China

A land revolution

One reason for communist success was the social revolution in rural China. The CCP was now unrestrained by the multi-class alliance of the United Front period. In mid-1946, as civil war became more certain, the party leaders launched a land revolution. They saw land redistribution as an integral part of the larger struggle; by encouraging peasants to seize landlords’ fields and other property, the party apparently expected to weaken the government’s rural class base and strengthen its own support among the poor. This demanded a decisive attack on the traditional village social structure. The party leaders believed that to crack the age-old peasant fear of the local elite and overcome the traditional respect for property rights required unleashing the hatred of the oppressed. Teams of activists moved through the villages, organizing the poor in “speak bitterness” meetings to struggle against landlords and Nationalist supporters, to punish and often to kill them, and to distribute their land and property. The party tried to control the process in order not to alienate the broad middle ranks among the peasants, but land revolution had a dynamism of its own, and rural China went through a period of terror. Yet apparently the party gained from the revolutionary dynamism; morale was at fever pitch, and, for those who had benefited from land distribution, there was no turning back.