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Politics28 June 1950 – 1953

Land Reform in China

Also called: Agrarian Reform Law, Chinese Land Reform Movement, struggle session

The Agrarian Reform Law of June 1950 launched a nationwide redistribution of landlords’ land to peasants that lasted until 1952–1953. At village “struggle sessions” many landlords were publicly tried and executed.

Liu Shaoqi reporting on land reform to the CPPCC — People’s Pictorial, July 1950
Liu Shaoqi reporting on land reform to the CPPCC — People’s Pictorial, July 1950

《人民画报》 · Public domain · Source

The Communists had carried out land reform in areas they held during the civil war, and on 28 June 1950 the new state promulgated the Agrarian Reform Law, extending it to the countryside of the East, Central-South and Southwest that had not yet been reformed. Work teams entered villages, sorted the population into landlords, rich peasants, middle peasants, poor peasants and labourers, and confiscated landlords’ land, livestock, tools and houses for distribution to the land-poor. Official figures say some 300 million peasants received land.

The reform was driven by village “struggle sessions” at which those classed as landlords were publicly denounced, beaten or executed. Overlapping with the contemporaneous campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries, it cost many lives; estimates of the dead vary widely among scholars, from several hundred thousand to around two million or more.

The redistributed plots did not last. From 1953 mutual-aid teams and elementary co-operatives, then the advanced co-operatives of 1955–1956, collectivised agriculture rapidly, and in 1958 everything was merged into people’s communes.

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States and rulers at the time
People's Republic of China — Paramount leader Mao Zedong

People

  • Mao Zedong1893 – 1976

    key figure · Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party who won the civil war and founded the People’s Republic in 1949, and launched the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution

  • Liu Shaoqi1898 – 1969

    key figure · Chairman of the People’s Republic (1959–1968) who led economic readjustment after the Great Leap Forward, but was branded a “capitalist roader” in the Cultural Revolution, expelled from the party and died in detention

Before and after

Earlier
1950 Korean War
Later
1957 Hundred Flowers and the Anti-Rightist Campaign

Themes that include this event

  • From the Chinese Civil War to the Cultural Revolution1927 – 1976

    From the collapse of the United Front in 1927, through rural bases, the Long March and Yan’an, to the Communists’ victory in the civil war and the founding of the People’s Republic — then land reform, the Great Leap Forward and famine, the Sino-Soviet split and the Cultural Revolution, up to Mao’s death and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976, while the Nationalist government withdrew to Taiwan