IMAGE 2. Chinese citizens flock to the South Central Land Reform Exhibit in Wuhan, 1952. Source: Zhongnan tudi gaige de weida shengli, 13
The Story of Mao’s Revolution
In early 1927, Mao Zedong returned home in search of evidence. He found a story. At the age of thirty-four, Mao was an increasingly visible figure in the Chinese Communist Party, well known for his early advocacy of peasants as a revolutionary force.1 It was for this reason that he now found himself out of step with party leaders. Like many other concerned citizens, Mao understood that rural distress was one of the greatest challenges facing reformers and revolutionaries alike.2 Land, an existential commodity for the vast majority of the Chinese people, was distributed unevenly. Some farmers prospered. Most got by. Many others suffered bitterly with little or no land at all. The leaders of the Communist Party, founded in 1921, knew this all too well. But eager to emulate the example of the Soviet Union, they envisioned their revolution as a proper Marxist affair, led by the urban proletariat in pursuit of collective ownership. The party’s first leader, Chen Duxiu, emphatically argued that the Communists must rely on industrial workers: “In a country such as China, over half the farmers are petit bourgeois landed farmers who adhere firmly to notions of private property.”3 How, Chen wondered, could such farmers ever embrace the Communists? Mao had experimented with rural activism, only to run into conflict with his party leaders and their Soviet advisors. And so Mao returned home to Hunan, determined to arm himself with data that might force Communist leaders, perhaps even the great Joseph Stalin himself, to recognize the centrality of the peasantry to China’s revolution.
Mao’s journey home occurred during a critical moment in the course of modern Chinese history. In 1923, the Communists had established a United Front with the Nationalists, a rival party that was also committed to saving the Chinese nation through revolution, albeit a revolution that promised to serve all social classes, not just the laboring masses. The Nationalists, by a wide margin the more powerful of the two parties, was then headed by Sun Yat-sen, China’s most respected revolutionary. Educated in Hong Kong and Hawaii, Sun had long pursued help from foreign powers, only to find frustration. Comintern agents, dispatched by Stalin to foment worldwide revolution, brokered the alliance between the two parties. Offering financial and military aid in exchange for the United Front, they found in Sun a willing partner. Despite their mutual suspicion, both parties experienced spectacular growth during their United Front. The Communists, primarily urban intellectuals, focused their organizational efforts on workers in China’s largest cities. Most party members viewed peasants with disdain, but Mao Zedong and a handful of activists started the process of reform in villages scattered across several provinces, helping the Communists make their first inroads into the countryside.4
Their success, coupled with policy trends within the United Front, encouraged the Communists to recognize the peasantry as an important ally in their proletarian revolution. This rural turn developed rapidly, thriving on the synergy between the gains Mao and like-minded comrades were making in the countryside and Sun Yat-sen’s growing belief in the need for agrarian reform. Influenced by his new Russian advisors, Sun had radicalized his approach to the land question, calling for a policy of “land to the tiller” (gengzhe you qi tian). Sun’s vision, centered on the idea of transferring property to land-hungry farmers, posed a direct threat to wealthy landlords who relied on rental income.5 Meanwhile, the alliance with the much larger Nationalist Party provided new opportunities for Mao and the Communists to deepen their experiments in rural reform. The founding of the Peasant Movement Institute in 1924 allowed the training of hundreds of agitators and organizers, fueling the growth of what was now called a peasant movement. Observing the movement firsthand, Mao began to insist that the party’s path forward lay not in China’s urban factories but in the vast and impoverished countryside.
The untimely death in of Sun Yat-sen, today still revered as a revolutionary hero on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, threw the alliance between the two parties into turmoil in 1925. Chiang Kai-shek, a military officer whose intense nationalism easily matched his hatred of the Communists, quickly established himself as Sun’s successor. Emboldened by the growth of his military forces, Chiang launched the Northern Expedition in summer 1926, rapidly expanding the territory under Nationalist rule. Rural organizers, many of them Communists, moved in advance of Northern Expedition troops to organize revolts in support of Chiang’s forces. They also made sure to establish peasant associations, village organizations that promoted the interests of poor farmers. Some peasant association activists seized land and attacked rural elites, disturbing Nationalist Party members with ties to rural landholders. With the peasant movement showing no sign of abating, internal debates over rural policy assumed ever greater importance. Factional divisions within the Communist Party came into full relief during a December 1926 meeting in Wuhan: Mao Zedong pushed for further radicalism in the countryside, while party leader Chen Duxiu, under Comintern orders to save the tenuous United Front, attempted to appease potential allies within the Nationalist Party. As the Comintern spoke for Stalin, Chen’s call to dampen class struggle and ignore the land problem won the day.6
This brings us to Mao in Hunan in early 1927, with the future of the revolution torn between city and countryside. Mao intended to investigate the peasant movement that had thrown the United Front into doubt. Evidence of farmers becoming political activists and transforming their village communities might convince Communist leaders that peasants, long derided as backward and self-interested, were in fact potential revolutionaries. Such a revolution had no historical precedent. Had not Karl Marx himself blamed the failure of France’s 1848 revolution on the passivity of the peasant class?7 Mao would have to draft a blueprint to explain not only how this grand experiment could possibly succeed, but why it must succeed. Investigating the peasant movement in five counties over the course of a month, Mao seized on a metaphor to capture his bold vision of rural revolution: the hurricane. This metaphor would become inexorably linked with what the party called land reform (tudi gaige), thanks in part to the talented author Zhou Libo, who decades later penned The Hurricane, a novel documenting the arrival of Communist power in a Northeast village. Zhou, however, was simply paying belated homage to Mao. According to Mao’s famous forecast, which Zhou would later use to preface his novel,
In a very short time, in China’s central, southern and northern provinces, several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back. They will smash all the trammels that bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation. They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves.8
Formulated by Mao and enshrined by Zhou, the hurricane metaphor took flight, framing rural revolution as a destructive tempest: violent, unstoppable, and utterly transformative. If Mao’s comrades did not flock to the countryside to lead the peasantry, he warned, they would find themselves smashed underfoot.
Mao’s blueprint, immortalized in his “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan,” would eventually became the story of land reform: a tale that made sense of peasant revolution by casting landlords as evil men running roughshod over moral peasants in oppressive feudal strongholds.9 The arrival of the revolution, Mao’s vision promised, would unleash the vast powers of the peasantry, liberating and revitalizing the realm. As Mao forcefully argued in 1927, village revolution was not a dinner party but a violent act of class struggle. He detailed how farmers could be remade into political activists, providing a revolutionary road map that the party would follow for decades. As Mao outlined, peasants gained power by settling accounts (qingsuan) and leveling fines (fakuan) on landlords, punishments that would cause class enemies to completely lose face (timian saodi) as news of their crimes spread. The most powerful attacks on rural elites were violent public rituals designed to destroy feudal power. This included major demonstrations (da shiwei), during which peasants would rally together and march to the houses of class enemies, slaughtering pigs and feasting on grain. In another highly ritualistic political attack, activists forced a landlord to don a dunce cap (gao maozi) for a humiliating parade through the village. Mao, noting that “this sort of thing is very common” during the peasant movement, outlined the proper method of ritualized class struggle and its expected results:
A tall paper-hat is stuck on the head of one of the local tyrants or evil gentry, bearing the words “Local tyrant so-and-so” or “So-and-so of the evil gentry.” He is led by a rope and escorted with big crowds in front and behind. Sometimes brass gongs are beaten and flags waved to attract people’s attention. This form of punishment more than any other makes the local tyrants and evil gentry tremble. Anyone who has once been crowned with a tall paper-hat loses face altogether and can never again hold up his head.”10
As Mao emphasized in early 1927, violent and ritualistic struggle coupled with economic expropriation was the most effective method of striking against class enemies. Only the worst local tyrants and evil gentry, who “literally slaughtered peasants without batting an eyelid,” needed to be executed.11
In Mao’s “Hunan Report,” the Chinese village, insular and cleaved by class hatred, was controlled by landlords who ruthlessly oppressed moral peasants. Those with land were bullies, ruffians unafraid to use force to get what they wanted from the poor. And all gentry were by nature evil. In reality, rural China was an expansive and endlessly diverse place, and it stubbornly resisted any simple characterization. Village communities were typically not isolated but deeply engaged with larger market systems, especially when located in the orbit of towns or urban centers.12 Large landholders certainly existed, but the villains that Mao used to justify agrarian revolution were far from universal. Many villages lacked true examples of economic exploitation.13 Partible inheritance, the time-honored tradition of equally dividing property among male heirs, promoted social mobility both up and down the village hierarchy. As one activist in Heilongjiang later recalled, landlord wealth in his village was due to hard work and never lasted even three generations. There was no reason to care too much about a landlord: “His grandson would be poor.”14
Ideology, however, now trumped reality. Mao vilified the very idea of owning a surplus of land that could be rented out for additional income.15 To be sure, many Communists, including Chen Duxiu, were repulsed by Mao’s violent vision of rural revolution, which to them seemed to go too far and too fast.16 Li Weihan, then in party central, was particularly concerned with Mao’s insistence on relying on the poorest members of rural society. These men had revolutionary potential, he noted, but were also quite “destructive”: they gambled, took liberties with women, and tended toward violence.17 More important, Mao’s “Hunan Report” was an ill fit with the Comintern line. Stalin, then locked in an ideological battle with Leon Trotsky, had doubled down on the United Front. With the Nationalists reliant on landlord supporters, the Communists backed away from rural revolution in hopes of appeasing their allies.
The Comintern’s ability to push the Chinese Communists away from rural radicalism did little to placate Chiang Kai-shek. While Northern Expedition troops under Chiang dallied outside Shanghai in April 1927, right-wing Nationalist Party leaders engineered the Shanghai Massacre, a brutal crackdown that left hundreds of Communists and workers murdered in the streets.18 After the Shanghai Massacre, Stalin backed away from his embrace of Chiang Kai-shek while still insisting on a United Front with leftist elements within the Nationalist Party. His thinking on the peasant movement, however, evolved: class struggle in the Chinese countryside was not to be feared after all.19 During the August 7 Conference of 1927, with Chen Duxiu no longer in control, the new Communist leader, Qu Qiubai, embraced the call to deepen rural radicalism while also preparing for military uprisings. Political power, Mao had explained, was obtained from the barrel of the gun. The Chinese revolution had now reached a new stage, that of the land revolution (tudi geming). A prelude to the story of agrarian revolution told in this book, the land revolution era cemented the role of violence in transforming village China.
This first attempt at property redistribution, designed to fund the newly formed Red Army and win over poor farmers, was carried out in the isolated base areas that had emerged in the aftermath of the collapse of the United Front. Most famously, Mao Zedong fled to the Jinggang Mountains, lying between Jiangxi and Hunan provinces, in October 1927. Zhu De, the talented general who would eventually help lead Mao and the Communists to military victory, joined him there in April of the following year. Within this and other rural base areas, the Communists carried out their land revolution, a chaotic attempt at transforming village societies. During the opening salvo of the land revolution, party central issued vague guidelines, calling for the confiscation of the property of large and medium landlords for distribution to land-hungry peasants, while reducing rent paid to small landlords.20 Finally free to formulate his ideal land policies, Mao instead called for the confiscation and redistribution of all land, hurting wealthy farmers as well as landlords. Lineage organizations resisted redistribution, as did many farmers. At times, redistribution did not start until the Red Army opened fire on villagers.21 Tensions flared with the party’s allies among the local elite, leading to open attacks on military units carrying out the land revolution.22 Many farmers fled, sending the local economy into a spiral. Only after land had been redistributed and just weeks before the Red Army abandoned the base area were these policies formalized in law.23 This dynamic interplay between revolutionary experiments and legal frameworks established a precedent: action on the ground typically outpaced official party policies.
Despite the strategic location of his first base area, Mao abandoned the Jinggang Mountains in January 1929, moving to southern Jiangxi. The land revolution, which had done much to destabilize the Jinggang Mountains base, continued as the Red Army roamed the countryside. Mao’s next land law called only for the confiscation of landlord and public land; wealthy farmers were to be politically isolated but would keep their land.24 This proved a brief moment of leniency to wealthy farmers. Less than a year later, a third land policy once again targeted wealthy farmers. According to this law, largely opposed by local Jiangxi Communists, farmers would lose anything more than “what is needed for self-support.”25 In practice, confiscations were widespread, leading many farmers to flee in fear.26
Shortly before the declaration of his third land law, Mao had written that the revolution, which seemed in mortal danger, was in fact ready to explode. Using the old Chinese adage that “a single spark can start a prairie fire,” Mao predicted rapid growth for the Communists. The continued inability of the Red Army to take and hold cities, however, demonstrated that the party still needed to follow its rural path by forming new base areas in the countryside. Mao selected a strategically placed base in northwestern Jiangxi, from which the Red Army could strike at nearby wealthy settlements. Officially established in November 1931, the Jiangxi Provincial Soviet Government provided Mao with his largest and most secure base yet. A testament to the military strength Mao found in the countryside, in Jiangxi the Red Army would successfully repulse four attempts by Chiang Kai-shek to encircle and destroy the base area. It was an ideal place to experiment further with rural revolution.27 Mao, meanwhile, insisted more than ever before that the countryside offered the party its best chance for military and political success, especially after another round of rural investigation in 1930 had confirmed what Mao had learned on his trip home in 1927: villages were rife with class conflict. This time, Mao explained that wealthy peasants, who farmed their own land, had to be attacked because their prosperity had earned them the hatred of the rural poor. According to Mao, if the Communists attempted to shield rich peasants from activists, “those poor peasants could not but hate” the party. Attacking wealthy farmers was thus “the paramount policy of the rural struggle.”28
Communist leaders continued to view Mao’s successes in the countryside as a sideshow to the main event: urban revolution. But things were not going well in the cities, especially after the April 1931 arrest of Gu Shunzhang, who had overseen the Communists’ assassination squads. Information provided by Gu, who had been recognized while passing himself off as a mime in a Shanghai park, allowed the Nationalists to arrest thousands of underground party members.29 Communist leaders, mainly either escaping from Shanghai or returning from study in Moscow, streamed to the Jiangxi Soviet throughout 1931. Their attempts to discredit and push Mao aside had an immediate influence on the land revolution; one of the main charges levied at Mao was his supposed leniency to wealthy farmers.30 Under prodding from Wang Ming and other newly arrived leaders, the Jiangxi Soviet passed what would prove to be the party’s most radical land law.31 With the Comintern mindful of Stalin’s own war against the kulaks, the December 1931 land law demanded the confiscation and distribution of all land owned by wealthy peasants and landlords. Rich peasants were to be given the poorest-quality land available. Even more extreme, the law denied landlords a share of land, leaving them utterly destitute. As was to be the case throughout the party’s decades of agrarian revolution, the fates of individuals targeted as class enemies were to be shared by their families.
In 1933 Mao Zedong penned two articles that provided his first analysis of rural classes. Declaring the landlord class the “principal enemy of the land revolution,” Mao announced the party’s intention to “annihilate the landlord class” by confiscating all their lands and properties.32 The subsequent “land investigation” (tiancha) campaigns proved particularly effective in realizing the party’s most radical vision of agrarian reform. Gong Chu, then a Communist military leader in the Guangdong-Jiangxi region, would later recall that “settling accounts led to more settling accounts, killings led to more killings.” Even locals serving in the Red Army saw their family members attacked and left with nothing. According to Gong, activists used extreme torture to extort cash from landlords. Under the slogan of “cutting the weeds to eliminate the roots,” they put entire families to death.33 As one PRC study of the land revolution admitted, while “land investigation” campaigns did mobilize the masses and attack some forms of feudal power, they also “severely encroached on the interests of the middle peasants, excessively attacked landlords and rich peasants, injured a good number of cadres, and ruined agriculture production.”34
Military defeat, not faulty land policies, brought down the Jiangxi Soviet: Chiang Kai-shek’s fifth encirclement campaign finally forced the Communist Party to abandon Jiangxi. By the time the ensuing Long March ended in the remote Shaan-Gan-Ning base area in Northwest China in 1935, Mao Zedong’s stature in the party had grown considerably. Aware of the growing threat of Japanese imperialism, Mao called for a change in agrarian policies in order to facilitate a new alliance with the Nationalist Party. Over the following two years, ever mindful of establishing a new United Front, the Communists moved to protect the lands of landlords and rich peasants.35
In January 1937, the land revolution era quietly came to a close. The formal Second United Front soon followed.36 During the war against Japan, the Communists initially did little to transform social or political relations at the village level.37 While mass implementation of double reduction, which sought to reduce the amount of rent and interest paid by famers living in the base areas, was one of Mao’s “Ten Great Policies” announced in August 1937, in practice little was actually done. The land revolution had typically damaged local economies; the party now focused on reclaiming wasteland and mobilizing farmers for production.38
But when tensions between the two parties inevitably began rising in the Second United Front, the Communist Party let it be known that village society was not to be left to its own devices. In 1940, the party’s Shaan-Gan-Ning base area finally implemented double reduction, lowering rents and interest paid to village elites.39 The double reduction campaign spread to other base areas, and with further experience, Mao Zedong refined the party’s rural policies in January 1942. Most notable, with Mao deciding that the majority of landlords were patriotic, the party insisted on limited, private, and nonviolent class struggle. Only the most obstinate landlords were subject to public rebuke. Although the January 1942 directive is now seen as moderate in comparison to the later move to all-out agrarian revolution, the double reduction campaigns explicitly challenged landlord supremacy.40 These campaigns remade rural societies by creating villages largely populated by farmers who owned their own fields.41 Double reduction, while primarily an economic program, also contained clear political and social components: the party encouraged tenants to personally negotiate with their landlords in order to gain a sense of their political power.42 Over 70 percent of base area villages carried out double reduction campaigns, resulting in an overall drop in landlord power, as well as an increase in agricultural production.43
Civil War: From “Land to the Tiller” to “Land Equalization”
Despite the successes of double reduction, Mao remained committed to his own vision of rural revolution: the inevitable and violent hurricane. When party propaganda chief Zhang Wentian, sent to investigate rural revolts against the Communists, suggested that Mao’s class scheme was unrealistic and unfair to hard-working wealthy farmers, he was effectively silenced.44 As the shift from radical land revolution to double reduction had already demonstrated, land policies were always subordinate to the military and political realities facing the party. So just as the war with Japan had demanded a softening of rural policy, the start of another civil war with the Nationalists required the opposite.45 With a fragile peace still holding in late 1945, rent and interest reduction remained the public centerpiece of the party’s land policy.46 But new campaigns against traitors and rural tyrants began the process of agrarian revolution, the topic of this book. These campaigns saw the return of the types of struggle Mao had first advocated in his 1927 “Hunan Report.” This was especially true in the Northeast, where the forces of Lin Biao, a talented Communist general, rapidly expanded the extent of party control after the collapse of Japanese power. Owning land, coupled with cooperation with the Nationalists or the Japanese, was enough to be branded as a “traitor to the nation.” These traitors and tyrants were often also denounced as landlords, foreshadowing a larger campaign against landholders.47 With a renewed double reduction campaign and these increasingly confrontational and violent movements, many villagers began to go beyond party policies by confiscating landlord property, often settling accounts by demanding payment for past exploitation. Mao, having long advocated settling accounts and now desperately in need of funding for the looming Civil War, was eager to use confrontational class struggle to open new revenue sources.48 By 1946, Communist leaders sensed the impending collapse of the party’s uneasy cease-fire with the Nationalists, leaving few political reasons to dampen peasant activism. Radical land reform, Mao further believed, represented one of the keys to military victory. Through fierce class struggle, peasants would gain land, political consciousness, and unbreakable ties to the party that would now protect them from landlord reprisals.49 It was time for the Communists to make Mao’s tale of rural revolution a reality.
With villagers throughout the party’s base areas already confiscating and redistributing the property of landlords, traitors, and collaborators, the Communist Party sought to bring land policies in line with local realities. Leading cadres traveled to the Communists’ capital in Yan’an to discuss the land question in a “report-back meeting” chaired by Liu Shaoqi, already one of the most powerful voices in the party. Liu’s conference resulted in the May Fourth Directive, which explicitly endorsed the desire of land-hungry villagers to confiscate fields, officially launching the first of many rounds of land reform. This initial campaign rallied villagers using Sun Yat-sen’s popular slogan, “land to the tiller.”50 In line with local demands, the party called for poor farmers to confiscate property from traitors, local tyrants, and bandits. Village cadres were instructed to use rent reduction and other peaceful methods to weaken the landlord class.51 The cautious return to agrarian revolution promised limited violence, with execution and beatings reserved for “extremely wicked traitors and public enemies.”52 The purposefully vague land-to-the-tiller campaign proved a good fit in North China, where many impoverished villages lacked wealthy landlords.53 But when local cadres moved to remake village political and social structures, all too often the result was widespread verbal and physical attacks on local elites, including wealthy farmers. Following the release of the May Fourth Directive, work teams organized by the party traversed the countryside with the explicit aim of helping the poorest of China’s villagers turn the world upside down.
Over the course of the following six years of rural revolution, the party’s work teams carried out land reform by following the Maoist script for the total transformation of the village. After arriving in a given village, teams began by disseminating propaganda and organizing poor farmers to “speak bitterness” against their wealthier neighbors. Team members then led these activists in determining the village’s class structure, dividing the vast majority of the community into Maoist classes: landlords, rich peasants, middle peasants, poor peasants, and hired hands. This class structure identified enemies and provided the framework for the transfer of economic and political power from established elites to a new and party-sanctioned core of impoverished activists. The public struggling of landlords served as the dramatic denouement of the campaign. Afterward, peasants, now considered enlightened, would take possession of the “fruits of struggle” (douzheng guoshi): the property of defeated class enemies. The novelist Ma Jia, recalling his own observation of land reform, aptly summarized the process of events necessary for the completion of a village’s revolutionary transformation:
The old village society was proclaimed to be over, for a new life was starting. The meeting place beckoned, and workers and poor peasants mobilized to determine class statuses, form a poor peasants and hired hands association, research the situation, arrest and try the landlords, collect movable property, hold struggle sessions, divide movable property, organize small production teams, measure the land, establish the party branch, and support the front line.54
Ma Jia was just one of the gifted writers to use the experience of taking part in the first rounds of land reform as the basis for a novel documenting the campaign. Ding Ling and Zhou Libo penned far more famous fictionalized accounts of their time in the countryside that would serve as handbooks for rural revolution.55
That intellectuals would transcribe their time on work teams into narratives is far from surprising. Stories are essential to human lives, helping construct both personal and social identities.56 Future work team members drew on these land reform novels as they prepared to carry out rural revolution. As one later noted, reading these novels was like “following Ding Ling and Zhou Libo as their work teams traveled to the countryside, experiencing the entire process of land reform.”57 These riveting accounts reduced the messy and diverse realties of agrarian revolution into a neat and tidy Maoist narrative, helping to inform operas, songs, and even exhibits that informed the expectations of future work team members. This shared narrative would have profound implications for the course of Chinese history.
These initial land-to-the-tiller land reform campaigns were marked by a diversity of methods. Different base areas experimented with a multitude of techniques of wealth transfer; broad policies for the confiscation and division of land emerged during land to the tiller, but with cadres reacting to local conditions and shifting fortunes of war, land reform remained unique in each base area.58 Outside North China, the Northeast was the most important base area for the first rounds of land reform.59 Following the arrival of the Soviet army in August 1945, Chinese Communist soldiers and cadres from “inside the pass” (guannei) had rushed to the northern side of the Great Wall. First focusing on establishing order by redistributing land owned by the Japanese or leading collaborators, work teams oversaw a moderate land reform campaign that lasted until the following year.60
Communist leaders encouraged work teams throughout the scattered base areas to employ a trial-and-error approach, with successful methods popularized through glowing reports in the party-run media. Some early experiments, including the purchase of landlord land for redistribution to the poor and allowing “enlightened” landlords to donate land, were briefly implemented but then discarded.61 These policies had failed to mobilize the peasantry in accordance with Mao’s vision of rural revolution, which demanded ritualized struggle. Other work teams, following the precedents of speak bitterness meetings and settling accounts from the recent campaigns against traitors and local tyrants, found a formula for land reform that dovetailed with Mao’s violent and confrontational approach to remaking village China. These cadres met with poor villagers and encouraged them to speak of the bitterness they had endured due to exploitative and evil landlords. Mobilized peasants would then settle accounts, confronting newly labeled class enemies by detailing every instance of economic exploitation, political oppression, and even personal humiliation. These landlords were considered “struggle targets” (douzheng duixiang), to be subjected to “struggle” (douzheng), the party’s ritualized enactment of rural class struggle. Not until they admitted their guilt and agreed to give up their lands were accounts considered to be truly settled.62
After a long summer of land to the tiller brought land reform to some 20 million villagers, the Communists moved to ramp up their rural revolution. The September announcement for a “fill the gaps” (tian ping bu qi) campaign echoed Mao’s “Hunan Report,” declaring that the question of the moment was not if the party was going too far (guo huo) but instead how to release the energies of the masses even more. Noting that some villages, perhaps fearing the period of chaos (luan yi dun) that was needed to build the new revolutionary order, had settled accounts with traitors but not solved the land problem, the call to fill the gaps promised to ensure that the poor received sufficient land, taking property from rich peasants as needed.63 Base areas moved to fill the gaps by rectifying the primary mistake of land to the tiller: the failure to fully mobilize the masses. Recognizing a common problem in land to the tiller, village cadres, activists, and militiamen who had taken an unfair share of property were asked to return fields and goods for another round of redistribution. The primary means of filling gaps, however, was through once again settling accounts with landlords, now seen as a potentially inexhaustible source of wealth.64 In the Northeast, meanwhile, the moderate rural program that had previously targeted only traitors and the worst local despots was similarly moving to a new phase. There, party leaders began describing the results of initial attempts at land reform as “half-cooked” (ban sheng bu shou); despite the division of land and the appearance of successful rural revolution, in reality peasants had not been mobilized to topple landlord power. Work teams were once again dispatched to the countryside, this time to reexamine and restart the process of land reform.65
As 1946 came to a close, party leaders increasingly viewed agrarian revolution through the lens of the ongoing Civil War. With Chiang Kaishek’s armies on the move and threatening the Communists’ Yan’an capital, the party announced a new drive to complete land reform before farmers returned to their fields for spring planting. One report, published in Liberation Daily, claimed that after land reform, peasants were joining the Communists’ military force, now renamed the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), in record numbers; in one region, nearly one in every five poor peasant and hired hand households sent a son to join the fight against Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists. This Liberation Daily report made a direct connection between land reform and military victory, and even noted how the two campaigns intertwined. Some peasants conducted guerrilla warfare during the day, returning home to settle accounts with class enemies at night. In other places, men left to fight while women took the lead in class struggle.66 Party leaders would eventually realize that mobilizing for war through land reform was in fact extremely difficult. In the first years of the Civil War, however, the desire to use agrarian revolution to fight the Nationalists would bring much chaos to the countryside. This was especially true after Liu Shaoqi and Zhu De, overseeing land reform in Hebei’s Pingshan County, allowed the use of violence during struggle, leading to two deaths. As news of party central’s lax attitude toward violent struggle spread, so did beatings and killings.67
In summer 1947, with a year of experience in all-out land reform, the Communist Party called for a conference on agrarian policy to unify ongoing and future campaigns. Originally scheduled to start on the one-year anniversary of the report-back meeting that had produced the May Fourth Directive, the meeting had to be postponed and relocated after Chiang Kai-shek’s troops occupied Yan’an. During the conference, held in Hebei’s unassuming Xibaipo village, Liu Shaoqi took the lead by noting that land reform was hampered by problems with local leadership. In some cases, cadres forced land reform on reluctant villagers, yet at other times, cadres protected potential struggle targets. Liu may have been the conference chair and in charge of land reform, but Moscow-trained Kang Sheng, a leading radical and head of party intelligence, spoke on Mao’s behalf.68 Kang’s tales of extracting hidden landlord wealth in Shanxi’s Linxian County made Mao’s support for fierce class struggle in the countryside clear.69 Kang and Liu called for a “moving stones” (ban shitou) campaign: peasants would throw off the leadership of their local cadres, seen as heavy weights holding back a revolutionary upsurge. One slogan that emerged that summer declared, “Do everything as the masses want it done.”70 Months of meetings resulted in the 1947 China Outline Land Law. Passed on September 23 and promulgated on October 10, the law’s sixteen articles promised the end of feudal exploitation by eliminating land rents and the landlord class. The Communists proudly announced that Sun Yat-sen’s dream of giving land to the tiller was finally coming true. But perhaps the party should have used Sun’s earlier slogan, “equalization of land holdings”: the most important aspect of the law was its sixth article, which called for even land distribution.71
The release of the land law was followed by “land equalization” (pingfen tudi), an intense round of campaigning that lasted well into the following year. These campaigns were paired with cadre rectification (zhengdang) campaigns to combat corruption, which party leaders had seen as one of the major reasons for previous problems in agrarian reform. In the party’s established base areas where land had already been redistributed, often more than once, the call to equalize landholdings was unpopular. Attempts to force land equalization at times even resulted in violent attacks on peasants.72 But a steady stream of military victories starting in the latter half of 1947 brought new lands under Communist rule, allowing the further spread of land equalization campaigns. In its attempts to establish base areas, it was only natural that the party turned to their established method of creating local support: rituralistically attacking local bullies and carrying out land reform. Following the spirit of his “Hunan Report,” Mao continued to insist that cadres not interfere with violence against class enemies.73 Work teams fanned out to “key point” (zhongdian) villages to implement the land law, but new conditions gave land reform violence a new set of problems. Because newly won areas were not militarily secure, peasants had to deal with the constant fear of landlord and Nationalist reprisals.
A lack of established activists, meanwhile, meant that work teams often had to rely on self-interested peasants whose bravery in standing up to village leaders was often coupled with impure motivations. This included preying on village women, an aspect of rural revolution that has so far escaped systematic examination. Mao, well aware of the plight of rural women, had noted as early as 1930 that these women, typically sold into marriage, essentially belonged to men and lacked personal freedom, to say nothing of political rights: “No one suffers more than women.”74 But in his “Hunan Report,” Mao had praised poor activists for barging into the houses of class enemies to seize grain and “even loll for a minute or two on the ivory-inlaid beds belonging to the young ladies in the households of the local tyrants and evil gentry.”75 The party never explicitly endorsed attacks on landlord women, but for some newly empowered men, many previously unable to afford a wife, these women were little more than another form of property to take from class enemies. This dynamic is clearly present in Fanshen, an account of land reform penned by William Hinton that brought Mao’s narrative of rural revolution to a global audience. Hinton was an American radical and highly sympathetic to Mao’s rural revolution, but he did not shy away from reporting on the abuses that local cadres and activists carried out. According to Hinton, one poor peasant rapist made the connections between sexual assault and rural revolution clear, proclaiming, “Bastard landlords, they took our women, why shouldn’t we take theirs?”76 This was one of seventeen instances of sexual assault committed by cadres and activists in a single village. Because the victims were wives and daughters from landlord or rich peasant households, the rapists were never punished.77 This was not an isolated problem. One work team cadre reported that activists were killing class enemies and dividing not just their fields but their wives and daughters as well. When the cadre attempted to rein in this violence, he was himself struggled and disarmed.78 Even a poor peasant wife might be stripped and beaten when her husband came under attack.79
While the Communists were seemingly unconcerned with what seems to have been widespread sexual assault, they did note with alarm other forms of violence during land equalization land reform. During a “swept-out-of-the-house” campaign, peasant activists left landlords with nothing, often using violence and torture to extract wealth.80 A round of land reform in Shandong killed over 150, including peasants and cadres deemed ideologically suspect.81 Violence spiraled out of control. Deng Xiaoping later chillingly summarized his experience leading the campaign in western Anhui:
The masses would hate a few landlords and want them killed, so according to the wishes of the masses we would have these landlords killed. Afterwards, the masses would fear reprisals from those who had ties to those we had just killed, and would draw up an even bigger list of names, saying if these people were also killed, everything would be alright. So once again, according to the wishes of the masses, we would have these people killed as well. After we killed these people, the masses felt that even more people wanted revenge for these deaths, and would draw up an even bigger list of names. So once again, according to the wishes of the masses, we killed these people. We kept on killing, and the masses felt more and more insecure. The masses were frightened, scared, and took flight. The result was that over two hundred people were killed, and work in twelve administrative villages was ruined.82
Rumors of rural violence spread widely. In Beijing, citizens heard tales of landlords being “swept” out of their houses. They also heard stories of activists “lighting sky lamps” (dian tiandeng), turning the heads of victims into torches.83 According to an angry land reform veteran, other torture methods included “standing on the tiger’s stool” and “spreading phoenix wings.”84 With violence threatening the Civil War effort, Communist Party leaders eventually realized that their hurricane had to be postponed: land reform in newly won territories would have to wait.85
Xi Zhongxun, father of current Chinese president Xi Jinping, now emerged as a voice of reason. Xi, then overseeing the Northwest Bureau, wrote directly to Mao in early 1948 and explicitly detailed the horrors the peasant masses had suffered during the chaotic push to equalize landholdings.86 Xi’s ideas were in line with the thinking of Ren Bishi, a party leader well trained in Marxist theory. Ren had been calling for a relaxation of class struggle since late 1947, and his January 1948 speech calling on cadres to correct past errors signaled a coming shift in land policy just as violent struggle reached its peak in the countryside.87 But change was slow. Not until April were work teams made aware that land reform policy had shifted to curb violent tendencies and attacks on farmers.88 Now land reform was made contingent on three conditions: villages must be militarily secure, peasants must want land reform, and local cadres must be well trained and ready to lead the campaign. As only a few new areas under Communist control qualified, land reform was essentially halted in summer 1948 in favor of double reduction. Work teams, meanwhile, revisited villages to undo some of the damage done to wrongly expropriated owner-cultivators.89 For many villages in the old base areas, this represented a third round of land reform.90 The importance of adequately preparing a village for land reform was a costly lesson, learned only after many areas where land reform had been carried out were subject to heavy reprisals when the Nationalists temporarily returned to power.91
Rural Revolution in the Early PRC
The accomplishments of Civil War–era campaigns were impressive. By the eve of military victory, of the over 270 million living under Communist control, over 150 million had taken part in land reform, and another 80 million had participated in double reduction; over 25 million hectares of land had been confiscated, largely from landlords and rich peasants.92 Agrarian revolution had proved a critical factor in military victory by tying the peasants of North and Northeast China to the fates of the Communist Party, which was now firmly ensconced in the countryside.93 Land reform would continue in peacetime, and in fact it moved to a much larger scale following the total breakdown of Chiang Kai-shek’s military forces and the subsequent establishment of the People’s Republic of China. The campaign resumed, with parts of North China, including the countryside surrounding Beijing, carrying out land reform in the winter of 1949 to 1950. This round of land reform, however, differed from Civil War campaigns. Treatment of landlords was considerably improved, with most avoiding public struggle.
In early spring 1950, party central moved to finally replace the Outline Land Law that had encouraged so much violence during the years of the Civil War. Requesting opinions from various regional leaders, party central floated the idea of dividing land reform into two stages separated by months, if not years. During the first stage, work teams would move only against landlords, leaving rich peasants for the second stage of land reform. Party central also raised the idea of confiscating only the lands that rich peasants rented out and wondered what would happen in places without much landlord wealth.94 The party’s rural policies thus remained very much in flux, even as Communist leaders prepared to release the land law that would guide agrarian revolution for the hundreds of millions living in the “new liberated areas.” But a trend toward moderation was clear. In a letter to Deng Zihui, a leading voice in land reform policy, Mao Zedong finally reversed course on the confiscation of rich peasant land. Noting that these lands would not have a significant impact on distributions to the poor, Mao declared the policy of not touching these lands “appropriate.”95
More lenient treatment of landlords and rich peasants became official with the promulgation of the Land Reform Law of the People’s Republic of China in summer 1950. Landlords would still lose their “five big properties”: land, draft animals, agricultural tools, excess grain, and any extra housing located within the village. Unlike earlier campaigns, however, landlords would be allowed to keep their other belongings, including commercial enterprises. This new law also lacked the references to land equalization found in the 1947 Outline Land Law. The property of middle peasants, the seventh clause clearly stated, was not to be touched.96
With this law, the party now promoted a more nuanced approach to class division, reducing the number of struggle targets in an effort to unite the broad peasant masses in opposition to a limited number of landlords. Civil War–era work teams had often started with the organization of “poor peasant leagues.” Now teams were to only form more inclusive “peasant associations.” Of central importance was the return of what was once dismissively referred to as the “rich peasant line”: the law’s sixth article, stipulating that the rich peasant economy must be preserved. Those unlucky rich peasants who had lost property during earlier campaigns would not be compensated, but this was the first time the Communist Party actively protected the rich peasant economy during land reform. Unlike the Jiangxi Soviet era, when the Comintern pushed the Chinese Communists to attack wealthy farmers, Stalin now gave his full support to the “rich peasant line.” Many peasants and cadres had difficulty accepting this new policy, however, believing the poor would not benefit from land reform without access to rich peasant property. In response, party leaders argued that the rich peasant class did not possess enough wealth to make a real difference in raising the standard of living for the poor. Furthermore, with the war over, the Communists sought to boost production by reducing the percentage of the population labeled as class enemies.97
A constant stream of information and propaganda concerning land reform, coupled with the active recruitment of city dwellers to participate in the campaigns, made rural revolution an inescapable part of urban life during the first months and years of the PRC. The party had found in land reform a powerful tool in the remaking of China’s national political culture. As Liu Shaoqi posited in his 1950 report on land reform:
During land reform, besides conducting widespread propaganda in the countryside, there should also be propaganda for all city residents and army units. The land reform policies and laws of the People’s Government should be explained to workers, students, office workers, merchants, officers, as well as soldiers, so that they understand, and even sympathize with and help the peasantry, while refusing to sympathize with or help landlords, and certainly not protect landlords, even those family members or friends who are landlords.98
Or as one of the 90,000 urbanites to see a Suzhou land reform exhibition proclaimed, “Before I did not know what land reform was, but now I understand.”99
This Suzhou exhibition was a minor affair. One of the grandest exhibits, sponsored by the South Central China Bureau, opened in 1952 at the height of a huge campaign that would affect some 130 million villagers. Visitors to the exhibition saw images of suffering peasants who gained liberation through taking part in class struggle. Cutting the ribbon to open the exhibit in Wuhan, senior party leader Deng Zihui made the party’s purpose explicit:
From these materials and artifacts we can see how landlords cruelly exploited the peasantry, and how politically landlords bloodily controlled and oppressed the peasants; we can see the fiendish, brutal, and totally uncaring nature of the landlord class; we can see how the landlord class squeezed and then extravagantly squandered the blood and sweat of the peasantry; we can see how imperialism ganged up with feudalism to squeeze the peasantry; we can see the brave and heroic record of how the great laboring and brave peasantry, under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, implemented an unyielding resistance and struggle against the landlords.100
Some 636,464 Chinese citizens attended the Wuhan exhibit, which was said to be only one of “countless” exhibits held throughout the region.101 For visitors this was no simple day at the museum, but another chance to absorb Mao’s narrative of exploited peasants finding emancipation and liberation through fierce struggle with evil landlords. For villagers and work team members alike, these stories helped make rural revolution both meaningful and understandable. During the years of the campaigns, the land reform narrative was inescapable. Tales of village transformation were found in novels, operas, news accounts, and even the couplets Chinese families hung on their doorways.
IMAGE 2. Chinese citizens flock to the South Central Land Reform Exhibit in Wuhan, 1952. Source: Zhongnan tudi gaige de weida shengli, 13
The arrival of land reform propaganda in Chinese cities was not only about education. Hundreds of thousands of urban residents would soon join work teams to personally take part in the campaigns to remake the countryside. One reluctant land reform work team member, the talented writer Zhang Ailing, would later use her time in the countryside to help inform her own novel on the Chinese revolution.102 Zhang, better known in the West as Eileen Chang, worked with American agents to structure her novel Love in Redland. Unlike the accounts of Ding Ling and William Hinton, which followed and praised Mao’s narrative of revolution, Zhang provided her readers a counternarrative of agrarian reform, attacking the Communists in an attempt to delegitimize the party’s promise of peasant liberation. Her deeply cynical account of rural revolution suggests how the implementation of Mao’s vision was a traumatic experience, one that could deeply scar villagers and work team members alike. With victory over the Nationalists and a new land law in place, the party seemed primed to bring agrarian revolution to its vast new territories. One observer noted that in Chengdu, citizens in the midst of regime change feared not the arrival of the Communists but what havoc the Nationalist troops and bandits might wreak before the establishment of the new order. As was often the case in the first years of the PRC, however, the arrival of the PLA brought a tax bill: a request for a massive amount of grain, deliverable immediately. One of the first messages given to Sichuan villagers was the need to turn over grain to support the new government. Party propagandists emphasized that this grain requisition was different from those demanded by the Nationalist government.103 But the fierce push for grain caused many locals to turn against the newly arrived Communists, who were unprepared for the challenges they faced far from Beijing. In some places, local resistance succeeded in delaying the party’s takeover, even forcing a temporary retreat.104 Land reform would have to wait.
The Communists, now calling for a slow and orderly implementation of agrarian revolution, deemed most villages unready for the arrival of work teams. Long after the founding of the PRC, Nationalist soldiers still roamed the countryside, and their presence gave pause to peasants still fearful of landlord retaliation.105 Having learned a painful lesson in the Civil War, the Communists insisted on establishing military dominance before bringing rural revolution to newly liberated villages. Peasants, meanwhile, unorganized and without trained local cadres, were ill prepared for public political activism. The party now demanded highly structured campaigns, emphasizing the gradual preparation of the countryside for land reform. Most notable, land reform was aided by two 1950 campaigns promising to “purge bandits” (qing fei) and “oppose tyrants” (fan ba). The first was a military operation carried out by the PLA as its soldiers hunted down “bandits”: rogue Nationalist army units, which in emulation of the Communists had turned to guerrilla warfare. These soldiers had been joined by secret societies, augmented by farmers angry over the party’s harsh requisition of grain.106 This was no minor uprising. Over seventy thousand bandits were caught in a single year in Hunan alone.107 Deng Xiaoping counted nearly half a million in the Southwest.108 During the “oppose tyrants” campaign, meanwhile, the party directed activists to publicly struggle “evil tyrants” (eba), estimated to compose 10 percent of the landlord population.109 This campaign typically represented the arrival of rural revolution, although unlike land reform, struggle was not brought to every village. Instead, the party singled out a small number of particularly exploitative landlords and power holders for massive struggle meetings that drew spectators from miles around.110
The campaign against evil tyrants revealed much about the unruly and seemingly lawless countryside that the Communists would attempt to tame through mass campaigns. In Beibei, a region on the outskirts of Chongqing, the men attacked as evil tyrants were accused of a wide range of crimes. Chen Xiangji, a landlord in his seventies, hailed from Liangtan village. According to charges leveled against him by the new government, in 1943 he forcibly evicted his tenant Yan Binglin, leaving the farmer without housing and fields and wrenching Yan’s family apart. In a 1950 feud with another tenant, he poisoned three of the tenant’s pigs. Chen, like many of the other accused evil tyrants, was initially unimpressed with the new regime, refusing to pay the grain tax demanded by the new government. But with land reform looming, he hid his belongings, concealed landholdings, and prayed for the return of Chiang Kai-shek. Condemned as an evil tyrant, he was executed by firing squad.111 Liu Guoqing, a second evil tyrant, was a well-known landlord in Dengzi village, where he often held leadership positions before the arrival of the Communists. Regime change did little to change Liu, who was accused of bribing cadres, spreading rumors, and threatening activists.112 According to a transcription of his struggle meeting, a dozen accusers came forward to levy charges against Liu for a host of crimes, including embezzling public property and causing the death of a famer. Liu meekly admitted his guilt, but he was executed after villagers demanded that his blood debt be paid with blood.113
After neutralizing such men, the most hated power holders in the countryside, the party launched further campaigns to mobilize peasants and begin the process of agrarian revolution. Most common were the familiar campaigns to reduce rent and interest, but the party also organized peasants to “retrieve deposits” (tui ya) to help renters get back the hefty fees they sometimes paid for the right to plant crops.114 Like land reform, cadres used peasant associations during these campaigns to determine classes and transfer wealth. And while these were intended to be generally peaceful campaigns, their links to land reform often led to outbreaks of extreme violence. Once these campaigns to secure the social order and organize the peasantry in opposition to landlords were completed, land reform could begin.
This final stage of land reform in size, scope, and complexity would go well beyond what the Communist Party had accomplished during the Civil War. Facing a widely divergent countryside as well as an acute lack of cadres, the party continually emphasized the need for controlled campaigns that would not begin until villages were declared ready for the campaign. While brutality against class enemies continued throughout land reform, these final campaigns called for fewer struggle targets and stressed legality over spontaneous violence.115 All of this would have been impossible without the massive recruitment of intellectuals and professionals to join work teams; in the city of Changsha alone, the party mobilized five thousand citizens to join work teams.116 A push by the fledgling government in 1951, meanwhile, drew over six thousand prominent figures from Beijing and Tianjin into work teams. Educators, artists, scientists, and physicians all took part.117 Many would discover that their recruitment was predicated on the belief that taking part in rural revolution would serve as a crash course in Maoist ideology.
The first wave of PRC land reform kicked off in autumn 1950 throughout the East, South Central, Southwest, and Northwest regions. During these campaigns, work teams perfected their methods in select villages before spreading throughout the countryside. East China’s land reform progressed the fastest, with most areas there finished by spring 1951. Other regions, especially where party rule came relatively late, such as the Southwest, did not finish until the following year. Land reform in what the Communists called the “new liberated areas” followed the model established in the earliest years of the campaign, now increasingly formulaic. As one work team summed up its time in working in Southwest China, land reform was essentially a step-by-step process. The team first mobilized the peasantry by announcing land reform and disseminating land reform propaganda. Far more important, work teams and local cadres brought villagers into the process of agrarian revolution by “visiting the poor and asking of their bitterness” (fangpin wenku). Next came the most dramatic stages of rural revolution: work teams helped villagers determine classes and struggle newly labeled landlords. Passage through the furnace of class struggle, the Communists promised, led to the liberation of the peasant masses. After overseeing the fair distribution of confiscated landlord property, finally, work teams would compile reports while mobilizing peasants to celebrate their liberation and increase agricultural production.118
This step-by-step process followed the plotline of the land reform narrative: a heroic tale of the victory of peasant revolution over evil feudal exploitation. Novels penned by party authors during the first days of land reform were heralded as literary field guides for fomenting class struggle in the countryside. Visitors to land reform exhibits saw this narrative visualized through photographs, paintings, and rural artifacts. In recognition of the centrality of this story for the course of land reform, the chapters of this book follow the narrative’s arc, analyzing the party’s attempt to transform the Chinese countryside through revolution, step by step. Each chapter begins with narrative treatments drawn from the work of the most talented authors to detail land reform: Ding Ling, Zhang Ailing, and William Hinton. The book also presents images from the massive Wuhan land reform exhibit, which visualized the story of agrarian revolution from start to finish. The first chapter of this story is, naturally, the arrival of the work team.