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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Any account of land reform has to begin with the distribution it set out to overturn, and with a warning that the baseline figures are themselves disputed. The most commonly cited set comes from the land surveys of the 1930s, the Nationalist government's Land Commission work and the rural surveys directed by John Lossing Buck: landlords and rich peasants, roughly a tenth of farm households, held about half the cultivated land, while tenants and part-tenants made up more than half of all households. The regional variation behind those averages was enormous. On the North China plain owner-cultivators predominated and many villages had no large landlord at all. Tenancy ran highest in the lower Yangtze and the Pearl River Delta, where tenants formed over sixty percent of households in parts of Guangdong, and tenancy was likewise deep in the Sichuan basin. One uniform policy therefore landed on completely different village structures. In a North China village of owner-cultivators, a work team ordered to find a landlord class had to manufacture one, grading the label upward until prosperous middle peasants and households running a small workshop filled the quota. That is precisely what the misclassification of late 1947 in Jin-Cha-Ji and Jin-Ji-Lu-Yu consisted of, and the Centre's own correction documents say so.

Communist policy had swung twice before 1946. 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 as well. For the anti-Japanese united front, the Central Committee announced in 1937 that confiscation would stop, and substituted rent and interest reduction: rents cut by twenty-five percent from the existing level, loan interest capped at one and a half percent a year. That policy ran for nearly ten years, so by 1946 landlord-tenant relations in the old liberated areas had already been adjusted once. The turn of 1946 was therefore not a beginning from nothing but a second, far larger step on top of rent reduction: a jump straight from reduced rents to confiscation and redistribution. The size of the jump is visible in the texts themselves. The May Fourth Directive of 1946 still instructed that middle peasants' land should in general not be touched and listed only landlords and old-style rich peasants as objects of confiscation. The Outline Land Law of 1947 went much further: it abolished landlord landownership altogether, confiscated the landlord's draught animals, tools, surplus grain and surplus housing, and directed that all village land be distributed equally per head of population. Equal distribution per head meant in practice that even a middle peasant's above-average holding went back into the pool — the policy root of the violation of middle-peasant interests that the correction campaign of 1948 formally admitted.

The most radical pilot of 1947, and the one later documents cite most often as a warning, ran in the Jin-Sui border region in Shanxi. In June 1947 Li Jingquan, secretary of the Jin-Sui sub-bureau, together with Kang Sheng, then working in the region, convened a meeting of prefectural secretaries at Caijiaya in Xingxian county. The meeting raised the slogan of “lighting fires in every village and smoke from every household” and ordered a thoroughgoing re-examination of landholding and a fresh assignment of class status across the region. Kang Sheng's own pilot village work at Haojiapo became the model: landlord and rich-peasant property was to be dug out three feet deep, nothing concealed left in the ground, and corporal punishment at struggle sessions was tolerated in practice. The region's newspaper, the Jin-Sui Daily, editorialized in praise of extreme methods. Mao's letter of August 1947 to the Northwest Bureau and the Jin-Sui sub-bureau criticized a Jin-Sui Daily editorial on land reform for taking a rightist stand — the exchange itself shows the Centre's attitude to Jin-Sui oscillating between endorsement and rebuke rather than correcting course from the start. Hu Qiaomu, in his later memoir of Mao, recalled that killings during the Jin-Sui reform were grave and that in some places struggle meetings turned into execution grounds. Bo Yibo's memoir of major decisions likewise concedes that the “left” errors of the Jin-Sui reform inflicted serious losses. Correction began in the winter of 1947, and by early 1948 overshot in places into returning struggle fruits to landlords wholesale. The episode's archival value is its completeness: mobilization, extremity, correction and relapse are all documented in sequence, making Jin-Sui the best single sample of the rhythm the national reform would repeat.

The novelist Zhao Shuli was held up in these years as the model writer of land reform. His novel Changes in Li Village and his story “The Floor” are both set in Jin-Sui reform villages. Zhao himself served with a work team in a Jin-Sui village in 1947 and, by the evidence of his chronology and colleagues' recollections, resisted the indiscriminate beatings he witnessed. This page records the point not as literary history but as a footnote on sources. The reform produced two faces in the same villages at the same time: the emancipation narrative of turning over, speaking bitterness and dividing the fruits, and the violence of the struggle sessions. The propaganda system of the day permitted only the first face to be shown. The land-reform novels and films published through the 1950s fixed that face as the standard memory, and the men beaten to death at the meetings do not appear in it.

A “landlord” in the reform was not a natural kind. The label was computed from documents. The governing standard descended from the 1933 Soviet government text How to Analyse the Classes in the Countryside: a landlord owned land, did not labour or laboured only incidentally, and lived by collecting rent; a rich peasant owned part of his land, laboured himself, and drew more than twenty-five percent of his total income from renting out the remainder, lending, or hiring labour. The computation ran over the three years before reform began in the locality. On 12 January 1948 Ren Bishi delivered his long speech “Some Problems in Land Reform” to an enlarged meeting of the Northwest Field Army's front committee, devoted largely to the chaos in classification. He pointed to places that had labelled as landlords men who owned a draught animal or two and rented out a scrap of land, and as rich peasants middle peasants who hired a single long-term hand. He required strict application of the exploitation ratio and the three-year rule, and laid down that landlords and rich peasants together should generally not exceed ten percent of households, the real figure being about eight. Mao revised the speech and circulated it as a central document; it is one of the core texts of the 1948 correction.

Standards on paper, however, met incentives in the field. A work team that classified high produced more struggle targets and more confiscated fruit, and looked zealous. A team that classified low risked the charge of rightism and sheltering landlords. Under that pressure the standard's three safeguards — the three-year window, the exploitation ratio, the household ceiling — were breached again and again. In February 1948 Mao drafted central instructions distinguishing old, semi-old and newly liberated areas and ruling that the old areas should conduct review only, with no fresh general redistribution. On 22 February a report by Xi Zhongxun on the reform at Yihezhen in Suide, criticizing work teams that bypassed the villagers and ran everything themselves, drew a long commendatory annotation from Mao and was circulated to the whole party. On 1 April 1948, addressing cadres in Jin-Sui, Mao summed up the general line as relying on the poor peasants, uniting with the middle peasants, and abolishing the feudal exploitation system step by step and with distinctions, while formally admitting that localities everywhere had violated middle-peasant interests and damaged industry and commerce. The density of these documents through the winter and spring proves that the correction was real. Its limits are equally clear in the same documents. The correction adjusted the method of classification and its proportions. It did not question confiscation of landlord land or mass struggle as such. The dead could not be corrected back to life, and the rehabilitation records of 1948 concern, almost by definition, the living.

The connection between land reform and war logistics can be stated in numbers, provided the numbers carry their provenance. The best-known set concerns support work for the Huaihai Campaign, as compiled in the campaign summaries and the PLA's official war history. The East China, Central Plains and North China liberated areas together turned out 5.43 million civilian labourers: 220,000 in standing units accompanying the armies, 1.3 million in second-line transport, and 3.91 million in temporary rear-area service. They raised 960 million jin of grain. Munitions and supplies moved on 880,000 wheelbarrows, 305,000 carrying-pole sets, and carts of every size in the hundreds of thousands; the cart figures differ between versions of the summary and are given here as the war-history account, not as a census. Chen Yi's remark that the victory at Huaihai was pushed out by the people with their wheelbarrows dates from his speech at the campaign's 1949 summing-up and has been quoted ever since. The scale is the point. Millions of men's labour and nearly a billion jin of grain were levied from villages that had just completed, or were in the middle of, land reform. Receiving land, paying the grain tax and sending sons to the army arrived in the same household in the same season. The reform's function as political mobilization and the war's demand for logistics were a single ledger, not two.

The other side of that ledger is the distribution of the burden. The grain tax was progressive on paper, assessed on land and yield, but wartime yields were estimated and reported by village cadres, and an over-estimate ate into eating grain and seed grain alike. Reports from Jin-Ji-Lu-Yu and Jin-Cha-Ji in 1947 and 1948 record excessive levies and villages short of food, and central documents through 1948 repeatedly order burdens lightened and subsistence grain left untouched. The casualties of the civilian labour armies were never systematically counted. Official commemorative materials for Huaihai give civilian dead and injured at over fifteen thousand, with another common figure of about eleven thousand, most of them victims of air attack, exhaustion and disease; the discrepancy between the two figures is unresolved, and this page marks both as commemorative accounts not independently verified. Set the two sides together and the archive reads whole: the reform genuinely gave land to poor peasants and hired hands, and in the same months it drew labour, grain and recruits out of the same villages. A page that records only one side of that sentence is not an archive. It is a poster for whichever side it chose.

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. That absence deserves to be made concrete. Official publications on the period concede “leftist errors” and “indiscriminate beatings and killings” as matters of character while giving no number at all. County-level figures scattered through local gazetteers cannot be added together, because their periods and boundaries do not match. Scholarly estimates span a wide range. Researchers working from local archives and memoir material put the landlords, rich peasants and misclassified households beaten to death or driven to suicide in the old areas in the hundreds of thousands. Other studies estimate total abnormal deaths across the entire land reform from 1946 to 1953, including the new-area reform after 1950, at between one and two million — a combined figure that must not be borrowed to fill the civil-war column, since most of its weight belongs to the later period. Suzanne Pepper's influential study of reform in North China, often cited in Western scholarship, concentrates on process and deliberately declines a national total. This page's position follows the evidence: for 1946 to 1949 the honest entry is that the official record gives no number, scholarly estimates run to the hundreds of thousands, and all of them are unverified. Any page that prints a single total for these years as settled fact has gone beyond what the sources support.

The dividing line against the 1950 reform must be drawn sharply, because the two campaigns are routinely conflated. 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, which held more than half the country's farm population, ending in the spring of 1953. The 1950 law differed from the 1947 Outline in substance, not merely in tone. Rich-peasant holdings were protected and exempt from confiscation. Only landlord land was taken. Landlords were to be dealt with through people's tribunals, and indiscriminate beating and killing were expressly forbidden. Those clauses are a direct, clause-by-clause response to the lessons of 1947 and 1948, even though violence in execution did not disappear. Death estimates must therefore be kept in their separate columns. For the new-area reform of 1950 to 1953 scholarly estimates run from the hundreds of thousands to above two million, and they must not be added to the civil-war figures to produce a single impressive total. This site's Land Reform page covers the post-1950 campaign; the present page covers 1946 to 1949; the two pages do not double-count. A reader who meets a headline figure for “deaths in land reform” anywhere should ask first which years it covers, which territory, and by what method it was built. A total that cannot answer those three questions should not be quoted.

Land reform in the Northeast ran on its own timetable and is added here to complete the page. In July 1946 the Northeast Bureau adopted its Resolution on the Situation and Tasks, shifting the centre of work to the countryside: mobilizing the peasants to settle accounts with collaborators and local tyrants and to distribute enemy and puppet land. Through the winter of 1946 and the spring of 1947, reform in much of the Northeast stopped at dividing movable property and settling old scores, while the land itself was never thoroughly redistributed. Contemporary documents called the result “half-cooked rice” — distribution incomplete, the masses not genuinely mobilized, and village power still resting with the old forces. In the summer of 1947, as the Northeastern Democratic Allied Army opened its summer offensive, reform deepened simultaneously in the newly recovered districts and the old liberated areas, and the Bureau demanded that the rice be cooked through: the feudal and semi-feudal land system abolished outright and peasant associations built under poor-peasant leadership. Chen Yun, who supervised finance and land-reform review in the Northeast in those years, argued in his reports that reform had to proceed together with restoring production and stabilizing the currency, and opposed the short-term practice of dividing movable wealth while leaving the land untouched. Violence in the Northeastern reform was comparatively restrained by the standards of the other liberated areas, but the winter of 1947 brought indiscriminate beatings, killings and misclassification to a number of Northeastern counties as well, and the Bureau's correction documents of early 1948 run in step with North China's. The Northeast's distinctiveness lay in its industry and railways. Villages that had completed reform supplied grain and recruits directly to the cities and the arsenals, and the logistics mobilization of the Liaoshen Campaign in the autumn of 1948 rested squarely on the rural organization the Northeastern reform had built, a causal line stated plainly in the campaign's own logistics summaries. With the Northeast included, this page's arc is complete: pilots in North China in 1946, general extension and extremity across the liberated areas in 1947, comprehensive correction and closure in 1948, and suspension in the newly liberated areas in 1949. The civil-war land reform is a four-year story, not a one-year one.