1947: The Logic of Communist Land Redistribution in China

 

"Die Geschichte aller bisherigen Gesellschaft ist die Geschichte von Klassenkämpfen.”

Karl Marx, Manifesto, 1848.

"The class struggles of the peasants, the peasant uprisings and peasant wars constituted the real motive force of historical development in Chinese feudal society.”

Mao Zedong, The Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party, 1939.

On the surface, in the official documents of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and according to the representations propagated by key United Front players, such as Edgar Snow and Song Qingling (LOVELL pp. 60-87, cp. CHANG), the peasant revolution appears to have a satisfactory mathematical and emotional simplicity, so as to suffice the most ardent of the downtrodden and the most progressive of intellectuals in the pursuit of justice. Everyone receives an equal piece of land; except the criminals, traitors, incorrigibles, etc., who will receive nothing. The villages will be organised democratically and all voices will be equal.[1] No one at the entrance to the kingdom of freedom (Reich der Freiheit, Marx) should ask the question "What next?”. What will happen in the next ten years after all the plots have been redistributed, the feudal chains broken? Following "liberation", this "turning over of the body" (fanshen 翻身) that marks the minds of the women interviewed by HERSHATTER, what would happen economically and politically? If a young ardent party follower had been questioned in the lower ranks, what might he have said in 1947? Probably nothing that would be very convincing in retrospect.

What could have motivated the party to launch a redistribution of land that claimed to be egalitarian, but which redistributed only 43% of the land just for it to be transformed into state property by the mid-1950s (LEESE p. 50)? A Chinese intellectual by the name of QIN Hui offers the following assessment of the 1947 rural terror that cost a quarter of a million lives (figure of Yang Kuisong, quoted in both LEESE and DEMAIRE): “Statistics have shown that 70% of deaths during [Civil War-era] land reform occurred around 1947 in the [areas that the CCP had been in charge of for a long time during the War of Resistance against Japan, O.D.S.], and in [these so-called laoqu 老區, O.D.S.] old areas, land reform did not really have the function of equalizing land. [Here I omit several paragraphs, O.D.S.] The point of reinvestigating again and again was not to find a bit more land, but to shed more blood, and to create an atmosphere of life-or-death struggle-this was the only way to achieve a high degree of mobilization.” Furthermore, “rural society completely lost its ability to autonomously govern itself” because of this “class struggle”, facilitating the party's seizure of political power in the rural areas. Linked to the murderous dynamics of classicide[2] was then an undisclosed strategy directed by the central organs fuelled by Mao Zedong's personal vision.

Behind the facade—of sham elections at the egalitarian village level (HILL pp. 194-5) or the propaganda of a charming 'Edgarian' Mao trying to unite all social classes by writing in favour of New Democracy in 1940—the steel fist of the Chinese secret service and the Organisation Bureau’s (zuzhibu 組織部) meticulous management of the population recreated political and economic power relations in the communist base areas (see Map). In the same way that the party controls its members with the creation of categories in the so-called party line struggle (see ISHIKAWA and SMITH), the Organisation Bureau was designed to classify newcomers from outside the communist base areas according to their loyalty and good behaviour (see GAO), always concerned that spies or traitors might be found amongst them, a consistent filtering by means of a constant stream of interrogations was thus established in Yan'an to consolidate ideological homogeneity. Differentiating rural classes into the groupings distinguished by MAO in his 1933 article (see "How to Differentiate the Classes in the Rural Areas"), at the same time, made it possible to control the peasantry in the rural class struggle for their predetermined political role in the new order. This role was to participate in a Maoist society, especially after Mao's apotheosis during the Rectification campaign (1942-5), i.e. a model that follows the developmental stages and priorities specified below, which emerged through this process of straightening the party line.

Map: 'Former liberated areas', laojiefangqu 老解放區 in dark grey (Source: SAICH p. 92)
In How the Red Sun Rose, GAO examines, among other things, the campaign against the "AB League" in Jiangxi/Fujian, the Zunyi conference, the elimination of Trotskyites and the Rectification campaign in Yan'an, as well as the Emergency Rescue campaign in the base areas—not all of which are visible on this map—of Shaan-Gan-Ning, Jin-Cha-Ji, Jin-Sui, Taihang, Central China Base Area—and the absence of this campaign in Shandong.

The Chinese secret service created by the Soviet Union in the 1920s (FALIGOT pp. 27-8) borrowed the interrogation methods that the Cheka under Lenin had taught them, and would borrow those of the OGPU (successor to the Cheka) under Stalin when secret service chief Kang Sheng (康生) returned to China (along with Wang Ming, the CCP's representative to the Comintern) from his stay in Moscow during the Great Terror of 1937-8. Throughout the period 1930-1945 (analysed in GAO), CCP leaders grafted Soviet institutions onto their government structure, including some stages of the Stalinist terror (cp. WERTH with GAO), e.g. the anti-Trotskyite campaign. The Maoist Rectification campaign launched in Yan'an in 1942 imposed the writing of autobiographies as well as diaries for the denunciation of oneself and others. These were used for interrogating “enemy spies”, during which the accused was tortured by being deprived of sleep, among other things (thus prefiguring the Hundred Flowers of 1956 in its means of attracting people critical of the communist party, publicly claiming to improve party democracy through democratic criticism, merely in order to accuse of espionage and interrogate critically minded individuals). Anti-spy campaigns were characteristic of Stalinist terror in Asia, against the Japanese or anyone else, as long as they were designated undesirables by communist agitators of a given region (for Mongolia and Xinjiang, see HIROAKI).

Already the terror against “social democrats” in the early 1930s perpetrated in Mao's personal military dictatorship in Jiangxi base area seems to be grafted from the Leninist terror against social revolutionary rivals during the civil war (1918-21).[3] This is not surprising when one remembers that it was the base in which the party founded the Soviet Republic of China in 1931, close in its organization to the other Soviet republics of the time. The analytical key the book How the Red Sun Rose by GAO Hua provides, in my opinion, is the substantial theoretical and organizational familiarity that the Chinese had with the Bolshevik system rather than a distinctly Chinese form of traditional hierarchy which Mao is supposed to have added to socialism, or with which he would have corrupted it (as some Chinese dissidents, like WANG Zhian, would like to see in this account). Mao had a certain willingness to experiment and a degree of independence, certainly; but his textbook is communist, more concretely it is The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik), Short Course published in 1938.[4] The strategy of the Chinese revolution is built on the conclusions reached within it. On page 390 STALIN optimistically concludes that the middle peasants supported the October Revolution because the alliance between the working class and the poor peasants (“the overwhelming majority of the peasant population”) had a favourable influence on their behaviour, “without this alliance the October Revolution could not have been victorious” ; rallying the middle peasants happens to be one of Mao’s key concerns prior to 1949. Furthermore, in order to fight the Russian landlords in 1918, the redistribution of confiscated land is represented as a temporary policy implemented by temporary committees of poor peasants (p. 403). The policies of Lenin (who died in 1924) had destroyed capitalism politically by expropriating the landlords and centralising the land, converting it into public property, etc. But in order to defeat capitalism economically, and not only politically, it is necessary, according to STALIN (p. 483), to build a “new Socialist economic system all over the country”, the first step of which must be socialist industrialization, which is the subject of the tenth chapter of the book, simultaneously being a falsified history as well as political textbook. Mao's ideological campaign was part of the updated tradition of the Russian experience considered as the political and economic case study par excellence, which makes him follow in the footsteps of Chinese communists employing textbooks of the 1920s (often translated or re-translated from Japanese, see appendices in ISHIKAWA 2012) based on the distorted history of the Russian revolution as revised by Russian historians under Lenin (see HOLMES). Thus, to a certain extent, the Chinese communists were relying on the changing whim of Moscow in setting the rules as much as the changing narrative of Soviet propaganda (feigning success and triumph) for their campaigns to transform society. That is, up until the Sino-Soviet Split that would notoriously exacerbate when the industrialization and collectivization efforts culminated in the Great Leap Famine of 1958-62. Yet even thereafter, Leninist propaganda about the effectiveness of the Soviet Union's cultural revolution and New Economic Policy in the 1920s would continue to exert its influence into the 1960s, 70s and 80s.

The economists who would develop economic planning in China, Xue Muqiao and Chen Yun (director of the Organization Bureau during the Rectification Campaign), were surely aware that land redistribution was of little economic importance, so there was no need to redistribute everything if the state had enough control in the regions to collectivize agriculture; their aim was not to produce equality of land ownership, but to abolish land ownership by centralizing it later on. What interested the communist economists at the time was industrialization, for which they were prepared to extract as many resources as possible from the peasantry.[5] This is far from the Confucian Literati’s egalitarian ideal during the Han dynasty, of intervening little in the peasant’s activities, as long as the land stays distributed into equal-sized fields (a system called jingtian 井田 laboured by one family per plot, cp. HUAN, see also MOTOKO). Land equality, while being one step in the consolidation of communist power, is not really a logical step towards the industrialization the communist movement so desperately sought.[6]

In conclusion, Maoist land redistribution did not have an economic end, much less one of economic equality. As a mass campaign, it was an invitation for class struggle within the framework of denunciation rituals.[7] The "enemy spy" and the "class enemy" were vague categories that could even lead to the death of the most party-loyal poor peasant, e.g. when—after a first redistribution of land to the tiller—any tiller was at risk to lose his conquered land due to the re-launching of redistribution in the village (examples in DEMAIRE describing the cycle or cycles of land redistribution). The promise of the landlords’ hidden wealth, their wives, and the glory one received fighting class enemies became factors in the continuation and risks in the relaunch of denunciation and deadly struggle. The bureaucratic apparatus gave its full support during the 1947 rural terror (carried out especially in the already redistributed former base areas, as QIN points out) the reason being the guiding function of communist ideology, which gives class struggle precedence above all else. It did this only to then retreat a little to avoid too many “mistakes” being made, sometimes later on rehabilitating wrongly struggled victims, as in 1944 after slowing down the Rectification campaign against spies (Emergency Rescue), due to complaints from Moscow (according to GAO).

After 1949, the party unhesitatingly revived its land reform campaign[8] with Mao's defined quota of 4/1000 people to be killed, for there must be at least as many incorrigible class enemies still within the country (DIKÖTTER), after Chiang Kai-shek and his army had fled to Taiwan. But instead of the reduced agricultural tax previously enjoyed within communist base areas (BIANCO and HUA 2005), in 1950 the PRC copied the land tax in kind that the KMT had introduced for the war effort in 1941, and increased it, leading to peasant revolts (KASKE and LIN pp. 273-4). To quell these revolts, as in the USSR, class struggle, applying MAO's categories (of 1933), was politically very useful. Getting rid of the landed elite and disrupting the land order left room for the new class (in DJILAS’ terminology) to be settled, the cadres of the communist party.

 

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[1] See documents, such as the Communist land law, in NOELLERT.

[2] Term coined by Thierry WOLTON, in the preface to his Global History of Communism, vol. 3. This strategy of rural class war was not unique to China and spread to other places, such as Peru, where the Yan'an precedent was taken as a model in the 1980s: "[María] Pantoja développa une tactique de conquête territoriale à la campagne. D'abord. les colonnes ouvraient des "zones d'opérations", c'est-à-dire de guerre éclair. Cela impliquait d'envahir les récoltes et d'assassiner les autorités, les curés, les maires, même les paysans prospères. On créait ainsi un vide de pouvoir, que les colonnes elles-mêmes remplissaient en organisant des jugements sommaires contre les voleurs de bétail et les violeurs. Les paysans sentaient alors qu'on rétablissait la justice et le principe d'autorité." (RONCAGLIOLO pp. 104-5)

[3] Chapter 1 section II of GAO 2019. Cp. the so-called "excisionary" violence of the Russian civil war in MAZARD 2016.

[4] An academic edition accompanied by a critical apparatus has been available since 2019, see STALIN.

[5] For economic policies during the civil war, see WEBER, "Re-Creating the Economy: Price Stabilization and the Communist Revolution", pp. 69-86, whose finding is that policies, such as the salt monopoly, were carried out preliminarily within a traditional logic of equalizing prices, in a gradual transition to a planned economy (as noted, land reform is not part of the economic logic of this transition). The following chapter deals with extractive Maoist-era economic policies, though rather see Part II of the second volume of Cambridge Economic History of China, 2022.

[6] As emphasized by DJILAS as an objective in both the Russian and the Yugoslav revolutions. China had its own tradition of advocating industrialization through government takeover of industry, that had just been further promoted by the 1935 publication of KANG Youwei’s Datongshu 大同書, in which the following problem with the traditional method of privatizing land through redistribution is pointed out (p. 211): “if we permit people to buy and sell private [real] property, if they all have private real property, then there will not be a levelling of wealth, and there will never be any way [to bring about] equality.”

[7] LEESE adds that (p. 56): "Ohne die Bitterkeitserzählungen [訴苦] wäre die Landreform aus Parteisicht sinnlos geblieben."

[8] The documents used to categorize the rural population were once more MAO’s two articles from 1933. Both articles with some additions made in 1950 can be found together in MAO 1993.