wealth
In the 1930s, during the Red Army’s five “anti-encirclement” campaigns at Jinggangshan, the battles were intense, with gunfire and flames lighting up the sky. Despite initial successes, they eventually faced defeat and retreat. How did they fund the military supplies, food, and salaries needed for such battles?
Starting from the Autumn Harvest Uprising in 1927 and the establishment of armed separatism in Jinggangshan, the CCP, led by Mao Zedong, consistently used “striking down local tyrants” to solve their military funding issues. Whenever they “liberated” an area, they would kill all the landlords there, seizing their wealth to fund their military needs.
When the “Red Areas” (Communist-occupied regions) were exhausted of local tyrants, they would send raiding parties to the “White Areas” (Nationalist-occupied areas) under the cover of darkness to eliminate and plunder the landlords there. Over time, even the nearby “White Areas” were depleted of landlords, and the ordinary people fled, creating a desolate “yin-yang boundary” of over 30 miles wide between the Red and White territories.
After 1949, the financial crisis was severe, with the country in ruins and in dire need of funds. Militarily, the West needed to enter Tibet, the South aimed to “liberate” Hainan Island, the Southeast prepared to attack Taiwan, and the North was involved in the Korean War. Where would the food and salaries for millions of “Liberation Army” soldiers come from? Thus, the largest “striking down local tyrants” campaign emerged, leading to the “land reform” movement that seized the wealth of the wealthy landlords in the prosperous Jiangnan rural areas.
In June 1950, the Third Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee of the CCP proposed “eight major tasks,” the first of which was land reform. Mao Zedong clarified that land reform was a primary condition for achieving a fundamental improvement in the financial and economic situation. This was the real purpose of land reform: to seize the wealth of landlords and resolve the financial crisis of the nascent red regime.
Intimidation
Land reform’s second primary purpose was to use landlords’ blood to consolidate the new red regime. After the establishment of the CCP regime, the resistance from the Nationalist Party and its remnants, as well as dispatched military and political personnel on the mainland, was quite strong. Spontaneous local bandits were rampant, often wiping out a township government overnight.
The nascent red regime was beset with internal and external troubles, constantly at risk of being overthrown. At this time, Mao Zedong believed it was necessary to suppress the arrogance of the “counter-revolutionaries.” But who to kill? Unfortunately, history chose the “landlords” as the “chickens” to be killed to warn the “monkeys.”
During land reform, the power to approve executions was at the district level, with district chiefs or district party secretaries in their twenties holding the power of life and death over tens of thousands of people. Late at night, after district and township cadre meetings, everyone would sleep after a long day.
The young district party secretary (or district chief) would sit under a kerosene lamp, drawing up the list of people to be executed the next day based on reports from various townships. Although the power to kill was at the district level, in reality, if a township cadre wanted someone killed or if a poor peasant had a personal vendetta and requested someone be killed, it was rarely denied by the district party secretary.
The scenes of struggle against landlords were ruthless, with fists, feet, shoe soles, sticks, and whips all coming into play, leaving the landlords beaten to a pulp, spitting blood, with broken bones and tendons. The sounds of their screams and cries were incessant. When landlords, kneeling on the stage of struggle, tried to explain the false charges against them, they were drowned out by the loud slogans led by activists below the stage. The activists on stage would immediately slap, punch, and kick them, making it impossible for them to speak.
At this critical moment, “human nature” played a role. If a landlord was exceptionally gentle and kind, never having offended anyone, and no one accused him, he might escape with his life. However, if, over the decades, he had offended a poor peasant over some trivial matter or careless words, and the peasant, incited by land reform cadres, accused him of being an “evil landlord,” he was doomed. As long as someone said you were an “evil landlord,” you were an “evil landlord” with no room for defense.
On the side of the poor and lower-middle peasants, if someone was kind-hearted and sympathetic, seeing the landlords being beaten and killed as pitiful, not holding grudges over past trivialities, they might not say anything, and the landlord might survive. However, landlords would die at their hands if someone was naturally jealous and gloating, excited by others’ suffering, and adding fuel to the fire when making accusations. Some, unable to resist the repeated persuasion of land reform cadres, said something wrong, leading to a landlord’s death, and later regretted it for a lifetime.
There was no standard for killing landlords. Every village had to kill someone, and it was mandatory. The policy from above was: “Every household (landlord’s home) must smoke, every village must see red.” If no one in a village qualified as a landlord, rich peasants would be elevated to landlords; if there were no rich peasants, the most unfortunate wealthy middle peasants would be elevated. In any case, at least one had to be killed to serve as a warning.
In those days, landlords were executed by placing a gun against the back of their heads and firing upwards from behind. With a gunshot, their skulls would be blown off, and red blood and white brain matter would scatter all over the ground. The bloodiness, cruelty, and terror of it all made witnesses tremble uncontrollably, some waking up from nightmares for several nights, covering their faces in tears. After many executions, the opposition was cowed, and the nascent red regime was consolidated.
Bloody vs. bloodless reforms
Anyone with some historical knowledge knows that the land reform of the time resulted in the deaths of 2 million “landlord elements.” An American scholar even estimated that as many as 4.5 million people died during the land reform on the mainland. Kind-hearted people can’t help but ask, was it necessary to make land reform so bloody and terrifying? Let’s see how Chiang Kai-shek conducted land reform in Taiwan.
When Chiang Kai-shek retreated to Taiwan, 11 percent of the rural population, who were landlords, owned 56 percent of the land. Meanwhile, 88 percent of the farmers only owned 22 percent of the arable land, and nearly 40 percent of tenant farmers and hired laborers were landless. They paid rents to landlords generally over 50 percent of the total harvest, sometimes as high as 70 percent. To solve the farmers’ issues, Chiang Kai-shek established the Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction, led by Chen Cheng, to conduct land reform in Taiwan from 1949 to 1953.
Taiwan’s land reform turned Sun Yat-sen’s ideas of “equal land rights” and “land to the tiller” into reality. After studying the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom’s “Heavenly Land System” and the mainland’s land reform policies, Chiang concluded that Taiping’s absolute egalitarianism was a fantasy of peasant smallholders and impossible to achieve.
While abolishing feudal land ownership on the mainland was reasonable, striking down local tyrants and confiscating landlord property was undesirable. Chen Cheng decided not to use violent means to seize land from the wealthy, not to rob the rich to aid the poor, not to implement radical peasant revolutions, but to carry out moderate socialist reforms.
Taiwan’s rural reform did not involve struggling against or killing anyone; it was completed through peaceful economic means. The government first bought the land and sold it to poor farmers on an installment basis according to their actual needs and capabilities. Farmers first cultivated the land, and the government provided loan support if they had difficulty starting production.
Farmers provided products for national industrialization and repaid the government annually from their profits. After several years, once the principal and interest were fully repaid, the farmers became the actual owners of the land. Farmers strongly supported this reform and worked hard to develop production in a capitalist manner, effectively becoming agricultural workers.
The government offered preferential policies for those selling land, helping them use the proceeds to develop enterprises, commerce, and services in modern industries. Since the income from modern industries was much higher than rental income, they were willing to sell their land to the government and use the proceeds as capital to develop modern enterprises.
The most commendable aspect of Taiwan’s land reform was its “class cooperation” approach. Landlords, farmers, and the government slowly discussed ways to solve the land issue, benefiting the farmers without harming the landlords. Although landlords’ land was requisitioned, they received many stocks in return, transforming them into emerging industrial and commercial giants.
Rural reform led to comprehensive economic development in Taiwan, and after more than a decade of effort, it entered the ranks of advanced countries worldwide. In the 1970s, Taiwan’s economy soared, becoming one of the “Four Asian Tigers” that attracted global attention. The foundation of this economic takeoff was the successful peaceful land reform in Taiwan in the early 1950s. Taiwan’s land reform benefited landlords and farmers, making everyone happy; opposing classes shook hands and achieved a win-win situation.
In 1994, in Singapore, a Chinese Ph.D. who had studied in the U.S. once said that the Soviet Union and China both “eliminated” landlords, leading to slow agricultural development and still not completing the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy. In contrast, Western countries and the “Four Asian Tigers” “eliminated” poor farmers, turning farmers into workers and landlords into capitalists, transitioning from an agricultural to an industrial economy. “You are getting poorer the more you do, while others are getting richer.”
Today, Taiwan’s per capita gross national product is much higher than the mainland’s. Before rural reform, Taiwanese farmers were as poor as mainland farmers, but they became prosperous three or four decades ago. Having one or two cars and various modern agricultural machines in a Taiwanese farmer’s home is common.
Mainland China’s land reform movement was carried out with great fanfare, but more than 75 years have passed, and most farmers are still impoverished, with some unable to solve even basic food and clothing problems. Why can’t a policy that benefits farmers, landlords, and the government be implemented? This is a question worth pondering.
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