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Land Reform Pilots and Repression during the Civil War (1946–1949)

During the 1946–1949 civil war, the CCP piloted land reform in liberated areas. From the "May Fourth Directive" to the Outline Land Law of China, "land to the tiller" came with violent landlord-struggle and "grain for the front." Prelude to the 1950 national reform — and the bloodiest laboratory of "strike local tyrants, divide the land."

Time

May 1946 – 1949 (peak: 1947–1948)

Place

Jin-Cha-Ji, Jin-Ji-Lu-Yu, Northeast and other liberated areas

Decision-makers

Mao Zedong (May Fourth Directive, overall line); Liu Shaoqi (in charge); regional bureaus and land-reform work teams

Background: from rent reduction to "land to the tiller"

During the anti-Japanese war, the CCP's base areas practiced "rent and interest reduction," uniting with landlords against Japan. After the civil war erupted in 1946, the Party pivoted to thorough land reform to mobilize peasants for the war.

May 4, 1946: The Center's "Directive on the Land Question" ("May Fourth Directive") replaced reduction with "land to the tiller," confiscating landlord land for peasants. Pilots spread across liberated areas.

Who decided

Mao Zedong was the supreme decision-maker. Chain: Mao set the tone → the CCP Central Committee issued directives → Liu Shaoqi oversaw the drafting of the Outline Land Law of China → the liberated areas executed.

• 1927 "Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan": Mao advocated mobilizing poor peasants for violent "struggle," rejecting peaceful reform — "revolution is not a dinner party."
• May 4, 1946 "May 4th Directive": the CCP Center replaced wartime rent-reduction with confiscation and redistribution — "land to the tiller."
• July–September 1947 National Land Conference: Liu Shaoqi oversaw the Outline Land Law (promulgated October 10, 1947) — abolishing feudal land ownership; peasant associations seized all landlord land, plus surplus grain, livestock, tools and houses.
• Mao's line: "The Present Situation and Our Tasks" (December 1947) — "overthrow the landlord class"; "On Several Important Questions of Current Party Policy" (January 1948) — strike landlords "resolutely and ruthlessly."
• Black box: internal deliberations were never disclosed; the Mao–Liu differences over "leftist" excesses are known only from later documents. Not invented here.

Detailed timeline

May–December 1946: The May Fourth Directive sent work teams into villages to "visit the poor," classifying class statuses.

July–September 1947: The National Land Conference at Xibaipo, Hebei, adopted the Outline Land Law of China — abolishing "feudal and semi-feudal" land tenure, confiscating landlord land.

October 10, 1947: The Outline promulgated; reform rolled out across liberated areas.

1947–1948: The peak. "Struggle landlords" rallies and "speak-bitterness" campaigns swept villages. "Left" excesses ran rampant in Jin-Cha-Ji and Jin-Ji-Lu-Yu — indiscriminate beatings and killings.

1948: Mao Zedong and Ren Bishi moved to correct "left" errors, but the violence had already killed massively.

1949: Newly liberated areas paused reform pending the 1950 Land Reform Law's national rollout.

Violence: struggling landlords, "grain for the front"

Struggling landlords: Work teams mobilized poor peasants to "speak bitterness," dragging landlords and rich peasants onto stages. Dunce caps, parades, binding and hanging-beatings were routine. Deaths at "struggle rallies" were common (exact numbers unverified).

"Grain for the front": Reform and war mobilization were two sides of one coin. Peasants given land owed public grain and military service. "Supporting the front" became a crushing burden — grain requisitioned almost as soon as land was divided.

Arbitrary class labels: "Landlord," "rich peasant," "middle peasant" criteria were vague; many middle and even poor peasants were mislabeled "landlords," struggled and executed.

Who executed

Execution chain: the CCP Center → regional bureaus → county/district party committees → work teams → poor-peasant corps/peasant associations → struggle sessions.

• Work teams: dispatched from above, the actual organizers — mobilizing poor peasants, assigning class labels, running struggle sessions.
• Poor-peasant corps and peasant associations: seized and redistributed land and property; carried out the public denunciation of landlords.
• Struggle sessions: "speaking bitterness" and "settling accounts" before public beatings; in some areas landlords were beaten or driven to death.
• "Leftist" excesses: late 1947–early 1948 saw indiscriminate beatings and killings and violations of middle peasants' interests; the Center began correcting "leftism" in early 1948 (Liu Shaoqi, Ren Bishi).
• Named executors: public sources rarely name grassroots executors for accountability — stated plainly.

Scale & methodology

Who opposed

Landlord resistance was scattered self-preservation; organized public opposition was virtually nonexistent — a direct function of the campaign's violence:

• Flight: some landlords sold property and fled to KMT-held areas or cities; those who stayed were forced to surrender land and property.
• Middle peasants' fear: some were mislabeled as landlords/rich peasants during "leftist" excesses; appeals were suppressed; some were rehabilitated after the 1948 correction.
• The intra-party correction: in early 1948 Liu Shaoqi, Ren Bishi and others reined in excesses — a limited correction of methods, not of land reform's direction.
• No public opposition: under the line of "overthrowing the landlord class," questioning land reform was a "class-standpoint problem." The silence is recorded as such.

Impact: prelude to the 1950 national reform

The template set: The civil-war reform fixed the full pattern — work teams, speak-bitterness, struggle landlords, divide land — replicated nationally after the 1950 Land Reform Law.

Violence normalized: The 1947–1948 "left" violence proved mass campaigns, once launched, cannot be controlled — a lesson replayed in every later movement.

Difference from 1950: The civil-war reform served war mobilization — hastier, more violent; the 1950 reform had fuller legal procedure (the Land Reform Law), but the violent essence was identical.

Where the land stood before reform: what tenancy actually looked like

Any account of land reform has to begin with the distribution it set out to overturn, together with a warning that the baseline figures are themselves disputed. The most commonly cited set derives from the surveys of the 1930s: the work of the Nationalist government's Land Commission and the great rural survey directed by John Lossing Buck. On those figures, landlords and rich peasants, roughly a tenth of farm households, held about half of the cultivated land in their hands, while tenants and part-tenants together made up more than half of all farm households and owned little or nothing. The regional variation hidden inside those averages was enormous, and it governed everything that followed. On the North China plain, owner-cultivators predominated and a great many villages contained no large landlord at all. Tenancy ran deepest in the lower Yangtze valley and the Pearl River Delta, where tenants formed more than sixty percent of households in parts of Guangdong, and it was likewise entrenched in the Sichuan basin, where large estates and rent in kind were the norm. A single uniform policy therefore descended on village structures that had almost nothing in common. In a North China village composed of owner-cultivators, a work team under orders to uncover a landlord class and confiscate its land had first to manufacture the class it proposed to expropriate, grading the landlord label upward until it rested on prosperous middle peasants, on households that ran a small workshop or a mill, on anyone whose granary was visibly fuller than his neighbour's. That is precisely what the misclassification of the second half of 1947 in Jin-Cha-Ji and Jin-Ji-Lu-Yu consisted of, and the Centre's own correction documents, read carefully, say so.

Communist policy on the land had swung twice before 1946, and the swings explain the speed of the third. During the Land Revolution decade, from 1927 to 1937, the soviets confiscated landlord land for distribution to poor peasants and hired hands and struck at rich peasants in the same movement. For the sake of the anti-Japanese united front, the Central Committee announced in 1937 that confiscation would cease, and substituted the milder policy of rent and interest reduction: rents cut by twenty-five percent from their existing level, in the formula universally known as the two-five reduction, and interest on loans capped at one and a half percent a year. That policy ran for nearly ten years. By 1946, therefore, landlord and tenant relations in the old liberated areas had already been adjusted once, moderately and by decree. The turn of 1946 was not a beginning from nothing. It was a second and far larger step taken on top of rent reduction, a jump in a single season from reduced rents to outright confiscation and redistribution. The size of the jump can be measured in the texts themselves. The May Fourth Directive of 1946 still instructed localities that the land of middle peasants should in general not be touched, and confined confiscation to landlords and old-style rich peasants. The Outline Land Law adopted seventeen months later went much further. It abolished landlord landownership altogether. It confiscated the landlord's draught animals, farm tools, surplus grain and surplus housing along with his land. And it directed that all the land of a village be received by the peasant association and distributed equally, per head of population, among all the village's inhabitants. Distribution equally per head meant in practice that a middle peasant holding more than the per-head average surrendered the excess into the common pool. The violation of middle-peasant interests that the correction campaign of 1948 would formally admit was not an accident of over-enthusiastic implementation. It was written into the arithmetic of the Outline itself.

The Jin-Sui laboratory: Caijiaya, Haojiapo and Kang Sheng's methods

The most radical pilot of 1947, and the one that later central documents cite most often as a warning, ran in the Jin-Sui border region of northwestern Shanxi. In June 1947 Li Jingquan, secretary of the Jin-Sui sub-bureau, together with Kang Sheng, who had been sent to work in the region, convened a conference of prefectural party secretaries at Caijiaya in Xingxian county. The conference raised the slogan that has followed the episode ever since: lighting fires in every village, smoke from every household. It ordered a thorough re-examination of landholding throughout the region and a completely fresh assignment of class status, village by village, on the premise that the classification inherited from the rent-reduction years had been far too lenient. Kang Sheng's own pilot work in the village of Haojiapo became the regional model, and its features were these. Landlord and rich-peasant property was to be dug out three feet deep, the phrase being literal, a direction to search floors and walls for buried silver and grain until nothing concealed remained. Settlement of accounts at struggle sessions was to be total. And corporal punishment of the struggled, which the directives formally discouraged, was in practice tolerated by the men running the pilot, because it produced confessions of concealment faster than argument did.

The regional newspaper, the Jin-Sui Daily, editorialized in praise of thoroughgoing methods. The Centre's response at the time was not the clean repudiation that later accounts suggest. In August 1947 Mao wrote to the Northwest Bureau and the Jin-Sui sub-bureau criticizing a Jin-Sui Daily editorial reviewing land reform work for adopting, in his phrase, a rightist stand — that is, for being too soft in its self-assessment. The correspondence is worth dwelling on for what it reveals about the correction that followed. The Centre's attitude toward Jin-Sui through the summer and autumn of 1947 oscillated between endorsement of its thoroughness and alarm at its results, and the eventual correction, when it came in the winter, was directed at methods and proportions rather than at the men who had set the tone. The retrospective record is blunter than the contemporary one. Hu Qiaomu, who served as Mao's secretary and later wrote a memoir of him, recalled that the killings during the Jin-Sui reform were grave, and that in some places the struggle meeting had become indistinguishable from an execution ground. Bo Yibo, in his memoir of major decisions and events, likewise concedes that the left errors of the Jin-Sui reform inflicted serious losses on the party's own rural base. Correction began in Jin-Sui in the winter of 1947, and by the early spring of 1948 it had overshot in the opposite direction in a number of villages, where struggle fruits were returned to landlords wholesale and the poor peasants who had received them were left exposed. The episode's value to an archive is its completeness. Mobilization, extremity, correction and relapse are all documented in sequence, in the party's own paper trail, within a single region and a single year. Jin-Sui is the best available sample of the rhythm that the national reform would go on to repeat at national scale.

The novelist Zhao Shuli was elevated in these same years as the model writer of land reform, and his case belongs in the record for a reason that has nothing to do with literature. His novel Changes in Li Village and his story “The Floor” are both set in Jin-Sui reform villages and were promoted as truthful pictures of the movement. Zhao himself served with a work team in a Jin-Sui village during 1947, and by the evidence of his published chronology and the recollections of colleagues who worked beside him, he resisted the indiscriminate beatings he witnessed and argued against them inside the work team. The point for an archive is about sources. Land reform produced two faces in the same villages in the same weeks: the emancipation narrative of turning over, of speaking bitterness, of dividing the fruits of struggle to the households that had never owned land, and the violence of the struggle session itself, the binding, the hanging up, the deaths. The propaganda system of the period permitted only the first of those faces to be printed. The land-reform novels and films that poured out through the 1950s fixed that permitted face as the standard national memory of the movement, complete in every detail except one. The men beaten to death at the meetings do not appear in it.

The technology of class labels: three years, exploitation ratios and Ren Bishi's speech

A landlord, in the machinery of the reform, was not a natural kind waiting to be found. The label was computed, and the computation had rules. The governing standard descended from the 1933 Soviet government pamphlet How to Analyse the Classes in the Countryside. By that standard, a landlord owned land, did not labour himself or laboured only incidentally, and lived by collecting rent from those who did. A rich peasant owned part of the land he farmed, laboured with his own hands, and at the same time rented out the remainder, lent money, or hired labour, drawing more than twenty-five percent of his total income from those exploitative sources. A middle peasant owned most of what he farmed and lived mainly by his own labour. The computation ran over the three years immediately before reform began in the locality, a provision designed, at least in intention, to prevent a single good or bad harvest, or a family's recent ruin, from fixing its political fate. Whether a household's surplus grain was confiscated and its men struggled in public, or whether it stood with the majority and received a share of the fruits, turned on arithmetic of this kind performed by a work team under time pressure in a village where it knew nobody.

On 12 January 1948 Ren Bishi, one of the party's five senior secretaries, delivered a long speech entitled “Some Problems in Land Reform” to an enlarged conference of the Northwest Field Army's front committee. The speech was devoted in large part to the chaos that classification had produced, and its examples were chosen to shame the classifiers. He pointed to localities that had labelled as landlords men who owned a draught animal or two and rented out a scrap of marginal land, and as rich peasants middle peasants whose whole offence was hiring a single long-term hand at harvest pressure. He required strict application of the exploitation ratio and the three-year rule. And he laid down the proportions within which the whole operation was supposed to stay: landlords and rich peasants together should generally not exceed ten percent of a village's households, the true figure in most places being nearer eight percent, and the two categories together a small minority of the population by design. Mao read the speech, revised it, and circulated it as a central document. It stands as one of the core texts of the correction of 1948, and its existence is the strongest single proof that the Centre knew, by the beginning of that year, in documented detail, what its classifications were doing in the villages.

Standards on paper nevertheless met incentives in the field, and the incentives usually won. A work team that classified high produced more struggle targets, more confiscated property to distribute, and a village that looked thoroughly remade; it read, in reports upward, as zeal. A work team that classified low produced little to show and exposed itself to the standing charge of rightism, of sheltering landlords, of having been bought with dinners by the very families it had been sent to dispossess. Under that asymmetry the standard's three safeguards, the three-year window, the twenty-five percent ratio and the ten percent ceiling, were breached again and again through the winter of 1947. The correction, when the Centre imposed it, was correspondingly elaborate. In February 1948 Mao drafted central instructions distinguishing old liberated areas, semi-old areas and newly liberated areas, and ruled that the old areas should conduct a review of completed reform rather than any fresh general redistribution. On 22 February, a report by Xi Zhongxun on the reform at Yihezhen in Suide, which had criticized work teams for bypassing the villagers entirely and running the reform as an administrative operation performed upon them, drew a long commendatory annotation from Mao and was circulated to the whole party as a model of how the thing should have been done. On 1 April 1948, addressing a conference of cadres in Jin-Sui itself, Mao stated the general line in the form it afterward kept: rely on the poor peasants, unite with the middle peasants, abolish the system of feudal exploitation step by step and with distinctions drawn, and develop agricultural production. In the same speech he admitted formally that localities everywhere had violated the interests of the middle peasants and damaged urban industry and commerce in the course of the reform. The density of high-level documents through that winter and spring establishes that the correction was genuine. Its limits are written in the same documents. The correction adjusted the method of classification and policed its proportions. It never questioned the confiscation of landlord land, and it never questioned mass struggle as the instrument of confiscation. The dead of the previous autumn could not be corrected back to life, and the rehabilitation files of 1948 concern, almost by the nature of the process, the living.

The logistics ledger: labour, grain and the wheelbarrow armies

The connection between land reform and the logistics of the civil war can be stated in numbers, so long as the numbers are allowed to carry their provenance openly. The best-known set concerns the civilian support effort for the Huaihai Campaign of November 1948 to January 1949, as compiled in the campaign summaries and in the PLA's official war history. On that account, the East China, Central Plains and North China liberated areas together turned out 5.43 million civilian labourers for the campaign: 220,000 of them in standing transport units that accompanied the armies throughout, 1.3 million in second-line transport behind the front, and 3.91 million in temporary service in the rear areas. The same effort raised 960 million jin of grain, close to half a million tons, from the villages of the three regions. Ammunition and supplies reached the front on 880,000 wheelbarrows, on 305,000 carrying-pole sets slung across men's shoulders, and on carts of every description numbered in the hundreds of thousands; the cart totals differ between versions of the official summary and are given here as the war-history account rather than as a census. Chen Yi, who commanded in the campaign, remarked at its summing-up conference in 1949 that the victory at Huaihai had been pushed out by the people with their small wheelbarrows. The sentence has been quoted ever since, usually as celebration. Read as logistics, it is simply accurate, and its scale is the point that matters for this page. Millions of men's labour and nearly a billion jin of grain were levied, in a single campaign, from villages that had just completed land reform or were in the middle of it.

That timing was not a coincidence, and it was not concealed at the time. Receiving land, paying the public grain levy, and sending sons into the army arrived in the same households in the same season, by design. A peasant who had been given a landlord's field in the autumn distribution understood, and was told, what the field obliged him to. The reform's function as an engine of political mobilization and the war's appetite for food, porters and recruits were a single ledger kept in one book, and the party's own documents of the period discuss them in the same paragraphs. The other side of the ledger is the distribution of the burden, and it too is documented. The grain levy was progressive in form, assessed on land and on estimated yield. But wartime yields were estimated and reported upward by village cadres under pressure to meet quotas, and every over-estimate was paid for out of the two categories of grain a peasant household could least spare, its eating grain and its seed grain. Reports surviving from Jin-Ji-Lu-Yu and Jin-Cha-Ji in 1947 and 1948 record levies that overshot, villages short of food in the spring hungry season, and in consequence a repeated series of central orders through 1948 requiring burdens to be lightened and subsistence grain left untouched. The human cost of the support armies themselves was never systematically counted. Official commemorative materials for Huaihai give civilian dead and injured at more than fifteen thousand; another figure in wide circulation gives about eleven thousand; most of the casualties in either account were the product of Nationalist air attack on the transport columns and of exhaustion and disease on the roads. The discrepancy between the two figures has never been resolved, and this page marks both as commemorative accounts that no independent body has verified. Set the two sides of the ledger together and the record reads whole. The reform genuinely transferred land to poor peasants and hired hands who had never owned any. In the same months it drew labour, grain and recruits out of those same villages at a rate no Chinese government had ever sustained. An archive that prints only one side of that sentence has not simplified the record. It has falsified it.

The toll: competing accounts, and the 1950 dividing line

The table on this page records that no systematic official figure for deaths in the old-area reform of 1946 to 1949 has ever been published, and that absence deserves to be made concrete rather than merely noted. Official publications on the period concede “leftist errors” and “indiscriminate beatings and killings” as matters of political character while supplying no number of any kind. County-level figures scattered through the local gazetteers published since the 1980s cannot responsibly be added together, because their time periods, their territorial boundaries and their definitions of a land-reform death do not match one another. Scholarly estimates, for their part, span a wide and genuinely uncertain range. Researchers working from local archives, gazetteers and memoir material place the landlords, rich peasants and misclassified householders beaten to death at struggle sessions or driven to suicide in the old areas during these years in the hundreds of thousands. Other studies estimate abnormal deaths across the entire span of land reform from 1946 to 1953, the new-area campaign after 1950 included, at between one and two million. That combined figure is repeatedly borrowed, in journalism and on the internet, to fill the civil-war column of the account, and the borrowing is illegitimate: most of the combined figure's weight belongs to the years after 1950, and none of it was compiled for the period this page covers. Suzanne Pepper's study of land reform in North China, among the most cited works in Western scholarship on the subject, concentrates on process and deliberately declines to offer a national total at all. This page follows the state of the evidence. For 1946 to 1949 the honest entry is that the official record publishes no number, that scholarly estimates run into the hundreds of thousands, and that every one of those estimates is unverified against any complete register, because no complete register exists.

The dividing line against the reform of 1950 must be drawn sharply in any archive, because the two campaigns are conflated constantly and the conflation corrupts every total built on it. On 30 June 1950 the Central People's Government promulgated the Land Reform Law of the People's Republic of China, and reform rolled out across the newly liberated areas of the centre, south and southwest, which between them held more than half of the country's agricultural population. That campaign was substantially complete by the spring of 1953. The 1950 law differed from the Outline Land Law of 1947 in substance and not merely in presentation. The economy of the rich peasants was to be protected, and rich-peasant land was exempt from confiscation. Only landlord land was taken. Landlords themselves were to be dealt with through the people's tribunals, under forms of law, and indiscriminate beating and killing were expressly forbidden in the text. Read clause by clause, the 1950 law is a direct reply to the documented experience of 1947 and 1948, drafted by men who had spent the winter of those years correcting the earlier campaign and who wrote its lessons into statute, even though violence in the execution of the later campaign did not disappear. The death estimates follow the same division. For the new-area reform of 1950 to 1953, scholarly figures run from the hundreds of thousands to above two million, and they belong to that campaign and to this site's Land Reform page, which covers it. The present page covers 1946 to 1949, and the two pages do not double-count. A reader who encounters a headline figure for deaths in “the land reform” anywhere, in any language, should ask three questions of it before repeating it: which years does it cover, which territory, and by what method was it built. A total that cannot answer those questions is not a statistic. It is a slogan wearing a statistic's clothes, and this archive declines to quote it.

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