Mao’s China · 1949
Did land reform win the villages by land or by violence?
The seminar question: “Did land reform secure the countryside for the Party chiefly through the land it gave or through the violence it organised?”
After Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic on 1 October 1949, the PLA still had to take the south-west and Hainan, while the Nationalists withdrew to Taiwan. The Party ruled at first through the “New Democracy” coalition and the Common Program, while land reform assigned class labels that lasted a generation.
WW2 is free — every chapter. Try chapters 1–2 of any 2 other atlases (3 with a free account). Opening a new atlas uses one of them. Membership opens all 21 — Join.
The new state began as an army that had to become a government, and the map of October 1949 shows how much of the country was still unconquered. The People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, was the ruling Communist Party’s army, much like a party militia grown to national size, and it was about five million strong. The arrows show Liu Bocheng and Deng Xiaoping’s forces driving into Guizhou and Sichuan, where Chongqing fell on 30 November and Chengdu on 27 December, and Lin Biao’s forces sweeping into Guangxi and across the strait to Hainan in April 1950. The Nationalists withdrew to Taiwan with about two million people, and after an assault on Kinmen island failed in October 1949, the chance of finishing the war across the strait slipped away. Until 1954 China was run as six great regions under military-administrative committees, boards of generals and Party officials, so the first rulers of the People’s Republic were its soldiers.
The short answer
- An army that had already won. The Party came to power through the People’s Liberation Army, which had grown to about five million soldiers by 1949 and had destroyed the Nationalist field armies in the great battles of 1948–49. Military victory gave the new state something no Chinese government had possessed since 1911, a single army obeying a single command across almost the whole country. The discipline that had won the war, with a political commissar in every unit, became the template for governing, and generals ran the six great regions into which China was divided until 1954.
- A country exhausted by war and inflation. After eight years of war with Japan and three more of civil war, many Chinese cared above all about order, whatever ideology came with it. Prices under the last Nationalist governments had risen so fast that the gold yuan, introduced in August 1948, was worthless within a year. The new government, guided on economics by Chen Yun, brought inflation under control by early 1950 by gathering grain and cloth into state hands and balancing the budget. Stable prices won the regime acceptance in cities that had never supported it.
- Land hunger and the landlord’s power. Close to 480 million Chinese lived in the countryside, and in much of the south a minority of landlords owned a large share of the best land, which they rented out for half the harvest or more. Landlords were often also the local moneylenders, tax collectors and militia leaders, so land meant power as well as income. The Communists had learned in their base areas since the 1920s that promising land won recruits, and turning that promise into national law gave poor peasants in every province a reason to back the Party.
- The Cold War chose sides early. The United States went on recognising the Nationalist government, and Mao judged that a revolution facing American hostility needed a great-power protector, which led to the Moscow treaty of February 1950. When the Korean War began that June, President Truman sent the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait and froze the civil war in place. From its first year the new state faced an enemy across the sea, a fact that justified vigilance, secrecy and campaigns against hidden enemies at home.
THE TURNING POINT
Tiananmen, 1 October 1949. The proclamation was the hinge because it turned an insurgent party into a state with the authority to decide who belonged to “the people”. Before October 1949 the Communists governed base areas that they might lose; afterwards they controlled ministries, courts, schools and the national budget, and the Common Program gave their power the form of law. The choice of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, from which emperors had issued their edicts, told the country that a new kind of dynasty had begun. Everything that follows in this atlas, from land reform to the Cultural Revolution, was done in the name of the state proclaimed that afternoon.
What it changed
War arrives before the state is built. The new state had to fight a great power before it had finished building itself. Eight months after the proclamation the Korean War began, and in October 1950 China sent its army across the Yalu, the river border with Korea. War with the United States gave the new government a reason to hunt enemies at home and the public mood in which to do it, so the campaigns of 1950–53 were far harsher than the coalition of 1949 had promised. The war also made loyalty measurable, since every citizen could be asked to denounce, donate or enlist.
Class labels that lasted a generation. The labels fixed during land reform were recorded in household files and inherited by children. A family marked “landlord” in 1951 faced suspicion in school, work and marriage for decades, and in the Cultural Revolution such families were the first victims of village killings. The new state had created a hereditary underclass in the name of abolishing class, and the files that recorded it outlived Mao himself.
The land given was soon taken back. Peasants held their new fields as private owners for only a few years. From 1953 the state bought grain at prices it set, and by the end of 1956 almost every household had been folded into collectives, so the land that had won peasant support passed to the co-operative and, in 1958, to the commune. Ownership had been the reward for supporting the revolution, and it turned out to be a loan.
Two Chinas. The failure at Kinmen and the arrival of the American fleet left the Nationalist Republic of China alive on Taiwan, holding China’s seat at the United Nations. The question of which government spoke for China shaped Beijing’s diplomacy until 1971, when it won the seat, and the strait remains divided today. A failed landing on a small island in 1949 still shapes the politics of East Asia.
The full answer, argued
Both explanations have strong evidence, and the best answers show how they worked together. The land mattered: about 300 million peasants received fields, tools and grain, and many families remembered fanshen, “turning over”, as the first time they had owned anything, which is why Hinton’s villagers defended the new order. The violence did a different kind of work. Struggle meetings made peasants accuse, vote and sometimes kill, and people who had taken part had every reason to fear the return of the old elite, so their loyalty rested on complicity as well as gratitude. Dikötter weighs the terror heavily, while DeMare and earlier writers give more room to the material gains, and a death toll estimated at one to two million is too uncertain to settle the debate by itself. The next decade adds evidence, because the same peasants lost their land to collectives within five years and resisted mostly in quiet ways, by slaughtering livestock or leaving co-operatives, without open revolt in the Han heartland. That suggests the lasting bond was fear and dependence as much as ownership. The wider lesson is that revolutionary states often secure loyalty by making their supporters share responsibility for what was done.
An interesting fact
Mao’s most quoted sentence of 1949, “The Chinese people have stood up”, belongs to a different day. He spoke it on 21 September, in his opening speech to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, and popular memory later moved it to the Tiananmen rostrum. The flag raised on 1 October was chosen from nearly 3,000 entries sent in by the public. Its designer, Zeng Liansong, an economics graduate working in Shanghai, had placed a hammer and sickle inside the large star; the committee removed them, leaving the five yellow stars on red that fly today.
This is the study layer of Mao’s consolidation and land reform, chapter 1 of The People’s Republic under Mao, 1949–1976; the full index of the atlas is here.
Related questions
THE FREE PRINTABLE STUDY GUIDE
Join the Dispatch — a short welcome series, then a letter when a new atlas opens — and the printable study guide for The People’s Republic under Mao is yours now, free.
NO TRACKING · YOUR ADDRESS IS USED FOR THE DISPATCH AND NOTHING ELSE · UNSUBSCRIBE ANYTIME