Land Reform and Early Agricultural Change, 1949–57 (Edexcel A Level History: Route E: Communist states in the twentieth century): Revision Note

Summary

• Mao needed to increase the amount of food produced in China

  • The populations of towns and cities were growing and were set to grow even more

  • Urban populations tend to consume food without producing it

• The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was very popular amongst the peasants in the countryside

  • Mao was eager to maintain this popularity whilst increasing the food supply

  • He instructed that land be seized from landlords and redistributed to the peasants

• There was then a gradual move towards creating a Communist society in the countryside with the establishment of Mutual Aid Teams (MATs) and Agricultural Producers' Co-operatives (APCs)

• Private ownership of land was not compatible with the Communist Revolution

  • So the pragmatism of the early years was abandoned in the mid-1950s, and collectivisation was enforced.

Land reform: Attacks on landlordism and redistribution of land

• China's landlords had long been viewed as class enemies by the CCP

  • The CCP's policy of seizing land from landowners and redistributing it to peasants had won them many supporters in the countryside

  • This had been taking place in Communist controlled areas long before 1949

• Once in power, the CCP stepped up their attacks on Landlordism

  • Work Teams were dispatched to villages

  • Peasants were encouraged to denounce their landlords as capitalist enemies of the revolution who had exploited their labour

  • Anger and ill-feeling were whipped up by the Work Teams

  • Landlords were often physically dragged to 'struggle meetings'

• Estimates suggest that between a million and two million landlords were executed during the process of redistributing the land

  • The figure given depends on the source used

• The redistribution took place rapidly

• By 1953, approximately 43 per cent of the land had been redistributed to 60 per cent of the population

• It had a dramatic impact on food production

  • Between 1950 and 1952, agricultural production increased by up to 5 per cent every year

Agricultural collectivisation: from voluntary cooperation to enforced communes

Mutual Aid Teams (MATs)

• With the redistribution of land underway, the CCP sent Mutual Aid Teams (MATs) out into the countryside in 1951

• These MATs organised peasants into teams of ten or fewer households

  • This would enable them to pool tools, animals and fertiliser as well as their labour and land and work towards common goals

  • The MATs were popular and helped increase production

Agricultural Producers' Co-operatives (APCs)

• The next step in trying to create a Communist society in the countryside was the introduction of the Agricultural Producers' Co-operatives (APCs)

  • These organised peasants into groups of 30 to 50 households

  • The APCs took a share of the harvest and gave the peasants either money or grain in return

    • The peasants still owned the land

  • Many peasants objected to this and attempted to stay outside of the APCs

  • Some even slaughtered animals rather than give them to the APC

• The consequence of many peasants resisting the APCs was a disappointing increase in agricultural production

  • Between 1953 and 1954, the increase in grain production was less than two per cent

Collectivisation

• Up until 1955, the approach to the agricultural reforms had been gradual and pragmatic

  • The CCP had been trying to balance increasing food production and popularity with the peasants with their Communist principles and ideals

• However, in July 1955, Mao decided that he was not going to replace one set of private landowners with another

• The CCP introduced full, enforced collectivisation

  • All private ownership was banned, and no compensation was given

  • All land, equipment, tools and animals were to be shared by the APC

  • Membership of an APC became compulsory

• At the beginning of 1956, around 66 per cent of Chinese peasants were part of an APC

  • Just 4 per cent were part of Higher-Level APCs that contained two or three hundred households

• By the end of 1956, around 88 per cent of peasants were members of Higher-Level APCs

  • All land had been taken over by the state, and privately owned land had all but disappeared

How successfully did the CCP transform Chinese agriculture in the years 1949 to 1957?

• The dramatic changes to Chinese agriculture can be viewed in different ways

  • Some historians see it as utterly transforming the lives of hundreds of millions of people in just a few years

  • Others see the changes as merely replacing private landlords with one huge landlord - the CCP

Monumental Change

• Mao completely transformed the lives of hundreds of millions of people in just a handful of years

Key historians

For a brief period after the creation of the PRC, Mao had encouraged the peasants to seize the land. They had been quick to respond. Landlords and their families had been attacked and killed in an orgy of retribution, but Mao did not intend the peasants to become private proprietors. He wanted China to be a communal society. Stilling protests from a number of his colleagues, most notably Deng Zihui, whose objection was not so much to the policy itself but to the pace of it, Mao demanded that communes be created throughout China to take the place of private farming. Squads of Party cadres were sent to the countryside. Their task was to organise the local people into peasant associations, which, under CCP direction, then introduced collectivisation. Mutual Aid Teams supervised the pooling of land, tools and resources and the creation of rural communes and co-operatives.The speed of the change was staggering. By the beginning of 1957, practically the whole of the Chinese peasantry had been collectivised; barely three per cent of farms remained in private hands. Mao had stood the revolution on its head. Under his direction, ‘the revolutionary state, having established its legitimacy by freeing the peasant from landlordism . . . had become the ultimate landlord’.14 His own comment on this remarkable achievement in centralised control was: ‘The peasants want freedom, but we want socialism.’

Michael Lynch, Mao, Second Edition, 2017

A Change in Landlords

• Private landlords had benefited from the labour of peasants for thousands of years

  • Mao's changes meant it was now the CCP that benefited

Key historians

"The socialist transformation of agriculture, which was not to have been completed until 1971, had been accomplished fifteen years early. Ideologically, it was a tremendous success. Politically, it was a mixed blessing. Economically, it held the seeds of disaster, for it convinced Mao and other leaders that, given the will to succeed, material conditions need not be decisive.

Collectivisation sapped the energies of the countryside for a generation to come, causing a levelling-down of rural society which stifled independent initiative, demotivated the most productive, rewarded the least capable, and replaced the rule of the landlords and literati with rule by the Party branch, whose members enjoyed power and privilege unconstrained by the fear of banditry and rebellion that, for centuries past, had kept their predecessors in check."

Philip Short, Mao: The Man Who Made China, 2016